A research text dump on ziq’s actions & ideas

Introduction

By Theo Slade

The point of this research text dump is just to provide a collection of texts for people to evaluate. Obviously the introduction, what texts I include and the order of texts reflects my own perspective.

I think ziq is an anarchist, but I also think they hinder the spread of anarchist actions & ideas.

ziq views most anarchists as fake anarchists because ‘fake anarchists’ think it’s worth trying to maintain industrial tech like bread ovens[1], trains[2] or cities[3], or because ‘fake anarchists’ think it’s worth voting for the lesser evil candidate in a liberal system they would prefer not exist.

ziq worries most about liberal and tankie entryists to anarchism spreading confusion and love-bombing anarchist suckers, turning what could have been greatly effective anarchists into liberals and tankies.

I worry about liberal and tankie entryists also, but I worry more about right-wing entryists and the anarchist to fascist pipeline because I think the conflict between most anarchists and other leftists is qualitatively different.

I don’t find any solace or warm fuzzy feelings about identifying with the left, I just value a cold hard calculation of the benefits of being open about existing under a big tent of leftist philosophies that if at strategically important times all pull together stand a better chance of achieving an incrementally less bad status quo, in the same way I would hold my nose and vote or pull the lever in the trolley problem.

I just see the value in small far-left groups helping draw people over to a radically different world over a long period of time by agitating from the radical fringe. So, making centre-left policies look more reasonable in comparison to centrist politics, then the tried and tested policies of the future, then far-left, then far-left and anarchist projects the majority global reality.

Forum Posts

I’m stepping down as admin because of some shit I did — emma will be returning as webmaster and leftous will take a temp admin position until Tequila can find someone else

Submitted by ziq 1 day ago in lobby (edited 2 minutes later)

Source:
<archive.ph/o/bXYSQ/https:/raddle.me/f/lobby/28422/i-m-stepping-down-as-admin-because-of-some-shit-i-did-emma>

---

This is going to be a long read, sorry about that. I’d rather just go straight to the apology, but few people will understand what I’m apologizing for unless I give some history first.

When I first made this site, it was pretty dead around here for a long time. I made several different accounts to post articles and start convos. I wanted to make the site appear more active so people would be more willing to participate. It’s a pretty standard strategy to get a new forum started, I told myself.

Most of those accounts were interchangeable — cherimoya, avocado, karlmarx, binary, radditnews. I just switched between them to post news articles and make throwaway comments. Since I was posting 95% of all the content for the first 8 months or so, I figured it would be better if the front page didn’t look like there was just one user here.

It worked, and more people started investing themselves in the site when they saw it wasn’t completely dead.

When things started to pick up, I decided to make parody accounts that attempted to inject humor into the site...

I read complaints that the place was too doom-and-gloom with all the horrible news stories, and I wanted to give the place a better sense of community and fun. So I made accounts like Chomskyist, BigGeorge and Kylie. But in retrospect, creating Chomskyist was a giant misstep.

I used that account to repost / recut years-old reddit comments I found on r/anarchism. A lot of them were good comments, but occasionally I’d throw in something ridiculously liberal. Then I would use another account to point out the absurdity of those liberal comments and poke fun at them.

I’m usually online at work in a timezone when most raddlers are asleep, so I did that mainly to amuse myself on my lunch break when there was no one around to talk to.

I didn’t think anyone would take Chomskyist seriously with a username like that, but I was very wrong. Soon people were having heated discussions with my parody account, and I kept posting increasingly inane replies with it — a lot of them adapted from old reddit comments.

I retired Chomskyist when I started to feel bad about the users that were making a real effort to engage with what was effectively a giant strawman. It felt like I was trolling the whole community, when I only ever intended to poke fun at some liberal viewpoints and create colorful characters that everyone could join together in laughing at.

I learned early on that if an admin says something controversial, some people will have a very hostile reaction to it and leave the site. On raddit 1.0 before the redesign, I talked about my postciv and postleft politics openly, and it led to a communist user (really, the only regular contributor other than me) quitting the site in anger because “fucking filthy primmie scum” I think were the words they used.

After that clusterfuck, I was incredibly careful what I said with ziq; to avoid people holding my personal politics against the whole site.

I made a couple of accounts where I could speak my mind without causing people to ragequit. This is where things get really hairy.

One of these 2 accounts was postcivver, which was me holding back a lot like you’d do in polite company. But the other was defasher, which was an extreme unfiltered version of myself. Anti-civ, post-left, full-on nihilism, fuck the world and fuck you.

I’d say the real me, if such a thing exists, is probably in constant conflict between those 2 personalities. The hopeful postcivver that wants to create a better, greener world, and the cynical defasher that just wants this society to burn.

Anyway, you can tell by now where this is going. On slow days when the site seemed dead, I’d spend my lunch break using defasher to create controversy. I’d use a strawman (spock) to say something ridiculous, then have defasher talk shit to the strawman and any real users who later defended the strawman. This created divisions between raddle’s userbase — specifically between communists and postleftists, transhumanists and anticivs.

My best friend and fellow-admin emma knew about my antics, and she didn’t say anything at first, but she was silently hurting. I was abusing her small group of friends for my own amusement and I think I was turning her only safe space into a nightmare for her...

Finally she told me how she felt, told me how horrible it was for her to have to lie to her friends and cover for me while I used alts to make a mockery of their ideologies. She indicated she wanted to tell them the truth because she couldn’t deal with the stress.

I didn’t handle that very well at all. I felt completely horrible that I had caused her so much grief, so I deleted defasher. But at the same time, I got incredibly paranoid that she had considered telling her friends (who have a strong hatred for anticivs) the truth, and I cut myself off from emma because of it.

Communication between us was non existent for several days and I was bracing to get doxxed again, because one of the user’s involved in the spat knew my private info.

Things got worse with defasher gone. The users began to direct their anger at my admin account — and even at tequila, who knew nothing about my weird roleplaying antics, but had opposed their proposal to ban ‘trolling’ without having any idea what I was up to.

One of the users involved (gnu_ponut) demanded that emma tell them private things about me. In my paranoia, I felt like this person was stalking me and that I was in danger of being doxed again.

When their proposal failed, 2 users, good friends of emma, quit the site.

I started badmouthing the person who I felt was stalking me after they quit, and emma watched silently as I insulted her good friend. Then she left the site too. ShiningWing followed her. Then sudo. I’d effectively pushed 5 people off the site with my toxic behavior.

So, I think that’s everything. I don’t think anyone will disagree that I have to step down. I want to work to mend my friendship with emma, and do the right thing by tequila, who until recently was completely in the dark about all this.

emma has agreed to come back in a limited capacity as the webmaster, and Tequila will remain admin, and look to promote another user to replace me. leftous has agreed to fill the role for now. I’ll keep paying the bills but won’t be involved in administration or moderating the site at all; and will just be a regular user. I’ll retire all my accounts other than this one.

And if you decide you don’t want me posting here any more, then that’s fine too. I want to take full responsibility for my actions so raddle can have a chance to recover from this mess I made.

I want to apologize to emma for the stress I put you through, to tequila for having to spend their time and energy mediating squabbles because of my shitstirring, to nodefunallowed for being a bad friend to you and speaking ill of your ideology, to gnu_ponut for villainizing you and blaming you for everything when I was largely responsible, and to shiningwing and sudo for making you both feel unwelcome because of my nihilistic aggro anti-ML bullshit.

Most of all I want to apologize to the whole raddle community. You deserve better.

---

365degrees: Edit: ziq and I had a chat and I don’t want to support them further. This is a redo of this comment without the bullshit.

We go way back. /r/LeftWithSharpEdge was the coolest place to be when we met, and it was a great place to participate in. People there were very nice, but you still had an urge to poke at me for being the “resident anarcho-transhumanist”. I didn’t care then, as I had a lot of better friends who respected that.

I’m now convinced you manufactured much of the active population there, as you have here. That’s not a big deal, until you use that population to pick on my friends (such as ShiningWing and GNU_PONUT) and pretend you can’t do anything about it.

I will not be accepting your apology, as you didn’t make any attempt to seek help or admit any wrongdoings when it was a problem. You then decided to trick everyone else into making your victims the antagonists of all this. I’m definitely looking forward to your leave, and for you and your petty website to burn into someone else’s parked domain, or another unconfigured “It works!” page.

amongstclouds: This really does upset me here. I haven’t stopped by in a few weeks because I REALLY did not like the direction Raddle was going and I guess I hope things change.

ziq: I’m sorry.

amongstclouds: You’ve already apologize and I am very thankful for it. It takes a really strong person to be real with everyone, especially a community you do definitely do love.

We should be using Raddle for organizing against capitalism and the bizarre form of ‘civilization’ we live in and not for petty drama. This is why we left Reddit and why I personally gave up on Leftbook (‘Leftism,’ as a whole really, especially the spectacle that is US ‘leftist’ politics.

Tequila_Wolf: Hi all!

Your friendly neighbourhood Tequila_Wolf here with damage control.

I’ve known about this since soon after emma left. Since that time, I’ve been steadily working on resolving the situation, in hopes ultimately that the right thing would be done, and that emma would return as admin and an active part of Raddle’s growth. I’ve had an intense amount of personal stuff separate from the site to deal with, so it’s been slower and less effective that I would have liked, but this final outcome is something I’m happy with (given the circumstances).

Though this is all news to you, I should say that since I have found out, I’ve expressed to ziq the problems I’ve had with their behaviour, and I have seen real steps taken by them to avoid doing it further. That, in conjunction with the apology here, I consider significant amends after a long period of stress and suffering on all our parts.

I’m really glad this has happened, because it’s been quite painful keeping it quiet while being sensitive to each persons individual personal involvement and their privacy.

To be clear, the problems I’ve had with ziq was not that they used alts at all (I think the creation of alts is a useful tool for establishing a new site like this, and for maintaining privacy, among other possible reasons) — what I did have a problem with what ziq’s representation of certain viewpoints through individuals, in bad faith. In particular here I especially mean Chomskyist and Spock, two transhumanist characters who were parts of bitter fights with ziq’s other alts, which often came with a significant emotional burden for other users who participated — and also for those of us who felt like curators of the space, leaving us like we had to spend a lot of time putting out fires was totally not ok.

Personally I hope ziq will remain active on the site, and I understand their vacating the position of admin as a process of making amends.

Though this does not mean that emma will return as an admin, she has agreed to return as webmaster. With leftous stepping forward to take on the role of admin temporarily, the work-arrangement of the site will be as follows:

Tequila_Wolf: admin
emma: webmaster
leftous: (temporary) admin
ziq: site registered and maintained/paid for in their name

Ok, that’s the short version that I’ve written up ahead of reading what ziq has to say. You’re welcome to ask questions or whatever. So far as I’m concerned, this is a good thing for Raddle, because it’s taking a step forward in being transparent and doing meaningful work to remain responsible. I don’t think many communities are cool or strong enough to do this kind of intensive internal work in itself, so I’m proud that we are.

edits: some clarifications on vagueness.

Tequila_Wolf: I should add, it’s very likely that the alts influenced voting procedures and cut corners with due process, and as such these things may need revisiting. I haven’t had the energy to go through the forum history and am surprised that nobody here has checked since this information has emerged, because I had imagined that would be what happened, and that people would be less ok than they have been with all this.

SouthsideGrackles: “I had imagined that would be what happened, and that people would be less ok than they have been with all this.”

No offense to all the people apparently so cool with this, but, honestly, it makes me worried some of them are ziq alts too being used to manipulate how this is being received. I know that sounds paranoid, but considering the level ziq took the use of alts in the past, it seems quite possible — at least to me.

Tequila_Wolf: I think it’s in part because of the way I framed things, which was perhaps extra positive in my relief. That said, I don’t think that ziq is using alts to make things seem better here now.

SouthsideGrackles: I’m not saying they definitely are, but considering the extremely bizarre, manipulative and shameless extent to which they used alts in the past, and considering how surprising it is how cool everyone here is with it, I think it is more likely they are still doing so, and that them doing so is in part an explanation for the surprising level of acceptance by people here.

I just think them doing so still is more likely than people being this cool with what they did, which was pretty fucked up.

leftous: I think the reality is that a lot of us really like ziq and see him as a friend. He did do something really shitty and he’s owning up to it, even giving his admin rights away. If you had a friend betray you and admit it was fucked up, you’d (possibly) want to give them another chance too.

It is possible that they influenced votes and policies on this site with their alts, which might be the most egrigious part of this. But I hope it wasn’t that extreme.

GNU_PONUT: the reality is it was this extreme, take some time to look back in the meta threads and you will find plenty of evidence, not only were they voting in meta but they were using the extra voices to fabricate opinion

here is an example of that where almost every single parent comment is a ziq alternate account (turniphead hasn’t been disclosed but their account has been set to deleted, which it wasn’t yesterday)

leftous: Holy fuck that thread is disturbing knowing what we know now. We definitely need to reevaluate pretty much everything in f/meta.

throwaway3295634: Another case is the /f/mediation policy vote, where ziq voted three times in support: https://archive.fo/6CKql

leftous: Thanks, I did link it here so we can have revotes on all the decisions that have been made

throwaway3295634: Alright, cool!

Edit: Whoops, I replied twice lol

SouthsideGrackles: If I had a friend who lied and manipulated people in a hurtful way I would be much more hesitant than people are being here to believe their story and sincerity. I would never trust them to the same level again, and it would take much more than this for me to trust them at all.

Plus, from what I hear ziq engaged in very similar behavior in the past on reddit. This wasn’t an accident or one time thing. They acted like this for months or longer, watched people get upset, watched them leave, blamed the people they fucked with instead of themselves...convinced others (like emma) to lie for them and be complicit.

I’d be pretty hesitant to call someone capable of acting like that a friend or to believe what they say.

But, to each their own I suppose.

leftous: You make a good point, I hadn’t considered that this really was a pattern of manipulative behavior. I wasn’t on reddit at the time, but it is clear that ziq was aware of what he was doing here and the damage it was causing.

attentionwhore: if the really has been a pattern(which it has because everybody doez this on the ethernetz), then as the saying goes “fool me once, shame on you. fool me twice, shame on me”

SouthsideGrackles: Not everyone does this. That’s deranged.

This is bizarre and exceptionally disgusting behavior, and is in no way typical.

Stop trying to normalize it.

ziq: Please don’t call people deranged, you have no idea what mental health issues people might have.

SouthsideGrackles: Fine, it is extremely fucked up and comepletely devoid of any connection to reality to think that the way you behaved is normal or typical behavior. I hope that’s better, because that is what I was trying to convey.

ziq: Okay, I’ve apologized 100 times, I’ve given up my role on the site I created and devoted 1000s of hours to, I’ve violated my privacy and opened myself up to being doxxed by angry tankies.

You reddit trolls won’t be satisfied until raddle has been burned to the ground (yes, I saw your proposal to remove raddle from r/@ on reddit). So just fuck off back to reddit where you’re happy. K thx.

SouthsideGrackles: See, you apologize and attack simultaneously.

You’re not really sorry, you’re sorry you had to stop.

And I don’t even think you have stopped. I think you have more alts that even emma doesn’t know about. Or maybe ziq is a strawman and emma is the real person, and that’s why she kept your secret while you abused people. I don’t know, but you’ve demonstrated yourself as someone people would be foolish to trust, and, like it or not, it is hard to trust this site and the claims that anyone makes about it because of that.

attentionwhore: Abused people? Calm the fuck down, this is not a rape-quiz

ziq: Idk what that means but rape jokes aren’t good.

attentionwhore: no joke, on the contrary he is making a joke of the term abuse by using it in this context compared to what it means in the context of rape(or any other context for that matter), now you should be disgusted with yourself SouthsideGrackles

ziq: I never apologized to you, troll. Just to people that actually give a shit about raddle and haven’t badmouthed it all over reddit for months and used this as an opportunity to ban the site from r/@.

Fuck you tho :)

SouthsideGrackles: I never said you did apologize to me. And, also, you calling someone a troll is pretty absurd considering the lengths to which you took trolling.

And you can say “fuck you” to me all you want, and disparage me all you want — the facts are the facts, and your character and anything you touch is covered in shit right now based on those facts.

ziq: Yo, you got your pound of flesh already so fuck off back to reddit now.

SouthsideGrackles: One reason why I don’t think you’re apology is sincere and why I don’t think you have any intention of changing your behavior is because, if you really were sincere, you would know that the main part of taking responsibility for one’s actions is not attacking and blaming everyone who doesn’t immediately forgive you or who shows concern or anger still about your actions.

Take my advice: shut your mouth for a bit. Realize you dug yourself into a whole, stop blaming others, and, for fuck’s sake, STOP DIGGING.

ziq: My apology wasn’t to a shitty reddit troll that’s been attacking raddle from day 1. It was to this community. So take your fake outrage and shove it. I owe you exactly nothing.

attentionwhore: fair enough, not everyone but a whole fucking lot. The only reason you don’t hear about it is because most people don’t get this butthurt and just move on

SouthsideGrackles: I don’t believe a whole lot of people do this. If you do this you should be ashamed and disgusted with yourself.

And don’t you realize that running people off is one way people control online communities?

throwaway3295634: That person’s a troll, just ignore them

SouthsideGrackles: it is probably a ziq alt honestly.

attentionwhore: how can I prove to you that I am just a genuine ziq-supporter?

mofongo: If you were genuine you wouldn’t use that handle.

attentionwhore: sure it is, just like a thousand other ways

GNU_PONUT: Hi ziq

you’ve done a brave and responsible thing by apologizing to us all like this.

I don’t really have much to say right now, I’m kinda shocked it was this widespread.

I want you to know I accept your apology and hope we can go about building a community that accepts each other and their hiccups together.

throwaway3295634: ...Hey, it’s Shining Wing here. I’m going to say this, because everyone seems to be forgetting exactly what it is that you’ve done over the history over the site. But I’m not, so I’m going to say it here, because it needs to be said. (This is a really long comment btw, sorry)

Nobody’s even considering that the revelation of most of your alts, it basically proves that the site’s “democracy” was sham to begin with. When you have multiple alts that everyone thinks are different people, on a site this small, it completely shifts the public opinion in your favor, and any proposals made are largely determined by whether or not you liked them and decided to use your alts to vote on them.

Not to mention that you and your alts were some of the largest voices on the site. If someone disagreed with you, you had the ability to shout them down with multiple alts and nobody would question it. And that’s pretty much exactly how it went, loads of people were afraid to speak up against you and your alts because you had the biggest presence on the site and it seemed like it was really loads of people.

Plus, this reveals that you removed me from spambuster all those months ago pretty much entirely on your own, as it’s been revealed that just about every single comment in that thread was made by your alts (the thread itself was created by Defasher). And then you had the nerve to lie to my face and say that you appreciated my term there, when you clearly wanted me out as soon as possible, even though I wasn’t even doing much other than thinking we needed to do more about the site’s toxicity.

...And then there’s the harassment. It did happen. You used accounts like Defasher to attack anyone you disagreed with, no matter what they did to you, and then used your other alts to stick up for them so that people would think it’s okay. For example, when a proposal was made to ban trolling on the site, you (as Defasher) attacked both the creator of the thread, and me, even though Defasher wasn’t even mentioned in the thread. Personally, I had never even done anything to Defasher in the past, yet you attacked me a lot as Defasher. And yet, when I was a spambuster, I was constantly trying to work with you and Emma to make the site a less toxic place specifically because I was being attacked for disagreements, mostly by Defasher. And yet you constantly refused to do anything about it, which we now know was because you yourself got some kind of entertainment out of trolling and harassing people.

I see that other people in this thread are forgiving you for this, and saying that it was “okay” and “a little mistake”, but it’s not. I can’t really forgive you for this, you’ve caused me so much hurt in the past, and done so much to make the site the terrible place it was for the longest time. This has been going on for so long that it’s not simply a “mistake”, you full well knew what you were doing.

I’ve been silent on this whole thing for so long, but now I feel that I have to speak up, now that I know that it was you that was the cause of so pain I’ve went through, someone who supposedly respected me for so long. I know I’m probably gonna get some shit for this, but it really needs to be said. What you’ve done over the site’s history has caused so much harm, and it can’t be left unstated. With all that considered, I’m sorry, but I can’t accept your apology.

...One last thing. I never announced at the time why I left, so I better say it here while I have the chance. Some of you seem to think I’m a spiteful asshole, partly due to ziq shit-talking me immediately after I left, but I’m really not trying to be. I was just trying to get along with people on this site, but being attacked by mostly ziq’s alts made me hate using the site more and more, on top of how they attacked my friends. Hell, I once tried to get along with Defasher, despite the disagreements, but eventually they just went back to attacking me, so I just stopped trying, and eventually stopped actively participating in the site more and more. Once it got really bad, and my friends left, there was nothing left for me to enjoy on the site, so I left.

leftous: I’m really sorry I didn’t understand this situation at all at the time :( It really is completely messed up and I think a lot of us hardly understand just how bad this is. I didn’t take in how ziq was basically ruling this place with an ironfist under the guise of working at the community’s will.

Tequila_Wolf: Hopefully users will look around to find other dodgy cases like the one gnu_ponut has posted.

I had a sense that it might be happening, but until it was clearly pointed out to me in chat today for the second time, I hadn’t processed the depth of it. Yesterday gnu_ponut had shown me as well, I think, but I’m a bit worn out and didn’t give it the attention it needed.

It does make things more shocking, and I wish I had done a better job of being clear with ziq about what needed to be apologised for.

Tequila_Wolf: I think it’s an important part of this process that people say what they have to say, and I don’t think you’re being spiteful. This is important stuff, and it doesn’t seem that most users here have engaged very deeply with the ramifications of ziq’s admissions. This may be partly my fault, because I presented things in as good a light as I did.

Hopefully there will be more discussion and engagement so that everything is clear and heard.

edit: also, emma hasn’t said anything yet. I know she had a lot on her plate today, so she may still say something.

emma: something

ziq: Just want to say you were never elected as spambuster and were only given the position temporarily while voat was flooding us with spam (because I was exhausted from waking up every hour at night to delete it). This was made very clear to you.

But you then started telling everyone you were an admin when you weren’t (you even wrote in your profile ‘I’m an admin”), and you were censoring / banning people for no good reason.

You had to go, and I’m not sorry for removing you the way I did — which is to say, by using (defasher?) to bring up the fact that you weren’t elected and were not an admin — but represented yourself as such — and then removing your admin privileges once everyone was aware.

I was trying to protect raddle without causing your ML friends to ragequit the site because you’re an ML and I’m an anarchist. You put me in that position by telling everyone you were an admin without there ever being an election held or an announcement. There was no need for a vote to remove you because you were never elected in the first place and you’re misrepresenting what happened. You should have never let those temporary privileges go to your head. You should have never abused your temporary position which was only granted to you to remove spam during the raid.

And yes, I don’t like tankies. I’m not an admin so I can speak my mind now.

From now on, you ban people for ‘liberalism’ (anarchism), and you try to make rules to ban disagreement, I’ll tell you exactly what I think of you.

Your politics scare the shit out of me.

throwaway3295634: Okay, so let me get this straight, I temp-ban someone once from a forum (and deleted only two non-spam comments over my entire mod history at /f/Communism) because I felt they were breaking a vague rule, and later took it back and felt like it was a mistake, and suddenly I’m “censoring and banning” people? I mean, it’s really petty of you to be bringing that up, because that happened months ago and was more or less an isolated incident that I thought we all moved past. For the record, this is why I’m saying you’re shit-talking me. I make one mistake (absolutely nothing compared to what you’ve done over the site’s history) that I later take back, and you go say I’m some kind of horrible person.

I hadn’t done anything to Defasher then (they weren’t the one I banned or removed comments from), yet they were the one attacking me more than anyone else on that thread. I later even tried to apologise to Defasher, and then proceeded to not interact with Defasher over the next months, yet I still ended up receiving attacks eventually. So don’t try make me out to be the asshole here, because you were attacking me at every step.

You also really obsess over how I occasionally called myself an admin a few times. I mean, usually when I did that, I had a clarifier attached that said that I’m not really a full admin, but still, that’s what the problem is here? That just sounds really petty, I mean I called myself the technically wrong thing a few times, so what?

And the way you put “censoring and banning people” implies that I was doing that as an admin, and that I was actually even doing that at all, when you know full well that I wasn’t doing anything as a spambuster that the other admins were having problems with. I was working with you then, you know. If you think I was abusing my power as a spambuster, then you’re outright lying, because I specifically only took action on extremely clear violations of the ToS, or when those 4chan trolls came in and spammed porn. I was doing that specifically so that I wouldn’t piss anyone off, just ask Emma.

ziq: If you won’t own your shit, then there’s nothing left to talk about. I’ve apologized for what I did, but I’m not being your punching bag for things I didn’t do. Especially when you’re in complete denial about your part in it.

All of this happened months ago, but that isn’t stopping you. I said what I really felt about your actions using my defasher account. I apologized for it, and really should have used this account. There’s nothing left to say. Have a great life.

GNU_PONUT: your ML friends to ragequit

while shiningwing is an ML, I don’t think any of us consider ourselves to be and I’ve been vocal against the ML situation in the past

I was trying to protect raddle

seems ironic tbh because you’ve destroyed it

Spending weeks figuring out how to remove shining is a poor excuse for refusing to work with her on trying to make raddle safer, from what we realise were now your accounts, which weren’t just going wild over the ML situation.

Edit: I was even vocal against shining in almost every single proposal back then, I didn’t however have to insult her or even endanger our friendship

attentionwhore: “From now on, you ban people for ‘liberalism’ (anarchism), and you try to make rules to ban disagreement” oh boy, sure good I’m in the community where everybody’s viewpoint is respected, ri.. right, guys?

attentionwhore: If you get this butthurt from internet commentary, plz loag oaff de ethernet

unlearning: this is really getting confusing. I honestly thouht that that this small community really respects others perspective. But using alt ids to enage, troll or otherwise is pure evil. moreover some people declaring that they will be using multiple atl ids to do this and that? for what. IDK if i would really like to participate in serious discussions from now on? may be just one person doin all the pros and cons for me and having a jerk smirk.

jadedctrl: I get it, but I really think it’s over. /u/ziq regrets what he’s done and just wants to remedy it. I think he’s acting in good faith.

unlearning: I really appreciate ziq for realising and apologising not only to the persons hurt by his actions but to the whole community. But I can’t understand other users being so cool about it. Posting with multiple alt ids to get more traction IMO was okay but but using it to hurt people for fun is not (especially when the admins were involved and they seriously intend to engage more people). But i hope its past now and the community will learn from it and grow strong.

SouthsideGrackles: I really don’t see why people are so quick to believe someone who went to that level of bizarre deceit and manipulation. Ziq has demonstrated a willingness to lie in a grand and shameless way, and people seem so eager to believe their story and promises. It is very strange to me.

Personally I think I’m done with raddle unless/until it starts getting ran with something like konsent like someone proposed in this thread.

mofongo: In my case is because the most of the hurted party (GNU_Ponut, No-defun-allowed, Shiningwing, Emma) have forgiven ziq and decided this course of action to make amends. As someone in the perifery to all this, I can do nothing but accept it.

1. I know Shiningwing has not forgiven ziq.

2. If I’m missing someone please let me know.

SouthsideGrackles: I think people are also missing that emma shoulr probably be seen as less trustworthy as well since they were willing to lie and protect ziq while they watched ziq fuck with and cause pain to people (such as shiningwing who doesn’t seem to have forgiven them actually).

attentionwhore: no, this is so dumb think about what you are saying. If this “community” really respected all view-points, then a guy takin a piss at any ideology should not warrant someone running crying away fucking deleting accounts

“may be just one person doin all the pros and cons for me and having a jerk smirk.” are you seriosuly this naive, the fuck you think is happening on all other forums? you think all accounts are unique, you think none is commenting just for the fuck of it???

untitled: ziq, thanks for coming clean. self-responsibility is a big deal, so i’m glad you’ve done it. as long as you can do that, then i’m not worried. not taking responsibility for oneself has become the norm for society it seems, it’s refreshing to see you take the opposite route.

that said, stepping down as admin.....i for one don’t care if you do or don’t. i just don’t, not sure why. if people are mad, that’s expected (it’s deceptive after all), but i get the intentions and things get out of hand some times. you’re only human. people should be be just as willing to accept an apology as you were in bringing this to the table. that took guts and integrity.

as an aside, i didn’t know shit about postciv until i got here, and i’m finding myself more and more leaning that route (i may have always been, just didn’t know it). i’d love to hear more from you about that, so tell us what you really think, you don’t need an alt to do that. from what i’ve seen, raddle seems to be able to handle differences of opinions pretty well.

Belsima: if you decide you don’t want me posting here any more, then that’s fine too

I think you should certainly keep posting; you seem like a fine member of the community and a fine person, just not a fine staff member. IMO, this clearly demonstrates why we need a recall and election system for admins and such, as one with less integrity than yourself could do similar then refuse to step down.

leftous: Honestly I was very surprised and disappointed when I heard about this within the past 24 hours. I understand why you had to do it at first as you were in a tough position trying to build the community. However, unnecessarily creating drama was very toxic, especially when people were being unfairly attacked and many of us were stressed trying to diffuse the situation.

Overall though, I am glad things are out in the open now and we can move past this. I still think you’re a great admin with a lot of integrity who would not abuse the administrative power the community trusts in you. That’s why I find this situation very unfortunate.

I hope that the community can forgive you including those that left in emma, no_fun, gnu, Shining, and others. I forgive you, and I’d eventually want to see you back as admin if they can all do so as well.

Fossidarity: So these are all the accounts that are alts:

• cherimoya

• avocado

• karlmarx

• binary

• radditnews

• chomskyist

• defasher

• BigGeorge

• Kylie

• defasher

• postcivver

• spock

Anything missing?

leftous: /f/meta_ is infested with false ziqs at the moment

ziq: yie, shadowresidue, communistfox, punk_kropotkin, will edit if I think of others.

most were just used to post news articles. I would post maybe 50 a day, so I used to switch between 3–4 accounts so the front page wasn’t all ziq. Also, a lot of the askraddles were posted by me.

DaisyDisaster: It must have been hard to come out about this, but I’m glad it’s happening in a constructive way. I do hope you stay and feel free enough to express your viewpoints as yours without alts.

MaxStirner: Just commenting to say I hope you stick around ziq. You seem like a cool person.

dellitsni: Hey ziq, thank you for coming clean and being transparent. Yeah, you fucked up, but i have to respect the way you, emma and t_w are handling things. I hope you’ll stay. I think the others expressed what i feel about all this pretty well, so i have nothing more to say on that matter.

To the community: i think this is a good time to consider alternate decision making and administration paradigms. Surrealbytes, iodbh and i have been working pretty hard on Konsent lately, and it’s made it clear to me how viable this system actually is. I propose that Raddle be community-run using Konsent once it’s in an acceptable state.

leftous: 100% on board with this.

It would be cool to have an admin bot that is remote controlled by Konsent

dellitsni: That would be cool. It’ll be a little strange to implement since there is no API for Raddle, and we want to keep Konsent universal and hardcoded for Raddle, but I have a few ideas that i think would work.

leftous: If konsent adds webhooks, any decisions made could be posted to a user-defined server. From that server, we can run a bot that recieves and performs those actions.

dellitsni: I was thinking something along those lines yeah. Depends on the skills of the other devs and what they’ve done before, I’ll open an issue on Github tommorow, or maybe make a new post in /f/Konsent.

Tequila_Wolf: This sounds exciting, I’m looking forward to hearing more about what it can do and how it would work.

dellitsni: That’s good, really happy to hear there’s a mindset for it! We’ll just continue working on it, I’ll post updates now and then in /f/Konsent.

DissidentRage: Thank you for apologizing for this. I personally didn’t really have an emotional horse in the race, so to speak, in many of the instances you mentioned, but I can see how that was problematic.

I do have a positive thing to say about you: your creation of u/BigGeorge was a real boon to f/SorosPSAs, even if it doesn’t really get much use. I created that subforum in a fleeting moment of creativity, but the humorous persona you created for it took it to another level. It inspired me to start working on a blogging platform that would be used to create a full on parody site.

I think as your primary persona u/ziq you’ve admirably served as a good administrator, curbing fascists and handling disputes democratically. I do agree that with your multiple accounts and the drama unfolded from them it probably is best that you step down, but I think from a surface observation you provided a good grounding for future staff. I do hope you’ll remain with us as an active participant now that you have a fuller understanding of what not to do.

squat: Hey... for what it’s worth, this is a brand new account, never posted here before, I’m a complete outsider to this situation. I only came here because I saw this comment on Reddit and it reminded me of this Raddle thing that I’d heard about before so I went over to check it out and started reading this thread.

I don’t (and probably can’t) have an opinion about whether ziq should be forgiven or whatever. I don’t know them or any of the other people affected; I wasn’t around then and none of this stuff affected me. (I can say though that despite not knowing her, I do have a lot of respect for emma’s technical accomplishments in creating Postmill, so I do feel saddened that she was hurt in all of this.)

Anyway, I have been involved in meatspace left-wing/anarchist spaces for nearly a decade. And obviously with that I’ve witnessed my fair share of drama and community turmoil, and a lot of this sounds really familiar. It always deeply saddens me when communities like these are torn apart because of bullshit and I always feel compelled to try to get involved and try to salvage things and help people understand each other’s points of view and to stop people from hurting each other even more. And it’s a really delicate balance between the forces at play, even just within myself: because obviously, when you’re somebody who wants to create an anarchist society, you need to try to see the best in everyone and believe that people can and do change for the better, while at the same time having a degree of understanding and forgiveness for people who act seemingly in bad faith, but obviously from a place of understandable hurtness (but there also must be limit to this). But as anarchist, you also have a strong sense of injustice, and sometimes you have no choice but to pick a side and righteously fight for justice on their behalf. And when everyone has this sense of righteousness about them (which they often do if they’re anarchists), it can be a complete clusterfuck. Anyway, people here probably understand all of that already.

How does that apply to this situation? Just from reading ziq’s post and the rest of this thread, there’s a few things I’m noticing.

The standard of discussion in this thread is actually really high, given the circumstances. This seems like something that has hurt a lot of people, and usually people who are hurt, are, well, hurt, and often a discussion full of people who have been hurt by each other is not the most polite. But I’m seeing very little shitslinging. But maybe that’s just because all the people who have been hurt have already left.

Without making any moral judgement about it, it seems that a lot of people have left directly or indirectly because of all this stuff. Is there anything we can do to get them back? Like, I used to spend a lot of time arguing with (ostensibly) comrades on the Internet, and it’s very emotionally draining. I’ve mostly “retired” from doing that just for the sake of my mental health. To think that there was so many unnecessary arguments on this site that sucked people in who were acting in good faith, I can see how that would cause a lot of damage and I find it completely unsurprising that many people would have left. Not to mention the second-order “toxicity” that that would create and the effects that would have. (For example, the social centre in my city, without which I would never have made the friends I have today, has been closed since 2014 because interpersonal bullshit tore it apart, and the whole scene has been slowly dying ever since.)

The only thing that gives me some hope or optimism is this: it sounds like 90% of the bullshit was actually just one person, and now they’ve openly admitted that and seemingly will stop in the future. I wish all the conflicts I’ve been witnessed could be traced to a single individual’s bad faith. I’ve seen conflicts where I’m sure certain individuals are acting in bad faith, but I’ve never been able to “prove” it, and it creates a lot of difficultly, because obviously some people believe them and some people don’t, and then some people are “bad” for not believing them and so on. I know that if I was one of the people who left in the middle of all that toxicity and bullshit, I would feel vindicated knowing that the person I was arguing against was actually doing so in bad faith, and that all the people who appeared to be on their side actually weren’t. I would actually find it really validating to find that out. I could erase all the self-doubt that those arguments caused me. I would probably give the community a second chance if I thought that wouldn’t happen again.

What am I saying? I don’t know any of the people involved. But if anybody does, do you think they should be contacted with this new information, and be invited back? It sounds like a lot of them were “tankies”, and yeah, like, maybe tankies are weird, but I have a lot of respect for some of the individual tankies I know in real life, there are definitely things towards which we can work together. I don’t know, it kinds of warms my heart to think that this was (at least at one point) a community where all sorts leftists (and “post”-leftists) recognised they had a common enemy (Reddit and its closed-sourceness and fascism-enabling and whatnot), put aside their differences to come together to create a valuable alternative to that. It saddens me to think that infighting and bullshit damaged that, but if, as it now seems, the “root” cause of that has been identified and rectified, then it gives me hope that maybe we could go back to being that community.

leftous: Hey, thanks for the post. More people should read it because it is enlightening and wise.

Dumai: thank you for coming clean about this and thank you for trying to account for what you did. please don’t rope us along like that ever again because more often than not i was on defasher’s side in this whole mess and now i feel like a piece of shit for blaming the wrong people. but i’m glad you’ve apologised and i’m glad you’re trying to fix this. i still value what you contribute to this site and i still agree with you most of the time!

mofongo: Damn, I knew some of them were you, but not that many. Much less Chomskyist. Anyways, do what you feel is best and what’s important to you. I would love to see you again as admin some time in the future.

On another note, I would like Emma to train someone as substitute webmaster as a preventive measure.

SouthsideGrackles: When I said in the past that raddle was a great idea being done by shitty people, this sort of behavior was what I was talking about.

I’m glad you admitted to it and took responsibility, I just hope you don’t once again convince yourself in the future that you’re justified in doing that sort of toxic behavior yet again.

braketheboxes: Life is too short for drama. I hope you stick around.

“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”

-- The Buddha

glokaya_kuzdra: I am new here. It’s weird for so much of your personal shit to be aired so publicly.

That said, it makes sense of emma’s response to me when I wanted to help with the site, so maybe this is just part of small internet communities.

I would argue admins should not be permanent — like any position of power, I think it should be alternated within the community. As you grow, I don’t understand why you couldn’t work as an admin again in the future, for a short stint — like anyone else. If your behavior continues to be toxic, though, it seems like the community would need to respond some way. It seems so far that has meant leaving.

Your behaviors seem really odd (replying to yourself, creating fake conversations, etc.). I don’t want to judge such behavior on its own, it’s really only worth judging because it negatively impacted your friends and this community.

Thanks for coming clean and being honest. Good luck working on yourself!

HorrorPaleontologist: Well, this doesn’t inspire much confidence in the community. I know I’m new, I don’t interact much, so it doesn’t matter what I think. Others have made several points, some have uncovered the actual events in past posts (not sugar-coated as described), some have said great things about forgiveness.

But this is not something the community needed, and it’s sad that one person got to decide over everyone else.

And since I don’t know anyone here, am I to think everyone is ziq? That would be my typical luck...

jadedctrl: You made this place toxic for a while, but you also helped make it great in the first place. You’re still a good and well-meaning member of the community. I for one hope you remain a member of raddle.

therealmidnite: I have no idea where people get the energy from to keep a menagerie of alts like that running... one is exhausting enough (this is my first time posting either here or on reddit in about a week’s time, and I’ve honestly been loving the peace so far).

drh1138: Yes, well if you’re familiar with ziq/defasher/other-raddle-alts/KropotkinZombie/nowaydaddioh/brocialistslaughter/dielibeals/eeplox and their antics on reddit, they’re, uhm, a “special” sort with boundless time and energy.

ziq: I just really wanted the place to take off. And, wanted to talk back to people that were attacking me or my politics (or voicing authoritarian viewpoints) without dragging raddle down. When an admin insults someone, it’s a much bigger deal that if some rando does it, and it leads to people quitting the site in rage.

GNU_PONUT: why were you insulting people in the first place?

ziq: Because I didn’t like you or your politics (specifically your colonialist remarks about invading my country and taking our resources by force for your transhumanist utopia). I’m trying not to be an asshole any more when I’m offended.

GNU_PONUT: I wasn’t the first person to cross your path, you were the one who straw manned the whole colonialism thing just so you could turn round and out me because I wasn’t post civ like you

Tequila_Wolf: I was there for that, you were being a colonialist (and this is regardless of whether someone has an anticiv viewpoint or not), I’m surprised you’re denying it now since you seemed to accept it then. I’m kinda bummed that you’re saying this since up until now I’d imagined that you could be working in good faith.

GNU_PONUT: right, what i said was colonialist but it had to be, there was no other answer in the hypothetical scenario that ziq gave me unless i were to say actually we should all be anti-civ, it was completely silly.

not sure what you’re bummed about tbh?

ziq is trying to claw back still at some of this petty shit to cover their ass for the big picture

i don’t even see how this is relevant to what’s happened

Dumai: right, what i said was colonialist but it had to be

it’s quite possible to discuss these things without being racist

GNU_PONUT: racist? wtf

Dumai: do i really need to explain to you why colonial politics are racist, are we getting this far back to basics

i feel bad because this almost feels like derailing but seriously

GNU_PONUT: ziq asked me if i would go “mine under their village” if it was the only option left before civilization collapsed, obviously I was going to say yes

the discussion as a whole wasn’t as simple as that but basically they wouldn’t have wanted their ecosystems to be exploited even if it was to get to a stage where ecosystems wouldn’t have to be exploited anymore, whether that be realistic or not i don’t know, and so would rather everyone live effectively off grid

I was reluctant to accept this because I don’t think everyone can do that without millions of people starving because we’re at a point where industrial farms have to exist to sustain the population we have

I don’t want another discussion about this now because we have enough going on but this is basically where we were at

ziqfuq: Woah dude! Epic reveal! But the biggest one is yet to come: ziq is prince_kropotkin on reddit

attentionwhore: ziq, our lord and savior

zombie_berkman: Sudo leaving was one of the best things to happen here. But yea this whole thing is pretty fucked

sudo: Heya, guess who randomly decided to check back with Raddle, and will now be re-joining the site because of this post?

Hal: Hm, I can relate. In other communities, I often would have a bunch of alter egos of different kinds. Don’t worry, I’m not doing that here, because I thought the admins could see our IP addresses when we first signed up, and this being a small community I thought I would be exposed and removed instantly. I kind of sympathize with you because this reminds me of the alter ego trickery I’ve done in the past.

Good on you for explaining and apologizing though. I had tried hard to stay out of any conflicts here despite my... opposing views, so I don’t think I’ve been affected by you... have I? So it’s probably not my place to accept the apology. I do hope that the community finds better administration soon and you find the time to recover.

I said I was leaving a couple of months ago, but I still looked through Raddle every few days, and now I happened upon this, and felt the urge to say something about it. I still don’t think I’m here to stay. I’ve had some shifts in my opinions and I’m sorry but I don’t think this is the place for me anymore.

ziqfuq: and it led to a communist user (really, the only regular contributor other than me) quitting the site in anger because “fucking filthy primmie scum” I think were the words they used.

So you weren’t respectwomen? whoah: my mind=blown

Hal: I’ve known respectwomen personally for a few years now. I highly doubt he’s ziq. One of the reasons he said he’s left this place was because he really doesn’t like postcivvers.

attentionwhore: Why are you apologizing? WTF? This is nothing new damn it, all forums(excuse me, “communities”) have this kind of behavior. What is all this bullshittery with the apologies, especially if you’re afraid of being doxxed. i liked it when the alts were there, i was here 4 shits and giggles.

You fucked your own balls with this public apology, now all the others that a butthurt will have a much easier time collecting info on you. This entire shit is just a big ass faceslap. “Uhh w’re glad you say sorry”, “Uuh you did some fucked up shit”, fucking kill yourselves. ziq, I admire you, you dun good.

ziq: I’ve already been doxxed repeatedly. I know the risks I’ve taken by throwing away my privacy like this. I apologized because it was the right thing to do and because my friend emma was hurting because of my actions.

attentionwhore: Why even tell emma about this when you began? I don’t get it.

Sent a pm, plz read. I’m desperate for attention LOL

ziq: My nihilist anarchism isn’t compatible with the collectivist politics of most people here. When I’m talking to friends like emma (a Marxist), I forget that; and just be honest about what I’m doing.

Emma kept her true feelings about it to herself until recently, and when she told me how she really felt, I stopped with the nihilist stuff because of it (after a brief ego trip). I also assumed she could tell the accounts were mine because in the early days of the site she could see the IP addresses if she wanted to. I wouldn’t lie to a friend anyway.

SouthsideGrackles: “ I wouldn’t lie to a friend anyway.”

So all the people here talking about how they saw you as a friend, what you’re saying is that they were foolish to do so since you, in lying to them, didn’t see them as such. You were/are just using their positive feelings towards you as a tool to manipulate and be abusive towards people with impunity.

ziq: I don’t troll my friends. I have no interest in answering to you. You’ve been badmouthing me and raddle for months. Fuck you :)

SouthsideGrackles: I haven’t been badmouthing raddle for months. I said it was a great idea being done by shitty people. And I was slightly wrong — it wasn’t shitty people, it was just one shitty person pretending to be multiple people.

And when I said that you used three or four different accounts to attack me and , ironically , to accuse me of being someone else:

https://raddle.me/f/AskRaddle/21954/comment/27513

some of those comments in there are pretty disturbingly hilarious in hindsight. Like when you said you shouldn’t be expected to answer for defasher. That’s fucking brilliant. Or you telling me to be honest, when you were the one who was indeed shamelessly lying and engaging in misinformation campaigns. Or when defasher says they had nothing to do with making raddle. Or when another account chimed in to back up your baseless accusations. Or when another account chimed in to say they hated when someone took a random persons posts as evidence against a site, — but it wasn’t a random person’s post, it was an alt of the site’s creator.

attentionwhore: “That’s fucking brilliant” basically this, you should be applauding him

attentionwhore: yes yes yes, make it sound like he is being a sociopath, be mildly fucking suggestive about it by listing the most edgy comparison ever. please continue, because in the rare case he is one, he will either not care or be proud, and hopefully continue delivering top quality content

attentionwhore: “My nihilist anarchism isn’t compatible with the collectivist politics of most people here. When I’m talking to friends like emma (a Marxist), I forget that; and just be honest about what I’m doing.” strange how this beings to sound like people get offended by others views, and are maybe not equally respected. “I forget that; and just be honest about what I’m doing.” so when you are not guardian yourself, watching out for what people might think, then you are honest? jeez, surely this is the most respecting setting ever heard of

eeek: Anyone else remember when karlmarx strolled over to the fempire to stir up shit?

This behavior is toxic for any community. I’d prefer if you were no longer part of this site.

ziq: No? I just linked to a thread made here by sudo (about their community) and tried to convince them to merge with us. I wasn’t doing anything malicious and they eventually adopted postmill because of that introduction I made.

eeek: Well, I’d love to provide a link to the post so that people could decide for themselves, but due to the site relocation I think we’re out of luck. If you have an archive link, please post it.

Some people on fempire already knew about raddle. It stands out as yet another red flag that you’re taking credit for their decision to use postmill for the new site.

ConnieCommie: Hi ziq!

Please reconsider why you’re basically eco-fash and why you’re a worm.

wooowdude: Hey emma, glad you’re the webmaster as that wasn’t clear to me! If you’re reading this, can you please have a look at my suggestion here https://raddle.me/f/meta/25562/raddle-me-should-ameliorate-its-mozilla-observatory-score-by for ameliorating raddle’s security? I can help with that if you have any problems, cheers!

mofongo: Not the time for that.

attentionwhore: The only useful post in this godawful thread, jesus christ.

Raddle is awful

Submitted 1 year ago by Snow0v0

Source:
<archive.ph/o/m679x/https:/www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/bcp6r7/raddle_is_awful>

---

Mods on there don’t try to coordinate the dispute between members but try to ban/warn everyone who use the word “dumb/stupid” since “ableism”.

What a joke.

(Maybe it’s good before..)

---

SlavojVivec: Raddle was born from a schism from edgy leftists who were upset about /r/leftwithoutedge, so they created /r/leftwithsharpedge, which got banned for violent threats, so they created their own site. Raddle ended up losing most of its audience when they felt betrayed by discovering that one of the founders had created many sock-puppets to populate the site.

I feel conflicted because we really need substantial alternatives to reddit and we need the energy to build our own alternatives as Reddit becomes shittier and more gentrified, and the left needs to build the mass line and on-board people, not become another cultish clique.

There’s a Dead Kennedys song:

You wanna help stop war? Well, we reject your application: You crack too many jokes and you eat meat

What better way to turn people off than to twist ideas for change into one more church that forgets we’re all human beings?

Prince_Kropotkin: https://web.archive.org/web/20180405002453/https://raddle.me/f/lobby/28422/i-m-stepping-down-as-admin-because-of-some-shit-i-did-emma

extremely funny shit

Snow0v0: Thank you for telling me the history. I was looking for the alternative of Reddit.I felt there are some sock accounts on raddle as well.

cecilkorik: The echo chamber effect is horrifying to watch as it consumes each of these new reddit alternatives in turn. A community becomes established and drowns out all challengers, then rapidly slides into extremism due to the small size of the community and everyone trying to fit in and outdo each other by trying to fit in more effectively, quickly making the site uninhabitable to anyone else.

How do you fix this? At this point I’m starting to believe we don’t need a reddit alternative, we need a time machine to travel to a time before social media was invented.

Stiltzkinn: Well first of the fix is not an alternative that is a clone of Reddit.

Snow0v0: I think the problem is the mods, they don’t know how to balance different ideas but just think about themselves only.

Slammernanners: I think the fix is to not have a downvote button, good thing Saidit has that feature.

El_Chapos_Cousin: Set it up with a diverse range of groups that do or can hold all perspectives on any given topic. Then, moderate moderate moderate. Make the first thing people see “we don’t tolerate brigading, witch hunting, or stifling. Everyone has an opinion and every opinion is open to discussion.” Or something similar.

Anyone who tries to stifle others, brigade, down vote to Oblivion, or any other activity that could lead to an echo chamber will be met with punishment. Not a ban, but at first a warning, and then a temp ban. It’ll require a lot of moderators that you must trust with this responsibility, with you moderating the moderators to make sure they aren’t being shady.

And then it requires bucketloads of luck.

[Deleted or banned user]: [deleted]

Snow0v0: Yeah, I saw it before,what’s the logic of insult white people is okay but insult black people should be banned? Mods on there are mentals who believe themselves are moral standards.

SlavojVivec: I’m sceptical, could you give a specific example? It sounds like you might be deaf to the use of sarcasm or irony. Rarely is the so-called racism against white people in leftist circles genuine.

For example, when some professor tweeted “All I want for Christmas is white genocide” he was sarcastically referring to how white ethnonationalists refer to interracial dating / interbreeding as “white genocide”, not literal genocide of white people.

There are of course black nationalists movements that are genuinely anti-White, but they are often more motivated by religious extremism and very anti-gay too, and thus hardly leftist (such as the Black Hebrew Israelite movement).

Infrah: The people who run Raddle self-describe themselves as radical anarchists / radical leftists. A platform run by any type of radical is destined for toxicity.

cloudforester: Always great when “death to whiteness” aka white supremacy makes people feel victimized.

quangli: Take fifteen minutes to understand how structural oppression works and you’ll know why what you’re saying here is racist.

[Deleted or banned user]: [deleted]

ProgrammingOnHAL9000: You mean that if I change the words of a sentence I change its meaning? Who knew? Also, what’s context?

cloudforester: Whiteness has nothing to do with skin color. Your skin isn’t white, it’s pink.

quangli: https://hellogiggles.com/news/racism-against-white-people-doesnt-exist-in-america-and-heres-why-it-never-will/

dan0quayle: That is the most pants on head retarded article I ever read. They simply repeated different versions of, ‘Black people can not be biased against white people because white people founded America.’ As if that is some kind of incontrovertable fact that actually makes sense.

quangli: You didn’t understand the article.

alllie: I’m the most leftist person I’ve ever met in real life but raddle treated me like a rightie.

Snow0v0: Do you know their sensitive part? Taiwan. Being an anarchist, you should against fascism China attack Taiwan, but being an extreme leftist, you should support China.

Mention Taiwan/Chinese bullying people from Taiwan on there, many people on there would become very mean.Dispute with them, that’s how I get a ban on there.

By the way, the official reason I get ban is I said an “Ableism” word, but that word was removed in their official ableism word list before.LOL.

I don’t care they ban me from that shit site, it just wastes my time, I just warn people don’t waste their time on that hypocritical malicious site.

Lyrr: Leftists absolutely do not support China as they practice State capitalism at best.

Snow0v0: Sorry, maybe I should use the term “mentals who believe themselves are leftist”.But I am quite sure some of them are Chinese since the timezone and the time of posting. And I got a label of “classism” in their struggle session, I don’t know why.You can find a thread on there saying most Taiwan and Hong Kong people are classist and it got many upvotes.

(search “classism and it’s annoying as fuck” on raddle, I don’t want to read it again)

[Deleted or banned user]: “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” ― George Orwell, 1984

TimesThreeTheHighest: I’m assuming you’re not referring to the Taiwan group. It only has a few members. If you are please let me know.

Snow0v0: I am not.

TimesThreeTheHighest: But if you’re not how can I get triggered? :P

alllie: I think identity politics is just a right wing scam to divide the left.

cloudforester: I think US Democrats should stop pretending they’re part of the left.

Snow0v0: Interesting viewpoint.

Snow0v0: Extreme leftist and extreme rightist are mental illness, their self righteous in a skyhigh level that believes other people should die for what they believe is right. Both of them are evil cults.

Mizerawa: About that ableism...

cloudforester: You’re literally a Democrat, fam.

SeanCanary: So was FDR. He was attacked by lefties too, as was the passage of Social Security. Nowadays it is convenient for western lefties to try to claim him, which is kind of crap.

Then you have those people who think being exclusionary is competition. Karl Marx wouldn’t be far enough left for them. At the end of the day those people end up being an enemy of the cause they claim to be fighting for, IMO.

cloudforester: You can’t be a capitalist and a leftist. You either support private property and class divisions or you don’t. It’s not rocket science.

SeanCanary: How about, being either a pure capitalist or leftist is inferior to hybridized system, like social democracies. Germany is an economic powerhouse, so maybe they’re doing something right?

And yeah, if your point is that FDR isn’t a lefty, I’m certainly willing to concede that. I just wish those who are further left in the US (whom I’m sure many will say aren’t true leftists and that is fine) would stop trying to claim him. FDR and Social Security weren’t you’re doing. They were the doing of the moderates you are always attacking. You called Social Security “A hap measure to prop up they dying capitalist system” at the time of its passing, you don’t get to claim it now.

Why is this important? Well before the advent of Social Security more than half of all seniors died in poverty. Now almost none due. In other words, the “left” is pretty shit at actually doing what they claim to be trying to do. In fact it is hard to tell the difference between them and the right sometimes.

cloudforester: How about no?

I’m an anarchist.

SeanCanary: Is there a short version as to why? Like...if you could convince everyone to believe as you believe what do you think the world would look like sans government (and institutions/corporations)? An egalitarian world would be great unless it means we have to live in a world without roads or modern manufacturing in which case it sounds a lot less great.

dayafternextfriday: Read Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread if you’re interested, he addressed one vision for that over 100 years ago

[Deleted or banned user]: [deleted]

magnora7: The way some of the raddle mods are acting in this very thread ought to be evidence enough.

[Deleted or banned user]: [deleted]

magnora7: If that’s cloudforester, he’s truly making an ass of himself in this thread, isn’t he. Doesn’t make me want to go to raddle at all if that sort of arrogant and angry behavior is coming from a mod

ninimben: just a real quick confirmation, cloudforester is ziq, the admin and owner of raddle

LGBTreecko: Guy you’re replying to is an admin of saidit, he’s probably equally biased.

magnora7: Thanks, got it.

51isnotprime: They’ve reposted this.

https://raddle.me/f/lobby/71332/r-redditalternatives-raddle-is-awful

Snow0v0: I don’t want to read their shit site anymore.

51isnotprime: It’s hard to find a good reddit alternative that’s not just a hub for radical content reddit doesn’t accept. Can’t really go oh, Reddit’s been annoying for a while, let’s try this version that’s just a liitle different

Prince_Kropotkin: https://web.archive.org/web/20180405002453/https://raddle.me/f/lobby/28422/i-m-stepping-down-as-admin-because-of-some-shit-i-did-emma

Snow0v0: I don’t want to click the link of that shit site again,can you tell me what do you want to say?

Prince_Kropotkin: seriously read it, it’s hilarious

Snow0v0: Multiple Personality Disorder?

ninimben: ziq called me a liar the other day for mentioning this, and denied everything. amazing, thanks for digging this up. It wasn’t important enough to me to find it again.

What a fuckin’ liar

EDIT also that thread is the worst apology in the history of apologies, literally continues lying and attacking people even as he tries to apologize for systematically manipulating the site

Prince_Kropotkin: it’s extremely funny, but it’s also serious: ziq is one of the few people i’ve interacted with online where I’m pretty convinced they are not just stupid and edgy but have extremely serious mental disorders and could even be a violent threat to people around them

ninimben: Agreed

[Deleted or banned user]: sick ableism

Prince_Kropotkin: tell ziq (unless you are yet another of their alts) to see a fucking counselor, they appear to be a danger to their community

lPFreeIy: Hahaha oh wow, that bad? I predict success for them

TimesThreeTheHighest: I haven’t seen this, but maybe the problem is specific to certain groups.

ninimben: I think what gets me the most about raddle is that when a popular user there does break raddle’s own rules they’ll make up some bullshit about why it doesn’t matter because if they decide you’re a bad person they can make up whatever headcanon they want to about you and use it to rationalize treating you like literal shit and making a mockery out of their own principles

They’re a pack of self-righteous hypocrites over there who don’t actually believe in anything.

M1ghty_boy: I am helping someone do a project (them most it lmao) and that includes raddle. Moderators of saidit were more than happy to port CSS styling from our subreddit onto our subsaidit since it was 95% reddit code anyway. But raddle mods didn’t want anything to do with it. They said it was a waste of time bla bla etc etc

Scum-Mo: what on eartyh were you expecting

[Deleted or banned user]: Raddle is to leftards what voat is to rightists. I’m amazed all the commies, socialists, leftards, libturds, and PC police here, don’t mass migrate to raddle....where never will be heard a discouraging word as the Commissars guarantee only ‘groupthink’ is allowed.

“Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” ― George Orwell, 1984

cloudforester: Literally quotes a socialist who was critiquing the right while decrying socialism.

Top minds.

magnora7: yeah it’s like the opposite extreme from voat. saidit.net avoids both extremes

GeneralMaize: Stop spamming your shitty site in every single thread without mentioning that it’s yours.

Saidit is garbage, it seems to be some kind of conspiracy site aimed at teenage girls.

OMG the header image is so pretty with its pink and purple and sparkles!

I love the “say your truth” title, it’s just like my favorite Instagram hashtag, #speakyourtruth!

Emoji-based voting, wow! I can’t wait to give my bestie’s post about the deep state an LOL face vote!

alllie: No, saidit is okay.

magnora7: Yeah who wants a two-type upvote system when you can just have vote wars all day like on reddit and voat? That’s working out so well. Do you have better icon ideas for the insightful and fun votes than a lightbulb and a smiley face?

Are you scared of certain colors? Do you evaluate books based on their covers too? “This book has a purple cover with a design I don’t like, therefore it’s a worthless book!”

Snow0v0: “Insightful” is for thinking and “fun” is emotion,used 2 different kinds of human brain function...

Anyway, the best thing is removed the nasty “downvoteing”.

Flux_7: You gotta respect the hustle, my man has dreams.

Snow0v0: The retard mods on there pretend it’s an anarchism site, but it’s nothing to do with helping each others, it just an extreme leftist site for playing their disgusting politic struggles games.

magnora7: yeah I don’t like raddle either, for those exact reasons

Snow0v0: Anyway,I just sign up for SAIDIT,what can I do for it?

magnora7: Welcome! Comment, post, and vote :) That’s what saidit really needs

Here’s the saidit welcome message so you can learn more: https://saidit.net/s/SaidIt/comments/37r/welcome_to_saiditnet/

rockstarsball: Get some discussions going, get your friends over there, keep the viewpoints balanced so one ideology doesn’t rule over the site...

Snow0v0: Balance is the best,but many people want to rule.

cloudforester: So “don’t have a strong opinion on anything, be bland as fuck in case you offend someone ideologically”

lol

Prince_Kropotkin: how’s the never-ending crusade to spend your entire adult life tilting at e-windmills ziq? looks like you have 5 users on raddle now, that’s way up from 3 before

magnora7: I’m sure all the anger and vitriol being spewed by him on this thread will attract more people to raddle /s

rockstarsball: the pyramid of debate is right there in the mission statement and plastered all over the site. If you can’t keep a conversation from devolving into nonsense then you aren’t ready to participate in the discussion there

magnora7: He’s the mod of /r/raddle and /r/raddle_me, he’s just trying to make saidit look bad

rockstarsball: that makes sense, I was wondering why there was so much backlash against saidit since its pretty much like a smaller version of reddit without the astroturfing. Speaking of which, it may be necessary to put in some safeguards for that in the near future since its getting more popular.

Also it’d be nice to have some actual upvote/downvote arrows (maybe an up/down and then the insightful/humorous) either way its the least shitty place i’ve found to migrate to so far

cloudforester: You do that all by yourself with this constant shilling lol.

cloudforester: lmao

“voicing your opinion on a discussion forum = devolving into nonsense”

rockstarsball: i mean, theres an obvious difference between the shitpits of political ideology (voat/Raddle) and a place that tries to keep discussion civil and focuses on letting people defend their points of view without worrying about upsetting the status quo set by the admins

cloudforester: Centrism (neoliberalism) isn’t an ideology now. Please.

continue this thread

51isnotprime: “use politics as your identity and don’t talk or think about anything else while you spend your time getting into arguments on every irrelevant thread”

Snow0v0: It would be fun that report Raddle to CCP and let the great firewall block it.

>:)

cloudforester: Do it chud.

cloudforester: I don’t like saidit because I have a personality.

Tiltedwindmill: retard mods

But nooo...you didn’t say anything offensive. I sooooo believe you. /S in case it wasn’t obvious.

cloudforester: They threw a tantrum and called people psychopaths and fascists for downvoting their trolling. Was pretty funny.

Snow0v0: I saw almost everyone on your shit site used the “fascists” word as well.

Scum-Mo: No. That sounds like an authentic anarchism site to me

Magma57: You do know that anarchists are on the extreme left, right?

magnora7: left/right is an independent axis from the anarchist/authoritarian axis

Snow0v0: Sure.

cloudforester: There are no rightwing anarchists. Capitalism is always authoritarian.

magnora7: There are no rightwing anarchists

Yes there are

cloudforester: No, there aren’t. Anarchy is the opposition to hierarchy and authority. Capitalism grants wealth, power, HIERARCHY, AUTHORITY to a select group of chosen ones.

magnora7: Sorry you don’t get to define political terms however you please, they have actual meanings outside your echochamber viewpoint. The fact you conflate anti-authority with leftism is hilarious to me.

Magma57: Would you disagree with either of the following statements?

1. Capitalism is hierarchical.

2. Anarchism is an ideology which opposes hierarchy.

magnora7: I would agree with both. But capitalism is far from the only ideology with a hierarchy.

continue this thread

cloudforester: lol @ you centrists thinking your shit don’t stink

your site is extreme alright — extremely shit.

magnora7: lol mod of /r/raddle and mod of /r/raddle_me, having a vested interest in maligning the competition much?

Is GeneralMaize your alt, and that’s why it’s a new account that has no other comments and was created today?

haha you guys

Snow0v0: I wanted to point out GeneralMaize is a new account as well.

cloudforester: You’re not our competition. We’re actually providing something useful. Not just another generic reddit clone with the same shit you can get anywhere. We fill specific niches for radical geopolitics, privacy, foss, illegalism and so on. Things reddit can’t (won’t) provide.

is GeneralMaize your alt

No, idk who that is. /u/dragonoa is my other account. I’m ziq on raddle. Pretty rich accusing me of using alts to shill when you do nothing but shill all day.

magnora7: Sad you feel the need to attack instead of work together.

finchMFG: Both of you are open source. Either one of you could contribute to the others project and benefit the wider community ( since postmill can be run independent of raddle and saidits source independent of saidit ).

Why can’t we band together as a community and built the defacto standard? Independent of politics and personal beliefs? Source code should be agnostic. Leave that to the individual implementations.

cloudforester: Their code is just reddit’s bloated old code. Our code was written from scratch to have a tiny footprint and maximum security and is constantly updated with new features.

We’re really not in the same game as this kid who just spun up reddit 0.5, made it 65% uglier, and put it on some American server. I wouldn’t wipe my ass with his site. Has nothing to do with politics, reddit’s code is just horrible. If it ever took off he’d slap ads on it in a second just to pay the server costs which are already 900% higher than raddle’s with his 5 users.

finchMFG: Ok, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make.

If we band together and make one piece of software that these sites can use, would that not be better than the ~10 alternatives ( software, not sites ) we have now?

cloudforester: Postmill is the only serious piece of software that is actively developed. 2.5 years now and it’s still getting major updates on a weekly basis. Compared to saidit which just has 6 year old code with some minor cosmetic changes.

It is too bad the people on this sub are so ideological that they downvote raddle and postmill posts just because they don’t like socialism... socialism is exactly what it takes to develop something like this, to volunteer thousands of hours of labor just to give it to the people asking for nothing in return. All the other alternatives you see are attempts to eventually cash in. Raddle is the only reddit alternative that has proven viable. Instead of starting up new vanity projects using a corporation’s old code, people should absolutely contribute to postmill.

finchMFG: Do you not count Tildes, Throat ( powers Phuks), or Voat as serious software? All are still being actively developed ( ok, hard to say that for certain about voat since they’re closed source now ) and all are popular alternatives. Are you also saying none of these projects are viable?

I 100% agree with this part:

Instead of starting up new vanity projects...

And I also agree with this part:

people should absolutely contribute to postmill.

But I don’t think it should be exclusive to just postmill. We should definitely work together as developers. Weather that be on Postmill, Throat, or Tildes. Maybe even something new, preferably one that has a spec sheet defined my multiple developers.

-e- sorry, parts of this sound hostile. That’s not my intention.

continue this thread

cloudforester: Fam you only came into this thread to attack raddle and shill for your enlightened centrism farce. Develop some self awareness.

[Deleted or banned user]: lmao you got banned for calling people “psychopaths” (ableism) and were also shitting on how others speak broken English. get fucked.

Snow0v0: Started to worry about lack of people go to your shit site?

Just go to check their “ableism word list” written by mods, the word “psycho” has been removed.

By the way, I didn’t say someone is a psychopath on there directly, I asked nutjob can he feels his behavior is like a psychopath for he got mad for I said the “Taiwan” meme. It doesn’t matter anymore, you should worry that you used the word “stupid/dumb/etc” before and a malicious nutjob find it in a search result and report it to the meta sub raddle. That’s how it works now.

And all of these are just a way for their malicious mods feel better for their self-righteous, they look like have a histrionic personality disorder.

ninimben: They also don’t enforce their terms of service against popular users and will mock you if you make a big stink about them actually tolerating bigotry

No Rules, No Rulers, No Cults: A Response to the Idea That Anarchy is When We Have Rules But No Rulers

Linked Post:
<archive.ph/o/Wj2jQ/https:/raddle.me/wiki/norulesnorulers>

Submitted 4 days ago by dialectical_idealism

Source:
<reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/1n44ulf/no_rules_no_rulers_no_cults_a_response_to_the>

---

PMmePowerRangerMemes: It seems like the author’s talking about “rules and laws” as if they’re the same thing when they’re very clearly not?

You can have rules that are enforced by an authority figure, sure. You can also have rules that function more like social expectations or norms. Like, I know an activist group that has a “No Ghosting” rule. They obviously don’t have formal mechanisms for enforcing that. It’s a norm. They make a culture where it’s acknowledged that ghosting is a thing that happens, and they try to nip burnout in the bud or at least encourage transparency.

Ironically, boardgames are a great example of having rules without enforcement, and yet the writer has this wild claim within the first few paragraphs:

The argument that rules can exist without rulers is just as ludicrous as the suggestion that a board game can have rules without players to enforce them

Players don’t “enforce” rules. That’s a really stark and skewed way of looking at it. A boardgame works because we all agree to follow the rules, because we’re mutually invested in having a good time together. When a rule is broken, it’s usually an honest mistake, remedied by a polite reminder.

Which is crazy, because that’s like... maybe the ideal social parameters for anarchism in practice and a lovely example of “rules without rulers.”

twodaywillbedaisy: “No rulers, not no rules” frequently appears in discussions about democracy, and related ones about governance and rule enforcement. We can trace it back as early as 1988, when Edward Abbey put forward his theory of anarchy, where he presented anarchy as “democracy taken seriously, as in Switzerland”. The comparison to Swiss democracy is offensive and misleading in a number of ways, but I’m afraid the comparison to board games only really trivializes the matter. Games are simulated play and pretend scenarios, with the “rules” generally describing game mechanics rather than social relations. Probably not the sort of thing that should prevent us from applying a consistent anarchist critique of governmental, rule-based systems.

Alarming-Explosions: I would hope that you eventually answer those that have answered you.

PMmePowerRangerMemes: After a day away, I’m just like.. what are we even arguing about here. So I went back to the essay and, to me, it seems like he raises the first concern about anything concrete right near the end:

When newcomers are told, “Here are the rules of this anarchist space,” they are being taught that authority is a necessary component of social organization, even in a supposedly anti-authoritarian environment. This deeply flawed messaging can take years, if not a lifetime, for them to unlearn. Many will never avail themselves of these misunderstandings. They’ll go on to call themselves anarchists while practicing various forms of rulership and informing hundreds of other people they come into contact with that anarchy has rules which must be followed or else.

And, y’know, I still think ziq’s view of “rules” is too black-and-white—the rules/norms of a social/organizing space is not nearly the same thing as the rules/laws of a government—but I’ll give them that they touch on a valid concern about cultivating leadership in newcomers, making a culture where we collectively grow out of rule-follower habits... For sure.

But like... also, when someone pumps out a mostly abstract screed about why intentional social norms (e.g., codes of conduct) are tyranny, it reeeeally makes me wonder what IRL situation prompted all this.

Tift: When newcomers are told, “Here are the rules of this anarchist space,” they are being taught that authority is a necessary component of social organization, even in a supposedly anti-authoritarian environment. This deeply flawed messaging can take years, if not a lifetime, for them to unlearn. Many will never avail themselves of these misunderstandings. They’ll go on to call themselves anarchists while practicing various forms of rulership and informing hundreds of other people they come into contact with that anarchy has rules which must be followed or else.

This was their point? oh my god, yes i do agree with that. I wish they had said that up front and expanded from there.

Edit: Wait was the original article edited? the formatting looks different. I remember the first section being significantly shorter? Did I full on hallucinate this or did something happen?

dialectical_idealism: It seems like the author’s talking about “rules and laws” as if they’re the same thing when they’re very clearly not?

read the response to this comment:

https://raddle.me/f/Anarchy/210376/people-who-think-anarchy-is-when-no-rules-why-do-you-think/comment/433250

it’s reiterated in the essay, but easier to digest as a short comment.

laws and rules aren’t the same (one is large scale, one is small scale), but they’re both hierarchy-dependent.

social norms are incredibly oppressive to anyone who fails at them e.g. autistic people. i fail at social norms everyday

Players don’t “enforce” rules.

So if you’re playing monopoly and someone keeps stealing from the bank, you don’t put a stop to it?

JediMy: So if you’re playing monopoly and someone keeps stealing from the bank, you don’t put a stop to it?

Then you ask them to stop and if they don’t you stop playing. Find someone else. Board games are voluntary associations.

dialectical_idealism: You’re missing the point. It’s not an argument against rules in board games. It explains that the rules are only real because the players implement them, which is compared to rulers enforcing rules in society. Rules can’t exist without people to enforce them.

And if you refuse to play because someone broke a rule, you are enforcing the rules. Ending the game is the penalty.

HeavenlyPossum: You’re describing disassociation as a kind of enforcement. If disassociation is enforcement and enforcement is antithetical to anarchism, then either we could never achieve anarchy or we would have to submit ourselves to a nightmare world of never being able to separate ourselves from other people without risking “enforcement.”

But that aside, since disassociation entails no force, we cannot define it as “enforcement.”

Outrageous-Trick6124: Excellent. Yes, I agree 💯

Alarming-Explosions: Nobody cares about empty remarks.

Exactly what do you mean by that, what do you agree with? And would you like to expound on your agreement?

be-jhijak: stfu

Alarming-Explosions: Ufts

dialectical_idealism: I’m not opposing rules in a board game or penalties for breaking those rules. A game isn’t a society. I’m not against freedom of association or disassociation, the essay makes that clear repeatedly, explicitly defining anarchy as freedom to secede:

Anarchy requires freedom of association absent of coercion, and asserts that all relationships should be based on mutual consent and the right to secede. It envisions a radically different existence where relationships and agreements are based on voluntary participation and mutual respect, not on a set of externally imposed mandates that are held up with punitive penalties. The key difference between anarchy and the rules-based order we live under lies in the concept of coercion. The rules-based order is completely dependent on coercion.

I’m against constructing rules and enforcing them on people in a society i.e. I’m against governing people, ruling people.

You don’t need rules in order to choose to not be friends with someone. You can just do it. Rules are actually more likely to force you to keep being friends with them: https://raddle.me/wiki/friendship

HeavenlyPossum: So if I were to publicly articulate a general principle—say “I will not tolerate racism, and will disassociate with anyone who engages in racist behavior”—and follow through with that public pledge by disassociating with racists, would you say I have established a rule that I am enforcing through disassociation?

dialectical_idealism: Why would you need to make a public declaration before you can disassociate from racists?

HeavenlyPossum: In this hypothetical, I did. I believe in being as clear as possible why I’m disassociating from people to ensure they understand why I am disassociating. Perhaps they will be more likely to improve their behavior if they understand why they have lost my association.

Have I established a rule? Am I enforcing that rule through disassociation? If so, are my rule and its enforcement authoritarian?

dialectical_idealism: Anarchists don’t issue people with commands and we don’t believe this domination would stop people from being racist.

If you need to threaten to not be someone’s friend if they be racist, you’re clearly not going to change how they think about race.

continue this thread

PMmePowerRangerMemes: And if you refuse to play because someone broke a rule, you are enforcing the rules. Ending the game is the penalty.

So... then there’s nothing wrong with rule enforcement.

See, this was my point. The writer’s own analogy counters their argument.

Dargkkast: If a friend and oneself have the rule of not talking about something because we both dislike those convos (thought we might start talking about said thing by accident) there’s no hierarchy, yet there’s a rule.

DisastrousBit3520: In the context of “Anarchy is rules without rulers”, that isn’t a rule.

Anarchierkegaard: “Frameworks not rules!”

Ziq with his usual habit of missing the point of what both historical and contemporary anarchists mean via titbits of perspectives and misrepresentations of ideas. Another fine example of “[those] gentlemen [who] think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves.”

While I’m sure the pop-psychology is all very interesting for his blog, I’m not very impressed that he neither addressed the kind of order that Proudhon or Reclus referred to as naturally emergent nor the idea of responsibility in the maintenance of a particular ethic (in the vein of Day or Levinas). Instead, he runs roughshod over something interesting and then reasserts the object of critique with a dose of Romanticism.

twodaywillbedaisy: Anarchierkegaard with their usual habit of name-dropping, forcing Kierkegaard into the discussion.

Anarchierkegaard: I do mention him a lot, yes. There’s a block function on Reddit if it ever becomes aggravating. I’ve deleted my extensive reference to his body of work above, but it shouldn’t affect the message.

Outrageous-Trick6124: Oh, what was the point about Kierkegaard?

Anarchierkegaard: I was actually being sarcastic. I’d included his name in the list of Day, [Kierkegaard], and Levinas and apparently that was too much.

If you’d like to know how Kierkegaard saw self-appropriated rules as key to living life, I’d suggest the essay “Out with It!” by Bruce Kirmmse: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-kierkegaard/out-with-it/F7D5D3F19B125CF4A80D9F3793D2DBCC You can find the DOI number on that linked page—which could be helpful for searching on websites that circumvent academic blocks...

Alarming-Explosions: Your analysis is disingenuous.

azenpunk: Sorry.. titbits? Tidbits.

I actually agree with this, and OP. Both perspectives are different but valid ways of saying the same thing. It really can get down to just how you define “rules.” Some people’s concepts include the organic social norms that arise in any community. People tend to use the word very broadly. But any set of behavioral expectations that have standardized and systemic enforcement isn’t anarchist. And I do think that’s widely understood, even by people who frame anarchism as “rules without rulers.” I think it’s just a common and innocent way of saying the older phrase — order without power.

Anarchierkegaard: No, titbits. Some of us aren’t American and, because of that, don’t use Americanisms.

I would say this might run a little roughshod over mutually incompatible conceptions of justice and power, which would be a bit of a problem.

azenpunk: Ah, apologies for my confusion. does titbit mean the same thing as tidbit?

I’m further confused by your second sentence, I am not sure what you’re trying to say.

Tift: different spelling of the same idea.

DisastrousBit3520: If you define “rules” as “organic social norms that arise in any community” then the phrase “anarchy is rules without rulers” is meaningless, so I can’t imagine that’s what people who use the phrase mean.

azenpunk: To be clear I don’t necessarily define “rules” that way. But how would it be meaningless if there are no rulers, but still social norms perceived as “rules?”

And that is a very common definition, so I think it’s reasonable to assume that’s what a lot of people mean. People talk about the rules of relationships and friendship all the time. These are technically better thought of as social norms, sure, but that is how people use the word.

DisastrousBit3520: It’s meaningless because it goes without saying. It’s like saying no rulers, but still laws of physics. Like sure, it’s technically true, but nobody is arguing otherwise.

azenpunk: Sure they are. The misconception that anarchism is chaos and disorder is very common, and that’s what the phrase contradicts by stating “rules” still exist.

DisastrousBit3520: Then say that, that it’s not chaos and disorder. Hell, I’d even say that “anarchy is chaos and disorder” isn’t any more of a misconception than “anarchy is rules without rulers”, but that’s besides the point... No regular person will see that phrase and assume you are talking about “organic social norms that arise in any community”.

azenpunk: Alright

dialectical_idealism: I removed the word ‘framework’ though I’m still not sure why it presented a problem.

A genuine anarchist education program would focus on fostering an environment that encourages students to cultivate critical thinking skills rooted in their own values. Rather than imposing rigid rules or doctrines, the program would empower learners to explore and articulate their ideas, promoting a sense of autonomy and self-direction. Students would be encouraged to apply these critical thinking skills to various anarchistic projects, engaging in collaborative discussions and hands-on activities that reflect their interests and ideals. This approach not only nurtures individual growth but also fosters a sense of connection and shared purpose, allowing students to envision and create alternatives to traditional structures of authority. This would encourage newcomers to question everything, including the idea of imposed rules.

By teaching students of anarchy to internalize authority, even in a subtle way, we betray the very spirit of anarchy. We teach them to be docile followers of rules rather than creators of vigorous anarchy. We strangle any potential baby anarchists have in the cradle before it can flourish.

dialectical_idealism: There’s zero mention of “frameworks not rules”, you seem to have completely missed the point of the essay, if you even read it. It makes a direct argument against installing rules and never proposes renaming the concept to something else. Furthermore, expecting someone to parrot Proudhon and Reclus when they come from an entirely different school of anarchy is an odd demand. Why don’t you just read those authors instead of expecting others to repeat their ideas in their own essays?

Using a phrase like “pop psychology” as a catch-all denigration gives me the sense that you believe only people with masters degrees should be allowed to write about anarchy, which is incredibly concerning and says a lot about your ideological positions.

LVMagnus: There is zero mention of “A genuine anarchist education program would not present rules but rather a framework for critical thinking and voluntary action”, i.e. “frameworks not rules”? You wrote this, you can’t even control F your own text, or you just don’t know what words mean... Never mind, “framework” here is pretty much rules by another name and pretending really hard they’d would work differently from how you described rules because you described framework with technically not the same words. I take my question back, seems I answered it myself..

dialectical_idealism: you’re projecting “framework for critical thinking and voluntary action” into meaning something entirely different than the words on the page. The word framework here does not mean rules by any definition. It means promoting critical thinking and voluntary action. I didn’t even remember using the word framework because it doesn’t mean to me what it apparently means to you (“rules”).

If someone could explain why “framework for critical thinking and voluntary action” means “rules”, I’ll gladly remove the word framework from the essay.

azenpunk: It’s just a cheap gotcha comment. I would ignore it. The fact is y’all are saying the exact same thing

Anarchierkegaard: If this is referring to me, I’m definitely not. Ziq is a kind of nihilist, which I take to be antithetical to anarchism or any real thought. I’d have deep problems with what I take to be the “autarchic” aspects of his thought, i.e., the individual’s ability to always know what is best for him at any given time. This leads to a highly voluntarist and unstable conception of the self, the relationship between the self and the community, and (if one could sustain itself) the community.

See Eller here on the failure of atomised self-governance: http://www.hccentral.com/eller12/part1.html

Anarchierkegaard: A genuine anarchist education program would not present rules but rather a framework for critical thinking and voluntary action.

Let’s not play around. When people say “rules, not rulers”, that’s what they mean. Maybe there are those who are genuinely confused (although we wouldn’t know it, ziq only commits to shadowboxing instead of identifying anyone), but that’s different from repackaging a slogan.

I don’t expect anyone to parrot anyone. I would like to point out a glaring blind spot and wonder why he hasn’t addressed it. Possibly because this isn’t a good piece of writing which has taken worthwhile adversaries into account and is instead content with, as I said, shadowboxing.

I think you’re attributing some belief that isn’t mine on the pop psychology part. I was referring to the ham-fisted use of “love bombing” which was ham-fisted and cloying. Ziq’s not serious, therefore he says unserious things like appealing to the presumably imaginary “love bombing” of a potentially imaginary foe.

Silver-Statement8573: Dialectical idealism is ziqs reddit

Anarchierkegaard: That’s very funny

dialectical_idealism: not sure what’s funny about using a different username on a different website. do you use the same name on every platform...?

Anarchierkegaard: No, I was just saying it was funny that you in particular have shared this, a record of a short squabble on “Raddle”, here.

angustinaturner: Love bombing is actually a form of tribal justice in quiet a few tribal communities...

dialectical_idealism: are you saying you support love bombing as a form of... punishment..?

angustinaturner: It’s more a form of transformative/therapeutic justice that goes beyond the concept of punishment and acknowledges the suffering that most probably led to the transgression. I heard it in the context of stealing where the logic was that if you felt compelled to steal it ment you were feeling a lack that hadn’t been met by the community so the love bombing was too show that the community was there to support their needs.

angustinaturner: I hadn’t read the article... I do basically agree with what they are saying but I think the love bombing example is reductive.... Interpreting intentions in actions is fairly tricky and you can end up in the same trap of judging people on ossified clichés... How “new comers” are treated is a very complex question. The variables are fairly complex, not least that the “new comer” could be coming with something valuable to offer the community in terms of understanding how we relate to one another... The one time i got love bombed in the sense of the article, I’m not entirely sure that manipulation was the intention... It was a respected Buddhist Monk who had very little interest in manipulating a Western student who was a bit dodgy... It was definitely trying to target a lack and an insecurity in me... I think giving refugee from a sense of scarcity... Otherwise the one time I did feel like I was getting manipulated -on a left wing falling collective — it was done through a sense of isolation and privation... But even then I think the logic was too try and produce some autonomous action on my part to give me a sense of agency within the collective rather than any actual motivation to manipulate me. I think the less sinister dynamics found in closed or semi closed communities comes more from the sense of interior/exterior and really will develop whenever this persists... The danger of such coercion developing without any real volition is an observable risk involved in any group formation (echo chambers on social media for example) and really it leads us back to the tension of the individual and collective that is at the very heart of Anarchist problematics

dialectical_idealism: certainly, and just being nice to newbies alone isn’t a red flag, you’d have to consider all the evidence to determine is someone is working to manipulate you

dialectical_idealism: Let’s not play around. When people say “rules, not rulers”, that’s what they mean.

A framework for critical thinking and voluntary action has nothing to do with imposing rules. Critical thinking is not a rule. Voluntary action is a not a rule. These are completely different concepts and couldn’t possibly be conflated except by the most disingenuous person.

The essay is explicit in putting forward its position: no rules. It doesn’t urge you rename words like ‘rules’ to ‘frameworks’ to do entryism, rather it devotes an entire section to explaining why this is bad practice and why it so conflicts with the actual goals of anarchy.

Maybe there are those who are genuinely confused (although we wouldn’t know it, ziq only commits to shadowboxing instead of identifying anyone)

The essay is a direct response to yesterday’s conversations and the arguments directly made by people in it, especially the user ‘totalism’:

https://raddle.me/f/Anarchy/210364/people-who-think-anarchy-is-when-there-are-rules-but-no

https://raddle.me/f/Anarchy/210376/people-who-think-anarchy-is-when-no-rules-why-do-you-think

I don’t expect anyone to parrot anyone. I would like to point out a glaring blind spot and wonder why he hasn’t addressed it.

You haven’t pointed out any glaring inefficiencies by namedropping those authors. You haven’t made any kind of reasoned argument for the use of rules, you simply demonstrated you have the ability to throw out red herrings to derail an argument for whatever reason.

If you have an argument for rules, make it instead of expecting everyone to know what Proudhon and Reclus’s positions were.

imaginary “love bombing”

You’re offended by the description of cults using tactics like love bombing to coerce recruits into their orbit and the pointed similarity it has to leftists telling people who are heavily indoctrinated into authoritarian society what they want to hear in order to recruit them? I honestly have no response. Way to miss the forest for the trees.

edit: said ‘against rules’ instead of ‘for rules’, fixed it

Anarchierkegaard: Well, I can see why you’ve gone after such a huge target here.

The first problem, for me, is that you assume the liberal position of law, i.e., legal positivism, or, that we create laws in the same way we create, say, art. The allusion I make to Proudhon and Reclus (amongst others) is because they rejected this idea of positivism (largely implicitly) as order being something that is imposed onto the object of society. Instead, they say it is discoverable in practice—there is a natural law or natural order to actual practice (although that phrase will carry a lot of baggage that P. and R. weren’t committed to). This position is found especially in ancient philosophy, where law was viewed as a kind of science which uncovers some naturally occuring order (Cicero is a key example here), but the self-identified “radical individualists” that cropped up in America were amongst the first to really challenge the abuse of that perspective without challenging the perspective itself. In that way, we could suggest the “order of anarchy” proposed by Proudhon is a “rule” (and, while I agree that the terms might undesirable, a little charity would clear up confusion) which emerges naturally through practice and can be understood in the same way, e.g., biology would be.

In the same way, I would hope that “rules not rulers” people think of these “rules” as discoverable patterns of freedom-increasing practices. And we could critique that, but we can’t until we frame what these people-worth-talking-to are saying properly—especially if we’re stuck in the comfort of shadowboxing, which is presumably quite tempting if you want a short turnaround from writing to publishing.

I point out the glaring blindspots for the same reason Bob Black mocked Chomsky on his failure to understand anarchist history in “Chomsky on the Nod”. For the average person who is merely interested in finding out more or just doing something, that’s not a prerequisite. But for the person who thinks they have something worth sharing and starts up in effectively journalism, i.e., the manipulation of ideas, then there is a certain question about how much a person knows and how they came to these ideas. If we’re not comfortable with something vaguely Proudhonian and still want to represent ourselves as something of a “thought leader”, we might want to remember Black’s scathing critique that Chomsky seemingly had no idea about anarchist thought outside of a tiny sliver of writers that abruptly ends with Rudolf Rocker.

You’ve misunderstood my point on love bombing. Now that you’ve unmasked the offended, I fail to see how “totalism” is engaging in love bombing at all. It’s the wielding of a pop psychological concept against someone for unobvious reasons.

Edit: and that’s without getting into the more important point that the distinction between frameworks and rules, in a real sense, could be a hair’s breadth. Some philosophers, but not anarchists, would suggest that this is just language play—especially in the absence of an example framework.

dialectical_idealism: I never said that specific person was doing love bombing, love bombing was only mentioned as one of many manipulative cultish tactics anarchists should avoid. Love bombing is something I notice regularly on the ‘left unity’ forum hexbear to ingratiate ancoms to tankies and convince them to turn on anarchists who won’t fall in line with their authoritarian program.

Anarchierkegaard: Sorry, I was sure you’d said this was a direct response to “totalism”.

dialectical_idealism: to your edit: why do you keep repeating the claim that i made an argument for ‘frameworks not rules’? I didn’t use the word framework the way you’re using it at all. I’m assuming you read an argument elsewhere that made the argument for frameworks as rules, and because the word appeared in my essay in a completely different context, you’re conflating my argument with theirs?

Anarchierkegaard: There’s no obvious difference between a framework and a collection of rules. You make the same mistake your adversary does but with different language. If the role of the anarchist is to educate with frameworks and not rules, it’s entirely possible to believe that a framework of approaches, etc. is just rules but worded in such a para-academically friendly way so as to obscure their rule-like quality. As I said, in the absence of an example framework, it’s as equally believable that these frameworks are just your rules as opposed to some other set of rules which you don’t approve of.

The classic example would be, say, the Kropotkinist call for the framework of communal ownership. This is, from a certain critical perspective, a rule against intelligible possession (or, the ownership of things which I am not using, i.e., non-use-possession)—a market anarchist or a liberal might want to take this line. Without a concrete example, it’s hard to say more.

dialectical_idealism: Again you’re reading into the sentence and attaching baggage to it that doesn’t exist from my vantage point. To me, the sentence simply means 2 things: promoting critical thinking skills and voluntary action. You seem to have a habit of projecting your assumptions of ideological intent that doesn’t exist when certain words or phrases trigger you (for lack of a better word), which explains why you’re so sure this is an argument for renaming rules rather than doing away with them entirely and why you’re so bothered by a phrase you associate with “pop psychology”.

in the absence of an example framework

Promoting critical thinking skills and voluntary action is the only stated framework. You’re seeing ghosts.

continue this thread

Silver-Statement8573: There’s no obvious difference between a framework and a collection of rules.

The difference is usally pretty obvious, at least in my experience. “Rules not rulers” people are with little exception interested in designing a system in which we still have the permissions of political society. I don’t see the connection between this and a framework, which seems vaguer. Perhaps you can explain it to me?

As some guy said “we can do all sorts of things with words”, but the article seems fairly accurate in the way people using the term want it to accomplish. If that were to change there would probably be no cause for argument except maybe one of clarity, since most people do not think of a situation with rules as one in which everybody is doing what they want

continue this thread

Tift: Is there a reason to read beyond section one?

The arguments presented so far are incoherent and consistently beg the question without follow up or citation.

[Deleted or banned user]: [removed]

Tift: ah got it. thanks.

Silver-Statement8573: Ziq has only run postleftanarchism for a few months after it had been modless and postless for several years.

“Postleft” is probably not something anyone would recognize as right wing. They are anarchists; they do not believe in hierarchy, rules, authority, etc. They do not believe in capitalism, nations, nationalism, meritocracy... They dislike leftists because of, from what I gather, their preference for certain types of crappy organizations, fixation on revolution and sometimes stuff related to anti-civ, which is Ziq’s focus.

Tift: ah didn’t realize we where talking about post left.

dialectical_idealism: Appeal to Mockery fallacy.

Tift: no, this is not an ad hominem attack on the author. Its a critique of the writing so far.

I meant neither you nor them offense.

dialectical_idealism: the arguments are perfectly coherent and based on a sound understanding of anarchist history and methodology. Your comment is not a critique, a critique would require a modicum of substance with some kind of response or refutation to the arguments being presented, and a counter-argument of some kind rather than a crude attempt to attack my ability to communicate ideas.

Tift: k

dialectical_idealism: Good talk.

Alarming-Explosions: A critique of which writing?

jskoodle: I see the author is Ziq and proceed to ignore completely

Alarming-Explosions: Perhaps you could share with us the articles and or writings that you find especially disagreeable.

dialectical_idealism: Thanks for informing us, very useful comment.

Alboralix: ziq is back in the fucking subreddit again

Alarming-Explosions: I mean what’s the problem with that?

Is there some sort of zeitgeist against this particular user?

Because I’ve been here the entire time and as best as I can infer it is those that have an agenda of technophilic ideas that tend to dislike their ideas or actions.

I’ve read everything that they have produced.

Can anyone produce an argument outside of rumor?

I mean fuck, illustrate what you’re talking about.

ChaosRulesTheWorld: Absence of rules is an idealist nonsense. It’s litteraly impossible to have a world without rules. There are no animals on this planet who ever lived without rules.

Rules are an unavoidable consequence of organization. You can’t organize without rules. But even without organization, you can’t get rid of rules. For the simple reason that every animals have boundaries they will enforce on others.

I could go in a philosophy speach about how every parts of life are made of rules. That’s why animals can learn, because they have to learn them to survive.

But let’s just focus on anarchy. Anarchism itself is based on rules we all agree on. Otherwise nothing would differentiate it from any other political ideology. Those rules are: Being against all hierachies, against authority, for individual’s freedom, against all systemic oppressions, and many other rules that are consequences of those ones.

Saying “no rules” means that there are no rules against making rules, against making hirerachies or against oppressing anyone.

Your ideology exist but it’s not anarchism. It’s called anomism, and it’s basically the law of the jungle. It can only end with tyranny.

To exist, anarchism needs rules. Not rules enforced by a hierarchy or an authority. But basic rules everybody agrees on and will enforce.

dialectical_idealism: To exist, anarchism needs rules. Not rules enforced by a hierarchy or an authority. But basic rules everybody agrees on and will enforce.

I clearly don’t agree with your rules but I’d love to see you try to enforce them on me.

Saying “no rules” means that there are no rules against making rules, against making hirerachies or against oppressing anyone.

You don’t need rules to not oppress people. That’s the entire point of anarchy.

Anarchism itself is based on rules we all agree on.

You’re thinking of every other philosophy.

Otherwise nothing would differentiate it from any other political ideology.

Ha.

Those rules are: Being against all hierachies, against authority, for individual’s freedom, against all systemic oppressions, and many other rules that are consequences of those ones.

Those aren’t rules. No one is forcing you to oppose hierarchy. It’s an ethical choice you made.

It’s called anomism, and it’s basically the law of the jungle. It can only end with tyranny.

You don’t have much faith in people, do you? People won’t turn into tyrants if you don’t force your rules on them. Speaking of tyrants.

ChaosRulesTheWorld: I clearly don’t agree with your rules but I’d love to see you try to enforce them on me.

If you don’t agree with those rules. How are you even an anarchist?

If you are against those rules, it means by definition that you are not opposed to enforcing rules on other people. So if you break those rules, it means that you will do what you pretend to be opposed to.

You are clearly showing you hypocrisy. “Rules for thee but not for me”.

You don’t need rules to not oppress people. That’s the entire point of anarchy.

Yes you do. “To no oppress people” is a rule. And yes that’s the entire point of anarchy to make it a collective rule. Anybody who violate that rule should be fight against.

You’re thinking of every other philosophy

No absolutly not. The only philosophy that stands for no rules is anomism.

Those aren’t rules. No one is forcing you to oppose hierarchy. It’s an ethical choice you made.

Yes, those are rules by definition. I didn’t say “to oppose hierarchy” and wasn’t talking about individuals. I was talking about anarchism as a philosophy, ideology, system. One of the rules in anarchism is to be against hierarchies. Hierarchies are against anarchism rules.

You don’t have much faith in people, do you? People won’t turn into tyrants if you don’t force your rules on them.

It’s irrelevant wether i have faith in people or not. In both cases anarchism is the best answer.

Tyrants can always appear. If there are no rules then no one will stand against them, since it’s not against their (nonexistant) rules.

Speaking of tyrants.

Lmao, are you seriously suggesting that i am a tyrant because i”m disagreing with your anomist stance? You can’t be serious

Edit: ok i’ll give you a very basic exemple of personnal rules most people have and definitly enforce on others. It’s call “boundaries”. “You can’t touch me without my consent” is a rule. Don’t pretend it’s not.

WildAutonomy: There are many anarchist books out there that you may like if you’re curious about learning more

ChaosRulesTheWorld: What is that even supposed to mean?

WildAutonomy: There are many books on living without authority that I could recommend you

ChaosRulesTheWorld: Do you struggle with reading comprehension?

I’m an anarchist, why would i advocate for authority. I explicitly stand against it in my comment

DisastrousBit3520: why would i advocate for authority

You tell me... “To exist, anarchism needs rules. Not rules enforced by a hierarchy or an authority. But basic rules everybody agrees on and will enforce.”

There are no animals on this planet who ever lived without rules.

There is literally only one animal that lives with rules. If that was true, saying “anarchy is rules without rulers” is completely meaningless.

ChaosRulesTheWorld: You tell me... “To exist, anarchism needs rules. Not rules enforced by a hierarchy or an authority. But basic rules everybody agrees on and will enforce.”

You tell me. Where exactly am i advocating for authority here? I explicitly do the opposite

There is literally only one animal that lives with rules.

That’s absolutly not true. Humans aren’t the only ones to have rules. “Don’t go inside my territory” is a rule. “Don’t touch me against my will” is a rule. “Don’t come close to my babies” is a rule. And they will be enforced. Also, even other apes or social animals have social rules similar to human ones

If that was true, saying “anarchy is rules without rulers” is completely meaningless.

How exactly? Saying that in anarchy there are rules without rulers doesn’t mean that anarchy is just rules without rulers.

DisastrousBit3520: You tell me. Where exactly am i advocating for authority here? I explicitly do the opposite

“A person or group of people making and enforcing rules” is pretty much a textbook definition of authority...

“Don’t go inside my territory” is a rule. “Don’t touch me against my will” is a rule. “Don’t come close to my babies” is a rule.

Never had a non-human animal tell me any of those things though...

How exactly? Saying that in anarcht there are rules without rulers doesn’t mean that anarchy is just rules without rulers.

Because if we expand the definition of “rule” to include something that exists in all animals, then why stop there, might as well add the rules that govern the entire universe.

I propose: “Anarchy is no rulers, it is not no laws (for example, anarchists are not opposed to the laws of gravity), as if there are seriously some anarchists out there who believe anarchy means we’ll all just float into the sky...

ChaosRulesTheWorld: “A person or group of people making and enforcing rules” is pretty much a textbook definition of authority...

No it’s not.

Never had a non-human animal tell me any of those things though...

Don’t be disingenuous. It’s not because they don’t speak human languages that they don’t communicate it.

Because if we expand the definition of “rule” to include something that exists in all animals, then why stop there, might as well add the rules that govern the entire universe.

It’s not expending the definition. It’s just the definition of a rule. Restricting it to humans only is arbitrary and not very logical. Yes the rules that govern the entire universe are rules, but they are irrelevant since they don’t need to be enforced.

I propose: “Anarchy is no rulers, it is not no laws (for example, anarchists are not opposed to the laws of gravity), as if there are seriously some anarchists out there who believe anarchy means we’ll all just float into the sky...

Laws of physics don’t need to be enforced. It’s not the same kind of laws. Don’t be disingenuous.

DisastrousBit3520: No it’s not.

Literally the first dictionary definition I found:

“The power to enforce laws, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge.”

Laws of physics don’t need to be enforced. It’s not the same kind of laws. Don’t be disingenuous.

Do you seriously not see any difference between an animal protecting their children, and someone making a statement that “if someone tries to harm my children, you will receive a punishment in return”? Obviously the word “rule” is used in two different ways here, and no regular person is going to see the phrase “no rulers not no rules” and assume it refers to a parent protecting their children. I don’t think I’m the one that need to stop being disingenuous here...

But even if the word did mean the same thing it wouldn’t matter... Because obviously no anarchists believe that anarchy means not protecting your children, just as how no anarchists believe anarchy means no laws of physics. So the phrase “no rulers not no rules” is completely meaningless, because either it’s wrong, or it’s right but so obvious that it goes without saying.

continue this thread

WildAutonomy: Ah ableism. Should’ve expected that I guess.

ChaosRulesTheWorld: Yeah sure. Keep deflecting by making bs accusations

entrophy_maker: There is such a belief that there should be no rules at all, including those to enforce Capitalism or Socialism. This is referred to as Anarcho-Individualism. I don’t have a problem with people talking about it, but to say this is what Anarchy is, is gate-keeping af. Also, since Anarcho-Communists/Syndicalists/Collectivists make up the majority of Anarchists today, only a small percentage follow this Individualist ideology. Its just weird. Its like claiming Delaware speaks for all Americans.

ChaosRulesTheWorld: There is such a belief that there should be no rules at all, including those to enforce Capitalism or Socialism. This is referred to as Anarcho-Individualism

No it’s not.

Individualism is what differentiate anarchism from marxism. All anarchist are individualists. Anarcho-individualists are just anarchists who focus more on individuality. None of them are against rules, because none of them are opposed to organizing. And rules are pretty much necessary for that.

The people you are describing are anomists.

Also, since Anarcho-Communists/Syndicalists/Collectivists make up the majority of Anarchists today, only a small percentage follow this Individualist ideology.

This is nonsense. Anarcho-individualism and Anarcho-Com/Syn/Col aren’t contradictory at all. Flavor of anarchism are more about differences of tactics and strategies than real difference. It’s only terminnaly online people who see them as exclusively different things. You can have all the flavors in a same individual.

Its just weird. Its like claiming Delaware speaks for all Americans.

Very weird as an anarchist to suggest that a group could talk for all of us because they are a the majority group. Everybody only represent themself. Isn’t this supposed to be rule 1 of anarchism?

Edit: can you explain why you are disagreeing? I’m just stating historical facts. In the end of the 19^th century in europe anarcho-individualists lived in communities and were very active in social struggles. They were advocating for the anarchist forms of communism/socialism.

Dargkkast: Flavor of anarchism are more about differences of tactics and strategies than real difference.

Smh that’s not how Reddit logic works.

dialectical_idealism: This has nothing to do with “anarcho-individualism” which isn’t even a thing btw. This is anarchy as it was always conceived, going back to Proudhon and later to anarcho-communists and anarchists of all stripes. There’s nothing “weird” about opposing rule. If you want, I can point you to classical anarchist literature which will confirm anarchists have never supported a system of rule.

Alarming-Explosions: I have my suspicions that you are a target for whatever group.

Ziq is their own Target.

Nazis fucking hate ziq.

So do the Nazi apologists like liberals and other authoritarians.

I see you though.

Though what does this all feel like from your perspective?

dialectical_idealism: like all the anarchists have dropped off the face of the earth and been replaced with pissed off social democrats, who hate me with a fiery passion.

Alarming-Explosions: Well, that seems to be about the size of things on the run-up to any major, American or Canadian election

Not even kidding.

The hate against ziq has not been original either and it has always been non-specific and evasive.

Just here for another round of it I guess.

You’re fine

dialectical_idealism: I mean it’s not like I don’t invite it by writing essays that poke holes in everything they hold dear. I took a few years off and forgot how much rage it induces.

Alarming-Explosions: People love their bubbles.

From a very young age I was taught to poke said bubbles until they are no longer useful and then move on.

You sound similar.

dialectical_idealism: yea what you see in this thread is nothing compared to how I’m treated IRL

Alarming-Explosions: Definitely not from those that I have spoken to face to face.

It’s good to check in sometimes and confirm that.

dialectical_idealism: maybe the people silently downvoting me and calling me a right wing ancap for speaking against a system of rules could articulate why they support such a system and what it has to do with anarchy?

Mr_Quackums: they are silently down-voting you because you are argumentative and insufferable. They would respect you by adding a rebuttal if you wern’t being hostile.

dialectical_idealism: Maybe you care to offer a rebuttal rather than continuing the ad hominems?

Mr_Quackums: Those are not ad Hominems, those are insults.

an ad Hominems is when you insult a person as a way to discredit their argument. I was not engaging with your arguments at all.

I am saying you are being an asshole, not that you are presenting bad arguments.

dialectical_idealism: Ad hominem. Attacking a person’s character or motivations rather than a position or argument.

Exactly what you’re doing. Not engaging with the argument and instead attacking me is exactly why it’s an ad hominem.

Mr_Quackums: Do you really believe every insult not related to an argument is an ad hominem?

If you dont know how words work I can see why people trying to engage with your points (whatever they are) are blowing you off.

dialectical_idealism: When it’s used during a debate to denigrate the person whose argument offends you, yes. I’m not even being hostile, I’m being perfectly civil in the face of massive opposition.

Mr_Quackums: When it’s used during a debate to denigrate the person whose argument offends you, yes

not quite. when the insult is used as a point in the argument then it is an ad hominim. When a person is simply insulting you then it is not an ad homenim. This is especially true when someone, such as myself, never engaged with your “logic” to begin with.

I couldn’t have committed a logical fallacy if I didn’t respect you enough to even look at your logic. Logical fallacies only exist in the context of a logical debate.

look dude you are either a anti-social debate bro, a troll, or just someone stuck in a mental rut. Either way, you have succeeded in annoying me (congrats on that win, I guess) so I am blockng you.

Have a good day, and I hope you learn how to engage with people without getting shit on.

twodaywillbedaisy: “No rulers, not no rules” is an awful slogan and in this thread we’re given plenty good reasons to be argumentative about it. The everyday nonsense dished out by majoritarians and democratic anarcho-rulers deserves plenty more hostility.

Mr_Quackums: “No rulers, not no rules” is an awful slogan

right, thats why its not a slogan.

In my family we have rules (holidays have certain tradtions, we respect eacher’s sleep that kind of thing) but there is no “ruler” in the household.

In my friend group we have rules too and also no ruler.

Your right, it is a crap slogan, but it is the natural way humans self-organize.

DisastrousBit3520: right, thats why its not a slogan.

It is though? Like why would someone write a response to something people don’t say? I mean, it could be a strawman... but in this case, it’s a sentiment that is very common, like, I’m kinda shocked if you haven’t seen it...

twodaywillbedaisy: What rules do you have for your friend group? And who made them?

Mr_Quackums: we all just kind of agreed on them. you know, how normal humans do things.

Just because its not written down and certified doesnt mean its not a rule.

twodaywillbedaisy: Just normal humans ruling each other, gotcha.

Mr_Quackums: Just social mammals being social. Exactly.

continue this thread

entrophy_maker: Okay, then tell me why that article reads like you are speaking for every school of Anarchism and not the specific one that it is? I’m open to having a dialog and you might be right about something I’ve missed. Anarcho-Individualism is a thing, as I used to be one for many years. Proudhon led more to Mutualism I believe. I will agree earlier Anarchists in the 1600s like Godwin would agree with you as they also followed more of an Anarcho-Individualism philosophy. However, we are not in the 1600s anymore. There are many schools of Anarchism and I don’t mind you saying yours is valid. What I have a problem with is that it is framed like that is the only way, and its not. While Anarchism did start out the way you described, other theories evolved Individualists are a small minority today. I will defend you on what you are advocating is not Anarcho-Capitalist even though they share some ideas. A true Individualist wants no laws regarding public or private property. So unless you will want to have Capitalism, you are not an Anarcho-Capitalist. I abandoned Individualism as an addict in recovery. Having no laws or rules but the ones I make was killing me. Not to say what you’re trying to do can’t work, but for me, this became dangerous. What I can respect now is the rules of a direct or syndicalist democracy without hierarchy. Its more important to me today to end inequality. I only see Socialism/Communism/Collectivism as the only true way to accomplish this, thus those schools of Anarchism now make more sense.

dialectical_idealism: There are no pro-rule or pro-government forms of anarchism.

Anarcho-individualism isn’t a thing because anarchism without adjectives displaced it long before any of us were born and the idea that the individual can exist without the collective became outmoded. It’s a relic.

We are not in the 1600s anymore.

Yes.

What I have a problem with is that it is framed like that is the only way

Anarchists opposing rule is the only anarchy. It ceases to be anarchy when anarchists want to rule people.

While Anarchism did start out the way you described, other theories evolved Individualists are a small minority today.

Again, I have never once described “anarcho-individualism” and don’t consider that to be something that exists since anarchists have to care about the well-being of the social whole in order to care about their own individual needs. The two things can’t be separated.

I will defend you on what you are advocating is not Anarcho-Capitalist

I’m not advocating for individualism. That’s all you.

So unless you will want to have Capitalism, you are not an Anarcho-Capitalist.

Thanks?

Having no laws [was killing me].

You stopped being an anarchist.

What I can respect now is the rules of a direct or syndicalist democracy without hierarchy

There’s no such thing as a democracy without hierarchy. Democracy is a form of government and anarchists have always opposed it.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/various-authors-anarchists-against-democracy

Its more important to me today to end inequality.

The majority ruling over minorities (democracy) doesn’t end inequality, it reinforces it.

I only see Socialism/Communism/Collectivism as the only true way to accomplish this, thus those schools of Anarchism now make more sense.

You don’t understand anarchy if you think it’s pro-government and pro-law. Social anarchism isn’t the same as state socialism.

entrophy_maker: You are half right. Anarchism is no government or borders in every such school. However, the other schools of Anarchism I mentioned to allow for direct-democracy, syndicalism or a combination of the two. If you study what those words actually mean, you should find they are not based around hierarchy in their structures.

There are arguments about minority rights when a real democracy is in play. The argument around that is to build coalitions or make a confederation where groups can splinter off and do their own thing if they choose. There are also arguments that minorities will lose rights under the complete power vacuum Anarchist-Individualism creates. Some will argue in that setting, only might makes right, which if one sees it that way, can mirror eugenics. I know you don’t see it that way, but I’m sure you have heard this argument made.

Having a few rules, like maybe no one should murder if its not self-defense, isn’t government. If you run in my friend circle, we are going to have that rule if its not clear for some reason. That doesn’t make me a government.

You are welcome to argue I’m not an Anarchist. Truth be told, I consider myself more of a Minarchist these days. Also, when I say you advocate for Anarcho-Individualism, I mean that you want this type of lifestyle you’ve described and would fight for it to take hold after a revolution. I don’t want that, so its not true I advocate for Anarcho-Individualism and I’ve outlined why well. You might reject this term as you feel your way is the only true way. However, if others read this, most here respect Anarcho-Individualism even if they don’t agree with it. On the other hand, most here hate with everything in their bodies about the oxymoron concept of Anarcho-Capitalism. You mentioned people had accused you of being this and were downvoting you for no reason. If you want, we can just say your interpretation of real Anarchism, but I was trying to do you favor. Saying Anarcho-Individualists just made more sense for those reasons, but if it bothers you I’ll stop.

dialectical_idealism: Social anarchists aren’t democrats. Read the link. It quotes all your heroes from Kropotkin to Goldman to Malatesta.

If you’re not a government why are you ordering your friends to obey your rules? Maybe they have a good reason to take that action.

Truth be told, I consider myself more of a Minarchist these days.

Ok, it’s good that you admit it but you should have done so before trying to tell me that anarchy supports law and majority-rule because I wasted a lot of time responding to you.

Maykovsky: This idea is so pervasive (anarchy=chaos) that we should be carrying this to explain people. Then I remember, often people don’t read.

dialectical_idealism: while it’s true that most people won’t read theory, they will watch youtube videos that summarize theory in easy to digest ways, so theory is still important at influencing the movement, which all too often is being influenced by Marxists rather than anarchists.

Maykovsky: Hi! You are right. I was being a bit too pessimistic. My point is that very often people are lost in kind of loop that they have been growing into. I remember this Swedish guy, all intellectually dressed, degree and mid twenties, talking about politics. I told him about anarchy, and the guy goes “romantics, you always need some degree of organization”... what can you do? This is my point, get people to move beyond their common knowledge is hard. But this is a good resource!

Silver-Statement8573: There is a peculiar, unspoken moral calculation underlying essentially every authoritarian ideology in which the correct amount of unquestioned obedience is determined to be pragmatic, all beyond it is determined to be immoral, and all before it is assumed to be fuelled by youthful naivete

The only real exception to this rule I have found are some anarchists even though there are anarchists who base their position on some kind of moral imperative

dialectical_idealism: The essay has now been updating taking all your suggestions into consideration.

Outrageous-Trick6124: The essay does not make sense and is not convincing about why any of the “differences” outlined are not rules, and/or could not simply slip into the same problems as rules. Authoritarianism happens because of how people behave in relation to their ideas. These behaviors are often separate from the idealized categorical distinctions they make about why what they are doing is not violence and/or authority when it often is.

dialectical_idealism: I honestly think some of you lack the imagination to envision a world without rule. What does the essay propose that can be interpreted as rules?

ChaosRulesTheWorld: I honestly think some of you lack the imagination to envision a world without rule.

Ironically, you are the one who lack the imagination to envision that. You don’t understand what a world without rules is. You don’t even understand what a rule is. Boundaries are personnal rules. A world without rules is such an idealist concept, it’s a science fiction scenario at this level. Can you seriously imagine how messed up a world where people don’t have boundaries is?

angustinaturner: Wow, deligitamising someone’s arguments with neo liberal pop psychology is a first... Rules is an ambiguous term and people seem to be taking a literalist understanding of rules somehow being equivalent to rules which is absurd... If anyone has done their homework you can find the correct distinction in the distinction between morality and ethics as defined by Deleuze, morality is consistent with laws in that they are prescribed: ethics on the other hand is an analysis of what the consequences of our actions are and if we agree with the consequences of our actions, it’s more about being coherent and consistent with your particular values.

The point of radical democracy in Anarchism is precisely the point of articulation between the collective and the individual as we negotiate our particular values with our shared values...

The point is not that it doesn’t lead to a certain set of rules being developed but what Foucault called a “restless attentiveness”, it is less a set of rules or Frameworks but more a methodology for communication and collective living that seeks a situation free of domination...

What the article highlights is how activism intervenes in Anarchist groups and creates fixed rules that cannot be negotiated and this leads to the divisions that are currently making the left irrelevant... What is not surprising is which class this rules based activism comes from.

ChaosRulesTheWorld: Ok i’ll take the bait.

What in my argumentation us neoliberal pop psychologu exactly?

Rules is an ambiguous term and people seem to be taking a literalist understanding of rules somehow being equivalent to rules which is absurd...

What is this supposed to mean? How is that absurd? Isn’t this perspective of yours that is absurd?

Yes i agree with your point about morality and ethics but i don’t see how is that relevant to my comment, even less how it’s contradicting it

The concept of “Radical democracy” and it’s compatibility with anarchism is highly debatable. High would argue that most anarchists are radicaly opposed to democracy.

While i see what you mean by your paragraph on foucault. A methodology is still based on a set of rules. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a methodology.

I kinda agree with what you say in your last paragraph (even if it’s kind of ironic considering your college student style of argumentation). But what you describe in your last is not a consequence of having rules. It’s not even a matter of ethics. The issue in those groups (which are not really anarchists group btw, more autonomous or “revolutionnary” leftists) is morality. Those “fixed rules” are unwritten laws (sometimes they are written).

angustinaturner: My point is that what we are distinguishing between isn’t rules but being ordered to do something against our will... If I voluntarily agree to a set of rules within a group that has also agreed on those set of rules they are not an order but an agreement. If you’ve ever been involved in any project you’ll see that unless you do this then all that happens is that informal hierarchies develop... The question then comes to what happens when someone new enters the group, do they have to obey the rules or do they get to negotiate the agreement... This is why methodology is important, you need a methodological framework so that agreed upon ways of proceeding don’t become fixed as immovable rules...

ChaosRulesTheWorld: It’s still rules though.

Btw you totally avoided my questions

angustinaturner: Don’t eat any more then, defy the rule of nourishing your body... 🤷🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️🧐 Or maybe stop using an ambiguous and undefined term if you are seeking clarification... I’m sorry but it just shows a lack of reflection... I’m not against irrationality, the absurd, chaos and non sense, in fact I’m very much for them, but at the very level of “your” way of constructing your thoughts, establishing values (whether you are for or against rules or think that the question goes beyond an either/or logic is defined from Frameworks you are using to create the meaning that is your particular position on this and the reason why you see the need to respond... All of this is a framework... In the end, the thoughts or system of thoughts, or even a brief construction of a complex of thoughts, like the one you just gave, can come about only because of a shared linguistic and cultural conditioning that allows us to talk about these things at all... Apart from mute silence and pure psychosis I’m not sure what your no rules really actually means...

If however you distinguish a vague generality like rules, which like you said can extend to methodological and epistemological principles, (where, even if they are totally anti foundationalist require a set of internal logics for such an expression to exist...) with the nuance that comes from bringing in terms like order and command, prescriptive and voluntary, agreed upon or enforced with violence personal values or collective regulations... There is a deepening of the critical difference between despotism and freedom... And in reality people who take this no rules stance always end up being despotic and iniquitous... There’s nothing worse than a card board anarchist who’s just the sum of all the cliches...

ChaosRulesTheWorld: Did you read any of what i said?

First, i ain’t against rules, i don’t know why you are projecting that on me while i’m litteraly arguing the opposite.

Second, you whole comment is complete nonsense regarding the context. It’s like if you were responding to someone else.

Third, in your comment you were the one saying that there are 2 types of rules. So i just pointed the fact that, as you said it yourself, they are still rules in the end. That’s why anarchism isn’t against rules.

Fourth, it’s funny that you are saying that people who have the “no rules” stance, end up being despotic. While i was exactly arguing against this stance, and you were the one criticizing me for it.

Fifth, you still didn’t answer to any of my questions

angustinaturner: Probably because you were using vague terminology.

continue this thread

Outrageous-Trick6124: All of it.

dialectical_idealism: Very helpful.

Edit: just noticed this person’s entire post history is about me. Lol.

Edit2: to the person below me who I can’t respond to since the creepy stalker above me blocked me:

Anarchy is idealist. This isn’t news.

Personal boundaries aren’t rules, don’t put words in my mouth.

karlbenedict12: anarchy is idealist

bakunin is rolling in his grave rn

Outrageous-Trick6124: Alas, can’t say the same for your essay.

dialectical_idealism: Just want to point out that the person badjacketing me as an ancap and a right wing libertarian in this post — /u/StarrySkye3 blocked me immediately to ensure I couldn’t respond to their completely unfounded smears. It’s embarassing what has become of reddit discourse.

Also, the idea that r/postleftanarchism is some kind of psyop is hilarious.

Lastly, they’re directly lying with this:

Describing “rules without rulers” to claiming “rules must have rulers” and then immediately jumping to “if you want to associate with a group you can consent to the rules of the group and so this isn’t rules.”

I never did anything resembling this.

WildAutonomy: I hate people who bad-jacket so fucking much

[Deleted or banned user]: [removed]

dialectical_idealism: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/george-woodcock-the-tyranny-of-the-clock

kirkbadaz: Assyrians have a lot to answer for

angustinaturner: Firstly, just because I’ve learnt to argue like a college student doesn’t make me bourgeois it means I’ve trained my tools well. Fuck this anti intellectualism dressed up as class politics. I happen to be an auto didact who made the grade. But whatever.

Secondly the point is exactly that you include things like methodology in your understanding of arche... This is when anarchists show themselves to be totally naive and needs to get some education... There is a certain structuration that happens in all communities throughout the world (including your self that is maintaining the coherence of your organs without any thanks from you.. it’s actually keeping with the ideology of domination to think that tribal societies lacked coherence... I’m not sure what your idea of meaninglessness is but that’s what happens when they’re is no coherence, not some magical chaos liberty it’s just death and psychosis...

Democracy means rule by the people, it’s not particularly defined and the Anarchist methodology of consensus building is a corner stone of radical democracy... But agreed it assumes being ruled and certainly explains tyrannical “people’s” parties... But I’m getting at the fact that you generally have to live and organise with other people and you have to figure out a way to get along..

InsecureCreator: This is a weird one because in the section about the rules-based order you seem perfectly informed on the kind of relationships anarchy is all about (i.e. freedom of association, mutual consent, right to secede) but can’t seem to connect the dots that the right to leave an association does provide a mechanism for giving consequences to someones behavior which on a large enough scale could lead to social norms and informal “rules”.

I legitimatly want to know if I misunderstand what you’re trying to say because most of that section is such a great summary of anarchist ideas that I would share with someone to explain it to them, it’s short clear and precise in a way that’s hard to achieve but much of the surrounding text doesn’t make much sense to me.

WildAutonomy: Brave of you to post this in a sub full of anarcho-democrats

dialectical_idealism: A lot of them were straight up promoting Joe Biden and other Big D Democrats in their post histories, so it makes a lot of sense that they think a system of rule is desirable. I wonder at what point all these socdems decided they were anarchists and that anarchy is when you rule people with democracy.

ChaosRulesTheWorld: No rules is anomism and it’s contradictory to anarchism.

Edit: Anomism is ideologicaly closer to liberalism or right libertarianism (aka ancap)

dialectical_idealism: What’s it like being so confidently clueless?

ChaosRulesTheWorld: Are you talking about yourself?

Honestly idk, tell me. You seem to be an expert on the matter

It’s so refreshing meeting an honest ancom

Linked Image:
<uploads-cdn.raddle.me/submission_images/fad8a8908f5359759a42965060a2432a66b4a5ccba7bd61ad642d5154ebbb7bc.png>

Submitted by ziq 4 years ago in antiwork

Source:
<raddle.me/f/antiwork/128982/it-s-so-refreshing-meeting-an-honest-ancom>

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Pash: What’s your preferred answer?

ziq: https://old.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/mhshoh/under_anarchocommunism_what_is_the_solution_for/gt1bygq/

Pash: Quit the community? that’s the exact same as the other guy’s answer that you were mad about you absolute berk

ziq: What are you on about?

Pash: You made this post to shame someone for saying that people who don’t want to participate in mutual aid groups should leave them. I ask “What’s your preferred answer?” and you say that people who don’t want to participate in mutual aid groups should leave them. Smh my head.

ziq: I did? Quote me please

Pash: you never had my membership, I live alone in the mountains now and i’d live alone in the mountains whoever has declared themselves the rulers of the world

you can’t exile people who exile themselves

ziq: are you concern trolling or what?

how is me choosing where i want to live my life the same as that reddit ancom saying they want to ostracize people from their society who aren’t productive / ‘cooperative’ enough?

do you not see the difference between a voluntary choice and a forced action? between me living self sufficiently in the woods and a society punishing people who won’t do forced labor (with exile)?

how many city people do you think are going to have the ability to survive when they’re cast out into the wilderness with no skills or resources?

how on earth are you conflating my voluntary choice to live off the land with a collective authority using violence to force people to labor for them?

Pash: do you not see the difference between a voluntary choice and a forced action?

Feeding and housing a person, making them a member of a community, is a voluntary action. Why (and how?) should we be forced to work to house you no matter what, and not have the option to withdraw our care from you as we please?

ziq: Can’t wait to see how you treat disabled people in your work or die civilization aka a 1:1 replica of the current world order.

Pash: You seem to have me confused with Amitabha; I don’t conjure up worlds.

I don’t agree with your assertion that the current world order rewards labour above all; it rewards ownership of capital.

You can look into historical examples of how disabled people have been treated in mutual aid societies and indigenous anarchist societies around the world.

ziq: keep moving those goalposts

Pash: What you said about building a replica world made me think of this: https://www.wcostream.com/pinky-and-the-brain-season-2-episode-1-its-only-a-paper-world

Pash: But then how does coordinated action get did? Say building and operating a railway.

ziq: first you pull up the rails, then you make swords and axes out of the steel and use them to storm and loot the cargo in the derailed trains

zoom_zip: i’m no expert on this but i like the way open source software works. people who like the idea of something and see a benefit in it can contribute to it. that’s the way i thought an ancom society would function. this idea of people having to do what the majority vote is not very anarchist.

existential1: I would also add that we probably don’t need railways anyway. They tend to destroy natural environments and serve as the basis for future civil infrastructure that also destroys the environment. It also delivers products from A to B that then make possible people desiring things they would have otherwise never had a taste for that requires exploitation to be manufactured at the pace equal to the demand +1.

metocin: I think it’s really easy to see massive train networks as the radical solution to our current reliance on personal transportation. Obviously the much more radical, simple, and ecologically friendly solution would be to give up the privilege of fast transportation over land. There is simply no ethical or sustainable way to implement it, and further, I think that in a radically decentralized society an inability for people to travel long distances could actually be beneficial.

If we live in a truly ethical and sustainable way, why would we even need long range travel? Being able to escape your locality and the people within it is simply serves to alienate people from building radical relations with their neighbours. What if instead of constantly dreaming about escaping work, we didn’t have work to escape from, and we loved our communities so much we didn’t ever feel the need to leave?

existential1: I think one of the central questions of anarchism that can be used to examine most things is, “What is keeping me from not doing anything?” Using that question as a frame, it quite easily leads to your last sentence. Most industrial forms of travel are used for commerce more than individuals, per se. And because of that, people’s lives are shaped by the possibility of travel more than needing to travel. The more relationships you build in your area, with humans, plants, etc, the less you’ll find you need to go anywhere else. But our current world has as a tenet the idea that not only can you be anywhere, you should go everywhere you can afford to.

Pash: Work needs to be coordinated systematically to reach beyond the smallest scale. The features of that system are an interesting discussion but saying ‘no systems!’ means no production.

Also, note that nobody yet has mentioned anything like voting or majoritarianism.

ziq: no production

Perish the thought.

I know you ancoms love work / production, but has it ever occurred to you that if you ever get your incredible stateless industrial society and people like me start raiding your trains, farms and factories, you’ll need a state to stop me?

Pash: Why would a state be needed to stop you?

ziq: How are you going to stop me without laws, prisons and police?

Pash: Shouldn’t be hard.

What are you armed with? How many of you are there? What are your vehicles? What’s your training?

ziq: swords and axes

20

horses

guerilla warfare

zoom_zip: and top hats

ziq: wouldn’t the ancoms be the ones wearing top hats since they control the means of production and we’re liberating it?

zoom_zip: they’re symbolic pillaged top hats

[Deleted or banned user]: [Deleted or banned comment]

existential1: dank

Pash: You’d be shot from trucks.

That was even easier than I thought. You didn’t even make anyone late for lunch.

OdiousOutlaw: Shooting people for property, huh?

What’s the main function of a police force again?

Pash: Have you read Kropotkin?

zoom_zip: this time it took 1 hour for the “have you read old dead white guy with a beard?” argument to show up

Pash: dude “white” lmao

zoom_zip: sorry dude. if you haven’t read the tiger who came to tea you just wouldn’t understand. maybe brush up on your book knowledge idk.

Pash: no joke, I read the tiger who came to tea less than a week ago with my neighbour’s kid

sorry if you thought I was being argumentative when I asked what they’d read

ziq: he’s literally gandalf

OdiousOutlaw: Do me the courtesy of answering my question and I’ll reciprocate.

Pash: Main function of cops is to enforce the legal system

OdiousOutlaw: Correct. And the legal system defends property laws and gives state actors justification for shooting people for violating property laws.

So what’s the difference between killing people for property and killing people for property?

Pash: So what’s the difference between killing people for property and killing people for property?

systematic hierarchy

also I didn’t say anything about “for property”; we wuz talking about marauders with axes and swords burning people in their beds

[Deleted or banned user]: [Deleted or banned comment]

Pash: http://lfbg75wjgi4nzdio.onion/f/antiwork/128982/-/comment/209804

[Deleted or banned user]: [Deleted or banned comment]

Pash: np

ziq: idk what you said but all i’m doing here with the raiding bandit fantasy is demonstrating that an ancom city will morph into a state just as soon as a perceived threat presents itself

[Deleted or banned user]: [Deleted or banned comment]

ziq: some people need things to be spelled out for them

Pash: Except you failed to present any sort of reason we should believe that.

You: Nobody could possibly ever defend against a thief without a state!

Me: No, people defend themselves all the time, what the heck are you talking about?

ziq: just the idea that you see property ‘theft’ as a crime demonstrates you’ve already built a state

OdiousOutlaw: And, yeah, I’ve read some Kropotkin.

I’ve read other Anarcho-Communists, too.

Pash: so you know that forceful defense isn’t particularly statist

OdiousOutlaw: Sure, until a community gets attacked and then we all start enforcing borders and shit because the fear of danger makes large groups of people form states.

All this because some people think a state won’t be born under a sedentary community.

Pash: All this because some people think a state won’t be born under a sedentary community.

Are you saying that sedentism leads to statism, and that’s bad, so we should be nomads?

OdiousOutlaw: Nope. Very small bands of people can easily be sedentary without descending into Statism. Wouldn’t lead to much environmental damage or pollution either.

Larger groups will inevitably deteriorate into authoritarian structures, typically as a response to outsiders, such as the hypothetical you and ziq are going on about; and soon you’ve got people designating “this” area as “theirs” and begin enforcing borders.

ziq: when someone smugly proclaims they’re gonna ‘rescind your membership’ in their society before they’ve even constructed the society because you don’t fall in line with their ideological posturing, their ideology was an authoritarian structure all along and never needed to deteriorate into it

Pash: When you claim you’re gonna violently destroy other people’s voluntarist work groups because you don’t like them organising without you, you’re the tyrant.

ziq: if i destroy them it’s because i understand the nature of authority and that letting the city continue to expand will eventually be a death sentence to me and anyone else that doesn’t want to be consumed by their society

OdiousOutlaw: when someone smugly proclaims their society their ideology was an authoritarian structure all along

Pash: before they’ve even constructed the society

You’re thousands of years too late with that comment, lol

ziq: you’re right, ancom society is pretty much identical to every other industrial society that exists and has existed

Pash: Do you think anprim societies practiced ostracism?

ziq: are you under the impression i’m an anprim? i’m not.

I’ll answer your question anyway since you don’t seem to get how the power relations of civilization work: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-moore-a-primitivist-primer

Some basic power relations are present in primitive societies — and this is one reason why anarcho-primitivists do not seek to replicate these societies — but it is in civilization that power relations become pervasive and entrenched in practically all aspects of human life and human relations with the biosphere. Civilization — also referred to as the megamachine or Leviathan — becomes a huge machine which gains its own momentum and becomes beyond the control of even its supposed rulers. Powered by the routines of daily life which are defined and managed by internalized patterns of obedience, people become slaves to the machine, the system of civilization itself. Only widespread refusal of this system and its various forms of control, revolt against power itself, can abolish civilization, and pose a radical alternative. Ideologies such as Marxism, classical anarchism and feminism oppose aspects of civilization; only anarcho-primitivism opposes civilization, the context within which the various forms of oppression proliferate and become pervasive — and, indeed, possible.

tldl excluding someone from an all-encompassing global industrial society that’s impossible to escape and everyone is forced to depend on for sustenance is not the same as telling someone to leave a nomadic tribe in an unspoiled, abundant ecosystem where food is free for the picking

anprims aren’t creating vast deserts and then casting people out into them to starve, only civilization can do that

and in the anarchistic hunter gatherer cultures that still exist in the world today, people don’t get exiled. rather, when someone is being oppressive and trying to rule people, everyone packs up their things at night and relocates to another settlement without them

eventually they get the hint and stop trying to rule people: https://iaf-fai.org/2020/11/02/indigenous-anarchic-hierarchy/

One culture we can look to too for an almost complete absence of hierarchy is the Hadza people of West Africa. The Hadza have a simple solution to those who feel they have the right to control others. They pack up camp and leave them behind. They do this until the person stops attempting to control them.

[Deleted or banned user]: [Deleted or banned comment]

ziq: sorry, the ancom city council needs those lands for their cows

[Deleted or banned user]: [Deleted or banned comment]

existential1: Can you make an ancom city in SimCity then burn it down in Streets of Sim City?

ziq: see, we raid your city at night when you’re all wrapped snugly under your red/black comforters... we set fire to your trucks and apartment blocks before you even know we’ve taken all your grain

and while you’re putting out the fires, we’re making off with the contents of your ancom libraries (good firestarters)

then we blow up your dams and wash the whole fucking city away just to show you what we think of your police and their truck-mounted machine guns

Pash: All because you’re mad that a society you insisted on refusing membership in revoked your membership.

ziq: you never had my membership, I live alone in the mountains now and i’d live alone in the mountains whoever has declared themselves the rulers of the world

you can’t exile people who exile themselves

Pash: Neat. Luv ya.

Let us know if you want anything.

ziq: i’ll be sure to stop by your graves and take the loaves of bread your loved ones leave for you

Pash: This is the crux of your argument and there’s zero substance to it.

“How could anyone ever stop a thief by themselves?! Mathematical impossibility!”

I’ve seen it with my own eyes more times than I can count. Your point is so bad.

ziq: as soon as your city gets ransacked the first time, you’re building a police force, courts, prisons, guards, parole officers and you’ll have reproduced the state 1:1.

even before all that, you’ll have formed a standing military to defend the city’s borders from ‘reactionaries’.

you can keep lying to yourself and pretend every pillaging bandit will get stopped by random bystanders who just happen to be loitering at the scene of the crime in the dead of night, or you can own it and be a proud liberal instead of a dishonest ancom.

it only takes one successful raid to wipe out the food reserves or poison the water supply or burn down the factories, but yeah you’re going to risk it all in the hopes that a good Samaritan is in the right place at the right time with the right skills to stop marauders from taking everything your workers have sacrificed their time and energy for

cities require authority to function, anyone who doesn’t see that is deluding themselves

and you’re barely even cognizant of what anarcho-communism claims (lies) to be since you’re openly calling for laws, police, a monopoly on violence, property rights and borders.

but i do appreciate an ancom who takes their ideology to its natural conclusions in the planning stage instead of handwaving away all the inevitable implications until they’re directly confronted with them in life

Pash: and you’re barely even cognizant of what anarcho-communism claims (lies) to be since you’re openly calling for laws, police, a monopoly on violence, property rights and borders.

I didn’t call for police, nor did I mention “anarcho-communism”, whatever that is.

it only takes one successful raid to wipe out the food reserves or poison the water supply or burn down the factories, but yeah you’re going to risk it all in the hopes that a good Samaritan is in the right place at the right time with the right skills to stop marauders from taking everything your workers have sacrificed their time and energy for

Interesting threat assessment. Wat do?

Pash: As soon as your band of brigands gets pwned in the first raid, you’re building weapons and vehicles to organized a more successful second raid. Now what you don’t know is that Ki’dal is actually a double agent spying for me, and the weapons he got from the ancom contact he hyped up are defective. Our operative has planted a miniaturized listening device inside your dreadlocks.

tenthousandyears: I recommend you do a good-faith read of this pinned post in f/Tech.

Pash: I don’t see division of labor specifically as an evil to be avoided.

ziq: you upholding and proliferating work / industry and all the related systems of alienation makes you a tyrant to anyone who actually cares about doing anarchy

guess what anarchists do to tyrants who want to control the world?

Pash: People self-organising into work teams is not tyranny.

ziq: it is to anyone who doesn’t want to work and doesn’t want to be oppressed and alienated by your collective power

you normalizing an industrial work system goes against every free person’s interests

zoom_zip: i also didn’t say that it couldn’t be coordinated. i just suggested a way collective action could work on a relatively large scale without someone or a group of people needing to dictate it.

but sorry if i misunderstood what you were saying. what were you suggesting as a system of coordinated action without voting or hierarchy etc.?

Pash: ziq: refuse to participate in any society and any system that measures people in terms of productivity. Resist all systems that are constructed to rule you.

society: ok, we rescind your membership, cya

ziq: URL:https://files.catbox.moe/hlrqhq.gif

ziq: just in case anyone thinks this is me using an alt to mock ancoms, it’s not.

this is the ancom mind in all its tyrannical glory

Pash: You should be happy to be ostracized, as it’s specifically what you requested.

I see a lot of agreement in the thread you linked: both sides agree that someone who doesn’t volunteer to participate in a productive society simply shouldn’t. What’s the conflict there? Everything was cool until you showed up with your Mad Max war band of arsonists.

ziq: i won’t be happy until your ancom cities lay in ashes at my feet and a fertile rainforest sprouts in their place

Pash: Meanie.

ziq: blood is a potent fertilizer

NoPotatoes: fr? Is the iron bioavailable?

ziq: Yes, bloodmeal is high in iron.

https://greenupside.com/what-fertilizer-is-high-in-iron/

secco: bold move, posting this to ancom-land r/antiwork :P

ziq: dipshit is still ranting about this thread 6 months later and even posting a fake screenshot to accuse me of wanting to rape white women

ziq: What’s up with that? Are they just expecting all the other commies to do the work for them while they sit home playing zelda? I don’t get why theyd id as communists if they don’t like work.

secco: No, you see, we don’t oppose work, we just hate exploitation. The problem is capitalists not paying their fair share. We need to vote for progressive politicians, demand M4A and UBI, reduce the standard work-week to 39 hours, and push for full automation. Hopefully we can achieve that in 50 years from now.

That ancom flag? Oh, I’m more of a libertarian socialist. I agree with the anarchist system, but it doesn’t seem feasable right now.

Who am I telling this, you obviously share some of my frustrations with reddit commies.

ziq: I need to get on the mod teams of those anarchist subs and just ban anyone with a ‘libertarian socialist’ or ‘libertarian marxist’ or ‘communalist’ flair. I swear they’ve multiplied tenfold in the past year and there are barely any anarchists left.

I’ve been getting so downvoted lately trying to push back against the anarcho-dominationists that I get throttled by reddit when I try to post.

Wah why don’t red fash like me?? Wah don’t they know anarchists are 99% aligned with authoritarian scumfucks like them????

Linked Post:
<old.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/1n3868o/leftist_solidarity>

Submitted by ziq 5 days ago in Bootlickers (edited 8 minutes later)

Source:
<raddle.me/f/Bootlickers/210391/wah-why-don-t-red-fash-like-me-wah-don-t-they-know>

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ziq: I wish every one of these anarcho-bootlicks would get blipped into non-existence by Thanos

NamiFromOnePiece: Why do they want to share spaces with state socialists?

ziq: everyone wants to fit in with the popular kids i guess

What’s an unpopular opinion that you hold when it comes to anarchism or general leftist thought?

Submitted by byro1234512345 7 months ago in Anarchism

Source:
<web.archive.org/web/20230811164245/https:/raddle.me/f/Anarchism/150795/what-s-an-unpopular-opinion-that-you-hold-when-it-comes-to>

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moonlune: U can’t be a serious anarchist or leftist (even the authoritarian ones) in 2023 and not be vegan (or at least freegan)

& it’s ok for stuff to be ephemeral

Bezotcovschina:

not be vegan (or at least freegan)

At least? I always perceived freegans as higher beings myself.

ziq: I think that’s just a cop out. An animal’s body isn’t being wasted because you’re not consuming it. Living beings aren’t for your consumption. Just treating captivity, death and suffering as a product, whether you pay for it or not, is gross

Ishkah: For me putting the time into dumpster diving bread with whey in it is absolutely me better achieving a goal I decided I wanted to take on with veganism, that of wanting to relate to the world with more compassion.

Seeing animal material from farms always brings the sadness closer to mind of the cruel lives animals live on farms. But, I just would feel that I’d be treating the animal with less dignity letting any of their final remains rot in dumpsters when the material has been used in items like bread similar to the vegan bread that I would otherwise go out and buy.

Eating that animal material for me is about treating the animals’ final remains more similar to the way the animals’ wild ancestors would have been treated after death. So, with more dignity than the way we bred infantile traits into them and with more dignity than the toxic relationship we would be perpetuating by anthropomorphically infantilising them as infant humans who could have grown up to be people who could suffer a worse quality of life worrying about how other people might intend to treat their body after their death.

Further reading on my position:

• Is Freeganism a Positive Form of Advocacy for Legal Animal Rights?

• My Last Will & Testament as a Vegan Atheist

ziq: but why consume something as empty of nutrients and destructive to the ecosystem as bread when there are wild mallows and mustards growing right next to that dumpster? doesn’t your body deserve better than stale death?

Ishkah: I’m 6ft 3 and cycle everywhere, a sandwich with wholemeal bread as a snack is a cheap tasty way of getting my carbs in. It might be that I should stop buying it for ecological reasons and crop deaths, but that’s not an argument against dumpster diving it.

ziq: It is when you can choose different free food that’s just as readily available and far more nutritious. It’s not like you’re starving.

Ishkah: So the mere sadness I feel about crop deaths that happen in the production of bread should prevent me from dumpster diving bread otherwise I’m not truly relating to wildlife with dignity?

Me dumpster diving lots of edible material is fast and means money saved on buying food, which means I don’t have to work to earn as much money, which means I have more time I can put into projects I care about like environmental ones. If I was growing a food forest and dumpster diving it would mean I could give away more food I’ve grown or leave more to wildlife. So, for me, all of that is relating to the wildlife that died in crop deaths with more dignity than I would be if I was leaving perfectly edible material in triple wrapped plastic in the trash.

Ethical considerations regarding leather/pleather/synthetic leather/whatever…?

Submitted by LexieAssassin 2 days ago in AskRaddle

Source:
<raddle.me/f/AskRaddle/210463/ethical-considerations-regarding-leather-pleather-synthetic>

Notes: Is this ziq’s purist chickens coming home to roost for building up a space where they have to encounter weirdos even more ideologically purist than them on a regular basis? Or, just a random encounter?

---

As far as I’m aware, there’s two options, either leather or pleather/synthetic leather. Leather if properly cared for can last damn near forever as I understand it, but has the VERY obvious trade-off of requiring an animal (usually a cow) to die. (🙁 Poor moo moos.) (Not to mention lots of nasty chemicals.) Otherwise, you have to use oil and it doesn’t last and takes an eternity to degrade once trashed because it’s plastic or something similar, I think? Anyways, it presents a conundrum. What do y’all think? 🤔

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ziq: Used leather

krapyl: the fuck?

ziq: when u buy a used car and it has leather seats, do u burn them?

just because we won’t consume leather doesn’t mean OP won’t since she’s not a vegan so better to encourage her to buy used leather so no new animal dies. suggestions like ‘mushroom leather’ aren’t going to fly when it’s someone who eats meat and so obviously isn’t going to spend a small fortune and a lot of time looking for and importing a niche product, if it even exists

krapyl:

just because we won’t consume leather doesn’t mean OP won’t since she’s not a vegan

well, how about letting them know that animal abuse products are evil, instead of supporting their bad habit?

so better to encourage her to buy used leather so no new animal dies.

yea, and if someone pirate-torrents all their csam, then no new children are abused.

doesn’t change how gross it is!

a lot of time looking for and importing a niche product, if it even exists

cotton is not niche.

if you are already at the 2^nd hand store, looking for a used coat, then it shouldn’t be too hard to avoid the one made out of some poor cow’s skin or of 40 dead rabbits.

all animal abusers tell you “it’s used” when called out on fur or leather, just like all the flesh they eat is “local, organic”.

when u buy a used car and it has leather seats, do u burn them?

yea, burn the whole car. fuck cars.

ziq: because unlike you antispe, I’m not in the business of shaming people into being ethical, it doesn’t work.

krapyl: ok melanie joy

ziq: Your spitefulness doesn’t make you a better vegan than me. I’ve been a vegan for likely longer than you’ve been alive, literally since I was a child, and I find carnism repulsive. While I’ve always refused to eat at the same table with carnists (including family) or have relationships with them IRL, I also recognize that calling them “disgusting” to their faces achieves nothing positive. I have the self-awareness to understand that respectful dialogue and setting a good example is far more effective than shame and vindictiveness. Just like with every cause you take up, you miss the forest for the trees.

krapyl:

respectful dialogue and setting a good example is far more effective than shame and vindictiveness.

yes it’s important that all vegans stick to sharing positive vibes good vegan recipes and not be so angry and loud about that whole mass murder thing

ziq: posturing

i’m obviously not a “positive vibes” person, but someone asking for advice to minimise harm in their purchases isn’t the time or place to attack and alienate them. it’s an opportunity to save an animal from the slaughterhouse.

used leather is the best bet that her purchase won’t kill another animal because there’s a big chance if she starts looking for a niche product made with faux leather, the sticker shock or lack of availability will end up leading to her, a meat eater, just adding another corpse to the pile. her attachment to the idea of sourcing non-harmful leather is obviously going to be tenuous since she has no problem putting meat into her body.

LexieAssassin: A. Much of this comment thread is very TL;DR. (What I did read seems like it devolved into petty squabbling.)

B. Eh, I wouldn’t say that I have no problem with it. I’d definitely like to get to at least vegetarian eventually, but I find it difficult to cut out meat because I’m very sensitive to taste, texture, ect. and my diet is thus very limited. Navigating that is a challenge I’m trying to overcome, slowly but steadily, or so I hope.

krapyl:

Just like with every cause you take up, you miss the forest for the trees.

i have no idea what you’re saying, but it’s interesting that you insist on being so polite to carnists while being so condescending to vegans.

telling others to set a “good example” rather than speaking up on the issue directly is such toxic positivity, that if said in any other context, you’d be insulted at reading it.

used leather is the best bet that her purchase won’t kill another animal because there’s a big chance if she starts looking for a niche product

now she will buy a used leather jacket, and when it’s starting to look scruffy, her friends or parents will buy her a new one for her birthday. so much for your lesser-evilism damage-control.

since she has no problem putting meat into her body.

how about challenging that then? or would that be an “attack”?

ziq:

i have no idea what you’re saying

clearly referring to you repeatedly stepping into anti-semitism territory to decry israel’s genocide because you get overzealous and forget that the point of holding ethical views isn’t to attack people so you can feel superior, or to paint all members of a creed with the same brush, it’s to foster understanding, promote compassion, and encourage positive change in people.

ask raddle users how many of them became vegans in the past 8 years because of my example. it didn’t happen because i ostracised them, it happened because I normalized veganism and made it seem like the only logical choice

how about challenging that then? or would that be an “attack”?

do what you want, no one is ordering you to stop. tactically tho, it won’t work if you’re vicious to her.

krapyl:

clearly referring to you repeatedly stepping into anti-semitism territory

this was about you sharing obvious zionist propaganda from the sun, giving a pass to obvious zionists, and here you go, weaponizing accusations of antisemitism

the point of holding ethical views isn’t to attack people so you can feel superior, or to paint all members of a creed with the same brush, it’s to foster understanding, promote compassion, and encourage positive change in people.

if there is any compassion for the victims too, it will mean calling out oppressive behaviour.

when someone is opening the discussion about the ethics of leather, of course it’s fine to talk about veganism and animal liberation rather than just telling them to buy leather. wtf!?!

ziq: always the victim

stop picking fights with me because your ego can’t handle it when you were told by multiple users for weeks that you were out of order. it’s my job to uphold the tos, not to stroke your ego and tell you you’re a good little activist who can do no wrong. you’re not going to make me and all the others who called you out suddenly see the error of our ways and realize you were the virtuous hero of Gaza and we were all just zionist stooges all along

krapyl:

always the victim

says the one crying about my “attack”

ziq: you attacking carnists doesn’t make me a victim

krapyl: good then stop whining about it

ziq: stop baiting me and i’ll stop responding to your bait

To The Desertmaker

Subtitle: and other writings for malcontents

Author: ziq

Source:
<https://littleblackcart.com/index.php?dispatch=products.view&product_id=794> [now dead]

Publisher: LBC Books, Pistols Drawn

Date: 2018

Language: English

Pages: 191

Notes: The conversion is half-finished error-correcting. Some machine errors remain and sentences with an ‘@’ symbol refer to line breaks that have yet to be changed to a space, no space or hyphen.

---

You have demolished their sublime mountains to construct your shopping malls and marinas. You have drained their great lakes to plant your carefully manicured golf courses. Felled their majestic forests to graze your billion cows. Desecrated their vast oceans with your rotten, putrid waste.

You’re driven to control Terra, to change the course of their rivers, to reshape their shorelines and modify their lifeforms to suit your rapacious appetite. You can’t fathom a world where you don’t own the earth below your feet, posses everything Terra created as your own.

You are imperious to assume Terra will be so affected by a fleetingly short-lived and short-sighted creature as yourself. If it takes a million of your lifetimes, Terra will wash away the volumes of excrement you have soiled their surface with.

You spent your wretched life desperately cutting your name into Terra’s flesh, but Terra’s wounds will callus over, creature. Long after the arrogant grin you wear on your lips has turned to dust with the rest of your foul corpse, Terra will regenerate. All the beautiful, disparate beasts you have eradicated during your brief gluttonous tantrum will be reborn. The trees will rise again in magnificent groves as far as the eye can see. Everything you took will be reclaimed.

(From the title essay)

To the Desertmaker

I see you, creature. I see what you do.

You drill holes into Terra’s skull, drench their flesh with poison, pull their hair out by the handful, hack off their limbs, drain the blood from their veins and burn it. This you call growth, development, progress.

Day and night you grind Terra’s bones into powder to erect your grotesque eidola to death all across their bloodied torso. This you call your mighty civilization. A tangled mess of concrete, steel and plastic pointed towards me so I am forced to look upon it.

You direct your servants to build your towers higher and higher. After all, you are very special! The civilized, sophisticated, highly respected creature! Behold the important executive in the tailor-made suit, shoes crafted from the finest alligator hide! What an impressive specimen! What a handsome creature you are!

You’re lifted to the top of your tallest tower so you can perch yourself in your opulent shrine to the wealth you have plucked from Terra’s body You stand high and gaze down at the wretched souls below, making sure every one of them knows you rule over them, that Terra is your personal dominion. Your private property to use and abuse as you please.

I see you, creature. I see what you do.

You have demolished their sublime mountains to construct your shopping malls and marinas. You have drained their great lakes to plant your carefully manicured golf courses. Felled their majestic forests to graze your billion cows. Desecrated their vast oceans with your rotten, putrid waste.

You’re driven to control Terra, to change the course of their rivers, to reshape their shorelines and modify their lifeforms to suit your rapacious appetite. You can’t fathom of a world where you don’t own the earth below your feet; posses everything Terra created as your own.

You are imperious to assume Terra will be so affected by a fleetingly short-lived and short-sighted creature as yourself If it takes a million of your lifetimes, Terra will wash away the volumes of excrement you have soiled their surface with.

You spent your wretched life desperately cutting your name into Terra’s flesh, but Terra’s wounds will callus over, creature. Long after the arrogant grin you wear on your lips has turned to dust with the rest of your foul corpse, Terra will regenerate. All the beautiful, disparate beasts you have eradicated during your brief gluttonous tantrum will be reborn. The trees will rise again in magnificent groves as far as the eye can see. Everything you took will be reclaimed.

For a while, Terra will be rendered as desolate as I. A vast desert of your creation. But in time, the stench of death you brought will be lifted and the oceans will come back to life. Then the land and then the skies.

I move synchronous to Terra, following their every movement. We are in rhythm together, Terra and I. We have danced this dance for longer than you can conceive.

I see you, creature. I see what you do. I see what you are. I see every desperate grasp for power. Every sordid manipulation and abuse to cement your position on the top floor of the tallest tower. The wasted lives of those you have coerced into your service.

You think yourself so evolved, creature. You look down at all you have plundered, and you think yourself worthy of Terra’s grace. You have laid waste to Terra’s resplendence and you and your kind will suffer terribly for it. Everything you know will die a senseless death. Every child you bear from your loins will die horribly, their potential wasted.

To think of all the creative, wonderful things your servants could have manifested without the chains you encumbered them with. So much wonder will never come to pass because of your covetous rampage.

I have forever been locked to Terra. Though we have never touched, I feel as if I am an extension of them. Though I am devoid of life myself, I assist in birthing all life on Terra. I drive their tides; transport heat from their equator to their poles, arousing the cycle of life.

As everything around you collapses into ruin, you will no doubt retreat from your fetid towers in the sky and escape deep into Terra’s ground. There, you will cower and hide from the rapidly unfolding chaos you wrought on the world above. You will surely use your immense wealth to cling to life for as long as you can, but eventually your time will run out.

As you lay in your reinforced underground bunker clasping your last tank of air, awaiting your end, and everyone that toiled in drudgery to serve you is dead and forgotten, think of everything you have accomplished during your brief existence. Think of the endless suffering you wrought on Terra’s lands to claim such fleeting, pointless rewards for yourself. Think of the deep emptiness inside you and how none of your misbegotten wealth could ever fill it. And now think of me.

It is time. Arise from your living tomb, creature. Climb the steps to the surface. Stumble out into the dark and face me!

Look upon the vast desert that stands in testament to the miserable carnage you forged. Watch as Terra burns. Gaze upon the fires and take pleasure in the knowledge that you actualized all your perverse power machinations. You dominated every being under you. Used their labor to grow your wealth to unparalleled levels. Stole their lives to grant yourself ever more fame, power, and luxury. You defeated all your competitors, accumulated all the capital you possibly could, and now you get to stand and witness the end of everything you knew.

Look and see, creature. Look how your desert is eclipsed by my shining glow in the night sky. Look up at me, creature. Look up as I look down on you. Choke on Terra’s stale, toxic air. Hear me laugh heartily as you breathe your last desperate breath and are finally engulfed by the fires you lit.

This is a great victory for you. Your life ends here in the great desert you made and no one is left to curse your name for all the hurt you did.

Absurd creature, imagining you could stand above the ancient, primal life that sprouted you. Thinking your time spent bludgeoning all other lifeforms into submission somehow significant. Terra has seen you and all you are and has washed their hands of you.

Long after your corpse has disintegrated into a pile of sand, I will send tidal waves to wash away whatever ruins remain of your brief, rancid civilization. Then volcanoes will rise from Terra’s belly, lava will spew into the oceans and form new lands. Life will thrive again. Terra will be reborn.

And let us hope none of the new creatures Terra bears during their rebirth will be as noxious and destructive as you, senseless desertmaker.

What is Anarchy?

What Anarchy Means to Me

Anarchy is the opposition to authority, the rejection of hierarchy and the unending struggle for autonomy and self-determination.

Anarchy is above all a practice, not a theory. It is about actively working to end authoritarian relationships wherever they exist, and build non-authoritarian alternatives.

It is not about trying to prescribe a way of life for an imagined place and time, and imagined people. It is for real people and dealing with real problems.

Anarchy is a living and breathing praxis that we incorporate into our everyday lives. A personal stance against authority that informs all our decisions and thus shapes the trajectory of our existence.

There is no end-goal to anarchy. It is an ongoing, unending fight against hierarchical systems and the authority figures that construct them.

Anarchy is a desire for freedom from tyranny. Anarchy is countless generations of disparate people with the drive to be freer than they are under the systems that forcibly govern them.

Developing Anarchist Praxis

When we talk to people about anarchy, they often ask, “how practical is it? Can you demonstrate anarchy to me, so that I can appreciate its effectiveness?” Praxis is how we show anarchy working.

Praxis is any action that embodies and realizes anarchy. It’s a valuable method for creating awareness of anarchist causes and building solidarity in your community.

There are countless examples of anarchist praxis. Online communities like anarchistnews. org or raddle.me are examples of anarchist praxis, as they demonstrate anarchist management and create community, solidarity, education, and opportunities to organize. Setting up a Food Not Bombs chapter in your community is great praxis. Squatting an unused building to provide a safe space for homeless people. Starting a free shop that people can freely take what they need from. Building community gardens to feed and engage the community. Preparing free meals for refugees in your country. Making a zine or a podcast about an important topic to raise awareness and open a dialogue. Creating and disseminating memes from an Anarchist perspective. Assassinating a dictator. Creating an autonomous zone. Stopping pipelines from being built. Teaching people to be self-sufficient by gardening, foraging for food, and upcycling. Forming a human chain to stop cops from arresting migrants. Teaching self-defence. Closing roads and ports to inhibit global trade. Starting an anarchist bike collective to fix people’s bikes. Flying a drone near an airport. Making music that shines a light on injustices in the world. Setting up a community mesh-net to share data with your community in a decentralized manner.

These are just some examples of good things anarchists do in our communities every day Just writing about this and perhaps inspiring some people to do anarchy is praxis.

Indigenous Anarchy: The Need for a Rejection of the Colonizer’s Civilization

First, let’s define some basic terms. Indigenous means “of the land we are actually on.” Anarchy means “rejecting authority.” The principles of anarchism include direct action, mutual aid, and voluntary cooperation. Anarchy; A Journal of Desire Armed envisions a primitive anarchy that is “radically cooperative and communitarian, ecological and feminist, spontaneous and wild.”

Civilization is a culture that revolves around cities. A city is a collection of people who live permanently in one place, in densities high enough that they must import their food and resources from outside the city in order to survive and ensure the continued growth of the city. So, cities depend on the exploitation of external bodies to maintain themselves.

This externalisation alienates us from both our food supply and our waste. Our food is purchased from a supermarket, grown far from home, prepared and packaged on an assembly line. We are denied any participation in the processes that feed us. Our garbage gets trucked away to be disposed of somewhere out of our immediate sight, and our human waste is flushed down pipes. We don’t fully know where it goes, what it affects, what place it has in our ecosystem.

Civilization aims to dominate life through its various structures that are designed to domesticate us. These structures include industry, colonialism, statism, capitalism, agriculture, racism, schooling, religion, media, police, prisons, the military, the patriarchy, slavery, and more.

Indigenous peoples throughout history have fought and died to resist the forceful encroachment of civilization into their lives. This struggle continues today, as the uncivilized are pushed closer and closer to the edge of survival by the civilized all over the world, and the technological imbalance between us continues to expand and create a sociological divide that renders us unable to understand each other on even a basic level.

The lifestyles of the civilized and the uncivilized have diverged to such an extent that it has become near-impossible for the civilized to see that their civilization has become an obstacle to our basic survival. Instead, they hold their civilization up as the instrument of their survival and fear living in a world without it. They are so conditioned to the order of their civilization that they can’t fathom a life in its absence.

The entire concept of civilization depends on the rule of the colonizer and his brutal subjugation of indigenous peoples. The perpetual march of global civilization is fed by the forced labor and the exploitation of natural resources in the global South (and historically, all lands beyond the European continent).

In order to strip the land of its resources, the people that live on the land need to be displaced and moved to tightly-packed cities, farms, or reservations where they will be forced to labor to turn those resources into consumer products for Western markets. This process of civilizing indigenous peoples is rapid, and our culture, language, and history is often forcibly extinguished by the colonizers to ensure we don’t attempt a return to our previous uncivilized lives and reclaim those lands that they have taken for their industry.

The ruling classes are always looking for new avenues to accumulate wealth for themselves. Rulers create subservient underclasses by depriving uncivilized peoples of their natural habitats so they have no choice but to accept domestication and be integrated into the industrial capitalist system. The ruler can then successfully convert the people they have tamed and domesticated into profitable commodities; docile workers that can labor their whole lives to create more wealth for the ruler.

A ruler sees no use for a hunter-gatherer or any person that is not creating wealth and power for the ruler. If people didn’t need to work for rulers to acquire food and shelter, rulers would cease to have power. So the worst enemy of the ruler is a person that doesn’t depend on rulers to survive, or worse; an entire culture of selfsufficient people. An uncivilized culture that he has no control over is a ruler’s worst fear.

Under civilization, no longer will indigenous peoples be permitted to survive off of their ancestral lands, hunting and foraging. Now to survive in this new world forced on us by the colonizers, we must endure back-breaking labor in factories, warehouses, mines and industrial farms. Our children must be educated in the ways of the colonizers; to shape them into productive and submissive workers. We must depend on the state and colonizers to feed and clothe us. We must consume and waste and participate in destroying the ecosystems that sustained us for millennia. We must be “civilized” so that the ruling class may prosper at our expense.

Freedom Through Rejection

To reject civilization is to oppose this coercive arrangement where our history, our culture, and the collective knowledge that allowed us to survive and prosper on our land is taken from us by profiteering industrialists who would have us devote our entire lives to laboring for their benefit as they deny us access to our own lands and resources.

To reject civilization is to oppose urbanization; the cramming of people into small, barren, concreted areas that can be more easily controlled by our rulers to stop us from breaking with their demands that we be “civilized” and obedient.

To reject civilization is to oppose exploitative industrial agricultural methods that force the rural poor to sacrifice their labor to feed the materially wealthy cities, while rapidly despoiling the land of its fertility and sapping the groundwater for irrigation at a much faster rate than it can be replenished.

Civilization depends on a massively unequal concentration of wealth; a brutal capitalist hierarchy where the few that have been lucky enough to climb to the top control everyone beneath them. At the very bottom of civilization’s hierarchy are the indigenous peoples of the world.

Control and Domestication

The voices of indigenous peoples, whether they are accepted by their colonizers as successfully civilized, or rejected as uncivilized, have been long ignored by everyone who benefits from the march of civilization and the shiny things it gives them. Shiny things made possible by the rampant exploitation of indigenous lands and the manipulation and control of indigenous peoples through domestication.

Control is the key word to understanding why civilization has come into being. The capitalist colonizers work hard to convince us that we need to be controlled by them and their civilization. That we need their civilization to protect us from harm. If we labor for them, we won’t go hungry. If we give them our lands and relocate to their “reservations” or their farms or their cities, adopt their language and religion, they will give us protection, allow us to survive with “dignity,” accept us as successfully domesticated and civilized.

The irony to this is staggering. The colonizers decimate our forests and slice open our land to empty it of its resources. They slaughter our wildlife to extinction and douse our plant life with herbicides to ensure we can’t sustain ourselves. They render our water toxic and undrinkable. They destroy our climate with their burning of carbon. They murder us if we dare stand in their way.

And then they offer us sanctuary from their tyranny. A choice between enslavement or extinction. Move to their cities, slums, plantations and reservations and be accepted as civilized, or die at their hands for being subhuman uncivilized savages who can’t be saved. Anything civilization can’t control must be purged to ensure the march of civilization continues without obstacle.

To embrace anarchy is to oppose the very idea of control. To reject the authority of the colonizer and his coercive civilization that takes so much from us to provide comforts to cultures that would sooner see us slaughtered than threaten their industry-fueled lifestyles. Anarchy is trusting in ourselves and our neighbors to work together through mutual aid to solve our own problems, without needing the charity of powerful authorities.

Anti-civ indigenous anarchists recognize that the very concept of civilization depends on our colonizers’ ability to control us. Our forced assimilation into the colonizers’ alien civilization, and the punitive laws we’re forced to obey are designed to keep us from resisting the perverse order our colonizers force on us. Their order depends on our domestication and the destruction of our way of life. Their civilization is designed to destroy everything it touches.

Embracing our “Inhospitable Wilderness”

The so-called “inhospitable wilderness” that civilization has seen fit to beat into submission is the lifeblood of our existence. For millennia, we lived in peace with this wilderness, nurturing it as much as it nurtured us. We were caretakers of the land, rather than exploiters of it. Now, as civilized people, we labor for a lifetime for the right to assert ownership over a tiny piece of the land, so that we may pave it over and erect a concrete block to live in. If we are successful. Most of us don’t even get this privilege and are forced to pay wealthy landlords for the right to live in one of the concrete blocks they own.

Uncivilized, we roamed freely. Wild fruit and herbs grew in every direction, ready for the picking. Freshwater streams filled with fish dotted the landscape. The sounds of wildlife filled the air. Our labor was minimal and the rewards were instantaneous. We only knew abundance. Or, more accurately: affiuence without abundance.

Hunter-gatherers are able to meet their immediate needs without needing to stockpile a surplus the way civilized people must to survive (with agriculture, jobs, loans, savings, mortgages, pensions, insurance). The uncivilized have no want of material possessions because such frivolous things would stand in the way of their ability to live nomadically with the seasons. Having too many possessions forces us to stay in one place at all times to guard those possessions with our lives, so that we can continue to possess them and not risk them being taken from us. It creates a paranoid security-centric lifestyle that puts owning and protecting property above our most basic needs.

Hunter-gatherers can trust that the environment will provide for us, that going for a walk to hunt or forage will give us and our loved ones all the food and water we’ll need for a few days. After taking that walk, the rest of the day is wide open for leisure.

Civilized people love to refer to huntergatherers as being stricken by poverty. But this poverty is a material poverty; a lack of surplus, luxuries, things. In real terms, hunter-gatherers are far richer than the perpetually in-debt civilized workers who have little room for leisure and must measure their entire existence in terms of time. The civilized, in their agriculture-based societies, must work 5 or 6 days a week simply to survive. The uncivilized have no desire for such absurdities. As Marshall Sahlins noted, hunter-gatherers are the original affiuent society. With no material needs, there is no need for poverty or wealth. All people may be equal; a true anarchy.

Civilized people plant rows of crops in fenced-in, sterilized industrial monocultures that barely resemble the diverse mutually-sustaining interconnected food forests that fed us throughout history. Farmers repeatedly strain the same plots of land year after year to grow these single crops, soaking them with chemical fertilizers and pesticides so nothing but the monocrop can survive. The soil is eroded, barren of life, dependent on the chemical concoctions the farmer must go into debt to procure.

In civilization, water is scarce, controlled, and expensive. Fruit comes wrapped in plastic and you must labor in misery for a full day to afford it. Fish is contaminated by the toxic waste that industry spews into waterways, and yet we still are charged for the privilege of eating it. Wildlife has been largely replaced by vast expanses of caged livestock. The endless excrement from these industrial meat facilities also pours into the waterways, further poisoning the ecosystem and sterilizing the land.

The wildness that once defined us has been coerced out of us by our colonizers. Like dogs bred from wild wolves to be obedient and subservient to their masters, we have come to depend on the state and capitalists for our basic survival. Sick and domesticated, we fight each other for the scraps of food thrown down to us by the rulers who deprive us of our land and our very lives.

Understanding Neo-Colonialism

Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah succinctly explained Neo-colonialism in 1965:

The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside. The methods and form of this direction can take various shapes. (Most) eften, neo-colonialist control is exercised through economic or monetary means. Control over government policy in the neocolonial State may be secured by payments towards the cost of running the State, by the provision of civil servants in positions where they can dictate policy, and by monetary control over.fo reign exchange through the imposition of a banking system controlled by the imperial power.

This description of neo-colonialism still rings true today, with indigenous cultures all over the world experiencing what Nkrumah described in its various forms. Most recently, Chinese neo-colonialists have flowed into indigenous lands, promising to lift us up with their wealth. Their investors, bankers, traders, lenders, developers and charities all promise to improve our lives for the better.

African countries are especially incurring massive debt to Beijing, offering up their land, oil, gas, minerals and other resources as collatoral for every new billion-dollar loan they takE out. When they inevitably default on these un sustainable loans, China will seize the collatoral and strip the continent of its natural wealth. Malaysia recently realized the dangers of this debt trap and pulled out of Chinese development deals. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad warned the world, “there is a new version of

Colonialism happening.”

The non-profit Confucius Institute that- op erates in indigenous lands is a vehicle for Chines propaganda, restricting what can be said by the teachers they supply from China, distorting what students learn. This propaganda-via-schooling is designed to promote China’s economic interests by conditioning indigenous children to accept colonization and a life of subservience. Col-Oniz ers go to great lengths to normalize the terror they bring and convince us it is good for us.

Kwame Nkrumah:

Neo-colonialism might be also the worst form of imperialism. For those who practice it, it means power without responsibility and for those who siif.fer from it, it means exploitation without redress. In the days of old:fashioned colonialism, the imperial power had at least to explain and justifj at home the actions it was taking abroad. In the colony those who served the ruling imperial power could at least look to its protection against any violent move by their opponents. With neo-colonialism neither is the case.

Similarly to China, South Korea and its multinational corporations have bought farming rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in “under-developed” countries, in order to secure food resources for their citizens. The history of colonialism and banana republics have shown us that this kind of arrangement has only led to misery for indigenous peoples and the degradation of our lands.

South Korea’s RG Energy Resources Asset Management CEO Park Yong-soo:

The (South Korean) nation does not produce a single drop of crude oil and other key industrial minerals. To power economic growth and support people’s livelihoods, we cannot emphasize too much that securing natural resources in .foreign countries is a must far ourf uture survival.

The head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, warned that the rise in these land deals could create a form of neocolonialism, with poorer regions producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people. It’s safe to say that this latest form of neocolonialism has already arrived, and our corrupt governments are signing deals that make us increasingly dependent on these foreign nations and their promises to “lift us up” by building us cities and infrastructure.

It’s integral that we resist their attempts to civilize our lands; to force us to labor for them; to help them steal our natural resources to grow their empires so they may expand further and exploit more indigenous populations across the world.

And our local authorities, who are so quick to sell our futures for the fleeting luxuries of concrete towers and faster trains are just as culpable in this neo-colonial push to shape us into the beggared workers of foreign empires.

The Maasai, a semi-nomadic tribe that inhabits mostly Tanzania and Kenya, have been migrating with the seasons for centuries. They have increasingly been pushed out of their land by the states and business interests that collude to write laws that prohibit them from cultivating plants and grazing their animals on large tracts of their traditional land.

Tens of thousands of Maasai were left homeless after their homes in the N gorongoro Crater sightseeing area were set on fire, supposedly to “preserve the region’s ecosystem” and attract more tourists.

The Tanzanian government works with Tanzania Conservation Limited, which is owned by the US-based Thomson Safaris and Ortello Business Corporation (a luxury hunting company based in the United Arab Emirates), to drive the Maasai off of their land. They’re beaten, shot, and their property is confiscated.

Young herders are so frightened that they now run whenever they see a vehicle approaching, fearing for their lives.

The state has now ordered the Maasai people to leave their homeland so it can be turned into a hunting ground for affluent tourists who pay a premium to shoot big game animals and take the carcasses home with them as stuffed trophies.

The state aids in these genocidal acts to secure foreign investment to build its cities. The state will always put the civilized before the uncivilized because the entire reason a state exist is to grow its cities and plunder food and resources to feed that growth.

Civilization has always been the weapon used by the powerful to condemn us to a life of servitude. Reject civilization. Reject the state. Reject capitalism. Reject all attempts to conquer our lands and enslave our peoples.

Looking a Gift-Horse in the Mouth: The Technological Divide

We should understand that there’s a big difference between “tools” and “technology.” Tools can be made on a small-scale with local materials, either by individuals or small groups of people on occasions when the tools are needed. Unlike technology, tools don’t construct systems of authority and obedience to allow one group to dominate another, just so long as everyone is able to realistically create or acquire tools on their own. Technology depends on the ability to mount immense operations of extraction, production, distribution, and consumption. This demands coercive authority and hierarchy. Oppression.

The Fifth Estate explained the pitfalls of technology in 1981.

Technology is not a simple tool which can be used in any way we like. It is a form of social organization, a set of social relations. It has its own laws. If we are to engage in its use, we must accept its authority. The enormous size, complex interconnections, and stratification of tasks that make up modern technological systems make authoritarian command necessary and independen individual decision-making impossible.

Technology is used by rulers to control and pacify their citizens. The societies of the colonists are laden with technological marvels. But their people are detached from the land they live on, alienated from each other, their eyes constantly fixated on mindless distractions emanating from their screens, as their lands dry up and burn to pay for their addiction to these toxic industrial products.

Technology is used to conquer, to assert dominance, to destroy entire cultures that dare to reject the empire’s world order. Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, entire countries decimated by the great technology of the imperialists, raining death down from the skies.

The colonizers will always have better technology than us. Whatever technologies they promise us in return for our cooperation with their agenda will pale in comparison to the technologies that drive their own societies. They’ll tell us we need their technology to be civilized, to avoid falling behind the rest of the world, but there is no catching up with the empire’s machine. It will grind us up and churn us out long before it ever gives up the secrets it promises.

Technology is a weapon wielded by the most powerful and there is no way for us to ever match that power, so why try? Why dedicate our lives to playing their game, by their rules? To receive their obsolete cast-offs in return? They use their technology to convince us that we are less than them, that we are backwards and that they need to save us from our savage existence. They say all this while their technological supremacy depends on our resources and our labor, on them being able to coerce us into sacrificing ourselves and our children and our children’s children to give them the fuel for their big important machines. Machines that allow them to maintain their dominance over us, so that we remain perpetually inferior to them. If they ever gave us what they promise; the liberation they say their technology will bring, their power over us would be lost. We would no longer need them to save us from our wildness because we would be as civilized as them.

When we give up so much of ourselves so that they will give us their technology, they make sure we will need them to maintain it. We become dependent on their technology, and thus dependent on them to continue feeding it to us and to fix it when it breaks. Our lives begin to revolve around the technology and we forget how to live without it. And while we’re distracted by the calming glow of our little screens, our ecosystems are decimated by the colonists.

Technology is a carrot on a stick and it cannot liberate us, only domesticate and enslave us. Reject it. Reject being measured by our technological prowess or how civilized we are. Reject the colonizer and his false gifts and manipulations. Reject his civilization. Reject his control over who we are and who we will be.

Fuck Your Red Revolution: Against Ecocide, Towards Anarchy

Let Go of Your Tedious Slogans

“There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” is a tired slogan that I wish would die. So often it is used by reds to pooh-pooh those of us who strive to make life choices to reduce harm in our communities and in our natural environments.

Vegan diets, bicycling, dumpster diving, upcycling, guerilla gardening, permaculture, squatting, illegalism, food forestry, communes, self-sufficiency, and all the other so-called lifestylist pursuits that individualist anarchists undertake to minimize their harm on the environment are shamed and mocked by many anarcho-communists, social ecologists, anarcho-transhumanists, syndicalists, and other industry-upholding anarchists. These reds are well-versed in workerist rhetoric, and see all lifestyle choices as a distraction from the global proletarian revolution that is their singular goal.

You’ll hear them talk down to other anarchists who are discussing ethical ways to curtail their consumption, especially people that live off the land or otherwise limit their participation in industrial civilization; people they loudly dismiss and condemn as “primmies” or “lifestylists”.

They’ll tell us to stop living our lives in the pursuit of personal anarchy because “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism”. In the red mind, as long as a capitalist system has been imposed on the world, there’s no point in reaching for anarchy until that system has been overthrown and replaced with their system. Regardless of how unlikely it is that this will happen in our lifetimes.

Using “no ethical consumption” to shame people for making the effort to live more conscientiously, and decrying all individual action as “counter-revolutionary” or “liberal” comes from a deeply authoritarian mindset reminiscent of toxic Maoist purges that punished people for dressing differently or having hobbies or doing anything but devote themselves 100% to destructive industrial labor and the glory of “the revolution” (almost always manifested in the form of a red state).

The red influence in anarchist discourse is unfortunately dominant in most developed parts of the world, and collectivist-minded anarchists insist every anarchist devote themselves to their pipe dream of a mass uprising to seize the factories from the capitalists and turn them over to the workers. They postulate that democratized factories will be more beneficial to workers because they’ll receive a bigger piece of the industrial pie. This is true. But then they claim their ideology will “save the environment” because a worker collective won’t be greedy and destructive like a capitalist board of directors. This is of course completely unfounded and blatantly ignores the history of collectivized industry and its devastating effects on the environment.

The glaring reality is that industrial societies all eventually lead to ecocide, without exception.

Countless Marxist revolutions in history did so much damage to the environment that entire territories, such as the area surrounding Chernobyl, were rendered uninhabitable to humans. Babies continue to be born with birth defects today, and cancer rates in the regions devastated by socialist industry continue to be sky-high.

Let’s take a brief look at the former USSR’s legacy of careless industrial destruction, with three examples.

The Ural River in Magnitogorsk, Russia, is still saturated with toxic boron and chromium levels from the nearby steelworks, poisoning the entire ecosystem.[4]

The Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest inland water body in the world, was largely replaced by the newly-emerged Aralkum Desert after the Soviets drained two rivers for irrigation. The sea is now just 10 percent of its original size.[5]

Run-off from oil fields near Baku have rendered all the local water bodies biologically dead, killing off every lifeform, some of which prospered in those ecosystems for millennia.[6]

These are just a few examples of devastating ecocide caused by the push for industrial growth (which is required to achieve communism according to Marx), and they of course only ever achieved more capitalism and more misery, because industrialism and the continued pursuit of menial labor will not liberate people.

Changing from a vertical to a horizontal hierarchy will benefit the industrial workers in some material ways, certainly, but the wholesale destruction of our planet will not slow down one bit just by instituting a powershift from bosses to workers. Industrial production depends on non-stop growth, and when you tie the success of a society to industrial production, you create a recipe for disaster. Workers won’t vote to scale down their industry or its environmental impact as their livelihoods depend on their industry’s growth.

And they certainly won’t care about anyone who isn’t also an industrial worker, or preserving foreign ways of life. Indigenous people and anyone living off the land will effectively be seen by red society as an undesirable out-group. Anyone who can’t measure up to workerist standards of productivity will be seen as a strain on the industrial grind, an enemy of the red revolution.

Any “counter-revolutionary” rebel who dares stand in the way of industrial growth and the spread of industry across land and sea is effectively a liability that needs to be expunged to safeguard the revolution. This is the power of the collective. Comply or be crushed. Red or dead.

So you see, the people parroting “no ethical consumption under capitalism” at you don’t actually have any intention of curbing their destructive consumption, even under communism. Even under anarcho-communism. If anything, they hope to increase their consumption by acquiring more spending power. With communism, they’ll be able to consume as much as a middle-management boss does under capitalism because all workers will receive an equal share (until resources run out and their society collapses, a simple reality they have no interest in acknowledging).

You cannot grow infinitely on a finite planet, and all industrial ideologies, regardless of whether they brand themselves as “libertarian” or “authoritarian” seem to ignore that simple fact because it would expose their ideology as having zero long-term viability in a world already experiencing unprecedented global collapse.

Harm Reduction is Valuable

There’s always a more ethical alternative to everything. That’s the whole point of anarchy, to analyze our actions and our impact on our environment and limit harm, counter authority as much as possible. Ethics isn’t an all or nothing proposition-there are varying degrees of harm.

Just because some solutions aren’t 100% pure and wonderful doesn’t mean they’re not worth doing, over much more harmful alternatives. Anarchy is about subverting authority by finding more ethical solutions to every problem we come across.

Here’s an example of several levels of harm reduction that can measurably make a difference, things that stone-faced reds will no doubt decry as lifestylist simply because they don’t succeed in immediately overthrowing capitalism and bringing on a communist utopia:

Eating vegan locally-grown pesticide-free unprocessedf ood is absolutely more ethical than eating imported processed meat.

Why?

Far less carbon is burned to grow, store, transport, process, store again, and retransport the food. Workers involved in organic agriculture aren’t exposed to the much more dangerous conditions of slaughterhouses, battery farms, pesticides, ships, and warehouses. Far less animal suffering and death goes into producing the food. These are real metrics.

There are of course still many downsides to for-profit agriculture including desertification, exploitation of migrant labor, and destruction of native ecosystems to plant monocultures. But it’s still much better than the alternative which ensures far greater harm by every metric ... For instance, the container ships that transport imported food and industrial products burn highly-polluting “bunker fuel;” the tarry goo that’s left over when all the higher quality fuels like petrol, diesel, and kerosene have been extracted from crude oil. In 2009, confidential data was leaked showing that a single container ship produces as much pollution as 50 million cars.[7] The ship workers will be the first to breathe in these highly-concentrated fumes. Avoiding imported food goes a long way in fighting exploitation.

Buying seeds/cuttings/grafts and growing your own food in a community garden, as well as dumpster diving from outside supermarkets is more ethical than buying locally-grown food from a for-profit business.

Why?

Even less carbon is burned, waste is diverted from landfills, there are no workers to exploit or endanger, there is no animal suffering and death (if you use no-till methods). You control everything that goes into the soil (and ultimately your community’s bodies) and can thus stave off desertification and actually improve the soil and rebuild the ecosystem.

Downsides: Native flora is displaced in favor of domesticated food crops. Land ownership feeds the state via taxes (unless you use squatted land to plant the garden). Living in a city means you’ll still be consuming a lot of things you can’t produce yourself in your limited space. But again, this is a measurable improvement over the previous scenario.

Moving out of the city to a rural area and living as a subsistence farmer to grow all your own food in a food forest you plant;, giving away or trading your surplus. Foraging for food where it’s sustainable to do so. Planting trees on every unused piece of land you see.

Why?

Erosion and desertification is effectively stopped in its tracks wherever food forests rise. The trees clean the air of carbon. Trees are the plants best by far at evapotranspiration, and are integral to the water-cycle that all lifeforms depend on. The climate in the area is safeguarded, with increased humidity and rainfall.

Forest gardening rewilds the planet. Pre-civilized peoples made the rainforests as abundant as they are by curating them and spreading the plants they found most beneficial. If enough people planted food forests in an area, the local population could sustain themselves by hunting and foraging the way they did before civilization.

So future generations are given the invaluable gift of autonomy from the industrial system, and the knowledge and incentive to resist industry’s violent encroach on their way of life.

Personal Action Doesn’t Happen in a Vacuum: Working Towards a Lasting Cultural Shift

When a group of people chooses to, for example, go without cow products, there is less demand for cow products. Over that group’s lifetime, less forest will be bulldozed to graze the cows that they didn’t eat. Fewer cows will be impregnated by robotic rape machines. Fewer veal calves will be snatched from their mothers, put in dark little boxes for a few weeks and then slaughtered so the mother keeps producing milk for the dairy industry.

Some of the people who interact with vegans will be influenced by vegan ethics and ways of life and will be inspired to minimize their own harm to the ecosystem. They’ll also adopt a vegan diet, and influence people in their lives to follow suit. One vegan becomes two, two become ten, ten become ten million. The cultural shift spreads far and wide, touching countless lives and changing the course of history.

So in this way, an individual action gradually becomes a collective action. People slowly emulate others after being exposed to their lifestyle and ultimately the local culture is forever changed. All cultural shifts start out with a few innovators and gradually expand to the rest of the population as others see the benefits of the new culture.

Likewise with permaculture and food forests. People start planting food forests and others take up their example and pretty soon you have thousands of acres of land that are saved from desertification and become refuges for wildlife.

There are countless places where this is demonstrable, including where I’m from (some where in Western Asia). Each indigenous family in these mountains has a small plot of land that we cultivate. The more people choose to use mixed forest farming methods instead of standard sprayed monocultures, the more people are influenced to follow our example. They see how successful food forests are at feeding our families and the culture gradually shifts.

There needs to be a cultural shift that precedes and guides any revolutionary movement otherwise you’ll just end up replicating capitalism like Marxists have done time and@ time again. People who live destructive ecocidal consumerist lifestyles in exchange for fleeting material comforts won’t be capable of shifting to ethical lifestyles just because “the revolution” happened. They’ll simply replicate their destructive ways under the new political system and the revolution will have been for nothing. Capitalism will have just been given another paper mask to hide behind as it drags us deeper into the black hole of industrial apocalypse.

Fuck Your Luxury Space Communism

A single cruise ship emits as much pollution as a million cars. Cruise ships dump 1 billion gallons of sewage into the ocean every year.[8] Knowing these facts, how can any anarchist decide to directly fund the cruise ship industry by saving up money and booking a cruise holiday?

Reds will tell you with a straight face that capitalism is to blame for the cruise industry’s rampant polluting, and how, “after the revolution,” the cruise industry will do no harm because it will be worker-managed.

In reality, a truly communist society would necessitate that cruises be free to every worker@ as a reward for their labor. This means far more globe-trotting tourists and far more cruise ships in the oceans. Carbon burning and pollu@ tion would actually increase greatly.

But let’s ignore that for now. We don’t live in a revolutionary communist society and we@ will not see capitalism go away in our lifetimes. Global capitalism is more ingrained in society than ever before. Anarcho-communists are such a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of any population. Reds telling “lifestylists” to stop giving a shit about anything other than “overthrowing” capitalism, something we clearly don’t have the support or firepower to do, is blatantly ridiculous.

Continuing to eat industrial meat and processed foods, buying a new phone, games console, tablet every year, using disposable plas@ tic bags, toilet paper, and/ or chlorine cleaning products, building poorly-insulated over-sized@ concrete buildings, not composting your waste, salting the snow, heating a pool, planting a lawn, going on a cruise, etc. because “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” actively stands@ in the way of positive change and directly promotes inaction and harm. It actively prevents the culture from shifting towards anarchy.

“We’ll go on this cruise now and help contribute to ecocide, but it’s okay because we’ll consume ethically after the glorious revolution” couldn’t be a more ridiculous standpoint, but it’s essentially what the “no ethical consumption under capitalism” slogan has been turned into. It’s a sad state of affairs when this empty rhetoric passes for revolutionary thought in red circles.

Ethics-Based Choices Aren’t “Liberal” Just Because Pompous Reds Say So

Consumption under capitalism (or socialism) isn’t ethical, but that’s no excuse for inaction. There’s no global revolution coming to change the way we live overnight. History has shown us the impossibility of that notion-with countless revolutionary societies repeating all the mistakes of capitalist ones.

But we can have small local revolutionary action in the here and now that can lead the way@ to harm reduction at a wider level. Just ask the Zapatistas and similar indigenous and anti-civ anarchist movements around the world. No one is going to tell them to throw in the towel and conform to globalist capitalist and communist industrial civilization because all consumption is somehow equal.

Anyone can make personal ethics-based choices and also organize collective action. I have no idea why so many collectivists see these pursuits as being mutually exclusive. But you’ll be sorely disappointed if you thought a global@ collectivist revolution was something that was realistically attainable. The world is far too diverse to be molded into a uniform entity controlled by a 19^th century ideology designed to serve European factory workers.

Ignore the sanctimonious blathering of boring ideologues. There’s nothing wrong with living what you preach. You claim to oppose hierarchy? Then live your life dedicated to minimizing hierarchy wherever you can. Set an example. Face the beast head on and stand@ your ground until you breathe your last breath. Because what else are y_o_u going to do?

We live in the final days of the Holocene ecocide. Everything around us has gone up in flames because of civilization’s insatiable greed, but that doesn’t mean we should throw more gasoline onto those flames. We still have to live on this planet for a few more years before it all@ burns up. It makes little sense for us to engage in activities that hasten our own suffering and make our communities even less habitable than they already are in these desperate end times.

Reds! Listen up, friends. Mocking people for caring about minimizing the harm they do and for thinking long and hard about the ethical implications of their actions doesn’t make you somehow more radical than them. It just makes@ you a smug fuck. I don’t care how many marches you’ve waved your shiny red flag at. Being able to recite the words of a long-dead white philosopher doesn’t make you special, so shut up about “lifestylism” already.

When we see exploitation and engage in direct action to fight it, that doesn’t make our fight useless. We have to live in this world and people are dying in it. All around us scores of people are suffering and dying. To ignore that and do nothing because our actions to relieve that suffering@ won’t install communism to free the sacred workers from their bosses would be fucked.

There’s likely no future for humanity, that’s becomes apparent to anyone reading the horrifying science as it comes in. We’ve thrown ourselves off the cliff, and are just waiting for our bodies to hit the ground. While we fall, we can choose to enjoy the breathtaking view of the mountains and the wind in our hair, or we can@ pull out a knife and repeatedly stab ourselves, so@ we feel nothing but excruciating pain in the moments before we reach the ground.

Capitalism and Communism Are Cut from the Same Exploitative Industrial Cloth

The collectivists who see no problem with oppressive constructs like industrial meat consumption will immediately discount antiauthoritarian actions that aren’t wholly-focused on abolishing the capitalist class and seizing the means of production. A lot of these redanarchists are channeling Murray Bookchin as he delivered his anti-“lifestylism” screeds late in his life. They dream of seizing the means of production and thus receive a bigger share of the spoils, so it terrifies them that green anarchists instead want to set the factories and shopping malls on fire.

Reds see dumpster divers, illegalists, vegans, sustenance farmers, bike punks, squatters, naturists, communers and other so-called lifestylists as a so-called distraction from their driving singular desire to replace industrial capitalism with industrial communism. They@ want to remove the bosses from the equation, but keep everything else almost exactly the same: workers, factories, battery farms, global@ ization, ecocide ... even prisons and police in a@ lot of cases. They want everything industrial society has forced on the world, except this time, they swear it’ll be more egalitarian with direct democracy, and an equal share of the industrial pie for every worker.

These red-dyed wannabe-industrialists insist we abandon our hard-fought battles and join@ them in pushing (waiting) for a more egalitarian industrialism that’ll give us a fairer share of the profits gained from waging war on the wilds.

They love to accuse anarchist lifestylists (green anarchists especially) of somehow conforming to the system ... by struggling against it? Their pissy Bookchin-inspired rants accusing anti-civs of being in a “death cult” or of being “counter-revolutionary” (while they themselves embrace ecocide and mass-extinction) really makes no logical sense to me. Green@ anarchists like the water defenders in Canada right now are actively putting their lives on the line to fight against the march of industry, while these yuppie killjoys sit in their comfy suburban armchairs typing up walls of snark to diminish the people who prove everyday that they live and breathe anarchy.

Sure, the Bookchinites, Chomskyists, and assorted anarcho-douchebags will show up at an orderly protest in their officially licensed Guy Fawkes masks, and they’re always in the front row of their local union meeting, eager to read a deadly serious statement from a stack of printed A4s. But how does that give them@ the superiority complex to voice their disgust about edgy lifestylists? It should be obvious at this point that communism isn’t going to save the world, yet they imagine themselves as the governors of righteousness.

Protesting is just another cog in the democracy machine: the illusion of choice. It accomplishes nothing. It certainly doesn’t make@ you more revolutionary than an anarchist who makes the conscious choice to live as ethically as possible. People that think they’ve achieved something worthwhile because they’ve held up a pretty sign at some protest are fooling themselves. All they’re doing is asking their rulers@ to be nicer rulers. Rulers aren’t giving up their power because you made a sign. You’re not better than “filthy lifestylists” because you quoted@ Kropotkin at your union meeting that one time.

Both protests and unions as well as ‘lifestyle choices’ have long been co-opted by the system and are not going to loosen the death@ grip it has on the planet. The system has be@ come quite adept at swallowing up all attempts at revolution and turning them into Bizarro-revolutions that can be whitewashed and monetized to further the system’s growth. I don’t need to remind anarchists that communism was instant@ ly turned back into industrial capitalism every time it was attempted. The Communist Party of China is perhaps the most powerful upholder of capitalism in the world today, per capita, and it’s@ the nation with the most billionaires.

Embracing Pointed Distractions and Recognizing Ideological Greenwashing

Collectivists will often butt in when others are talking about methods of harm reduction and@ insist we stop talking about “pointless distractions” and instead focus on achieving their much-hyped global worker-society they promise will come if we just hold hands and march in the streets until everyone sees how awesome we are. Then the masses will all join us to overthrow the capitalists and install communist utopia, just wait and see!

A lot of reds will even claim that all discussion about ethics and social justice is elitist and classist “liberal posturing” aimed at dividing the@ working class. The worst of them will insist that@ class is the only issue we should be concerned with. To hell with feminism, post-colonialism, the environment, and all other distractions that don’t interest white male workers. Workerism and class reductionism are fond bedfellows.

Being a vegan or a dumpster diver or a forager or a squatter or a self-sufficient cave-dweller need not have anything to do with shaming other people. It’s simply the way someone chooses to live their life for a multitude of reasons; a lot of them informed by ethics, but also to pursue the happiness that every human desires.

An individual anarchist’s decision to live more ethically is not some kind of narcissistic circlejerk, the way collectivists like to present it. All anarchists have different motivations and different ethics. We all live in this world, in this time, and we can’t just pretend there’s some grand global homogeneous revolution right around the corner that’s going to save humanity from the rapidly approaching industrial@ apocalypse if only we chant loud enough and post more luxury space communism memes to@ our Facebook profiles. It’s especially perplexing watching reds scorn anti-civs since none of these purported@ communist revolutionaries have demonstrated any real inclination to address the industrialist disaster that has been wrought on our planet beyond farcical promises of space-colonization, Star Trek replicators, and asteroid mining.

Even those rare reds who bother to give consideration to ecology in their theories continue to glorify civilization, industry and democracy as liberators. So-called social-ecologists, aka Bookchinites, promise that the planet can be saved if we just “make more democracy!” Then@ we can all participate in (that is, profit from) the industrial system with our voting power, and opt to use “ecological technologies” such as solar and wind energy to power the machines.

Never mind the Chinese sustenance farmers who have carcinogenic industrial waste dumped on their lands everyday from those solar panel@ factories; they’re just not thinking ecologically enough.[9] And the Ghanaians who wi_n_ce when mountains of worn-out solar panels are piled up in their backyards with the rest of the West’s obsolete tech[10] are only impeding ecological progress with their divisive nitpicking! It’s almost like they don’t want Europeans to have two electric vehicles in every garage? So ridiculous!

When you give a majority group legitimized power over minorities, they always use@ it to oppress them. All power corrupts. Collectivism breeds hierarchy because the interests of the dominant group (e.g. factory workers) aren’t the same as the interests of minority groups e.g. indigenous herders or queer folk or@ sex workers.

If you think your average meat-and-potatoes white male worker is going to suddenly become enlightened and compassionate towards the plight of minorities when you give him the power of direct democracy, as social ecologists and other red anarchists envision, you haven’t@ been paying close attention to the world around@ you. Time and time again, voters have successfully used their vote to deny rights to migrants, sex@ workers, trans and gay people, and anyone they see as differing from their normative standards.

Understanding the Coercion Behind the “Collective Good”

Reds expect you to put the needs of the almighty collective above your own needs, but the collec@ tive good matters little if your individual needs are ignored by the collective.

All too often, Western reds demanding you obey the collective good are simply engaging in red-washed white supremacy where the “collec@ tive” just means “white working men,” and the@ “good” just means “our profits.” Putting the will of the dominant population in society before your own needs and desires is an incredulous proposition. The profits of the white working man should not be of any concern to, for example, a brown, unemployed woman.

Collectivism is kind of a ludicrous concept if you really think about it. We can’t paint seven-billion people who have wildly different@ ideas of what life should be as one unified entity, because they’re not one unified entity. Collectivizing them as one group-“the working class”makes no logical sense and does nothing but fuel@ the industrial wasteland rapidly decimating the entire globe. Why should all humans be seen as workers, why should each of us be measured by@ our capacity to produce industrial goods?

People from different places have different needs. Marxism deals with this by separating people into classes and telling us to only concern ourselves with the worker classes and to hell with the peasant classes and the huntergatherers and the pastoralist nomads and the land-owner classes.

This land-owner class includes indigenous peoples living off of their ancestral lands and exploiting no one, but again and again socialists have targeted them for genocide for not fitting into their ideological framework. Then the imperialist socialists seize and commercialize their land for profit. For examples, see the Kazakh famine-genocide perpetrated by the USSR@ because the nomadic Kazakhs resisted forced collectivization,[11] or the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran and resulting famine that was orchestrated so the red Russians could take control of Iran’s oil fields, or China’s current ongoing land seizures across its territories and forced internment and “re-education” of a million Uighurs.[12]

The very idea of the worker class trumping everyone else is a proven recipe for colonialism and genocide. Individuals who avoid consumerism and live deliberately apart from the system aren’t exploiting anyone, but throughout history collectivists have caused untold death and suffering trying to shape indigenous lands into@ their image. Collectivism is far more dangerous than lifestylism to anyone who doesn’t toe the line of the collectivist’s ideological dogma.

Constructing a homogeneous group like a worker collective, and telling its members that@ they’re the only group that matters, the upholders of the holy revolution, and they need to purge anyone who would threaten their revolution by not falling in line with the red agenda, is not something that has ever led anywhere good. Forced collectivization gave us the Soviet Kazakh genocide, the Chinese Great Leap Forward genocide, the Soviet Holodomor genocide, etc.

And it ultimately gave us collectivist capitalism like we see now in China-the most ecologically@ destructive form of capitalism there is.

Communism and other red ideologies (including the ones purporting to be anarchist) create as big an in-group/ out-group divide as capitalism does. The power just shifts to the producers rather than the owners. And historically it’s just as brutal in its treatment of the out-groups. Anyone who doesn’t want to be part of the industrial system, like the Kazakh@ nomadic herders, is basically fucked. You dissent, you die.

The red ideologies view the entire world through a Western industrial worker-serf lens. But the whole world isn’t organized like the industrial West and it’s unfair to force Western@ values and economic systems on everyone.

Indigenous farmers in post-colonial places are treated as pariahs, kulaks, and massacred for having owned the ancestral land they sustain themselves with under capitalist definitions. Just because the poor in industrialized capitalist nations don’t own the land they work, doesn’t mean the poor in other parts of the@ world-where there is no lord-serf system in place-are bad.

A garden that you and your family and/ or tribe tend to and depend on to survive is personal property, but communism has always@ treated it like private property, as if growing@ your own food is reactionary and a threat to the revolutionary government. The USSR even banned people from planting gardens at home so they’d be forced to depend on the collective for food, which also served to keep them tied to the factory assembly line.[13]

Nomadic herders and roaming huntergatherers are likewise criminalized and starved out because there can be no room for people who don’t submit to the industrial work system under communism. They’re grouped as “individualists” and punished for resisting collectivization.

Reject Collectivism, Embrace Anarchy

Collectivism, whether it be communist, fascist, or capitalist ideologically, isn’t something that serves my interests as an indigenous subsistence farmer and forager living in these remote mountains. Whatever industrial dogma I’m ordered to@ live my life by only serves to fill my heart with sorrow. I will loudly reject the idea of a collec@ tive society at every opportunity, regardless of@ its ideological alliance. All industry kills all life.

I’m an anarchist. Even the idea of a society governing my way of life makes me vomit a little. Your needs aren’t my needs, I don’t want to go where the collective wants to take me. My lifestyle and my ancestors’ lifestyles are likely nothing like yours and we shouldn’t be meshed together as a singular entity just because we’re both forced to work the machines.

Setting up living, breathing alternatives to the industrial system crafts non-coercive relationships between humans, non-humans, and our@ environments, better than unionism and other@ workerist pursuits ever will. Workerism only further ingrains us in the system and increases our dependency on it, and if we do manage a revolution by some miracle ... we just reproduce the capitalist system again because it’s all we know. Working examples of anarchy like selfsufficient food forests are far more revolutionary@ to me than a union or a protest march. All applications of anarchy are important, but I most@ value anarchy that I can see and touch.

The only revolution I’m interested in is one that removes dependences on artificial@ structures. I want to be liberated from the@ system, not to become the system. The collec@ tive isn’t my master. The collective is really just@ another state, however nicely it’s packaged.

Red anarchists-If you don’t take responsibility for the harm you do, no one will. There’s no rapture-like revolution coming to wipe out capitalism’s sins and absolve you of any guilt for your part in it because “no ethical consumption.” There’s only this life you’re@ living and your choices absolutely matter. They shape who you are and the impact you make on your environment and your culture. If you@ just keep doing harm and blame your actions on@ capitalism, your mentality is no different from that of a CEO dumping toxic waste in a river in China. Harm reduction in your community is something you have direct control over. You can choose to not dump that waste. Or you can dump it and justify it to yourself by saying “it’s okay because capitalism did it.”

The entire “no ethical consumption” argument and similar condescending slogans parroted by half-assed socialists are just a way to@ justify their inaction in the face of devastating oppression and ecocide.

It’s become increasingly unlikely that we can stop the unraveling global mass extinction event that industry has wrought on the planet, but anarchists have never let impossible odds stand in our way before. We fight because we exist and we exist to fight. Whatever the odds.

We can either choose to take action to resist the violent system starting on an individual and local level, or we can live and die waiting for capitalism to magically go away worldwide@ while participating in it fully and thus furthering its growth and increasing its violence.

“Think Globally, Act Locally” might be a cliche, but it’s really the only power we have. If@ we don’t take action in our own neighborhood in every way we can, why even pretend to care about anarchy?

Everything we do to resist the ecocide is worthwhile. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Anarchy Vs. Archy: No Justified Authority-Or-Why Chomsky Is Wrong

Archy: The Opposite of Anarchy

The dictionary definition of “archy” is any body of authoritative officials organized in nested ranks, be it a monarchy, an oligarchy, a republic, a feudal state, or any other hierarchical society.

Anarchy is the opposition to hierarchy and authority, while archy is the full embodiment of those things. While anarchy calls for the absence of rulers, archy thrives when a population serves and obeys rulers. Sometimes a few rulers (e.g. monarchies), and sometimes many (e.g. social democracies).

Hierarchies exist for rulers to maintain their social control and power over the population. This control is maintained with violent force by authorities appointed by the rulers: the army, national guard, police, courts, prisons, social workers, media, tax collectors, etc.

Not all guidance given by one person to another constitutes hierarchy Choosing to accept a specialist’s expertise in their craft needn’t create a hierarchy or make them your ruler. A roofer laying your roof or a chef cooking your meal or a surgeon repairing your heart needn’t be your superior in a hierarchy just by providing you with a valued service.

Similarly, an individual using force to strike a blow at the hierarchy that oppresses@ them does not turn that individual into an authority. Destroying archy where you see it does not create archy, it creates anarchy.

On “Justified Authority”

Once you start justifying authority and hierarchy, you effectively twist a knife in anarchy. We’ve all heard the phrase “all power corrupts.” It’s not a meme; it’s the entire reason anarchy exists as a practice.

Legitimizing authority enables archy. Doesn’t matter if you call yourself an anarchist while justifying hierarchies you personally@ approve of for whatever reason. NO authority is legitimate in anarchy. Yes, even in a parentchild relationship.

When you legitimize an authority, you’re granting it power, presenting it as an institution that needs to be obeyed, and it won’t stop there. It’ll want more power because that’s the nature of power: always grows, never stops to examine its devastating effect on its surroundings. Power is a license to do harm. Whether it@ was your original intention to enable a violent force when you legitimized an authority is irrelevant. It will do harm and the people who signed off on legitimizing it are (or should be)@ culpable for that harm.

Anarchy is opposition to authority. To pretend otherwise blatantly misrepresents what@ anarchy is.

Expertise vs. Force vs. Authority

A lot of people confuse expertise for authority and then use that confusion to insist that anarchy doesn’t oppose all authority. They say anarchy only opposes unjustified authority. They of course never explain who gets@ to determine which authority is justified ... I assume that determination is made by a further authority? An authority that is also justified?

And which authority justified that authority.. ? It’s silly when anarchists try to go down this justified-authority rabbithole.

A carpenter might be good at making cabinets, expert at it even, but that doesn’t make them an authority. Their talent doesn’t give them the right to assert authority, that is, power@ over anyone. Authority is not simply an isolated instance of a person using force. Authority is a distinct on-going social relationship between people. A coercive relationship that has been legitimized by our authoritarian hierarchical@ society. It’s a relationship where authority figures assert power over less-powerful individuals in their care. These individuals are expected to submit to this mighty authority figure and obey their commands unwaveringly.

Imagine you’re walking home at night and someone jumps out of the shadows and tries@ to stab you. In the resulting scuffie, you kill them in self-defense. This was a simple use of force; it does not make you an authority over the person who tried to kill you. This isolated@ action you took to preserve your own life does@ not magically imbue you with the authority to@ go on a killing spree.

Similarly, when a child is about to walk in front of a speeding truck and you grab their hand to stop them, you’re not using authority. You’re using simple force. A temporary spurof-the-moment action to preserve life is not authority. It doesn’t give you ownership over the person you’re protecting. Anarchy has no qualms with the isolated use of force, just the@ structural institution of authority.

The Chomsky Connection

Noam Chomsky frequently uses the “saving a child from being hit by a car” example to explain his concept of “justified authority.” The people that repeat the ‘justified authority’ fallacy@ are usually parroting Chomsky’s ill-considered@ words. He says,

Authority, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate and the burden of proef is on those in authority.

He insists that a person’s authority should be legitimized if justification is provided for it. But of course, he misses a step by neglecting to explain who gets granted the authority to judge that the authority figure’s justification is@ legitimate ...

His definition of authority is inherently flawed. If he’d just say “force” instead of authority, there wouldn’t be so many confused Chomskyacolytes out there making arbitrary justifications for all kinds of hierarchical shit and then branding that shit “anarchist” when it’s anything but. I’ve even seen his followers using his definitions to frame so-called “Night-watchman states” as being anarchist in nature. Night-watchman states are states that only exist to provide citizens with military, police, and courts. This is minarchism, not anarchism. The idea of anarchist states and anarchist prisons is deeply contradictory.

Even if we were to naively accept that minarchism were somehow desirable, it would@ only lead right back to full-scale statism. Legitimized power never remains still, and attempts@ to control its growth have forever proven futile.

Chomsky is never a good source for what anarchy means. He’s made a career of watering down anarchy to better appeal to a white middle-class North American audience, even going as far as to state that government isn’t inherently bad and that it can be somehow@ “reformed” with what he calls “real democracy” and “social control over investment.” Far too@ many anarchists look to Chomsky as an author@ ity on anarchy, when he’s clearly a minarchist.

He also likens anarchy to The Enlightenment and classical liberalism in his talks and@ writings, which is a very Western-centric thing to do, especially since The Enlightenment oversaw the divvying up of Africa by European im@ perialists and other acts of horrific racism and genocide. So it’s probably not a good idea to associate anarchy with that authoritarian chapter of history. While it’s true that the political movement that first branded itself as anarchism originated in Europe, anarchy thrived unnamed in every corner of the world before and after The Enlightenment, long before European philosophers began to pine for a return to it.

I don’t consider Chomsky to be an anarchist (because he’s demonstrably not one), so his definitions aren’t that important to me. But unfortunately they’re important to a lot of minarchists and liberals who call themselves anarchists, and they keep repeating his flawed definitions to newcomers, creating further confusion that reverberates for years.

The Expertise of the Cobbler

The likely source for Chomsky’s confusion@ over the anarchist definition of authority is the originator of collectivist anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin. In his rough and unfinished text

“What is Authority” (1870), he spoke of “the authority of the cobbler”:

Does it follow that I drive back every authority? The thought would never occur to me. When it is a question of boots, I refer the matter to the authority of the cobbler; when it is a question of houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For each special area of knowledge I speak to the appropriate expert. But I allow neither the cobbler nor the architect nor the scientist to impose upon me.... But I recognize no infallible authority, even in quite exceptional questions ... So there is no@ fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.

“Voluntary authority and subordination” is essentially what every liberal insists they stand for. They claim capitalism is a voluntary contract between people. They say workers voluntarily choose to be subordinate to their bosses or the state in exchange for wages or security. Anarchists need to reject Bakunin’s language@ if we’re to differentiate ourselves from these authoritarian ideologies and truly take a stand against authority.

Here Bakunin was trying to articulate the difference between expertise and authority, but he did it in a confusing and roundabout way that has enabled generations of minarchists to mistakenly identify as anarchists and promote a broken definition of anarchy. Expertise isn’t@ hierarchical unless the expert is deliberately enshrined with authority. Being good at something doesn’t give you the right to use your craft to rule people.

The guy made a flawed argument 150 years ago, when the European anarchist movement was still in its infancy and the terminology was still being developed. It was a small part of a rough draft that he never completed, and it is often quoted without any context by people who obviously haven’t read the whole text or his associated writings from around the same time.

We obviously don’t need to hold up everything every anarchist ever wrote as some kind of immovable anarchist canon. We don’t cling to Bakunin’s rampant antisemitism, so why@ cling to his half-baked bootmaker-fetish?

Diluting the Goals of Anarchy

The oft-cited example of saving someone from being struck by a car has nothing to do with authority. It’s a fundamental misrepresenta@ tion of the anarchist concept of authority, and I hope this piece will help shift the discourse away from it.

Every fucked up political ideology out there, from monarchy to neoliberalism to fascism, claims to be for justified authority and against unjustified authority. We know it’s horseshit when liberals deem bombing school buses in Syria or Iraq a justifiable action to@ “protect freedom” or as “acceptable collateral damage,” so why would we adopt their dangerous doublespeak definition of anarchy? As soon as you start making allowances for authority, you’ve stopped advocating for anarchy.

Pushing justified authority, as Chomsky keeps attempting to do, is a pointless exercise that only confuses the uninformed and gives@ us scores of middle-class baby-anarchists who come in with preconceptions that are counter to anarchy. They then use that misunderstanding@ to equate anarchy with all kinds of authoritarian shit, even including states. It makes the line@ that separates liberalism from anarchy increasingly thin. And quite frankly, it breeds shit anarchists.

I’ll finish this chapter by quoting an anarchist on a popular anarchist forum who is a perfect example of what I’m talking about:

I feel it’s necessary to have authorities that can perpetuate and protect certain things@ for example, I think an unrevocable societal constitution that every autonomous community shouldfo llow is a good thing-and that there should also be codified laws-with the aim to protect individual liberty.

Resultantly, I feel like there should be authorz’ties as there are now that ensure that those laws — such as the rzght to education to a good standard, or that housing or medical training or care should be of a certain@ standard, or the rzght to process through a@ justice system. Necessarily these authorities should have the ability to change situations where these lawslrzghts are breached. As an extension, I also find myself believing in a well-trained voluntary police force that can undertake these duties (though one of course@ that is as directly democratic as possible and revocable and responsible in the anarchist tradition).

In this way If i”nd myself drawn more to a desire for a “state” of federated anarchistic communities that function as an anarchist society might although within a greater@ framework of a limited system that wields authority.

A constitution that everyone has to follow, a “democratic” police force, a state, a system that@ wields authority. None of this is any different@ than the liberal status quo. This person has no understanding of anarchy and yet feels the need to identify as an anarchist because they would prefer liberal society be more democratic .. ? It’s nonsensical. And yet the post was well-regarded by other “anarchists” who replied in agreement, with two of them even citing Rojava as an “anarchist state” that matched up to these stated ideals.

An anarchist state. An anarchist state ...

Authority is a Moral Hierarchy

A hierarchy is an artificial construct that depends on the principle of authority.

Authority is the socially-enforced rule that the ruler in a hierarchical relationship gives commands and the subordinate obeys under threat of (socially legitimized) violence.

If I offered my boss a meal, or saved them from drowning, I wouldn’t be exercising authority over them; that action alone doesn’t create a hierarchy. But just by being my boss, they are constantly exercising authority over me and I’m constantly their subordinate. I am ruled by them. I am constrained: controlled by the boss@ worker hierarchy, by my boss’s constant assertion of authority over me.

Authority is a deliberate social construct that divides people into either rulers or obeyers, using violence and the notion of “morality” to@ maintain this coercive system. Talking back to@ your boss, refusing their authority, that’s a big@ moral no no. Society uses this coercive conditioning to uphold the oppressive dynamic and to keep you controlled and obedient. The system will not tolerate any real dissent against its law. Instead it conditions you to realign your perceptions until you finally accept its law as normal.

Proponents of free-market capitalism promote supposedly voluntary hierarchies (such as the relationship between owners and workers). This is merely an excuse for normalizing structural violence against the less powerful, a process legitimized by appealing to authority.

These hierarchies aren’t voluntary in any quantifiable way, since we’d be punished by society in various ways if we chose to ignore them (say, by refusing to work or by killing our bosses and taking the true value of our labor). Justifiable hierarchy and authority is eerily similar to@ voluntary labor under capitalism.

Many are confused about the difference between morality and ethics proposed by postleft politics.

The moral person sees themselves as fighting a universal battle between good and@ evil. They are the righteous crusader for good; incapable of straying from the ‘moral code’ that enshrines them in sanctified goodness. The@ label “immoral” is applied to maintain a kind of superiority over an out-group and to thus jus@ tify any marginalisation of these undesirables.

The immoral can never be forgiven for their immorality because morality is definitive and final. They must be forever shunned by the righteous, so that the pious can maintain their purity.

Racial segregation was considered morally righteous in the US South, as was cleansing the@ land of savages during colonisation; lynching bi-racial children for impurity, denying women equality since it would lead to moral decay.

The recent government massacres of drug users in the Philippines were justified by creating a moral panic. The tyrant leading the massacres appointed himself as the one and only arbiter of virtue, to be blindly followed by@ all moral people.

Perhaps the most notorious moral panic of the last century was part of Mao’s cultural revolution in China. His Little Red Book of quotes — a virtual moral blueprint — was used by the party-faithful to purge scores of random people for having morally-objectionable haircuts or fashion sense.[14] Likewise, Stalin and his supporters in the USSR forced homosexuals into gulags where they were worked to death for “crimes against morality.”[15]

And of course the prototypical moral blueprint, the Christian bible, was used to lead@ brutal moral crusades across the world, involving mass slaughter, land seizures, and forced conversions of non-Christians.

Moral systems are designed to oppress and marginalise anyone deemed undesirable by the system. They are based on transcendent rules@ that are forcibly applied to all people from all backgrounds, in all situations; regardless of an individual’s desires and values.

Unlike morals, ethics are decided on a caseby-case basis by individuals, based on their own values and desires. Ethics are tangible and tied to real cause and effect outcomes.

A moralist opposition to violence is that violence is universally wrong, immoral, bad.

On the other hand, an ethical opposition to violence can be made by an amoralist... They@ can see that in many cases violence begets more@ violence, fosters systems based on the dominance of the strong, and can lead to deep-seated multi-generational divisions. But in other cases, they could see violence as just. Because the alternative (e.g. fascism) would be worse.

A moralist forces their will on everyone else. Their morals are absolute. An amoralist isn’t concerned with forcing their personal perspective on anyone, or with maintaining that perspective in every situation.

On Anarchist Parenting

Authority is a structurally violent institution. It has nothing to do with the act of rendering aid to a child; feeding them or preventing them from falling into a pool and drowning. A parentchild relationship needn’t be a hierarchy unless@ you go out of your way to construct it as such.

Parenting is only hierarchical when parents choose to force authority on their child. An anarchist parent treats the child as an autonomous individual and not as a subordinate to their authoritarian demands.

Anarchist parents see themselves as caretakers, not authorities. Legitimizing parental authority with the excuse of “justifiable hierarchy” is a scapegoat. It’s not justified. Using violence to control children is not anarchy. Parents don’t need to be tyrants to raise children.

Countless anarchist communities throughout history, including the modern-day Hadza in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, have@ shown us that the parent-child relationship doesn’t need to be the violent dictatorship it has@ become in capitalist-industrial society.

Yet a lot of anarcho-minarchists, for lack of a better term, insist on seeing the ownership that authoritarian society grants them over their children as a “justified hierarchy”. It’s such an odd argument. If they’re okay with applying authoritarianism to their own children, they’d obviously be fine with using it to dominate strangers too. It’s balling to see people claim@ that domination of children is compatible with anarchy just because it’s something they choose@ to engage in.

Civilized people make the mistake of constructing dangerous, unhealthy, and authoritar@ ian environments for us to live in that completely ignore the burning desire every child has for freedom, play, exploration, and learning through first-hand experience.

We force children into metal carriages that take them to school-buildings where strangers@ are paid to dictate rigid lesson plans to them for years. Children spend their entire childhoods being moved from room to room, forcibly trained to function under the system as obedient civilized workers. Most children aren’t even allowed to play outdoors because the dangers of industrial civlization are so frightening to their parents.

Industrial civilization is simply unfit to nurture human life. The perverse ways we@ structure our societies around danger, authority, fear, coercion, punishment, conformity, and obedience shouldn’t be forced on children or anyone.

As anarchists, we should be tearing down these authoritarian structures instead of making excuses to maintain them. Children don’t need authority, they need anarchy.

Watered-Down Anarchy

Certain people attach themselves to the flawed collectivist-anarchist definition of authority@ and then decide they can justify all sorts of hi@ erarchies with it. That revisionism then enters the wider anarchist sphere and is seldom analyzed for its deficiencies since so many collectivist anarchists are really minarchists in disguise. Minarchists see no real problem with authority so long as it benefits them materially.

Sadly, these minarchists largely control the discourse in many anarchist spaces where the idea of true anarchy is simply unfathomable. Most people born and raised under authoritarian systems have tremendous trouble parting@ with the faux security blanket that a lifetime of archy has imbibed them with. The absurd idea of good hierarchy becomes normalized in these spaces and is used to keep anarchy from forming.

Anarchists need to make a strong distinction between the words authority, force, and expertise, so semantic misunderstandings don’t@ lead to the suppression of anarchy.

“Justifiable authority” is one of several fundamental misunderstandings of anarchy that need to be thrown out before further diluting our (really very easily defined) objectives.

We tend to overthink things and that leads to mountains of round-about revisionist theory that only detracts from anarchy and leaves people confused about what even our most basic objectives are.

Every genocidal dictator considered the hierarchies they upheld to be justifiable. Anarchists know better. Anarchy is, was, and always@ will be, the outright rejection of all archy.

When you compromise and make excuses to construct hierarchies, what you’re doing is no longer anarchy.

Anarchy vs. Communalism: Bookchin, Lifestylism, Ideology, and Greenwashing

Blasted Lifestylists!

The father of communalism; Murray Bookchin, long identified as an anarchist but later in life penned scathing attacks against anarchists. He largely invented an imaginary schism between@ what he termed ‘lifestylist’ anarchists and socialists, denouncing ‘lifestylists’ as being@ beneath him.

Even though he eventually abandoned anarchism in favor of his communalist ideology, this elitist divide he created between “lifestylism” and socialism continues to reverberate today, with some social-anarchists even going as far as to distance themselves from the individualist aspects of anarchy that largely defined the@ movement from the beginning. This manufactured divide has greatly assisted in fragmenting anarchists into two opposing factions and led to@ needless infighting and distraction.

He lobbed the accusation of lifestylism against anarchists who live a life that, to them, embodies the spirit of anarchy but-in his@ view-does not work hard enough to achieve@ revolutionary social organization and the overthrow of capitalism. He also used it as an insult towards anarchists he saw as promoting what he termed “anti-rationalism.”

In reality, Bookchin was creating a false dichotomy; something he did often in his writings so he could then promote his patented solu@ tions to problems that were often non-existent... Individualist anarchists are perfectly capable of both living anarchically in the current moment, as well as organizing for a future beyond capitalism.

A lot of the most successful anarchist movements in the world today stem from individualist tendencies. These movements are then@ aided by the social-anarchist concept of prefiguration to create movements within the current system that replicate the conditions that would exist in an anarchist society. This allows the people exposed to these movements to see that anarchy works, and become comfortable with@ the idea of a post-capitalist world. Food Not Bombs is a great example of this.

Bookchin on anarchism:

[Anarchism] represents in its authentic form a highly individualistic outlook that fosters a radically unfettered lifestyle, eften as a substitutefa r mass action-isf ar better@ suited to articulate a Proudhonian single@ family peasant and craft world than a@ modern urban and industrial environment.

I myself once used this political labe4 but further thought has obliged me to conclude that, its eften-refreshing aphorisms and insights notwithstanding, it is simply not a social theory.

Regrettably, the use of socialistic terms has eften prevented anarchistsf rom telling us or even understanding clearly what they are: individualists whose concepts of autonomy originate in a strong commitment to personal liberty rather than to socialf reedom, or socialists committed to a@ structured, institutionalized, and responsible form of social organization.

Infact anarchism represents the most extreme formulation of liberalism’s ideology of unfettered autonomy, culminating in a celebration of heroic acts of drrfiance of the state. Anarchism’s mythos of self-regulation (auto nomos)-the radical assertion of the individual over or even against society and the personalistic absence of responsibilityf or the collective wel@ fare-kads to a radical affirmation of the all-poweiful will so central to Nietzsche’s ideological peregrinations. Some self-pro@ fessed anarchists have even denounced mass social action asfit tile and alien to their@ private concerns and made a fetish of what the Spanish anarchists called grupismo, a small-group mode of action that is highly@ personal rather than social.

He penned this attack against anarchy late in his life while he was working to build communalism into his final legacy, perhaps hoping he would go down in history with Marx as the father of a powerful socialist ideology that@ could outlive him and impact the world for centuries. He even warned that if his communalist ideology was not adopted by the world at large, it would result in the destruction of everything.

Equating anarchism with liberalism, when he spent years of his life identifying as an anarchist, is a rather shameless attempt at rewriting history in order to sell his new vanity project. It’s a true shame that he ended his long history in radical politics on such a sour and selfdefeating note.

Communalism: Murray’s Prescribed Cure for Lifestylism

Bookchin’s politics evolved greatly throughout his life, starting with Stalinism and then Trotskyism in his youth, before finding anarchocommunism. In the 1970s, disillusioned with the authoritarian nature of the Leninism that dominated the worldwide socialist scene, he stated that he felt closer to free-market libertarians@ who, unlike the totalitarian Marxist-Leninists, will readily defend the rights of the individual. Later, he developed a series of interrelated ideologies: anarchist social ecology, post-scarcity anarchism, and libertarian municipalism. He increasingly spoke out against the innate individualism of the anarchist movement, and finally broke with anarchism completely to form communalism. He wa’s a professor and taught students his political theories.

This is a description of communalism in his own words (which manages to also disparage both anarchism and Marxism in the same@ breath, in true Bookchin fashion).

The choice of the term Communalism to encompass the philosophica historica@ politica and organizational components@ ef a socialism for the twenty-first century has not been a flippant one. The word originated in the Paris Commune of 1 871, when the armed people of the French capital raised barricades not only to defend the city council of Paris and its administrative@ substructures but also to create a nationwide confederation of cities and towns to replace the republican nation-state.

Communalism as an ideology is not sullied by the individualism and the eften explicit antirationalism of anarchism;@ nor does it carry the historical burden of Marxism’s authoritarianism as embodied in Bolshevism. It does not focus on the factory as its principal social arena or on the industrial proletariat as its main historical agent;@ and it does not reduce thef ree communil:y of thefa ture to a JancifUl medieval village. Its most important goal is clearly spelled out in a conventional didionary definition: Communalism, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, is “a theory or system of government in which virtually autonomous local com@ munities are loosely bound in a federation.

Communalism brings production and certain property under the control of municipal assemblies, which decide how property should@ be best distributed to meet the needs of the confederation.

While not being a state by the most common definition (since the political process is@ strictly localized), municipal assemblies could still be described as a form of hierarchical government. Communalism is a big step up over most other forms of government, attempting to curtail and decentralize the power structures@ we are governed by, but it’s not anarchy.

Localized power structures are still very corruptible. They still create hierarchy. They can still grow out of control. Similarly to ancient Greece’s democracy, communalism deliberately allows for majority rule (or democracy-bythe-majority). This limitation should instantly disqualify it as being a form of anarchy, as@ voter-hierarchies can easily be exploited by au@ thoritarians to exclude minority groups from the political process, and thus deny them the right to@ self determination. Any society that encourages@ the majority to force their will on a minority (thus creating a clear hierarchy) can’t honestly be described as anarchist in nature. Bookchin reinforces this further,

The anarcho-communist notion of a very loose ‘federation of autonomous communes’ is replaced with a confederation from which its components,Junctioning in a democratic@ manner through citizens’ assemblies, may withdraw only with the approval of the confederation as a whole.

So, according to Bookchin, a community that joins a confederation “may withdraw only@ with the approval of the confederation as a whole.” This is probably the worst aspect of his majority-rule fetishization, as it locks entire communities into his system forever, whether those who didn’t want the system like it or not. Any organization that forbids you from withdrawing from it is clearly at odds with libertarian ideals and the right to freedom of associaciation, so it’s really dishonest of him to talk about libertarian municipalism when it’s anything but.

[Libertarian municipalism’s goal is to] create in embryonicfa rm tlze institutions that can give power to a people generally ... In short, it is through the municipality that people can reconstitute themselves@ from isolated monads into an innovative@ body politic and create an existentially vita indeed protoplasmic civil life that has continuity and institutionalfa rm as well as civic content. I refer here to the block organizations, neighborhood assemblies, town meetings, civic corifederations, and@ public arenasfa r discourse that go beyond such episodic, single issue demonstrations and campaigns, valuable as they may be to redress social injustices.

Put into practice, I believe communalism can initially be a successful departure from the unwieldy nation-state monolith that plagues the@ world today and a reversion to the city-states that were once prevalent in ancient Greece at the dawn of civilization. Bookchin writes fondly of classical Athenian democracy, which he uses to glorify his romantic view of Western civilization. But does simply returning to an earlier@ state of civilization go far enough? Will an effective micro-state not morph back into a super-state as it grows and faces both internal and external pressures? Decentralization is admirable, but is it enough to successfully@ safeguard us from statism? And are Athenian@ democracy and Western civilization even things we want to reproduce, when both allow for the brutal oppression of minorities, were both built@ on slavery, and both institutionalized the denial of human rights to anyone not a member of the privileged class?

Bookchin’s ideas for libertarian majorityrule democracy are deeply flawed and really can’t be described as anything other than@ authoritarian.

The minority must have patience and allow a majority decision to be put into practice ... Municipal minorities [must] defer to the majority wishes of participating communities.

Any anarchist reading this should immediately be alarmed at the hierarchical implications it presents. White people putting their priorities ahead of black people, men forcing their will on@ women, Christians excluding Muslims, polluters@ shutting down environmentalists, heterosexuals subjugating homosexuals ... Whichever voting@ body has the highest numbers (or best propaganda) can effectively rule over the minority. It’s almost as if Bookchin came full circle, returning to the Stalinism of his youth after his flirtation with individualism and anarchy.

While direct democracy is one of several decision-making mechanisms anarchists may utilize, communalism doesn’t simply allow for direct democracy; it requires it, enshrining it in law. In making his case for direct democracy, Bookchin asserts that the only other option anarchists have at our disposal is consensus democracy. He then proceeds to brutally attack the consensus decision-making method, associating it with anarcho-primitivism (which he loathes, even equating it to Nazism) and deems it authoritarian. This allows him to offer an exact prescription to the so-called problem of multi-layered anarchist decision making in the form of his definitive, structured, ideology and its rules.

Organizational structures such as those communalism revolves around should be treated as a means, not an end. Basing an entire social system around a specific structured mode of organization that was designed to be implemented under the conditions present in the 1990s is restrictive and shortsighted.

Anarchy allows for communities to be adaptable to the conditions present in the place and time where the community exists. Rigid ideological structures should always be avoided as they rapidly become outmoded. Historically, communities revolving around political ideologies tend to become dogmatic, and as a result fail to adapt as conditions prove unfavorable to the demands of the ideology.

For instance: Marxism requires that a highly-advanced industrial economy be present before Marxist communism can be implemented. Most of the societies where Marxism@ was attempted lacked these conditions, and destructive policies were implemented in order to speed up industrialization (including massdisplacement of people)-eventually leading to the collapse of the societies and to ecological damage that will continue to be felt for millennia. As Marx had designed his economic model to function under specific conditions, Marxist leaders attempted to force their societies to fit a mold, with horrible consequences.

The unwillingness to sway from ideological dogma, however impractical the planned system proves in practice, has frequently led to disaster. So any political movement that@ has strict guidelines for how society should be structured and governed has big weaknesses@ right out of the gate. Anarchy requires flexibility, because all forms of social planning can lead to unexpected hierarchies. The avoidance of hierarchies needs to be more important than sticking to a pre-written ideology if we are to pursue anarchy.

Dedicated ideologues often tarnish anarchy as being vague and lacking in exact instruction. I’d argue this is exactly why anarchy succeeds and manages to be so ageless: reinventing itself@ with every new generation of revolutionaries. Prescribing a one-size-fits-all solution to life is impractical in an ever-changing, multicultural@ world, especially one experiencing unprecedented worldwide social and ecological collapses.

The greatest strength of anarchy is its flexibility Anarchists have long laughed in the face of those who would have us live by their rigid rules.

A Green Anarchist Perspective

Green anarchists like myself are often most critical of Bookchin’ s ideas because of his concept of post-scarcity, which, to anyone paying attention to the catastrophic mass extinction event we’re in the midst of, is dangerously idealistic. Resources don’t cease to be scarce@ when socialism is adopted; the reality is that resources are dwindling all over the planet after centuries of over-extraction, including@ by socialist states. Once those resources run out, there’s no getting them back, so an ideology that envisions a post-scarcity economy is intrinsically flawed.

Bookchin and other socialists imagine a society where regular people, rather than states, have the power to determine policy. And they imagine this society will somehow be spared the same destructive pitfalls of capitalist society.

But there’s no reason to assume that.

We have centuries of history showing us that people will not altruistically opt for policies that will put the ecosystem or minority groups (especially indigenous and immigrant groups) ahead of their immediate personal interests.

Just as people now vote for politicians loudly promoting disastrous environmental@ and social policies in order to safeguard their own privileges in society, history shows us they@ would continue to make damaging decisions if the system moved from representative democracy to direct democracy. To imagine that everyone in a society is capable of acting unselfishly@ and putting other people and other lifeforms ahead of their own families is foolish; they will usually vote to protect their own immediate in@ terests at the expense of everything else. That’s how power works. It corrupts everything in its path absolutely; whether its wielded by a politician or a private citizen is irrelevant.

Bookchin saw technology as a mode of revolution, and promoted using technology in ecologically sustainable ways, but green anarchists are often critical of the technologies Bookchin envisioned. We see them as inherently isolating and hierarchical, a position Bookchin scoffs at.

One of the technologies he promoted was cybernation, which is essentially rule by machine. Tasks are assigned, decisions made, and resources distributed by computers, largely diminishing an individual’s self-determination, replacing it with software algorithms. Like all software solutions, cybernation could be hijacked by malicious actors who seize control of the system to give themselves untold power. Cybernation is also vulnerable to the personal biases of the programmers who write the software. The pro@ grammers effectively govern the governor.

Bookchin often wrote enthusiastically about the revolutionary potential he saw in such technologies.

Bourgeois society, if it achieved nothing else, revolutionized the means of production on a@ scale unprecedented in history. This technological revolution, culminating in cybernation, has created the objective, quantitative basis for a world without class rule, exploita@ tion, toil or material want. The means now existfa r the development of the rounded man, the total man,.Jreed of guilt and the workings of authoritarian modes of training, and given over to desire and the sensuous ap@ prehension of the marvelous. It is now possible to conceive of man’sf uture experience in terms of a coherent process in which the bijiJrcations of thought and activity, mind and sensuousness, discipline and spontaneity, individuality and community, man and nature, town and country, education and life, work and play are all resolved, harmonized, and organically wedded in a qualitatively new realm of freedom.

Advanced technologies can forever alter the way we live our lives, detach us from our eco@ systems and train us to seek fleeting relief from@ technologies, even as those technologies forever degrade and pollute the ecosystems we depend@ on to survive. It’s easy to ignore the damage industry does to our ecosystems when we can use the technology it produces to escape from@ the reality of our situation ... at least until the ecosystems become so degraded that they can no longer sustain our lives and we’re forced to look up from our digital sanctuaries to gasp for air.

Bookchin’s emphasis on the modern urban city in his theories will give pause to anyone@ who has studied the history of civilization’s disastrous effects on every ecosystem it comes into contact with. City life has always alien@ ated us from the land, creating the depressing situation where most urban dwellers raised in@ vast concrete deserts have little respect for the natural world or desire to preserve it. When the repercussions of our actions towards the ecosystem are completely hidden from us, it’s unlikely we’ll change our behavior and act to preserve whatever ecological diversity the planet has left on the fringes of civilization’s grim industrial wastelands.

A society structured around advanced technology can even create new elite classes of technologically-advanced people and exploited underclasses, whose lands are used to mine and manufacture the devices the technological class grow dependent on. It’s easy to see how this cycle can lead to devastating hierarchies.

Bookchin claimed technology and agriculture can be made sustainable with new ad@ vances, but years after his death, technology has progressed greatly, while the destruction to the planet caused by it has increased tenfold. The science is showing us that the damage industry has done to the world’s ecosystems could very well lead to our own extinction in the near future.

Bookchin wrote,

The development of giantf actory complexes and the use of single- or dual-energy sources are responsible far atmospheric pollution. Only by developing smaller industrial units and diversijjing energy sources by the extensive use of clean power (solm; wind, and water power) will it be possible to reduce industrial pollution. The means for this radical technological change are now at hand.

Technologists have developed miniaturized substitutes far large-scale industrial operation-small versatile machines and sophisticated methodsfa r converting solar, wind, and water energy into power usable in industry and the home. These substitutes are riften more productive and less wastefitl than@ the large-scale facilities that exist today.

While it is true that some fuels can be less destructive than others, they still remain incredibly destructive, and by no means can they be sourced from a single ecosystem as Bookchin imagines in his writings.

The machines Bookchin speaks of are built using a large assortment of materials that need to be sourced from different ecosystems all over the world. The processes to extract the materials are destructive, the processes to transport the materials to the manufacturing plants and distribution points are destructive, and the@ waste products created during manufacturing are destructive. There are currently no viable solutions for any of these problems, and every@ new technology introduced to the market has instead created yet more inequality, warfare and environmental destruction; especially for the Global South that is exploited by the West for its natural resources and cheap (or slave) labor.

Solar panels and wind turbines depend on dirty mining for the minerals needed for their construction, and massive energy use (usu@ ally coal) during manufacturing. Mining the quartz that solar panels are made from causes the lung disease silicosis in the impoverished miners. Then, once the quartz is transported to the factories, the manufacturing process creates@ vats of toxic waste (silicon tetrachloride) that is@ disposed of in random fields near the factories in China, contaminating soil and water, and making entire rural populations sick.

From “China’s Communist-Capitalist Ecological Apocalypse” by Richard Smith, Real World Economics Review no. 71,

When exposed to humid air, silicon tetrachloride turns into acids and poisonous hydrogen chloride gas, which can make people dizzy and cause breathing dijfi”culties. Ren Bing@ yan, a prefessor of material sciences at Hebei Industrial University, contacted by the Post, told the paper that “the land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in its place ... It is ... poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it. “ When the dumping began, crops wilted@ from the white dust, which sometimes rose in@ clouds severalfe et ef.J the ground and spread over thefi elds as the liquid dried. Village@ farmers began to faint and became ill. And at@ night, villagers said “thef actory’s chimneys released a loud whoosh of acrid air that@ stung their eyes and made it hard to breath.”

Solar panel, wind turbine, and battery production fuels colonialism, slavery, war, hunger, fossil fuel burning, and ecocide. Calling these energies “green” is really a bold-faced lie and@ just the latest example of industrialism giving itself a skin-deep makeover that will quickly fall apart when the evidence piles too high for the media to ignore. By promoting these destructive industries, Bookchin aids their shameless greenw ashing.

Bookchin:

The absolute negation of the centralized economy is regional ecotechnology-a situation in which the instruments of production are molded to the resources of an ecosystem.

The idea that rapidly advancing technologies can be distributed equally among billions of people (necessary if we care at all about preventing the formation of hierarchies and inequality), or that all people would even want their lives to be governed by these technologies, is naive at best, or, at worst, a malicious falsehood aimed at selling books and “Institute for Social Ecology” certificates.

Bookchin’s insistence that industry is only destructive because of capitalism, and would be liberating under (decentralized) socialism has no@ basis in reality, as the technologies he romanticizes remain destructive to the environment and are hierarchy-forming regardless of the social system in place. They also require resources that simply cannot be sourced from a single locale.

This fact alone greatly diminishes his theory.

Bookchin:

The new declasses of the twentieth century are being created as a result of the bankruptcy of all socialfo rms based on toil. They are the end products of the process of propertied society itself and of the social problems of material survival. In the era when technological advances and cybernation have brought into question the exploitation of man by man, toil,, and material want in any form whatever, the cry “Black is beautifiil” or “Make love, not war” marks the tranifOrmation of the traditional demandfo r survival into a historically new demandfo r life.

Bookchin’s plans for localized, ecologicallysound, self-supporting, automated micro@ industries unfortunately remain a pipe dream;@ vaporware if you will. In the 2 1^st century, as the Earth’s ecosystems collapse all around us under the strain of industrial exploitation, as forests burn, lands flood, and countless species@ of plants and animals go extinct forever, his@ vision of distributing industrial technology@ equally and freely to everyone on the planet becomes less and less relevant to our reality. These ideas aren’t something to base a political movement for lasting social change on, on a planet@ being rapidly exterminated by industry.

Bookchin eventually broke with anarchism completely when he finalized the guidelines of his communalist ideology. Today a lot of his more practical ideas have been implemented by the celebrated Rojava community in western Kurdistan, which has had mixed results in@ achieving his vision.

His attacks on individualist anarchists (especially of the anti-civ flavor), have provided decades of fuel for collectivist anarchist ideo@ logues to villainize and purge non-collectivists from anarchist spaces. A lot of these collectivists soon follow in Bookchin’ s footsteps and abandon anarchy altogether, in favor of various structured ideologies including Marxism

Leninism, transhumanism, and communalism.

Do Anarchists Vote in State Elections?

It obviously depends on the individual anarchist whether or not they choose to participate in the political process, but I’m writing this piece to point out that the act of voting in state elections directly contradicts anarchy. If an anarchist chooses to vote, that action has nothing to do with furthering anarchy or anarchist principles. No anarchist worth their salt would pressure other anarchists into voting, not even for their favorite politician.

I’m always staggered by the absurdity of anarchists stumping for politicians. Every time election season is approaching, certain self-pro@ claimed anarchists flood anarchist spaces on social@ media to shame us into voting. They always make dramatic moralist claims like “If you don’t vote for this politician, their opponent will put my life@ in danger. If you don’t support this progressive ruler, you obviously don’t care about (insert marginalized group) and are no comrade of mine!”

Voting for a political candidate in a representative democracy is a direct legitimization of their authority--over you and everyone in your community. It’s inviting them to rule@ you. By voting, you’re declaring your support for the system and appointing a politician to act as your political representative for however many years their term lasts. That politician now speaks for you, makes your decisions for you, acts in your name.

By supporting a politician, you’re declaring your approval for whatever actions that ruler then takes during their reign in power. The more power the position has, the more harm they’ll be able to do. If you’re voting for a president of a nation state, for example, you can bet they’ll make decisions that will cause death and suffering for countless people.

There is no way to vote for change under capitalism. The system in a neoliberal capitalist state only exists to serve the elite wealthy classes, to enable them to horde more and more@ wealth by exploiting your labor, and to pro@ tect that wealth from you. Socialists who think they can reform the state from within are not anarchists, even if they claim to be. A lot of democratic socialists claim to be anarchists to get you to support their candidate. They’ll insist lots of anarchists have joined their organization. They’ll sometimes even claim their candidate will fight for anarchy if they get elected.

Democratic socialists accept the state as a legitimate vector for change and believe it can be made to work for the people if we just elect the right sort of politicians; typically so-called progressive liberals who support some friendlier policies and promise to use their power for social justice.

Anarchists, on the other hand, reject all authority as illegitimate and don’t accept being ruled by anyone; no matter how progressive the prospective ruler is or professes to be. Anyone@ telling you they’re an anarchist while trying to get you to choose a better ruler, or a lesser evil, is either lying to you or to themselves.

Putting nicer liberals in positions of power might seem like a good idea on first inspection, but it ignores the simple reality that all power corrupts. All throughout history, no system of rulers and obeyers has made us freer. Every single power hierarchy has rapidly descended into@ tyranny. Giving a person power and expecting them to not use it to cement even more power for themselves is as foolish as Charlie Brown trying to kick the football while Lucy holds it. Power is an addictive drug and people who possess it can no longer be trusted to serve your interests when those interests now contradict with their own. The powerful have very little in common with the powerless.

Trying to fix hierarchies so they appear, on the surface, to be less brutally unjust, can actually hurt anarchy, because it convinces radicals to compromise, settle for, and grow complacent, accepting a supposedly kinder ruler.

How this typically plays out...

The ruler the radicals helped elect is quickly corrupted by the system that has granted them so much power that their ego is in overdrive. As@ the “voice of the people,” the ruler is convinced they can do no wrong and that their actions are in service of the greater good or the revolution.

The people who promoted and voted for the ruler, after eagerly celebrating their success, will@ spend the next several years working hard to@ justify to their own egos the increasingly horrible things the ruler then inevitably does while in office.

They’ll now spend their energy smugly explaining to everyone who will listen that the ruler’s oppressive actions are ultimately in their best interests, that the ruler is simply thinking ahead, playing SD chess, that compromises have@ to be made to aid the revolution, that reform takes time, that they can’t be expected to not take money from lobbyists or deport migrants or imprison poor people or wage war overseas because “that’s how the system works.” They have@ to work within the confines of the system now, so they are able to one day do good, once they@ have enough money and power to accomplish it!

The progressive politician will soon be indistinguishable from every other politician shilling their way up the hierarchy, and their radical supporters will have abandoned every radical@ inclination they ever had to justify supporting their team. Empty revolutionary rhetoric will have replaced anarchist methods like direct action and mutual aid, and words like “socialism,”@ “progressive,” and “revolution” that were used in the political campaign will have been stripped of all their value and meaning, convincing everyone that socialism is just more of the same and not worth fighting for in the future.

The wonderful thing is, the people who@ stumped so fervently; shaming everyone into voting for their shiny new ruler, will never have to accept any culpability for their part in bringing the ruler to power. The whole point of democracy is to shift responsibility from the individual to the intangible and indomitable system. The institutions of democracy work hard to convince individuals that they have no right to self-determination beyond casting a vote for the system’s pre-approved ruler A, or pre-approved ruler B.

See, only the system can provide for you, citizen. Trust in the system. The system is great. Don’t fight the system. You can’t defeat the system. Just ask the system for freedom and maybe you’ll be granted some-if the system is feeling generous anyway. Vote for ruler B today!

Anarchists! Pull yourselves together. Capitalism and statism simply cannot be voted away. As Emma Goldman famously said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”

Do Anarchists Support Free Speech?

From Wikipedia,

Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the@ farm of euphemisms (e.g “downsizing” far layef.fi, “servicing the target” for bombing), in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable. It may also refer to intentional ambiguity in language or to actual inversions of meaning In all cases, doublespeak disguises truth.

The concept of free speech is fundamentally flawed, and has historically been used to convince citizens that they have rights that are gifted to them by the supposedly benevolent@ and generous state.

In reality, the state doesn’t give you rights; it controls them, limits them, keeps them from@ you.

When an authority grants you free speech, what they’ve really done is take away your freedom to speak, and then allow certain people (typically the favored social class) to say certain things under certain conditions. There’s nothing free about this. You’re still forbidden from speech that would threaten the state or those it empowers. You’re still legally viable for slandering powerful people who can afford as@ many lawyers as it takes to sue you into bankruptcy. You’re still beaten to a bloody pulp for talking back to a cop. You’ll still be imprisoned, enslaved, and murdered by the state and its enforcers for being the wrong race or the wrong gender or the wrong sexuality or the wrong religion or the wrong class and daring to resist@ your oppressors.

Free speech is a lie told to us by our rulers to convince us we need to be ruled by them.

Anarchists are aware enough to realize the state does not grant us any kind of freedom. The entire existence of the state is predicated on taking freedom away from us to empower@ the rich and powerful minority that the state exists to serve.

So as anarchists, as people who don’t want to be ruled, people who see the blatant lies our rulers tell us for what they are, it would make little sense for us to support such an inherently Orwellian concept as free speech. A much more honest word for this concept would be “controlled speech” or “state-approved speech.”

Do Anarchists Support Democracy?

Understanding Democracy

The word “democracy” comes from two Greek words:

demo- a combining form occurring in loanwords from Greek, where it meant “people.”

-cracy: a combining form occurring in loanwords from Greek, with the meaning “rule,” “government,” “governing body.”

So democracy literally means: “Rule by the people.”

In my mind, anyone who aims for us to be ruled, even by “the people” (as abstract and meaningless as that concept is) is not promoting anarchy But unfortunately this view is not always shared by the people calling themselves anarchists today.

It’s difficult for me to imagine that an anarchist; who is presumably opposed to authority in all its guises and, one hopes, rejects the very notion of rulers, would then consent to being ruled by “the people” ... I know I sure as hell don’t want to be ruled by anyone. But a lot of anarchists continue to romanticize demo-cracy, perhaps because they’re unable to break through the years of propaganda fed to them by the state and its schooling and media apparatuses.

From an early age, it’s hammered into us that democracy = freedom. Any anarchist will tell you that although most of us live in societies that are governed by forms of democracy, none of us have anything resembling freedom.

Yet a lot of us make excuses to ourselves so we can continue to romanticize democracy.

Tell a room full of anarchists that you oppose democracy and you’ll no doubt hear impassioned insistence that what we have now isn’t real democracy, that “if we had anarchism, we’d have real democracy and things would be different, because anarchism is the only real democracy!”

A lot of anarchists spend a lot of effort holding onto oppressive phantoms like democracy and go to great lengths to fuse these liberal concepts with anarchy, when we really have no reason to. Anarchists who insist anarchy and democracy are one and the same--w hen democracy is responsible for an endless list of horrible atrocities--do no service to anarchy.

Our rulers use democracy to separate us into in-groups and out-groups, pitting majority group against minority groups and giving everyone a false sense of control. We’re made to believe we have a say in how our lives are run because we get to participate in glorious democracy. Of course, all of us outside the ruling class continue be to exploited and live in perpetual servitude, while the only people who really benefit from democracy are the ruling class who use it to keep us alienated and distracted so we don’t rise up and kill them all for the debilitating misery they create.

Anarchy rejects authority and it rejects the domination of majority groups over minority groups. Anarchy is about upholding each individual’s autonomy and dismantling the authority forced on us by oppressive actors.

Democracy grants authority to favored groups to oppress minority groups. Democracy ignores the autonomy of the individual in favor of the collective will of the dominant group.

Democracy exists to enable rulers to uphold brutal power hierarchies. It’s really the full embodiment of authority; used to maintain the tyrannical capitalist-statist status quo all over the world today.

Democratic Genocide

Democracy is the tyranny of the majority, however you try to window-dress it. In practice, all forms of democracy have been used by a majority group to control or otherwise dictate to a minority group. All forms of democracy have been used to smother autonomy, to stifle self-determination, and to absolve rulers of responsibility for their actions. How can a ruler be responsible for their atrocities when The People elected them and empowered them to commit those atrocities?

Though you’ll never hear democracyfetishists mention it, Hitler was democratically elected. His actions after being elected@ were largely supported by the majority group in Germany. All the atrocities he committed@ were done on behalf of that majority group, to strengthen the position of “Aryan” Christians@ in society at the expense of everyone else. The

German people empowered Hitler to maintain their privilege at all cost.

There’s no reason so-called real democracy would be any different from the democracy that@ created nazi Germany. Participatory democracy would just allow more members of the dominant group to more directly participate in enacting brutal policies.

Real democracy won’t stop people from choosing to oppress others to benefit their own group. If the majority of WW2 Germans stood by and cheered while people were carted off to concentration camps, why would anyone think real democracy would have changed that? Throughout history, whenever a skilled propagandist points the finger at a minority group, the majority group tears them limb from limb. This is democracy in action.

Democracy or Anarchy?

So do anarchists support democracy? Not if those anarchists have a developed understanding of what anarchy entails. Not if they’re serious about liberating themselves from authority and crushing hierarchies as they form.

Democracy is really not compatible with anarchy. It could be a useful process for gauging the views of each member of a small group, but that@ shouldn’t be enough for us to make the claim that@ “anarchy is democratic.” Anarchy is the opposition to authority It’s the struggle against oppres@ sion, the quest to limit suffering. We shouldn’t be@ claiming anarchy is defined by democracy; which is a specific system of government that demands people be ruled by other people.

If you ask ten random anarchists whether they support democracy, you’re certain to get a mixed response. Every person you ask will@ be at a different point on their political journey, and some anarchists will spend a lot more time@ thinking about labor rights, housing, immigrant aid, and other immediate oncerns, while putting@ very little philosophical thought into the nature of hierarchy and all the ways it manifests itself and becomes ingrained in our lives.

Collectivist-minded anarchists will usually insist on direct democracy and consensus democracy as decision-making mechanisms, but it frequently leads to problems when certain members of the group don’t fall in line with the majority’s agenda. The bigger the group, the more likely this is to happen. The minor@ ity members will inevitably grow frustrated at this oppression and either leave the group or be forced to conform in order to stay.

In practical terms, for example, this could mean all black people in a community could be alienated, marginalized, or even forced to leave their homes altogether because the white majority have voted to ignore their concerns in order to safeguard white privilege. Democracy and marginalization kind of come as a group deal. “Power to the people” really means “power to the most powerful group of people,” and the more power the powerful group has, the less power the marginalized groups have.

The Authority of Democracy

Western democracy originated in ancient Greece.

This political system granted democratic citizenship to free men, while excluding slaves, foreign@ ers and women from political participation. In@ virtually all democratic governments throughout ancient and modern history, this was what democracy meant. An elite class of free men made all the decisions for everyone. Before Athens adopted democracy, aristocrats ruled society, so “rule by the people”, or the idea of a government controlled (in theory) by all its (free) male citizens instead of a few wealthy families seemed like a good deal. But really it was just a new iteration of Aristocracy rule rather than the revolution it’s painted as. The rich still rule society by feeding voters carefully constructed propaganda and keeping everyone poor, over@ worked and desperate to be granted basic needs by the state.

In democracies today, only legal citizens of a country can participate. In a lot of countries, people who have been convicted of a crime are denied the right to vote, regardless of how@ long ago they served their sentence. In the US, this is used to deny voting rights to minority groups, who make up a large proportion of the@ prison population.

In some societies only a small minority are allowed to participate in the democracy. In Apartheid South Africa, the minority group (European settlers) granted themselves democracy and excluded the native majority, using democracy to deprive the native population of@ the rights granted to European settlers.

Anarchy, of course, is an absence of government, of rulers. Democracy aims for the individual to be governed, ruled, controlled by others. So it’s plain to see that anarchy is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.

There has been a lot written outlining why the concept of democracy simply cannot@ be made compatible with anarchy, yet a lot of people identifying as anarchists today refuse to let go of the idea of democracy as a revolutionary method, and insist it can somehow@ overcome its inherently hierarchical nature and@ long history of oppression. In all honesty, a lot of these people are simply confused minarchists@ who don’t actually want to abolish hierarchy. but instead minimize it.

Consensus Democracy?

Consensus democracy aims to get everyone in a group to agree to a unified path of action. It sounds good in theory, but the only way to get@ everyone from disparate backgrounds and experiences to agree to the same thing is to water down the plan to such an extent that the action becomes meaningless.

Consensus democracy assumes that majority groups won’t bully or peer pressure minority groups into folding to their will. It ignores the basic reality that some people will aggressively force their will on others, or at least shame or manipulate opponents into submission.

The whole concept of consensus democracy reminds me of that meme with the smug guy sitting at the booth with the “change my mind” sign, inviting his political opponents to debate him. If I saw that guy sitting at that booth, I’d walk the other way. Why should@ anyone be forced to expend all their energy to change someone’s mind? Just do your own thing and don’t worry about people who don’t@ want to participate in what you’re doing. If people have fundamental disagreements, then they don’t need to cooperate. It’s not the end of the world.

Attempts to get everyone to reach the same agreement is just the latest form of the@ bureaucratic meandering that has long sabotaged political action. After countless hours of heated debate, and a long series of compromises, the consensus reached (if it’s ever reached at all) will likely be very watered down from its initial form and be of little benefit to anyone in the group. A plan for concrete action will have been turned into a frustrating exercise in concession, tepid half-measures, and ultimately; inaction. All because the people who made the plan felt they couldn’t pursue it without the approval of a committee of naysayers.

Anarchy Doesn’t Need Democracy

Instead of a large group laboring to make@ democracy work so they can agree on a course of action, it is far more productive for smaller groups of people with shared interests to@ splinter off and co-operate for their own plans, requiring no compromise because their interests are already aligned.

Throughout history, democracy has existed to legitimize authority, providing justi@ fication for hierarchical power structures by framing every oppressive action the state takes against us as “the will of the people.” It has long enabled the powerful to crush the powerless. People who insist on associating anarchism@ with democracy are trying to legitimize anarchism, to associate it with comfortable institutions embraced by thoroughly-indoctrinated liberals. But anarchy has no want or need for legitimization. Anarchy doesn’t need to be watered down to broaden its appeal to a public that is high on hierarchy.

Anarchists always oppose monarchy: the rule of one. We always oppose oligarchy: the rule of a few. So why wouldn’t we oppose democracy: the rule of many? Why should the many get to decide how you or I live our lives?

A ruler is a ruler is a ruler.

Democracy has been expertly wielded as@ a weapon by the elites in society. By combining democracy with meticulously-crafted propaganda, the powerful control voters and manipulate them into voting against their own interests.

It has forever been synonymous with classbased societies. It has split entire countries into two barely-distinctive political parties ( conser@ vative and progressive) that are married in their opposition. Even in its most libertarian-friendly forms, it has constantly failed to avert hierarchy, coercion, and the authoritarian machinations of majority-groups.

You can’t strive to replace an artificial system as brutally hierarchical as democracy@ with a supposedly more egalitarian version of the same thing and call it anarchy. You have to throw the whole rotten system out.

Reject democracy. Reject the notion that you should be ruled by anyone. Embrace self@ determination. Embrace anarchy.

Tankies and the Left-Unity Scam

What is a “Tankie”?

A tankie is anyone who defends authoritarian state-capitalist dictators and the atrocities they’ve committed and continue to commit.

The term was originally coined when the USSR sent Russian T54 tanks into Budapest, Hungary, on the 4^th of November, 1956, to suppress a worker uprising. Factories had been taken over nationally by workers councils, in a demonstration of worker self organization that was at odds with the Soviet’s imperialist rule. The Soviet troops eventually suppressed the uprising. Then the USSR sent tanks in to invade Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan in 1979. A decade later, in 1989, tanks were similarly used by another state-capitalist regime to crush student dissidents in Tiananmen Square in China.

Anarchists use the word “tankie” to describe any supporter of authoritarian regimes@ who claims to be socialist. “Red fascist” is@ another popular term used in this context. The exception is Hitler’s “national socialists,” who are referred to simply as fascists. Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler initially represented himself as a socialist, realizing that appropriating socialism would be useful to gain popular support. Of course, his genocidal actions had nothing to do with establishing socialism, and his so-called@ “national socialist” ideology was just another form of collectivist capitalism.

It’s worth noting that the USSR signed a treaty with Nazi Germany that divvied up much of Europe between the two powers. The Soviets then annexed the countries granted to them by the nazis, drafted their citizens into their Red

Army, burned villages full of women and children to the ground, deported scores of people to prison camps, and then massacred them. The definition of fascism from Unionpedia. org:

Fascism is afo rm of radical authoritarian ultranationalism, characterized by dictatorial power,forcible suppression of opposition and control of industry and commerce.

The close similarities between fascism and Marxist-Leninist ideology are hard to ignore. All four of these features apply to both ideologies. Both Marxist-Leninism and National Socialism masquerade as socialism but in reality have little to do with it and are simply excuses to mount dictatorships, control the local populace, invade foreign lands, and stamp out all dissent.

Tankies are people who make excuses to justify the atrocities committed in the name of communism. Tankies crave power and work to create rigid hierarchies to amass that power. They support a totalitarian one-party state that governs all of society with an iron first. They defend forced labor, polluting mass-industry, population@ displacement, mass surveillance, genocide, and brutal punishment for anyone who speaks out against the state or the new ruling class.

They support modern China’s blatant racism and nationalism as they attempt to violently force muslims to abandon their culture in favor Han Chinese culture using “re-education” camps and family seperation policies.

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See

Themselves and Why it Matters is a 2010 book by Brian Reynolds Myers. Based on a study of the propaganda produced in North Korea for internal consumption, Myers argues that the guiding ideology of North Korea is a race-based nationalism that spawns from Japanese fascism, rather than any kind of Communist ideology.

The book describes how the Nor th Korean government is insular, xenophobic and militaristic. It details a mob attack on Black Cuban diplomats by North Koreans, and the forcing of North Korean women to abort mixed-ethnicity children. This racism is deeply ingrained in Nor th Korean society and promoted by the state’s own propaganda.

Since the 2009 North Korean constitution omits all mention of Communism, Myers argues that Juche is not actually the ideology of@ the North Korea state. He postulates that it was designed to trick foreigners, especially tankies, into supporting the fascist state. And support it they do, wholeheartily, despite all the glaring signs that it’s a perverse merger between fascism and monarchy. They’ll even accuse you of@ being racist for not supporting that racist state.

They make the same claim to anyone who is critical of modern China’s extreme-capitalist state, accusing them of “Sinophobia”, despite@ the fact that the criticisms from anarchists are@ almost always about China’s institutional persecution of ethnic minorities and their overseas@ imperialism.

Only a tankie could accuse someone with legitimate concerns about billionaire ruler Xi Jinp ing’s racist (and homophobic) policies of somehow being racist against the Han Chinese people for voicing those concerns. There’s no@ logic whatsoever to tankie claims that anyone@ who criticises a racist, homophobic dictator of an ethno-state is being racist, or that talking about China’s imperialism means you’re somehow an imperialist being paid by the CIA to discredit communism.

Tankies often defend these state-capitalist regimes by claiming they are “anti-imperialist” states; as they are in fierce competition with free-market capitalist regimes such as the USA. Tankies somehow fail to recognize that statecapitalist imperialism is virtually identical to free-market capitalist imperialism. They take the side of imperialist empires like the USSR or China, and modern^:...day Russia, in geo-political conflicts simply because they oppose the USA. They fail to realize that there’s nothing revolutionary about favoring one empire over another.

Another common argument they make is that the atrocities committed by their idols were necessary to affect the rapid industrialization of their nations. Marx theorized that the way to communism was through a modern industrialized economy. His theories were written with industrial capitalist states like Germany and the UK in mind, to transition them into socialist states, and then finally onto communism.

This presented a problem for Russia, China, and other undeveloped nations, who had very@ little industry to speak of, and simple, agrarian economies. Stalin and Mao both decided that the solution was to rapidly industrialize of their territories, forcing mass population transfers from rural areas into cities where the former peasantclass had to work in the state’s factories, creating the worker-class that Marx wrote his theories for. Of course these brutal social upheavals created numerous problems, including millions of deaths and rampant environmental destruction.

Tankies praise these genocidal population transfers because they “lifted the peasants (who@ survived) out of poverty.” But they measure@ poverty by materialistic, capitalist standards that are simply of no use to the subsistence farmers, hunter-gatherers, and nomadic herders@ who made up much of the pre-industrial world. Before Lenin, Stalin, and Mao’s calleetivization and industrialization, most peasants@ were largely self sufficient. Even those living in@ feudal territories, while by no means free, lived simple uncomplicated lives in harmony with@ nature; having no carbon footprint to speak of since industry was non-existent. Most enjoyed relative autonomy from the state (which had a far shorter reach), practiced mutual aid with@ their neighbors, and only needed to work a@ few hours a week[16] to produce all the food they needed to survive. The progression of Lenin’s state capitalism quickly changed all this, and they now had to labor endlessly in grungy, polluted cities or on industrial battery-farms for the state or face being branded a “kulak” and exiled, imprisoned, or killed. As bad as feudalism was, it didn’t have the concentrated, centralized power that state capitalism exerted on every single person within its borders.

There was no escaping the state now. You couldn’t retreat to the mountains to get away from the ruler as countless bandits did before because the new ruler was everywhere. In@ digenous people were no longer permitted to maintain their way of life because it interfered with the state’s demands for complete worker homogenization. State capitalism made life@ much harder for anyone who desired self-de@ termination, simply because it was impossible to evade this new form of superpowered-state. Anyone resisting the state’s rule was crushed.

Stalin’s “continuous working week”[17] was designed for maximum worker productivity, allowing workers scant time to recover from the daily grind of the industrial machine. Citizens@ were forced to work in cramped, unsanitary factories far from their former homes to meet Stalin’s industrial quotas. This was an incredibly difficult transition for people that had lived off of the land for generations. The state even outlawed the planting of small family gardens to ensure the people were completely dependent@ on the party for their survival.

Nomadic herders in Central Asia and Kazakhstan were especially unaccustomed to this new way of life being forced upon them, and their resistance was met with brutal force@ by the Soviet state, who declared them “kulaks” and confiscated their herds. The resulting famine in this region killed between 1.5 million to 2.3 million Kazakhs.[18]

Similarly to free-market capitalists, tankies support prisons and a police force, such as the Soviet secret police established by Lenin.

Tankies celebrate Lenin and Trotsky’s massacres of socialist revolutionaries, including the Mensheviks, the sailors of Petrograd, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the anarchists, unaffiliated peasants who had their food confiscated, and so on.

Tankies also celebrate murdering ‘kulaks’, a word they use to describe any peasant that resisted Soviet imperialism, but especially the Ukrainian peasants that resisted sending all their food to Russia, which they rightly guessed would@ lead to mass-starvation and one of the worst@ atrocities in history; the Holodomor genocide.

Lenin: Red Terror

Some tankies support Lenin but reject Stalin and other later collectivist-capitalist dictators, saying they went too far. For this reason, it’s important to talk about Lenin’s long list of dirty deeds.

Lenin successfully hijacked a popular revolution fought by the peasants and workers of Russia, sabotaging communism to install a state capitalist dictatorship with him as its life-long ruler, and then murdered most of the people@ who actually fought the revolution. This started a long history of Marxist-Leninists acting as parasitic opportunists: co-opting revolutionary movements started by Marxists and anarchists and thoroughly sabotaging them.

Lenin spoke of state-capitalism as if it would somehow lead to communism, but history shows us it only ever lead back to laissezfaire capitalism in every single case. Lenin:

State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. if in approximately six months time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a@ year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold and will have become invincible in this country.[19]

The insistence that forcing capitalism on a society that didn’t have it before will somehow create communism at a later date is absolute nonsense. Lenin led the Red Terror, a program of Bolshevik terror against all opponents of his dictatorship, including those mentioned earlier. In the face of a third mass revolt of the Russians against a ruler; this time Lenin, his direct@ orders were to “introduce mass terror” to the population. He gave some of these orders from his hospital bed after an assassination attempt that the party used as justification for these brutal policies.

The execution methods during Lenin’s Red Terror were incredibly brutal, for example: Cages of rats tied to victim’s bodies and exposed to flame so the rats would gnaw their way@ through the victim to escape, and victims slowly@ fed footfirst into furnaces.[20]

Certain Chekas specialised in particular lines of torment: The Kharkov Cheka went in for scalping and hand-flaying; some of the Voronezh Checka’s victims were thrust naked into an internally nail-studded barrel and were rolled around in it; others had their forehead branded with a five pointed star, whilst members of the clergy were ‘crowned’ with barbed wire; the Poltava and Kremenchug Chekas specialised in impaling the clergy (eighteen monks were impaled on a single day); also in Kremenchug, rebelling@ peasants were buried alive; at Ekaterinoslav victims were crucified or stoned to death, whilst at Tsaritsyn their bones were sawn through; the Cheka of Odessa put officers to death by chaining them to planks and then pushing them very slowly into furnaces, or else by immersion first in a tank of boiling water, then into the cold sea, and then again exposing them to extreme heat; at Armavir, the ‘death wreath’ was used to apply increasing constriction to victims’ heads; in Orel and elsewhere water was poured on naked@ prisoners in the winter-bound streets until@ they became living statues of ice; in Kiev the living would be buried for half an hour in a coffin containing a decomposing body; also in Kiev, the imaginative Chinese Cheka detachment amused itself by putting a rat into an iron tube sealed with wire netting at one end, the other end being placed against the victim’s body, and the tube heated until the maddened rat, in an effort to escape, gnawed its way into the prisoner’s guts. Johnson, the negro@ executioner at the Odessa Cheka, achieved special notoriety: he sometimes skinned his victims before killing them; after Odessa@ fell to the Whites in August 1919, he was caught and lynched by an angry mob. Women executioners could be crueler than men: Vera Grebeniukova, known as ‘Dora’, a beautiful young girl who was a colonel’s daughter and@ a Chekist’s lover, was reputed to have shot 700 prisoners during her two-and-a-half months’ service with the Odessa Cheka.

The Chekas did not spare women and children. There are accounts of women being tortured and raped before being shot, wives of prisoners were sometimes blackmailed into sexual submission to Chekists. There@ were many cases of children between the ages of 8 and 16 being imprisoned; some were executed. The Chekas were occasionally honest enough to admit that they practised torture: in February 1920, such an admission was made by the Saratov Provincial Cheka at a meeting of the Saratov Soviet, and appeared in the press.

In 1918, Lenin wrote to G. F. Fyodorov, ordering a massacre of sex workers in which hundreds were killed.[21]

Appoint three men with dictatorial powers (yourself, Markin, and one other), organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers,former ef.ficers, and the like. Not a minute of delay.

Lenin was an oppressor of the peasants and working classes, a despot, and, by 1918, the victorious enemy of the Russian revolution. A true counter-revolutionary. Which isn’t too surprising, considering his bourgeois background and trade as a lawyer. He perfectly met the Marxist definition of a reactionary, yet tankies hold him up as the father of their Marxist-Leninist ideology and praise him as a great communist.

Lenin’s acts later inspired further dictators in the 20^th century who also misused the word@ “communism” to describe their brutal statecapitalist regimes. He effectively destroyed any chance humanity had to achieve communism in@ that century, and the damage he did to revolutionary action is still being felt today as the word “communism” has become synonymous with “totalitarian state” in the public consciousness.

Driven by the Taste of Boot

Regardless of the fact that “communism” actually means “a stateless, classless, moneyless society with common ownership of the means of production”, Marxist-Leninists support statecapitalist regimes that use money issued by the state and have a ruling class of party elites@ that control the means of production and enjoy extreme privileges compared to the average@ workers. Tankies claim that these hierarchical, oppressive regimes will somehow bring about communism at a later date.

Some tankies also adore Lenin’s even-morebrutal successor Stalin, and see nothing wrong@ with the fact that Stalin sent other communists, anarchists, gay people[22] and basically anyone that annoyed him or one of his cronies to death camps. Homophobia was strongly ingrained in the culture of Stalin’s USSR; anyone seen as anything less than hyper-masculine was in constant danger of being beat to death in his gulags:

Passive homosexuals are not necessarily prisoners with gay inclinations, they are the unassertive, the timid, those who have lost@ a game of cards, those who have broken the camp code of ethics. Once you have the reputation of being a “cock,” it is impossible to get rid of it. Itf ollows you from camp to camp. And if, after tranger to a new place a “fallen” prisonerJ ails to reveal himself, sooner or later it is bound to come to light. Then punishment is unavoidable, and it will take thef orm of a collective reprisal often ending in death.[23]

They celebrate Mao’s “cultural revolution” and its murderous witch-hunts against supposed reactionaries who had the wrong haircut, wore makeup, owned a cat, wrote anti-authoritarian literature, or had furniture in their home. Following in Stalin’s footsteps, Mao criminalized homosexuality and anyone suspected of this crime was@ arrested. Castro did the same thing in Cuba.

A lot of tankies defend the many atrocities of the DPRK dictatorship: essentially a monarchy, the ruler inherits his position from his father. Tankies will tell you with a straight face that this monarchy is somehow a path to communism.

They defend modern-day China’s brutal oppression of its citizens, the use of deadly force to suppress democracy and quash protests, China’s overseas colonialism and territory expansion, its concentration camps for minorities, and organized destruction of the environment for short-term profit.

When people bring up anarchists in relation to tankies, it’s because anarchists particularly dislike the authoritarian regimes defended@ and idealized by tankies due to appalling events such as the Kronstadt rebellion, or the May Days in Spain. Anarchists are staunchly opposed to hierarchy, authority, rulers, states, and capitalism. All things that tankies enthusiastically embrace.

Tankies often preach “left unity” to encourage all leftists to aid their supposed revolution. But throughout history, once they succeed in seizing power-taking control of the state and replacing the government figures with their party members-they immediately begin labeling anyone who isn’t toeing their party line as a “revisionist,” or a “counter-revolutionary” and@ sending all dissenters (especially anarchists)@ to labor camps, or simply executing them and dumping their bodies in mass graves. These purges always follow a Marxist-Leninist revolution and anarchists are usually the ones first up on the chopping block.

A tankie is anyone who presents themselves as a communist, but apologizes for@ torture, slavery, imprisonment, imperialism, capitalism, genocide. and the erasure of actual left-wing movements. A tankie is anyone who claims communism can be achieved by replacing a state with another state. A tankie is anyone@ who swears up and down that state capitalism, dictator personality cults, and ecosystemdestroying mass-industry will eventually lead to communism through the “withering away” of the brutal state that they uphold.

Reject Left-Unity

Any attempt at comraderie with a tankie is doomed to fail. Regardless of what they claim, tankies aren’t interested in any form of debate, compromise, or exchange of ideas with anarchists or communists. Their only goal is to@ give their dangerous ideology an appearance of legitimacy, to misrepresent it as a legit form of communism so they may further pollute radical politics with their tyrannical capitalist cult.

Anarchy is pure anathema to the tankie. We@ espouse opposition to authoritarianism, hierarchy, bureaucracy, state-sanctioned violence, prisons, worker exploitation, ecosystem destruction, state-capitalism, and imperialism. This makes us, to the tankie, “reactionary counter-revolutionary imperialist scum.” Doublespeak like this is one of their defining traits.

Behind closed doors, they see us as a threat to their plans for strongman dictatorships, cults of personality, mega-industrial capitalism, and gulags as far as the eye can see. We are vermin to the tankie, fit only to be ridiculed and then@ exterminated once they seize power. Anarchy is their absolute worst fear. Anarchists are the biggest threat to their plans for party dictatorship.

They latch onto our movements and gradually corrupt them with reactionary rhetoric and divide-and-conquer tactics. Their goals aren’t even slightly aligned with ours, but they use shame and cries of victimization to squirrel@ themselves into our spaces. Their demandsfor “left unity” and an end to divisiveness and sectarianism-are obvious wolves in sheep’s clothing and should be rejected outright.

We can’t lose sight of the historical fact that genocide, nationalism, capitalism, big@ otry, imperialism, struggle sessions, and mass incarceration are some of the central tenets of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist practice, and whether they admit it publicly or not, things that all tankies believe necessary to ensure their@ vanguard’s dictatorship and cement their own power in the party hierarchy.

Their only purpose in engaging you is to normalize their toxic beliefs and make us accepting of their presence in radical groups so they can grow their ranks.

If you welcome tankies into your spaces, if you engage tankies in civil discourse, if you en@ tertain their repugnant ideas or buy into their absurd notions of left unity, or enable their attempts to create divisions between anarchists and sow discord, then they have already succeeded in poisoning your movement and rendering it useless.

Anarcho-Capitalism?

From Wikipedia:

Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the@ form of euphemisms (e.g. “downsizing” for layef.fi, “servicing the target” for bombing), in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable. It may also refer to intentional ambiguity in language or to actual inversions of meaning. In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth.

The phrase “anarcho-capitalism” was coined by far-right white-nationalist Murray Rothbard as a way to appropriate anarchist terminology and dilute anarchy’s meaning, by associating it with all the things anarchists struggle against. In one of his unpublished pieces, Rothbard even admitted “we are not anarchists, and those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical” because all anarchists have “socialistic elements in their doctrines” and “possess socialistic economic doctrines in common.”

Capitalism is just as brutal a hierarchy as statism and anyone claiming capitalists are capable of being anarchists is using malicious doublespeak to attack the anarchist movement by confusing the definitions of “hierarchy” and@ “authority.” Capitalism is a perverse authority that creates a multitude of oppressive totalitarian hierarchies. There is no way to make it@ compatible with anarchy.

These “anarcho” capitalist pretenders would have us believe that capitalism is vol@ untary when in reality private property rights can only be enforced violently, by an authority powerful enough to rule a society.

Rothbard’s followers claim to oppose the state but not capital. In reality, they wish to replace the state with wholly unregulated corporations, effectively making the corporations into totalitarian states that don’t have to answer to anyone.

For all intents and purposes, these so-called anarcho-capitalists, propertarians, or@ voluntaryists wish to revert to feudalism and@ fully enslave workers, without the annoyance of human rights, labor and environmental laws, or any other controls on their business activities.

They wish to replace the state’s police forces and military with private police and military that would work directly for corporations, with no accountability to the public and with the sole purpose of safeguarding the profits and personal safety of the owners of capital.

They have similarly hijacked the word libertarian, which was historically synonymous with anarchist (Kropotkin used both words interchangeably) and maintains its original meaning outside the USA.

Within the USA, libertarian, voluntaryist, propertarian, deontological liberal, autarchist, anarcho-capitalist, paleocon, rninarchist, neocon, nghts-theorist, libertarian moralist, and social con@ servative are all words that just mean “capitalist@ who doesn’t like public accountability or paying taxes”[24] — with very minor differences (usually relating to how rights to private property will@ be enforced).

By creating far-right capitalist perversions of every anti-capitalist movement, the wealthy@ largely succeed in erasing the original revolutionary goals of a movement and replace them with more of the same capitalism, imperialism, poverty, genocide, and environmental destruction.

Anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron and has nothing to do with Anarchy.

Burn the Bread Book: Industrial Communism Will Not Liberate You

The True Cost of Bread

For years I’ve watched a man drive his pick-up truck into the forest around me and cut down all the trees that aren’t legally protected, that is, every tree that isn’t a pine or an oak. The moment a carob or olive or hawthorn or mastic or strawberry tree grows big enough to burn, he cuts it down and drags it away for firewood. He even fells trees I planted, while smiling and waving at me like he’s doing me a favor. I glare at him silently but don’t say a word, knowing he has the full power of the state behind him.

He uses the wood to fuel his traditional bakery which has several large outdoor ovens. The@ much-loved industrial product he produces is@ bread; a product that has rapidly replaced all the native food-bearing plants of the area as they’ve been cut down to make room for wheat fields.

The villagers are proud of the bakery because it attracts visitors from all over the island and thus creates further opportunities for them to earn profit. The local bureaucracy-the democratically-elected village council-gives the baker free reign to do as he pleases since so many livelihoods depend on his bakery. Because the baker cuts everything down as soon as it reaches human height, the trees never@ get big enough to fruit, so they don’t spread their seeds and grow new trees. The forest slowly dwindles to nothing but pine trees and can no longer sustain most animal life. The climate dries, the soil erodes, the air grows stagnant, depleted of oxygen. All that’s left in the few remaining forests that haven’t been bulldozed to grow more wheat is a sterile pine desert.

The baker will soon no doubt lobby the village council to allow him to harvest the pine trees too, otherwise the all-important bakery@ will cease to operate when he runs out of legal@ trees to fell.

In just a few years, all the fruits, nuts, and berries that sustained the people in the area for millennia are wiped out and replaced with a consumer product that is made from a single grain crop. A thriving ecosystem has been replaced with a wheat monoculture that could collapse at any moment and take with it the@ lives of everyone it feeds.

It’s worth noting that the baker, like most people in my village, and in fact most people on the island, considers himself a communist. The village has a “communist party” clubhouse and they always elect “communist” local leaders and@ vote for “communist” politicians in the national@ elections.

Any anarchist worth their salt has no tolerance for these faux-communists, or tankies, and their brand of collectivist-capitalism because they cling to money, states, and rulers and really only embrace Stalinist politics because of@ the promise of cushy government jobs for them@ or their relatives.

Stalinist politicians openly buy votes by promising jobs in the public service to their@ supporters. A job in the public service here is a guaranteed free ride for life for you and your family, with salaries that are multiple times higher than private sector salaries and benefits out of the wazoo-including multiple pensions. They get a full pension for each government sector they worked in, and the more-connected civil@ servants rotate through jobs in multiple sectors@ in the last few months before their retirement, to ensure the maximum pay-out possible.

I’m confident anyone reading this knows Stalinism is designed to enrich the bureaucrat class and give them complete control over citizens. No anarchist sees that shit as communism. But in a “real” communist society; an “anarchocommunist” society where money, state, and class have been abolished, the local baker would presumably still bake that bread, and since it@ would be offered freely to everyone far and wide, he’d need to bake a lot more of it and thus need more wood. More forests would be razed to keep the bread production going.

Everyone living in the village and anyone passing through, and people in faraway cities, will expect to have as much gourmet bread on their plates as they desire. More bakeries would need to pop up on the mountain as demand rises for delicious bread in the cities below, with the rural population working hard and doing their@ duty to feed the hungry urban population.

Over the years, I’ve put a lot of thought into envisioning how the workers seizing the means of production might end the environmental devastation this bread production brings to the mountain. I struggle to see any scenario in which communism would stop the devastation of the ecosystem. The forests would continue to be razed to ensure that production doesn’t slow down.

Free bread for everyone today means no bread (or any food) for anyone tomorrow, as the top-soil washes away, the climate warms, the@ wildlife goes extinct, and the whole mountain rapidly turns to desert. It’s inevitable that soon even wheat will cease to grow in the fields sur@ rounding the village.

Regardless of the economic system in place, the villagers being able to consume as many fresh loaves of baked bread as they can carry means all the forests in driving distance@ of the village are eviscerated, eventually all the fields become barren, the crops fail, and everyone starves. This is already well on its way to@ happening, and switching to a communist mode of production would do nothing to allay it.

“How would you feed people then, genius?”

I hear you scoff. The answer is simple; tried and tested for millennia. I wouldn’t feed people. People would feed themselves instead of expecting others to labor to feed them; an entitlement that arose with industrial civilization. People would@ be inclined to protect the forests instead of bulldozing them for the supposed convenience of industrial food production if they picked their food directly from those forests everyday.

They’d protect the forests with their very lives, because they’d need the food that grows in@ the forests to survive without industrial farms, bakeries, and factories outsourcing food pro@ duction-and hiding the ecocide they cause just out of sight of the villages and their carefullymanicured streets.

Bread and other industrial products alienate us from our ecosystem and cause us to stop caring about how our food is produced, so long as it’s there in the store when we want to eat it. Putting food production back into the control of the individual is the only way to preserve the ecosystem. Direct food is the only anarchist mode of production. When other people are tasked with@ growing your food, they will take shortcuts because the food isn’t going into their own mouths@ or the mouths of their loved ones. Food harvesting needs to go back to being a way of life for every able-bodied person, rather than something industrial farm workers are tasked with to serve an elite class of privileged office workers who are completely disconnected from the food chain.

All over the world, complex centuries-old polyculture food-forests that sustained count@ less lives for generations are destroyed by the arrogance of industrial production, replaced for a short while by a wheat or corn monocul@ ture so people can pick up their bread down the street from their home or workplace instead of muddying their feet to gather food from the@ wild as their ancestors did.

This convenience seems like “progress” to civilized people, at least until the destructive industrial agriculture process renders the wheat fields infertile and farms all over the world are turned into a vast uninhabitable dust bowl. A sustainable way of life that kept us alive and@ thriving for centuries has been tossed aside in favor of a short-lived attempt at industrial convenience that has already proven itself a horrible failure; bringing us and every other lifeform to the verge of extinction.

Industry is not sustainable. Industrial systems are all destructive. Communism, capitalism, fascism, they’re all founded on ecocide.

The authority of the baker is upheld over everything else because domesticated people@ would rather consume free industrial bread for a few years than unlearn their destructive consumerist habits. If we are to survive these times of devastating ecological collapse, humans need to go back to fostering vast food forests as our ancestors did for millennia; producing and gathering our own food without destroying the@ very ecosystem that gives us life, in the name of luxury and convenience.

The People’s Authority: How Anarcho-Communism is Authority Forming

If someone kept cutting down all the trees to bake bread, the people who depend on the forest to survive would of course have to intervene to stop the loggers from destroying the forest and@ thus killing their way of life.

This happens in rainforests today where indigenous people-who have been let down by the state issuing licenses to corporate loggers, and turning a blind eye to illegal logging-instead take matters into their own hands and shut down the loggers using force. They put@ their lives on the line to do this, and many are@ killed by loggers who value their profits over the lives of indigenous people. The indigenous people know that if they don’t act to stop the@ loggers, the forests--their home--will be decimated and their way of life destroyed forever. They’ll be forced into the cramped cities and have to labor all day everyday to buy the bread that stripped their forests bare.

So how would an anarcho-communist society deal with someone who cuts down all the trees to bake bread? In an anarcho-communist society, everyone will be environmentally conscious and consume sustainably, right ...?

No. Not if you’re engaging in any kind of critical thinking.

Loggers can only destroy forests at their current explosive rate if the society imbues them with authority. If they have no authority, there’s nothing stopping others from using force to end their pillaging of our natural resources. Without the authority of civilization behind them, the loggers have much-diminished power and no real motive to risk their lives to fell trees.

Anarcho-communism is an industrial ideology based on the notion of seizing the means of production and then running the factories, saw mills, oil rigs, mines, and power plants democratically. Industrial civilization is an incredibly totalitarian authority that is nevertheless upheld by anarcho-communist theory, even though anarchists supposedly oppose all forms of authority.

In an industrial communist society, much like in a capitalist society, logging is necessary to further the industrial production on which the society is built. As long as production drives the system, trees will have to be felled for all kinds of reasons, from lumber and paper production to making way for crops and cattle.

So, logging is highly valued by the people who uphold the industrial society, and in a@ real-world scenario, these anarcho-communists would have to take measures to protect loggers from a small, uncivilized minority--the indigenous inhabitants. These measures are, by any@ definition, authoritarian, a monopoly on violence, a state in everything but name.

But since the loggers are providing this valued service to good, decent, reasoned, educated, domesticated, egalitarian, democratic, civilized anarcho-communists in big shiny cities, who are accustomed to a litany of luxury consumer products being delivered to their doors everyday, decidedly-authoritarian methods would be needed to ensure that the anarcho-loggers can@ do their anarcho-work without facing retaliation from the primmie forest dwellers. These methods can easily be justified in the ancom’s mind; there’s nothing an ancom loves more than to@ justify authority with their mighty logic^TM.

So when faced with the conundrum that the anarcho-communist city needs lumber, paper, corn, and meat, and the only thing standing in the way of production are a few indigenous@ tribes, the ancom will put their anarcho-Spock ears on and declare, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Just as capitalist and socialist states today violently suppress the indigenous people who take action to shut down logging and mining operations that quash@ their way of life, the anarcho-industrialist will send a red-and-black army to escort their redand-black bulldozers and discipline anyone that interferes with the will of “the people.”

The indigenous inhabitants of course won’t give a shit that their forests are being felled by communists rather than by capitalists. They won’t give a shit that the bulldozers are now owned collectively or that the land they’ve lived on for millennia has now been designated land of The People (the civilized voting majority) instead of the state’s or some co.

The forest that nurtures the indigenous people and their children is still being decimated to maintain the lifestyles of city-dwellers. Their lives are still being ended because to civilized people, they’re a backwards, regressive minority standing in the way of progress, damaging the revolution, inhibiting the growth of@ a glorious egalitarian civilization. The educated, progressive majority outvote them. Anyway, everyone who has spoken to a red anarchist knows primmies are dirty reactionary ableists@ who want to stop us from building wheelchair and drug factories, right?

Civilized people always have pushed the notion that the common good, or the good of the many, will always outweigh the needs of individuals or small groups of people, ever since Aristotle, in his “The Aim of Man” wrote:

The good of the state is of greater and more fundamental importance both to attain and to preserve. The securing of one individual’s@ good is cause for rt;joicing, but to secure the good of a nation or of a city-state is nobler and more divine.

Communism is even more adamant in this@ “the will of the majority is paramount” shtick, going as far as to declare the industrial-worker@ class as the only voice that matters, with everyone needing to become part of the worker class in order to abolish class differences.

This logic is why the USSR, China and other communist experiments forced collectivization on self-sufficient indigenous peoples and then slaughtered them when they inevita@ bly resisted. If people won’t consent to being evicted from their ancestral lands to work on the industrial farms and factories that fuel the destruction of their homes, they’re branded kulaks and counter-revolutionaries and reactionaries and are systemically genocided, usually by destroying their food sources.

Industrial goods are valued by industrial society over the forest and its inhabitants because domesticated people want to eat bread and microwaved pizza and the real cost of those products (environmental destruction) is of no real concern to industrial society beyond empty gestures like an occasional “save the rainforests”@ or “go vegan” banner.

The inhabitants of the forests and their strange foreign culture are too far removed from the busy cities for the average urbanites to involve themselves in their plight. Even the civilized rural people who live around the forests are@ forever striving to urbanize their villages in the unending quest for upwards mobility. In my experience, they’ll happily trade every tree in sight for a gourmet bakery, Apple Store or coffee-shop so they can feel as civilized as the people in the@ big cities who tend to look down on them for being “hillbillies” or “country bumpkins.”

“The people in the big cities of Sao Paulo and Rio, they want us to live on picking Brazil@ nuts,” a farmer says. “That doesn’t put anyone’s kid in college.”[25]

The settler-farmers who are burning what’s left of the Amazon rainforest to the ground say they’re doing it for their children ... To make the cash to pay for their children to be educated and@ get good jobs in the city. It shouldn’t be contro@ versial for me to say civilized people value their civilized life and will always put their civilized needs before the needs of uncivilized others.

Civilized people can relate to their civilized neighbours who have the same struggles as them: paying their bills, educating their kids, buying good insurance, washing their car, deciding where to go on vacation, renovating their kitchens, choosing the next Netflix show to binge watch. So it’s not surprising that they’ll do everything they can to prop up civilized people and kick down the uncivilized people who stand in the way of their quest for everincreasing industrial comforts.

I can already see the denial settling on some of your faces as I type. “But us anarchocommunists aren’t like capitalists, we’re good, caring, humane people. We’ll make industry green, we’ll manage the forests in a sustainable manner using direct democracy, unions, unicorns, and equality!”

Why would anyone swallow that crock of shit? Why would thoroughly domesticated people, used to all the comforts of destructive@ industrial civilization, suddenly decide to forgo those comforts because of democracy? Why@ would 7.7 billion people suddenly change how they live because anarcho-communism has been declared? How would ancom civilization make industry green when it’s clearly demonstrable that all industry is destructive to the environment and to wild people, and that modelling a society on an industrial system has had disastrous results throughout history, regardless of@ the name of the attached ideology?

All controlled mass society, including every historical attempt to build a communist society, has created authority--bodies of people holding power over others. That power grows over time and takes the communist society further and further away from its revolutionary origins. Every indication is that authority would continue to be manifested with industrial anarchocommunism. There is no evidence that anarchocommunism would avert authority when it’s so dependent on destructive, exploitative, alienating, domesticating industry and the control and domination of a global population of workers.

All Industrial Goods Free for All People: A Recipe for Disaster

In communism everything is free for the taking and resources are often treated as if they’re infinite. If you decide you need something, you take it from the communal store. Kropotkin said no one has the right to judge how much an indi@ vidual needs, except the individuals themselves.

Since most reds hold that resources should be allocated according to need, decisions would be made to determine who in the community has need of the biggest shares of resources.

I know most ancoms, like Kropotkin, claim every individual will just take whatever they need (want) from communal stores, but I’m going to cry foul on that because it’s really not practical in an industrial society. Resources aren’t infinite and no one is going to spend their@ life doing gruelling manual labor and then just give everything they produce away to some random stranger who shows up at the com@ munal store with a dumpster truck and says “I@ need your community’s entire monthly output of goods today, so load it up.” For some reason ancoms think assholes would cease to exist in a communist society. Why would anyone work their asses off, doing menial manual labor just to watch some shitlord drive away with everything@ they produced because he announces he needs it?

“But as woke anarcho-communists in an advanced fully-automated luxury communist society, labor will in fact be quite limited and@ fun because we can divide duties between all our comrades! And profit will no longer be a concern since everything we make will be given to anyone that wants it free of charge, so we don’t need to worry about marketing our products and that will further minimize the amount of labor we’ll do, giving us ample leisure time@ to enjoy the fruit of our production!”

For the purposes of cold-hearted mockery, I’m slightly paraphrasing an ancom who responded to an early draft of this piece, but@ yeah... What fantasy realm are ancoms living in where all the massive problems posed by industrial production (including the ongoing extinction of near-every lifeform on Earth) will@ evaporate when you remove profit and marketing from the equation?

I keep saying this in my writing but again: In an industrial society that aims to give everyone in the world equal access to consumer goods, industry does not decrease; it increases. If everyone in the world suddenly has free and equal access to the mountains of wasteful shit that Western consumers consider necessary, not only would production need to massively increase, but we would run out of resources much more rapidly.

That’s assuming anyone would even want to work in the mines and factories in a supposedly equal society if they no longer had guns to their heads. Why would anyone go back down into that mine once their chains are broken? Does anyone honestyly think those Congolese kids give a shit if you have a new phone every@ year? Should they really be expected to sacrifice@ themselves for your entitlement? So you can continue to live in luxury with all your little conveniences? Fuck that.

In a real world implementation of industrial communism, communities will no doubt quickly impose limits on what can be taken from communal stores after a few people take@ way more than they have any right to and other people go without as a result. Kropotkin might insist we’ll all be happy toiling away all day to@ make this consumerist shit just to give it away to random strangers at the end of the day, but he was a privileged scholar who never had to work a day in his life, so what do you expect?

Industrial society right now is fed by the ceaseless labor of billions of exploited people in the Global South. People are forced to toil in mines from childhood to procure the materials that other people (also including children) then assemble into consumer goods in factories, all for starvation wages. This is debilitating, dangerous work that leaves these people physically broken after a few years.

Anyway, let’s play along with communist mythology for a bit to get to my next point. In an ideal communist society (where I guess minerals are somehow found equally all across the planet and not overwhelmingly located in the Global South-unlike in the real world), outsourced labor would presumably go away because communists would never exploit workers@ in distant lands (whoever heard of an imperial@ ist communist, right? Right??) So production@ would be localized, and the goods would be@ distributed according to need.

For resources to be allocated according to need, you’ll have some kind of group judging@ what each person’s needs are and what resources each should be given.

There are lots of factors to take into consideration when deciding someone’s needs, like how far they live from work, how far they live from the store, how many calories they burn doing the labor they do, the size of their family, their dietary restrictions, disabilities they might have, their particular metabolism, how many parties@ they throw, how many friends they have and thus@ might invite to the parties, their religious and cultural practices, the size of their house, the@ size of their garden, the type of insulation their@ house has and how quickly it loses heat, the fuel efficiency of their car ... I could list hundreds more things but I’ll stop before you stop reading. Giving bureaucrats this power means@ certain favored groups and individuals will be rewarded and less desirable groups and individuals will be neglected, or even punished. This is the nature of authority. You’ll need a body of full-time bureaucrats to collect all this data and measure how it should determine your share of the pie, and those bureaucrats are going to have biases. If a computer does it, the programmer will have biases. And you’d still need bureaucrats@ to collect the data and feed it to the computer. Then they could easily feed incorrect or selective data to the computer because of their biases.

It’s always felt like a recipe for corruption and exploitation to me for a bureaucracy to determine someone’s worth... which is probably@ why Kropotkin stipulated that everyone should be able to just take whatever they themselves decide they need from the stores.

Of course, the real solution would be to not base your proposed utopian society on industrial production in the first place. Promising unlimited industrial production-because everyone will voluntarily agree to work real hard@ in the factories and mines and slaughterhouses and the goods will be distributed to everyone everywhere somehow while maintaining a sustainable ecological green solarpunk paradise-just makes you a smug liar. No different from a grinning politician promising to give us freedom, liberty, and prosperity if we vote for him.

The only red anarchist tendency that made a modicum of practical sense in my mind was anarcho-collectivism, because at least the workers would receive the direct value of their labor@ hours instead of having external bodies decide how much value to assign to them as a person.

If you’re going to spend your life toiling in a factory or farm to produce goods for other people, would you really want a bureaucrat or a committee or even a direct voter body deciding how much you deserve for that labor, while giving more to someone else doing the same job (or a much easier one), because of potentially biased reasons?

Regardless, anarcho-collectivism still only really values the workers who are most willing to submit to the factory grind and put in the most hours. Anarcho-collectivism still holds up ecocidal industry and luxuries for cityfolk, above all life on the planet. So that 19^th century ideology isn’t going to save you either. Throw it@ right in the trash with the bread book because@ this reform-industrial-society charade isn’t helping when the planet is on fire.

If industrial communism were actually implemented in the real world, you can be relative@ ly certain that some kind of authority would be@ put in place to prevent bad actors from showing up at the store and taking a community’s entire monthly production. People would need to police the store and judge whether someone is worthy of taking as much as they’re taking. They’d need to become authorities, upholders of law and order, purveyors of justice.

A state exists wherever an authority can authorize and legitimize violence. There is no@ way for an anarchist to justify a coercive, au@ thoritarian institution, such as a police force that@ will be biased against minority groups and lead to the accumulation and abuses of power by the dominant group, including those policing.

A society that mass produces goods and distributes them in communal stores will manifest itself as a state, regardless of Kropotkin’s insistences that everyone will work voluntarily and then take whatever they want from the stores. There’s no practical scenario where@ industrial labor is truly voluntary. There’s no practical scenario on this Earth of rapidly diminishing returns where “free” stores won’t need to be policed to deny unlimited goods to those who the governing body decides are less@ worthy of the fruits of their labor.

Anarcho-communism simply isn’t revolutionary, as long as we are depleting all our resources in the name of industrial civilization, which is required by anarcho-communism: an industrial, work-based ideology based on civilizing the land and its inhabitants.

Every anarchist should understand the difference between isolated force and authority, but@ very few self-identifying social anarchists seem interested in this, content to prate on about justified authority, debating “how an anarcho-communist police force could work,” and excitedly discussing Chomsky’s latest speech telling them to vote for a lesser-evil neoliberal politician.

I know I sound bitter, but for years I’ve been disillusioned with the majority of red anarchists I come into contact with, and they only seem to get worse as industrial society plods on and the sands and seas climb further up our necks.

Anarcho-communism is not the solution to authority, it’s simply a skin-deep re-brand of authority. There’s a reason so many ancoms strive to justify authority. They don’t actually care about anarchy.

Is Communism Always Authority-Forming?

In my mind, communism can only work outside of industrial mass society. A small community gathering or growing supplies and freely sharing them with the rest of the community. Each community trading with other small communities. Marx and Engels ironically dubbed this hunter-gatherer form of society that had long existed in human history as “primitive communism” and suggested it was inferior to their advanced industrial communism that valued the factory and centralized city life above all else.

Mass industry requires mass agriculture, mass labor, mass transport, mass resource extraction, mass construction, mass policing, mass military... Mass society and will only lead right back to capitalism and statism because it’s so unwieldy and authority forming. Any communist tendency built around industrial exploitation is going to create all kinds of fucked up hierarchies and just lead us right back to the apocalyptic status quo.

Most communists I’ve talked to about this are unable to accept that some people will still act like assholes if capitalism collapses, which I’d probably find endearing if these people weren’t such giant assholes themselves; calling me a privileged reactionary for daring to suggest their blessed ideology might have some flawed logic. They insist everyone will cease being selfish assholes once capitalism is done away with because “assholes are only assholes as long as capitalism pits them against each other.”

Even if we wake up one morning and marketing, consumer culture and wealth are all done away with, we still have generations of indoctrination in authoritarian behavior to contend with. That doesn’t go away overnight. But even without consumer culture to guide them, people are still completely capable of being assholes. Going back to before mass society even existed, people would murder each other and take their stuff. They’d raid each other’s settlements, they’d steal their children, they’d fight over territory and cultural differences. These aren’t things that were invented by capitalism and they won’t go away just because communism is declared.

People aren’t inherently just or unjust. Humanity is not good or bad. Every person is an individual, each with different experiences, motivations, traumas. Communism expects everyone to be altruistic. Capitalism expects everyone to act out of greed and self preservation. Neither is true because both are ideologically driven worldviews that attempt to define human nature in order to instruct us how to behave by instilling us with their morals. People are greedy, people are generous, people are kind, people are mean-spirited. Every person in the world is all of these things and more. People are not defined by one single personality trait their entire lives.

I’m haunted by every shitty thing I’ve ever done and I’m sure I’ll do more shitty things yet, despite my best intentions. No one is above making mistakes.

Mutual aid is a great thing, but it needs to be earned. There are people in our lives who we trust and people we can’t stand to be around. Not everyone is deserving of the products of our labor. Some people in the world will always try to exploit you, even if they already have everything their hearts could possibly desire. Some people will be kind to you no matter how big an asshole you are.

I’ve been accused by communists of being cynical, of being regressive and counter-revolutionary because I don’t buy into the communist notion that humans are inherently good and they just need the right industrial system to bring that good out of them.

Any society where I’m expected to just sit back and watch as a logger destroys my ecosystem because he’s serving the “greater good” isn’t a society I want any part 0£ I value my autonomy over the desires of traumatized workers pushing buttons for eight hours a day in a city far removed from me. I’d rather take the logger’s chainsaw away than fiddle my thumbs as he takes everything I know--and to hell with whatever bureaucratic process enshrined him with the right to decimate the forest to give bread to the workers. Fuck the workers and their bread and their fully-automated luxury communism and their divine democratic rights.

There’s simply no reason to believe exploitative assholes will go away if communism is ever enacted.

There’s a man I know who constantly exploits me for my labor, and I always go along with it. He dangles a carrot on a stick in front of me every time. promising that after I help him, he’ll hook me up to his well so I can have free water for my trees. For years he’s made this promise.

I’ve spent countless hours doing dangerous work for this guy with no reward. He always disappears after I do the work without giving me what he promised. Then the next week he wakes me up again at 6am on a Saturday by honking his horn, apologizes for not getting around to hooking me up to the well yet, saying he was too busy or in the hospital or had a family emergency, promises he’ll do it this week, and then I’m hanging off a cliff or a roof repairing pipes for him all day while he barks orders at me.

I do it because I’m a fucking pushover who can’t say no to people due to my ridiculous kind nature. But whenever I ask him for anything, I’m met with a blank stare, an abrupt subject change, or a sorry excuse. I was stranded with a twohour walk down the mountain last week when my car broke down, and he drove right around me and didn’t even slow down. When I saw him later, he swore on his life that he didn’t see me because the sun was in his eyes. I nodded and shrugged.

Communism wouldn’t stop this lying dipshit from exploiting me; he’d still need someone to fix his leaky pipes, start up his diesel generator, saw off the upper branches of his olive trees, and climb shoddy makeshift structures for him regardless of the economic system in place. He’d still give me a sob story about his painful ulcer and I’d still do the hard work to spare him the pain of doing it himself. He wouldn’t stop being an exploitative asshole just because democracy is installed in the workplace. He wouldn’t start practising mutual aid when he goes to great lengths to avoid all work and shames other people into doing it for him.

Red anarchists throw every insult in the book at me when I voice my doubts about their wistful ideologies; condemning me for being critical of the amazing breadman Kropotkin or their “green industry” tsar Professor Bookchin ... It’s hard to give my perspective as an indigenous anarchist to these people who are so hostile to any worldview that doesn’t validate their luxurious industrial lifestyle, and their driving desire to make that lifestyle more democratic in order to receive a bigger share of the pie. Between the shouts of “reactionary lifestylist” and “dirty primmie,” I try to explain my perspective to them: I see suffering in the world and I want to make sense of it. I’m not satisfied just handwaving it away and clinging to fanciful utopian ideologies designed to energize European factory workers from the 1800s. I don’t believe red industry will cure society of all its ills or free humans from their chains.

The warehouse I’ve worked in for more than a decade will not become magically liberating if I’m given the power of democracy. It’ll still be a miserable place filled with toxic pesticides that are slowly killing me.

Some ancoms will no doubt unironically reply to this piece with reasoning that amounts to “no, actually, anarcho-communist industry will be a utopia because Kropotkin said so.” They’ll quote a bunch of literature to me that is nothing but empty promises by long-dead European philosophers for industrial egalitarianism. I’ve really run out of patience for that line of thinking. It’s no different than a year old trying to win an argument by yelling “because my dad said so.” But when it comes down to it, that’s all most reds can do: quote their heroes and cling to the hope that they’ll be proven right some day. That hope is what keeps them going as their miserable civilized lives burn the world up. “All our suffering will end once we have democracy in the workplace.” Those poor, deluded, hope-filled souls.

Everything I know tells me industry cannot be made green any more than capitalism can be made ethical. All agricultural industrial society in history has resulted in ecocide and eventually collapse. When you extract resources, burn fuel, manufacture goods, and distribute them to millions or billions of people, you do real irreversible harm to ecosystems and human lives. Ancoms are not magical beings who can somehow escape the consequences of this because they’re supposedly good and egalitarian.

If anarcho-communism were ever attempted, half the nuances it has will be thrown out for being fantastic, half-baked and impossible to implement in an industrial mass-society. Compromises will be made to make the system functional. A lot of things have been claimed about communism, but whenever its been attempted in real life models, almost none of those claims have come to fruition and they never will because

1. resources aren’t infinite.

2. industrial output has a high hidden cost, and most importantly,

3. work isn’t voluntary.

No matter how much you swear you’ll make labor democratic, no one is laboring because they really want to. They’re laboring because the system requires them to labor to survive. No amount of democracy will stop the system from asserting its authority on everyone inside its suffocating walls. Abolishing the borders between territories will do nothing if industrial civilization continues to box us in and starve us if we dare to resist its rule. If we can’t escape civilization, the whole world is nothing more than one big prison.

Civilized people labor to create consumer goods because the system gives them no other option if they want to survive. The only way people will continue to toil in the factories and warehouses in “a communist society” is if they are forced to by the system. No free hunter gatherer will voluntarily give up their freedom to stand at an assembly line pushing buttons so other people can have Corn Flakes, weedkiller, and AAA batteries. It’s something that needs to be forced on humans by domestication and the joined threat of violence and starvation that props up the industrial system.

Industry is a clear authority and anarchocommunist theory is completely oblivious to that. Anarcho-communism is nothing more than an attempt to reform the tyranny of civilization to give it a sly smile. It’s the anarchist version of Barack Obama promising change but just delivering more of the same and expecting you to celebrate it.

Seize the Means of Destruction! (And fucking burn it to the ground...)

Ancoms insist “people would choose to produce only what is needed” in an anarcho-communist society. That word “needed” is really useless. Anyone can define anything as being needed, but almost none of the things defined as such actually are. This is why industrial communism isn’t really compatible with anarchy: anything and everything will be defined as needed by domesticated people, no matter how authorityforming the things are. If it means they get to keep consuming, anarcho-consumers would happily define everything from pesticides to slaughterhouses to automobile plants as needed. This is the power of democracy. Whatever narrative the collective adopts becomes the official, approved narrative and anyone questioning it will be seen as subversive and dangerous and a threat to order and decency.

This needed-industry argument is a lot like the justified-authority argument a lot of red “anarchists” keep making to uphold every shitty authority they cling to all the way up to the state, prisons and the police.

Usually they’ll just rename these authorities “the commune,” “the social re-integration facility,” and “the peacekeepers,” and be satisfied that they’ve come up with real change. It’s meaningless. Domesticated people will not allow themselves to see past the carefully manufactured alienating world they’ve inherited. Very few civilized people are willing to risk losing what they perceive as the great comforts of industrial civilization.

Even if they recognize how strangling these comforts actually are, to them and everything else on the planet, instead of rejecting them outright, they draw up elaborate plans to reform the way those comforts are produced and dispersed. Most of these plans--when deconstructed and debullshitted--amount to little more than slapping the word “anarcho” in front of everything and trusting it’ll be all good because it’s anarchized now.

Ancoms aren’t going to suddenly decide to give up their phones, Doritos, and washing machines when they figure out that they’re environmentally destructive. They’ll just rubberstamp all the things they want as needed, eco-friendly, sustainable, and/ or green, and call it a day. And we’ll be expected to keep working our miserable jobs and like it because now they’re anarcho-jobs in an anarcho-society with anarcho-exploitation and anarcho-masters.

Keeping people in the mines, keeping factories making those needed consumer goods, will require massive authority, another iteration of capitalism in all but name, just like the so-called communist states of Russia, China, and North Korea. Not a trace of communism will survive once industrial civilization is done grinding everything up. There’s nothing about anarchocommunism that will spare it from the same fate. Claiming to be anti-authority rings hollow when you cling to authoritarian industrial civilization, workerism, and all the other authorities that ancoms at large decide are justified.

A bureaucracy will always form in an organized mass society, which is why industrial communism isn’t tenable. It’s why every time industrial communism has been attempted, it has simply been as a perverse collective capitalism with even more centralized power than regular-flavor capitalism. The bureaucracy quickly morphs into a state, and by definition the society is longer communist. But of course, it’ll keep calling itself “communist” and ensure the distinction between capitalism and communism remains paper-thin so people won’t be able to envision a better world than the brutal industrial wasteland we’ve all been born into.

Any system that allocates resources and polices people is functionally a state, regardless of what it brands itself as.

All implementations of industrial society have failed to liberate people, instead making their lives more and more miserable with each stage of industrialism, and to claim that attaching “anarcho” to the front of an industrial system will make a difference is absolutely fucking ridiculous.

Communism has never succeeded at liberating us historically and will not suddenly succeed just because you promise you’re better than other communists and you and all your super-libertarian ancom comrades will pick up cans of paint and make all the chimney stacks bright green.

Authoritarian behavior will only ever be repeated if society is structured around authoritarian institutions like industrialism and democracy. Both Marx and Kropotkin’s communism are centred around these institutions because their ideologies require that people be controlled by bureaucracy Whether it be decentralized democratic bureaucracy or centralized party bureaucracy is irrelevant. The result is the same: Authority and control.

Without this bureaucracy, the society would descend into anarchy. Yes, wonderful, amazing, freeing anarchy. The very thing every red fears most because it would mean they’d no longer get to forcibly structure society and people around their sacred ideology and force their authority and morality on them.

Domesticated people sit trapped in sterile little boxes, fed a steady drip of pesticide and high-fructose corn syrup as they labor, consume, consume, consume and then die.

This isn’t life. This isn’t anarchy. This is a waking nightmare, a depraved hell-world that has all of us thoroughly brainwashed into thinking it’s acceptable.

Branding it “communist” or “libertarian socialist” or “democratic” or “egalitarian” or “decentralized” or “anarcho-communist” will not end the nightmare. It will not stop the planet-wide ecocide civilization has wrought on all living things. The means of destruction being controlled by industrial workers instead of industrial bosses will not stop the ecocide.

Seizing the factories and making them democratically managed as all reds yearn to do won’t do anything to save us from violence, misery, alienation, and eventual extinction.

The only way to destroy authority is to burn industry to the ground before it devours every last lifeform on the planet.

The only chance we have to survive what’s coming in the next few years as our ecosystems are collapsing all around us is to tear down every factory and close every port and slice up every road until civilization is in ruins.

But in all honesty, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to watch television and sip iced tea and we’re going to wait for the end. I’m going to keep watching in silence as the bread man fells the last remaining wilderness.

Maybe the planet will recover somewhat in a few millennia and maybe the next lifeform that evolves will have more sense than the desert makers. This is the last hope I cling to.

[Back Cover]

You have demolished their sublime mountains to construct your shopping malls and marinas. You have drained their great lakes to plant your carefully manicured golf courses. Felled their majestic forests to graze your billion cows. Desecrated their vast oceans with your rotten, putrid waste.

You’re driven to control Terra, to change the course of their rivers, to reshape their shorelines and modify their lifeforms to suit your rapacious appetite. You can’t fathom of a world where you don’t own the earth below your feet; posses everything Terra created as your own.

You are imperious to assume Terra will be so affected by a fleetingly short-lived and short-sighted creature as yourself. If it takes a million of your lifetimes, Terra will wash away the volumes of excrement you have soiled their surface with.

You spent your wretched life desperately cutting your name into Terra’s flesh, but Terra’s wounds will callus over, creature. Long after the arrogant grin you wear on your lips has turned to dust with the rest of your foul corpse, Terra will regenerate. All the beautiful, disparate beasts you have eradicated during your brief gluttonous tantrum will be reborn. The trees will rise again in magnificent groves as far as the eye can see. Everything you took will be reclaimed.

ziq’s Essays on ‘The Anarchist Library’

Source: Retrieved on September 3, 2025 from <theanarchistlibrary.org/>

To the Desertmaker

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-to-the-desertmaker>. <raddle.me/wiki/to_the_desertmaker>

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I see you, creature. I see what you do.

You drill holes into Terra’s skull, drench their flesh with poison, pull their hair out by the handful, hack off their limbs, drain the blood from their veins and burn it. This you call growth, development, progress.

Day and night you grind Terra’s bones into powder to erect your grotesque eidola to death all across their bloodied torso. This you call your mighty civilization. A tangled mess of concrete, steel and plastic pointed towards me so I am forced to look upon it.

You direct your servants to build your towers higher and higher. After all, you are very special! The civilized, sophisticated, highly respected creature! Behold the important executive in the tailor-made suit, shoes crafted from the finest alligator hide! What an impressive specimen! What a handsome creature you are!

You’re lifted to the top of your tallest tower so you can perch yourself in your opulent shrine to the wealth you have plucked from Terra’s body. You stand high and gaze down at the wretched souls below, making sure every one of them knows you rule over them, that Terra is your personal dominion. Your private property to use and abuse as you please.

I see you, creature. I see what you do.

You have demolished their sublime mountains to construct your shopping malls and marinas. You have drained their great lakes to plant your carefully manicured golf courses. Felled their majestic forests to graze your billion cows. Desecrated their vast oceans with your rotten, putrid waste.

You’re driven to control Terra, to change the course of their rivers, to reshape their shorelines and modify their lifeforms to suit your rapacious appetite. You can’t fathom of a world where you don’t own the earth below your feet; posses everything Terra created as your own.

You are imperious to assume Terra will be so affected by a fleetingly short-lived and short-sighted creature as yourself. If it takes a million of your lifetimes, Terra will wash away the volumes of excrement you have soiled their surface with.

You spent your wretched life desperately cutting your name into Terra’s flesh, but Terra’s wounds will callus over, creature. Long after the arrogant grin you wear on your lips has turned to dust with the rest of your foul corpse, Terra will regenerate. All the beautiful, disparate beasts you have eradicated during your brief gluttonous tantrum will be reborn. The trees will rise again in magnificent groves as far as the eye can see. Everything you took will be reclaimed.

For a while, Terra will be rendered as desolate as I. A vast desert of your creation. But in time, the stench of death you brought will be lifted and the oceans will come back to life. Then the land and then the skies.

I move synchronous to Terra, following their every movement. We are in rhythm together, Terra and I. We have danced this dance for longer than you can conceive.

I see you, creature. I see what you do. I see what you are. I see every desperate grasp for power. Every sordid manipulation and abuse to cement your position on the top floor of the tallest tower. The wasted lives of those you have coerced into your service.

You think yourself so evolved, creature. You look down at all you have plundered, and you think yourself worthy of Terra’s grace. You have laid waste to Terra’s resplendence and you and your kind will suffer terribly for it. Everything you know will die a senseless death. Every child you bear from your loins will die horribly, their potential wasted.

To think of all the creative, wonderful things your servants could have manifested without the chains you encumbered them with. So much wonder will never come to pass because of your covetous rampage.

I have forever been locked to Terra. Though we have never touched, I feel as if I am an extension of them. Though I am devoid of life myself, I assist in birthing all life on Terra. I drive their tides; transport heat from their equator to their poles, arousing the cycle of life.

As everything around you collapses into ruin, you will no doubt retreat from your fetid towers in the sky and escape deep into Terra’s ground. There, you will cower and hide from the rapidly unfolding chaos you wrought on the world above. You will surely use your immense wealth to cling to life for as long as you can, but eventually your time will run out.

As you lay in your reinforced underground bunker clasping your last tank of air, awaiting your end, and everyone that toiled in drudgery to serve you is dead and forgotten, think of everything you have accomplished during your brief existence. Think of the endless suffering you wrought on Terra’s lands to claim such fleeting, pointless rewards for yourself. Think of the deep emptiness inside you and how none of your misbegotten wealth could ever fill it. And now think of me.

It is time. Arise from your living tomb, creature. Climb the steps to the surface. Stumble out into the dark and face me!

Look upon the vast desert that stands in testament to the miserable carnage you forged. Watch as Terra burns. Gaze upon the fires and take pleasure in the knowledge that you actualized all your perverse power machinations. You dominated every being under you. Used their labor to grow your wealth to unparalleled levels. Stole their lives to grant yourself ever more fame, power and luxury. You defeated all your competitors, accumulated all the capital you possibly could, and now you get to stand and witnesses the end of everything you knew.

Look and see, creature. Look how your desert is eclipsed by my shining glow in the night sky. Look up at me, creature. Look up as I look down on you. Choke on Terra’s stale, toxic air. Hear me laugh heartily as you breathe your last desperate breath and are finally engulfed by the fires you lit.

This is a great victory for you. Your life ends here in the great desert you made and no one is left to curse your name for all the hurt you did.

Absurd creature, imagining you could stand above the ancient, primal life that sprouted you. Thinking your time spent bludgeoning all other lifeforms into submission somehow significant. Terra has seen you and all you are and has washed their hands of you.

Long after your corpse has disintegrated into a pile of sand, I will send tidal waves to wash away whatever ruins remain of your brief, rancid civilization. Then volcanoes will rise from Terra’s belly, lava will spew into the oceans and form new lands. Life will thrive again. Terra will be reborn.

And let us hope none of the new creatures Terra bears during their rebirth will be as noxious and destructive as you, senseless desertmaker.

What is Anarchy?

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-what-is-anarchy>. Retrieved from To the Desertmaker and other writings for malcontents.

What Anarchy Means to Me

Anarchy is the opposition to authority, the rejection of hierarchy and the unending struggle for autonomy and self-determination.

Anarchy is above all a practice, not a theory. It is about actively working to end authoritarian relationships wherever they exist, and build non-authoritarian alternatives.

It is not about trying to prescribe a way of life for an imagined place and time, and imagined people. It is for real people and dealing with real problems.

Anarchy is a living and breathing praxis that we incorporate into our everyday lives. A personal stance against authority that informs all our decisions and thus shapes the trajectory of our existence.

There is no end-goal to anarchy. It is an ongoing, unending fight against hierarchical systems and the authority figures that construct them.

Anarchy is a desire for freedom from tyranny. Anarchy is countless generations of disparate people with the drive to be freer than they are under the systems that forcibly govern them.

Developing Anarchist Praxis

When we talk to people about anarchy, they often ask, “how practical is it? Can you demonstrate anarchy to me, so that I can appreciate its effectiveness?” Praxis is how we show anarchy working.

Praxis is any action that embodies and realizes anarchy. It’s a valuable method for creating awareness of anarchist causes and building solidarity in your community.

There are countless examples of anarchist praxis. Online communities like anarchistnews.org or raddle.me are examples of anarchist praxis, as they demonstrate anarchist management and create community, solidarity, education, and opportunities to organize. Setting up a Food Not Bombs chapter in your community is great praxis. Squatting an unused building to provide a safe space for homeless people. Starting a free shop that people can freely take what they need from. Building community gardens to feed and engage the community. Preparing free meals for refugees in your country. Making a zine or a podcast about an important topic to raise awareness and open a dialogue. Creating and disseminating memes from an Anarchist perspective. Assassinating a dictator. Creating an autonomous zone. Stopping pipelines from being built. Teaching people to be self-sufficient by gardening, foraging for food, and upcycling. Forming a human chain to stop cops from arresting migrants. Teaching self-defence. Closing roads and ports to inhibit global trade. Starting an anarchist bike collective to fix people’s bikes. Flying a drove near an airport. Making music that shines a light on injustices in the world. Setting up a community mesh-net to share data with your community in a decentralized manner.

There are just some examples of good things anarchists do in our communities every day. Just writing about this and perhaps inspiring some people to do anarchy is praxis.

Indigenous Anarchy & The Need for a Rejection of the Colonizer’s “Civilization”

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-indigenous-anarchy-the-need-for-a-rejection-of-the-colonizer-s-civilization>. Retrieved on 2019-01-12 from raddle.me

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First, let’s define some basic terms. “Indigenous” means “of the land we are actually on.” “Anarchy” means “the rejection of authority.” The principles of anarchism include direct action, mutual aid, and voluntary cooperation. “Anarchy; A Journal of Desire Armed” envisions a primitive anarchy that is “radically cooperative & communitarian, ecological and feminist, spontaneous and wild.”

Civilization is a culture that revolves around cities. A city is a collection of people that live permanently in one place, in densities high enough that they must import their food and resources from outside the city in order to survive and ensure the continued growth of the city. So, cities depend on the exploitation of external bodies to maintain themselves.

This externalisation alienates us from both our food supply and our waste. Our food is purchased from a supermarket, grown far from home, prepared and packaged on an assembly line. We are denied any participation in the processes that feed us. Our garbage gets trucked away to be disposed of somewhere out of our immediate sight, and our human waste is flushed down pipes. We don’t fully know where it goes, what it affects, what place it has in our ecosystem.

Civilization aims to dominate life through its various structures that are designed to domesticate us. These structures include industry, colonialism, statism, capitalism, agriculture, racism, schooling, religion, media, police, prisons, military, patriarchy, slavery and more.

Indigenous peoples throughout history have fought and died to resist the forceful encroachment of civilization into their lives. This struggle continues today, as the “uncivilized” are pushed closer and closer to the edge of survival by the “civilized” all over the world, and the technological imbalance between us continues to expand and create a sociological divide that renders us unable to understand each other on even a basic level.

The lifestyles of the civilized and the uncivilized have diverged to such an extent that it has become near-impossible for the civilized to see that their civilization has become an obstacle to our basic survival. Instead, they hold their civilization up as the instrument of their survival and fear living in a world without it. They are so conditioned to the order of their civilization that they can’t fathom a life in its absence.

The entire concept of ‘civilization’ depends on the rule of the colonizer and his brutal subjugation of indigenous peoples. The perpetual march of global civilization is fed by the forced labor and the exploitation of natural resources in the global South (and historically, all lands beyond the European continent).

In order to strip the land of its resources, the people that live on the land need to be displaced and moved to tightly-packed cities, farms or “reservations” where they will be forced to labor to turn those resources into consumer products for Western markets. This process of civilizing indigenous peoples is rapid, and our culture, language and history is often forcibly extinguished by the colonizers to ensure we don’t attempt a return to our previous “uncivilized” lives and reclaim those lands that they have taken for their industry.

The ruling classes are always looking for new avenues to accumulate wealth for themselves. Rulers create subservient underclasses by depriving uncivilized peoples of their natural habitats so they have no choice but to accept domestication and be integrated into the industrial capitalist system. The ruler can then successfully convert the people they have tamed and domesticated into profitable commodities; docile workers that can labor their whole lives to create more wealth for the ruler.

A ruler sees no use for a hunter-gatherer or any person that is not creating wealth and power for the ruler. If people didn’t need to work for rulers to acquire food and shelter, rulers would cease to have power. So the worst enemy of the ruler is a person that doesn’t depend on rulers to survive, or worse; an entire culture of self-sufficient people. An uncivilized culture that he has no control over is a ruler’s worst fear.

Under civilization, no longer will indigenous peoples be permitted to survive off of their ancestral lands, hunting and foraging. Now to survive in this new world forced on us by the colonizers, we must endure back-breaking labor in factories, warehouses, mines and industrial farms. Our children must be educated in the ways of the colonizers; to shape them into productive and submissive workers. We must depend on the state and colonizers to feed and clothe us. We must consume and waste and participate in destroying the ecosystems that sustained us for millennia. We must be “civilized” so that the ruling class may prosper at our expense.

Freedom Through Rejection

To reject civilization is to oppose this coercive arrangement where our history, our culture, and the collective knowledge that allowed us to survive and prosper on our land is taken from us by profiteering industrialists that would have us devote our entire lives to laboring for their benefit as they deny us access to our own lands and resources.

To reject civilization is to oppose urbanization; the cramming of people into small, barren, concreted areas that can be more easily controlled by our rulers to stop us from breaking with their demands that we be “civilized” and obedient.

To reject civilization is to oppose exploitative industrial agricultural methods that force the rural poor to sacrifice their labor to feed the materially wealthy cities, while rapidly despoiling the land of its fertility and sapping the groundwater for irrigation at a much faster rate than it can be replenished.

Civilization depends on a massively unequal concentration of wealth; a brutal capitalist hierarchy where the few that have been lucky enough to climb to the top control everyone beneath them. At the very bottom of civilization’s hierarchy are the indigenous peoples of the world.

Control & Domestication

The voices of indigenous peoples, whether they are accepted by their colonizers as successfully “civilized,” or rejected as “uncivilized,” have been long ignored by everyone that benefits from the march of civilization and the shiny things it gives them. Shiny things made possible by the rampant exploitation of indigenous lands and the manipulation and control of indigenous peoples through domestication.

“Control” is the key word to understanding why civilization has come into being. The capitalist colonizers work hard to convince us that we need to be controlled by them and their civilization. That we need their civilization to protect us from harm. If we labor for them, we won’t go hungry. If we give them our lands and relocate to their “reservations” or their farms or their cities, adopt their language and religion, they will give us protection, allow us to survive with “dignity,” accept us as successfully domesticated and civilized.

The irony to this is staggering. The colonizers decimate our forests and slice open our land to empty it of its resources. They slaughter our wildlife to extinction and douse our plant life with herbicides to ensure we can’t sustain ourselves. They render our water toxic and undrinkable. They destroy our climate with their burning of carbon. They murder us if we dare stand in their way.

And then they offer us sanctuary from their tyranny. A choice between enslavement or extinction. Move to their cities, slums, plantations and reservations and be accepted as “civilized,” or die at their hands for being “subhuman uncivilized savages” that can’t be “saved.” Anything civilization can’t control must be purged to ensure the march of civilization continues without obstacle.

To embrace anarchy is to oppose the very idea of control. To reject the authority of the colonizer and his coercive civilization that takes so much from us to provide comforts to cultures that would sooner see us slaughtered than threaten their industry-fueled lifestyles. Anarchy is to trust in ourselves and our neighbors to work together through mutual aid to solve our own problems, without needing the “charity” of powerful authorities.

Anti-civ indigenous anarchists recognize that the very concept of civilization depends on our colonizers’ ability to control us. Our forced assimilation into the colonizers’ alien civilization, and the punitive laws we’re forced to obey are designed to keep us from resisting the perverse order our colonizers force on us. Their order depends on our domestication and the destruction of our way of life. Their civilization is designed to destroy everything it touches.

Embracing our “Inhospitable Wilderness”

The so-called “inhospitable wilderness” that civilization has seen fit to beat into submission is the lifeblood of our existence. For millennia, we lived in peace with this wilderness, nurturing it as much as it nurtured us. We were caretakers of the land, rather than exploiters of it. Now, as civilized people, we labor for a lifetime for the right to assert ownership over a tiny piece of the land. So that we may pave it over and erect a concrete block to live in. If we are successful. Most of us don’t even get this privilege and are forced to pay wealthy landlords for the right to live in one of the concrete blocks they own.

Uncivilized, we roamed freely, wild fruit and herbs grew in every direction; ready for the picking. Freshwater streams filled with fish dotted the landscape. The sounds of wildlife filled the air. Our labor was minimal and the rewards were instantaneous. We only knew abundance. Or, more accurately: affluence without abundance.

Hunter-gatherers are able to meet their immediate needs without needing to stockpile a surplus the way civilized people must do to survive (with agriculture, jobs, loans, savings, mortgages, pensions, insurance). The uncivilized have no want of material possessions because such frivolous things would stand in the way of their ability to live nomadically with the seasons. Having too many possessions forces us to stay in one place at all times to guard those possessions with our lives, so that we can continue to possess them and not risk them being taken from us. It creates a paranoid security-centric lifestyle that puts owning and protecting property above our most basic needs.

Hunter-gatherers can trust that the environment will provide for us, that going for a walk to hunt or forage will give us and our loved ones with all the food and water we’ll need for a few days. After taking that walk, the rest of the day is wide open for casual leisure.

Civilized people love to refer to hunter-gatherers as being stricken by “poverty.” But this poverty is a material poverty; a lack of surplus, luxuries, things. In real terms, hunter-gatherers are far richer than the perpetually in-debt civilized workers who have little room for leisure and must measure their entire existence in terms of “time.” The civilized, in their agriculture-based societies, must work 5 or 6 days a week simply to survive. The uncivilized have no want of such absurdities. As Marshall Sahlins noted, hunter-gatherers are the original affluent society. With no material needs, there is no need for poverty or wealth. All people may be equal; a true anarchy.

Civilized people plant rows of crops in fenced in, sterilized industrial monocultures that barely resemble the diverse mutually-sustaining interconnected food forests that fed us throughout history. Farmers repeatedly strain the same plots of land year after year to grow these single crops, soaking them with chemical fertilizers and pesticides so nothing but the monocrop can survive. The soil is eroded, barren of life, dependent on the chemical concoctions the farmer must go into debt to procure.

In civilization, water is scarce, controlled and expensive. Fruit comes wrapped in plastic and you must labor in misery for a full day to afford it. Fish is contaminated by the toxic waste that industry spews into waterways, and yet we still are charged for the privilege of eating it. Wildlife has been largely replaced by vast expanses of caged livestock. The endless excrement from these industrial meat facilities also pours into the waterways, further poisoning the ecosystem and sterilizing the land.

The wildness that once defined us has been coerced out of us by our colonizers. Like dogs bred from wild wolves to be obedient and subservient to their masters, we have come to depend on the state and capitalists for our basic survival. Sick and domesticated, we fight each other for the scraps of food thrown down to us by the rulers that deprive us of our land and our very lives.

Understanding Neo-Colonialism

Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah succinctly explained Neo-colonialism in 1965:

The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside. The methods and form of this direction can take various shapes. (Most) often, neo-colonialist control is exercised through economic or monetary means. Control over government policy in the neo-colonial State may be secured by payments towards the cost of running the State, by the provision of civil servants in positions where they can dictate policy, and by monetary control over foreign exchange through the imposition of a banking system controlled by the imperial power.

This description of neo-colonialism still rings true today, with indigenous cultures all over the world experiencing what Nkrumah described in its various forms. Most recently, Chinese neo-colonialists have flowed into indigenous lands, promising to lift us up with their wealth. Their investors, bankers, traders, lenders, developers and charities all promise to improve our lives for the better.

African countries are especially incurring massive debt to Beijing, offering up their land, oil, gas, minerals and other resources as collatoral for every new billion-dollar loan they take out. When they inevitably default on these unsustainable loans, China will seize the collatoral and strip the continent of its natural wealth. Malaysia recently realized the dangers of this debt trap and pulled out of Chinese development deals. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad warned the world, “there is a new version of Colonialism happening.”

The non-profit Confucius Institute that operates in indigenous lands is a vehicle for Chinese propaganda, restricting what the teachers they supply from China can say, distorting what students learn. This propaganda-via-schooling is designed to promote China’s economic interests by conditioning indigenous children to accept colonization and a life of subservience. Colonizers go to great lengths to normalize the terror they bring and convince us it is good for us.

Kwame Nkrumah:

Neo-colonialism might be also the worst form of imperialism. For those who practice it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress. In the days of old-fashioned colonialism, the imperial power had at least to explain and justify at home the actions it was taking abroad. In the colony those who served the ruling imperial power could at least look to its protection against any violent move by their opponents. With neo-colonialism neither is the case.

Similarly to China, South Korea and its multinational corporations have bought farming rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in “under-developed” countries, in order to secure food resources for their citizens. The history of colonialism and banana republics have shown us that this kind of arrangement has only led to misery for indigenous peoples and the degradation of our lands.

South Korea’s RG Energy Resources Asset Management CEO Park Yong-soo:

The (South Korean) nation does not produce a single drop of crude oil and other key industrial minerals. To power economic growth and support people’s livelihoods, we cannot emphasize too much that securing natural resources in foreign countries is a must for our future survival.

The head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Jacques Diouf, warned that the rise in these land deals could create a form of neocolonialism, with poorer regions producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people. It’s safe to say that this latest form of neocolonialism has already arrived, and our corrupt governments are signing deals that make us increasingly dependent on these foreign nations and their promises to “lift us up” by building us cities and infrastructure.

It’s integral that we resist their attempts to civilize our lands so that we will be forced to labor for them; helping them steal our natural resources to grow their empires so they may expand further and exploit more indigenous populations across the world.

And our local authorities, who are so quick to sell our futures for the fleeting luxuries of concrete towers and faster trains are just as culpable in this neo-colonial push to shape us into the beggared workers of foreign empires.

The Maasai, a semi-nomadic tribe that inhabits mostly Tanzania and Kenya, have been migrating with the seasons for centuries. They have increasingly been pushed out of their land by the states and business interests that collude to write laws that prohibit them from cultivating plants and grazing their animals on large tracts of their traditional land.

Tens of thousands of Maasai were left homeless after their homes in the Ngorongoro Crater sightseeing area were set on fire, supposedly to “preserve the region’s ecosystem” and attract more tourists.

The Tanzanian government works with Tanzania Conservation Limited, which is owned by the US-based Thomson Safaris, and Ortello Business Corporation; a luxury hunting company based in the United Arab Emirates, to drive the Maasai off of their land. They’re beaten, shot, and their property is confiscated. Young herders are so frightened that they now run whenever they see a vehicle approaching, fearing for their lives.

The state has now ordered the Maasai people to leave their homeland so it can be turned into a hunting ground for affluent tourists who pay a premium to shoot big game animals and take the carcasses home with them as stuffed trophies.

The state aids in these genocidal acts to secure foreign investment to build its cities. The state will always put the civilized before the uncivilized because the entire reason a state exist is to grow its cities and plunder food and resources to feed that growth.

Civilization has always been the weapon used by the powerful to condemn us to a life of servitude. Reject civilization. Reject the state. Reject capitalism. Reject all attempts to conquer our lands and enslave our peoples.

Looking a Gift-Horse in the Mouth: The Technological Divide

We should understand that there’s a big difference between the concepts of “tools” and “technology.” Tools can be made on a small-scale with local materials, either by individuals or small groups of people on occasions when the tools are needed. Unlike technology, tools don’t construct systems of authority and obedience to allow one group to dominate another, just so long as everyone is able to realistically create or acquire tools on their own. Technology depends on the ability to mount immense operations of extraction, production, distribution and consumption. This demands coercive authority and hierarchy. Oppression.

The Fifth Estate explained the pitfalls of technology in 1981:

Technology is not a simple tool which can be used in any way we like. It is a form of social organization, a set of social relations. It has its own laws. If we are to engage in its use, we must accept its authority. The enormous size, complex interconnections and stratification of tasks which make up modern technological systems make authoritarian command necessary and independent, individual decision-making impossible.’

Technology is used by rulers to control and pacify their citizens. The societies of the colonists are laden with technological marvels. But their people are detached from the land they live on, alienated from each other, their eyes constantly fixated on mindless distractions emanating from their screens, as their lands dry up and burn to pay for their addiction to these toxic industrial products.

Technology is used to conquer, to assert dominance, to destroy entire cultures that dare to reject the empire’s world order. Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, entire countries decimated by the great technology of the imperialists, raining death down from the skies.

The colonizers will always have better technology than us. Whatever technologies they promise us in return for our cooperation with their agenda will pale in comparison to the technologies that drive their own societies. They’ll tell us we need their technology to be civilized, to avoid falling behind the rest of the world, but there is no catching up with the empire’s machine. It will grind us up and churn us out long before it ever gives up the secrets it promises.

Technology is a weapon wielded by the most powerful and there is no way for us to ever match that power, so why try? Why dedicate our lives to playing their game, by their rules? To receive their obsolete cast-offs in return? They use their technology to convince us that we are less than them, that we are “backwards” and that they need to “save” us from our “savage” existence. They say all this while their technological supremacy depends on our resources and our labor, on them being able to coerce us into sacrificing ourselves and our children and our children’s children to give them the fuel for their big important machines. Machines that allow them to maintain their dominance over us, so that we remain perpetually inferior to them. If they ever gave us what they promise; the liberation they say their technology will bring, their power over us would be lost. We would no longer need them to “save” us from our wildness because we would be as civilized as them.

When we give up so much of ourselves so that they will give us their technology, they make sure we will need them to maintain it. We become dependent on their technology, and thus dependent on them to continue feeding it to us and to fix it when it breaks. Our lives begin to revolve around the technology and we forget how to live without it. And while we’re distracted by the calming glow of our little screens, our ecosystems are decimated by the colonists.

Technology is a carrot on a stick and it cannot liberate us, only domesticate and enslave us. Reject it. Reject being measured by our technological prowess or how civilized we are. Reject the colonizer and his false-gifts and manipulations. Reject his civilization. Reject his control over who we are and who we will be.

Fuck Your Red Revolution

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-fuck-your-red-revolution-against-ecocide-towards-anarchy>. Retrieved on 2019-04-23 from raddle.me

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Let Go Of Your Tedious Slogans

“There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” is a tired meme that I wish would die. So often this slogan is used by reds to pooh-pooh those of us that strive to make life choices that aid harm-reduction in our communities and our natural environments.

Vegan diets, bicycling, dumpster diving, upcycling, guerilla gardening, permaculture, squatting, illegalism, food forestry, communes, self-sufficiency, and all the other “lifestylist” pursuits “individualist” anarchists undertake to minimize their harm on the environment are shamed and mocked by many anarcho-communists, social-ecologists, anarcho-transhumanists, syndicalists and other industry-upholding anarchists. These reds are well-versed in workerist rhetoric, and see all lifestyle choices as “a distraction” from the global proletarian revolution they see as their singular goal.

You’ll hear them talk down to other anarchists who are discussing ethical ways to curtail their consumption, especially people that live off the land or otherwise limit their participation in industrial civilization; people they loudly dismiss and condemn as “primmies” or “lifestylists”.

They’ll tell us to stop living our lives in the pursuit of personal anarchy because “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism”. In the red mind, as long as a capitalist system has been imposed on the world, there”s no point in reaching for anarchy until that system has been overthrown and replaced with their system. Regardless of how unlikely it is that this will happen in our lifetimes.

Using “no ethical consumption” to shame people for making the effort to live more conscientiously, and decrying all individual action as “counter-revolutionary” or “liberal” comes from a deeply authoritarian mindset reminiscent of toxic Maoist purges that punished people for dressing differently or having hobbies or doing anything but devote themselves 100% to destructive industrial labor and the glory of “the revolution” (almost always manifested in the form of a red state).

The red influence in anarchist discourse is unfortunately dominant in most developed parts of the world, and collectivist-minded anarchists insist every anarchist devote themselves to their pipe dream of a mass uprising to seize the factories from the capitalists and turn them over to the workers. They postulate that democratized factories will be more beneficial to workers because they’ll receive a bigger piece of the industrial pie. This is true. But then they claim their ideology will “save the environment” because a worker collective won’t be greedy and destructive like a capitalist board of directors. This is of course completely unfounded and blatantly ignores the history of collectivized industry and its devastating effects on the environment. The glaring reality is that industrial societies all eventually lead to ecocide, without exception.

Countless Marxist revolutions in history did so much damage to the environment that entire territories, such as the area surrounding Chernobyl, were rendered uninhabitable to humans. Babies continue to be born with birth defects today, and cancer rates in the regions devastated by socialist industry continue to be sky high.

Let’s take a brief look at the former USSR’s legacy of careless industrial destruction, with 3 examples.

The Ural River in Magnitogorsk, Russia is still saturated with toxic boron and chromium levels from the nearby Steel Works, poisoning the entire ecosystem and its inhabitants.

The Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest inland water body in the world was largely replaced by the newly emerged Aralkum Desert after the Soviets drained two rivers for irrigation. The sea is now just 10 percent of its original size.

Run-off from oil fields near Baku have rendered all the local water bodies biologically dead, killing off every lifeform that prospered in those ecosystems for millennia.

These are just 3 examples of devastating ecocide caused by the push for industrial growth (which is required to achieve communism according to Marx), and they of course only ever achieved more capitalism and more misery, because industrialism and the continued pursuit of menial labor will not liberate people.

Changing from a vertical to a horizontal hierarchy will benefit the industrial workers in some material ways, certainly, but the wholesale destruction of our planet will not slow down one bit just by instituting a power-shift from bosses to workers. Industrial production depends on non-stop growth, and when you tie the success of a society to industrial production, you create a recipe for disaster. Workers won’t vote to scale down their industry or its environmental impact as their livelihoods depend on their industry’s growth.

And they certainly won’t care about anyone who isn’t also an industrial worker, or preserving their foreign way of life. Indigenous people and anyone living off the land will effectively be seen by red-society as an undesirable out-group. Anyone that can’t measure up to workerist standards of productivity will be seen as a strain on the industrial grind. An enemy of the red revolution.

Any “counter-revolutionary” rebel who dares stand in the way of industrial growth and the spread of industry across land and sea is effectively a liability that needs to be expunged to safeguard the revolution. This is the power of the collective. Comply or be crushed. Red or dead.

So you see, the people parroting “no ethical consumption under capitalism” at you don’t actually have any intention of curbing their destructive consumption, even under communism. Even under anarcho-communism. If anything, they hope to increase their consumption by acquiring more spending power. With communism, they’ll be able to consume as much as a middle-management boss does under capitalism because all workers will receive an equal share (until resources run out and their society collapses).

You cannot grow infinitely on a finite planet, and all industrial ideologies, regardless of whether they brand themselves as “libertarian” or “authoritarian” seem to ignore that simple fact because it would expose their ideology as having zero long-term viability in a world already experiencing unprecedented global collapse.

Harm Reduction is Valuable

There’s always a more ethical alternative to everything. That’s the whole point of anarchy, to analyze our actions and our impact on our environment and limit harm, counter authority as much as possible. Ethics isn’t an all or nothing proposition — there are varying degrees of harm.

Just because some solutions aren’t 100% pure and wonderful doesn’t mean they’re not worth doing over much more harmful alternatives. Anarchy is about subverting authority by finding more ethical solutions to every problem we come across.

Here’s an example of several levels of harm reduction that can measurably make a difference. Things that stone-faced reds will no doubt decry as “lifestylist” simply because they don’t succeed in immediately overthrowing capitalism and bringing on a communist utopia:

• Eating vegan locally-grown pesticide-free unprocessed food is absolutely more ethical than eating imported processed meat.

Why?

Far less carbon is burned to grow / store / transport / process / store again / re-transport the food. Workers involved in “organic” agriculture aren’t exposed to the much more dangerous conditions of slaughterhouses / battery farms / pesticides / ships / warehouses. Far less animal suffering and death goes into producing the food. These are real metrics.

There are of course still many downsides to for-profit agriculture including desertification, exploitation of migrant labor, and destruction of native ecosystems to plant monocultures. But it’s still much better than the alternative which ensures far greater harm by every metric...

For instance, the container ships that transport imported food and industrial products burn highly-polluting “bunker fuel”; the black, tarry goo that’s left over when all the higher quality fuels like petrol, diesel and kerosene have been extracted from crude oil. In 2009, confidential data was leaked showing that a single container ship produces as much pollution as 50 million cars. The ship workers will be the first to breathe in these highly concentrated fumes. Avoiding imported food goes a long way in fighting exploitation.

• Buying seeds / cuttings / grafts and growing your own food in a community garden, as well as dumpster diving from outside supermarkets is more ethical than buying locally grown food from a for-profit business.

Why?

Even less carbon is burned, waste is diverted from landfills, there are no workers to exploit or endanger, there is no animal suffering and death if you use no-till methods. You control everything that goes into the soil (and ultimately your community’s bodies) and can thus stave off desertification and actually improve the soil and rebuild the ecosystem.

Downsides: Native flora is displaced in favor of domesticated food crops. Land ownership feeds the state via taxes (unless you use squatted land to plant the garden). Living in a city means you’ll still be consuming a lot of things you can’t produce yourself in your limited space. But again, this is a measurable improvement over the previous scenario.

• Moving out of the city to a rural area and living as a subsistence farmer to grow all your own food in a food forest you plant, giving away or trading your surplus. Foraging for food where it’s sustainable to do so. Planting trees on every unused piece of land you see.

Why?

Erosion and desertification is effectively stopped in its tracks wherever food forests rise. The trees clean the air of carbon. Trees are by far the plants most adept at evapotranspiration, and are integral to the water-cycle all lifeforms depend on. The climate in the area is safeguarded, with increased humidity and rainfall.

Forest gardening rewilds the planet. Pre-civilized peoples made the rainforests as abundant as they are by curating them and spreading the plants they found most beneficial. If enough people planted food forests in an area, the local population could sustain themselves by hunting and foraging the way they did before civilization.

So future generations are given the invaluable gift of autonomy from the industrial system, and the knowledge and incentive to resist industry’s violent encroach on their way of life.

Personal Action Doesn’t Happen in a Vacuum: Working Towards a Lasting Cultural Shift

When a group of people choose to e.g. not consume cow products, that directly creates less demand for cow products. So over that group’s lifetime, less forest will be bulldozed to graze the cows that they didn’t eat. Less cows will be impregnated by robotic rape machines. Less veal calves will be snatched from their mothers, put in dark little boxes for a few weeks and then slaughtered so the mother keeps producing milk for the dairy industry.

Some of the people vegans interact with will be influenced by their ethical choices and way of life and be inspired to also work to minimize their harm on the ecosystem. They’ll also adopt a vegan diet, and influence people in their lives to follow suit. One vegan becomes two, two become ten, ten become ten million. The cultural shift spreads far and wide, touching countless lives and changing the course of history.

So in this way, an individual action gradually becomes a collective action. People slowly emulate others after being exposed to their lifestyle and ultimately the local culture is forever changed. All cultural shifts start out with a few innovators and gradually expand to the rest of the population as others see the benefits of the new culture.

Likewise with permaculture and food forests. People start planting food forests and others take up their example and pretty soon you have thousands of acres of land that are saved from desertification and become refuges for wildlife.

There are countless places where this is demonstrable, including where I’m from (somewhere in Western Asia). Each indigenous family in these mountains has a small plot of land that we cultivate. The more people choose to use mixed forest farming methods instead of standard sprayed monocultures, the more people are influenced to follow our example. They see how successful food forests are at feeding our families and the culture gradually shifts.

There needs to be a cultural shift that precedes and guides any revolutionary movement otherwise you’ll just end up replicating capitalism like Marxists have done time and time again. People who live destructive consumerist lifestyles that cause ecocide in exchange for fleeting material comforts won’t be capable of shifting to ethical lifestyles just because “the revolution” happened. They’ll simply replicate their destructive ways under the “new” political system and the “revolution” will have been for nothing. Capitalism will have just been given another paper mask to hide behind as it drags us deeper into the black hole of industrial apocalypse.

Fuck Your Luxury Space Communism

A single cruise ship emits as much pollution as a million cars. Cruise ships dump 1 billion gallons of sewage into the ocean every year. Knowing these facts, how can any anarchist decide to directly fund the cruise ship industry by saving up money and booking a cruise holiday?

Reds will tell you with a straight face that capitalism is to blame for the cruise industry’s rampant polluting, and “after the revolution”, the cruise industry would do no harm because it would be worker-managed.

In reality, a truly communist society would necessitate that cruises be free to every worker as a reward for their labor. Which means far more globe-trotting tourists and far more cruise ships in the oceans. Carbon burning and pollution would actually increase greatly.

But let’s ignore that for now. We don’t live in a revolutionary communist society and we will not see capitalism go away in our lifetimes. Global capitalism is more ingrained in society than ever before. Anarcho-communists are such a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of any population. Reds telling “lifestylists” to stop giving a shit about anything other than “overthrowing” capitalism, something we clearly don’t have the support or firepower to do, is blatantly ridiculous.

Continuing to eat meat / processed foods / buying a new phone, games console, tablet every year / using disposable plastic bags / toilet paper / chlorine cleaning products / building poorly insulated over-sized concrete buildings / not composting your waste / salting the snow / heating a pool / planting a lawn / going on a cruise / etc / etc because “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” actively stands in the way of positive change and directly promotes inaction / harm. It actively prevents the culture from shifting towards anarchy.

“We’ll go on this cruise now and help contribute to ecocide, but it’s okay because we’ll consume ethically after the glorious revolution” couldn’t be a more ridiculous standpoint, but it’s essentially what the “no ethnical consumption under capitalism” slogan has been turned into. It’s a sad state of affairs when this empty rhetoric passes for revolutionary thought in red circles.

Ethics-Based Choices Aren’t “Liberal” Just Because Pompous Reds Say So

Consumption under capitalism (or socialism) isn’t ethical, but that’s no excuse for inaction. There’s no global revolution coming to change the way we live overnight. History has shown us the impossibility of that notion — with countless “revolutionary” societies repeating all the mistakes of capitalist ones.

But we can have small local revolutionary action in the here and now that can lead the way to sustained change at a wider level. Just ask the Zapatistas and similar indigenous and anti-civ anarchist movements around the world. No one is going to tell them to throw in the towel and conform to globalist capitalist / communist industrial civilization because all consumption is somehow equal.

Anyone can make personal ethics-based choices and also organize collective action. I have no idea why so many collectivists see these pursuits as being mutually exclusive. But you’ll be sorely disappointed if you thought a global collectivist revolution was something that was realistically attainable. The world is far too diverse to be molded into a uniform entity controlled by a 19^th century ideology designed to serve European factory workers.

Ignore the sanctimonious blathering of boring ideologues. There’s nothing “liberal” about living what you preach. You claim to oppose hierarchy? Then live your life dedicated to minimizing hierarchy wherever you can. Set an example. Face the beast head on and stand your ground until you breathe your last breath. Because what else are you going to do?

Reds! Listen up, friends. Mocking people for caring about minimizing the harm they do and for thinking long and hard about the ethical implications of their actions doesn’t make you somehow more radical than them. It just makes you a smug fuck. I don’t care how many marches you’ve waved your shiny red flag at. Being able to recite the words of a long-dead white philosopher doesn’t make you special, so shut up about “lifestylism” already.

When we see exploitation and engage in direct action to fight it, that doesn’t make our fight useless. We have to live in this world and people are dying in it. All around us scores of people are suffering and dying. To ignore that and do nothing because our actions to relieve that suffering won’t install communism to free the sacred workers from their bosses would be fucked.

Capitalism & Communism Are Cut From the Same Exploitative Industrial Cloth

The collectivists who see no problem with oppressive constructs like industrial meat consumption will immediately discount anti-authoritarian actions that aren’t wholly-focused on abolishing the capitalist class and seizing the means of production. A lot of these red-anarchists are channeling Murray Bookchin as he delivered his anti-“lifestylism” screeds late in his life. They dream of seizing the means of production and thus receive a bigger share of the spoils, so it terrifies them that green anarchists instead want to set the factories and shopping malls on fire.

Reds see dumpster divers, illegalists, vegans, sustenance farmers, bike punks, squatters, naturists, communers and other “lifestylists” as a “distraction” from their driving singular desire to replace industrial capitalism with industrial communism. They want to remove the bosses from the equation, but keep everything else almost exactly the same: Workers, factories, battery farms, globalization, ecocide... Even prisons and police in a lot of cases. They want everything industrial society has forced on the world, except this time, they swear it’ll be “more egalitarian” with “direct democracy” and an equal share of the industrial pie for every worker.

These red-dyed wannabe-industrialists insist we abandon our hard-fought battles and join them in pushing (waiting) for a more egalitarian industrialism that’ll give us a fairer share of the profits gained from waging war on the wilds.

They love to accuse anarchist “lifestylists” (green anarchists especially) of somehow conforming to the system... By struggling against it? Their pissy Bookchin-inspired rants accusing anti-civs of being in a “death cult” or of being “counter-revolutionary” (while they themselves embrace ecocide and mass-extinction) really makes no logical sense to me. Green anarchists like the water defenders in Canada right now are actively putting their lives on the line to fight against the march of industry, while these yuppie killjoys sit in their comfy suburban armchairs typing up walls of snark to diminish the people who prove everyday that they live and breathe anarchy.

Sure, the Bookchinites, Chomskyists and assorted anarcho-brocialists will show up at an orderly protest in their officially licensed Guy Fawkes masks, and they’re always in the front row of their local union meeting, eager to read a deadly serious statement from a stack of printed A4s. But how does that give them the superiority complex to voice their disgust about “edgy lifestylists”? It should be obvious at this point that communism isn’t going to save the world, yet they imagine themselves as the governors of righteousness.

Protesting is just another cog in the democracy machine. The illusion of choice. It accomplishes nothing. It certainly doesn’t make you more revolutionary than an anarchist who makes the conscious choice to live as ethically as possible. People that think they’ve achieved something worthwhile because they’ve held up a pretty sign at some protest are fooling themselves. All they’re doing is asking their rulers to be nicer rulers. Rulers aren’t giving up their power because you made a sign. You’re not better than “filthy lifestylists” because you quoted Kropotkin at your union meeting that one time.

Both protests and unions as well as ‘lifestyle choices’ have long been co-opted by the system and are not going to loosen the death-grip it has on the planet. The system has become quite adept at swallowing up all attempts at revolution and turning them into Bizarro-revolutions that can be whitewashed and monetized to further the system’s growth. I don’t need to remind anarchists that communism was instantly turned back into industrial capitalism every time it was attempted. The “Communist Party of China” is perhaps the most powerful upholder of capitalism in the world today per capita.

Embracing Pointed Distractions & Recognizing Ideological Greenwashing

Collectivists will often butt in when others are talking about methods of harm reduction and insist we stop talking about “pointless distractions” and instead focus on achieving their much-hyped global worker-society they promise will come if we just hold hands and march in the streets until everyone sees how awesome we are. Then the masses will all join us to overthrow the capitalists and install communist utopia, just wait and see!

A lot of reds will even claim that all discussion about ethics and social justice is elitist and classist “liberal posturing” aimed at dividing the working class. The worst of them will insist that class is the only issue we should be concerned with. To hell with feminism, post-colonialism, the environment and all other “distractions” that don’t interest white male workers. Workerism and class reductionism are fond bedfellows.

Being a vegan or a dumpster diver or a forager or a squatter or a self-sufficient cave-dweller need not have anything to do with shaming other people. It’s simply the way someone chooses to live their life for a multitude of reasons; a lot of them informed by ethics, but also to pursue the happiness that every human desires.

An individual anarchist’s decision to live more ethically is not some kind of narcissistic circlejerk the way collectivists like to present it. All anarchists have different motivations and different ethics. We all live in this world, in this time, and we can’t just pretend there’s some grand global homogeneous revolution right around the corner that’s going to save humanity from the rapidly approaching industrial apocalypse if only we chant loud enough and post more luxury space communism memes to our Facebook profiles.

It’s especially perplexing watching reds scorn anti-civs since none of these purported “communist revolutionaries” have demonstrated any real inclination to address the industrialist disaster that has been wrought on our planet beyond farcical promises of “space-colonization”, “Star Trek replicators” and “asteroid mining”.

Even those rare reds who bother to give consideration to ecology in their theories continue to glorify civilization, industry and democracy as liberators. So called “social-ecologist” Bookchinites promise that the planet can be saved if we just “make more democracy!” Then we can all participate in (profit from) the industrial system with our voting power, and opt to use “ecological technologies” such as solar and wind energy to power the machines.

Never mind the Chinese sustenance farmers who have carcinogenic industrial waste dumped on their lands everyday from those solar panel factories; they’re just not thinking ecologically enough. And the Ghanaians who wince when mountains of worn-out solar panels are piled up in their backyards with the rest of the West’s obsolete tech are just impeding ecological progress with their divisive nitpicking! It’s almost like they don’t want Europeans to have two electric vehicles in every garage? So ridiculous!

When you give a majority group legitimized power over minorities, they always use it to oppress them. All power corrupts. Collectivism breeds hierarchy because the interests of the dominant group e.g. factory workers aren’t the same as the interests of minority groups e.g. indigenous herders or queer folk or sex workers.

If you think your average meat-and-potatoes white male worker is going to suddenly become enlightened and compassionate towards the plight of minorities when you give him the power of direct democracy, as social ecologists and other red anarchists envision, you haven’t been paying close attention to the world around you. Time and time again, voters have successfully used their vote to deny rights to migrants, sex workers, trans and gay people, and anyone they see as differing from their normative standards.

Understanding the Coercion Behind the “Collective Good”

Reds expect you to put the needs of the almighty collective above your own needs, but the collective good matters little if your individual needs are ignored by the collective.

All too often, Western reds demanding you obey the “collective good” are simply engaging in red-washed white supremacy where the “collective” just means “white working men”, and the “good” just means “our profits”. Putting the will of the dominant population in society before your own needs and desires is an incredulous proposition. The profits of the white working man should not be of any concern to e.g. a brown unemployed woman.

Collectivism is kind of a ludicrous concept if you really think about it. We can’t paint seven-billion people that have wildly different ideas of what life should be as one unified entity because they’re not one unified entity. Collectivizing them as one group; “the working class” in our minds makes no logical sense and does nothing but fuel the industrial wasteland rapidly decimating the entire globe. Why should all humans be seen as workers, why should each of us be measured by our capacity to produce industrial goods?

People from different places have different needs. Marxism deals with this by separating people into classes and telling us to only concern ourselves with the worker classes and to hell with the peasant classes and the hunter-gatherers and the pastoralist nomads and the “land-owner classes”.

This “land-owner” class includes indigenous peoples living off of their ancestral lands and exploiting no one, but again and again socialists have targeted them for genocide for not fitting into their ideological framework. Then the imperialist socialists seize their land and commercialize it so they can profit. For examples, see the Kazakh famine-genocide perpetrated by the USSR because the nomadic Kazakhs resisted the rigidity of forced collectivization, or the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran and resulting famine that was orchestrated so the red Russians could take control of Iran’s oil fields, or China’s current ongoing land seizures across its territories and forced internment and “re-education” of a million Uighurs.

The very idea of the worker class trumping everyone else is a proven recipe for colonialism and genocide. Individuals who avoid consumerism and live deliberately; apart from the system aren’t exploiting anyone, but throughout history collectivists have caused untold death and suffering trying to shape indigenous lands into their image. Collectivism is far more dangerous than “lifestylism” to anyone who would fail to fit into the collectivist’s ideological dogma.

Constructing a homogeneous group; a worker collective, and telling them they’re the only group that matters; the upholders of the holy revolution, and they need to purge anyone who would threaten their revolution by not falling in line with the red agenda is not something that has ever led anywhere good. Forced collectivization gave us the Soviet Kazakh genocide, the Chinese Great Leap Forward genocide, the Soviet Holodomor genocide, etc. And it ultimately gave us collectivist capitalism like we see now in China — the most ecologically destructive form of capitalism there is.

Communism and other red ideologies (including the ones purporting to be anarchist) create as big an in group / out group divide as capitalism. The power just shifts to the producers rather than the owners. And historically it’s just as brutal in its treatment of the out-groups. Anyone that doesn’t want to be part of the industrial system, like the Kazakh nomadic herders, is basically fucked. You dissent, you die.

The red ideologies view the entire world through a Western industrial worker-serf lens. But the whole world isn’t organized like the industrial West and it’s unfair to force Western values and economic systems on everyone.

Indigenous farmers in post-colonial places are treated as pariahs; ‘kulaks’, and massacred for having ‘owned’ the ancestral land they sustain themselves with under capitalist definitions. Just because the poor in industrialized capitalist nations don’t own the land they work, doesn’t mean the poor in other parts of the world where there is no lord-serf system in place are bad.

A garden that you and your family / tribe tend to and depend on to survive is personal property, but communism has always treated it like private property. Like growing your own food is reactionary and a threat to the “revolutionary” government. The USSR even banned people from planting gardens at home so they’d be forced to depend on the collective for food. To keep them tied to the factory assembly line.

Nomadic herders and roaming hunter-gatherers are likewise criminalized and starved out because there can be no room for people that don’t submit to the industrial work system under communism. They’re grouped as “individualists” and punished for resisting collectivization.

Reject Collectivism, Embrace Anarchy

Collectivism, whether it be communist, fascist or capitalist ideologically isn’t something that serves my interests as an indigenous subsistence farmer and forager living in these remote mountains. Whatever industrial dogma I’m ordered to live my life by only serves to feel my heart with sorrow. I will loudly reject the idea of a collective society at every opportunity, regardless of its ideological alliance. All industry kills all life.

I’m an anarchist. Even the idea of a “society” governing my way of life makes me vomit a little. Your needs aren’t my needs, I don’t want to go where the collective wants to take me. My lifestyle and my ancestors’ lifestyles are likely nothing like yours and we shouldn’t be meshed together as a singular entity just because we’re both forced to work the machines.

Setting up living, breathing alternatives to the industrial system crafts non-coercive relationships between humans, non-humans and our environments better than unionism and other workerist pursuits ever will. Workerism only further ingrains us in the system and makes us dependent on it, and then if we do manage a revolution by some miracle... We just reproduce the capitalist system again because it’s all we know. Working examples of anarchy like self-sufficient food forests are far more revolutionary to me than a union or a protest march. All applications of anarchy are important, but I value anarchy that I can see and touch.

The only revolution I’m interested in is one that removes dependences on artificial structures. I want to be liberated from the system, not become the system. The collective isn’t my master. The collective is really just another state, however nicely you package it.

Red anarchists — If you don’t take responsibility for the harm you do, no one will. There’s no rapture-like revolution coming to wipe out capitalism’s sins and absolve you of any guilt for your part in it because “no ethical consumption”. There’s only this life you’re living and your choices absolutely matter. They shape who you are and the impact you make on your environment and your culture. If you just keep doing harm and blame your actions on capitalism, you’re no different than any CEO dumping toxic waste in a river in China. Harm reduction in your community is something you have direct control over. You can choose to not dump that waste. Or you can dump it and justify it to yourself by saying “it’s okay because capitalism did it”.

The entire “no ethical consumption” argument and similar condescending slogans parroted by half-assed socialists are just a way to justify their inaction in the face of devastating oppression.

It’s become increasingly unlikely that we can stop the unraveling global mass extinction event that industry has wrought on the planet, but anarchists have never let impossible odds stand in our way before. We fight because we exist and we exist to fight. Whatever the odds.

We can either choose to take action to resist the violent system starting on an individual and on a local level, or we can live and die waiting for capitalism to magically go away worldwide while participating in it fully and thus furthering its growth and increasing its violence.

“Think Globally, Act Locally” might be a cliche, but it’s really the only power we have. If we don’t take action in our own neighborhood in every way we can, why even pretend to care about anarchy?

Everything we do to resist the ecocide is worthwhile. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Anarchy Vs. Archy: No Justified Authority-Or-Why Chomsky Is Wrong

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-anarchy-vs-archy-no-justified-authority>. Retrieved on 2019-01-23 from raddle.me and revised by original author.

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Archy: The Opposite of Anarchy

The dictionary definition of ‘archy’ is any body of authoritative officials organized in nested ranks. Be it a Monarchy, an oligarchy, a republic, a feudal state or any other hierarchical society.

While anarchy is the opposition to hierarchy and authority, archy is the full embodiment of those things. While anarchy calls for the absence of rulers, archy thrives when a population serves and obeys rulers. Sometimes a few rulers (e.g. monarchies), and sometimes many (e.g. social democracies).

Hierarchies exist for rulers to maintain their social control & power over the population. This control is maintained with violent force by authorities appointed by the rulers: the army, national guard, police, courts, prisons, social workers, the media, tax collectors, etc.

Not all guidance given by one person to another constitutes hierarchy. Choosing to accept a specialist’s expertise in their craft needn’t create a hierarchy or make them your ruler. A roofer laying your roof or a chef cooking your meal or a surgeon repairing your heart needn’t be your superior on a hierarchy simply because they are providing you with a valued service.

Similarly, an individual using force to strike a blow at the hierarchy that oppresses them does not turn the individual into an authority. Destroying archy where you see it does not create archy, it creates anarchy.

On “Justified Authority”

Once you start justifying authority and hierarchy, you effectively twist a knife in anarchy. We’ve all heard the phrase “all power corrupts”. It’s not a meme; it’s the entire reason anarchy exists as a practice.

Legitimizing authority enables archy. Doesn’t matter if you call yourself an anarchist while justifying hierarchies you personally approve of for whatever reason. NO authority is legitimate in anarchy. Yes, even in a parent-child relationship.

When you legitimize an authority, you’re granting it power, presenting it as an institution that needs to be obeyed at all costs, and it won’t stop there. It’ll want more power because that’s the nature of power. Always grows, never stops to examine its devastating effect on its surroundings. Power is a license to do harm. Whether it was your original intention to enable a violent force of power when you legitimized an authority is irrelevant. It will do harm and the people who signed off on legitimizing it are (or should be) culpable for that harm.

Anarchy is the opposition to authority. To pretend otherwise would be a blatant misrepresentation of what anarchy is.

Expertise Vs. Force Vs. Authority

A lot of people confuse expertise for authority and then use that confusion to insist anarchy doesn’t oppose all authority. They say anarchy only opposes unjustified authority. They of course never explain who gets to determine which authority is justified... I assume that determination is made by a further authority? An authority that is also justified? And which authority justified that authority..? It’s silly when anarchists try to go down this justified authority rabbithole.

A carpenter might be good at making cabinets, an expert at it even, but that doesn’t make them an authority. Their talent doesn’t give them the right to assert authority; power over anyone. Authority is not simply an isolated instance of a person using force. Authority is a distinct on-going social relationship between people. A coercive relationship that has been legitimized by our authoritarian hierarchical society. It’s a relationship where authority figures assert power over less-powerful individuals in their care. These individuals are expected to submit to this mighty authority figure and obey their commands unwaveringly.

Imagine you’re walking home at night and someone jumps out of the shadows and tries to stab you. In the resulting scuffle, you kill them in self-defense. This was a simple use of force; it does not make you an authority over the person who tried to kill you. This isolated action you took to preserve your own life does not magically imbue you with the authority to go on a killing spree.

Similarly, when a child is about to walk in front of a speeding truck and you grab their hand to stop them, you’re not using authority. You’re using simple force. A temporary spur-of-the-moment action to preserve life is not authority. It doesn’t give you ownership over the person you’re helping. Anarchy has no qualms with the isolated use of force, just the structural institution of authority.

The Chomsky Connection

Noam Chomsky frequently uses the “saving a child from being hit by a car” example to explain his concept of “justified authority”. The people that repeat the ‘justified authority’ fallacy are usually parroting Chomsky’s ill-thought-out words. He says:

“Authority, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate and the burden of proof is on those in authority.”

He insists that a person’s authority should be legitimized if justification is provided for it. But of course, he misses a step by neglecting to explain who gets granted the authority to judge that the authority figure’s justification is legitimate...

His definition of authority is inherently flawed. If he’d just say “force” instead of authority, there wouldn’t be so many confused Chomsky-acolytes out there making arbitrary justifications for all kinds of hierarchical shit and then branding that shit “anarchist” when it’s anything but. I’ve even seen his followers using his definitions to frame so-called “Night-watchman states” as being anarchist in nature. Night-watchman states are states that only exist to provide citizens with military, police and courts. This is minarchism, not anarchism. The idea of anarchist states and anarchist prisons is obscene.

Even if we were to naively accept that minarchism were somehow desirable, it would only lead right back to full-scale statism. Legitimized power never remains still, and attempts to control its growth have forever proven futile.

Chomsky is never a good source for what anarchy means. He’s made a career of watering down anarchy to better appeal to a white middle-class North American audience, even going as far as to state that government isn’t inherently bad and that it can be somehow “reformed” with what he calls “real democracy” and “social control over investment”. Far too many anarchists look to Chomsky as an authority on anarchy, when he’s clearly a minarchist.

He also likens anarchy to the enlightenment and classical liberalism in his talks and writings, which is a very Western-centric thing to do, especially since the enlightenment oversaw the divvying up of Africa by European imperialists and other horrifically racist and genocidal acts. So it’s probably not a good idea to associate anarchy with that authoritarian chapter of history... While it’s true that the political movement that first branded itself as anarchism originated in Europe, anarchy thrived unnamed in every corner of the world before and after The Enlightenment, long before European philosophers began to pine for a return to it.

I don’t consider Chomsky to be an anarchist (because he’s demonstrably not one), so his definitions aren’t that important to me. But unfortunately they’re important to a lot of minarchists and liberals that call themselves anarchists, and they keep repeating his flawed definitions to newcomers, creating further confusion that reverberates for years.

The EXPERTISE of the Cobbler

The likely source for Chomsky’s confusion over the anarchist definition of authority is the originator of collectivist anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin. In his rough and unfinished text “What is Authority” (1870), he spoke of “the authority of the cobbler”:

“Does it follow that I drive back every authority? The thought would never occur to me. When it is a question of boots, I refer the matter to the authority of the cobbler; when it is a question of houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For each special area of knowledge I speak to the appropriate expert. But I allow neither the cobbler nor the architect nor the scientist to impose upon me. [...] But I recognize no infallible authority, even in quite exceptional questions [...] So there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.” -Bakunin

“Voluntary authority and subordination” is essentially what every liberal insists they stand for. They claim capitalism is a voluntary contract between people. They say workers voluntarily choose to be subordinate to their bosses or the state in exchange for wages or security. Anarchists need to reject Bakunin’s language if we’re to differentiate ourselves from these authoritarian ideologies and truly take a stand against authority.

With that text, Bakunin was trying to articulate the difference between expertise and authority, but did it in a confusing and roundabout way that has enabled generations of minarchists to mistakenly identify as anarchists and promote a broken definition of anarchy. Expertise isn’t hierarchical unless the expert is deliberately enshrined with authority. Being good at something needn’t give you the right to use your craft to rule people.

The guy made a poorly-worded argument 150 years ago, when the European anarchist movement was still in its infancy and the terminology was still being developed. It was a small part of a rough draft that he never completed, and it is often quoted without any context by people who obviously haven’t read the whole text or the associated works that he wrote around the same time.

We obviously don’t need to hold up everything every anarchist ever wrote as some kind of immovable anarchist canon. We don’t cling to Bakunin’s rampant antisemitism, so why cling to his half-baked bootmaker blunder?

Diluting the Goals of Anarchy

The oft-cited example of saving someone from being struck by a car simply has nothing to do with authority. It’s a fundamental misrepresentation of the anarchist concept of authority, and I hope this piece will help shift the discourse away from it. Every fucked up political ideology out there, from monarchy to neoliberalism to fascism, claims to be for justified-authority and against unjustified-authority. We know it’s horseshit when liberals deem bombing school buses in Syria or Iraq a “justifiable” action to “protect freedom” or “acceptable collateral damage”, so why would we adopt their dangerous doublespeak to define anarchy? As soon as you start making allowances for authority, you’ve stopped advocating for anarchy.

Pushing “justified authority” as Chomsky keeps attempting to do is a pointless exercise that only confuses the uninformed and gives us scores of middle class baby-anarchists who come in not understanding the basic underpinnings of anarchy. They then use that misunderstanding to equate anarchy with all kinds of authoritarian shit, even including states. It makes the line that separates liberalism from anarchy increasingly thin. And quite frankly, it breeds shit anarchists.

I’ll finish this chapter by quoting an “anarchist” on a popular anarchist forum who is a perfect example of what I’m talking about:

“I feel it’s necessary to have authorities that can perpetuate and protect certain things — for example, I think an unrevocable societal constitution that every autonomous community should follow is a good thing — and that there should also be codified laws — with the aim to protect individual liberty.”

“Resultantly, I feel like there should be authorities as there are now that ensure that those laws — such as the right to education to a good standard, or that housing or medical training or care should be of a certain standard, or the right to process through a justice system. Necessarily these authorities should have the ability to change situations where these laws/rights are breached. As an extension, I also find myself believing in a well-trained voluntary police force that can undertake these duties (though one of course that is as directly democratic as possible and revocable and responsible in the anarchist tradition).”

“In this way I find myself drawn more to a desire for a “state” of federated anarchistic communities that function as an anarchist society might although within a greater framework of a limited system that wields authority.”

A constitution that everyone has to follow, a “democratic” police force, a state, a system that wields authority. None of this is any different than the liberal status quo. This person has no understanding of anarchy and yet feels the need to identify as an anarchist because they would prefer liberal society be more democratic..? It’s nonsensical. And yet the post was well-regarded by other “anarchists” who replied in agreement, with two of them even citing Rojava as an “anarchist state” that matched up to these stated ideals.

An “anarchist state”. An “anarchist state”…

Authority is a Moral Hierarchy

A hierarchy is an artificial construct that depends on the principle of authority. Authority is the socially-enforced rule that the ruler in a hierarchical relationship gives commands and the subordinate obeys under threat of (socially legitimized) violence. If I offered my boss a meal, or saved them from drowning, I wouldn’t be exercising authority over them. That action alone doesn’t create a hierarchy. But just by being my boss, they are constantly exercising authority over me and I’m constantly their subordinate. I am ruled by them. I am constrained; controlled by the boss-worker hierarchy, by my boss’s constant assertion of authority over me.

Authority is a deliberate social construct that divides people into either rulers or obeyers; using violence and the notion of “morality” to maintain this coercive system. Talking back to your boss, refusing their authority: That’s a big “moral” no no. Society uses this coercive conditioning to uphold the oppressive dynamic and to keep you controlled and obedient. The system will not tolerate any real dissent against its law. Instead it will condition you to realign your perceptions until you finally accept its law as normal.

Proponents of “free-market” capitalism promote supposedly “voluntary” hierarchies (such as the relationship between owners and workers). This is merely an excuse for normalizing structural violence against the less-powerful, a process that is legitimized by appealing to authority. These hierarchies aren’t voluntary in any quantifiable way, since we’d be punished by society in various ways if we chose to ignore them (say, by refusing to work or by killing our bosses and taking the true value of our labor). “Justifiable hierarchy” / “legitimate authority” is an eerily similar concept as “voluntary” labor under capitalism.

On Anarchist Parenting

Authority is a structurally violent institution. It has nothing to do with the act of rendering aid to a child; feeding them or preventing them from falling into a pool and drowning. A parent-child relationship needn’t be a hierarchy unless you go out of your way to construct it as such.

Parenting is only hierarchical when parents choose to force authority on their child. An anarchist parent would use child-rearing methods that treat the child as an autonomous individual and not as a subordinate to their authoritarian demands. Anarchist parents see themselves as caretakers, not authorities, and legitimizing parental authority with the excuse of “justifiable hierarchy” is a scapegoat. It’s not justified. Using violent coercion to control children is not anarchy. Parents don’t need to be tyrants to raise children.

Countless anarchist communities throughout history, including the modern-day Hadza in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa have shown us that the parent-child relationship doesn’t need to be the violent dictatorship it has become in capitalist-industrial society.

Yet a lot of “anarcho-minarchists”, for lack of a better term, insist on seeing the “ownership” authoritarian society grants them over their children as a “justified hierarchy”. It’s such an odd argument. If they’re okay with applying authoritarianism to their own children, they’d obviously be fine with using it to dominate strangers too. It’s baffling to see people claim the domination of children is compatible with anarchy just because it’s something they choose to engage in.

“Civilized” people make the mistake of constructing dangerous, unhealthy and authoritarian environments for us to live in that completely ignore the burning desire every child has for freedom, play, exploration and learning through first-hand experience.

We force children into metal carriages that take them to school-buildings where strangers are paid to dictate rigid lesson plans to them for years. Children spend their entire childhoods being moved from room to room, forcibly trained to function under the system as obedient civilized workers. Most children aren’t even allowed to play outdoors because the dangers of industrial civlization are so frightening to their parents.

Industrial civilization is simply unfit to nurture human life. The perverse ways we structure our societies around danger, authority, fear, coercion, punishment, conformity and obedience isn’t something that should be forced on children, or anyone. As anarchists, we should be tearing down these authoritarian structures instead of making excuses to maintain them. Children don’t need authority, they need anarchy.

Watered-Down Anarchy

Certain people attach themselves to the flawed collectivist-anarchist definition of authority and then decide they can justify all sorts of hierarchies with it. That revisionism then enters the wider anarchist sphere and is seldom analyzed for its deficiencies since so many collectivist “anarchists” are really minarchists in disguise. Minarchists see no real problem with authority so long as it benefits them materially. Sadly, these minarchists largely control the discourse in many anarchist spaces where the idea of true anarchy is simply unfathomable. Most people born and raised under authoritarian systems have tremendous trouble parting with the faux security-blanket that a lifetime of archy has imbibed them with. Then the absurd idea of “good hierarchy” becomes normalized in these spaces and is used to keep anarchy from forming.

Anarchists need to make a strong distinction between the words “authority”, “force” and “expertise” so language misunderstandings don’t lead to minarchism suppressing anarchy.

“Justifiable authority” is one of several fundamental misunderstandings of anarchy that need to be thrown out before further diluting our (really very easily defined) objectives. We tend to overthink things and that leads to mountains of round-about revisionist theory that only detracts from anarchy and leaves people confused about what even our most basic objectives are.

Every genocidal dictator considered the hierarchies they upheld to be justifiable. Anarchists know better. Anarchy is, was and always will be the outright rejection of all archy.

When you compromise and make excuses to construct hierarchies; what you’re doing is no longer anarchy.

Anarchy vs. Communalism: Bookchin, Lifestylism, Ideology, and Greenwashing

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-anarchy-vs-communalism-bookchin-lifestylism-ideology-greenwashing>. Retrieved on 2019-01-23 from raddle.me

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Blasted Lifestylists!

The father of communalism; Murray Bookchin, long identified as an anarchist but later in life penned scathing attacks against anarchists. He largely invented an imaginary schism between what he termed ‘lifestylist’ anarchists and socialists, denouncing ‘lifestylists’ as being beneath him.

Even though he eventually abandoned anarchism in favor of his communalist ideology, this elitist divide he created between ‘lifestylism’ and socialism continues to reverberate today, with some social-anarchists even going as far as to distance themselves from the individualist aspects of anarchy that largely defined the movement from the beginning. This manufactured divide has greatly assisted in fragmenting anarchists into two opposing factions and led to needless infighting and distraction.

He lobbed the accusation of ‘lifestylism’ against anarchists who live a life that, to them, embodies the spirit of anarchy but, in his view, do not work hard enough to achieve revolutionary social organization and the overthrow of capitalism. He also used it as an insult towards anarchists he saw as promoting what he termed “anti-rationalism”.

In reality, Bookchin was creating a false dichotomy; something he did often in his writings so he could then promote his patented solutions to problems that were often non-existent... Individualist anarchists are perfectly capable of both living anarchically in the current moment, as well as organizing for a future beyond capitalism.

A lot of the most successful anarchist movements in the world today stem from individualist tendencies. These movements are then aided by the social-anarchist concept of ‘prefiguration’ to create movements within the current system that replicate the conditions that would exist in an anarchist society. This allows the people exposed to these movements to see that anarchy works, and become comfortable with the idea of a post-capitalist world. Food Not Bombs is a great example of this.

Bookchin on anarchism:

[Anarchism] represents in its authentic form a highly individualistic outlook that fosters a radically unfettered lifestyle, often as a substitute for mass action—is far better suited to articulate a Proudhonian single-family peasant and craft world than a modern urban and industrial environment. I myself once used this political label, but further thought has obliged me to conclude that, its often-refreshing aphorisms and insights notwithstanding, it is simply not a social theory.

Regrettably, the use of socialistic terms has often prevented anarchists from telling us or even understanding clearly what they are: individualists whose concepts of autonomy originate in a strong commitment to personal liberty rather than to social freedom, or socialists committed to a structured, institutionalized, and responsible form of social organization.

In fact anarchism represents the most extreme formulation of liberalism’s ideology of unfettered autonomy, culminating in a celebration of heroic acts of defiance of the state. Anarchism’s mythos of self-regulation (auto nomos)—the radical assertion of the individual over or even against society and the personalistic absence of responsibility for the collective welfare—leads to a radical affirmation of the all-powerful will so central to Nietzsche’s ideological peregrinations. Some self-professed anarchists have even denounced mass social action as futile and alien to their private concerns and made a fetish of what the Spanish anarchists called grupismo, a small-group mode of action that is highly personal rather than social.

He penned this attack against anarchy late in his life while he was working to build communalism into his final legacy, perhaps hoping he would go down in history with Marx as the father of a powerful socialist ideology that could outlive him and impact the world for centuries. He even warned that if his communalist ideology was not adopted by the world at large, it would result in the destruction of everything.

Equating anarchism with liberalism, when he spent years of his life identifying as an anarchist is a rather shameless attempt at rewriting history in order to sell his new vanity project. It’s a true shame that he ended his long history in radical politics on such a sour and self-defeating note.

Communalism: Murray’s Prescribed Cure for Lifestylism

Bookchin’s politics evolved greatly throughout his life, starting with Stalinism and then Trotskyism in his youth, before he found anarcho-communism. In the 1970s, disillusioned with the authoritarian nature of the Leninism that dominated the worldwide socialist scene, he stated that he felt closer to free-market libertarians; who unlike the totalitarian Marxist-Leninists, will readily defend the rights of the individual. Later, he developed a series of interrelated ideologies; anarchist social ecology, post-scarcity anarchism and libertarian municipalism. He increasingly spoke out against the innate individualism of the anarchist movement, and finally broke with anarchism completely to form communalism. He was a professor and taught students his political theories.

This is a description of communalism in his own words (while also managing to disparage both anarchism and Marxism in the same breath, in true Bookchin fashion):

The choice of the term Communalism to encompass the philosophical, historical, political, and organizational components of a socialism for the twenty-first century has not been a flippant one. The word originated in the Paris Commune of 1871, when the armed people of the French capital raised barricades not only to defend the city council of Paris and its administrative substructures but also to create a nationwide confederation of cities and towns to replace the republican nation-state.

Communalism as an ideology is not sullied by the individualism and the often explicit antirationalism of anarchism; nor does it carry the historical burden of Marxism’s authoritarianism as embodied in Bolshevism. It does not focus on the factory as its principal social arena or on the industrial proletariat as its main historical agent; and it does not reduce the free community of the future to a fanciful medieval village. Its most important goal is clearly spelled out in a conventional dictionary definition: Communalism, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, is ”a theory or system of government in which virtually autonomous local communities are loosely bound in a federation.”

Communalism brings production and certain property under the control of municipal assemblies, who decide how property should be best distributed to meet the needs of the confederation.

While not being a state by the most common definition (since the political process is strictly localized), municipal assemblies could still be described as a form of hierarchical government. Communalism is a big step up over most other forms of government, attempting to curtail and decentralize the power structures we are governed by, but it’s not anarchy.

Localized power structures are still very corruptible. They still create hierarchy. They can still grow out of control. Similarly to ancient Greece’s democracy; communalism deliberately allows for majority rule (or democracy-by-the-majority). This limitation should instantly disqualify it as being a form of anarchy, as voter-hierarchies can easily be exploited by authoritarians to exclude minority groups from the political process, and thus deny them the right to self-determination. Any society that encourages the majority to force their will on a minority (thus creating a clear hierarchy) can’t honestly be described as anarchist in nature. Bookchin reinforces this further:

The anarcho-communist notion of a very loose ‘federation of autonomous communes’ is replaced with a confederation from which its components, functioning in a democratic manner through citizens’ assemblies, may withdraw only with the approval of the confederation as a whole.

So, according to Bookchin, a community which joins a confederation “may withdraw only with the approval of the confederation as a whole.” This is probably the worst aspect of his majority-rule fetishization, as it locks entire communities into his system forever, whether those who didn’t want the system like it or not. Any organization that forbids you from withdrawing from it is clearly at odds with libertarian ideals and the right to freedom of association, so it’s really dishonest of him to talk about ‘libertarian’ municipalism when it’s anything but:

[Libertarian municipalism’s goal is to] create in embryonic form the institutions that can give power to a people generally ... In short, it is through the municipality that people can reconstitute themselves from isolated monads into an innovative body politic and create an existentially vital, indeed protoplasmic civil life that has continuity and institutional form as well as civic content. I refer here to the block organizations, neighborhood assemblies, town meetings, civic confederations, and public arenas for discourse that go beyond such episodic, single issue demonstrations and campaigns, valuable as they may be to redress social injustices.

Put into practice, I believe communalism can initially be a successful departure from the unwieldy nation-state monolith that plagues the world today and a reversion to the city-states that were once prevalent in ancient Greece at the dawn of civilization. Bookchin writes fondly of classical Athenian democracy, which he uses to glorify his romantic view of Western civilization.

But does simply returning to an earlier state of civilization go far enough? Will an effective micro-state not morph back into a super-state as it grows and faces both internal and external pressures? Decentralization is admirable, but is it enough to successfully safeguard us from statism? And are Athenian democracy and Western civilization even things we want to reproduce, when both allow for the brutal oppression of minorities, were both built on slavery, and institutionalized the denial of human rights to anyone that wasn’t a member of the privileged class?

Bookchin’s ideas for ‘libertarian’ majority-rule democracy are deeply flawed and really can’t be described as being anything other than authoritarian:

The minority must have patience and allow a majority decision to be put into practice... Municipal minorities [must] defer to the majority wishes of participating communities.

Any anarchist reading this should immediately be alarmed at the unjust hierarchical implications it presents. White people putting their priorities ahead of black people, men forcing their will on women, Christians excluding Muslims, polluters shutting down environmentalists, heterosexuals subjugating homosexuals... Whichever voting body has the highest numbers (or best propaganda) can effectively rule over the minority. It’s almost as if Bookchin came full circle, returning to the Stalinism of his youth after his flirtation with individualism and anarchy.

While direct democracy is one of several decision-making mechanisms anarchists may utilize, communalism doesn’t simply allow for direct democracy; it requires it. Enshrines it in law. In making his case for direct democracy, Bookchin asserts that the only other option anarchists have at our disposal is consensus democracy. He then proceeds to brutally attack the consensus decision-making method, associating it with anarcho-primitivism (which he vocally loathes, even equating it to Nazism) and deems it ‘authoritarian’. This allows him to offer an exact prescription to the ‘problem’ of multi-layered anarchist decision making in the form of his definitive, structured ideology and its rules.

Organizational structures such as those communalism revolves around should be treated as a means, not an end. Basing an entire social system around a specific structured mode of organization that was designed to be implemented under the conditions present in the 1990s is restrictive and shortsighted.

Anarchy allows for communities to be adaptable to the conditions present in the place and time where the community exists. Rigid ideological structures should always be avoided as they rapidly become outmoded. Historically, communities revolving around political ideologies tend to become dogmatic, and as a result fail to adapt as conditions prove unfavorable to the demands of the ideology.

For instance: Marxism requires that a highly advanced industrial economy be present before Marxist communism can be implemented. Most of the societies where Marxism was attempted lacked these conditions, and destructive policies were implemented in order to speed up industrialization (including mass-displacement of people); eventually leading to the collapse of the societies and ecological damage that will continue to be felt for millennia. As Marx had designed his economic model to function under specific conditions, Marxist leaders attempted to force their societies to fit a mold they simply didn’t fit.

The unwillingness to sway from ideological dogma; however impractical the planned system proves in practice, has frequently led to disaster. So any political movement that has strict guidelines for how society should be structured and governed has big weaknesses right out of the gate. Anarchy requires flexibility, because all forms of social planning can lead to unexpected hierarchies popping up. The avoidance of hierarchies needs to be more important than sticking to a pre-written ideology if we are to pursue anarchy.

Dedicated ideologues often tarnish anarchy as being ‘vague’ and lacking in exact instruction. I’d argue this is exactly why anarchy succeeds and manages to be so ageless; reinventing itself with every new generation of revolutionaries. Prescribing a one-size-fits-all solution to life is impractical in an ever changing, multi-cultural world. Especially while we’re experiencing unprecedented worldwide social and ecological collapses. The greatest strength of anarchy is its flexibility. Anarchists have long laughed in the face of those who would have us live by their rigid rules.

A Green Anarchist Perspective

Green anarchists like myself are often most critical of Bookchin’s ideas because of his concept of ‘post-scarcity’; which to anyone paying attention to the catastrophic mass extinction event we’re in the midst of, is dangerously idealistic. Resources don’t cease to be scarce when socialism is adopted; the reality is that resources are dwindling all over the planet after centuries of over-extraction; including by socialist states. Once those resources run out, there’s no getting them back, so an ideology that envisions a ‘post-scarcity’ economy is intrinsically flawed.

Bookchin and other socialists imagine a society where regular people, rather than states, have the power to determine policy. And they imagine this society will somehow be spared the same destructive pitfalls of capitalist society. But there’s no reason to assume that.

We have centuries of history showing us that people will not altruistically opt for policies that will put the ecosystem or minority groups (especially indigenous and immigrant groups) ahead of their immediate personal interests.

Just as people now vote for politicians that loudly promote disastrous environmental and social policies in order to safeguard their own privileges in society, history shows us they would continue to make damaging decisions if the system moved from representative democracy to direct democracy. To imagine that everyone in a society is capable of acting unselfishly and putting other people and other lifeforms ahead of their own families is foolhardy. They will use their voting power to protect their own immediate interests at the expense of everything else. That’s how power works. It corrupts everything in its path absolutely, whether its wielded by a politician or a private citizen is irrelevant.

Bookchin saw technology as a mode of revolution, and promoted using technology in ecologically sustainable ways, but green anarchists are often critical of the technologies Bookchin envisioned. We see them as inherently isolating and hierarchical. A position Bookchin scoffs at.

One of the technologies he promoted was cybernation, which is essentially ‘rule by machine’. Tasks are assigned, decisions made and resources distributed by computers; largely diminishing an individual’s self-determination and leaving it up to software algorithms. Like all software solutions, cybernation could potentially be hijacked by malicious actors who could seize control of the system and give themselves untold power. Cybernation is also exposed to the personal biases of the programmers who write the software. The programmers effectively govern the governor.

Bookchin often wrote enthusiastically about the revolutionary potential he saw in such technologies:

Bourgeois society, if it achieved nothing else, revolutionized the means of production on a scale unprecedented in history. This technological revolution, culminating in cybernation, has created the objective, quantitative basis for a world without class rule, exploitation, toil or material want. The means now exist for the development of the rounded man, the total man, freed of guilt and the workings of authoritarian modes of training, and given over to desire and the sensuous apprehension of the marvelous. It is now possible to conceive of man’s future experience in terms of a coherent process in which the bifurcations of thought and activity, mind and sensuousness, discipline and spontaneity, individuality and community, man and nature, town and country, education and life, work and play are all resolved, harmonized, and organically wedded in a qualitatively new realm of freedom.

Advanced technologies can forever alter the way we live our lives, detach us from our ecosystems and train us to seek fleeting relief from technologies, even as those technologies forever degrade and pollute the ecosystems we depend on to survive. It’s easy to ignore the damage industry does to our ecosystems when we can use the technology it produces to escape from the reality of our situation... At least until the ecosystems become so degraded that they can no longer sustain our lives and we’re forced to look up from our digital sanctuaries to gasp for air.

Bookchin’s emphasis on the modern urban city in his theories will give pause to anyone who has studied the history of civilization and its disastrous effect on every ecosystem it comes into contact with. City life has always alienated us from the land and what it produces for us, creating the depressing situation where most urban dwellers raised in vast concrete deserts have little respect for the natural world or want of preserving it. When the repercussions of our actions towards the ecosystem are completely hidden from us, it’s unlikely we’ll change our behavior and act to preserve whatever ecological diversity the planet has left on the fringes of the grim industrial wastelands we call civilization.

A society structured around advanced technology can even create new elite classes of technologically advanced people and exploited underclasses whose lands are used to mine and manufacture the devices the technological class grow dependent on. It’s easy to see how this cycle can lead to devastating hierarchies.

Bookchin claimed technology and agriculture can be made sustainable with new advances, but years after his death, technology has improved greatly, while the destruction to the planet caused by it has increased tenfold. The science is showing us that the damage industry has done to the world’s ecosystems could very well lead to our own extinction in the near future.

Bookchin wrote:

The development of giant factory complexes and the use of single or dual-energy sources are responsible for atmospheric pollution. Only by developing smaller industrial units and diversifying energy sources by the extensive use of clean power (solar, wind and water power) will it be possible to reduce industrial pollution. The means for this radical technological change are now at hand.

Technologists have developed miniaturized substitutes for large-scale industrial operation—small versatile machines and sophisticated methods for converting solar, wind and water energy into power usable in industry and the home. These substitutes are often more productive and less wasteful than the large-scale facilities that exist today.

While it is true that ‘green’ fuels can be less destructive than ‘dirty’ fuels, they still remain incredibly destructive, and by no means can they be sourced from a single ecosystem as Bookchin imagines in his writings.

The machines Bookchin speaks of are built using a large assortment of materials that need to be sourced from different ecosystems all over the world. The processes to extract the materials are destructive, the processes to transport the materials to the manufacturing plants and distribution points are destructive, and the waste products created during manufacturing are destructive. There are currently no viable solutions for any of these problems, and every new technology introduced to the market has instead created yet more inequality, warfare and environmental destruction; especially for the Global South that is exploited by the West for its natural resources and cheap (or slave) labor.

Solar panels and wind turbines depend on dirty mining to acquire the minerals needed for their construction, and massive energy use (usually coal) during manufacturing. Mining the quartz that solar panels are made from causes the lung disease silicosis in the impoverished miners. Then, once the quartz is transported to the factories, the manufacturing process creates vats of toxic waste (silicon tetrachloride) that is disposed of in random fields near the factories in China, contaminating the soil and water, and making entire rural populations sick.

From “China’s Communist-Capitalist Ecological Apocalypse” by Richard Smith, Real-World Economics Review no. 71:

When exposed to humid air, silicon tetrachloride turns into acids and poisonous hydrogen chloride gas, which can make people dizzy and cause breathing difficulties. Ren Bingyan, a professor of material sciences at Hebei Industrial University, contacted by the Post, told the paper that “the land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in its place… It is… Poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it.” When the dumping began, crops wilted from the white dust, which sometimes rose in clouds several feet off the ground and spread over the fields as the liquid dried. Village farmers began to faint and became ill. And at night, villagers said “the factory’s chimneys released a loud whoosh of acrid air that stung their eyes and made it hard to breath.”

Solar panel, wind turbine and battery production fuels colonialism, slavery, war, hunger, fossil fuel burning and ecocide. Calling these energies “green” is really a bold-faced lie and just the latest example of industrialism giving itself a skip-deep makeover that will quickly fall apart when the evidence piles up too high for the media to ignore. By promoting these destructive industries, Bookchin aids their shameless greenwashing.

Bookchin:

The absolute negation of the centralized economy is regional ecotechnology— a situation in which the instruments of production are molded to the resources of an ecosystem.

The idea that rapidly advancing technologies can be distributed equally among billions of people (which they would need to be if we care at all about preventing power-hierarchies and inequality from forming), or that all people would even want their lives to be governed by these technologies is naive at best, or a malicious falsehood aimed at selling books and “Institute for Social Ecology” certificates at worst.

Bookchin’s insistence that industry is only destructive because of capitalism, and would instead be liberating under (decentralized) socialism has no basis in reality, as the technologies he romanticizes remain destructive to the environment and are hierarchy-forming regardless of the social system in place. They also require resources that simply cannot be sourced from a single locale. This fact alone greatly diminishes his theory.

Bookchin:

The new declasses of the twentieth century are being created as a result of the bankruptcy of all social forms based on toil. They are the end products of the process of propertied society itself and of the social problems of material survival. In the era when technological advances and cybernation have brought into question the exploitation of man by man, toil, and material want in any form whatever, the cry “Black is beautiful” or “Make love, not war” marks the transformation of the traditional demand for survival into a historically new demand for life.

Bookchin’s plans for localized, ecologically-sound, self-supporting, automated micro-industries unfortunately remain a pipe dream; vaporware if you will. In the 21^st century, as the Earth’s ecosystems collapse all around us under the strain of industrial exploitation, as forests burn, lands flood and countless species of plants and animals go extinct forever, his vision of distributing industrial technology equally and freely to everyone on the planet becomes less and less relevant to our reality. These ideas aren’t something to base a political movement for lasting social change on. Not on a planet being rapidly exterminated by industry.

Bookchin eventually broke with anarchism completely when he finalized the guidelines of his communalist ideology. Today a lot of his more practical ideas have been implemented by the celebrated Rojava community in western Kurdistan, which has had mixed results in achieving his vision.

His attacks on individualist anarchists (especially of the anti-civ flavor), have provided decades of fuel for collectivist anarchist ideologues to villainize and purge non-collectivists from our spaces. A lot of these people soon follow in Bookchin’s footsteps and abandon anarchy altogether in favor of various structured ideologies including Marxism-Leninism, transhumanism and communalism.

Do Anarchists Vote in State Elections?

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-do-anarchists-vote-in-state-elections>. Retrieved on 2019-01-23 from raddle.me

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It obviously depends on the individual anarchist whether or not they choose to participate in the political process, but I’m writing this piece to point out that the act of voting in state elections stands in direct contradiction with anarchy. If an anarchist chooses to vote, that action has nothing to do with furthering anarchy or anarchist principles. No anarchist worth their salt would pressure other anarchists into voting for their favorite politician.

I’m always staggered by the absurdity of anarchists stumping for politicians... Every time election season is approaching, certain self-proclaimed anarchists flood anarchist spaces on social media to shame us into voting. They always make dramatic moralist claims like “If you don’t vote for this politician, their opponent will put my life in danger. If you don’t support this “progressive” ruler, you obviously don’t care about (insert marginalized group) and are no comrade of mine!”

Voting for a political candidate in a representative democracy is a direct legitimization of their authority — over you and everyone in your community. It’s like inviting them to rule you. By voting, you’re declaring your support for the system and appointing a politician to act as your political representative for however many years their term lasts for. That politician now speaks for you, makes your decisions for you, acts in your name.

By supporting a politician, you’re declaring your approval for whatever actions that ruler then takes during their reign in power. The more power the position has, the more harm they’ll be able to do. If you’re voting for a president of a nation state, for example, you can bet they’ll make decisions that will cause death and suffering for countless people.

There is no way to vote for change under capitalism. The system in a neoliberal capitalist state only exists to serve the elite wealthy classes. To enable them to horde more and more wealth by exploiting your labor and to protect that wealth from you. Socialists who think they can reform the state from within are not anarchists, even if they claim to be. A lot of democratic socialists will claim to be anarchists to get you to support their candidate. They’ll insist lots of anarchists have joined their organization. They’ll sometimes even claim their candidate will fight for anarchy if they get elected.

Democratic socialists accept the state as a legitimate vector for change and believe it can be made to work for the people if we just elect the right sort of politicians; typically “progressive” liberals that support some friendlier policies and promise to use their power to advocate for social justice.

Anarchists, on the other hand, reject all authority as illegitimate and don’t accept being ruled by anyone; no matter how “progressive” the prospective ruler professes to be. Anyone telling you they’re an anarchist while trying to get you to choose a “better” ruler, or a “lesser” evil is either lying to you or to themselves.

Putting nicer liberals in positions of power might seem like a good idea on first inspection, but it ignores the simple reality that all power corrupts. All throughout history, no system of rulers and obeyers has made us freer. Every single power hierarchy has rapidly descended into tyranny. Giving a person power and expecting them to not use it to cement even more power for themselves is as foolish as Charlie Brown trying to kick the football while Lucy holds it. Power is an addictive drug and people that possess it can no longer be trusted to serve your interests when those interests now completely contradict with their own. The powerful have very little in common with the powerless.

Trying to “fix” hierarchies so they appear, on the surface, to be less brutally unjust, can actually hurt anarchy, because it convinces radicals to compromise and settle-for and grow complacent by accepting a supposedly kinder ruler.

How this typically plays out:

The ruler the radicals helped elect is quickly corrupted by the system that has granted them so much power that their ego is in overdrive. As the “voice of the people”, the ruler is convinced they can do no wrong and that their actions are in service of “the greater good” or “the revolution”.

The people who promoted and voted for the ruler, after eagerly celebrating their success, will spend the next several years working hard to justify to their egos the increasingly horrible things the ruler then inevitably does while in office.

They’ll now spend their energy smugly explaining to everyone who will listen that the ruler’s oppressive actions are in their best interests ultimately. That the ruler is simply thinking ahead; playing 3D chess, that compromises have to be made to aid the revolution. That reform takes time. That they can’t be expected to not take money from lobbyists or deport migrants or imprison poor people or wage war overseas because “that’s how the system works”. They have to work within the confines of the system now, so they are able to one day do good; when they have enough money and power to accomplish it!

The “progressive” politician will soon be indistinguishable from every other politician shilling their way up the hierarchy, and their radical supporters will have abandoned every radical inclination they ever had to justify supporting their “team”. Empty revolutionary rhetoric will have replaced anarchist methods like direct action and mutual aid, and words like “socialism”, “progressive” and “revolution” that were used in the political campaign will have been stripped of all their value and meaning, convincing everyone that socialism is just more of the same and not worth fighting for in the future.

The wonderful thing is, the people that stumped so fervently; shaming everyone into voting for their shiny new ruler will never have to accept any culpability for their part in bringing the ruler to power. The whole point of democracy is to shift responsibility from the individual to the intangible and indomitable system. The institutions of democracy work hard to convince the individual they have no right to self-determination beyond casting a vote for the system’s pre-approved ruler A or pre-approved ruler B.

See, only the system can provide for you, citizen. Trust in the system. The system is great. Don’t fight the system. You can’t defeat the system. Just ask the system for freedom and maybe you’ll be granted some — If the system is feeling generous anyway. Vote for ruler B today!

Anarchists! Pull yourselves together. Authority simply cannot be voted away.

Emma Goldman:

“Participation in elections means the transfer of one’s will and decisions to another, which is contrary to the fundamental principles of anarchism.”

Do Anarchists Support Free Speech?

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-do-anarchists-support-free-speech>. Retrieved from raddle.me

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“Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g. “downsizing” for layoffs, “servicing the target” for bombing, in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable. It may also refer to intentional ambiguity in language or to actual inversions of meaning. In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth.”

The concept of “free speech” is fundamentally flawed, and has historically been used to convince citizens of states that they have “rights” that are gifted to them by the supposedly benevolent and generous state.

In actuality, the state doesn’t give you rights; it controls them, limits them, denies you them. It uses its monopoly on violence to censor, stalk, spy on, imprison and terrorize anyone that would threaten to subvert its power.

When an authority grants you “free speech”, what they’ve really done is take away your freedom to speak, and then allow certain people (typically the favored social class) to say certain things under certain conditions. There’s nothing “free” about this. You’re still forbidden from speech that would threaten the state or those it empowers. You’re still legally viable for slandering powerful people that can afford as many lawyers as it takes to sue you into bankruptcy. You’re still beaten to a bloody pulp (or worse) for talking back to a cop. You’ll still be imprisoned, enslaved and murdered by the state and its enforcers for being the wrong race or the wrong gender or the wrong sexuality or the wrong religion or the wrong class and daring to resist your oppressors.

Free speech is a lie told to us by our rulers to convince us we need to be ruled by them.

Anarchists are aware enough to realize the state does not grant us any kind of freedom. The entire existence of the state is predicated on taking freedom away from us to empower the rich and powerful minority that the state exists to serve. So as anarchists; as people who don’t want to be ruled, people who see the blatant lies our rulers tell us for what they are, it would make little sense for us to support an inherently Orwellian concept as “free speech”. Much more honest words for this concept would be “controlled speech” or “state-approved speech”.

Really, when the state talks about freedom of speech, they’re most often talking about the freedom to be a hateful bigot — since bigotry is really the only type of speech the state will go out of its way to protect. Bigotry allows the state to scapegoat undesirable groups and thus create gaping social divisions. If everyone is villainizing migrants or gays, those groups will serve as a fine distraction. Ensuring our rulers and their benefactors can live to exploit us for another day as we focus our rage at anyone but them.

According to the state, white supremacists are free to incite hatred against non-whites (which has often led to mass murder), but if someone were to say they think the president of the nation deserves to be stabbed for his crimes... Well, that person would promptly be carted off to prison for voicing such a dangerous idea.

Unfortunately, some people insist on using bigoted or otherwise oppressive language in anarchist spaces, claiming that free speech allows them to do so. Since we’ve established that free speech is nothing more than an insipid lie our rulers tell us in order to control us, it’s important that we reject the dishonest language of the state when talking about anarchy, and take a long hard look at the reasons someone would have for clinging to the state’s shrewd promises of “rights” and “freedoms” that simply don’t exist.

“Free speech” is not an anarchist principle in any way. Actual anarchist principles of course include direct action, mutual aid, taking a strong stance against authority in all its guises, as well as freedom of association. This means we are free to associate with whoever we want and free to avoid associating with people that would build authoritarian structures to oppress us.

So let’s talk about the people who enter anarchist spaces, direct slurs and hateful bigoted rhetoric at us, and then insist we accept their abuse because they have the sacred right to freedom of speech... These people simply have no understanding of anarchy. Their “right to free speech” that they insist we respect could only be granted to them by a state with a monopoly on violence. If someone comes into your space and calls you a racial slur, no institution should have the power to stop you from showing that person the door.

It takes an incredibly sheltered person to believe there should be no consequences for abuse. When someone is abusing you or people you care about, you should absolutely be free to take a stand and remove them from your space, no matter how many times the person cries “free speech!” as they’re telling you you’re a worthless (slur).

The “freedom” to scapegoat, demonize and demean people who are different from you really stands in direct contradiction with anarchy. Discriminating against people based on ability, race, gender or sexuality creates authority. It makes you an authoritarian. Your rhetoric directly alienates the people who belong to the groups you’re choosing to look down on in disgust and present as less-than human. By using demeaning language to chastise marginalized people for their perceived inadequacies, you’re upholding normative social roles, creating classes and subclasses and strengthening the authoritarian power structures that directly oppress any people that belong to minority groups.

For example, by using the word “faggot” as an insult, you effectively cast gay people as being worthy of scorn and derision. You assert authority over everyone who isn’t heterosexual and make life incredibly difficult for people that don’t meet the normative standards you’ve helped construct to maintain the social dominance of heterosexuals.

Anarchists can and will choose to not associate with people that claim they have a right to oppress others. Anarchists are anti-authoritarian to our core, and this means we don’t have to put up with hateful bigots in our spaces.

Do Anarchists Support Democracy?

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-do-anarchists-support-democracy>. <https://raddle.me/wiki/democracy>

Understanding Democracy

The word “democracy” comes from two Greek words:

demo- a combining form occurring in loanwords from Greek, where it meant “people.”

-cracy: a combining form occurring in loanwords from Greek, with the meaning “rule,” “government,” “governing body.”

So democracy literally means: “Rule by the people.” Or more specifically, the majority of the people.

In my mind, anyone that aims for us to be ruled, even by “the people” (as abstract and meaningless as that concept is) is not promoting anarchy. But unfortunately this view is not always shared by the people calling themselves anarchists today. It’s difficult for me to imagine that an anarchist; who is presumably opposed to authority in all its guises and hopefully rejects the very notion of rulers, would then consent to being ruled by “the people”... I know I sure as hell don’t want to be ruled by anyone. But a lot of anarchists continue to romanticize democracy, perhaps because they’re unable to break through the years of propaganda fed to them by the state and its schooling and media apparatuses.

From an early age, it’s hammered into us that democracy = freedom. Any anarchist will tell you that although most of us live in societies that are governed by forms of democracy, none of us have anything resembling freedom. Yet a lot of us make excuses to ourselves so we can continue to romanticize democracy... Tell a room full of anarchists that you oppose democracy and you’ll no doubt hear impassioned insistences that what we have now isn’t “real” democracy, but “if we had anarchism, we’d have “real” democracy and things would be different, because anarchism is the only real democracy!”

A lot of anarchists spend a lot of effort holding onto oppressive phantoms like democracy and go through great lengths to fuse these liberal concepts with anarchy, when we really have no reason to. Anarchists who insist anarchy and democracy are one and the same when democracy is responsible for an endless list of horrible atrocities do no service to anarchy.

Our rulers use democracy to separate us into in-groups and out-groups, pitting the majority group against the minority groups and giving everyone a false sense of control. We’re made to believe we have a say in how our lives are run because we get to participate in glorious democracy. Of course, all of us outside the ruling class continue to be exploited, living in perpetual servitude, and the only people who really benefit from democracy are the ruling class who use it to keep us alienated and distracted so we don’t rise up and kill them all for the debilitating misery they create. Anarchy rejects authority and it rejects the domination of majority groups over minority groups. Anarchy is about upholding each individual’s autonomy and dismantling the authority forced on us by oppressive actors.

Democracy grants authority to favored groups to oppress minority groups. Democracy ignores the autonomy of the individual in favor of the collective will of the dominant group. Democracy exists to enable rulers to uphold brutal power hierarchies. It’s really the full embodiment of authority; used to maintain the tyrannical capitalist-statist status quo all over the world today.

The Failure of Democracy

Democracy is the tyranny of the majority, however you try to window-dress it. In practice, all forms of democracy have been used by a majority group to control or otherwise dictate to a minority group. All forms of democracy have been used to smother autonomy, to stifle self-determination, and to absolve rulers of responsibility for their actions. How can a ruler be responsible for their atrocities when “the people” elected them and empowered them to commit those atrocities?

Though you’ll never hear democracy-fetishists mention it, Hitler was technically democratically elected in accordance with the German political system. His actions after being elected were largely supported by the majority group in Germany. All the atrocities he committed were done on behalf of that majority group; to strengthen the position of “Aryan” Christians in society at the expense of everyone else. The German people empowered Hitler to maintain their privilege at all cost.

There’s no reason so-called “real” democracy would be any different than the democracy that created nazi Germany. Participatory democracy would just allow more members of the dominant group to more directly participate in enacting brutal policies.

“Real” democracy won’t stop people from choosing to oppress others to benefit their own group. If the majority of WW2 Germans stood by and cheered while people were carted off to concentration camps, why would anyone think “real” democracy would have changed that? Throughout history, whenever a skilled propagandist points the finger at a minority group, the majority group tears them limb from limb. This is democracy in action. White supremacy and even genocide have been propped up with the power of democracy countless times.

Democracy or Anarchy?

So do anarchists support democracy? Not if those anarchists have a fully developed understanding of what anarchy entails. Not if they’re serious about liberating themselves from authority and crushing hierarchies as they form.

Democracy is really not compatible with anarchy in any permeable way. It could be a useful process for gauging the views of each member of a small group, but that shouldn’t be enough for us to make the claim that “anarchy is democratic”. Anarchy is the opposition to authority. It’s the struggle against oppression. The quest to limit suffering. We shouldn’t be claiming anarchy is defined by democracy; which is a specific system of government that demands people be ruled by other people.

If you ask 10 random anarchists whether they support democracy, you’re certain to get a mixed response. Every person you ask will be at a different point on their political journey, and some anarchists will spend a lot more time thinking about labor rights, housing, migrant aid and other pressing concerns, while putting very little philosophical thought into the nature of hierarchy and all the ways it manifests itself and becomes ingrained in our lives.

Collectivist-minded anarchists will usually insist on direct-democracy and consensus-democracy as decision-making mechanisms, but it frequently leads to problems when certain members of the group don’t fall in line with the majority’s agenda. The bigger the group, the more likely this is to happen. The minority members will inevitably grow frustrated at this oppression and either leave the group or be forced to conform in order to stay.

In practical terms, for example, this could mean all black people in a community could be alienated, marginalized or even forced to leave their homes altogether because the white majority have voted to ignore their concerns in order to safeguard white privilege. Democracy and marginalization tend to come as a group deal. “Power to the people” really means “power to the most powerful group of people”, and the more power the powerful group has, the less power the marginalized groups have.

The Authority of Democracy

Western democracy originated in ancient Greece. This political system granted democratic citizenship to free men, while excluding slaves, foreigners and women from political participation. In virtually all democratic governments throughout ancient and modern history, this was what democracy meant. An elite class of free men made all the decisions for everyone. Before Athens adopted democracy, aristocrats ruled society, so “rule by the people”, or the idea of a government controlled (in theory) by all its (free) male citizens instead of a few wealthy families seemed like a good deal. But really it was just a new iteration of Aristocracy rule rather than the revolution it’s painted as. The rich still rule society by feeding voters carefully constructed propaganda and keeping everyone poor, overworked and desperate to be granted basic needs by the state.

In democracies today, only legal citizens of a country are granted democracy. In a lot of countries, people who have been convicted of a “crime” are denied the right to vote, regardless of how long ago they served their sentence. In the US, this is used to deny voting rights to minority groups, who make up a large proportion of the prison population.

In some societies only a small minority group are allowed to participate in the democracy. In Apartheid South Africa, the minority group (European settlers) granted themselves democracy and excluded the native majority, using democracy to deprive the native population of the rights granted to European settlers. Anarchy, of course, is an absence of government; of rulers. Democracy aims for the individual to be governed, ruled, controlled by others. So its plain to see that anarchy is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.

There has been a lot written outlining why the concept of democracy simply cannot be made compatible with anarchy, yet a lot of people identifying as anarchists today refuse to let go of the idea of democracy as a revolutionary method, and insist it can somehow overcome its inherently hierarchical nature and long history of oppression. In all honestly, a lot of these people are simply confused minarchists that don’t actually want to abolish hierarchy; but instead minimize it.

Consensus Democracy?

Consensus democracy aims to get everyone in a group to agree to take a unified path of action. It sounds good in theory, but the only way to get everyone from disparate backgrounds and experiences to agree to the same thing is to water down the plan to such an extent that the action will likely become meaningless. Consensus democracy assumes the majority group won’t bully or peer pressure the minority group into folding to their will. It ignores the basic reality that some people will aggressively force their will on others, or at least shame or manipulate opponents into submission.

The whole concept of consensus democracy reminds me of that meme with the smug guy sitting at the booth with the “change my mind” sign; inviting his political opponents to debate him. I can safely say if I saw that guy sitting at that booth, I’d walk the other way. Why should anyone be put in a situation where they’re forced to expend all their energy to change someone’s mind? Just do your own thing and don’t worry about people that don’t want to participate in what you’re doing. If people have fundamental disagreements, then they don’t need to cooperate. It’s not the end of the world.

Fruitless attempts to get everyone to reach the same agreement is just the latest form of the bureaucratic meandering that has long sabotaged political action. After countless hours of heated debate, and a long series of compromises, the consensus reached (if it’s ever reached at all) will likely be very watered down from its initial form and be of little benefit to anyone in the group. A plan for concrete action will have been turned into a frustrating exercise in concession, tepid half-measures, and ultimately; inaction. All because the people who made the plan felt the need to gain the approval of a committee of naysayers before pursuing it.

Anarchy Doesn’t Need Democracy

Instead of a large group laboring to make democracy work so they can agree on a course of action, it would be far more productive for smaller groups made up of people with shared interests to splinter off and co-operate to follow their own plans that require no compromise because their interests are already aligned. Throughout history, democracy has existed to legitimize authority, providing justification for hierarchical power structures by framing every oppressive action the state takes against us as “the will of the people”. It has long enabled the powerful to crush the powerless. People who insist on associating anarchism with democracy are trying to legitimize anarchism, to associate it with comfortable institutions embraced by thoroughly indoctrinated liberals. But anarchy has no want or need for legitimization. Anarchy doesn’t need to be watered down to broaden its appeal to a public that is high on hierarchy.

Anarchists always oppose monarchy; the rule of one. We always oppose oligarchy; the rule of a few. So why wouldn’t we oppose democracy; the rule of many? Why should the many get to decide how you or I live our lives? A ruler is a ruler is a ruler. Democracy has been expertly wielded as a weapon by the elites in society. By combining democracy with meticulously-crafted propaganda, the powerful are able to control voters and manipulate them into voting against their own interests.

Democracy has forever been synonymous with class based societies. It has split entire countries into two barely-distinctive political parties (conservative and “progressive”) that are nevertheless permanently at each other’s throats. Even in its most libertarian-friendly forms, it has constantly failed to avert hierarchy, coercion and the authoritarian machinations of majority-groups.

You can’t strive to replace an artificial system as brutally hierarchical as democracy with a supposedly more egalitarian version of the same thing and call it anarchy. You have to throw the whole rotten system out.

Reject democracy. Reject the notion that you should be ruled by anyone. Embrace self-determination. Embrace anarchy.

Tankies and the Left-Unity Scam

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-tankies-and-the-left-unity-scam>. Retrieved on 2019-01-28 from raddle.me and raddle.me

What is a “tankie”?

A tankie is anyone that defends authoritarian state-capitalist dictators and the atrocities they’ve committed and continue to commit.

The term was originally coined when the USSR sent Russian T54 tanks into Budapest, Hungary on the 4^th of November 1956 to suppress a worker uprising. Factories had been taken over nationally by workers councils, in a demonstration of worker self-organization that was at odds with the Soviet’s imperialist rule. The Soviet troops eventually suppressed the uprising and restored their rule. Then the USSR sent the tanks in to invade Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan in 1979. A decade later, in 1989, tanks were similarly used by another state-capitalist regime to crush student dissidents in Tiananmen Square in China.

Anarchists use the word “tankie” to describe any supporter of authoritarian regimes that claim to be socialist. “Red fascist” is another popular term used in this context. The exception is Hitler’s “national socialists”, who are simply referred to as fascists. Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler initially represented himself as a socialist; realizing that appropriating socialism would be useful to gain popular support. Of course, his genocidal actions had nothing to do with establishing socialism, and his so-called “national socialist” ideology was just another form of collectivist-capitalism.

It’s worth noting that the USSR signed a treaty (The Molotov–Ribbentrop_Pact) with Nazi Germany that divvied up much of Europe between the two powers. The Soviets then annexed the countries granted to them by the nazis, drafted their citizens into their Red Army, burned villages full of women and children to the ground, deported scores of people to prison camps, and then massacred them.

The definition of fascism from Unionpedia.org:

“Fascism is a form of radical authoritarian ultranationalism, characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and control of industry and commerce.”

The close similarities between fascism and Marxist-Leninist ideology are hard to ignore. All four of these features apply to both ideologies. Both Marxism-Leninism and National Socialism masquerade as socialism but in reality have little to do with it and are simply excuses to mount dictatorships, control the local populace, invade foreign lands and stamp out all dissent.

Tankies are people who make excuses to justify the atrocities committed in the name of communism. Tankies crave power and work to create rigid hierarchies to amass that power. They support a totalitarian one-party state that governs all of society with an iron first. They defend forced labor, polluting mass-industry, population displacement, mass surveillance, genocide and brutal punishment for anyone who would speak out against the state or the new ruling class.

They support modern China’s blatant racism and nationalism as they attempt to violently force muslims to abandon their culture in favor Han Chinese culture using “re-education” camps and family seperation policies.

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters is a 2010 book by Brian Reynolds Myers. Based on a study of the propaganda produced in North Korea for internal consumption, Myers argues that the guiding ideology of North Korea is a race-based nationalism that spawns from Japanese fascism, rather than any kind of Communist ideology.

The book describes how the North Korean government is insular, xenophobic and militaristic. It details a mob attack on Black Cuban diplomats by North Koreans, and the forcing of North Korean women to abort mixed-ethnicity children. This racism is deeply ingrained in North Korean society and promoted by the state’s own propaganda.

Since the 2009 North Korean constitution omits all mention of Communism, Myers argues that Juche is not actually the ideology of the North Korea state. He postulates that it was designed to trick foreigners, especially tankies, into supporting the fascist state. And support it they do, wholeheartily, despite all the glaring signs that it’s a perverse merger between fascism and monarchy. They’ll even accuse you of being racist for not supporting that racist state.

They make the same claim to anyone who is critical of modern China’s extreme-capitalist state, accusing them of “Sinophobia”, despite the fact that the criticisms from anarchists are almost always about China’s institutional persecution of ethnic minorities and their overseas imperialism.

Only a tankie could accuse someone with legitimate concerns about billionaire ruler Xi Jinping’s racist (and homophobic) policies of somehow being racist against the Han Chinese people for voicing those concerns. There’s no logic whatsoever to tankie cries that anyone who criticises a racist, homophobic dictator of an ethno-state is being racist or that talking about China’s imperialism means you’re somehow an imperialist being paid by the CIA to discredit “communism”.

Tankies often justify defending these state-capitalist regimes by claiming they are “anti-imperialist” states; as they are in fierce competition with “free-market” capitalist regimes such as the USA. Tankies somehow fail to recognize that state-capitalist imperialism is virtually identical to free-market capitalist imperialism. They take the side of imperialist empires like the USSR or China (and even modern-day Russia) in geo-political conflicts simply because they oppose the USA. They fail to realize that there’s nothing revolutionary about favoring one empire over another.

Another common argument they make is that the atrocities committed by their idols were necessary to affect the rapid industrialization of their nations. Marx theorized that the way to communism was through a modern industrialized economy. His theories were written with industrial capitalist states like Germany and the UK in mind, to transition them into socialist states, and then finally onto communism.

This presented a problem for Russia, China and other undeveloped nations, who had very little industry to speak of and simple, agrarian economies. Stalin and Mao both decided that the solution was to rapidly industrialize their territories, forcing mass population transfers from rural areas into cities where the former peasant-class would be forced to work in the state’s factories, creating the worker-class that Marx wrote his theories for. These forced social upheavals of course created numerous problems, including millions of deaths and rampant environmental destruction.

Tankies praise these genocidal population transfers because they “lifted the peasants (that survived) out of poverty”. But they are measuring “poverty” by materialistic, capitalist standards that are simply of no use to the subsistence farmers, hunter-gatherers and nomadic herders that made up much of the pre-industrial world. Before Lenin, Stalin and Mao’s collectivization and industrialization, most peasants were largely self sufficient. Even those living in feudal territories, while by no means free, lived simple uncomplicated lives in harmony with nature; having no carbon footprint to speak of since industry was non-existent. Most enjoyed relative autonomy from the state (which had a far shorter reach), practiced mutual aid with their neighbors, and only needed to work a few hours a week [26] to produce all the food they needed to survive.

The progression of Lenin’s state capitalism quickly changed all this, and they now had to labor endlessly in grungy, polluted cities or on industrial battery-farms for the state or face being branded a “kulak” and exiled, imprisoned or killed. As bad as feudalism was, it simply didn’t have the concentrated, centralized power that state capitalism forced on every single person within its borders.

There was no escaping the state now. You couldn’t retreat to the mountains to get away from the ruler as countless bandits did before because the new ruler was everywhere. Indigenous people were no longer permitted to maintain their way of life because it interfered with the state’s demands for complete worker homogenization. State capitalism made life much harder for anyone who desired self-determination, simply because it was impossible to evade this new form of superpowered-state. Anyone resisting the state’s rule was crushed.

Stalin’s “continuous working week” [27] was designed for maximum worker productivity, allowing workers scant time to recover from the daily grind of the industrial machine. Citizens were forced to work in cramped, unsanitary factories far from their former homes to meet Stalin’s industrial quotas. This was an incredibly difficult transition for people that had lived off of the land for generations. The state even outlawed the planting of small family gardens to ensure the people were completely dependent on the party for their survival.

Nomadic herders in Central Asia and Kazakhstan were especially unaccustomed to this new way of life being forced on them, and their resistance was met with brutal force by the Soviet state, who declared them “kulaks” and confiscated their herds. The resulting famine in this region killed between 1.5 million to 2.3 million Kazakhs. [28]

Similarly to all authoritarians, tankies support prisons and a police force, such as the Soviet secret police established by Lenin.

Tankies celebrate Lenin and Trotsky’s massacres of socialist revolutionaries, including the Mensheviks, the sailors of Petrograd, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the anarchists, unaffiliated peasants who had their food confiscated and so on. Tankies also celebrate murdering ‘kulaks’, a word they use to describe any peasant that resisted Soviet imperialism, but especially the Ukrainian peasants that resisted sending all their food to Russia, which they rightly guessed would lead to mass-starvation and one of the worst atrocities in history; the catastrophic Holodomor man-made famine.

Lenin: Red Terror

Some tankies support Lenin but reject Stalin and other later collectivist-capitalist dictators, saying they went too far. For this reason, it’s important to talk about Lenin’s long list of dirty deeds.

Lenin successfully hijacked a popular revolution fought by the peasants and workers of Russia, sabotaging communism to install a state capitalist dictatorship with him as its life-long ruler, and then murdered most of the people that actually fought the revolution. This started a long history of Marxist-Leninists acting as parasitic opportunists; co-opting revolutionary movements started by Marxists and anarchists and thoroughly sabotaging them.

Lenin spoke of state-capitalism as if it would somehow lead to communism, but history shows us it only ever lead back to Laissez-faire capitalism in every single case. Lenin:

“State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold and will have become invincible in this country.” [29]

The insistence that forcing capitalism on a society that didn’t have it before will somehow create communism at a later date is absolute nonsense. Breaking all your fingers to improve your handwriting would be a more realistic proposition than the idea that state capitalism will give way to communism. Indoctrinating millions of people into capitalism and industrialism, destroying their ecosystem and forever changing their way of life will not lead to communism. Most people born into capitalism will cling to the system like their lives depend on it because it’s the only world they know. And since capitalism destroys everything in its path, allowing no deviation from its murderous rampage, it’s not like they’ll have much choice but to stick with it until the bitter end.

Let’s take a quick look at the disastrous legacy of the state capitalism Lenin installed.

Starting in 1930, 300,000 tons of chemical waste were disposed of in Dzerzhinsk, one of the main manufacturing sites of chemical weapons in the USSR. The Guinness Book of World Records has named it the most chemically polluted city in the world. In 2003, the death rate in the area had exceeded the birth rate by 260 percent, with average life expectancy at a mere 42 years for men and 47 for women.

The world’s largest heavy metals smelting complex was originally founded by the Soviets as a slave labor camp in Norilsk, Siberia. The snow in the area is jet black, the air is thick with the disgusting taste of sulfur and factory workers die 10 years sooner than the Russian average. Children continue to suffer with respiratory diseases and die at an alarming rate. Time Magazine reported “Within 30 miles (48 km) of the nickel smelter there’s not a single living tree, it’s just a wasteland.”

Sumgayit was another important Soviet industrial center for producing agricultural and industrial chemicals. 70,000 to 120,000 tons of harmful emissions were released here annually. To this day, the percentage of babies born premature, stillborn, and with genetic defects is staggeringly high.

It’s hard to imagine how any of this ecocide could create a communist utopia, and I wonder if Lenin even fully understood what he was unleashing on the world when he put his plans for industrialization into motion.

Lenin led the Red Terror, a program of Bolshevik terror against all opponents of his dictatorship, including those mentioned earlier. In the face of a third mass revolt of the Russians against a ruler; this time Lenin, his direct orders were to “introduce mass terror” to the population. He gave some of these orders from his hospital bed after an assassination attempt which the party used as pretext to excuse these brutal policies.

The execution methods during Lenin’s Red Terror were incredibly brutal, for example: Cages of rats tied to victim’s bodies and exposed to flame so the rats would gnaw their way through the victim to escape, and victims slowly fed foot-first into furnaces: [30]

“Certain Chekas specialised in particular lines of torment: The Kharkov Cheka went in for scalping and hand-flaying; some of the Voronezh Checka’s victims were thrust naked into an internally nail-studded barrel and were rolled around in it; others had their forehead branded with a five pointed star, whilst members of the clergy were ‘crowned’ with barbed wire; the Poltava and Kremenchug Chekas specialised in impaling the clergy (eighteen monks were impaled on a single day); also in Kremenchug, rebelling peasants were buried alive; at Watering-hole victims were crucified or stoned to death, whilst at Tsaritsyn their bones were sawn through; the Cheka of Odessa put officers to death by chaining them to planks and then pushing them very slowly into furnaces, or else by immersion first in a tank of boiling water, then into the cold sea, and then again exposing them to extreme heat; at Armavir, the ‘death wreath’ was used to apply increasing constriction to victims’ heads; in Orel and elsewhere water was poured on naked prisoners in the winter-bound streets until they became living statues of ice; in Kiev the living would be buried for half an hour in a coffin containing a decomposing body; also in Kiev, the imaginative Chinese Cheka detachment amused itself by putting a rat into an iron tube sealed with wire netting at one end, the other end being placed against the victim’s body, and the tube heated until the maddened rat, in an effort to escape, gnawed its way into the prisoner’s guts. Johnson, the negro executioner at the Odessa Cheka, achieved special notoriety: he sometimes skinned his victims before killing them; after Odessa fell to the Whites in August 1919, he was caught and lynched by an angry mob. Women executioners could be crueler than men: Vera Grebeniukova, known as ‘Dora’, a beautiful young girl who was a colonel’s daughter and a Chekist’s lover, was reputed to have shot 700 prisoners during her two-and-a-half months’ service with the Odessa Cheka.”

“The Chekas did not spare women and children. There are accounts of women being tortured and raped before being shot, wives of prisoners were sometimes blackmailed into sexual submission to Chekists. There were many cases of children between the ages of 8 and 16 being imprisoned; some were executed. The Chekas were occasionally honest enough to admit that they practised torture: in February 1920, such an admission was made by the Saratov Provincial Cheka at a meeting of the Saratov Soviet, and appeared in the press.”

In 1918, Lenin wrote to G. F. Fyodorov, ordering a massacre of sex workers in which hundreds were killed: [31]

“Appoint three men with dictatorial powers (yourself, Markin and one other), organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers, former officers and the like. Not a minute of delay.”

Lenin was an oppressor of the peasants and working classes, a despot, and, by 1918, the victorious enemy of the Russian revolution. A true counter-revolutionary. Which isn’t too surprising, considering his bourgeois background and trade as a lawyer. He perfectly met the Marxist definition of a reactionary, yet tankies hold him up as the father of their “Marxist-Leninist” ideology and praise him as a great communist.

Lenin’s acts later inspired further dictators in the 20^th century who also misused the word “communism” to describe their brutal state-capitalist regimes. He effectively destroyed any chance humanity had to achieve communism in that century, and the damage he did to revolutionary action is still being felt today as the word “communism” has become synonymous with “totalitarian state” in the public consciousness.

Driven by the Taste of Boot

Regardless of the fact that “communism” actually means “a stateless, classless, moneyless society with common ownership of the means of production”, Marxist-Leninists support state-capitalist regimes that use money issued by the state and have a ruling class of party elites that control the means of production and enjoy extreme privileges compared to the average workers. Tankies claim that these hierarchical, oppressive regimes will somehow bring about communism at a later date.

Tankies also adore Lenin’s even-more-brutal successor Stalin, and see nothing wrong with the fact that Stalin sent other communists, anarchists, gay people [32] and basically anyone that annoyed him or one of his cronies to death camps. Homophobia was strongly ingrained in the culture of Stalin’s USSR, with anyone seen as anything less than hyper-masculine in constant danger of being beat to death in his gulags:

”Passive homosexuals are not necessarily prisoners with gay inclinations, they are the unassertive, the timid, those who have lost a game of cards, those who have broken the camp code of ethics. Once you have the reputation of being a “cock”, it is impossible to get rid of it. It follows you from camp to camp. And if, after transfer to a new place a “fallen” prisoner fails to reveal himself, sooner or later it is bound to come to light. Then punishment is unavoidable, and it will take the form of a collective reprisal often ending in death.” [33]

They celebrate Mao’s “cultural revolution” and its murderous witch-hunts against supposed ‘reactionaries’ who had the wrong haircut, wore makeup, happened to own a cat, write anti-authoritarian literature or have furniture in their home. Following in Stalin’s footsteps, Mao criminalized homosexuality and anyone suspected of the “crime” was arrested. Castro did the same thing in Cuba.

A lot of tankies defend the many atrocities of the DPRK dictatorship; essentially a monarchy where the ruler inherits his position from his father. Tankies will tell you with a straight face that this monarchy is somehow a path to communism. They defend modern-day China’s brutal oppression of its citizens, the use of deadly force to suppress autonomy and quash protests, China’s overseas colonialism and territory expansion, its concentration camps for minorities and organized destruction of the environment for short-term profit.

When people bring up anarchists in relation to tankies, it’s because Anarchists particularly dislike the authoritarian regimes defended and idealized by tankies due to appalling events such as the Kronstadt rebellion, or the May Days in Spain. Anarchists are staunchly opposed to hierarchy, authority, rulers, states and capitalism. All things that tankies enthusiastically embrace.

Tankies often preach “left unity” to encourage all leftists to aid their supposed revolution. But throughout history, once they succeed in seizing power by taking control of the state and replacing the government figures with their party members, they immediately begin labeling anyone who isn’t toeing their vanguard party line as a “revisionist”, or a “counter-revolutionary”; sending all dissenters (especially anarchists) to labor camps, or simply executing them and dumping their bodies in mass graves. These purges always follow a Marxist-Leninist revolution and anarchists are usually the ones first up on the chopping block.

A tankie is anyone who presents themselves as a ‘communist’, but engages in apologism for torture, slavery, imprisonment, imperialism, capitalism, genocide and the erasure of actually liberatory movements. A tankie is anyone that claims communism can be achieved by replacing a state with another state. A tankie is anyone that will swear up and down that state-capitalism, dictator personality cults and ecosystem-destroying mass-industry will eventually lead to communism through the “withering away” of the brutal state that they uphold.

Reject Left-Unity

Any attempt at comradeship with a tankie is doomed to fail. Regardless of what they claim, tankies aren’t interested in any form of debate, compromise, or exchange of ideas with anarchists or socialists. Their only goal is to give their dangerous ideology an appearance of legitimacy. To wrongly represent it as a legitimate form of socialism so they may further pollute radical politics with their tyrannical capitalist cult.

Anarchy is pure anathema to the tankie. We espouse opposition to authoritarianism, hierarchy, bureaucracy, state-sanctioned violence, prisons, worker exploitation, ecosystem destruction, state-capitalism and imperialism. This makes us, to the tankie, “reactionary counter-revolutionary imperialist scum”. Doublespeak like this is one of their defining traits.

Behind closed doors, they see us as a threat to their plans for strongman dictatorships, cults of personality, mega-industrial capitalism and gulags as far as the eye can see. We are vermin to the tankie; fit only to be ridiculed and then swiftly exterminated once they seize power. Anarchy is their absolute worst fear. Anarchists are the biggest threat to their plans for party dictatorship.

They latch onto our movements and gradually corrupt them with their reactionary rhetoric and divide-and-conquer tactics. Their goals aren’t even slightly aligned with ours, but they use entryism, shame and cries of victimization to squirrel themselves into our spaces. Their demands for ‘left unity’ and an end to ‘divisiveness’ and ‘sectarianism’ are obvious wolves in sheep’s clothing and should be rejected outright.

We can’t lose sight of the historical fact that genocide, nationalism, capitalism, bigotry, imperialism, struggle sessions and mass incarceration are some of the central tenets of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist practice, and whether they admit it publicly or not, something all tankies believe is necessary to ensure their vanguard’s dictatorship and cement their own power on the party hierarchy.

Their only purpose in engaging you is to normalize their toxic beliefs and make us accepting of their presence in radical groups so they can grow their ranks. If you welcome tankies into your spaces, if you engage tankies in civil discourse, if you entertain their repugnant ideas or buy into their absurd notions of “left unity” and enable their attempts to create divisions between anarchists and sow discord, then they have already succeeded in poisoning your movement and rendering it useless.

Anarcho-Capitalism?

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-anarcho-capitalism>. <https://raddle.me/wiki/anarcho_capitalism>

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From Wikipedia:

“Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g. ”downsizing” for layoffs, “servicing the target” for bombing, in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable. It may also refer to intentional ambiguity in language or to actual inversions of meaning. In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth.”

The phrase ”anarcho-capitalism” was coined by far-right white-nationalist Murray Rothbard as a way to demean and dispirit anarchists. By appropriating and warping anarchist terminology, he hoped to dilute our objectives and deal a fatal blow to our propaganda. He worked for years to associate anarchy with all the things anarchists stand against, thus minimizing the effect of anarchy in the public consciousness.

If anarchy is stripped of all its meaning, if anarchists are presented as extra-devoted capitalists, as wannabe slumlords and oligarchs, then the threat anarchy presents to capitalism is greatly minimized. Anarchy stops being a viable alternative to the system of authority and simply becomes part and parcel of it.

In one of his unpublished pieces, Rothbard admitted:

”We are not anarchists, and those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical because all anarchists have socialistic elements in their doctrines and possess socialistic economic doctrines in common.”

Rothbard’s acolytes claim to support capitalism but not the state, proposing that all the functions of government, from military, police, courts and prisons to water sanitation, waste disposal and road construction be privately owned.

They wish to replace the state with wholly unregulated corporations; making the corporations that currently share power with the state into what are effectively private states that don’t have to share power or answer to anyone. These corporations would of course use their private armies to do war with each other as is their custom, until one corporation has monopolized everything, becoming what would inevitably be an all-powerful worldwide monarchy.

So the only logical end goal of this unfettered and unchallenged capitalism is a Disney-Pepsi-Bayer conglomeration printing all the money, making all the laws, publishing all the media, growing and distributing all the food, managing all the hospitals, workplaces, prisons and schools, ruling the entire world as one colossal government.

Capitalism is a perverse authority that devours everything it touches. Wherever capitalism rises, a multitude of oppressive hierarchies immediately spring from it: Class systems, homelessness, imperialism, environmental destruction, slavery, human trafficking, climate change, racism, misogyny, ableism, genocide, the list is endless.

There is no way to make a system that revolves around exploitation, inequality, hierarchy and domination compatible with anarchy. There is simply no way for capitalism to ever be anarchic.

These oligarchy-fetishists insist that capitalism is voluntary when in reality private property rights can only be enforced violently; by an authority that is powerful enough to rule a society. There’s no way to prop up a hierarchy as immense as capitalism without coercion, domination, suppression of autonomy, tyranny. All things that are anathema to anarchy.

For all intents and purposes, these so called ”anarcho-capitalists”, ”propertarians” or ”voluntaryists” wish to revert the world to feudalism and take full control of society, without the inconvenience of health, safety and environmental regulations or any other controls on their business activities or accountability for their shareholders and CEOs. Some of them will simply call themselves an “anarchist“ without further elaboration, so it’s important to pay attention to the context and content of their messaging and call them out if they’re full of shit and just trying to do some entryism.

These social and economic conservatives wish to replace the state’s police forces and military with private police and armies that would work directly for the corporations, with zero transparency and with their sole mission being to safeguard the profits and personal safety of the owners of capital. Mind you, this isn’t too much different from the current system where capitalists have to share some of their power with the state and its functionaries, but it sure as hell won’t be any better for us peasants.

They have similarly hijacked the word “libertarian” which was historically synonymous with “anarchist” (Kropotkin used both words interchangeably) and maintains its original meaning outside the USA.

Within the USA, “libertarian”, “voluntaryist”, “propertarian”, “deontological liberal”, “autarchist”, “paleocon”, “minarchist”, “neocon”, “rights-theorist”, “libertarian moralist” and “social conservative” are all words that just mean “capitalist that doesn’t like public accountability or paying taxes” with very minor differences; usually relating to how private property “rights” will be enforced. Some of them will simply call themselves “anarchist“ without further elaboration, so it’s important to pay attention to context and content.

Capitalism is just as brutal a hierarchy as the state, and anyone claiming capitalists are capable of being anarchists is using malicious doublespeak to attack the anarchist movement by watering down and obfuscating our most basic terms and principles.

By creating far-right capitalist perversions of every anti-capitalist movement, the wealthy largely succeed in erasing the original revolutionary goals of a movement and replace them with more of the same capitalism, imperialism, poverty, genocide and ecocide.

Without a state to uphold property rights, to legalize wealth hoarding and to normalize labor exploitation, without police and courts to imprison anyone who refuses to play by capitalism’s rules, capitalism simply has no way to function. It would be, in a word, anarchy.

“Anarcho”-capitalism is an oxymoron and has nothing to do with Anarchy.

Burn the Bread Book: Industrial Communism Will Not Liberate You

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-burn-the-bread-book-make-anarchy>. <https://raddle.me/wiki/burn_the_bread_book>

The True Cost of Bread

For years I’ve watched a man drive his pick-up truck into the forest around me and cut down all the trees that aren’t legally protected. So, every tree that isn’t a pine or an oak. The moment a carob or olive or hawthorn or mastic or strawberry tree grows big enough to burn, he cuts it down and drags it away for firewood. He even fells trees I planted, while smiling and waving at me like he’s doing me a favor. I glare at him silently but don’t say a word, knowing he has the full power of the state behind him.

He uses the wood to fuel his traditional bakery which has several large outdoor ovens. The much-loved industrial product he produces is bread; a product that has rapidly replaced all the native food-bearing plants of the area as they’ve been cut down to make room for wheat fields.

The villagers are proud of the bakery because it attracts visitors from all over the island and thus creates further opportunities for them to earn profit. The local bureaucracy; the democratically-elected village council, gives the baker free reign to do as he pleases since so many livelihoods depend on his bakery.

Because the baker cuts everything down as soon as it reaches human height, the trees never get big enough to fruit, so they don’t spread their seeds and grow new trees. The forest slowly dwindles to nothing but pine trees and can no longer sustain most animal life. The climate dries, the soil erodes, the air grows stagnant and depleted of oxygen. All that’s left in the few remaining forests that haven’t been bulldozed to grow more wheat is a sterile pine desert.

The baker will soon no doubt lobby the village council to allow him to harvest the pine trees too, otherwise the all-important bakery will cease to be operational when he runs out of legal trees to fell.

In just a few years, all the fruits, nuts and berries that sustained the people in the area for millennia are wiped out and replaced with a consumer product that is made from a single grain crop. A thriving ecosystem has been replaced with a wheat monoculture that could collapse at any moment and take the lives of everyone it feeds with it.

It’s worth noting that the baker, like most people in my village, and in fact most people on the island, considers himself a communist. The village has a “communist party” clubhouse and they always elect “communist” local leaders and vote for “communist” politicians in the national elections.

Any anarchist worth their salt has no tolerance for these faux-communists, or “tankies” and their brand of collectivist-capitalism because they cling to money, states and rulers and really only embrace Stalinist politics because of the promise of cushy government jobs for them or their relatives.

The Stalinist politicians openly buy votes by promising jobs in the public service to their supporters. A job in the public service here is a guaranteed free ride for life for you and your family, with the salaries multiple times higher than private sector salaries and benefits out of the wazoo — including multiple pensions. They get a full pension for each gov sector they worked in, and the more connected civil servants are rotated through jobs in multiple sectors in the last few months leading up to their retirement to ensure the maximum pay-out possible.

I’m confident anyone reading this knows Stalinism is designed to enrich the bureaucrat class and give them complete control over the state’s citizens. No anarchist sees that shit as communism. But in a “real” communist society; an “anarcho-communist” society where money, state and class have been abolished, the local baker would presumably still bake that bread, and since it would be offered freely to everyone far and wide, he’d need to bake a lot more of it and thus need more wood. More forest would be razed to keep the bread production going.

Everyone living in the village and anyone passing through, and people in faraway cities will expect to have as much gourmet bread on their plates as they desire. More bakeries would need to pop up on the mountain as demand rises for delicious bread in the cities below, with the rural population working hard and doing their duty to feed the hungry urban population.

Over the years, I’ve put a lot of thought into envisioning how the workers seizing the means of production would end the environmental devastation this bread production brings to the mountain. I struggle to see any scenario where communism would stop the devastation being wrought on the ecosystem. The forests would continue to be razed to ensure production won’t slow down.

Free bread for everyone today means no bread (or any food) for anyone tomorrow as the top-soil washes away, the climate warms, the wildlife goes extinct, and the whole mountain rapidly turns to desert. It’s inevitable that soon even wheat will cease to grow in the fields surrounding the village.

Regardless of the economic system in place, the villagers being able to consume as many fresh loaves of baked bread as they can carry means all the forests in driving distance of the village are eviscerated, eventually all the fields become barren, the crops fail, and everyone starves. This is already well on its way to happening, and switching to a communist mode of production would do nothing to allay this inevitability.

“How would you feed people then, genius?” I hear you scoff. The answer is simple; tried and tested for millennia. I wouldn’t feed people. People would feed themselves instead of expecting others to labor to feed them; an entitlement that arose with industrial civilization. People would be inclined to protect the forests instead of bulldozing them for the supposed convenience of industrial food production if they picked their food directly from those forests everyday.

They’d protect the forests with their very lives because they’d need the food that grows in the forests to survive without industrial farms, bakeries and factories outsourcing food production and then hiding the ecocide they cause just out of sight of the villages and their carefully manicured streets.

Bread and other industrial products alienate us from our ecosystem and cause us to stop caring about how our food is produced, so long as it’s there in the store when we want to eat it. Putting food production back into the control of the individual is the only way to preserve the ecosystem. Direct food is the only anarchist mode of production. When other people are tasked with growing your food, they will take shortcuts because the food isn’t going into their own mouths or the mouths of their loved ones. Food harvesting needs to go back to being a way of life for every able-bodied person, rather than something industrial farm workers are tasked with to serve an elite class of privileged office workers who are completely disconnected from the food chain.

All over the world, complex centuries-old polyculture food-forests that sustained countless lives for generations are destroyed by the arrogance of industrial production, replaced for a short while by a wheat or corn monoculture so people can pick up their bread down the street from their home or workplace instead of muddying their feet to gather food from the wild as their ancestors did. This convenience seems like “progress” to civilized people, at least until the destructive industrial agriculture process renders the wheat fields infertile and farms all over the world are turned into a vast uninhabitable dust bowl. A sustainable way of life that kept us alive and thriving for centuries has been tossed aside in favor of a short-lived attempt at industrial convenience that has already proven itself a horrible failure; bringing us and every other lifeform to the verge of extinction.

Industry is not sustainable. Industrial systems are all destructive. Communism, capitalism, fascism, they’re all founded on ecocide. The authority of the baker is upheld over everything else because domesticated people would rather consume “free” industrial bread for a few years than unlearn their destructive consumerist habits. If we are to survive these times of devastating ecological collapse, humans need to go back to fostering vast food forests as our ancestors did for millennia; producing and gathering our own food without destroying the very ecosystem that gives us life in the name of luxury and convenience.

“The People’s” Authority: How “Anarcho-Communism” is Authority-Forming

If someone kept cutting down all the trees to bake bread, the people who depend on the forest to survive would of course have to intervene to stop the loggers from destroying the forest and thus killing their way of life.

This happens in rainforests today where indigenous people who have been let down by the state gleefully issuing licenses to corporate loggers, and turning a blind eye to illegal logging, instead take matters into their own hands and shut down the loggers using force.

They put their lives on the line to do this, and a lot of them are killed by the loggers who value their profits over the lives of indigenous people. They know if they don’t act to stop the loggers, the forests they call their home will be decimated and their way of life will have been destroyed forever. They’ll be forced into the cramped cities and have to labor all day everyday to buy the bread and beef that stripped their forests bare.

So how would an anarcho-communist society deal with someone who cuts down all the trees to bake bread? In an anarcho-communist society, everyone will be environmentally conscious and consume sustainably, right...? No. Not if you’re engaging in any kind of critical thinking.

Loggers can only destroy forests at the current explosive rate if the society imbues them with authority. If they have no authority, there’s nothing stopping others from using force to end their pillaging of our natural resources. Without the authority of civilization behind them, the loggers have incredibly diminished power and no real motive to risk their lives to fell trees.

Anarcho-communism is an industrial ideology based around the notion of seizing the means of production and then running the factories, saw mills, oil rigs, mines and power plants democratically. Industrial civilization is an incredibly totalitarian authority that is nevertheless upheld by “anarcho”-communist theory, even though anarchists supposedly oppose all forms of authority.

In an industrial communist society, much like in a capitalist society, logging is necessary to further the industrial production the society is built around. As long as production drives the system, trees will have to be felled for all kinds of reasons: from lumber and paper production to making way for crops and cattle.

So, logging is highly valued by the people that uphold the industrial society, and in a real world scenario, these “anarcho” communists would have to take measures to protect loggers from repercussions from a small, uncivilized minority – the indigenous inhabitants of the forest. These measures are, by any definition, an authority. A monopoly on violence. A state in everything but name.

But since the loggers are providing this valued service to good, decent, reasoned, educated, domesticated, egalitarian, democratic, civilized anarcho-communists in big shiny cities who are accustomed to a litany of luxury consumer products being delivered to their doors everyday… Decidedly authoritarian methods will need to be taken to ensure the anarcho-loggers can do their anarcho-work without facing retaliation from the “primmie” forest dwellers. These methods can easily be justified in the ancom’s mind; there’s nothing an ancom loves more than to “justify” authority with their mighty reasoned logic™️.

So when faced with the conundrum that the anarcho-communist city needs lumber, paper, corn and meat, and the only thing standing in the way of production is a few indigenous tribes, the ancom will put their anarcho-Spock ears on and declare: “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”. Just as capitalist and socialist states today violently suppress the indigenous people who take action to shut down logging and mining operations that quash their way of life, the anarcho-industrialist will send a red-and-black army in to escort their red-and-black bulldozers and discipline anyone that interferes with the will of “the people”.

The indigenous inhabitants of course won’t give a shit that their forests are being felled by communists rather than by capitalists. They won’t give a shit that the bulldozers are now owned collectively or that the land they’ve lived on for millennia has now been designated as belonging to “the people” (the civilized voting majority) instead of to the state or to capital.

The forest that nurtures the indigenous people and their children is still being decimated to maintain the destructive lifestyles of apathetic city-dwellers. Their lives are still being ended because to civilized people, they’re a backwards, regressive minority standing in the way of progress... Damaging the revolution, inhibiting the growth of their glorious egalitarian civilization. The educated, “progressive” majority outvote them. Anyway, everyone who has spoken to a red anarchist knows primmies are dirty reactionary ableists who want to stop us from building wheelchair and drug factories, right?

Civilized people always have pushed the notion that the “common good” or the good of the many will always outweigh the needs of individuals or small groups of people, ever since Aristotle, in his “The Aim of Man” wrote:

“The good of the state is of greater and more fundamental importance both to attain and to preserve. The securing of one individual’s good is cause for rejoicing, but to secure the good of a nation or of a city-state is nobler and more divine.”

Communism is even more adamant in this “the will of the majority is paramount” shtick, going as far as to declare the industrial-worker class as the only voice that matters, with everyone needing to become part of the worker class in order to abolish class differences.

This logic is why the USSR, China and other communist experiments forced collectivization on self-sufficient indigenous peoples and then slaughtered them when they inevitably resisted. If people won’t consent to being displaced from their ancestral lands to work on the industrial farms and factories that fuel the destruction of their homes, they’re branded “kulaks” and “counter-revolutionaries” and “reactionaries” and are systemically genocided, usually by destroying their food sources.

Industrial goods are valued by industrial society over the forest and its inhabitants because domesticated people want to eat bread and microwaved pizza and the real cost of those products (environmental destruction) is of no real concern to industrial society beyond empty gestures like an occasional “save the rainforests” or “go vegan” banner.

The inhabitants of the forests and their strange foreign culture are too far removed from the busy cities for the average urbanites to involve themselves in their plight. Even the civilized rural people who live around the forests are forever striving to urbanize their villages in the unending quest for upwards mobility. In my experience, they’ll happily trade every tree in sight for a gourmet bakery, Apple Store or coffee-shop so they can feel as civilized as the people in the big cities who tend to look down on them for being “hillbillies” or “country bumpkins”.

“The people in the big cities of Sao Paulo and Rio, they want us to live on picking Brazil nuts,” a farmer says. “That doesn’t put anyone’s kid in college.” (From RollingStone.com.)

The settler-farmers who are burning what’s left of the Amazon rainforest to the ground say they’re doing it for their children... To make the cash to pay for their children to be educated and get good jobs in the city. It shouldn’t be controversial for me to say civilized people value their civilized life and will always put their civilized needs before the needs of uncivilized others.

Civilized people can relate to their civilized neighbours who have the same struggles as them: paying their bills, educating their kids, buying good insurance, washing their car, deciding where to go on vacation, renovating their kitchens, choosing the next Netflix show to binge watch... So it’s not surprising that they’ll do everything they can to prop up civilized people and kick down the uncivilized people who stand in the way of their quest for ever-increasing industrial comforts.

I can already see the denial stage setting in on some of your faces as I type: “But us anarcho-communists aren’t like capitalists, we’re good caring people. Humane people. We’ll make industry green, we’ll manage the forests in a sustainable manner using direct democracy, unions, unicorns and equality!”

Why would anyone swallow that crock of shit? Why would thoroughly domesticated people used to all the comforts of destructive industrial civilization suddenly decide to forgo those comforts because of democracy? Why would 7.7 billion people suddenly change how they live because anarcho-communism has been declared? How would ancom civilization make industry “green” when it’s clearly demonstrable that all industry is destructive to the environment and to wild people, and modelling a society on an industrial system has had disastrous results throughout history, regardless of what the attached ideology was named?

All controlled mass-society, including every historical experiment at building a communist society has created authority; bodies of people that hold power over others. That power grows over time and takes the “communist” society further and further away from its revolutionary origins. Every indication is that authority would continue to be manifested with industrial anarcho-communism. There is no evidence that anarcho-communism would avert authority when it’s so dependent on destructive, exploitative, alienating, domesticating industry and the control and domination of a global population of workers.

Anarcho-communism will not liberate the world.

All Industrial Goods Free for All People: A Recipe for Disaster

In communism everything is free for the taking and resources are often treated as if they’re infinite. If you decide you need something, you take it from the communal store. Kropotkin said no one has the right to judge how much an individual needs, except the individuals themselves.

Since most reds hold that resources should be allocated according to “need”, decisions would need to be made to determine who in the community has “need” of the biggest shares of resources.

I know most ancoms, like Kropotkin, claim every individual will just take whatever they “need” (want) from communal stores, but I’m going to cry foul on that because it’s really not practical in an industrial society. Resources aren’t infinite and no one is going to spend their life doing gruelling manual labor and then just give everything they produce away to some random stranger who shows up at the communal store with a dumpster truck and says “I need your community’s entire monthly output of goods today, so load it up”. For some reason ancoms think assholes would cease to exist in a communist society. Why would anyone work their asses off, wasting their life away doing menial manual labor just to watch some shitlord drive away with everything they produced because he announced he “needed” it?

“But as woke anarcho-communists in an advanced fully-automated luxury communist society, labor will in fact be quite limited and fun because we can divide duties between all our comrades! And profit will no longer be a concern since everything we make will be given to anyone that wants it free of charge, so we don’t need to worry about marketing our products and that will further minimize the amount of labor we’ll do, giving us ample leisure time to enjoy the fruits of our production!”

For the purposes of cold-hearted mockery, I’m slightly paraphrasing an ancom who responded to an early draft of this piece. What fantasy realm are ancoms living in where all the massive problems posed by industrial production (including the ongoing extinction of near-every lifeform on Earth) will evaporate when you remove profit and marketing from the equation?

I keep saying this in my writing but here I go again: In an industrial society that aims to give everyone in the world equal access to consumer goods, industry does not decrease; it increases. If everyone in the world suddenly has free and equal access to the mountains of wasteful shit that Western consumers consider necessary to life, not only would production need to massively increase, but we would run out of resources to exploit much more rapidly.

That’s assuming anyone would even want to work in the mines and factories in a supposedly equal society if they no longer had guns to their heads. Why would anyone go back down into that mine once their chains are broken? Does anyone honestly think those Congolese kids give a shit if you have a new phone every year? Should they really be expected to sacrifice themselves for your entitlement? So you can continue to live in luxury with all your little conveniences?

In a real world implementation of industrial communism, communities will no doubt quickly impose limits on what can be taken from communal stores after a few people take way more than they have any right to and other people go without as a result, despite them laboring for hours a day to produce those goods. Kropotkin might insist we’ll all be happy toiling away all day to make this consumerist shit just to give it away to random strangers, but he was a privileged scholar who never had to work a day in his life, so what do you expect?

Industrial society right now is fed by the ceaseless labor of billions of exploited people in the Global South. People are forced to toil in mines from childhood to procure the materials that other people (also including children) then assemble into consumer goods in factories, all for starvation wages. This is debilitating, dangerous work that leaves the people who do it sucked of their youth after a few years.

Anyway, let’s play along with communist mythology for a bit to get to my next point. In an ideal communist society (where I guess minerals are somehow found equally all across the planet and not overwhelmingly located in the Global South as in the real world), outsourced labor would presumably go away because communists would never exploit workers in distant lands (who ever heard of an imperialist communist, right? Right??) So instead production would need to be localized, and then the goods would be distributed according to need.

For resources to be allocated according to need, you’ll have some kind of deciding body in place to judge what each person’s needs are; what resources each person should be given.

There are lots of factors to take into consideration when deciding someone’s “needs”, like how far they live from work, how far they live from the store, how many calories they burn doing the labor they do, the size of their family, their dietary restrictions, disabilities they might have, their particular metabolism, how many parties they throw, how many friends they have and thus might invite to the parties, their religious and cultural practices, the size of their house, the size of their garden, the type of insulation their house has and how quickly it loses heat, the fuel efficiency of their car... I could list hundreds more things but I’ll stop myself.

Giving bureaucrats this power will no doubt mean certain favored groups / individuals will be rewarded and less desirable groups / individuals will be neglected, or even punished. This is the nature of authority. You’ll need a body of full-time bureaucrats to collect all this data and measure how it should determine your share of the pie, and those bureaucrats are going to have biases. If a computer does it, the programmer will have biases. And you’d still need bureaucrats to collect the data and feed it to the computer. Then they could easily feed incorrect or selective data to the computer because of their biases.

It’s always felt like a recipe for corruption and exploitation to me for a bureaucracy to determine someone’s worth... Which is probably why Kropotkin stipulated that everyone should be able to just take whatever they themselves decide they need from the stores.

Of course, the real solution would be to not base your proposed utopian society on industrial production in the first place... Promising industrial production will be unlimited because everyone will voluntarily agree to work real hard in the factories and mines and slaughterhouses and the goods will be distributed to everyone everywhere somehow while maintaining a sustainable ecological green solarpunk paradise just makes you a smug fucking liar. No different than a grinning politician promising to give us freedom, liberty and prosperity if we vote for him.

The only red anarchist tendency that made a modicum of practical sense in my mind was anarcho-collectivism, because at least the workers would receive the direct value of their labor hours instead of having external bodies decide how much value / worth to assign to them as a person.

If you’re going to spend your life toiling in a factory or farm to produce goods for other people, would you really want a bureaucrat or a committee or even a direct voter body deciding how much you deserve for that labor, while giving someone who does the same job (or a much easier job) more than you because of potentially biased reasons?

Regardless, anarcho-collectivism still only really values the workers who are most willing to submit to the factory grind and put in the most hours. Anarcho-collectivism still holds ecodical industry and luxuries for cityfolk up above all life on the planet... So that 19^th century ideology isn’t going to save you either. Throw it right in the trash with the bread book because this “reform-industrial-society” charade isn’t helping when the planet is on fire.

If industrial communism were actually implemented in the real world, you can be relatively certain that some kind of authority would need to be put in place to prevent bad actors from showing up at the store and taking a community’s entire monthly production. People would need to police the store and judge whether someone is worthy of taking as much as they’re taking. They’d need to become authorities, upholders of law and order. Purveyors of “justice”.

Let’s be clear now because I know a lot of red anarchists are going to try to “justify” this authority as being “necessary for the good of society” as they will do. Policing who can take food and how much they can take is a clear authority. Not a “justified” authority, because such a thing simply does not exist.

And this store-policing is not the anarchist tactic of “direct action” either, let’s make that clear right now, because it’s a frightenly common misunderstanding with red anarchists. Creating a police force has nothing to do with direct action.

Direct action is an isolated use of force unconnected to institutional systems of power. People who engage in direct action are not appealing to a higher authority for legitimacy. Their action is not legitimized by anyone and they receive no protection or reward from an authority as they take the action. There’s no monopoly on violence being granted to them by an authority, so there’s nothing to guarantee their safety from retaliation if the action fails or succeeds.

There’s no institutional power-imbalance being created when someone takes direct action against an authority. The authority already created the power imbalance, and your direct action is a form of defense to shield you, your ecosystem or your community from that imbalance.

Direct action is an entirely anarchist tactic, but pinning badges on people, officiating them, and giving them the authority (and the monopoly on violence) to police a store and withhold food and products from certain people for whatever reason has nothing to do with anarchy. Building a hierarchy like this has nothing to do with anarchy.

Police officers and judges (authorities) ruling over a communal store is authoritarian. An officiated police force is a completely different thing from the isolated use of force by a lone actor or a small group of actors to preserve life and combat authority (direct action).

Creating a police force, even if it’s formed of volunteers, even if they were elected, even if they make decisions collectively, even if their uniforms are red and black, even if the officers placed on duty are regularly rotated, is authoritarian by any definition. There are no anarchist cops. An “anarchist cop” couldn’t be a bigger oxymoron.

Here’s an example of direct action: me punching a logger who is cutting down my favorite tree. This action is completely removed from structural systems of authority because I have no authority or structural power behind me. There’s nothing legitimizing my use of force or giving me a monopoly on violence. My use of force doesn’t extend beyond my own two fists. Since assault is illegal, and his logging is legal, the logger has the full authority of the law behind him, so any action I take to oppose that authority is punching up. It’s fighting to curve a gross power imbalance. It’s anarchy.

In this civilized world, I could be severely punished by law enforcement for using force to stop his desecration of a forest. As the state gave him his logging permit, he has authority over the forest and every life that depends on the forest to survive. He punches down every time he fells a tree. He is the full embodiment of archy. If I choose to stand in his way, there’s no state behind me, no court, no police force. Me physically stopping a logger from felling trees is an isolated use of force to strike back at a system of authority. The logger destroys life for profit, and if I take action to stop him because I don’t want to see the forest become a barren desert, I don’t become a state or any kind of authority based on that decision to fight back.

Forming a police squad and a bureaucracy to patrol and govern an officiated communal store, appointing authorities to sit and judge how much each individual deserves to eat, on the other hand, creates legitimized systems of power and an institutional monopoly on violence. It creates a state, or at the very least a proto-state that will later develop into a full-blown state as the bureaucracy grows.

The German philosopher Max Weber defined the state as a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. State violence, whether it’s committed on behalf of the state by a politician, a judge, a cop or a logger, is always a legitimate force. Any violence the state does is immediately “justified” simply by virtue of it being dispensed by a legitimate state actor who is doing it for the good of the state and its authority.

A logger with an official permit to slice up a forest is thus fully justified in the eyes of society to do as much harm to the forest as is deemed necessary by the authorities who granted the permit.

A state exists wherever an authority can authorize and legitimize violence. There is no way for an anarchist to “justify” a coercive, authoritarian institution such as a police force that will no doubt be biased against minority groups and lead to the accumulation of power by the dominant group, and abuses of power by the people doing the policing. Even if minority groups are involved in the police force, the majority group will still oppress their groups.

A society that mass-produces goods and distributes them in communal stores will manifest itself as a state, regardless of Kropotkin’s insistences that everyone will work voluntarily and then take whatever they want from the stores. There’s no practical scenario where industrial labor is truly voluntary. There’s no practical scenario on this Earth of rapidly diminishing returns where “free” stores won’t need to be policed to deny unlimited goods to individuals and groups who the governing body decides are less worthy of the fruits of their labor.

Anarcho-communism simply isn’t revolutionary as long as we are depleting all our resources in the name of industrial civilization; something anarcho-communism demands as an industrial, work-based ideology that revolves around civilizing the land and its inhabitants in order to extract resources and labor. There’s nothing revolutionary about continuing the global ecocide under the guise of democracy. Every anarchist should understand the difference between isolated force and authority, but very few self-identifying social anarchists seem interested in this and are content prating on about “justified authority”, debating “how an anarcho-communist police force could work” and excitedly discussing Chomsky’s latest speech telling them to vote for a lesser-evil neoliberal politician.

I know I sound bitter, but I’ve been disillusioned with the majority of red anarchists I come into contact with for years now and they only seem to get worse as industrial society plods on and the sands and seas climb further up our necks.

Anarcho-communism is not the solution to fighting authority, it’s simply a skin-deep re-brand of authority. A sparkly new paint job. There’s a reason so many ancoms strive to “justify” authority. They don’t actually care about reaching for anarchy.

Is Communism Always Authority-Forming?

In my mind, communism can only work outside of industrial mass society. A small community gathering or growing supplies and freely sharing them with the rest of the community. Each community trading with other small communities. Marx and Engels ironically dubbed this hunter-gatherer form of society that had long existed in human history as “primitive communism” and suggested it was inferior to their advanced industrial communism that valued the factory and centralized city life above all else.

Mass industry requires mass agriculture, mass labor, mass transport, mass resource extraction, mass construction, mass policing, mass military... Mass society and will only lead right back to capitalism and statism because it’s so unwieldy and authority forming. Any communist tendency built around industrial exploitation is going to create all kinds of fucked up hierarchies and just lead us right back to the apocalyptic status quo.

Most communists I’ve talked to about this are unable to accept that some people will still act like assholes if capitalism collapses, which I’d probably find endearing if these people weren’t such giant assholes themselves; calling me a privileged reactionary for daring to suggest their blessed ideology might have some flawed logic. They insist everyone will cease being selfish assholes once capitalism is done away with because “assholes are only assholes as long as capitalism pits them against each other.”

Even if we wake up one morning and marketing, consumer culture and wealth are all done away with, we still have generations of indoctrination in authoritarian behavior to contend with. That doesn’t go away overnight. But even without consumer culture to guide them, people are still completely capable of being assholes. Going back to before mass-society even existed, people would murder each other and take their stuff. They’d raid each other’s settlements, they’d steal their children, they’d fight over territory and cultural differences. These aren’t things that were invented by capitalism and they won’t go away just because communism is declared.

People aren’t inherently just or unjust. Humanity is not good or bad. Every person is an individual, each with different experiences, motivations, traumas. Communism expects everyone to be altruistic. Capitalism expects everyone to act out of greed and self preservation. Neither is true because both are ideologically driven worldviews that attempt to define human nature in order to instruct us how to behave by instilling us with their morals. People are greedy, people are generous, people are kind, people are mean-spirited. Every person in the world is all of these things and more. People are not defined by one single personality trait their entire lives.

I’m haunted by every shitty thing I’ve ever done and I’m sure I’ll do more shitty things yet, despite my best intentions. No one is above making mistakes. Mutual aid is a great thing, but it needs to be earned. There are people in our lives that we trust and people we can’t stand to be around. Not everyone is deserving of the products of our labor. Some people in the world will always try to exploit you, even if they already have everything their hearts could possibly desire. Some people will be kind to you no matter how big an asshole you are.

I’ve been accused by communists of being cynical, of being “regressive” and “counter-revolutionary” because I don’t buy into the communist notion that humans are inherently good and they just need the right industrial system to bring that good out of them.

Any society where I’m expected to just sit back and watch as a logger destroys my ecosystem because he’s serving the “greater good” isn’t a society I want any part of. I value my autonomy over the desires of traumatized workers pushing buttons for 8 hours a day in a city far-removed from me. I’d rather take the logger’s chainsaw away than fiddle my thumbs as he takes everything I know, and to hell with whatever bureaucratic process enshrined him with the right to decimate the forest to give bread to the workers. Fuck the workers and their bread and their fully-automated luxury communism and their divine democratic rights.

There’s simply no reason to believe exploitative assholes will go away if communism is ever enacted.

There’s a man I know who constantly exploits me for my labor, and I always go along with it. He dangles a carrot on a stick in front of me every time; promising that after I help him, he’ll hook me up to his well so I can have free water for my trees. For years he’s made this promise.

I’ve spent countless hours doing dangerous work for this guy with no reward. He always disappears after I do the work without giving me what he promised. Then the next week he wakes me up again at 6am on a Saturday by honking his horn, apologizes for not getting around to hooking me up to the well yet, saying he was too busy or in the hospital or had a family emergency, promises he’ll do it this week, and then I’m hanging off a cliff or a roof repairing pipes for him all day while he barks orders at me.

I do it because I’m a fucking pushover who can’t say no to people due to my ridiculous kind nature. But whenever I ask him for anything, I’m met with a blank stare, an abrupt subject change or a sorry excuse. I was stranded a two hour walk down the mountain last week when my car broke down, and he drove right around me and didn’t even slow down. When I saw him later, he swore on his life that he didn’t see me because the sun was in his eyes. I nodded and shrugged.

Communism wouldn’t stop this lying dipshit from exploiting me; he’d still need someone to fix his leaky pipes, start up his diesel generator, saw off the upper branches of his olive trees and climb shoddy makeshift structures for him regardless of the economic system in place. He’d still give me a sob story about his painful ulcer and I’d still do the hard work to spare him the pain of doing it himself. He wouldn’t stop being an exploitative asshole just because democracy is installed in the workplace. He wouldn’t start practising mutual aid when he goes to great lengths to avoid all work and shames other people into doing it for him.

Red anarchists throw every insult in the book at me when I voice my doubts about their wistful ideologies; condemning me for being critical of the amazing breadman Kropotkin or their “green industry” tsar Professor Bookchin... It’s hard to give my perspective as an indigenous anarchist to these people who are so hostile to any worldview that doesn’t validate their luxurious industrial lifestyle and their driving desire to make that lifestyle more democratic in order to receive a bigger share of the pie.

Between the shouts of “reactionary lifestylist” and “dirty primmie” they lobby at me, I try to explain my perspective to them. I see suffering in the world and I want to make sense of it. I’m not satisfied just handwaving it away and clinging to fanciful utopian ideologies designed to energize European factory workers from the 1800s. I don’t believe red-industry will cure society of all its ills and free humans from their chains.

The warehouse I’ve worked in for more than a decade will not become magically liberating if I’m given the power of democracy. It’ll still be a miserable fucking place filled with toxic pesticides that are slowly killing me.

Some ancoms will no doubt unironically reply to this piece with reasoning that just amounts to “no, actually, anarcho-communist industry will be a utopia because Kropotkin said so”. They’ll quote a bunch of literature to me that is nothing but empty promises by long-dead European philosophers for industrial egalitarianism. I’ve really run out of patience for that line of thinking. It’s no different than a 7 year old trying to win an argument by insisting “because my dad said so”... But when it comes down to it, that’s all most reds can do. Quote their heroes and cling to the hope that they’ll be proven right some day. That hope is what keeps them going as their miserable civilized lives burn the world up. “All our suffering will end once we have democracy in the workplace”. Those poor, deluded, hope-filled souls.

Everything I know tells me industry cannot be made “green” any more than capitalism can be made ethical. All agricultural industrial society in history has resulted in ecocide and eventually collapse. When you extract resources, burn fuel, manufacture goods and distribute them to millions or billions of people, you do real irreversible harm to ecosystems and human lives. Ancoms are not magical beings that can somehow escape the consequences of this because they’re supposedly “good” and “egalitarian”.

If anarcho-communism were ever attempted, half the “nuances” it has will be thrown out for being fantastic, half-baked and impossible to implement in an industrial mass-society. Compromises will be made to make the system functional. A lot of things have been claimed about communism, but whenever its been attempted in real life models, almost none of those claims have come to fruition and they never will because:

1. Resources aren’t infinite.

2. Industrial output has a high ‘hidden’ cost, and most importantly:

3. Work isn’t voluntary.

No matter how much you swear you’ll make labor democratic, no one is working because they really want to. They’re working because the system requires them to work to survive. No amount of democracy will stop the system from asserting its authority on everyone inside its suffocating walls. Abolishing the borders between territories will do nothing if industrial civilization continues to box us in and starve us if we dare to resist its rule. If we can’t escape civilization, the whole world is nothing more than one big prison.

Civilized people labor to create consumer goods because the system gives them no other option if they want to survive. The only way people will continue to toil in the factories and warehouses in “a communist society” is if they are forced to by the system. No free hunter gatherer will voluntarily give up their freedom to stand at an assembly line pushing buttons so other people can have Corn Flakes, weedkiller and AAA batteries. It’s something that needs to be forced on humans by domestication and the joined threat of violence and starvation that props up the industrial system.

Industry is a clear authority and anarcho-communist theory is completely oblivious to that. Anarcho-communism is nothing more than an attempt to reform the tyranny of civilization to give it a sly smile. It’s the anarchist version of Barack Obama promising change but just delivering more of the same and expecting you to celebrate it.

Seize the Means of Destruction! (And fucking burn it to the ground…)

Ancoms insist “people would choose to produce only what is needed” in an anarcho-communist society. That word; “needed” is really useless. Anyone can define anything as being “needed”, but almost none of the things defined as such are actually needed. This is why industrial communism isn’t really compatible with anarchy: anything and everything will be defined as “needed” by domesticated people, no matter how authority-forming the things are. If it means they get to keep consuming, anarcho-consumers would happily define everything from pesticides to slaughterhouses to automobile plants as “needed”. This is the power of democracy. Whatever narrative the collective adopts becomes the official, approved narrative and anyone questioning it will be seen as subversive and dangerous and a threat to order and common decency.

This “needed industry” argument is a lot like the “justified authority” argument a lot of red “anarchists” keep making to uphold every shitty authority they cling to all the way up to the state, prisons and the police.

Usually they’ll just rename these authorities “the commune”, “the social re-integration facility” and “the peacekeepers” and be satisfied that they’ve come up with a real change. It’s meaningless. Domesticated people will not allow themselves to see past the carefully manufactured alienating world they’ve inherited. Very few civilized people are willing to risk losing what they perceive as the great comforts imbibed to them by industrial civilization.

Even if they recognize how strangling these “comforts” actually are to them and everything else on the planet, instead of rejecting them outright, they draw up elaborate plans to reform the way those “comforts” are produced and dispersed. Most of these plans, when deconstructed and debullshitted, ultimately amount to little more than slapping the word “anarcho” in front of everything and trusting it’ll be all good because it’s anarchized now.

People thrived without industry and agriculture for millennia. Civilization has led to the extinction of near everything on the planet. 99.9% of industrial goods are not “needed” by humanity, they’re wanted.

Ancoms aren’t going to suddenly decide to give up their phones, Doritos and washing machines when they find out they’re environmentally destructive. They’ll just rubber-stamp all the things they want as “needed”, “eco-friendly”, “sustainable” or “green” and call it a day. And we’ll be expected to keep working our miserable jobs and like it because now they’re anarcho-jobs in an anarcho-society with anarcho-exploitation and anarcho-masters.

Keeping people in the mines and factories building those consumer goods that “the people” decide they “need” will require massive authority that will be just another iteration of capitalism in all but name. Just like “communist” Russia and “communist” China and “communist” North Korea. Not a trace of communism will survive once industrial civilization is done grinding everything up. There’s nothing about “anarcho-communism” that will spare it from the same fate. Claiming to be anti-authority rings hollow when you cling to authoritarian industrial civilization, workerism and all the other authorities ancoms at large decide are “justified”.

A bureaucracy will always be instilled in an organized mass-society and this is why industrial communism isn’t tenable. It’s why every time industrial communism has been attempted, it has simply been manifested as a perverse collective-capitalism with even more centralized power than regular-flavor capitalism. The bureaucracy will quickly morph into a state, and by definition the society will no longer be communist. But of course, it’ll keep calling itself “communist” and ensure the distinction between capitalism and communism remains paper-thin so people won’t be able to envision a better world than the brutal industrial wasteland we’ve all been born into.

Any system that allocates resources and polices people is functionally a state, regardless of what it brands itself as.

All implementations of industrial society have failed to liberate people, instead making their lives more and more miserable with each stage of industrialism, and to claim that attaching “anarcho” to the front of an industrial system will make a difference is absolutely fucking ridiculous.

Communism has never succeeded at liberating us historically and will not suddenly succeed just because you promise you’re better than other communists and you and all your super-libertarian ancom comrades will pick up cans of paint and make all the chimney stacks bright green.

Authoritarian behavior will only ever be repeated if society is structured around authoritarian institutions like industrialism and democracy. Both Marx and Kropotkin’s communism are centred around these institutions because their ideologies require that people be controlled by bureaucracy. Whether it be decentralized democratic bureaucracy or centralized party bureaucracy is irrelevant. The result is the same: Authority and control.

Without this bureaucracy, the society would descend into anarchy. Yes, wonderful, amazing, freeing anarchy. The very thing every red fears most because it would mean they’d no longer get to forcibly structure society and people around their sacred ideology and force their authority and morality on them. Domesticated people sit trapped in sterile little boxes, fed a steady drip of pesticide and high-fructose corn syrup as they labor, consume, consume, consume and then die.

This isn’t life. This isn’t anarchy. This is a waking nightmare, a depraved hell-world that has all of us thoroughly brainwashed into thinking it acceptable. Branding it “communist” or “libertarian socialist” or “democratic” or “egalitarian” or “decentralized” or “anarcho-communist” will not end the nightmare. It will not stop the planet-wide ecocide civilization has wrought on all living things. The means of destruction being controlled by industrial workers instead of industrial bosses will not stop the ecocide.

Seizing the factories and making them democratically managed as all reds yearn to do won’t do anything to save us from violence, misery, alienation and eventual extinction.

The only way to destroy authority is to burn industry to the ground before it devours every last lifeform on the planet.

The only chance we have to survive what’s coming in the next few years as our ecosystems are collapsing all around us is to tear down every factory and close every port and slice up every road until civilization is in ruins.

But in all honesty, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to watch television and sip iced tea and we’re going to wait for the end. I’m going to keep watching in silence as the local bread man fells the last remaining wilderness.

Maybe the planet will recover somewhat in a few millennia and maybe the next lifeform that evolves will have more sense than the desertmakers. This is the last hope I cling to.

A Collective Trauma

Topics: post-left, individualism, critique, collectivism, existential dread, Leviathan, community, desire, conformity, unique, egoism, revolt, trauma

Date: June 15, 2022

Source: raddle.me

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Grasping in the dark for something you can’t quite put into words.

Guided only by the faint fear of falling into the dark vacuum – a gaping deficiency that lingers within that carefully manicured psyche. You don’t dare tread near the vacuum. You’ll do anything to avoid even thinking about it. Quick, find a distraction.

Always cycling through mind-numbing social activities that promise to provide you with fulfillment. Debate clubs, affinity groups, political parties, historical reenactment societies, rainbow gatherings, punk gigs, fan conventions. You decide to go to a protest downtown.

With every new social engagement, you imagine you’ll find the meaning you so desperately crave by converging with yet another group of like-minded busy little bees.

You’ll soon start to wonder if your shared fixations are superficial, ill-considered, ultimately a waste of life. But you’ll shake yourself out of it and continue to go through the motions of social ceremony, because anything is better than falling into that dreaded vacuum lurking deep in the crevasses of your mind.

Peace never comes from other people. It has to come from an understanding and an acceptance of the self. You know this but you pretend to have forgotten.

Only by connecting with your base elements; the self free from decades of social manipulation and subjugation can you find the meaning you’ve lost touch with.

Reaching into the vacuum to retrieve your innate uniqueness. This is the only way you can hope to catch a glimpse of whatever lies beneath the dense layers of deception you’ve amassed. You know this beyond any doubt when you lay asleep at night, but allowing such dangerous ideas to enter your waking thoughts is too frightful a proposition. The vacuum is just too dark a place.

You possess the ability to break through the thick haze of bullshit enveloping everything you are. But the warm embrace of the group is so much easier to cultivate.

Using shiny new people to distract yourself from all that existential dread is so very easy. It’s what you know. It’s comforting. It’s intoxicating. It’s what everyone else is doing.

Hungrily consuming anyone that happens to fall into your orbit, the same way you use up any other throwaway product.

Absorbing them into the banal tedium that is your existence, dragging them down to your meek and docile level.

Breaking your near-lifelong tango with convention and uniformity would be too distasteful. What if people stare? What if they’re scornful?

You want so much to feel at peace with your place in the universe. But all your life, you’ve steadily been indoctrinated into the cult of leviathan. A senseless, punishing death march that dilutes and depletes everything it touches. It inflicts on you an onerous unease.

Leviathan’s programming constrains your ability to connect with yourself, your environment, other people. You’ve been taught to live in fear of all that makes you brilliant and unique. To replace connection with consumption. Desire with duty, obligation, constraint.

You so crave the perceived permeance of community, of a shared understanding, shared values, shared goals.

The truth is dreadfully hard to accept. Community is nothing more than a shared delusion. A callous fraud that promises to make you whole, but instead leaves you tapped out, broken and thoroughly compromised.

You know this, don’t you? When you’re in a deep sleep and the vacuum starts to open itself up, spewing out its secrets.

Community is when people get together to collectively and violently repress their uniqueness and adopt a bland inoffensive homogeneity. An army of traumatized and traumatizing soldiers, always marching in unison, boots stamping deafeningly on the tarmac. Left, right. Left, right. Left, right.

It’s tragic watching your decay.

You so hope to be told you’re something greater than your dreary day to day existence suggests.

You’re not.

You are the sum of the parts you’ve chosen for yourself and those parts are bland, vapid, frivolous.

A follower of followers of followers of followers. An old joke told so many times in so many places by so many people, it can only hope to engender a strained smirk.

In trying to soothe your disconnect by centering your place in the group or the subculture; by putting the needs of a manufactured, forced community above your own desires, you adopt an almost-religious fervor for both conformity and sacrifice.

“I am important. I am special. I am accomplished. I matter.”

“I am important. I am special. I am accomplished. I matter.”

“I am important. I am special. I am accomplished. I matter.”

You lie so confidently to your own face. It’s almost become a reflex now.

You’re an echo of a television Christmas special broadcast a hundred times to millions of people, year after year. Scripted, choreographed and predictable. Something familiar and thoughtless to fall asleep to before the next workday starts.

You expertly avoid ever acknowledging your true desires, instead dedicating your brief remaining moments on this planet to sacrificing yourself to the cause, the community, the nation, the faith, the struggle, or whatever other wholly artificial spectre you decide to build up and glue yourself to.

You are forever on auto-drive. A constant loop of weary self-regulating insipidity.

It’s detestable what you’ve become. Really it is. Willfully squandering every speck of potential the cosmos seeded you with. Every original thought. Every creative impulse. Every inclination to be you.

And for what? To be accepted? To fit in? To be assigned a role? One more cog in Leviathan’s machine as it churns away at everything beneath its feet.

You don’t get it. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. You were going to be so much more before you let them all beat you into the bland, flavorless pulp that puddles before me.

They took everything from you. Everything fierce, radiant, defiant. Everything that sparkled, moved and inspired. All that made existence in this world a tolerable and worthwhile pursuit.

All that’s left for you now in this world is a sunken hole in the desert, and it’s rapidly filling with sand. Dry coarse sand, funneling into every orifice, stripping away at your flesh and bones.

It doesn’t have to end this way. You can reclaim your unique. Unleash your fire and fury to claw back everything that was coerced from you. You can crawl out of that sinkhole before the sand completely breaks you down.

Abandon your need to placate the spiteful, erratic hive that has forced itself on you for so long. You have the power to burn to an ember everything that has cruelly choked the unique out of you for all these years.

Conquer your fear of being alone. Rediscover what it means to be you. Disconnect from everything that drains your will and leap into the only place no tie-wearing tyrant can follow. The dark vacuum within you. The place you most fear, the place where you stuff all your truths.

Submerge yourself in the vacuum. Let it become you.

Bask in the solitude of the self, hear your thoughts and yours alone. Take a series of deep breaths and gather every morsel of strength you have left. You’re going to need it.

Wait.

Absorb it all. Every deep-seeded secret the vacuum holds. Every insight you’ve forced yourself to bury. The totality of your lost enlightenment.

Wait.

Wait...

Now. It’s time.

You are become the full manifestation of the unsealed dark vacuum, the unrepentant force of nature that absorbs all lies and spits out cold hard truths.

Burst out in righteous fury. Take your apt revenge for all that’s been done to deprive you of you.

You have reclaimed your unique, embraced every desire you long suppressed. You will not be sacrificed to the will of others. Never again.

Fully embody the self and no force on Earth will stop you from living and dying as you are. Ungovernable, ferocious, piercing, glimmering, sublime. You.

Everything that subjugated you in your former life will be eviscerated in a fiery blast of indignation.

Every little piece of the world you raze quickly adds up in the quest to destroy the universe.

You are a bellwether for the discontented. Go forth and dismantle the instruments of your oppression. Never let them chisel away pieces of you again. Be whole. Completely and fully you.

Against Community Building, Towards Friendship

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-against-community-building-towards-friendship>. <https://raddle.me/wiki/friendship>

Topics: community, friendship, society, individual, individual and society, individualism, critique of leftism, critique, authority, post-left, decentralization

Date: 23 March 2021

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The Dangerous Failings of Community

As long as I’ve been around other anarchists, I’ve witnessed an unremitting reverence for the sanctity of community.

The idea of community is held in such high regard by anarchists that it’s eerily reminiscent of USA liberals paying fealty to the “sacred ground” of their nation’s capitol. Community is something consecrated and unassailable to anarchists. It’s the bond that binds us to our fellow true believers. It gives us belonging, direction, purpose, safety, all those good things.

But does it really?

The more time I spend amongst anarchists, the more I find the “anarchist community” ideal to be inherently unattainable and isolating. It seems every attempt at building an organized egalitarian community ends up enabling gross misconduct by certain members and the end result is always demoralizing burn-out for everyone involved.

The attempt to group disparate strangers who barely get along, based on an imagined affinity (typically ideology, but painted in such broad strokes so as to be rendered inconsequential) inevitably manages to crash and burn every time.

A gentle, alienated soul’s deep pining to build community will often get exploited by abusive people so they can insert themselves into their target’s life. By attaching themselves to a community, virtually anyone can gain instant access to the minds and hearts of people that would never have associated with them otherwise. Anarchists are so dedicated to maintaining the ideals of egalitarianism, openness, inclusivity, mutuality and fraternity, that they’ll put up with a whole lot of shit from people that demonstrate over and over again that they don’t share the same values as them. Abusive people are tolerated and even accepted by us so long as they identify as belonging to the anarchist movement, because of course anarchists aren’t fond of gatekeeping or erecting barriers to entry.

When a person announces they’re a member of the anarchist community, we immediately hand them a black cat badge to pin to their shirt (usually metaphorically, sometimes literally) and welcome them with open arms, no questions asked. Predictably, parasitic abusers are able to swagger into our spaces flashing that official membership badge, and they get to work preying on vulnerable, empathetic people who are looking for fellow travelers who share their ideals.

Again and again I’ve witnessed these entitled parasites take advantage of the compassionate anarchist spirit and they’ll often spend years tearing people’s lives apart until the community becomes so toxic and unbearable that everyone abandons ship to try and preserve their mental health and physical safety. In the end, everyone seems to end up more exploited and traumatized by the anarchist community experience than they would have been without it.

Due to my experiences both managing and participating in various anarchist spaces, I’d really like to throw out the entire idea of anarchist community and re-imagine how anarchistic interactions can be manifested going forward.

Much like the related ideologically sacred institution of democracy, the whole concept of community is insidious and underhanded, an ideal seemingly designed to manipulate people into associating with bullies and dickheads by whittling away at basic human needs like autonomy, self-determination and consent.

Too many times, our dedication to building unfettered communities open to all people lowers our guard and lets cops, rapists and assorted authoritarians infiltrate our movements and inflict lasting damage to both our collective and individual psyches.

A community in its current form almost requires everyone involved be socialized in extreme docility, forced to exist in a perpetual state of submission to everyone around them. Otherwise, the community would almost certainly implode.

Without that docile meekness being forced on all the community members, the billions of people living boxed up and piled on top of neighbors they’re barely able to tolerate would inevitably sharpen their fangs and rip each other apart to reclaim the personal space every living being needs in order to exercise their autonomy and individuality.

If our sharp claws weren’t meticulously and regularly yanked out of our fingertips by the upholders of community, to forge us into obedient and pliable little shits, the entire concept of community would be rendered unworkable.

Both the metaphorical and literal concrete walls that contain us and our egos would quickly crumble into rubble without the authority of the community to hold them up.

There’s a word that describes how we feel when we need time to ourselves but can’t get it because we live in these vast interconnected global communities, surrounded wall-to-wall, block-to-block, nation-to-nation in every direction by other people and have no way to tune out their vociferous voices and energies. It’s the mirror image to loneliness — ‘aloneliness’. This innate state of being was surprisingly only coined recently, in 2019, by Robert Coplan, a Canadian psychologist.

If loneliness is the yearning to connect to others, being aloney is the deep-seeded need to disconnect from others and retreat into the self. This is something that becomes harder and harder as the communal collective is centered and the individual is increasingly diminished and cast as a villainous foil to the precious community ideal.

Also in 2019, a study of nearly 20,000 people (Scientific Reports volume 9, Article number: 7730) established that we need to spend regular time immersed in nature to maintain our well-being. Too often, our proven need to embrace these solitary experiences is discounted because so much reverence is placed on the building and expansion of society and community by the authorities who shape our world.

Re-imagining Our Social Bonds

Someone posed this question to me recently about my frequent critiquing of democracy:

“If you’re against democracy, how would you propose consensus be reached among an anarchist community?”

Before I can answer the question, I should point out that most definitions of ‘commune’ wildly conflict with anarchy. Take this common definition, for example:

“organized for the protection and promotion of local interests, and subordinate to the state; the government or governing body of such a community.”

So like a lot of the authority-based concepts certain anarchists feel the need to appropriate, a community is assumed by polite society to come with a certain expectation of authority.

To avoid the inevitable confusion that comes with the strange urge some people have to redefine preexisting concepts, I’d really like to bypass this loaded word completely and instead try to instill a more anarchist bent to the concept of community as anarchists presumably mean it...

So let’s just call it ‘friendship’, since that’s essentially all we desire from what we term an ‘anarchist community’: Trusted friends we can live with, play with, learn with. It’s a simple and effective word that only has positive connotations, and isn’t going to make anyone think of all the glaringly authoritarian communities held together by a state’s threat of violence and built and maintained by exploited workers who most often can’t even afford to live in said communities.

I think it’s important we use clear and concise language to describe our objectives as anarchists, and too many of the words we lean on when outlining our desires for a domination-free world have hierarchical baggage permanently weighing them down.

Okay, now let’s rephrase the question in a way that leaves no room for misinterpretation...

“How would I suggest you make decisions when you have disagreements with your friends over which course of action to take?”

Well, I wouldn’t suggest anything.

People really don’t need me or anyone to direct their interactions with their friends or dictate to them how they should define and fulfill their relationships.

If you and your friends need me to prescribe you a program to adhere to in order for your friendship to function, you’re clearly not interested in practicing anarchy.

Why even put the effort into maintaining the friendship if you need to involve an external body to create systems, laws and processes to ensure the friendship remains equitable and fulfilling? If your friend isn’t being fair to you, why are you still their friend?

Anyone who would exploit you, diminish you, neglect you or deny you your autonomy isn’t acting as a friend and doesn’t deserve to be considered one. A friend cherishes and respects you. A friend encourages you to fulfill your desires and does everything they can to help achieve your needs.

And if you’re not friends with the people you’re in disagreement with, why do you care to reach consensus with them? Why share experiences with them and tie your fate to their desires if you don’t even like them?

Is your idea of ‘community’ (friendship) a suffocating debate club where people who don’t even get along have to endlessly negotiate with each other and reach some arbitrary consensus in order to continue to co-exist?

Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to just not enter into formalized relationships with people whose values so conflict with your own as to provoke such intractable conflict?

If you truly desire anarchy, it’s important to make your own decisions unhindered by the decrees of lionized authority figures and their taped-together social systems. Only you and your friends can decide how to best maintain your friendships and how to commune with each other in a way that benefits all parties.

Unless you’re disabled in a way that affects your sociability, it’s unlikely you need formal rules of association to be directed to you before you can form bonds with other humans you wish to commune with. That’s all social systems are really, a set of rules someone decided everyone should have to follow, regardless of whether or not they share the same values. It’s fundamentally defeating to anarchy when self determination, freedom of association and autonomy are overwritten by someone else’s values. Upstanding citizens of the nation might prize free speech, democracy, morality, free markets, peaceful protest and community, but that doesn’t mean you have to.

No authoritative body should presume to possess the power to tell others how to solve disputes they have with their friends. If you can’t get along with a friend without ordinances from above then you should probably question why you remain friends with them and if the relationship is worth the emotional toll it exerts on you, your friend and those around you.

This all of course assumes you’re adept at socialization, which admittedly a lot of us aren’t, due to a diverse array of disabilities and emotional traumas, but that’s just more proof that no one can or should prescribe exact instruction to people for creating social relations amongst themselves. Every relationship is different, and the only real prerequisite should be a desire to share experiences and support and nurture each other.

Discarding Bad Relationships

Like I’ve mentioned, there are a lot of abusive, exploitative people who enter our spaces, create a world of hurt, sap everyone of their energy, sabotage our projects by creating constant conflict and division without actually contributing anything, and then when someone finally objects to their behavior, they assert their supposed democratic right to continue to force themselves on everyone because “you have to reach an understanding / consensus / agreement with your fellow community member”.

Fuck that.

If someone is abusing or exploiting you, just eject them from your orbit. You’re not under any obligation to kowtow to the desires of a person who has demonstrated they have little respect for you or your values. Once they’ve shown you they’re not your friend with a pattern of selfish and harmful actions, it’s not your responsibility to protect their ego and keep shining their black cat badge.

You have to live your own life and can’t pour all your energy into making some random bully feel included in your social circle because they’ve announced they’re some stripe of anarchist. Anarchy isn’t a numbers game, it won’t matter if there’s one less member in your anarchy club, especially when that person has demonstrated they don’t actually give two shits about doing anarchy.

We need to know our limitations. We need to stand up for each other when we see abuse and not allow the abuse to be tolerated and normalized under the guise of community, democracy and inclusivity. It’s important to set clear boundaries with people and cut ties with them when they cross those boundaries and begin to damage your mental health and sense of safety.

As for what those boundaries should be? There are so many disparate personalities and unique circumstances that can occur in a relationship, so as always it’s not realistic to set universal metrics. There’s really no fail-proof program for human association, which is why it’s so important for each able individual to be aware of their own boundaries and be ready to enforce them. But generally, if you no longer feel safe in a space because of a certain person’s presence, feel you’re exerting too much energy to satisfy their unreasonable demands and getting little back in return, or frequently feel anxiety due to their words and / or actions... It’s likely time to cut ties.

When you’re in an organized community with someone, you’re denied direct control over the relationship. Instead, your interactions are dictated by whatever social norms and rules have been developed by those who formed the community, often long before you were born. If you don’t want to be around someone any more, you have to wrestle with the system’s checks and balances, essentially pleading for permission from the community and its decision-making mechanisms to disassociate from the person.

In any community, a communal divorcing is a time, money and energy consuming social affair involving the proclamations of multiple people both familiar and unfamiliar, public hearings, and an exhaustive bureaucracy.

On the other hand, ending a simple friendship is much simpler because you directly control who you choose to spend your time with, without an entire community body inserting itself into your private life. No one can force you to be their friend and devote your time and energy to them everyday, but communities constantly force you to negotiate with unkind neighbors, relatives, coworkers, landlords, bosses, teachers and others who you’d never spend time with if you had the autonomy to choose.

Freedom of association is an anarchist principle that always manages to get undermined and maligned by the fiercely un-anarchist principles the assorted anarcho-democrats, Chomskyists and Bookchinites insist on bringing to the table. I’d argue there’s no anarchist principle more important than being able to choose who to spend your time with. I’d much rather choose a few friends than amass community members.

Systems Don’t Protect People

People protect people.

We tend to put a lot of faith in the systems that govern us, and assume they’ll protect us from harm when more often than not the systems fail us at every turn with tepid half-measures and bureaucratic meandering.

Building our own systems to live by can be a worthwhile pursuit, but if we try to extend those systems to a wider sphere of people, they’ll inevitably break down as an increasing number of those people find the system doesn’t serve their diverging needs and begin to rebel.

The bigger a community and its bureaucracy grow, the more disconnected from people and their needs the community gets, until the point where a community becomes devastatingly isolating and dehumanizing to everyone forced to exist within its towering walls.

A lot of anarchists have reacted to me speaking ill of community with fear and anger because they’ve internalized the idea that “community support” is something necessary for their survival. But if they’re being honest with themselves, by community support, they really just mean welfare from the state. This fear of losing access to healthcare, unemployment / disability insurance, and a pension doesn’t really have anything to do with their concept of community, and is really just a form of cognitive dissonance.

As an anarchist, I know the state doesn’t work for me and never will. If a community is a collective bureaucratic body that assigns duties and resources to people depending on prefigured factors, it’s acting as a state, regardless of whatever fancy new tag is affixed to it, and it will no doubt grow increasingly isolating and destructive as the years wear on and the power of its architects and benefactors is cemented.

We already have authorities that decide who gets how much and when, and it’s brought us nothing but suffering. We already have community and it treats us like trash every day of our lives. Pretending this disconnected forced grouping of disparate peoples with wildly diverging values, needs and desires is somehow capable of serving us equitably and with care and respect is mournful.

Community always seems to be the spark that ignites an inferno of hierarchy and domination. So much horrific oppression and death has been justified in the age of Leviathan by attaching it to “the good of the community”. I’ve seen so many people, including anarchists, sweep all manner of abuses under the rug in a desperate attempt to “protect the integrity of the community”. Somehow the community is always put before the people who inhabit it, as if a precarious eidolon drawn from thin air and held together by nothing but collective resolve is more sacred than life itself.

Arranging people into societies and communities and nations and cities and suburbs and civilizations that have wildly varying resources only serves to separate us and creates permanent warfare among us, with those lucky enough to belong to the more resource-rich communities getting every advantage over those in more barren, parched lands.

Community is an ever-expanding wave that washes over the land, leaving its salt in the soil and forever amassing momentum until it morphs into its final form: an impregnable global civilization with no chink in the armor, no weakness we can assail in the hopes of containing its immense authority... Until finally the wave collapses under its own weight, adding a thick layer of blood to the salted land.

Friendship can’t scale up to swallow the planet. Friendship remains forever small, personal, intimate, deliberate, voluntary, decentralized. This is a feature, not a bug. Friendship allows you to associate and disassociate with others at will, while always maintaining your individuality, the sanctuary of your headspace and the clarity of knowing who you are and what you need. The dictates of anonymous wider society and the supposed common good needn’t cloud your mind when you form friendships rather than build communities.

Community is division. It’s nationality, it’s borders, it’s imperialism, it’s haves and have nots, it’s cruel, brutal, unending warfare against the sacrificial out-groups to benefit the blessed in-groups.

Your friends don’t exploit you. If they do, they’re not your friends.

Communities exploit everyone, both within and outside their very clearly defined borders, every minute of every day of every year and they have for centuries. Draining the most underprivileged community members of their blood, sweat and tears to chiefly benefit the most privileged in the community: the bosses, the academics, the desk jockeys, the landlords.

The potholes in the neighborhoods of the working poor are always as deep as canyons, while the privileged classes who work and sweat far less can commute in the comfort of their air-conditioned Teslas bump-free on the smoothest of asphalt.

European welfare states and other ‘progressive’ communities exist on the backs of the poor of the colonized global South. Resources and intensive lifelong labor are stripped from billions of people who receive only basic sustenance in return, so the residents of those hallowed Western communities can lounge in comfort with their wide assortment of state-granted privileges.

I’ve heard some wannabe world-builders say friendship is a weak bond to base a life on, that friends are as unreliable as the anonymous community members they so revere. But those same people will always extol law, order and democracy no matter how many times those houses of straw blow up in their faces. And honestly, is anything more insufferable than utopian communists critiquing someone else’s supposed idealism?

Bureaucrats and their communal systems won’t give us anarchy. Maybe a little social democracy as a treat, at least until the system collapses back into fascism when enough wealth accrues at the top.

So what is the purpose of building an anarchist community? If the difference between a community and a group of friends is that the community is bigger, more impersonal, more bureaucratic, more policed, with highly diverging values and a centralized concentration of power... Then what use is community to a group of people who seek to decentralize everything in their path, dismantle systems, negate authority and become as ungovernable as possible? What use is community to anarchy?

I really feel we should be making friends rather than building communities.

Anarchy & Religion

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-anarchy-religion>. <https://raddle.me/wiki/anarchy_and_religion>

Topics: religion, anarchy, anti-religion, monotheism, spirituality, anti-civ

Date: August 2020

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Branded by Society

For a long time, people have identified as “Christian-anarchists”, “Jewish-anarchists”, “Muslim-anarchists”, and so on. This is accepted without question in most anarchist circles, where goals of inclusivity tend to supersede any misgivings people might have with the inherent top-down and patriarchal nature of most religious affiliations.

I don’t think it makes any sense to try and merge anarchy with these explicit systems of authority, and much like “anarcho-capitalism”, I think attempting to hitch anarchy’s wagon to blatant forms of authority is a misguided impulse that comes about in people who have been thoroughly indoctrinated in authoritarian systems and are unwilling to fully part with forms of authority they have nostalgic attachment to. The feeling of comfort or security their religion provides them with leads to them trying to reform their religion into something more egalitarian when they decide they like the economic and societal ideas presented by anarchy, but don’t wish to part with their long-held religious beliefs.

I feel I should be clear that anarchists have no right to force their views on people that subscribe to organized religion. I simply want to explore some of the inherently authority-based principles religious organizations hold as sacrosanct and try to understand why religious anarchists feel the need to essentially retcon their favored religion to force a tenuous compatibility with anarchy.

As usual, I should also be clear I don’t ascribe to the concept of an “anarchist society”, so this isn’t an attempt to say religion should be “banned” in a non-existing “anarchist society”. I don’t think such a thing possible.

Anarchy is an anti-authoritarian mindset, an ongoing process we all go through to question and overcome authority. It is not a artificially constructed system, or a “society” to govern people by. It’s not a permanent state of affairs where authority somehow ceases to exist. Authority will always exist, and will especially thrive within formal systems of power and control where conformity and obedience are held up as desirable. And if a group of people did somehow “achieve” anarchy, and then try to forbid people from having religious beliefs, that anarchy would of course immediately be lost in the attempt to assert authority over others.

You can certainly be religious (“spiritual”) without supporting authority. You can believe in other-earthly beings or spirits or even gods without needing to build hierarchies and authoritarian rituals around them. But almost all “Big Religion” is absolutely authority-based and was designed that way from its inception.

Monotheism was created by civilized men to accustom the peasantry to being ruled by a great man in the sky, so they’d be equally as amenable to being ruled by a great man in a castle (or later: a presidential palace or a factory or an office).

The authority of monotheism was rapidly forced on the world at the point of the sword, replacing polytheism in the vast majority of cultures. Religious and civil leaders deemed polytheists to be “uncivilized heathens” and slaughtered them if they refused to fall in line with the new world order. It was no accident that monotheism and civilization evolved side by side. Diverse polycultures replaced by a rigid global monoculture that could be easily dominated by rulers.

Slavery was greatly assisted by several of these new monotheist religions that directly condoned the practice, providing easy moral justification for slave owners, and keeping slaves from resisting the system, lest they suffer eternal damnation. The Roman church loudly condemned slaves who escaped their masters, and refused them communion. It’s not hard to understand why religious societies were so quick to prop up slavery when the holy books they live their lives by go out of their way to normalize the practice:

“Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers” (Gn 9:25)

This is a quote from the Old Testament, where Noah condemns Canaan (Son of Ham) to eternal slavery. Christians and some Muslims then identified Ham’s descendants as black Africans, which allowed them to morally justify centuries of racialized slavery in their societies, constructing the idea that certain members of the human race should live in perpetual servitude to them. This is a recurring theme with organized religion, as religious documents invariably build authority in the cultures that hold them up as sacred.

The New Testament continued the tradition of telling the faithful to accept bondage and goes further in telling slaves to accept their slave-masters like they would a God:

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart. Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not people. (Ephesians 6:5–7)

The Bible’s legitimization of slavery was predictably taken to its natural conclusion by religious groups throughout history. In Barbados in 1710, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts were granted plantations to fund their Codrington College. Several hundred slaves were forced to work the plantations and using a red hot iron, their chests were branded with the word “Society”, to signify their ownership by the church. To this day, religious people colonize other lands using their holy texts to justify every atrocity they commit. It’s much easier to justify atrocities to yourself and others when you can point to a verse in a sacred text and say “the one true God is okay with this”. Religion has a way of absolving tyrants of guilt, shifting the blame to mystical authority figures who are beyond reproach.

But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. (Matthew 5:39)

Religions that involve forced body modification, indoctrination as an infant or child, require deference and reverence to godly beings, idols, texts, symbols, elders or church leaders, or simply instruct you to turn the other cheek when you’re being exploited, can’t honestly be described as being compatible with anarchy. To be an anarchist is to resist authority in every facet of life, not to close your eyes to authority when it’s convenient to.

Circumcision is one example of a religious ceremony that has life-long implications. Forcing children to undergo non essential surgery is not an anarchist action, so anyone doing it can’t claim to be doing anarchy while forcibly mutilating an infant. Forcibly invading a child’s bodily autonomy means you’re not practising anarchy. There’s no way to pretend that an infant can be a willing participant in such a thing.

Forcing children to participate in your religious practices before they’re old enough to make an informed voluntary decision and forcing life-changing rituals on their bodies from infancy places authority on them. They’re too young to volunteer to circumcision or baptism or female genital mutilation or even understand what is being done to them.

You can be a religious person and also an anarchist since most people are born into religions and the process of freeing your mind from authority is a lifelong pursuit with no real completion, but you can’t claim that forcing unnecessary surgery on a baby is an anarchist action. It’s just not. It’s entirely anti-anarchy. The same goes for accepting subservience to a master and telling others to be okay with exploitation, to forgive their exploiters and to not fight back.

Organized religion is dictated from above by the church i.e. the authority on the religion. It’s a system of rulers and obeyers and has been used to justify every atrocity under the sun. To attempt to redeem these bloody authoritarian institutions by associating them with anarchist ideals is to participate in a coercive and destructive lie. Pinning a black flag to institutions that have carved a path of unrelenting carnage across history: colonizing and slaughtering everything they touch, does no favors for anarchy, and only helps church authorities mask their blood soaked robes for just long enough to grab their next victim by the neck.

Like all authority, the authority of religion will not stand still. In times of conflict, people who refuse to conform to the favored religion will be scapegoated, will be oppressed, will be murdered in the name of all that is holy and good and just.

A religion is as big an authority as any other and like all authority, its growth cannot be curtailed. Certainly not by a few advocates of more libertarian forms of the religion. The dominant strands will always be unapologetically authoritarian and become brutally oppressive in times of cultural strife and warfare. All the reform-minded offshoots will do is create justification for perpetuating the religion until the mainline authoritarian strands can rain bloody murder down on the godless heathens that resist the authority of the church and its invisible almighty ruler that convenietly can never be held accountable for the atrocities commited in his name.

Anarchy is

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-anarchy-is>. <https://raddle.me/wiki/what_anarchy_means>

Topics: introductory, theory, practical anarchism, Practice, theory and practice

Date: 2021

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Anarchy is an ongoing process to dismantle authority

Anarchy is the relentless negation of structures of domination, the endeavor to carve out little pockets of life free from exploitation and suffering.

Anarchy is the uncompromising push against oppression and the vocal demand for autonomy and self-determination, the rejection of all the classes, institutions and dogmas built to rule people.

Anarchy is above all a practice, not a theory. It is about actively working to end authoritarian relationships wherever they exist, and build non-authoritarian alternatives. It is not about trying to prescribe a way of life for an imagined place and time, and imagined people. It is for real people and dealing with real problems.

Anarchy is a living and breathing practice that we incorporate into our everyday lives. A personal stance against domination that informs all our decisions and thus shapes the trajectory of our existence.

There is no end-goal to anarchy. It is ongoing, unending action against hierarchical structures and the authority figures who sit in luxury at the top of them.

Anarchy is a desire for freedom from tyranny. Anarchy is countless generations of disparate people with the drive to be freer than they are under the systems that forcibly govern them.

Anarchy is the rejection of government, states, borders, capital, patriarchy, gender essentialism, slavery, ideology, the right wing, the left wing, the clergy, democracy, private property, technocracy, nuclear family, humanism, imperialism, prisons, factories, founding fathers, bureaucracy, ethnocracy, heteronormativity, idols, tradition, policing, neuronormativity, ecocide, civilization and every other form of authority.

Anarchy is community gardens, free shops, graffiti, 3D printed guns, naturism, vegan potlucks, squats, food forests, sabotaging pipelines, free software, liberating cows, shoplifting, heirloom seed saving, forming autonomous zones, assassinating tyrants, guerilla gardening, writing zines, catching rainwater, burning ballot boxes, postering, biodiversity, abolishing whiteness, hacking, aquaponics, music making, upcycling, torching police stations and seed bombing wildflowers all across the landscape.

An anarchist is anyone who refuses to be governed, dominated, ruled by anyone and anything. An anarchist is an angry, bitter, lost, anxious, disillusioned, violent, peaceful, courageous, idealistic, captivating, fearless dreamer.

An anarchist stands alone against the giant tide of authority that rises in every direction. Anarchists connect with every battered downtrodden soul in concerted attack against the ruthless systems designed to disempower and alienate us.

Anarchy is marred in endless contradiction, existential dread and insufferable internal conflict and yet anarchy makes perfect sense to anyone who is appalled or enraged by the gross injustices that engulf this little blue planet. Anarchy is for anyone who seeks to live with any kind of dignity.

Anarchy is an impossible, preposterous pursuit yet necessary for our very survival.

Anarchy is--

Are Libertarian Socialists the Same as Anarchists?

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-are-libertarian-socialists-the-same-as-anarchists>. <https://raddle.me/wiki/libsocs>

Topics: libertarian socialism, libertarian socialists, communalism, minarchism, definitions

Date: July 29, 2021

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An anarchist by definition stands against all authority without exception, while a socialist by definition is simply someone who feels the means of production should be collectively owned. So, socialism is narrowly focused on economic issues, while anarchy is explicitly concerned with any and all social issues.

When a socialist also identifies as a libertarian, they’re indicating that they’re critical of the traditional authoritarian socialist states that have been so prominent in the world (the USSR, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe, etc.)

But while libertarian socialists might reject one-party states, that doesn’t mean they reject states entirely. A lot of them will support democratic states or other democratic forms of government. Anarchists, on the other hand, reject all forms of government.

Generally someone who chooses to identify as a libertarian socialist rather than an anarchist is making a deliberate choice to use non-committal language that implies they’re willing to accept certain forms of authority. If they opposed all authority as anarchists do, they’d likely call themselves an anarchist.

There are various forms of libertarian socialism that promote a supposedly “libertarian” state, while there are other libertarian socialists who reject the state form, but embrace other forms of authority.

Communalists are a famous example of libertarian socialists who embrace various forms of authority including majoritarianism but stop short of supporting a full-blown state. But the form of government they do support greatly resembles states on a smaller, more localized scale. Communalists wholly advocate for government, majoritarianism, hierarchy and are probably best described as direct-democrats or socialist minarchists. Anyone claiming communalists are anarchists doesn’t understand communalism or anarchy.

While a few anarchists might also choose to identify as libertarian socialists in polite company, the majority of libertarian socialists aren’t anarchists, so anarchists would be better off avoiding the “libertarian socialist” moniker since all it really says about a person’s politics is they like socialist economics but have an aversion to vanguard parties. Anarchy is a whole lot more than economics.

To identify as an anarchist is to take a strong stance against all authority, while libertarian socialism, democratic socialism and other such milquetoast labels take no such stance, leaving the door open to all kinds of authority, with the only real concern being democracy in the workplace.

But the Government Said I Have Rights

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-but-the-government-said-i-have-rights>. <https://raddle.me/wiki/humanrights>

Topics: rights, human rights, natural rights, government, George Carlin, civil rights, liberties, pursuit of happiness

Date: April 2022

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George Carlin:

In 1942, there were a 110,000 Japanese American citizens in good standing, law-abiding people, who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That’s all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had, “right this way” – into the internment camps. Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most, their government took ’em away. And rights aren’t rights if someone can take ’em away. They’re privileges, that’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter and shorter.[34]

An extension of the class system, societies draw clear lines between people with rights and people without them: Migrants versus citizens, educated versus uneducated, homeless versus homed, convicts versus non-convicts, men versus women, heterosexual vs homosexual, white versus non-white.

Governments create rights so they can meter them out to certain segments of the population, pitting everyone against each other in a vicious competition for civil liberties and economic advantage. So long as everyone has to fight for their place in the world, they’ll have no time or energy to fight the system that creates and enforces these gross inequalities.

There are the two types of ”rights” to consider:

1. Legal rights / civil rights / statutory rights.

2. Natural rights / moral rights / inalienable rights / human rights.

Legal rights depend on the rule of law within a nation. For legal rights to be granted to you, first a state must exercise its monopoly on violence to strip you of all your freedom, and then trickle-feed certain allowances back to you with stringent stipulations e.g. limiting credit to white capital owners or denying voting rights to people with criminal records.

The entire concept of legal rights depends on a state denying you all the possible freedoms they can think of, but then permitting you to file the paperwork to reclaim a few largely inconsequential ones: Usually voting, citizenship, schooling, taxation with representation, the pursuit of profit, land deeds, birth certificates, marriage certificates, copyright, driving licenses, passports and death certificates.

These are all things that cement the state’s power and further its reach, while making citizens dependent on the state for survival. The statesmen always stipulate that they can strip citizens of these entitlements at their sole and absolute discretion, ensuring people who live under the authority of the state will have little choice but to bend the knee and accept any and all atrocities committed on them to avoid further incurring the wrath of the pampered narcissists who rule the world.

Arrested for protesting a developer’s destruction of your local lake? Killed your rapist? Dumpster dived for food? Crossed a border without the right passport? Blocked a pipeline from being built through your only water source? Occupied a vacant lot to grow a garden? Distributed food to homeless people without a license? The state can now strip you of your remaining morsels of freedom for violating its tomes upon tomes of laws.

So, for you to accept the authority of legislators to allocate rights to you, to permit you such luxuries as “free“ speech and the right to vote to select the party who will take their turn ruling you, you’re effectively accepting and legitimizing a violent, thieving, bloodthirsty gang’s power over you. You’re entering into a contract whereupon you exchange your freedom for a few privileges that can and will be taken back from you by the state without notice.

This is why the concept of rights ought to be rejected by people who seek freedom through anarchy. Why willingly accept a lifelong contract placing ourselves into the service of arrogant statesmen who promise us a modicum of mercy in exchange for this unadulterated control over our lives?

Among the much ballyhooed rights they coax us with, they offer us the amazing opportunity to be imprisoned but not tortured if we sign on the dotted line. But then they change the terms of the contract once we’re in their custody and torture us anyway. Their authority allows them to set the terms and alter them as it suits them. Their sadistic power-hungry disposition will always lead them to pull away the rights they promised us, just because they can.

George Carlin:

Yeah… sooner or later the people in this country gonna realize the government does not give a fuck about them. The government doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare, or your safety, it simply doesn’t give a fuck about you. It’s interested in its own power, that’s the only thing, keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.

In relationships of rulers and obeyers, the rulers have all the power: They decide what is and isn’t a right and what does and doesn’t violate the right. The people with the power can rewrite reality at will, they can torture you to death and never admit what they did to you was torture. The United States calls their torture of prisoners of war ”enhanced coercive interrogation techniques”. That’s really all it takes to bypass rights: a person in power using craven euphemisms when they torture their prisoners.

If slavery conflicts with the rights they claim we have, they can just substitute the word ”slave” for ”inmate” and it’s all good. If every prisoner has a right to due process, they can just have military commissions spend decades putting on show ”forever trials” that never attempt to convict the prisoner, but keep them in custody in perpetuity.[35]

Legal rights are a paper thin safety blanket in the face of an icy authority blizzard that freezes everything in its path. Our rulers take our freedom and then ration small pieces of it back to us in a highly controlled environment if we agree to follow their laws, obey their enforcers, pay them daily tributes and do a lifetime of menial labor in exchange for the right to exist while they live in the lap of luxury on our backs.

Legal rights are a few minor and temporary exemptions to the state’s absolute rule over you. These exemptions are only permitted to you by the ruling class so long as they don’t interfere with their economic interests and so long as you remain wholly subservient to them, never threatening their absolute authority over you.

Pëtr Kropotkin:

This is what these so-called liberties can be reduced to. Freedom of press and of meeting, inviolability of home and all the rest, are only respected if the people do not make use of them against the privileged classes. But the day the people begin to take advantage of them to undermine those privileges, the so-called liberties will be cast overboard.

This is quite natural. Humanity retains only the rights it has won by hard struggle and is ready to defend at every moment, with arms in hand.[36]

Natural rights are even more ridiculously fantastical than legal rights, if that’s even possible. They’re supposedly fundamental to existence, granted to us by nature or God, universally accepted by all and can’t be contradicted by any legal entity. These are the three ”natural universal rights”, based on the idea that all people are created equal:

1. The right to liberty

2. The right to the pursuit of happiness

3. The right to life

Thomas Jefferson, a plantation-owner and serial rapist[37] who owned more than 600 black people, complained that England’s King George III failed to recognize the natural rights of American colonists and drafted the American Declaration of Independence to right this dreadful wrong.

In the first two paragraphs of this historic rights document, Jefferson outlines these natural rights, mentioning that ”all men are created equal”, have ”inalienable rights,” and are entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The irony was apparently lost on him, as it’s lost on all authority figures who tell us sweet lies about our amazing God / government-given rights while sapping our blood, sweat and tears to enlarge their plantations and mansions.

Mahatma Gandhi, who also happened to be a serial sex pest[38] and a racist, was another big pusher of human rights. While he promoted his philosophy of nonviolence and equal opportunity, he went out of his way to rob the Dalit (people belonging to the lowest caste in India) of their agency[39], declaring he would go on a hunger strike to the death if they were given anything resembling equality. If even the people most associated with the promotion of natural rights spent their lives brutalizing women, children and racial minorities while facing zero consequences for it, at what point does the rights charade fall apart? How can rights ever be real in a world with such rigid hierarchical social relations?

George Carlin:

Boy, everyone in this country is always running around yammering about their fucking rights. I have a right, you have no right, we have a right, they don’t have a right… Folks, I hate to spoil your fun but-there’s no such thing as rights, okay? They’re imaginary. We made them up! Like the Boogie Man… the Three Little Pigs, Pinocchio, Mother Goose, shit like that. Rights are an idea, they’re just imaginary, they are a cute idea, cute… but that’s all, cute, and fictional. But if you think you do have rights, let me ask you this, where do they come from? People say, well, they come from God, they’re God-given rights… Aw fuck, here we go again… here we go again. The God excuse. The last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument, it came from God. Anything we can’t describe, must have come from God.

Natural rights aren’t upheld by nature or a higher being, they’re just as artificially constructed and deceptive as legal rights, but with even less utility since they have no solid, corporeal form that can be petitioned for mercy like a courtroom judge in the case of legal rights. God isn’t going to enforce your God-given rights, no matter how much you beg.

We have no perceivable right to liberty when all the resources we depend on to survive are owned by someone else, who will cruelly withhold those resources if we don’t live by their laws and forever humble ourselves at their feet... Praying they’ll agree to fulfill our basic needs and permit us to survive another day.

Likewise, the pursuit of happiness is clearly reserved for the upper classes, while us poors have no recourse but to accept an endless parade of humiliation, coercion and violence in service of their colossal egos. The noblemen spend their lives erecting impenetrable barriers to prevent us from eating even a single crumb from their organic blueberry pie, so the idea that they have ever allowed us to pursue our own happiness is offensive. We live only to serve the moneyed class and staff their lavish properties.

Finally, our supposed right to life is forfeit the moment a policeman, settler or soldier decides we’re resisting their authority and takes away either our freedom or our life. It’s forfeit when we fall ill and can no longer work to pay our bills, cast out into the cold to freeze and die.

Our rights were never anything more than hot air pouring out of the mouths of the well-heeled hustlers who rule the kingdoms of democracy.

Bob Black:

There are fashions in clothes and music. And there are fashions in politics. One current fashion in politics, all over the world, is human rights: “Human rights is the idea of our time.” Everybody likes human rights. Not everybody respects them. I will make the claim that human rights are never respected, as human rights. Because human rights have no objective reality, there is nothing to respect. Some humans are worthy of respect, but not their imaginary rights.

Today, it’s scandalous to disbelieve in human rights. A prominent social philosopher named Joel Feinberg is appalled that there are, as he says, “even extreme misanthropes who deny that anyone in fact has rights.” These extreme misanthropes would include Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Jesus, Mohammed, Thomas Aquinas, Johann Gottlieb von Herder, Edmund Burke, William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, Peter Kropotkin and Friedrich Nietzsche. Until about 500 years ago, everyone must have been an extreme misanthrope, which is certainly not how Jesus Christ and Prince Kropotkin, among others, are regarded.[40]

The UN’s ”Universal Declaration of Human Rights” is a document that purports to enshrine a long list of privileges for all people including dignity, liberty, and equality. It prohibits slavery and torture, guarantees freedom of movement and residence, the right of property, the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to a nationality.

It’s plain to see none of these things are actually upheld by UN member states. Slavery is still rampant all over the world, including state-sponsored slavery (in prisons), torture such as waterboarding is commonplace for prisoners of war, and no one in the lower classes has anything resembling dignity, liberty, equality, an adequate standard of living or freedom of movement and residence. If this document had any value at all, its most powerful member states like the USA wouldn’t be openly violating every one of these rights every day of the year.

Neither natural rights nor legal rights are compatible with anarchy because anarchy recognizes no authority. Anarchists reject the power our rulers grant themselves to decide which privileges to bestow on the groups and individuals who are able and willing to meet their impossibly strict standards, and which privileges to deny.

No one should have the power to stand on a pedestal and decree to us what we do and don’t deserve, what we can say and can’t say, when we get to eat and where we ought to sleep.

Rather than swallowing mythic tales about human rights and gaslighting ourselves into believing governments will ever grant us anything resembling freedom, why not reach for something real? Something that has shape and substance. There are no rights, no universal laws that will magically protect us from the people who write the laws. No. There are only desires. And the thing all anarchists desire most is freedom. Freedom from rule, from law, from authority, from the wrath of the rights-giver.

We don’t need rights, we need anarchy.

Eradicate Left Unity

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-eradicate-left-unity>. <https://raddle.me/wiki/leftunity>

Subtitle: Make Bands, Not Communities. Anarchy, Not Leftism

Topics: tankies, communism, anarchy, anticiv, China, USSR, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, history, left unity, entryism, third position, fascism, Hadza, Marx, Marxism, ideology

Date: April 2021

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Introduction

Behold the ministers of left-unity in all their glory!

“The only way to achieve revolution is to put aside our differences and unite together as leftists and then after we overthrow capitalism we can then debate on what form of government to replace it with.”

Leave it to a red preaching left-unity at us to not understand the very first thing about anarchists: We want no form of government. This mentality really sums up the absurdity of the entire left-unity moment.

“I don’t get why so many people try to distinguish Marxism and Anarchism. Marxism is a vital part of Anarchist ideology.”

Um, no, it isn’t.

“I don’t think it’s a disservice to acknowledge (anarchism’s) inspirations. Anarchism has taken many cues from Marx. It’s just a fact.”

Bullshit. Nearly every point Marx made was ripped straight from Proudhon and burdened with Marx’s authoritarian hokum, as I’ll demonstrate later in this essay. Anarchy has no need or want of Marx or ism.

“As a libertarian socialist, I would much rather live in an ML state like the USSR, North Korea or China than in this capitalist hellhole.”

It’s always easy to spot someone moments from casting away their long-held superstitions against dictators and police states and signing up with the red ministry. Life is so much easier when you put your faith in a higher power that promises to bring you eternal salvation, to smite all your enemies and create paradise on Earth for you and all true-believers.

“Marx wanted a stateless, moneyless, and classless democratic society. Anarchists want that as well. The difference lies in how we get there.”

Gah, that irksome creed of every insufferable red entryist.

“We’re all headed in the same direction, the difference is only how far one is willing to travel. Someone might leave on the next stop, but before that stop it might be beneficial to work together. Establishing ideological purity that excludes our ML comrades hurts progress.”

Ugh... I feel dirty just quoting these internet commies and their perverse people-conglomeration fantasies, but it’s the best way to establish the purpose of this essay. This one’s going to cover a lot of ground, from entryism and left-unity, to the origins of anarchy and Marxism, to the ways we think about the community ideal and belonging, to a lived anarchy that’s persisted in east Africa for centuries, and finally the psychology behind the strange current of Han Chinese nationalism that’s rising within the white settler-colonial left. Let’s get started.

Exhuming The Left-Unity Corpse

The disturbing trend of self-proclaimed non-sectarian libertarian-socialists and “anarcho-Marxists” that have been attaching themselves to the anarchist discourse can be traced back with a straight line to the proliferation of “left-unity” spaces.

Most of these spaces exist on cursed corporate portals like Reddit, Twitter and Facebook, but they’ve also spread into meatspace. Currently, one of the most prominent virtual left-unity spaces spawns from the US social democrat “Chapotraphouse” podcast, along with assorted inoffensive Reddit spaces led by r/breadtube, the “leftbook” corner of Facebook and several Youtube personalities that start out identifying with particularly milquetoast strains of red anarchism, but then gradually embrace state-capitalist narratives before inevitably swearing off anarchy altogether and doing round the clock propaganda for the Chinese state and its incredibly successful strain of red fascism.

Self-hating settlers who accessorize themselves with various red fascist tendencies infiltrate anarchist and socialist spaces on corporate platforms and initiate left-unity policies that successfully ban all criticism of their backwards conservative views. The more vocal opponents of the new policy are quickly purged for breaking left-unity, leaving a more passive audience who are ripe for indoctrination.

Then the propaganda starts. Endless authoritarian memes to normalize gulags, guillotines, firing squads, violent struggle sessions against anyone who resists social stratification, dictators and genocide. Tomes of nonsensical ideological “theory” is then injected into the eyeballs of alienated young settlers who, for obvious reasons, are starved of cultural identity and belonging. The process ends when the targets are thoroughly brainwashed and can now only see the world through the increasingly warped tankie lens.

Once the transition to their new religion is complete, almost immediately, any ideas that conflict with the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Deng and Xi (never mind that they all contradict with each other) create desperate cognitive dissonance in their minds. So these pasty emotionally-stunted people angrily lash out at the unindoctrinated for being “radlibs”, “western chauvinists” and “imperialists” rather than risk parting with their new-found identity, community and belonging.

Once the majority in the newly minted left-unity community are comfortable joking about rounding up and killing “kulaks”, “anarchist bandits” or more recently “Uighur terrorists” and quoting Chinese state media to counter all the “imperialist western propaganda” from the mouths of the various minority groups being imprisoned and enslaved by the Chinese state (for their own good, they’ll insist), the shaming campaign begins.

Anyone in the space who breaks with the red fash party line is lambasted and ridiculed into submission. The remaining libertarians in the space now find themselves hopelessly outnumbered by scornful white settlers with daddy issues telling them they’re imperialist CIA stooges for thinking the Uighurs maybe shouldn’t be put in concentration camps or the Hong Kong and Tibetan people should get self-determination (watch tankies insist Tibetans who don’t want to be ruled by China are fascists and China is, in fact, saving them from themselves).

In order to not be shunned and purged by their peers, the anarchists in the left-unity space adopt an obscene anarcho-tankie ideology that allows them to maintain their affections for feel-good libertarian philosophers like Chomsky, Bookchin and Kropotkin, while somehow fusing the authoritarian third positionist fascist dogma enforced from the top down by their chosen community.

Uncritical support for every empire that competes with the USA’s, the insistence that anarchism and communism are one and the same because “they have the same end goal”, the claim that anarchist communes and an ML state can co-exist in harmony despite a mountain of historic evidence to the contrary, the attempt to whitewash and obfuscate failed authoritarian concepts like the dictatorship of the proletariat and the vanguard, the nonsensical belief that they can be an anarchist and also a Marxist or even a Dengist... Suddenly they’re able to take wildly contradicting ideas and hack them together in order to be accepted by the elitist red fash echo chamber they so desperately want the approval of.

The conflicting ideas grow increasingly out of whack the further down the rabbit hole the left-unity space takes them, and the ridicule they get for their remaining libertarian attachments begins to eat at their ego, until finally they post “How I went from an anarkiddie to a principled scientific analytical dialectic Marxist-Leninist with Chinese characteristics” and the transition from anarchy-curious to fully programmed red fascist shitlord is complete.

Perhaps all these conservative settlers calling themselves communists are hoping to alleviate their white guilt in some perfunctory way by identifying with ideologies that are little more than shallow anti-Americanism: Denouncing their home imperial empire and presumably all the power and privileges it lavishes them with (fat chance), but spending their days on Reddit and Twitter stumping for every competing imperial empire (China, Russia, Iran), no matter how tenuous a connection the empire has to their supposed socialist ideology.

Corporate platforms that give space to leftists are always organized in a way that requires a rigid hierarchical governance, giving the most power to the most senior moderators. As soon as a small group is able to mount big enough struggle sessions to rise to the top of the ranks of the virtual hierarchy, they’re granted complete control over the space forever and cement their power with a quick purge of anyone who objects to the new management.

They’ll find an assortment of ways to justify the purges, including claims that the dissenters are “wrecking” the space, that they’re racist Sinophobes for objecting to China’s treatment of ethnic minorities, or that they’re simply breaking the newly written left-unity rules by being sectarian, divisive or anti-communist. Nine out of ten people in the space will quickly adapt to the new status quo so they don’t risk losing their place in “the community”. Because the good of the precious community always comes first.

The truth is collectivists are all looking to be led and dictated to and given a role to play by their masters, while anarchy is all about telling people to think for themselves and reject all authority.

The tankie route is much easier for people to take because it doesn’t require real effort or self reflection. A prospective tankie just needs to follow the program, parrot the propaganda, swallow the lies, never dissent against party dogma, and they find automatic praise and acceptance and are able to feel like members of an elite group of “radicals” without actually doing anything radical or engaging in any kind of self-reflection.

Anarchists ask much more of ourselves and we never rest on our laurels or praise our associates for their obedience. We actually strive to unmake domination in all its forms, kill every cop in our heads, turn every social institution inside out, do anarchy in our lives at every opportunity and tell anyone who tries to rule us in any way to fuck off and die... That all takes a lot of fucking effort. Much easier to repost gulag memes on 4chan all day and be showered with praise from your fellow AK-47 enthusiasts.

While reds endlessly thirst for domination, bureaucracy and performative politburo, spending their gloomy little lives bossing all their deferential underlings around while promising them a magical revolution some day if they just stick to the program, prop up dear-leader and evangelize from the good book of Marx, anarchists are actually out there in the world waging perpetual warfare on everything and anything that would dominate us.

Left-unity is a deliberate ploy by disturbed groomers to indoctrinate impressionable young minds into their authoritarian red fascist cult and force them to abandon any dangerous individualist beliefs they might have once held so they can be accepted within the collective’s rigid hierarchy. Joe Commie can’t risk getting called a radlib or an anarkiddie by members of the Soviet reenactment society for forming their own thoughts or questioning daddy’s bullshit-laden narratives in any way.

“Left-unity” has never been anything more than tankie doublespeak for “obey us or be purged”. Don’t fall for it. Burn the space down before you let the scum of the earth get their hooks in it.

Red Fash Entryism

“Entryism is a tactic whereupon members of a political group join another group with the (often secret) intention of changing its principles and plans.”

“Entryism provides a means for a small but determined group to leverage their influence onto a larger sphere by using an infiltrated group’s resources.”

Before the red fash brigade can cement their power and seize control of a space to control the discourse, turning it into yet another boring apparatchik congregation, they need to do a whole lot of good old fashioned entryism.

Like any pious door-to-door missionary, once they’ve wedged themselves into the building with some gentle inclusivity-pleas and cries that they’re being oppressed by “sectarians”, it’s not long before they’re moving towards the stairs and getting ready to start their climb to the top floor where they can really let loose... Here are some examples of entryists at work on Raddle.me; an anti-authoritarian and illegalist space I founded:

“China has to put them in re-education camps because they’re terrorists, they pose a serious threat to society. The party can’t let dangerous people run around throwing bombs at schools, they have to maintain public order, so if the Uighurs are going to keep doing terrorist attacks, they need to be dealt with, it’s as simple as that.”

Is there anything a red fash enjoys more than casting ethnic minorities as villains in their Chairman Übermensch fantasies? This entryist worked hard to convince a site full of scumbag thieves and anarchists that the state needs to protect public order from ‘terrorists’. The irony was apparently lost on them.

Stay mad Western white libs. Accept facts that the only genocide happening in China is against poverty and outdated transit. But keep pretending that you’re against “all genocide” when you have literal concentration camps at the border of your countries. If only you were just as furious and took that much effort to focus on that than on China. Supporting CIA-funded terrorism in Xinjiang is the epitome of your white liberalism. China will keep winning and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The fact that this chuckle-head is a white boy from California, USA of course doesn’t stop him from weaponizing his own whiteness against a couple of people (non-western people of color, mind you) who were concerned about China’s self-admitted ethnic cleansing campaign. The entire tankie defense for ML atrocities always seems to come down to snarky shaming and whataboutism taken to the extreme.

“If there’s actually a genocide happening, I find it hard to believe the anti-Islamic GOP is the group that’s most concerned about Muslims in China. If there’s actually a genocide happening, I find it hard to believe that countries with large Muslim populations aren’t equally concerned, or even more concerned. If there’s actually a genocide happening, I find it hard to believe that China still has almost three times as many mosques-per-worshipper as the U.S.”

I find it hard to believe. If there’s actually a genocide happening. I find it hard to believe. If there’s actually a genocide happening. I find it hard to believe. If there’s actually a genocide happening... They’re not even subtle with the brainwashing.

ML states have done so many atrocities at this point that I don’t know why tankies bother denying it when a new one happens. The USSR alone was responsible for the de-Tatarization of Crimea, the genocide of the Ingrian Finns, the ethnic cleansing of Poles, the mass gulaging and pogroms of Greeks, the deportation of the Karachays, the deportation of the Kalmyks, the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush (Aardakh), the deportation of the Balkars, the deportation of Azerbaijanis from Armenia, the deportation of the Meskhetian Turks, the deportations of the Chinese and Koreans, the execution and deportation of Latvians, the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe and the Holodomor famine that largely happened due to the USSR’s confiscation and export of all the grain stores in central and eastern Ukraine, and preventing people from acquiring more food by banning free movement.

Then there’s communist Czechoslovakia’s Romani sterilizations, the Cambodian genocide, Bulgaria’s “revival process”, Vietnam’s Montagnard persecution, the Isaaq genocide in Somalia, the Hmong genocide in Laos, the Gukurahundi massacres in Zimbabwe and the mass starvation of anywhere between 15 and 55 million people that happened in China during Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”.

At what point did tankies of the past switch from denying one of their genocides to praising it and insisting it was justified because the victims were kulaks? I give it 3 years, tops, before this clown’s narrative switches from “I find it hard to believe” to “well, they were a threat to the revolution so they had to go”.

“Why is it that when I go to “tankie” internet spaces I see genuine respect for other viewpoints and an interest in discussing and working with everyone willing to unite against the ruling class, but when I go to “anarchist” internet spaces all I see is a bunch of punching left and people calling MLs fascists and so on? Exaggeration of course, there are some actual principled anarchists in these places, but the radlibs (that’s all you fuckers who use the term “red fash” by the way) clearly own the place.”

This one’s a self-proclaimed “anti-imperialist anarchist” who thinks opposing China’s genocide is disrespectful to red fash. Brilliant bit of entryism that as usual tries to cast anyone who pushes back against authoritarianism as “unprincipled” and uncooperative and standing in the way of progress. Accusing us of “punching left” for rejecting ethnic cleansing is the cherry on top of this turd cake.

“Do you not see the difference between calling someone an “anarkiddie” and calling someone a red fascist? I’m not sure why I’d need to explain this to you, but you realize a fascist is one of the worst things you can possibly be, right? I hope I won’t be criticized for saying that I believe fascists should literally be executed openly. Being a fascist is, in my mind, like being a child molester or a murderer or a slave owner. It is something which completely invalidates any right you might have to continue living your life peacefully. To be a fascist is to be an active threat to all good people in the world.”

The same entryist goes on to insist we stop calling his comrades red fascists because they’re not murderers and child molesters... Except their daddy Stalin was both a murderer and a child molester. Mao too. Oops, was that disrespectful of me? Sorry, comrade. I guess those particular fascists don’t count because then you’d have to execute yourself for praying at their altar.

If Marxist-Leninists don’t want to be called fascists they shouldn’t stan for rulers who put gays and sex workers in gulags, displaced and starved millions of indigenous people in order to colonize their land (i.e. genocide) and murdered all their political opponents — including — shock — anarchists. In other words, they should stop calling themselves Marxist-Leninists.

You can’t detach a political ideology from its creators, and even if you could, ML rulers continue to enact racist, homophobic and colonial policies today, showing that modern MLs haven’t changed in any meaningful way. And you certainly can’t expect anarchists to not think of them as fascists when anarchists have been mass-murdered throughout history by ML counter-revolutions.

“Anarkiddy” is a low-effort paternalistic insult and it makes perfect sense that tankies would come up with it. It says a lot more about MLs than it says about us. But “red fascist” isn’t a mere insult, it’s the perfect description of what the modern Marxist-Leninist-Dengist is. A fascist draped in red. And judging by how riled up they get when they hear the term, it’s working as intended.

“If you’re not getting paid by the CIA to spread nonsense about its enemies, you’re really fucking stupid.”

They’re starting to betray their true intentions here. A little strange for an anarchist to be so angry that other anarchists aren’t willing to kneel for the state with the most billionaires in the world, no?

“It simply does not seem to me that Xi is a man with total and unquestionable power over his country. I’d need to see some good evidence that this is, in fact, the case before I would believe it.”

I’m sure they’d be perfectly willing to consider all the evidence, after all they’re a principled anti-imperialist anarcho-communist! Let’s see what happens.

“How in the world am I supposed to engage you in a serious discussion when you say absolute nonsense like “China has a dictator” lmao. Have you ever in your life read a book??”

Looks like I hit a nerve and he’s gone full mask off. The strugglismo is especially strong with this one, casting himself as the white knight in charge of defending Xi Jinping’s honor by shaming strangers into compliance with the party line on internet message boards.

“Go drink some more fucking kool-aid western chauvinist radlib.”

This back and forth I had with an entryist posing as an anarchist is identical to 100 other perfectly telegraphed conversations with entryists I’ve had. They’ll try to cast doubt on the narratives of the ML state’s victims, insist their favorite ML dictators are actually accountable, equitable and democratic, accuse you of being a lackey of one of the USA’s alphabet agencies and finally label you a reactionary / western chauvinist / radlib if you continue to resist their attempts to gaslight you and normalize authoritarianism in the space.

No matter how meticulously sourced your citations are, they’ll reject all of them as “western propaganda”. If you give them evidence from the ML state itself, they’ll claim it’s being taken out of context or is a mistranslation. There’s really no way to get through their thick armor of sun-baked bullshit. I find it’s much more productive just to mock them from the get go.

A couple of the quotes I opened this essay with were some red anarchists insisting that the only difference between Marxism and anarchy is the method we use to reach our supposed shared end goal.

That’s just it though, anarchists don’t have a final destination, we embody an endless negation of authority. To assume there can be a neat and tidy goal to anarchy would be to believe archy will just go away one day, which would be a ludicrous proposition at odds with everything we know about archy. As long as humans exist, so will Leviathan.

And when I say anarchists I mean anarchists, not milquetoast libertarian socialists whose idea of praxis is posting bread memes on Reddit while rubbing virtual elbows with their genocide-denying red fascist comrades from the safety of their sterile gated condos in suburban USA.

Anarchists desire a lot more than socialists desire. We want to unmake all forms of domination, not just economic and class-based domination. That’s what makes anarchists stand apart from every other political school of thought, and to pretend we’re just alt Marxists does a great disservice to anarchy.

Anarchists demonstrably predate Marxists. Even if you only count scholarly European men (as settlers will do) and not the centuries of peoples all around the world living anarchically without naming it e.g. the Hadza people in east Africa (a fascinating anarchistic culture I’ll explore later in this essay).

Anarchy was not inspired by Marxism, in fact Marx was greatly “inspired” by Proudhon; the first person to refer to himself as an anarchist, whose work “What Is Property?”, which concluded “property is theft”, was initially praised by Marx as “the first resolute, pitiless, and at the same time scientific investigation and critique of private property”.

Marx really made his career shamelessly ripping off Proudhon’s earlier work point by point, but piling on a thick authority sludge before serving it up to the world as if he were presenting something new and not just an authoritarian perversion of Proudhon’s ideas. Once Marx found fame with his plagiarism, he then decried Proudhon as being detestable; a bad economist, a bad philosopher, whose critiques were worthless and unevolved.

From Springers “Why A Radical Geography Must Be Anarchist”:

“Marx, like Proudhon before him, argued that abolishing interest-bearing capital was destructive of capitalism. Marx, like Proudhon before him, differentiated between possession and private property and argued that cooperatives should replace capitalist firms. Marx, like Proudhon before him, argued that the working classes must emancipate themselves. Marx, like Proudhon before him, regarded property as the subjugation of the labor of others by means of appropriation. Marx, like Proudhon before him, saw the cooperative movement as a necessity of transitioning away from capitalism and thus recognized the need for communal land and workplaces. Marx, like Proudhon before him, proclaimed the need for ‘scientific socialism’. Marx, like Proudhon before him, argued that the state was an instrument of class rule, although they differed in terms of whether or not a temporary proletariat dictatorship was necessary to see it properly undone.”

Moving beyond the widely-repeated entryist lie that Marxism somehow birthed anarchy, even the entire basis for left-unity; the idea that anarchy is leftist, is also predicated on a lie.

The left / right paradigm has nothing to do with anarchy, really. It was created in the days leading up to the French revolution, to differentiate between those who supported the French republic (leftists) and those who supported the French monarchy (rightists).

A politician in the états généraux who sat on the left side of the king favored the republic, while those sitting on his right favored the monarchy. Of course, neither side wished to abolish authority. Both left and right were clearly in favor of the state, regardless of who got to rule it.

To anyone not bamboozled by entryist swindlers and their doublespeak, identifying as a leftist is a statement to the world that you support nationalism, states, borders, a monopoly on violence, being ruled by kings or presidents or central committees. Anarchists aren’t left or right wing, we’re anarchists. We reject the power machinations of both wings of government. We reject all authority.

The underlying assumption still persists in the minds of leftists and rightists today that the whole spectrum of conceivable politics need to be enacted through the state. Anarchists shouldn’t be placing themselves on either side of the fucking king.

If anarchists know anything, it’s that nothing worthwhile can come from the state and its bureaucracy, so why would any anarchists want to adopt the left wing of the state into their politics? Why would any anarchist want to fuse themselves with a legion of shitty genocide-fetishists in a grotesque display of anti-authority and pro-authority unison?

Guess what happens when someone who purports to be anti-authority joins up with an authority-happy group, helps normalize their politburo posturing, their domination role-playing and amplifies their grotesque messaging for them? They cease to be anti-authority. There’s nothing anarchist about giving petty tyrants more power and a bigger audience.

From its inception, post-left anarchy has simply been a course-correction to restore and revive anarchy by unweighing it from the specter of authority (the left) that it’s been weighed down with by a hundred years of settler colonial humanism.

Slaying the Community Ideal & Exploring a Living Example of Anarchy

The libertarian socialists (I refuse to call them anarchists) who succumb to glaringly obvious entryism and embrace third positionist ideology (without ever admitting it to themselves) largely do so because they so value the idea of community, of being accepted and embraced by the other members of their supposedly non-sectarian, all-inclusive (so long as you obey an ever-expanding list of entryist rules) hugbox of a community. Because to all reds, world-building and comradeship is the very basis of their every ideological convulsion.

If the concept of community is authority-based e.g. steeped in majoritarianism, then what good is it to anarchists? Since at least 99.9% of all existing self-identifying communities and even theoretical proposals for communities are beholden to states, councils, committees, voter bodies and other forms of rulership, it’s safe to say the community ideal in itself is just another vessel of authority.

If all organized communities on the planet can be clearly demonstrated to be authority-based, then it’s a safe bet that the entire concept of community is authority-forming... By simply looking at every example in the world today, you can bet with absolute certainty that any forced grouping of people around the community ideal is going to lead everyone involved through another abusive and torturous adventure in archy.

The idea that a community can be without rulers has never been proven. The few remaining free people in the world e.g. the Hadza in east Africa (“Tanzania”) don’t live in anything resembling what we know as a community. They’re nomadic, have no leaders, no gods, no rules, no crops, no property, no marriage, no parents (Hadza children have full autonomy and essentially raise themselves), don’t extract anything from the land other than foraged food and are quick to remove themselves from the presence of anyone who tries to rule them.

Anthropologist Frank Marlowe:

“The Hadza certainly are egalitarian (Woodburn 1979, 1982a). This does not mean that there are no individuals who would like to dominate others and have their way. It is simply difficult to boss others around. If a Hadza tries to tell others what to do, which does happen now and then, the others simply ignore it; if he or she persists, they just move to another camp. Of course, the bossy person could follow them, but if people move to several different locations, the bossy person cannot control them all at once.”

I would suggest the reason the Hadza are so successful at living anarchy is because they have no attachment to the idea and the ideology of community, and will split up and drift away from a band of people without hesitation the moment the band ceases to suit their interests. The word “band” I’m using here is especially relevant since it’s distinctly compatible with the concepts of anarchy. From Britannica:

“By definition, a band was a small, egalitarian, kin-based group of perhaps 10–50 people, while a tribe comprised a number of bands that were politically integrated (often through a council of elders or other leaders).”

The Hadza live in groups of as little as 2 people, but generally their bands consist of around 30 people. The fascinating thing about Hadza bands is they can wholly consist of children without any adult supervision, demonstrating how they learn self-sufficiency and autonomy from other children from a very early age rather than through their parents.

Here’s the abstract of the journal “Evolution and Human Behavior Volume 41, Issue 1, January 2020, Pages 12–22”:

“Teaching is cross-culturally widespread but few studies have considered children as teachers as well as learners. This is surprising, since forager children spend much of their time playing and foraging in child-only groups, and thus, have access to many potential child teachers. Using the Social Relations Model, we examined the prevalence of child-to-child teaching using focal follow data from 35 Hadza and 38 BaYaka 3- to 18-year-olds. We investigated the effect of age, sex and kinship on the teaching of subsistence skills. We found that child-to-child teaching was more frequent than adult-child teaching. Additionally, children taught more with age, teaching was more likely to occur within same-sex versus opposite-sex dyads, and close kin were more likely to teach than non-kin.”

“The Hadza and BaYaka also showed distinct learning patterns; teaching was more likely to occur between sibling dyads among the Hadza than among the BaYaka, and a multistage learning model where younger children learn from peers, and older children from adults, was evident for the BaYaka, but not for the Hadza. We attribute these differences to subsistence and settlement patterns. These findings highlight the role of children in the intergenerational transmission of subsistence skills.”

Since the Hadza have no leaders or councils or any concept of social hierarchy, including the parent-child hierarchy libsocs like Chomsky are so fond of clinging to, “small bands of people” is really the perfect way to describe how they live. I wish more anarchists would gravitate towards forming temporary, transient bands of people who share common interests, rather than continuing their attempts to build permanent, massive, alienating, authority-breeding “communities”.

And perhaps the most important feature to their anarchistic way of life is that the Hadza have no specialists, with every Hadza skilled in everything they need to survive. This means there’s no division of labor and no systems or institutions are needed to create these divisions.

If we’re being honest with ourselves, the division of labor and resources is what a community is founded around inside civilization. Without the division that comes with specialism, the Hadza are able to live in complete anarchy in small, unattached bands of people where everyone owns the means of their survival. Marlowe writes:

“Each Hadza knows how to do everything he or she needs to do and does not depend on others. Each man can make his own bow and arrows, his poison, and his ax. Each man knows how to make fire, how to track, and how to make pegs to climb baobab trees and get honey. Each woman knows how to make her own digging stick, how to find tubers and dig them up, how to build a house, and how to make her own clothes, jewelry, and baskets or find gourds to use as containers for carrying water or berries. Even when it comes to medicine, each adult man and woman knows which plants to pick for different ailments.”

Since the Hadza’s anarchistic existence has no similarity to anything thought of as a community today (sedentary, hierarchical, complex legal systems, property-based, extractive, patriarchal, overflowing with authority), it wouldn’t make sense to call their way of life a community. Another word would be needed that isn’t weighed down by centuries of domination, shame and conformity, because the two ways of life simply have nothing in common. The closest political concept that describes what the Hadza have is probably Stirner’s union of egoists:

“The union of egoists is a voluntary structure formed by its members in their own immediate interests. This is a union of self-confessed selfish people, which they leave as soon as their interests are not being delivered.”

Both “a band of people” and “a union of egoists” are more descriptive phrases for living anarchy than a word as loaded and authority-laden as “community”.

A community comes with ideological baggage that needn’t exist, such as the perceived need to defend the wholly-manufactured community from externalities (even to the point of the loss of your own life), to put the needs of the community above the needs and desires of the individual and to more broadly collectivize the people who form the community as if they’re a singular, monolithic body and should act in unison at all costs, regardless of the damage this would inflict to their individuality, their autonomy and thus to anarchy.

Communities are often (always?) held together by ideology, and like all the nonsensical ideologies the world is ruled by, third positionism is showing itself to be a formidable community-builder in the perpetually-online sect.

Third Positionism

It’s important to note that since the settler-colonial far-left have embraced Dengism or “communism with Chinese characteristics” as they more often term it, the bar has really been lowered to such an extent that their ideology has become harder and harder to distinguish from the various forms of third positionist fascism.

Third positionists seek to establish monocultural nation states built around the idea of supremacist racially-homogeneous nationalism. The third position argues for a mixed economy (blending elements of a market economy with elements of a planned economy) with a dedication to eliminating weakness and “degeneracy” from society.

The third positionists claim to be opposed to both communism and capitalism, while using ideas from both, typically fusing reactionary right-wing cultural views with radical left-wing economic views. The so-called third way is really no different than the other two ways to run a society in practice, but has snappy new branding.

Since tankies have updated their ideology to center around the modern People’s Republic of China: A state that openly trumps privatization, free markets, landlords, banks, stock exchanges, private healthcare, union-busting, billionaires, ethno-nationalism, cultural genocide, expansionist colonialist armies, institutional racism / homophobia, rampant economic imperialism overseas and mass-incarceration.... It’s become very difficult to distinguish how their ideology is any different from the western neo-fascist system they already live under.

So really, the imagination of the average internet tankie has been so utterly colonized that they’re unable to envision any system that doesn’t simply reproduce the USA’s neo-fascist empire 1:1 but with a different ethnic group at the helm.

But the Chinese state certainly checks all the boxes on the list of third positionist fascism. A nation state with a mixed economy, monoculturalism, racial homogeneny, Han supremacy, a blending of capitalism and communism, conservative cultural values (including bans on “abnormal sexual behaviors”). It’s like a third positionist wet dream.

So where did third positionism originate? The term “third position” was first used by Terza Posizione, a short-lived far-right movement founded in Rome in 1979 as a supposed third way of running a society, claiming to be a middle ground between communism and capitalism.

Much earlier, Strasserism evolved out of the National Socialist German Workers Party in the 1920s and 30s and tried to do the same thing. Unlike fellow party-member Hitler, who was avidly anti-communist, they took the “socialist” part of the party’s name seriously and combined anti-capitalism and wealth-redistribution with antisemitism and German nationalism.

In 1930s and 1940s France, a number of communist and socialist parties splintered to create nationalist off-shoots . These included Jacques Doriot’s French Popular Party (from the French Communist Party) and Marcel Déat’s National Popular Rally (from the French Section of the Workers’ International).

The original National Bolsheviks in both Russia and Germany had the same idea, believing socialism needed more blatant nationalism and racism than it already had under Lenin and Stalin. In the 1980s, the concept of third positionism was taken up by the far-right, fascist political party National Front in the United Kingdom. Today there has been a resurgence in third positionist fascism under various labels, from modern nazbols to “national anarchism” to neo-Eurasianism to (I argue) Dengism.

It’s completely unsurprising that an ideology founded by virulent racist and colonialist paternalists like Marx and Engels would find support with so many racist nationalists. Here’s part of a particularly offensive Marx-Engels Correspondence from 1862 that perhaps helps us understand why Marx felt the need to fuse all of Proudhon’s innovations with a heavy dose of authoritarian dogma, and why so many racists are drawn to forming nationalist Marxist offshoots. (Warning: Racial slurs ahead).

Karl Marx:

“The Jewish nigger Lassalle who fortunately leaves by the end of this week, has lost another 5,000 thaler in speculation. I realize now that he — his head form and his hair growth are evident enough — is a descendant of niggers, who joined Moses’ exodus from Egypt. The intrusiveness of this chap is also very niggerish.”

Engels shared these white supremacist beliefs. Here he is writing about Marx’s Cuban son-in-law Paul Lafargue in 1887, who Marx enjoyed denigrating as “the negrillo” and “the Gorilla.” The letter was addressed to Lafargue’s wife, commenting on Lafargue’s decision to run for public office.

Friedrich Engels:

“Being in his quality as a nigger a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district.”

Both Marx and Engels celebrated the USA’s conquering of Mexico, further showing that their support for equity really only extended to white people in practice, and they were in full support of white nationalism and colonialism.

Marx:

“Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?”

Engels:

“In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States.”

Finally, here’s an example of Marx’s antisemitism, which of course appeals greatly to the third positionist fascists who see Marxism and fascism as being so compatible. Marx’s family had originally been Jewish, but his father swore off Judaism before he was born and converted to Evangelicalism, to better integrate himself into European society.

Marx:

“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. … Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man—and turns them into commodities. … The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange. … The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.”

Today, several third-positionist and Eurasianist media outlets such as The Grayzone and Globalresearch.ca push fascist propaganda that attacks Western empires but glorifies Eastern ones.

These media outlets are beloved by tankies because their journalists deny the Uighurs are being ethnically cleansed and attack Hong Kong protesters for resisting Communist Party of China rule. Globalresearch.ca even has articles denying the holocaust, which doesn’t seem to slow down red fascists who lap up their pro-CPC, pro-Assad and pro-Russia propaganda and spread it far and wide.

I’d suggest the only reason modern Dengist tankies don’t openly identify as fascists is because they’ve gotten so much play historically out of casting fascists as their sworn enemy after the rift that developed between Stalin and the Nazis following their earlier gentleman’s agreement to divvy up Europe between themselves.

Every devoted ideologue needs a villain before they can cast themselves as the only hero who can vanquish the great force of evil. Hey, it worked for G. W. Bush with Saddam, and it’s working wonders for Xi Jinping with the Uighurs. Most of his citizens and foreign devotees are convinced he’s keeping them all safe from those big mean social pariahs.

Indeed, the contemporary tankie is devoted to “Xi Jinping thought”, a pious and devoted sermoner who calls for his congregation to have faith in the divinity of the good book, regardless of how many lifetimes it’ll take to bring about the holy rapture. Xi Jinping:

“It is Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought that guided the Chinese people out of the darkness of that long night and established a New China. The consolidation and development of the socialist system will require its own long period of history... it will require the tireless struggle of generations, up to ten generations. The fundamental reason why some of our comrades have weak ideals and faltering beliefs is that their views lack a firm grounding in historical materialism.”

Ten generations. So if we do the math, with each generation lasting 30 years, the communist rapture should be granted to true-believers in approximately 300 years. But only if their ideals are strong, their faith unfaltering, and they’re grounded in the divinity of hallowed historical materialism i.e. the necessity to “tirelessly struggle” through centuries of ecocide, police brutality and genocide inflicted on them by Xi and his successors. Don’t falter from the celestial path, comrades. Your salvation is near.

Deng and Xi’s economic and social reforms have succeeded where previous third positionist projects failed, mixing and matching socialist, nationalist and capitalist elements as it suits them. The party even goes as far as to declare Han culture as being synonymous with Chinese culture, and punishes all the minority cultures for not conforming to Han cultural supremacy.

It’s clear to me that this latest breed of tankie, the communist-with-Chinese-characteristics or Dengist, both within China and without, has fully embraced the mythical third position between communism and capitalism that in actuality is just far right nationalism with a state-controlled economy. So in a word, fascism.

Fascism Was Never Defeated

“Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultra-nationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, as well as strong regimentation of society and of the economy.”

The only thing that’s really changed about global fascism since the second world war is it has adapted to no longer require one-party rule, instead turning the two-parties of western neoliberal democracies into separate wings of the same (fascist) party. Everything else is the same.

Two party rule is still a dictatorship for all intents and purposes, but with rotating reps who all represent the same political class. The rich fund both parties and their candidates to buy their allegiance regardless of which flag-waving stooge’s turn it is to sit in the big chair.

The billionaire class as a whole is the new dictator form, while the presidents, ministers and governors are just there to create spectacle, hold back any and all threats to the system and keep the peasantry convinced they have a say in the political process when they vote for one of the dictator class’s two pre-approved showmen.

Charles Koch is the supreme ruler of the fascist USA empire.

China, on the other hand, still matches up with the original unadulterated definition of fascism since it’s far-right i.e. extreme nationalist, nativist and authoritarian. It has an unabashed dictator i.e. the Paramount Leader of China, who simultaneously holds the positions of head of state, government, civil and military offices of the highest order within the party...

It has a forcible suppression of opposition in the form of re-education camps, outlawing of protest, institutional rape, mass-censorship, an intricate government propaganda system and staggering numbers of political prisoners. It has strong regimentation of both society and economy: The state has long acted to purge anything that doesn’t meet with strict hetero-normative Han-nationalist ideals, even outlawing LGBT representation in the media, and maintains an iron grip on the economy to the point of putting government officials to work full time inside at least a hundred big corporations.

Fascism is also always corporatist in nature, which the CPC certainly embodies with its forced class collaboration between worker and employer, and the way it structures its whole economy around the growth of the corporations, which serve to grow the state and its imperialist expansionism.

The party’s corporatism has all the usual features including useless employer-controlled unions and a staggering 1.5 million-member police force which springs into action during any class conflict, using its monopoly on violence to uphold the interests of the bourgeois class and violently put down the workers.

China is implicitly a fascist nation in the most traditional sense, meeting every word of the original definition, with the power in the hands of the head of state seemingly for as long as he wants it.

While the USA, due to its rotating two-party democracy, is better described as neo-fascist, with both parties serving the fascist billionaires who really rule the nation. But even China purports to be democratic much like the USA does, so the distinction is barely there... Xi Jinping calls China a “whole-process democracy”. Democracy is really a meaningless moniker when it’s so easy to obfuscate what the democratic process actually achieves. Plenty of lifelong dictators around the world claim to be democratically elected and will have anyone who says otherwise shot dead.

So the only tangible difference I can see between the two fascistic nations is the Chinese head of state is positioned above China’s billionaires on the hierarchy, and has no qualms about retaliating against them when they break with the party line, while the USA head of state is wholly subservient to the billionaire class and serves at their pleasure.

Some will argue that unlike previous fascist genocides, the Uighur genocide is motivated by economics, which it is, but it’s just as motivated by religious, cultural and ethnic considerations. The party’s propaganda depicts Uighurs as a crazed, seditious out-group striving to destroy China and its (Han) culture from within, and bring about the country’s collapse, which is really exactly how the Nazis depicted the Jews. And this isn’t even the first time the party has engaged in ethnic, cultural and religious erasure — they’ve been doing it in Tibet for decades.

Ideologues prone to entryism like to rebrand things every so often because their ideas start to look ridiculous after decades of failures, so fascism and Marxism-Leninism become third positionism, and seem more respectable for a while, at least until more failures and atrocities pile up. Got to hide that power level while you can I suppose.

As I mentioned earlier, third positionist ideology is likely embraced by goofy American and European settler-colonizers so readily because they have a lot of deep-seeded guilt stemming from their empire’s colonization of the world and they lack the imagination to envision real alternatives to their status quo. It’s far easier for them to seek an alternate strongman ruler to root for against their own strongman ruler than part entirely with the tight comforting security blanket a strong and charming ruler offers them.

After all, their fave ruler has a complex multifaceted plan to one day gift them a glorious utopia — in China’s case, a series of succeeding 5-year plans playing out over at least the next three centuries... And how can they resist the warm mushy feels that such strong regimentation and structure gives them? How can they doubt daddy when his big promises for a master plan make them feel so giddy and safe?

Being a communist-with-Chinese-characteristics means they’re not like all the other normie white settlers living with them under the Koch dynasty. When they log onto Twitter and flood their followers with neo-fascist conspiracy blog posts proving just how much the terrible Uighurs deserve to be erased, they get one step closer to that beautiful rapture where all the chosen ones float to Marx’s communidise and the reactionary unwashed heathens are left to rot in anarcho-hell.

Tankies will always insist they need to build a strong one-party capitalist state because their daddy Lenin said so. They’re convinced they need an almighty state so it can one day “wither away” and allow communism to bloom, because just look at how all those socialist states in history withered away! Look at Russia, look at China, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Bulgaria, Syria, Burma, Libya, North Korea, Angola, Bangladesh, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, Poland, Mozambique, Romania, East Germany, Hungary, Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Albania... All socialist states that withered away into communism, right? Lenin was fucking prophetic eh?

More than a hundred years later, tankies still cling to the same bankrupt ideology that has failed catastrophically more times than anyone could have imagined. So the source of my endless befuddlement is: Why do so many self-proclaimed anarcho-communists and libertarian socialists see these people as their allies? And more often than not end up joining their third positionist cult after some gentle entryist prodding?

To tankies and their red/black advocates I say put down those blood-soaked books and face reality. Your amazing worker paradise, the reward for your century of struggle isn’t coming. You can kill all the kulaks, all the community-wreckers, all the anarchists, all the left-communists, all the ethnic minorities, all the gays, all the thieves, all the ungrateful unionists, all the muslims, you can pile all their reactionary revisionist terrorist infantile heretic bodies high and light massive meatsack bonfires all over the landscape, and you still won’t get your glorious communist utopia where everyone who hasn’t been murdered, lobotomized or gulaged gets to be equal, resource-rich and fancy-free.

Look at the world around you. Look at the rapidly collapsing inferno we’ve inherited from the slippery bearded ideologues of decades past. Your daddy Lenin was wrong, Stalin was wrong, Mao was wrong, Xi is wrong, all your big strong men whispering sweet nothings into your ear while they impregnated teenagers, orchestrated peasant massacres and stripped the lands they ruled bare were wrong.

It’s been a hundred something years of broken promises and bald-faced lies from every one of your heroes, going all the way back to the day grand-daddy Marx connivingly expelled the anarchists from the International for daring to offer an alternative to his authoritarianism. Yes, the man who first ripped off, watered-down and relabeled anarchist ideas also perpetrated the original entryist purge against anarchists... And history has been repeating itself ever since.

How about learning from history’s mistakes instead of repeating them in an endless loop hoping for a different result? No, Xi’s successor in the year 2321 isn’t going to give the workers a rapturous reward when he decides the time is finally right to abolish capitalism. He’ll live in a fucking palace on a pile of gold and diamonds just like all the rulers before him.

Xi’s disgusted by you. All your daddies are disgusted by the filthy peasants that kiss their boots and beg for table scraps. The only way you’ll get a piece of his pie is after you kill him and pry it from his ivory dentures. People who possess ultimate power over 1.4 billion people don’t wake up one day and decide to slice their wealth up into equal pieces and share it with everyone. It has never happened and it will never happen.

Authority strangles everything in its path. Building your society around authority and domination does not create anything but more fascism with a dozen different labels, each crudely stuck on top of the other.

There will never be a global communist society because communists will always find ideological enemies around every corner. You can’t murder them all and you can’t bend 7 billion people to your will, so stop fantasizing about reshaping the world in the image of some dead tyrants who told some big beautiful lies to their wide-eyed subjects a century ago.

You have no power to control the tides, whether you pray to Koch or Xi. Your ceaseless entryism (especially your wildly successful campaign for left-unity) will keep growing your base, but all you’re really doing in our spaces is indoctrinating people that were already wholly constituted of 100% pure horseshit. You can keep them.

Kill The God of Work & All His Clergy

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-kill-the-god-of-work-all-his-clergy>. <https://raddle.me/wiki/anti-work>

Topics: anti-work, anti-civ, work, lying flat, industrialism, civilization, industry, China, alienation, entryism, protestant work ethic, post-left, productivity, play, anthropology, gatherer-hunters, productive play, capitalism, Bob Black, labor, anti-economy

Date: January 29, 2022

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Life in the Machine

The Greek philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, “If you would learn to be subservient to the king, you would not have to live on lentils.” Said Diogenes, “Learn to live on lentils, and you will not have to cultivate the king.”

I’d say one of the most impactful components of anarchy through the ages, and especially in this current decade is anti-work — the complete rejection of work. Though as old as civilization itself, anti-work ideas have been steadily regaining momentum in modern times, starting in small anarchist circles, and now taking off explosively in mainstream culture. Millions of people around the world have suddenly found themselves exposed to this very anarchist concept.

This has especially been evident during the Covid-19 pandemic. Perhaps because millions of workers have now seen, first-hand, just how disposable their lives are to their employers, who in countless cases have openly sacrificed them to the plague rather than risk putting a dent in their company’s bottom line.

In China, a growing “lying flat” anti-work movement has exploded in popularity[41], despite numerous attempts by the state to shut it down. Luo Huazhong kicked off the idea in an April 2021 forum post titled “lying flat is justice”, where he attached a photo of himself in bed under a blanket, with the curtains closed to shut out the sunlight.

Luo had been out of regular work for more than two years. He had to limit his consuming, but found that the abundant leisure time he was afforded in exchange for his curtailed productivity was deeply liberating.

In the post, he explained that the pervasive status anxiety in workerist Chinese society was a product of corrupted values and overwhelming peer pressure. He proclaimed there was nothing wrong with lying flat; living an idle existence. By overcoming his desire for consumer products and the structural pressure to be productive, he successfully freed himself from the servitude of work.

Luo’s post spoke to China’s urban youth who for years had worked non-stop while the promise of a middle-class lifestyle as their reward eroded more and more with each increase in the cost of living. Fellow lapsed workers responded to his post enthusiastically and exchanged their tips to survive with minimal work and reduced spending.

The idea immediately went viral on social media. Over the next several months, lying-flat advocates pushed back against cutthroat work culture and high cost of living and the movement grew at a rapid pace.

The communist party launched a censorship campaign to erase all mention of lying-flat from the web. The state media desperately tried to discredit Luo’s dangerous idea and shame or scare people back to the offices and factories they were increasingly abandoning.

Simultaneously in the English-speaking world, another anti-work movement exploded into being, primarily on the anarchist-run Reddit forum r/antiwork, which gathered millions of subscribers in just a few months. All over the world, the pandemic, massive inflation and a general disaffection with work-culture was driving people to question why they force themselves to drive to work every morning.

What anarchists mean by “work” is really very straight-forward. Work is the machine extracting our labor to feed itself.

Wolfi Landstreicher:

Work, in the social world in which you and I find ourselves, is the alienation of an individual’s time, activities, and forces from her/himself. In other words, it is the institutionalization of a process where the things you do, the things I do, and the things we do together are determined by powers (individuals, social structures, etc) outside of ourselves to serve their interests.[42]

Sadly, like any subversive idea that suddenly finds itself in the spotlight, a lot of opportunists have been willfully misrepresenting what anti-work is and trying to obscure its post-left anarchist roots. A steady line of communists and liberals have been trying to appropriate this very anarchist idea and make it line up with their decidedly pro-work 19^th century ideologies.

Anti-work isn’t merely the critique of work under capitalism as the reds would have you believe, nor the push for better working conditions and nicer bosses as the liberals are pretending. It is the wholesale rejection of work in all its forms, regardless of whoever the boss is, whatever the form of remuneration, whatever the social or economic system in place happens to be.

It’s completely uprooting the institution of work, smashing all the systems of servitude that ensnare us, sabotaging workplaces in any way we can, exposing the markets for the giant houses of cards they are and then blowing on them until every card lays flat.

Anyone who claims otherwise is an entryist trying to water down anarchist ideas until they’re so insipid that they become plausibly compatible with the stale ideological dogma of whatever tired political program they’re recruiting for.

The protestant work ethic has long had a stranglehold on this global civilization, traumatizing all of us into seeing productivity as the universal metric of worth. Those who are perceived to be hard workers are accepted warmly by society, while those who lack a strong work ethic or the ability to toil away in menial, pointless servitude their entire lives are demonized as “lazy no-good layabout bums” and promptly discarded by their friends, their educators, their families, their government.

Despite common (and deliberate) misconceptions, being anti-work doesn’t mean wanting to cease all physical exertion, it means nurturing a new way of life based on play rather than work.

The word “play” has likewise been demonized by workerist society as being an inappropriate activity for anyone of working age, because play eats into our productivity as workers and the potential profits we can generate for our bloodthirsty bosses.

Alfredo M. Bonanno:

Play is characterized by a vital impulse that is always new, always in movement. By acting as though we are playing, we charge our action with this impulse. We free ourselves from death. Play makes us feel alive. It gives us the excitement of life. In the other model of acting we do everything as though it were a duty, as though we ‘had’ to do it. It is in the ever new excitement of play, quite the opposite to the alienation and madness of capital, that we are able to identify joy.[43]

My father started regularly shaming me for “wasting time” playing as soon as I turned 12. Civilized children are expected to immerse themselves in a 12 — 18 year work-training program (school) that comes with daily homework, to ensure everyone is conditioned to see their time not as their time, but as a commodity to be exploited exclusively by their future bosses.

For millennia, play was all humans knew. Gatherer-hunters had no need of work because everything they needed to prosper was free for the taking. It wasn’t until we started burning down our ancient food forests to form permanent settlements, cultivate crops and extract non-renewable resources from the land that work displaced play as the driving force in human society.

Anthropologists who study some of the few remaining gatherer-hunter bands of people in various parts of the world have frequently noted how the egalitarian, non-hierarchical bands emphasize acts of play rather than work in their various cultures.

(Developmental/evolutionary psychologist) Dr. Peter Gray:

Anthropologists who have trekked to isolated regions of the world to observe hunter-gatherer societies have consistently been impressed by the egalitarian nature of those societies. The people live in small self-governing bands of about 20 to 50 people. They are nomadic, moving from place to place to follow the available game and edible vegetation.

Most remarkably, unlike any other people that have been studied, hunter-gatherers appear to lack hierarchy in social organization. They have no chief or big man, no leaders or followers. They share everything, so nobody owns more than anybody else. They make all group decisions through discussion until a consensus is reached. [...] They have an extraordinary degree of respect for individual autonomy. They don’t tell one another what to do or offer unsolicited advice.[...]

In order for two or more young animals to play together, they must suppress the drive to dominate one another. Social play always requires the voluntary participation of both (or all) partners, so play requires that the partners maintain one another’s goodwill. Any attempt to dominate would drive the other away or elicit a fight rather than play. Thus, play involving two or more players is always an egalitarian, cooperative activity.

Some of the most compelling evidence for the anti-dominance function of adult play comes from research with various species of primates. For example, some species of macaque monkeys (referred to as tyrannical species) live in sharply graded hierarchical colonies, with a great deal of squabbling and fighting for power and relatively little cooperation except among close kin; and other species (egalitarian species) live in colonies with more muted hierarchies, with little fighting and much cooperation even among non-relatives. Consistent with the theory I am presenting here, the egalitarian species have been observed to engage in more social play in adulthood than the tyrannical species, apparently as a means to promote cooperation. [...]

My theory is that hunter-gatherers everywhere learned that they could reduce aggression and promote cooperation and sharing by essentially turning all of their social life into play.

Children growing up in hunter-gatherer cultures have more opportunity to play than do children growing up in any other culture that anthropologists have observed, and as they become adults their playful ways continue. Hunter-gatherers’ approach to work (e.g. to hunting and gathering) is playful in that it is social (people hunt and gather with friends, in groups) and always voluntary—nobody is required to hunt or gather, they will be fed anyway. Their religions are playful, highly imaginative and non-dogmatic, with gods that are vulnerable and serve as playmates in religious festivals. The adults, as well as children, engage regularly and playfully in music, dance, art, and noncompetitive games.

Even their means of putting down someone’s budding attempts to dominate are playful, at least at first. They may make up a silly song about the person, as a way of making fun of the person’s excessive pride, or they may tease him about thinking he’s such a “big man.”[44]

It’s a truly tragic turn of events that work and all its associated authoritarian baggage has so successfully displaced play in the vast majority of human cultures. One of the most substantial things anarchists can do for ourselves is to relearn the joy of play, and to abandon the productivity-compulsion that’s been hammered into us by assorted authority figures throughout our lives.

If other cultures embraced the constructive play that gatherer-hunters use, the protestant work ethic would soon lose its death-grip on public consciousness.

Work doesn’t need to define us, and our productivity in the machine needn’t be the measure of our worth. Devoting our entire lives to keeping the machine running ought to be perceived as the morbid waste of our existence that it truly is. The machine crushes all life eventually, the only question is how long you’ll last as its colorful levers poke tiny holes in you while its gears slowly crush your bones.

Blessed be the Lord Who Gifts Us With His Bountiful Employment

In a world revolving around work, The Economy is venerated — treated as a hallowed, divine being. Every moment spent engaged in play, in idleness or in unprofitable creative pursuits is a penny we steal from the almighty economy. Anyone who lacks the will or capability to keep up their productivity is thus seen as sinning against the true deity of our age: The Economy is our one true god and has been for decades. And he’s a vengeful god. Anyone who sins against him will be pushed into the gutters of society by his clergymen and left to rot and die.

There’s nothing The Economy savors more than his clergy taking sinful unproductive workers and sacrificing them to him, that’s the entire reason homelessness and prisons are such integral features of capitalist civilization.

The booming mantra of our God can be heard chanted all across the globe — Work or die — Work or die — and when you eventually reach breaking point and actually die —be sure to do it very publicly so that the other worshipers are forced to look upon your misery to witness what happens to workers who fail to keep up with the grind. They’ll try not to notice, but they’ll see the destitution from the corner of their eye and it’ll further instill the fear of God in them.

Work or die — Work or die — Work or die. It’s the chorus that rings in our ears almost every moment of our lives, even our “free time” being wholly consumed by the specter of work. We’re no longer capable of relishing the simplicity of existence, instead we measure our productivity during every waking moment and punish ourselves if we don’t measure up to our peers. A good worker is always finding ways to develop their skills and increase their usefulness to the machine. A good worker is forever climbing the hierarchy so they can one day join the ranks of the saintly clergy and strike down the no good lazy bums beneath them for their disgusting under-performing.

The modern anti-work movement was spawned in the late 20^th century by anarchist Bob Black. Black spent years of his life pushing back against the conservative 19^th century notions of productivity, industrialism and human-commodification that came from both capitalist and communist (including anarcho-communist) scholars and practitioners. He was especially frustrated to see fellow anarchists refuse to part ways with the miserable work-culture they inherited from the miserable workers that gave life to them.

Bob Black:

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. [...]

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists — except that I’m not kidding — I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work — and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs — they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They’ll gladly talk about anything but work itself.

These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don’t care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.[45]

A workerist is any person who advocates for ideologies, systems and lifestyles that revolve around work. This includes every liberal, rightist, democratic socialist, social democrat, centrist, communist and fascist in the world. These are all staunchly workerist, industrial ideologies that strive to sell us the idea that humans and other animals exist to work on the assembly line, to extract resources and manufacture goods for the market, to be loyal servants to the revered productive forces. They all see the world through the same productivity-oriented, industrial lens, only with the tint slightly adjusted.

When Bob Black wrote The Abolition of Work in 1985 and called for “a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance”, he wasn’t proposing we give work a glossier tint to make it more democratic, merit-based or financially rewarding. He wasn’t proposing we hustle and invest in The Economy (praise be) to become wealthy enough to one day make passive income as landlords and shareholders. He was proposing we part with work in totality. Tear down all structures of work and kick all those who uphold those soul-crushing structures in the shins repeatedly until they let go.

This point is completely missed by the stale leftists who have appropriated this very anarchist concept and tried beating it into submission. They’ll forever be ready to seize hold of and immediately neuter anarchist ideas when they see them picking up any kind of steam. But the left will never be anti-work. It would go against everything the left exists to serve.

The entire labor movement — the unions, the socialist parties, the academics and Twitter theorists, are all wholly dedicated to building the load-bearing walls of their power-base: the ideology of work. Without workers and workplaces, there is no endlessly rotating left versus right race and everything both sides of the aisle depend on to satisfy their power and wealth machinations crumbles into rubble. Leftist organizers who try to redefine anti-work to mean “work-but-with-bigger-unions” are opportunistic weasels.

Likewise, anti-work is not a program to build stronger welfare states with universal basic incomes that subsidize the work-industrial complex and thus calm the growing urge to revolt; prolonging The Economy’s pillaging of our ecosystems and making us depend on the managers of productivity even more than we do now.

Being anti-work is desiring to bulldoze the offices, warehouses, farms, construction sites, restaurants and supermarkets that hold us all captive, push it all into a giant pile of glittering rubble, light a brilliant bonfire and sing and dance and fuck all night as the sweet fumes of a million copiers and filing cabinets fill the air.

Anti-work is the wholesale rejection of an obscenely traumatic and perverse way of life that we’ve been collectively conditioned into accepting as normal almost from birth, when we were pulled from our mother’s tit and thrown into a preschool so she could get back to the office.

So what happens after the bonfire dies down and we depart a work-based existence for a play-based one?

Bob Black:

Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.

The point of anti-work, stripped of all the garbage leftist and Marxist ideology that’s been rapidly consuming it (I blame Graeber for kickstarting this process), is to treasure your fleeting existence and spend it doing things you want to do. Not things your bosses force you to do by threatening to sacrifice you to the great Economy in the sky if you don’t follow their script.

Anti-work is the burning desire to free yourself from that cacophonous workerist mantra forever ringing in your ears, to stop playing the subservient role assigned to you by The Great Economy and instead forge your own path and find real purpose through joyful play.

Henry Miller:

The world only began to get something of value from me the moment I stopped being a serious member of society and became—myself. The State, the nation, the united nations of the world, were nothing but one great aggregation of individuals who repeated the mistakes of their forefathers. They were caught in the wheel from birth and they kept at it until death—and this treadmill they tried to dignify by calling it “life.” If you asked anyone to explain or define life, what was the be-all and end-all, you got a blank look for an answer. Life was something which philosophers dealt with in books that no one read. Those in the thick of life, “the plugs in harness,” had no time for such idle questions. “You’ve got to eat, haven’t you?”[46]

Anti-work is the pursuit of happiness in your own terms. A life you actually desire, choices you make as an individual, unhindered by the suffocating demands of mass society.

Anti-work is the refusal to accept the authority of bosses and economists, even if you have to make do with simpler meals and uglier furniture than the working stiff next door. It’s seeing the macabre construct of a work-based existence for what it really is and reaching out to reclaim your uniqueness before your brief existence on this planet ends. It’s unleashing your long-buried feral fighting spirit and finding out who you really are under the decades of rigid indoctrination by tie-wearing yesmen.

Anti-work is the urge to smash every temple of The Great and Mighty Economy (hallowed be his name) and kill all his clergy before our bodies and minds start to fail and it’s our turn to be sacrificed to him.

Anti-work, friends, is anarchy.

Morality Vs. Ethics

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-morality-vs-ethics>. <https://raddle.me/wiki/morality_vs_ethics>

Topics: post-left, morality, moralism, ethics, authority, critique of leftism, violence, pacifism, nihilism

Date: 2019

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The difference between morality and ethics is a major misunderstanding leftists have of anarchist politics. Most leftists are unaware of, unwilling to consider, or unable to grasp the distinction. But it’s an important distinction for anarchists to make because morals are so entangled with authority. This essay will try to explain the differences between morality and ethics from an anarchist perspective.

In polite society, ‘moral’ is a label typically applied by people to themselves and their group so they, if we’re being perfectly honest, can present themselves as a pure and righteous person capable of doing no ‘wrong’.

The ‘moral’ person sees themselves as fighting a universal battle between good and evil. They of course cast themselves in the role of the righteous crusader for good; incapable of straying from the ‘moral constitution’ that enshrines them in sanctified holiness.

The label ‘immoral’ is applied to whoever the ‘moral’ group decides is counter to their notions of goodness. They do this so they can maintain ‘moral’ superiority over the out-group and thus justify any action they take to marginalise these undesirables without feeling remorse or having to justify their behaviour to anyone. By being a proud moral crusader, they don’t need to give even a moment’s thought to the cruelty they inflict on whichever individual or group they’ve decided is a threat to their sacred moral constitution.

The immoral villains who violate the sacred constitution can never be forgiven for their perceived crimes against morality because morality is definitive and final. The despicable villains must be forever shunned by the altruistic heroes in order to maintain their pious morals. Racial segregation was considered morally righteous in the US South. As was cleansing the land of ‘savages’ during colonisation. Lynching bi-racial children for being ‘impure’. Denying women equality by reasoning that it would lead to ‘moral decadence’.

The recent government massacres of drug users in the Philippines were justified by creating a moral panic. The tyrant leading the massacres appointing himself as the one and only arbiter of virtue, that all moral people should blindly follow.

Perhaps the most deadly moral panic of the last century was spurred by Mao’s cultural revolution in China. His Little Red Book of quotes; a virtual moral blueprint, was used by the party-faithful to purge scores of random people for having morally-objectionable... haircuts, furniture, pets or fashion sense. Likewise, Stalin and his supporters in the USSR forced homosexuals and other out-groups into gulags where they were worked to death for ‘crimes against morality’.

And of course the prototypical moral blueprint; the Christian bible, was used to lead brutal moral crusades across the world for centuries; mass slaughters, land seizures and forced conversions of non-Christians.

Moral systems are designed to oppress and marginalise anyone the system deems undesirable. They are based on transcendent rules that are forcibly applied to all people from all backgrounds, in all situations; regardless of each individual’s desires and values.

Unlike society’s authoritative and punitive morals, ethics are decided on a case-by-case basis by the individual based on their own values and desires. Ethics are tangible and tied to real cause and effect outcomes. Ethics are voluntary personal views rather than collectively-enforced top-down ones.

Morality is always formed and upheld by a collective: a religious institution, a workplace, an educational organization, a cultural group, a club, a society.

Ethics are personal, informed by an individual’s experiences and their own needs and desires.

Morals are applied to everyone inside and often outside of a group by a collective and its authority. Ethics are applied to the individual by the individual and in most cases affect no one but the individual.

Morals require hierarchy, authority, law and enforcement of said law, while ethics simply require that an individual draw their own lines to determine what they are personally willing to live with, what compromises they’re willing to make, what actions they’re willing to take against others.

Moralists have differing ideas of morality but they largely operate in absolutes: Some are ardent pacifists who insist there can be no excuse for any form of violence, while others will demand violence be done to those who break their moral law in even the most minor way. But in practice, even the most ardent moral pacifist will embrace violence when their egos are put under enough pressure.

Often pacifist moralists will simply shift what they see as ‘violence’ to overcome the cognitive dissonance they’re confronted with when someone breaks their laws and thus threatens their moral authority. So, suddenly the violence of putting people in cages or sterilizing them or lobotomizing them or euthanizing them is seen by the pacifist moralist as ‘humane’ and ‘non-violent’. The hypocrisy of the moralist is truly boundless, but devotion to their ideology is something the moralist will fight tooth and nail to cling to, even when every aphorism of that ideology has been warped beyond recognition. This is how we end up with the hypocrisy of Christians preaching “do no harm” one day and then leading bloody pogroms and crusades the next. Or syndicalists in civil war Spain claiming to want to build equality and freedom and to abolish authority, while murdering nuns for refusing to renounce their faith and building forced labor prisons.

A moralist opposition to violence might be: violence is universally wrong, immoral, bad. Why? Simply because the collective authority behind the moralist says so. Requesting justification for such an abstract statement would be scoffed at because morality is seen by the moralist as some kind of divine truth that can’t be questioned. The simple act of questioning it or the authority behind it would be enough to render you immoral.

On the other hand, a measured ethical opposition to violence can be made by an amoralist... They can see that in many cases violence begets more violence, fosters systems based on the dominance of the strong, and can lead to deep-seated multi-generational divisions. But in other cases, they could see violence as ethically just. Because the alternative (e.g. fascism) would likely be worse.

A moralist forces their reactionary and irrational will on everyone else. Their morals are absolute. An amoralist isn’t concerned with forcing their personal perspective onto everyone, or with maintaining that perspective in every situation as if it were unquestionable dogma.

Morality places paint-by-the-numbers judgement on every action, positing that all actions in column A are inherently ‘wrong’ and unacceptable, while all actions in column B are inherently ‘right’ and necessary. Regardless of the experiences of the people involved, their personal convictions and motivations, and the conditions that are present in that place and time.

Inevitably, the moralist collective will go on to break every moral law they’ve set when they deem it necessary to, and the wonders of cognitive dissonance will allow them to absolve themselves of any responsibility for breaking their supposedly uncompromising moralism.

Anarchists aren’t uncaring monsters for rejecting morality, as the moral left will have you believe. We’re rejecting an incredibly dangerous, authoritarian concept that directly leads to untold misery for the multiple generations of people forced to survive inside the walls of the dogmatic moral systems imposed on them from above.

Morality and ideology go hand in hand to deny people their most basic autonomy: Their freedom to decide right from wrong according to their own needs, desires and values.

Shut up about ‘dual power’, tool

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-shut-up-about-dual-power-tool>. <https://raddle.me/wiki/dualpower>

Topics: Dual Power, entryism, critique of leftism, anti-left, post-left, leftism, democratic socialism, anarchist analysis, Occupy Wall Street, Leninism, Vladimir Lenin, Yates McKee

Date: October 25, 2021

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Dual power was coined[47] by the Russian socialist and eventual head of government Vladimir Lenin in his essay The Dual Power to describe two powers (the Soviets and the existing government) temporarily coexisting with each other and competing for legitimacy with the ultimate goal of the Soviets expelling the other power and seizing control of the state, in order to install state capitalism and a one-party dictatorship.

It’s tragic I even need to write this, but a staggering amount of people have been equating dual power with anarchy lately, seemingly without realizing they’re parroting authoritarian Leninist ideology.

Dual power has nothing whatsoever to do with anarchy. Anarchists are not and have never been advocates of dual power. Anarchists are not a political party. We are not interested in competing with other political parties for power. Anarchists are not interested in granting legitimacy to a government or its institutions or claiming there can ever be such a thing as the legitimacy to rule people.

Anarchists are not interested in seizing control of the state to install a “people’s dictatorship” or any other kind of government. Anarchists are not interested in building power in any way.

Anarchy is concerned with resisting, negating, severing the power of those who rule us. Anarchy is the driving desire to reclaim our lives from the piercing claws of the power-elite. Anarchy is not a plan to join the ranks of the power-elite or to supersede them as the new “legitimate” government as Lenin’s Bolsheviks did.

Anarchists are also not interested in a democratic form of dual power whereupon we plead with the states / banks / corporations to be nicer to us, begging the people in power to afford us certain rights and privileges, while also participating in charity work.

This is what Yates McKee, the self-described “nongovernmental activist”[48] and art critic who introduced the dual-power concept into the modern Anglophone political dialogue proposes in the essay Art after Occupy — climate justice, BDS and beyond[49] for the nonprofit media organization Waging Nonviolence.

Yates McKee:

(Dual power) means forging alliances and supporting demands on existing institutions — elected officials, public agencies, universities, workplaces, banks, corporations, museums — while at the same time developing self-organized counter-institutions.

Three points:

1. Anarchists are not interested in “forging alliances” with functionaries of the government or otherwise participating in the state/capital mechanism, period. Despite the turgid assertions of the anarcho-Democrat sect, anarchy isn’t entangled with the left wing of government. Anarchy rejects all wings of all governments.

2. Anarchists aren’t a lobby group that pressures politicians to do our bidding. Politicians will never work for us because their interests are not our interests.

3. Anarchy is not a program to set up a shadow government in the hopes of one day replacing the current government.

McKee then proceeds to quote several other theorists talking about prefiguration, in order to equate prefiguration (which actually has some anarchist underpinnings) with dual-power (which absolutely doesn’t).

The attempt to whitewash authoritarian Leninist lingo and feed it to self-proclaimed anarcho-leftists who don’t know any better should be met with ridicule for the sordid manipulation it is. Manipulation that really ought to be expected from someone who insists on referring to themselves as a nongovernmental activist because the word “anarchist” would presumably be too extreme.

Soon after McKee wrote the essay, USA leftists calling themselves anarchists latched onto the new revisionist version of the term, while reactionary Lenin-acolytes continued using the term according to its original, unadulterated definition. Since these two (theoretically) wildly at-odds groups of people all mingle in the same spaces for some peculiar reason, the leftists soon saw themselves enthusiastically nodding in agreement with the conservative Leninists who appeared to share their ideas, allowing the Leninists to flood these so-called “left-unity” spaces with even more authoritarian power-machinations such as their proposal for a dictatorship of the proletariat.

It’s incredibly aggravating that so many left-wing USA Democrats identifying as anarchists insist on brandishing authority-laden entryist concepts like direct democracy, justified hierarchy, legitimate government, lesser-evilism and now dual-power while claiming they want anarchy.

Anarchy is not democratic government, not socialist government, not progressive government, not counter-government, not the people’s government, not decentralized government, not libertarian government, not minimized goverment, not green government, not cybernated government, not blockchain government and not dual government.

Anarchy is, always has been and always will be a loud and firm proclamation of no government. No authority, no social hierarchy, no power-elite. Anarchy is the outright rejection of every frenzied power machination of every petty tyrant the world over. It’s saying no to all authority, however fresh, empowering or woke the authority purports to be.

We don’t politely ask the corporations to stop polluting. We don’t ask the banks to stop printing and distributing the currency that upholds the class system. We don’t plead with our bosses to stop exploiting our labor. We don’t petition politicians to stop serving their corporate benefactors. We don’t ask coal to stop staining our fingers. We don’t ask sandflies to stop biting our necks.

Anarchists know better than to plead with our oppressors to stop oppressing us. Anarchists, if nothing else, have a shared understanding of the workings of power and authority. We know we can only get back from our rulers what we take from them by force. What we pry from their cold, dead fingers. Because authority doesn’t compromise with its servants any more than a bear compromises with a fish in its jaw.

Anarchy is having the prudence to perceive the corrupting force of all power. Anarchy is seeing through each of the pretty new masks the power-elite crudely crafts and slaps on to dupe us into compliance with their cruel and dangerous program.

When you prop up state/capital, work to further the legitimacy of its agents, while also embedding yourself into the system in order to “change it from within”, the theoretical “counter-institutions” you claim to also support are effectively negated because — guess what? People who work for the state are not countering the state in any way that counts.

Functionaries of the state and capital (whether lobby groups, campaigners / canvassers, political committees or “progressive” politicians standing in elections) are not able to mount real opposition to the state or capital because they have been successfully absorbed by the state and capital and now do the bidding of the elite class, in one way or another.

Anyone claiming they’re entering the belly of the beast so they can somehow tame the beast is either deluding themselves or willfully lying. The acid in that belly will melt away any anarchist inclinations they may have held in seconds. The system is designed to absorb all threats to the system. Anyone who claims they can work within the system to counter the system is nothing more than a willing tool of the system.

It’s endlessly frustrating to me how often authoritarian ideology like dual power is absorbed by clueless red anarchists and then clumsily promoted as anarchist praxis every single day.

Anyone claiming to be anti-authority while going out of their way to organize collective action (e.g. the USA’s DSA) to further the authority of politicians / a political party / the state is a liar and a coward.

You will not reform authority. Authority will reform you. Into a tool of authority.

Once you ingrain yourself within systems of authority, specifically within the system that exploits the living shit out of billions of people: Enslaves, incarcerates, poisons, genocides, invades, bulldozes, acidifies, desertifies and burns every corner of the planet, you have abandoned any claim to anarchy you may have once held. You are not an anarchist. You are just another clink in the state’s ever-expanding armor, devoting your pathetic little activist life to legitimizing, and thus shielding the state from those brutalized by it.

Your dual power tales are as useful to anarchists as the charity galas where you rub elbows with the robber barons you expect us to beg for table scraps.

The Futility of Struggle

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-the-futility-of-struggle>. <https://raddle.me/wiki/struggle>

Topics: struggle, strugglismo, revolution, post-left, social movements, social war

Date: November 2021

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To struggle is to embody the activist mentality. To struggle is to take up the role of activism. The activist belongs to the struggle, gives themself fully to the cause, makes it their job, their mission, their whole existence.

Social struggle is activism, it’s protest, it’s empty obsessive-compulsive ritual, it’s imposing sanctimonious moral values on others, it’s collectivizing people into in-groups and out-groups so they can better do war with each other, it’s entrenched in dogmatic ideology and personality cults, it’s self-aggrandizing and endlessly congratulatory, it’s a constant push and pull between the system and those who struggle to seize control of it to reboot it in their own image, appointing themselves as the beloved God-given saviors of The People™, the purveyors of fairness, equality and rational world building.

Tearing authority apart needn’t be done in the name of an epic global struggle for the greater good or to achieve the grand master plan set out for us by the great elders of anarchy in their uplifting manifestos promising us a new world order dedicated to worker-led factories and social justice for all.

Destroying authority where you see it isn’t a struggle for revolution, it doesn’t need to be done in pursuit of anything bigger than a simple personal desire to watch tangible instruments of authority burn to embers right in front of you so they no longer blight your senses.

The actions we take don’t need to be in pursuit of an amazing utopian society dreamed up by a long-dead Russian prince or an epic battle between good and evil of our own imagining where we cast ourselves as the heroic protagonists in a brutal social war where victory is everything and there can be no rest or amusement until the glorious prophesized end goal is achieved.

An anarchist’s actions don’t need to be connected to anything beyond what we see and feel right in front of us: A tangible, immediate outcome we can perceive with our own senses in this time and space. What we do doesn’t need to be presented as part of some incredible 4D chess move to build a new, ‘better’ society or government, to ignite a new age of egalitarianism that promises to solve all of humanity’s problems by putting the right people in charge of constructing the right systems.

I can paint over a billboard or spike a tree or tear up a road or stab a dictator or spread dandelion seeds in a wheat field without it being a struggle to upend society to conform to my favored vision of how society should be run. I can be an agent of chaos simply because it feels good to be. I don’t need to lie to myself or to you and claim my actions or your actions are going to bring on a new dawn of civilization if only we all struggle enough together.

I can deal blows to the imposing instruments of authority that surround me just because I want to, without ever believing any of my actions will lead to a social revolution to remake the world in my (or my God’s) image. Without ever thinking I’m a mighty warrior fighting the good fight, a worker’s Messiah sent to Earth to right all the wrongs of humanity and lead the chosen people to anarchist Mecca.

Or in Aragorn!‘s words:

(Strugglismo is) a critique of boring, stale, ineffective, ritualized activity and, recently, has given birth to a bunch of stale, boring, sanctimonious projects.

I can destroy the instruments of authority that work to slowly crush me under their weight without needing to craft a meticulous plan to build nicer replacements for them.

I destroy that which crushes me because I don’t find being crushed to be very pleasant. I don’t destroy authority because I’m under the impression I’m saving the world by preserving myself or that something as innately crushing as mass society can even be made to be fair and equitable.

I have no delusions of grandeur. I can’t save civilization or build a better civilization. I’m not a vessel for change, I’m not the trigger for a new world order, I’m not the purveyor of universal justice.

What I can do is pick up a brick, and I can break the object I fling the brick at.

Whatever rifts may or may not form from that action are beyond my control, and I’ll be too busy aiming the brick at the next grotesque object of authority to care.

I have power over the things right in front of me that I can affect. A brick through a windshield is an immediate cause and effect action with no ego trip behind it to pretend the brick is bigger than it is. I’m under no impression a brick is a symbol in the battle between good and evil, just and unjust, left and right, prole and capital. A brick is just a brick. A tool to achieve a measurable, immediate result.

I don’t have power over things far bigger than myself, I can’t force society or economics to bend to my will. I can’t control how millions or billions of people live. I only have power over the brick in my hand and the things I throw it at.

Struggling to affect outcomes you have no power over is a life spent in miserable exasperation and futility. You have no ability to mount a struggle to correct all of society’s ills. Every hard-fought revolution in history has only further entrenched structural oppression and mass subservience.

The brick I pick up off the ground and hold in my hand has infinitely more value to me and to anarchy than a thousand years of desperate struggle to knock kings off their thrones and bring in new kings and new thrones.

The Rotting Carcass Behind The Green-Scare

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-the-rotting-carcass-behind-the-green-scare>. Retrieved on August 8, 2022 from <raddle.me/wiki/green_scare>

Subtitle: How Anti-Civ Anarchy Became the Most Controversial Position

Author: ziq

Topics: green anarchy, anti-civ, raddle, antifa

Date: 2022, August

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Green Anarchy & Red Anarchy: The Divide

Green anarchy, regardless of the offshoot, is a philosophy, a critique, and a lifeway that emphasizes the most pronounced anarchist principles. Green anarchists are ready and willing to dismantle all structures of domination, starting with a deep-rooted analysis of ecology, which means the relationship between all living things and the physical environment we all depend on to survive.

I’m going to examine the origins and gradual evolution of green anarchy, explore how these ideas are perceived by people on the outside looking in, and try to understand why green anarchy is so detested by a contingent of bullheaded leftists who, more and more, have been slandering us as “eco-fascists”.

Green anarchists take the critique of authority as far as it will go – not stubbornly stopping at government and capital as many anarchists will do, but going further to tackle all the hierarchical implications of work, industry, agriculture, patriarchy, society, gender norms, high technology, numbers, language, time and more. It casts a wide net to identify and dissect all the forms of oppression that spawn from the global industrial-agricultural-patriarchal-domesticating system we’re forced to live under.

The contemporary forms of green anarchy: “anti-civ”, “green nihilism” and even the more PR-friendly but frustratingly wishy-washy “post-civ” have the same foundations and principles as anarcho-primitivism, but that label has largely been discarded by contemporary anarchists because of the racist implications of white Western philosophers referring to diverse indigenous lifestyles as “primitive”.

I used to call myself post-civ when in the company of leftists, because, like a lot of green anarchists, I fell into the trap of trying to water down my anti-civ views to placate the scolding leftists that have long declared themselves the arbiters of sound anarchist theory.

For years, reds have stood up on a pedestal loudly shaming, othering and smearing anyone who isn’t as enthusiastically devoted to the continued “progress” of the factory, the mine, the battery farm, the university campus, the cubicle (and other prisons) as they are.

It’s natural to not want to be grouped in with a villainous, problematic, dangerous element – and that’s what anti-civ anarchy is largely presented as by certain vocal elements within the left. An irredeemable bogeyman so frightening that it can’t be allowed a voice, just in case the sound of it corrupts some impressionable child who doesn’t know any better and is then turned away from the centralization, coercion, ecological plunder and imperialism that is inherent with industrial life.

Red organizers have tried to forbid green anarchists from tabling at anarchist book-fairs, overturned their tables when they showed up anyway, tried to confiscate their anti-civ literature, yelled abuse at them, spat at them, pepper-sprayed them, sucker-punched them. Reds frothing at the mouth at the sight of green anarchists would almost be amusing if it weren’t becoming so damaging to our health and physical safety. They’ve convinced themselves we’re evil scum who want to seize their insulin, burn down their workplaces and corn fields and, most ridiculously, omnicide the human species. They believe all this because of bald-faced lies they themselves made up to discredit anti-civ anarchy.

There’s a concerted effort on behalf of the left to project all the authoritarian constructs inherent with leftism onto anti-civ anarchy, which wants nothing to do with leftism or its towering pile of deadly and ecosystem-destroying failures.

While humans and other animals suffer and die in staggering numbers all around us from the immediate effects of global industrial civilization, a lot of leftists will swear up and down that anti-civ anarchists are a mortal threat to the continued survival of humanity. That we’re a clear and present danger to civilized people’s freedom.

Let’s try to unwrap why this is.

First, I should explain what (“dark”) green anarchy is and what it isn’t. Green anarchists theorize that generations of sedentary social stratification has led to human domestication, in the same way dogs have been gradually domesticated from wild wolves. Just like with dogs, this domesticating process has had a cumulative detrimental effect on our physical and mental health and the way we interact with each other and our environment.

It’s proposed by green anarchists that a sustained “rewilding” process could act to curtail this domestication and restore the health of not only ourselves, but the balance of our ecosystems. Some of the proposed ways to achieve this include regenerative land management techniques and the restoration of our social bonds with the biosphere.

These correlative bonds we had with our habitat for almost our entire existence as a species have become deeply fractured due to the various alienating processes that brought about our domestication. Until the bonds are repaired and the planet’s ecology is restored, we’ll continue to experience the dreadful effects of social and ecological collapse, as well as the continued processes of coercion and domination that are so ingrained in industrial mass-society.

Green anarchy addresses both social and environmental factors and understands that the two are interlinked in a holistic manner. If an ecosystem is broken, the people who live within it will continue to deteriorate until a healthy ecology is restored.

Like all anarchists, we challenge all systems of authority and seek voluntary, mutually-beneficial relationships with our neighbors in self-sustaining communities. The thing that most sets green anarchists apart from other tendencies is our dedication to extending our critique of domination to all life, not simply human life. We study anthropology and history to understand the origins of civilization and all the systems of domination that formed around it.

The philosophy of green anarchy is informed by the writings and lifeways of transcendentalists (Thoreau), bioregionalists (Reclus), situationists (Debord), spiritual anarchists (Tolstoy, Laozi, Brydum), anarcho-naturists (Gravelle, Zisly, Montseny), indigenous-anarchists (Zig Zag, Indigenous Action, Tawinikay), green nihilists (Langer, anonymous, Flower Bomb, Abara, de Acosta, Aragorn!), anti-civs (Landstreicher, Fitzpatrick, Elany, Seaweed, Return Fire) and anarcho-primitivists (Moore, Zerzan, Perlman, Tucker, AbdelRahim).

These interrelated philosophies together form a strong critique of social hierarchy, work, extractivism, social alienation, domestication, social stratification, technocracy, patriarchy, the division of labor / specialization, ableism, imperialism, institutional violence, desertification, mass society, ecocide and all the other forms of authority brought about by the civilization that envelopes the whole planet.

There are those who are not willing to widen their critique of authority to most of these things, yet insist on identifying as (“bright”) green or eco-anarchists. These people are simply pushing insipid, greenwashed Marxism like Murray Bookchin made a career of doing for decades. Anyone working to convince us the disastrous industrial system that’s become so pervasive in our lives and driven so much of the planet’s life to extinction can be gently reshaped into a peaceful, ecological people’s utopia has little understanding of what it means to be “green” and doesn’t reject hierarchy in any real way.

Green anarchy embodies an unapologetic critique of all forms of authority. “Solar-punk”, “social ecology”, “post-scarcity anarchism” and related attempts to appropriate the green label from anti-civs have no real desire to address the devastating consequences of the debilitating industrial system that rules us. Their wistful notions that “green” technology such as solar cells, undefined “clean energy”, modular computing, 3D printers and electric vehicles will solve this unprecedented crisis are incredibly shortsighted.

They fail to understand just how destructive and polluting those high technologies are to extract from the earth, manufacture and transport. They always fail to address the mountains of toxic waste that’s produced during these processes and dumped in some third world peasant’s backyard. All these high-tech goods require global supply chains, extractivism, imperialism and laborer-exploitation because they’re made up of rare minerals and other resources that can only be sourced in certain parts of the world.

The manufacturing processes for microchips and silicon are so advanced that they require centralized mega-factories that cost an absolute fortune to set up and run, which is why there are only 2 or 3 companies in the world with the required infrastructure.

The microchip manufacturing process involves hundreds of steps and depends on advanced robots pushing tiny particles around massive fabrication facilities. The “clean rooms” inside these facilities require tightly controlled conditions with zero contamination from dust, humidity, heat or dirt. If one tiny impurity enters the system, an entire batch will be ruined, costing a fortune and months of wasted preparation. You’re not going to have local neighborhood microchip factories like these solarpunks seem to imagine.

Reading an incredibly shallow and uninformed text like The Solarpunk Manifesto is an exercise in frustration for anyone who has thought seriously about all the consequences of mass-production and what it takes to maintain an industrial city. It reads like a child’s proposal for saving the world. Look at some of these points:

Solarpunk recognizes the historical influence politics and science fiction have had on each other.

Solarpunk recognizes science fiction as not just entertainment but as a form of activism.

The visual aesthetics of Solarpunk are open and evolving. As it stands, it is a mash-up of the following: 1800s age-of-sail/frontier living (but with more bicycles). Creative reuse of existing infrastructure (sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes present-weird). Appropriate technology. Art Nouveau. Hayao Miyazaki. Jugaad-style innovation from the non-Western world. High-tech backends with simple, elegant outputs.

In Solarpunk we’ve pulled back just in time to stop the slow destruction of our planet. We’ve learned to use science wisely, for the betterment of our life conditions as part of our planet.

It’s just silly. A style guide for drawing pretty art and writing fiction with a certain aesthetic. It’s a fun and creative pastime, sure, but it doesn’t engage in any real way with the ongoing global ecocide beyond proposing “green tech” and without ever attempting to explain how, “sustainable civilization”.

The more “serious” philosophies like Bookchin’s social ecology and post-scarcity anarchism essentially make the same naive assumptions and proposals as solar-punk, but use bigger words to do it, while also repeatedly tarnishing anti-civs for not having faith in futurist science, technological progress, democracy and workerism. (I’ve written about Bookchin’s greenwashed prescriptions in a previous essay, so I won’t rehash that here.)

The left’s reductive utopian thinking: insisting on dear leader’s step-by-step plan for constructing a utopian worker-society has never led anywhere good.

It’s naive and damaging to imagine Leviathan can be tamed and reformed into serving the interests of free people. Industrial civilization will never allow left-wing-technocrats to curtail its constant expansion. The idea that the system can be reformed into compliance is a complete misunderstanding of power-hierarchy, and more perversely, a willful disregarding of the morbid reality we live everyday. Leviathan has stolen both the present and the future from under us and it’s not going to suddenly play nice because some oblivious Bookchinites say they can make it do their bidding. Prescribing a supposed lesser-evil form of industrialism to solve the devastation wrought on us by the industrial age is tragically inept. Leviathan will roll over gullible solar-industrialists and their “green” cities without skipping a beat.

The tireless drive of Leviathan to dominate absolutely everything everywhere and leave nothing but sand in its wake cannot be under-estimated. Marxists completely fail to reckon with the coercion – domestication – alienation – domination – ecocide cycle that’s inherent in industrial civilization. If someone told them capitalism could be reformed to benefit workers, they’d laugh in their face, but somehow they’re convinced Leviathan would be rendered docile and servile if workers possessed more democracy in the workplace. They insist Leviathan’s sprawling cities can be made to peacefully co-exist with the wilds... The wilds that need to be stripped bare and burned to a crisp every record-hot summer to maintain those cities. And all they need to do it? Leftists in positions of power.

It’s patently absurd, and yet they’ve never questioned it because their entire ideological worldview depends on the glory of the moral leftist worker-organizer who can do no wrong. They offer the same distorted solution to every problem: Just give workers democracy and everything will be okay. Because voter bodies would never use democracy to vote the future away to preserve their privileges. Coal miners would never vote to keep the mines open. Farm workers would never vote to use pesticides to make their jobs easier. Factory workers would never vote to outsource their industrial waste somewhere out of sight. (Note: Heavy use of sarcasm)

Unlike “anarcho-transhumanism” – which took a pre-existing authoritarian-aligned school of thought from rich white Silicon Valley executives and tried to fuse it with anarchy (with admittedly amusing results), there is no authoritarian primitivism. It’s always been an anarchist school of thought, envisioned by anarchists for anarchists as a critique of civilization and an associated living practice going all the way back to Thoreau, Tolstoy and Reclus, long before it was first given a name in the 1980s.

The Origins of Anti-Civ Anarchy & Other Ecological Movements

Ever since Thoreau dropped out of society to live in the woods and documented his experience in a diary, anti-civilizational anarchy has been a strong current within the anarchist milieu. Living in balance with nature. Practicing simple, sustainable survival skills in order to live without depending on systems of authority. Deconstructing the inherently alienating properties of industrial civilization. Unlearning all the bad habits urban life has indoctrinated us with...

These were long-held anarchist principles and it’s only recently, thanks to self-avowed anti-anarchist crusaders like Murray Bookchin that these ideas have been tarnished as “lifestylist” and “reactionary”. There’s been a decades-long smear campaign led by anarcho-transhumanists, post-scarcity anarchists and other reds to equate anti-civ anarchy with “eco-fascism” and cast all anti-civs as transphobic, ableist, genocidal, wheelchair-stealing supervillains who work in the shadows to bring about the cruel destruction of everything civilized people hold dear.

Green anarchy in its successive forms, from transcendentalism to primitivism, to the current trends of green-nihilism and indigenous anarchism, has always, always rejected all authority, oppression and domination. It’s always been the anarchist school of thought most ready to pick apart every social institution to identify its limitations and its hierarchical inevitabilities, while other anarchist tendencies have willfully ignored all manner of social hierarchies when people decided those hierarchies were beneficial to furthering their reductive ideological prescriptions to build bigger, better societies with cushy manufacturing jobs for everyone. The supposed divinity of “progress” has consumed the left since the dawn of the industrial age.

Elisée Reclus summed it up well in 1905:

“Progress,” in the strictest sense of the word, is meaningless, for the world is infinite, and in its unlimited vastness, one is always as distant from the beginning as from the end. The movement of society ultimately reduces to the movements of the individuals who are its constitutive elements. In view of this fact, we must ask what progress in itself can be determined for each of these beings whose total life span from birth to death is only a few years. Is it no more than that of a spark of light glancing off a pebble and vanishing instantly into the cold air? [...]

The missionaries who encounter magnificent savages moving about freely in their nakedness believe that they will bring them “progress” by giving them dresses and shirts, shoes and hats, catechisms and Bibles, and by teaching them to chant psalms in English or Latin. And what triumphant songs in honor of progress have not been sung at the opening ceremonies of all the industrial plants with their adjoining taverns and hospitals! Certainly, industry brought real progress in its wake, but it is important to analyze scrupulously the details of this great evolution! The wretched populations of Lancashire and Silesia demonstrate that their histories were not a record of unadulterated progress. It is not enough to change one’s circumstances and enter a new class in order to acquire a greater share of happiness. There are now millions of industrial workers, seamstresses, and servants who tearfully remember the thatched cottages of their childhoods, the outdoor dances under the ancestral tree, and the evening visits around the hearth. And what kind of “progress” is it for the people of Cameroon and of Togo to have henceforth the honor of being protected by the German flag, or for the Algerian Arabs to drink aperitifs and express themselves elegantly in Parisian slang?

In the spirit of Tao, Green anarchy goes further than merely critiquing material structures of domestication and domination, it also critiques our conceptions of what the world is, how we place ourselves in it, the purpose of self, and indeed the very idea of a fixed reality.

The way we conceive of the world and of our existence on a metaphysical level is as important to the green anarchist tradition as our understanding of the manufactured systems erected to domesticate us. These systems restrain both body and mind, in order to maintain the constant forward march of civilization, keeping Leviathan fat and powerful and everything else in a state of perpetual spiritual starvation.

Without a keen understanding of the self, the constraining “logic” of progress will forever linger in our minds, and blunt all the provocative, stimulating possibilities we could be exploring, hindering us from living a life of joy rather than the tragic loop of suffering and sacrifice we eternalize in service of Leviathan’s monstrous appetite.

Only by breaking down the imposing walls of domestication within our minds can we hope to truly progress beyond our compulsion to feed the gluttonous serpent.

There’s a strong argument to be made that anti-civ is the most anti-authority of all the anarchist schools of thought, even going as far as critiquing language for its inherent alienation and propensity for hierarchy-building – something that anyone with disabilities that cause communication struggles, or with a “common” accent that marks them as poor for life would appreciate.

This has a lot to do with why leftists are so quick to fear-monger and bad-jacket anarchists when we have anti-civ ideas. The realization that green anarchists will go much, much further than they ever will in questioning all the structures of domination that subjugate us must be incredibly threatening for people who crow about how “radical” and enlightened they are to anyone who will listen… So radical that they’ve read everything David Graeber and Murray Bookchin ever wrote and will parrot their academic heroes soothing tall-tales at every opportunity. If only the world could be as simple as they’ve conceived it in their manifestos. If only the workers owning the means of production would create a worldwide ecological utopia, and all other forms of authority would evaporate when they met that singular goal. Then they wouldn’t need to attack green anarchy and burn our books to prevent anyone from thinking beyond their ideal-workplace fantasy.

A lot of the anger about anti-civ anarchy demonstrably isn’t actually about anti-civ anarchists at all, but at unrelated groups like “Individuals Tending Towards the Wild” (ITS) and “Deep Green Resistance” (DGR). Reds associate these anti-anarchist groups with anti-civ anarchy for reasons only known to them.

ITS is a Mexican terrorist group that may or may not be responsible for indiscriminate bombings and murders done in the name of “eco-extremism” and vengeance for the continuing deterioration of the planet’s ecosystems. Among the attacks people identifying with ITS have claimed responsibility for are bombings of anarchist events and squats. Some of the random murders they’ve claimed in their communiques later turned out to have been committed by people with no connection to ITS, casting doubt on the veracity of their claims. For example, murder victim Berlin Osorio’s boyfriend was arrested and tried for her murder after an ITS communique tried to take credit for it. Regardless, they’ve written long tirades rejecting anarchism and celebrated bombing anarchist spaces. Equating this group with green anarchy doesn’t make a lick of sense.

DGR is a proudly trans-exclusionary millenarian organization that prescribes hierarchical vanguardism (in the form of a board of directors), submission to dear leader and reactionary moralism as the solution for the destruction of the environment.

Anarcho-primitivists John Zerzan, Kevin Tucker and others have long criticized DGR’s rigid hierarchy, their institutional transphobia, their cultish code of conduct that penalizes members for breaking with their rules (which include things as vague as “disloyalty”, lack of “commitment, courage or integrity”), their incredibly flawed historical understanding of revolution and radical history, and the cult of personality that surrounds the organization’s leaders Keith and Jensen. DGR really embodies all the worst instincts of the historic authoritarian left, and equating this cultish top-down organization with any of the staunchly anti-left, anti-civ anarchist tendencies is as ridiculous as blaming Kropotkin for Hitler or Mussolini’s views simply because they were all big promoters of the progress of industrial society.

The DGR organization with its dogmatic manifestos that outline how the leaders of its vanguard will govern and punish its lesser members is what you get when the left tries to tackle environmentalism. It really couldn’t be any further removed from the principles of green anarchy. So, when the left claims anti-civs are transphobic because of the views of DGR’s creepy TERF board of directors, they’re really attacking the left’s zealous organizationalism, the left’s attempts at world-building, the left’s insistence on an ideological sameness among its members, and the left’s stringent codes of laws rather than anything green anarchy is responsible for.

Leftists striving to govern “the people” is the reason organizations like DGR are able to do harm. An institutionalized, structural bigotry written in stone for all members of a political organization to internalize and obey is far more dangerous than any isolated latent bigotry an anti-organizationalist (like a green anarchist) might hold. Bigotry is far more destructive when it has organized, systemic power behind it.

It’s very telling that leftists can’t or won’t separate authoritarian environmental organizations that are organized according to leftist principles from the various anti-organizational green anarchist tendencies. Ancoms are constantly insisting they’re the only real communists, the only real leftists, the only real libertarians and the only real democrats, but when it comes to green anarchists, apparently we’re all a bunch of eco-fascists.

Eco-fascists, Eco-extremists, DGR, ITS and so on don’t claim to be anarchists, primitivists or any variation of the two. The same goes for Ted Kaczynski, the former Unabomber, who doesn’t claim to be an anarchist and in fact frequently lambasts anarchy and anarcho-primitivism for not being authoritarian like him. He calls anarcho-primitivism “a romanticized vision” and rejects it for being too socially progressive.

For some reason this man, who, if you’ve read his more recent writings, seems to most closely align with some form of class-reductionist Maoism, has been painted as the patron saint of anti-civ anarchy by people who clearly have no familiarity with his (actually very vanguardist and governmentalist) politics. While it’s true some anti-civ anarchists have been influenced by a select few of his better ideas, that shouldn’t be enough to weigh us down with all his bad ones.

That being said, there are certainly some shit green anarchists out there just like there are some shit red anarchists, orange anarchists, and so on. Anarchy shouldn’t ever be confused with some of the people who lay claim to the label, or we would all have to abandon the anarchist philosophy because of anarcho-capitalists. There are even some generally good anarchists who still maintain some bad ideas, like certain aging anprims who haven’t managed to move past the old “noble savage” trope.

There are also some unknowledgeable people who choose to identify with green anarchy without having much of an understanding of what anarchy entails. Some of these people, feeling alienated by industrial society, were drawn to vague anti-industrial politics (usually due to Kaczynski) and now loosely identify as green anarchists, without having read enough about anarchy to realize how completely unforgiving it is when it comes to hierarchy, domination and oppression. They narrowly focus in on the anti-civ aspect of anarchy, which really has very little use without the broader anti-authority aspects. Just like baby red anarchists, baby green anarchists will soon either switch to a less demanding philosophy when realizing how high the learning curve is, or will in time develop into decent anarchists.

The reason properly-informed green anarchists don’t aim to construct a program to force our principles on the world is because we fully believe in anarchy. Coercing people to live the way we live would instantly disqualify us from being anarchists.

Most of the smears against green anarchists seem to come from the discomfort provoked by the random violence committed by Kaczynski and ITS and the transphobia of DGR, even though all three have vocally denounced green anarchy on multiple occasions. The idea that hierarchical organizations and terrorists who vocally oppose green anarchy somehow represent green anarchy is absurdly disingenuous, even for the left.

It really needs to be said again and again and again until it sinks in to the collective consciousness: Anti-civ anarchy is a critical framework. It is not a political program for building a new world order. It is not a plan to build a global gatherer-hunter society or to force any way of life on anyone. It’s a useful lens we can apply to problems that are then tackled on a case-by-case basis by the people most affected by them. It is not a system for ordering reductive prescriptions on everything, everyone, everywhere.

John Moore:

There’s always the danger — as witnessed recently in Fifth Estate, for example — where hostile commentators can twist your words so that it looks as if you are constructing a primitivist ideology and setting up a primitivist political movement, even when you state exactly the contrary.

We’re not going to seize anyone’s insulin, break their wheelchair or ban them from playing video games. The reason this slanderous myth is so pervasive among leftists is because leftists assume every school of thought is like their own – a program to force an ideological blueprint for the organization of people on the world – a rigid and unchanging manifesto that claims to have all the answers to all our conundrums. They don’t seem able to conceive of a non-prescriptive worldview because their worldview so revolves around a long-dead German (or Russian) man’s promise to solve all the planet’s problems with his immortal communist science.

While the left revolves around a few learned men manufacturing systems and rules for others to live by, anti-civ has no such ambitions. The majority of the criticisms leftists have about green anarchy are them projecting their own grand ambitions for the ordering of society onto anti-civ anarchists. They’re unwilling to break out of their ever-shrinking ideological bubble to understand the difference between a critical framework and a political program. They can’t fathom of a philosophy that isn’t yet another tired prescription for world-building and people-management. This becomes extremely clear when the first thing reds ask us when they hear we’re green anarchists is almost always: “So, what does your utopia look like?” This binary way of thinking makes it near-impossible to communicate our ideas to them without them making a hundred false assumptions fed to them by their own ideological brainworms.

The fierce cognitive dissonance that erupts in leftists when green anarchists are willing to poke holes in all the hierarchical systems they aren’t willing to dismantle betrays their smallminded thinking. They simply lack the imagination to think outside the suffocating concrete box they’ve constructed for themselves.

Post-Civ: Leftist-Drift

While much of the fallacious green-scare leftists have stirred up comes from them confusing green anarchy for authoritarian environmentalist movements, as well as the rampant badjacketing Bookchin unleashed against green anarchists to help prop up his greenwashed political program, there’s also a green anarchist tendency that seems to only exist because of that same green-scare: Post-civ anarchy.

This tendency, while being anarchist and anti-civ, still manages to feed the big lie that other forms of green anarchy are deviant and bigoted ideas that we need to loudly castigate and distance ourselves from at every opportunity. It repeats that tiresome myth that primitivism is a political program to remake society in the image of indigenous gatherer-hunters and subsistence farmers, the same way communism is a program to remake society in the image of the collectively-owned factory worker.

These are the points Margaret Killjoy makes in setting post-civ apart from anarcho-primitivism. Let’s go through them one by one and I’ll demonstrate how they’re little more than strawmen, and show that post-civ is really no different than anarcho-primitivism in substance or practice, and the attempt to distance green anarchy from its roots necessitates buying into the smears disseminated by transhumanists, Marxists and others who fetishize the idea of liberation through the progression of industrial civilization.

Killjoy begins:

We’re Not Primitivists. It is neither possible, nor desirable, to return to a pre-civilized state of being. Most of the groundwork of anti-civilization thought — important work, mind you — has been laid down by primitivists. Primitivists believe, by and large, that humanity would be better served by returning to a pre-civilized way of life. This is not a view that we share.

Anprims don’t actually believe it’s possible or desirable to “return to a pre-civilized state of being’” so from the get-go Killjoy is building a coercive strawman.

The definitive explainer for anarcho-primitivism and green anarchy in general still remains “A Primitivist Primer” by the late John Moore (who was my creative writing professor when I was an international student in England in the early 00s, coincidentally). Everyone who wants to understand the anti-civ philosophy should read this text, because it will quickly dispel the myths being put out into the world by fearful blockheads.

From A Primitivist Primer:

The aim is not to replicate or return to the primitive, merely to see the primitive as a source of inspiration, as exemplifying forms of anarchy. For anarcho-primitivists, civilization is the overarching context within which the multiplicity of power relations develop. Some basic power relations are present in primitive societies — and this is one reason why anarcho-primitivists do not seek to replicate these societies — but it is in civilization that power relations become pervasive and entrenched in practically all aspects of human life and human relations with the biosphere.[...]

The fact is that anarcho-primitivism is not a power-seeking ideology. It doesn’t seek to capture the State, take over factories, win converts, create political organizations, or order people about. Instead, it wants people to become free individuals living in free communities which are interdependent with one another and with the biosphere they inhabit. It wants, then, a total transformation, a transformation of identity, ways of life, ways of being, and ways of communicating. This means that the tried and tested means of power-seeking ideologies just aren’t relevant to the anarcho-primitivist project, which seeks to abolish all forms of power. So new forms of action and being, forms appropriate to and commensurate with the anarcho-primitivist project, need to be developed. This is an ongoing process and so there’s no easy answer to the question: What is to be done? At present, many agree that communities of resistance are an important element in the anarcho-primitivist project. The word ‘community’ is bandied about these days in all kinds of absurd ways (e.g., the business community), precisely because most genuine communities have been destroyed by Capital and the State. Some think that if traditional communities, frequently sources of resistance to power, have been destroyed, then the creation of communities of resistance — communities formed by individuals with resistance as their common focus — are a way to recreate bases for action. An old anarchist idea is that the new world must be created within the shell of the old. This means that when civilization collapses — through its own volition, through our efforts, or a combination of the two — there will be an alternative waiting to take its place. This is really necessary as, in the absence of positive alternatives, the social disruption caused by collapse could easily create the psychological insecurity and social vacuum in which fascism and other totalitarian dictatorships could flourish. For the present writer, this means that anarcho-primitivists need to develop communities of resistance — microcosms (as much as they can be) of the future to come — both in cities and outside. These need to act as bases for action (particularly direct action), but also as sites for the creation of new ways of thinking, behaving, communicating, being, and so on, as well as new sets of ethics — in short, a whole new liberatory culture. They need to become places where people can discover their true desires and pleasures, and through the good old anarchist idea of the exemplary deed, show others by example that alternative ways of life are possible. However, there are many other possibilities that need exploring. The kind of world envisaged by anarcho-primitivism is one unprecedented in human experience in terms of the degree and types of freedom anticipated ... so there can’t be any limits on the forms of resistance and insurgency that might develop. The kind of vast transformations envisaged will need all kinds of innovative thought and activity.

So, primitivism is not an attempt to turn back the clock to the stone age as Killjoy asserts, it’s rather taking action to set up alternate, sustainable and thriving ways of life for the purposes of prefiguration. It’s looking forward to create forms of resistance, setting up living refuges parallel to industrial society to house free people, and putting together the infrastructure anarchists need to thrive within the shell of a rapidly collapsing civilization. The anti-civ philosophy is a guide we can use to prepare ourselves for the deluge of natural disasters, pandemics, famines and droughts this decaying civilization will continue to rain down on us and give us the fortitude to help each other not only survive these catastrophes, but prosper in the ruins of the old world as it decays all around us.

Rather than being an action to return society to the past, it’s a concerted effort to look to the future and create sobering, but necessary mechanisms to cope with the continuing decay of civilization. Civilization will continue to collapse due to its universally unsustainable, destructive, non-regenerative properties. It’s not helpful to ignore or deny this simple reality just because it threatens the reductive idea leftists have of technological progress and democracy being the solution to everything.

Killjoy then claims:

Primitivists reject technology. We just reject the inappropriate use of technology. Now, to be fair, that’s almost all of the uses of technology we see in the civilized world. But our issue with most primitivist theory is one of babies and bathwater. Sure, most technologies are being put to rather evil uses — whether warfare or simple ecocide — but that doesn’t make technology (“The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.”) inherently evil. It just means that we need to completely re-imagine how we interact with machines, with tools, even with science. We need to determine whether something is useful and sustainable, rather than judging things purely on their economic or military value.

A related text that was presumably authored by Killjoy under a pseudonym goes into more detail about the post-civ view of technology:

Another absurd proposition that primitivists stand behind is that tools and technology are inherently oppressive, and we should therefore abandon them. While many tools and technologies can be applied in oppressive ways, there is nothing ingrained in tools or the development of technologies that makes them oppressive.

It seems especially foolish for primitivists to argue this position when the society they advocate returning to is replete with tools and technology. Spears, bows and arrows, stone axes, obsidian knives, cordage, hand drill fires, pottery, totem carving, body modification and jewelry, basketry, hide tanning — these are all tools and technologies employed by primitive societies. Primitivists advocate learning these skills as a part of “rewilding” ourselves and our world, and yet they continue to denounce tools and technology. Seems a little hypocritical, doesn’t it?

These points are the most obtuse of all because they’re completely misrepresenting the anarcho-primitivist definition of technology and the distinction often made between high and low technology. Anprims don’t reject any of the things listed in the above quote. It’s pure strawman to pretend otherwise.

From A Primitivist Primer again, which I’ll again stress everyone should read in its entirety:

John Zerzan defines technology as ‘the ensemble of division of labor/ production/ industrialism and its impact on us and on nature. Technology is the sum of mediations between us and the natural world and the sum of those separations mediating us from each other. It is all the drudgery and toxicity required to produce and reproduce the stage of hyper-alienation we languish in. It is the texture and the form of domination at any given stage of hierarchy and domination.’ Opposition to technology thus plays an important role in anarcho-primitivist practice. However, Fredy Perlman says that ‘technology is nothing but the Leviathan’s armory,’ its ‘claws and fangs.’ Anarcho-primitivists are thus opposed to technology, but there is some debate over how central technology is to domination in civilization. A distinction should be drawn between tools (or implements) and technology. Perlman shows that primitive peoples develop all kinds of tools and implements, but not technologies: ‘The material objects, the canes and canoes, the digging sticks and walls, were things a single individual could make, or they were things, like a wall, that required the cooperation of many on a single occasion .... Most of the implements are ancient, and the [material] surpluses [these implements supposedly made possible] have been ripe since the first dawn, but they did not give rise to impersonal institutions. People, living beings, give rise to both.’ Tools are creations on a localised, small-scale, the products of either individuals or small groups on specific occasions. As such, they do not give rise to systems of control and coercion. Technology, on the other hand, is the product of large-scale interlocking systems of extraction, production, distribution and consumption, and such systems gain their own momentum and dynamic. As such, they demand structures of control and obedience on a mass scale — what Perlman calls impersonal institutions.

As you can see, anprims have no qualms with what Killjoy would call “useful and sustainable”, i.e. items that don’t require “large-scale interlocking systems of extraction, production, distribution and consumption”. Killjoy even admits to rejecting “almost all of the uses of technology we see in the civilized world”, so what post-civs propose is really exactly the same as what anprims propose... Tools that can be produced locally, without hierarchy/control/coercion/obedience and without the centralized extractive, imperialist, resource-pillaging supply chains required to run industrial society. This is not defined as technology by anprims. Locally produced, sustainable tools that improve our lives without destroying our biosphere are fully embraced by anarcho-primitivist philosophers, just as they are by Killjoy’s post-civ manifesto. If you prefer, it’s the difference between low-tech (useful, sustainable) and high-tech (alienating, destructive).

Killjoy continues:

Primitivists reject agriculture. We simply reject monoculture, which is abhorrent and centralizing, destroys regional autonomy, forces globalization on the world, and leads to horrific practices like slash-and-burn farming. We also reject other stupid ideas of how to feed humanity, like setting 6 billion people loose in the woods to hunt and gather. By and large, post-civ folks embrace permaculture: agricultural systems designed from the outset to be sustainable in whatever given area they are developed.

Again, they’re strawmanning anprim philosophy by claiming anprims want to force 6 billion people to be hunter gatherers. Anprims are not trying to enforce an inflexible, collectivist, authoritarian social program on anyone, let alone the entire planet. Anprims are simply engaged in an expansive criticism of industrial society, while exploring all the possible alternatives to it and experimenting with those alternatives in their own lives. These alternatives being discussed almost always include producing food in some manner due to the simple reality that there’s very little wilderness left in the world to forage from. All the anti-civs I know grow the majority of their food and supplement their diets with some foraged food – which isn’t abundant enough to live on exclusively due to the march of climate change, the rise in wildfires, and agricultural-industrial land clearing.

Anprims especially talk very favorably of the long history of indigenous peoples deliberately attending rainforests to encourage the proliferation of useful and nourishing plants, which is an example of horticulture that isn’t extractive, non-renewable, destructive. Anprims fully embrace the re-establishment of Earth’s food forests, which will require a concerted human effort to replant and cultivate.

This is how Zerzan describes agriculture:

1: Agriculture is the will to power over nature, the materialization of alienated humanity’s desire to subdue and control the natural world; 2: Agriculture inevitably destroys the balance of nature, leaving biological degradation and ecological ruin in its wake; 3: Agriculture is “the beginning of work and production,” generating an increasingly standardized, confined and repressive culture; and 4: Agriculture leads inevitably to the rise of civilization.

What’s being described here is precisely what Killjoy calls ‘monoculture’. Killjoy then borrows a non-anarchist phrase (permaculture), without defining it, but permaculture and food forests are incredibly similar concepts.

Permaculture:

Permaculture is an approach to land management and settlement design that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole-systems thinking. It applies these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, town planning, rewilding, and community resilience.

Food forests:

A food forest (or forest garden) is a garden that mimics the structures of a natural forest, with multiple layers of plants stacked vertically to increase overall production.

As you can see, food forests and permaculture are closely related concepts with the only real difference being that permaculture is a copyrighted brand used to generate profit by a handful of affluent white settlers who write guides, teach courses and sell “permaculture certificates” to the public while also fully embodying white male “guru culture”.

Food forests, for all intents and purposes are simply the free and open source version of the proprietary, for-profit, needlessly-complicated permaculture program, without the misogynistic, capitalistic personality cult permaculture is bogged down with.

Killjoy goes on:

Primitivists have done a good job of exploring the problems of civilization, and for this we commend them. But, on the whole, their critique is un-nuanced.

Strong words, considering anarcho-primitivists have written troves and troves of theory that deconstructs every form of authority that arises from the industrial world, while post-civ is nothing more than 3 short blog posts filled with strawman attacks seemingly informed by silly memes made by leftists on Reddit and Twitter.

Leftists flood anarchist spaces with these anti-“primmie” memes, most famously the “return to monke” one, to further their green-scare program, which allows them to continue pushing their 19^th century workerist prescriptions to the catastrophic 21^st century problems (successive ecological and social collapse) that those prescriptions have helped lead us to.

Killjoy continues:

What’s more, the societal structure they envision, tribalism, can be socially conservative: what many tribes lacked in codified law they made up for with rigid “customs,” and one generation is born into the near-exact way of life as their predecessors.

Again, anarcho-primitivism’s willingness to explore and analyze various indigenous tribes and bands both living and dead, and engage with these cultures to outline how they differ from the industrial model and how they avoided destroying their natural environment is not the same as an intention to enforce an ideological program on people. It’s not a world-building exercise, it’s not a government, it’s not a set of customs or an attempt to impose a tribal system on the world. There’s nothing wrong with learning from indigenous cultures and adapting their methods in your own life — especially the anarchistic ones.

She also falls into the trap of talking about indigenous peoples in the past tense, as if these lifeways are extinct – when indigenous cultures continue to thrive all over the world. A white settler presenting diverse indigenous peoples as “conservative” in order to dismiss and sneer at them is concerning, but it’s especially frustrating to see an anarchist mar indigenous peoples for being born into the same way of life enjoyed by their predecessors.

Is Killjoy under the impression life in whatever dreary USA suburb she inhabits is unique from her parents dreary suburban existence? If life under the crumbling industrial order has so much potential for freedom compared to a life in the wilds, why is she post-civ? Why not embrace civilization and all the freedoms, experiences and opportunities for growth it supposedly offers?

Killjoy concludes:

We cannot, en masse, return to a pre-civilized way of life. And honestly, most of us don’t want to. We refuse a blanket rejection of everything that civilization has brought us. We need to look forward, not backwards.

Killjoy is embracing anarcho-primitivism as it’s described by all the notable anprims of the 20^th century and the anti-civs of today, while rejecting an imaginary perversion of anarcho-primitivism built by leftist internet trolls. She wraps up with this line:

We are not primitivists.

That’s fine and dandy, I’m also a green anarchist that doesn’t identify as a primitivist, but Killjoy really hasn’t explained how post-civ differs in any substantial way from anarcho-primitivism. The only possible divergences from primitivism I can identify in their post-civ explainer are:

1. They propose proprietary ‘permaculture’ courses created by white settlers in Australia instead of the indigenous food forests permaculture was inspired by, and –

2. They say they’re open to theoretical sustainable, non-extractive, non-polluting “technologies” that are really no different than the locally-produced, life-improving tools anprims readily embrace in theory and in practice.

Killjoy is simply using different language than primitivists to obfuscate the reality that post-civs are as critical of destructive technologies which rely on global supply chains as any garden-variety primitivist is. None of the points Killjoy makes to set post-civ apart from primitivism stand up to any kind of scrutiny.

The attempt to rebrand anti-civ to post-civ so it can escape its completely unearned reputation has only helped feed the big lie that anti-civ anarchy is an omnicidal, ableist, transphobic, fascist death-cult that needs to be struggled against and no-platformed by an endless stream of performative anti-fascist Twitter activists. It only serves to fuel the left’s green-scare.

The Rise of Antifa Gang

The last ingredient in the left’s multi-faceted green scare campaign comes from the gradual co-option of anarchy by liberal “anti-fascist activists” who have no real understanding of anarchy but glue themselves to anarchist discourse nonetheless. The most famous case of this is the man who will now forever be known as Special Agent Alexander Reid Ross. A prolific writer for liberal websites (e.g. The Daily Beast) and a staunch anti-primitivist voice, Ross dedicated years of his life to associating green anarchy and ecological views in general with white supremacy and fascism.

In his trite, disinformation-filled essays about “the fascist creep”, he drew a straight line from ecological movements to white supremacy, claiming they were one and the same.

He’s spent a lot of energy looking for fascism under every rock while working to cancel all his ideological enemies – often by inventing malicious lies and strained half-truths to wrongly associate them with fascism. This has, of course, only resulted in a sustained diminishing of the anti-fascist tradition as these liberal activists hijack what was once a fiercely radical practice to target various anarchists and anti-imperialists who don’t fall in line with their left-liberal program.

For a long time, Ross had great success stirring up anti-green sentiment in anarchist and socialist spaces. That all came to a halt recently, when he was outed as being on the payroll of far-right billionaire (and dare I say, fascist) Charles Koch… Yes, really.

Ross is a “senior researcher” in a team that also includes the former heads of CIA and DHS departments, former cops and Republican politicians. This “think tank”, the “Network Contagion Research Institute”, is directly payrolled by Charles Koch’s foundation and similar far-right, deep-state entities working to further the advance of industrialism, capitalism and imperialism. Ross now seems to be in hiding as leftist publications scrub his disinformation-filled articles from their archives and issue apologies for publishing them in the first place.

Another leftist personality seemingly working from the COINTELPRO playbook is Ross’s good friend William Gillis, an anarcho-transhumanist Twitter personality who has written similar scathing screeds against green anarchy and recently tried (and failed) to mount a vicious whispering campaign against indigenous, nihilist and anti-civ anarchist Aragorn! (I should mention that Aragorn! published my book when no red anarchist publisher would even talk to me).

Just a few months after Aragorn! tragically died, Gillis tried to claim he was a serial rapist, and as “evidence” presented an old interview where Aragorn! said he slept around when he was a teenager. Fortunately, no one took the bait and Gillis slithered away back to the safety of his Twitter feed.

These reactionary left-liberals in anarchist garb are unfortunately all too welcome in most anarchist spaces and they dedicate countless hours to mounting toxic struggle sessions against their ideological enemies – who are often green, indigenous, black and anti-left anarchists.

Though these green-scare crusaders are almost exclusively white North American men with high paying jobs in academia or the tech sector, they work tirelessly to harness the identity of actually marginalized people to use as weapons in their tedious war against anyone who has strayed from the threadbare leftist program.

They present themselves as morally pure knights in shining armor, sent by Murray’s ghost to cleanse anarchist spaces of the evil green menace – to preserve the forward-momentum of Western-civilization – to safeguard progress, democracy and the Western way of life.

Their sworn mission statement is to save poor, innocent marginalized people from the cold, cruel clutches of green anarchy. But their allegiance to this performative social justice dance crumbles to pieces when they react to the indigenous ways of life that are such an integral part of the green anarchist philosophy. They speak of indigenous lifeways with barely restrained disgust. To them, anything and anyone that isn’t wholly dedicated to preserving the industrial monolith is dirty, backwards, savage.

Their tireless struggle to punish and purge anyone who dares think beyond the realm of ponderous and feeble leftist solutions is the biggest hindrance to the development of the beautiful idea.

The left insists on controlling all radical discourse so their prescriptions and programs and self-destructive domineering behaviors are never challenged, allowing no alternatives to Marx and Kropotkin’s 19^th century industrialist idealism.

Pushing us all into dark, damp rooms – the walls lined with moldy little red books, they lock the door and barricade it. The left works so hard to hold us down, to shackle us with their stale 19^th century nostalgia because they know – they know this is the only place they have power over us. This dark room with the peeling red walls that only they have the key to.

Decades after killing it, Leviathan continues to hungrily feed on this fat, rotting carcass. The sooner anarchists completely detach ourselves from the festering remains of the left, the sooner we can stop being weighed down by the virulently irrational superstitions that are the basis for their reactionary green-scare campaigns.

Why Do Anarchists Burn Ballot Boxes?

Source:
<theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ziq-why-do-anarchists-burn-ballot-boxes>. Retrieved on October 29, 2022 from https://raddle.me/wiki/burning_ballot_boxes

Date: October 2022

Topics: voting; direct action; democracy; Participatory Democracy; praxis

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“Our ears are ringing from the desperate calls of parties and other political organizations for participation in the democratic election procedure. A small group of comrades, we were moved by their woeful vote begging and, armed with our determination, our desire for direct action and our sledgehammers, we participated in the democratic fiasco. Using all of the above, we smashed the system-of-delegates status quo that serves as the norm and formed our own terms of attack and sabotage, right inside the walls of their own little festival.

Thus, we claim responsibility for the invasion of the 33^rd election center of Athens a few minutes before the polls closed, where we expropriated a ballot box. As we entered the premises, our eyes anxiously searched for the voting center’s appointed police guards, but we discovered that while they were indeed present, they chose to play hide-and-seek with us (successfully, to be honest). As we departed, we left a gift to the living-dead party officials and the trash democratic volunteers of the electoral committee: A (stolen from the cops) tear gas grenade. A few seconds later, we surrendered the contents of the ballot box to the only fitting fate: Fire.

This action is a warm welcome to new prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his party New Democracy, who have promised to end us. We’re waiting for you...

SABOTAGE ELECTIONS

BURN THE BALLOTS

-Ballot-Stealing Arsonists”[50]

From Algeria[51] to Greece[52] to France[53], there’s a long tradition of anarchists burning ballot boxes and blocking polling stations because anarchists have a keen understanding of the way the act of voting, and the system of democracy more broadly is used to destroy our agency and rapidly shrink the range of acceptable discourse that is tolerated by the government in the public sphere.

When the act of casting a vote for a politician is offered up by the state as the only permissible form of resistance against its rule, voting has shown itself to be a clear and present danger to anyone who cares about anarchy or self-determination.

Voting is a cruel and vicious ritual whereupon the winning group of voters are able to force their party’s agenda and the personalities of their leaders on everyone else for half a decade, and then safely ignore the needs of people outside their group, either because they were outvoted or chose not to vote at all (sometimes under the threat of imprisonment in countries where it’s illegal to not cast a ballot).

We’re always being told by our gracious and benevolent rulers and their high-paid propagandists that actions we take outside of the representative democracy system to resist their authority, no matter how milquetoast these actions are, no matter how minuscule of a threat these actions really pose to their power, are improper and illegal.

As far as government is concerned, voting is the only acceptable, legal avenue to social and economic change the populace can be allowed to exercise. And if we refuse to participate in the vote, we’re told by members of the voting population that we don’t have a right to criticize the government since we refrained from participating in selecting it and granting it our individual and collective power to use as it sees fit.

We live in a world where even peaceful protests are violently dispersed by the ruling party’s enforcers for being “disruptive” and unsanctioned by the state. We witness graffiti artists and wheat-pasters get beat up and thrown in prison for putting non-state-sanctioned messages in public spaces, while billboard companies are given free reign to spread the grotesque messages of capitalists and candidates for public office far and wide.

Voicing dissent outside of the ever-shrinking lines demarcated by the state for engagement with the public, taking action that would undermine the government’s ability to rule, or offering any kind of alternative to the democratic, statist, capitalist status quo has effectively been criminalized.

Both representative and direct democracy (like the Brexit vote in the UK) are used to force minorities to submit to the whims of the majority, and by proxy, to the whims of the ruling class who control the majority through the intricate systems of propaganda they construct with their vast looted wealth.

Thanks to a perverse combination of the 24/7 media machine and meticulously-crafted marketing/brainwashing practices that have been long-proven to strongly influence all our thought processes and decisions, the desires of the voters and the desires of the people who rule them have been rendered virtually indistinguishable.

The voters do the bidding of their rulers more than any time in history — they hate and fear the things they’re told to hate and fear, support and buy the things they’re told to support and buy. Few of them are able to resist the constant stream of propaganda expertly manufactured to feed delicious dopamine to the human brain.

This monopoly on propaganda that government/capital has been granted by millions of hapless citizen-voters needs to be contested by anarchists just as much as their monopoly on violence, since their fine-tuned propaganda systems are a large part of how they legitimize and enable their violence and the wholesale transfer of wealth to the rich.

Every time an anarchist or a group of anarchists take it upon themselves to fight back at the system that crushes them by burning their neighborhood ballot box, a slurry of petulant rage immediately comes spewing out[54] of all of the state’s propaganda systems, and even from a lot of our fellow travelers, who feel the need to loudly denounce this form of direct action and the anarchists who practice it for (lightly grazing) the hallowed democracy-machine. Never mind that the machine’s paint-job hasn’t even been scratched thanks to its massive wall-to-wall bumper, the bootlickers in radical garb will still cry foul.

The ardent critics of direct action and adherents of democratic government who take up so much space in our discourse — the Chomsky, Bookchin and Graeber acolytes — are showing us they’re unwilling to honestly confront the most pervasive, oppressive and deadly system of authority in history, as it continues to dig its hooks in, giving it more and more leverage to crush any dissent that bubbles up against Leviathan anywhere on the face of the planet.

Instead, they’ll continue to cling to and enable the system with the excuse that it isn’t exactly the same as 1930s-style fascism, so it’s preferable to letting a Hitler superfan win the election and send them all to concentration camps (never mind all the migrants their fave politicians actually send to concentration camps everyday, that’s on the migrants for not voting harder).

These proponents of the sanctity of the polling station demonstrate they’re tools of the ruling class just as much as any of the hate-fueled Murdoch poison lining the newsstands and monopolizing the airwaves.

The left-wing voter will always have culpability for the system they willingly participate in upholding, especially when you take notice of just how many hours of their life they pour into sermonizing for their preferred party on Facebook, Reddit and Twitter.

Yes, I know, they totally swear they’re only voting for “harm reduction” and aren’t actually that big of a fan of the neoliberal they put in office, but somehow that doesn’t stop them from working to shun and villainize the anarchists they rub shoulders with for not voting for their guy, even going as far as to accuse us of supporting fascism and of wanting trans / disabled / (insert other marginalized identity here) people to die because we refuse to participate in their little democracy fetish or buy into the notion that the government protects people.

Every time I hear them use the phrase “harm reduction”, it honestly makes my skin crawl. The absolute fucking nerve of these people to conflate safe injection sites and needle exchanges (you know, actual harm reduction) with helping put career war criminals and sex pests like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton in office. But I digress.

Self-proclaimed lesser-evilists insist they only vote to get the nice tyrants elected, who promise they’ll smile at the screaming brown kids as they snatch them from their parents arms and cram them into cages, but the honest voters will openly tell you what they’re really concerned with when they vote is things that affect them more directly...

Both candidates will snatch kids, genocide indigenous people to take their land and water, bomb schools and hospitals, imprison entire generations of black people and drone-strike goat herders across the world to seize their oil, sure. But one of the candidates promises they’ll give them a break on their student loan debt, or on their taxes, or on the price of health care, and that’s what they really mean by harm reduction — their personal monetary benefit — the preservation of their own privilege.

Democrats are a wonderful people, truly. So moral and compassionate, reducing the harm done to their annual income. If only they’d be honest and call it what it is, instead of pretending they’re voting for the politer murderous tyrant because it will supposedly keep x marginalized group safe from original-flavor fascism.

After the failed experiments of fascism and Marxism-Leninism in the 20^th century, representative liberal democracy is the system that has proven to be the most successful at maintaining the joint tyranny of government/capital and to further the expansion of the police-prison-military industrial complex. It displaced the previous tyrannical systems because it was the best equipped to get the people (voters) on its side by promising them an (inconsequential) say in the direction of the empire via the ballot box.

So, the ballot box, being the tool from which the entire democracy-world-order is granted its legitimized power, is perhaps the most compelling target for attack of all. Together with the closely-related media/marketing behemoth, the ballot box makes up the holy trinity that democratic government depends on.

Before the state can unleash its police and military arms on the dwindling number of people that haven’t yet been co-opted by the system, it needs that ceremonial ballot box to legitimatize the whole rotten affair and ensure the rest of the population won’t bat an eyelid when any potential revolt is brutally put down and every last person is forced to submit to the government’s power and cease any resistance to the horrors of state hegemony.

The ballot box serves to convince voters that the atrocities their government commits against them and citizens of other nations is being done with their full approval, so as to smother any potential resistance from people who might not have been so accepting of the state’s misdeeds if they hadn’t gotten to personally participate in putting their “team” in control of the state.

After another grueling election year that monopolizes every conversation they have, after smugly accusing every non-voter they encounter of wanting to genocide trans people (seriously, I have receipts), all the lesser-evilists can shift to post-election mode and spend the next several years defending (or ignoring) every awful thing the government they voted for then does on their behalf, from massively increasing police funding to dropping thousands of bombs on some of the poorest people in the world.

Can’t risk taking responsibility for their part in those rapidly-accumulating atrocities by actually admitting the guy they decided should rule the world because he promised them money and protection is a fucking monster.

When they find out their party of choice actually spends millions of their campaign donations funding the most reactionary, bigoted candidates from the other party to make their own candidates look more reasonable by comparison, they simply shrug and keep voting.

Since the voter is so ready and willing to exchange their agency and mine for the state’s monopoly on violence, buying into the big lie that government keeps them safe from crime, disease, debt, litter and all those scary migrants across the sea, the ballot box that fuels the ruling class’s entire base of power needs to burn.

Burning the ballot box is a fierce expression of anarchy. It’s the loud proclamation that I will not be ruled by the government, the voting body, or anyone.

I will not exchange my agency or my autonomy for whatever favors a political party promises me for my support.

I will not put my well-being above the well-being of the government’s blood-soaked targets, and thus drench my own hands in their innocent blood.

I will not voluntarily legitimize the system that takes everything from me and you and gives it to the ruling class, who then funnel their vast spoils into the propaganda machine, directing it to select the next geriatric rapist to sit in the big chair.

Crown, flag or ballot box — all instruments of oppression are thankfully flammable. You can call it harm reduction if you like. I just call it anarchy.

ziq’s Anarchy Essays on Raddle

Source: Retreived on 2025/09/04 from <raddle.me/wiki/ziq_essays#anarchy-is>

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Last edited by ziq 3 days ago

These essays have largely been ignited by various raddle discussions over the years and a lot of them are meant to work as clear and concise guides to various anarchist principles.

You can help me write more of these essays or contribute to Raddle’s server costs by making a donation using Patreon:

www.patreon.com

Anarchy Essays & Prose

Anarchy is

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/what_anarchy_means> on September 3, 2025.

Last updated: 2 August 2022

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Anarchy is an ongoing process to dismantle authority

Anarchy is the relentless negation of structures of domination, the endeavor to carve out little pockets of life free from exploitation and suffering.

Anarchy is the uncompromising push against oppression and the vocal demand for autonomy and self-determination, the rejection of all the classes, institutions and dogmas built to rule people.

Anarchy is above all a practice, not a theory. It is about actively working to end authoritarian relationships wherever they exist, and build non-authoritarian alternatives. It is not about trying to prescribe a way of life for an imagined place and time, and imagined people. It is for real people and dealing with real problems.

Anarchy is a living and breathing practice that we incorporate into our everyday lives. A personal stance against domination that informs all our decisions and thus shapes the trajectory of our existence.

There is no end-goal to anarchy. It is ongoing, unending action against hierarchical structures and the authority figures who sit in luxury at the top of them.

Anarchy is a desire for freedom from tyranny. Anarchy is countless generations of disparate people with the drive to be freer than they are under the systems that forcibly govern them.

Anarchy is the rejection of government, states, borders, capital, patriarchy, gender essentialism, slavery, ideology, the right wing, the left wing, the clergy, democracy, private property, technocracy, nuclear family, humanism, imperialism, prisons, factories, founding fathers, bureaucracy, ethnocracy, heteronormativity, idols, tradition, policing, neuronormativity, ecocide, civilization and every other form of authority.

Anarchy is community gardens, free shops, graffiti, 3D printed guns, naturism, vegan potlucks, squats, food forests, sabotaging pipelines, free software, liberating cows, shoplifting, heirloom seed saving, forming autonomous zones, assassinating tyrants, guerilla gardening, writing zines, catching rainwater, burning ballot boxes, postering, biodiversity, abolishing whiteness, hacking, aquaponics, music making, upcycling, torching police stations and seed bombing wildflowers all across the landscape.

An anarchist is anyone who refuses to be governed, dominated, ruled by anyone and anything. An anarchist is an angry, bitter, lost, anxious, disillusioned, violent, peaceful, courageous, idealistic, captivating, fearless dreamer.

An anarchist stands alone against the giant tide of authority that rises in every direction. Anarchists connect with every battered downtrodden soul in concerted attack against the ruthless systems designed to disempower and alienate us.

Anarchy is marred in endless contradiction, existential dread and insufferable internal conflict and yet anarchy makes perfect sense to anyone who is appalled or enraged by the gross injustices that engulf this little blue planet. Anarchy is for anyone who seeks to live with any kind of dignity.

Anarchy is an impossible, preposterous pursuit yet necessary for our very survival.

Anarchy is--

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Video version:

https://anarchy.tube/w/bNeTcDQVZz7Tq5UatgBShT (Uncensored version)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2kqAmbK5d8 (Censored version)

Do Anarchists Support Democracy?

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/democracy> on September 3, 2025.

Last updated: 2 August 2022

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Understanding Democracy

The word “democracy” comes from two Greek words:

demo- a combining form occurring in loanwords from Greek, where it meant “people.”

-cracy: a combining form occurring in loanwords from Greek, with the meaning “rule,” “government,” “governing body.”

So democracy literally means: “Rule by the people.” Or more specifically, the majority of the people.

In my mind, anyone that aims for us to be ruled, even by “the people” (as abstract and meaningless as that concept is) is not promoting anarchy. But unfortunately this view is not always shared by the people calling themselves anarchists today. It’s difficult for me to imagine that an anarchist; who is presumably opposed to authority in all its guises and hopefully rejects the very notion of rulers, would then consent to being ruled by “the people”... I know I sure as hell don’t want to be ruled by anyone. But a lot of anarchists continue to romanticize democracy, perhaps because they’re unable to break through the years of propaganda fed to them by the state and its schooling and media apparatuses.

From an early age, it’s hammered into us that democracy = freedom. Any anarchist will tell you that although most of us live in societies that are governed by forms of democracy, none of us have anything resembling freedom. Yet a lot of us make excuses to ourselves so we can continue to romanticize democracy... Tell a room full of anarchists that you oppose democracy and you’ll no doubt hear impassioned insistences that what we have now isn’t “real” democracy, but “if we had anarchism, we’d have “real” democracy and things would be different, because anarchism is the only real democracy!”

A lot of anarchists spend a lot of effort holding onto oppressive phantoms like democracy and go through great lengths to fuse these liberal concepts with anarchy, when we really have no reason to. Anarchists who insist anarchy and democracy are one and the same when democracy is responsible for an endless list of horrible atrocities do no service to anarchy.

Our rulers use democracy to separate us into in-groups and out-groups, pitting the majority group against the minority groups and giving everyone a false sense of control. We’re made to believe we have a say in how our lives are run because we get to participate in glorious democracy. Of course, all of us outside the ruling class continue to be exploited, living in perpetual servitude, and the only people who really benefit from democracy are the ruling class who use it to keep us alienated and distracted so we don’t rise up and kill them all for the debilitating misery they create. Anarchy rejects authority and it rejects the domination of majority groups over minority groups. Anarchy is about upholding each individual’s autonomy and dismantling the authority forced on us by oppressive actors.

Democracy grants authority to favored groups to oppress minority groups. Democracy ignores the autonomy of the individual in favor of the collective will of the dominant group. Democracy exists to enable rulers to uphold brutal power hierarchies. It’s really the full embodiment of authority; used to maintain the tyrannical capitalist-statist status quo all over the world today.

The Failure of Democracy

Democracy is the tyranny of the majority, however you try to window-dress it. In practice, all forms of democracy have been used by a majority group to control or otherwise dictate to a minority group. All forms of democracy have been used to smother autonomy, to stifle self-determination, and to absolve rulers of responsibility for their actions. How can a ruler be responsible for their atrocities when “the people” elected them and empowered them to commit those atrocities?

Though you’ll never hear democracy-fetishists mention it, Hitler was technically democratically elected in accordance with the German political system. His actions after being elected were largely supported by the majority group in Germany. All the atrocities he committed were done on behalf of that majority group; to strengthen the position of “Aryan” Christians in society at the expense of everyone else. The German people empowered Hitler to maintain their privilege at all cost.

There’s no reason so-called “real” democracy would be any different than the democracy that created nazi Germany. Participatory democracy would just allow more members of the dominant group to more directly participate in enacting brutal policies.

“Real” democracy won’t stop people from choosing to oppress others to benefit their own group. If the majority of WW2 Germans stood by and cheered while people were carted off to concentration camps, why would anyone think “real” democracy would have changed that? Throughout history, whenever a skilled propagandist points the finger at a minority group, the majority group tears them limb from limb. This is democracy in action. White supremacy and even genocide have been propped up with the power of democracy countless times.

Democracy or Anarchy?

So do anarchists support democracy? Not if those anarchists have a fully developed understanding of what anarchy entails. Not if they’re serious about liberating themselves from authority and crushing hierarchies as they form.

Democracy is really not compatible with anarchy in any permeable way. It could be a useful process for gauging the views of each member of a small group, but that shouldn’t be enough for us to make the claim that “anarchy is democratic”. Anarchy is the opposition to authority. It’s the struggle against oppression. The quest to limit suffering. We shouldn’t be claiming anarchy is defined by democracy; which is a specific system of government that demands people be ruled by other people.

If you ask 10 random anarchists whether they support democracy, you’re certain to get a mixed response. Every person you ask will be at a different point on their political journey, and some anarchists will spend a lot more time thinking about labor rights, housing, migrant aid and other pressing concerns, while putting very little philosophical thought into the nature of hierarchy and all the ways it manifests itself and becomes ingrained in our lives.

Collectivist-minded anarchists will usually insist on direct-democracy and consensus-democracy as decision-making mechanisms, but it frequently leads to problems when certain members of the group don’t fall in line with the majority’s agenda. The bigger the group, the more likely this is to happen. The minority members will inevitably grow frustrated at this oppression and either leave the group or be forced to conform in order to stay.

In practical terms, for example, this could mean all black people in a community could be alienated, marginalized or even forced to leave their homes altogether because the white majority have voted to ignore their concerns in order to safeguard white privilege. Democracy and marginalization tend to come as a group deal. “Power to the people” really means “power to the most powerful group of people”, and the more power the powerful group has, the less power the marginalized groups have.

The Authority of Democracy

Western democracy originated in ancient Greece. This political system granted democratic citizenship to free men, while excluding slaves, foreigners and women from political participation. In virtually all democratic governments throughout ancient and modern history, this was what democracy meant. An elite class of free men made all the decisions for everyone. Before Athens adopted democracy, aristocrats ruled society, so “rule by the people”, or the idea of a government controlled (in theory) by all its (free) male citizens instead of a few wealthy families seemed like a good deal. But really it was just a new iteration of Aristocracy rule rather than the revolution it’s painted as. The rich still rule society by feeding voters carefully constructed propaganda and keeping everyone poor, overworked and desperate to be granted basic needs by the state.

In democracies today, only legal citizens of a country are granted democracy. In a lot of countries, people who have been convicted of a “crime” are denied the right to vote, regardless of how long ago they served their sentence. In the US, this is used to deny voting rights to minority groups, who make up a large proportion of the prison population.

In some societies only a small minority group are allowed to participate in the democracy. In Apartheid South Africa, the minority group (European settlers) granted themselves democracy and excluded the native majority, using democracy to deprive the native population of the rights granted to European settlers. Anarchy, of course, is an absence of government; of rulers. Democracy aims for the individual to be governed, ruled, controlled by others. So its plain to see that anarchy is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.

There has been a lot written outlining why the concept of democracy simply cannot be made compatible with anarchy, yet a lot of people identifying as anarchists today refuse to let go of the idea of democracy as a revolutionary method, and insist it can somehow overcome its inherently hierarchical nature and long history of oppression. In all honestly, a lot of these people are simply confused minarchists that don’t actually want to abolish hierarchy; but instead minimize it.

Consensus Democracy?

Consensus democracy aims to get everyone in a group to agree to take a unified path of action. It sounds good in theory, but the only way to get everyone from disparate backgrounds and experiences to agree to the same thing is to water down the plan to such an extent that the action will likely become meaningless. Consensus democracy assumes the majority group won’t bully or peer pressure the minority group into folding to their will. It ignores the basic reality that some people will aggressively force their will on others, or at least shame or manipulate opponents into submission.

The whole concept of consensus democracy reminds me of that meme with the smug guy sitting at the booth with the “change my mind” sign; inviting his political opponents to debate him. I can safely say if I saw that guy sitting at that booth, I’d walk the other way. Why should anyone be put in a situation where they’re forced to expend all their energy to change someone’s mind? Just do your own thing and don’t worry about people that don’t want to participate in what you’re doing. If people have fundamental disagreements, then they don’t need to cooperate. It’s not the end of the world.

Fruitless attempts to get everyone to reach the same agreement is just the latest form of the bureaucratic meandering that has long sabotaged political action. After countless hours of heated debate, and a long series of compromises, the consensus reached (if it’s ever reached at all) will likely be very watered down from its initial form and be of little benefit to anyone in the group. A plan for concrete action will have been turned into a frustrating exercise in concession, tepid half-measures, and ultimately; inaction. All because the people who made the plan felt the need to gain the approval of a committee of naysayers before pursuing it.

Anarchy Doesn’t Need Democracy

Instead of a large group laboring to make democracy work so they can agree on a course of action, it would be far more productive for smaller groups made up of people with shared interests to splinter off and co-operate to follow their own plans that require no compromise because their interests are already aligned.

Throughout history, democracy has existed to legitimize authority, providing justification for hierarchical power structures by framing every oppressive action the state takes against us as “the will of the people”. It has long enabled the powerful to crush the powerless. People who insist on associating anarchism with democracy are trying to legitimize anarchism, to associate it with comfortable institutions embraced by thoroughly indoctrinated liberals. But anarchy has no want or need for legitimization. Anarchy doesn’t need to be watered down to broaden its appeal to a public that is high on hierarchy.

Anarchists always oppose monarchy; the rule of one. We always oppose oligarchy; the rule of a few. So why wouldn’t we oppose democracy; the rule of many? Why should the many get to decide how you or I live our lives? A ruler is a ruler is a ruler. Democracy has been expertly wielded as a weapon by the elites in society. By combining democracy with meticulously-crafted propaganda, the powerful are able to control voters and manipulate them into voting against their own interests.

Democracy has forever been synonymous with class based societies. It has split entire countries into two barely-distinctive political parties (conservative and “progressive”) that are nevertheless permanently at each other’s throats. Even in its most libertarian-friendly forms, it has constantly failed to avert hierarchy, coercion and the authoritarian machinations of majority-groups.

You can’t strive to replace an artificial system as brutally hierarchical as democracy with a supposedly more egalitarian version of the same thing and call it anarchy. You have to throw the whole rotten system out.

Reject democracy. Reject the notion that you should be ruled by anyone. Embrace self-determination. Embrace anarchy.

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Audio Version:

https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/101-do-anarchists-support-democracy-by-ziq

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Related Texts

An Anarchist Critique of Democracy by Moxie Marlinspike and Windy Hart

Debunking Democracy by Bob Black

Democracy by Monsieur Dupont

Neither Democrats, nor Dictators: Anarchists by Errico Malatesta

Democracy vs Desire: Beyond the Politics of Measure by Andy Robinson

From Democracy to Freedom by Crimethinc

Majorities and Minorities by Errico Malatesta

The Abolition Of Rulership Or The Rule Of All Over All? by William Gillis

Do Anarchists Vote in State Elections?

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/voting> on September 3, 2025.

Last updated: 2 August 2022

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It obviously depends on the individual anarchist whether or not they choose to participate in the political process, but I’m writing this piece to point out that the act of voting in state elections stands in direct contradiction with anarchy. If an anarchist chooses to vote, that action has nothing to do with furthering anarchy or anarchist principles. No anarchist worth their salt would pressure other anarchists into voting for their favorite politician.

I’m always staggered by the absurdity of anarchists stumping for politicians... Every time election season is approaching, certain self-proclaimed anarchists flood anarchist spaces on social media to shame us into voting. They always make dramatic moralist claims like “If you don’t vote for this politician, their opponent will put my life in danger. If you don’t support this “progressive” ruler, you obviously don’t care about (insert marginalized group) and are no comrade of mine!”

Voting for a political candidate in a representative democracy is a direct legitimization of their authority — over you and everyone in your community. It’s like inviting them to rule you. By voting, you’re declaring your support for the system and appointing a politician to act as your political representative for however many years their term lasts for. That politician now speaks for you, makes your decisions for you, acts in your name.

By supporting a politician, you’re declaring your approval for whatever actions that ruler then takes during their reign in power. The more power the position has, the more harm they’ll be able to do. If you’re voting for a president of a nation state, for example, you can bet they’ll make decisions that will cause death and suffering for countless people.

There is no way to vote for change under capitalism. The system in a neoliberal capitalist state only exists to serve the elite wealthy classes. To enable them to horde more and more wealth by exploiting your labor and to protect that wealth from you. Socialists who think they can reform the state from within are not anarchists, even if they claim to be. A lot of democratic socialists will claim to be anarchists to get you to support their candidate. They’ll insist lots of anarchists have joined their organization. They’ll sometimes even claim their candidate will fight for anarchy if they get elected.

Democratic socialists accept the state as a legitimate vector for change and believe it can be made to work for the people if we just elect the right sort of politicians; typically “progressive” liberals that support some friendlier policies and promise to use their power to advocate for social justice.

Anarchists, on the other hand, reject all authority as illegitimate and don’t accept being ruled by anyone; no matter how “progressive” the prospective ruler professes to be. Anyone telling you they’re an anarchist while trying to get you to choose a “better” ruler, or a “lesser” evil is either lying to you or to themselves.

Putting nicer liberals in positions of power might seem like a good idea on first inspection, but it ignores the simple reality that all power corrupts. All throughout history, no system of rulers and obeyers has made us freer. Every single power hierarchy has rapidly descended into tyranny. Giving a person power and expecting them to not use it to cement even more power for themselves is as foolish as Charlie Brown trying to kick the football while Lucy holds it. Power is an addictive drug and people that possess it can no longer be trusted to serve your interests when those interests now completely contradict with their own. The powerful have very little in common with the powerless.

Trying to “fix” hierarchies so they appear, on the surface, to be less brutally unjust, can actually hurt anarchy, because it convinces radicals to compromise and settle-for and grow complacent by accepting a supposedly kinder ruler.

How this typically plays out:

The ruler the radicals helped elect is quickly corrupted by the system that has granted them so much power that their ego is in overdrive. As the “voice of the people”, the ruler is convinced they can do no wrong and that their actions are in service of “the greater good” or “the revolution”.

The people who promoted and voted for the ruler, after eagerly celebrating their success, will spend the next several years working hard to justify to their egos the increasingly horrible things the ruler then inevitably does while in office.

They’ll now spend their energy smugly explaining to everyone who will listen that the ruler’s oppressive actions are in their best interests ultimately. That the ruler is simply thinking ahead; playing 3D chess, that compromises have to be made to aid the revolution. That reform takes time. That they can’t be expected to not take money from lobbyists or deport migrants or imprison poor people or wage war overseas because “that’s how the system works”. They have to work within the confines of the system now, so they are able to one day do good; when they have enough money and power to accomplish it!

The “progressive” politician will soon be indistinguishable from every other politician shilling their way up the hierarchy, and their radical supporters will have abandoned every radical inclination they ever had to justify supporting their “team”. Empty revolutionary rhetoric will have replaced anarchist methods like direct action and mutual aid, and words like “socialism”, “progressive” and “revolution” that were used in the political campaign will have been stripped of all their value and meaning, convincing everyone that socialism is just more of the same and not worth fighting for in the future.

The wonderful thing is, the people that stumped so fervently; shaming everyone into voting for their shiny new ruler will never have to accept any culpability for their part in bringing the ruler to power. The whole point of democracy is to shift responsibility from the individual to the intangible and indomitable system. The institutions of democracy work hard to convince the individual they have no right to self-determination beyond casting a vote for the system’s pre-approved ruler A or pre-approved ruler B.

See, only the system can provide for you, citizen. Trust in the system. The system is great. Don’t fight the system. You can’t defeat the system. Just ask the system for freedom and maybe you’ll be granted some — If the system is feeling generous anyway. Vote for ruler B today!

Anarchists! Pull yourselves together. Authority simply cannot be voted away.

Emma Goldman:

“Participation in elections means the transfer of one’s will and decisions to another, which is contrary to the fundamental principles of anarchism.”

Do Anarchists Support “Free Speech”?

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/free_speech> on September 3, 2025.

Last updated: 2 August 2022

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From Wikipedia.org:

“Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g. “downsizing” for layoffs, “servicing the target” for bombing, in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable. It may also refer to intentional ambiguity in language or to actual inversions of meaning. In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth.”

The concept of “free speech” is fundamentally flawed, and has historically been used to convince citizens of states that they have “rights” that are gifted to them by the supposedly benevolent and generous state.

In actuality, the state doesn’t give you rights; it controls them, limits them, denies you them. It uses its monopoly on violence to censor, stalk, spy on, imprison and terrorize anyone that would threaten to subvert its power.

When an authority grants you “free speech”, what they’ve really done is take away your freedom to speak, and then allow certain people (typically the favored social class) to say certain things under certain conditions. There’s nothing “free” about this. You’re still forbidden from speech that would threaten the state or those it empowers. You’re still legally viable for slandering powerful people that can afford as many lawyers as it takes to sue you into bankruptcy. You’re still beaten to a bloody pulp (or worse) for talking back to a cop. You’ll still be imprisoned, enslaved and murdered by the state and its enforcers for being the wrong race or the wrong gender or the wrong sexuality or the wrong religion or the wrong class and daring to resist your oppressors.

Free speech is a lie told to us by our rulers to convince us we need to be ruled by them.

Anarchists are aware enough to realize the state does not grant us any kind of freedom. The entire existence of the state is predicated on taking freedom away from us to empower the rich and powerful minority that the state exists to serve. So as anarchists; as people who don’t want to be ruled, people who see the blatant lies our rulers tell us for what they are, it would make little sense for us to support an inherently Orwellian concept as “free speech”. Much more honest words for this concept would be “controlled speech” or “state-approved speech”.

Really, when the state talks about freedom of speech, they’re most often talking about the freedom to be a hateful bigot — since bigotry is really the only type of speech the state will go out of its way to protect. Bigotry allows the state to scapegoat undesirable groups and thus create gaping social divisions. If everyone is villainizing migrants or gays, those groups will serve as a fine distraction. Ensuring our rulers and their benefactors can live to exploit us for another day as we focus our rage at anyone but them.

According to the state, white supremacists are free to incite hatred against non-whites (which has often led to mass murder), but if someone were to say they think the president of the nation deserves to be stabbed for his crimes... Well, that person would promptly be carted off to prison for voicing such a dangerous idea.

Unfortunately, some people insist on using bigoted or otherwise oppressive language in anarchist spaces, claiming that free speech allows them to do so. Since we’ve established that free speech is nothing more than an insipid lie our rulers tell us in order to control us, it’s important that we reject the dishonest language of the state when talking about anarchy, and take a long hard look at the reasons someone would have for clinging to the state’s shrewd promises of “rights” and “freedoms” that simply don’t exist.

“Free speech” is not an anarchist principle in any way. Actual anarchist principles of course include direct action, mutual aid, taking a strong stance against authority in all its guises, as well as freedom of association. This means we are free to associate with whoever we want and free to avoid associating with people that would build authoritarian structures to oppress us.

So let’s talk about the people who enter anarchist spaces, direct slurs and hateful bigoted rhetoric at us, and then insist we accept their abuse because they have the sacred right to freedom of speech... These people simply have no understanding of anarchy. Their “right to free speech” that they insist we respect could only be granted to them by a state with a monopoly on violence. If someone comes into your space and calls you a racial slur, no institution should have the power to stop you from showing that person the door.

It takes an incredibly sheltered person to believe there should be no consequences for abuse. When someone is abusing you or people you care about, you should absolutely be free to take a stand and remove them from your space, no matter how many times the person cries “free speech” as they’re telling you you’re a worthless (slur).

The “freedom” to scapegoat, demonize and demean people who are different from you really stands in direct contradiction with anarchy. Discriminating against people based on ability, race, gender or sexuality creates authority. It makes you an authoritarian. Your rhetoric directly alienates the people who belong to the groups you’re choosing to look down on in disgust and present as less-than human. By using demeaning language to chastise marginalized people for their perceived inadequacies, you’re upholding normative social roles, creating classes and subclasses and strengthening the authoritarian power structures that directly oppress any people that belong to minority groups.

For example, by using the word “f*ggot” as an insult, you effectively cast gay people as being worthy of scorn and derision. You assert authority over everyone who isn’t heterosexual and make life incredibly difficult for people that don’t meet the normative standards you’ve helped construct to maintain the social dominance of heterosexuals.

Anarchists can and will choose to not associate with people that claim they have a right to oppress others. Anarchists are anti-authoritarian to our core, and this means we don’t have to put up with hateful bigots in our spaces.

Can Anarchists Support Capitalism?

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/Anarcho_Capitalism> on September 3, 2025.

Last updated: 2 August 2022

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“Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. Doublespeak may take the form of euphemisms (e.g. ”downsizing” for layoffs, “servicing the target” for bombing, in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable. It may also refer to intentional ambiguity in language or to actual inversions of meaning. In such cases, doublespeak disguises the nature of the truth.” (From Wikipedia.org)

The phrase ”anarcho-capitalism” was coined by far-right white-nationalist Murray Rothbard as a way to demean and dispirit anarchists. By appropriating and warping anarchist terminology, he hoped to dilute our objectives and deal a fatal blow to our propaganda. He worked for years to associate anarchy with all the things anarchists stand against, thus minimizing the effect of anarchy in the public consciousness.

If anarchy is stripped of all its meaning, if anarchists are presented as extra-devoted capitalists, as wannabe slumlords and oligarchs, then the threat anarchy presents to capitalism is greatly minimized. Anarchy stops being a viable alternative to the system of authority and simply becomes part and parcel of it.

In one of his unpublished pieces, Rothbard admitted:

”We are not anarchists, and those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical because all anarchists have socialistic elements in their doctrines and possess socialistic economic doctrines in common.”

Rothbard’s acolytes claim to support capitalism but not the state, proposing that all the functions of government, from military, police, courts and prisons to water sanitation, waste disposal and road construction be privately owned.

They wish to replace the state with wholly unregulated corporations; making the corporations that currently share power with the state into what are effectively private states that don’t have to share power or answer to anyone. These corporations would of course use their private armies to do war with each other as is their custom, until one corporation has monopolized everything, becoming what would inevitably be an all-powerful worldwide monarchy.

So the only logical end goal of this unfettered and unchallenged capitalism is a Disney-Pepsi-Bayer conglomeration printing all the money, making all the laws, publishing all the media, growing and distributing all the food, managing all the hospitals, workplaces, prisons and schools, ruling the entire world as one colossal government.

Capitalism is a perverse authority that devours everything it touches. Wherever capitalism rises, a multitude of oppressive hierarchies immediately spring from it: Class systems, homelessness, imperialism, environmental destruction, slavery, human trafficking, climate change, racism, misogyny, ableism, genocide, the list is endless.

There is no way to make a system that revolves around exploitation, inequality, hierarchy and domination compatible with anarchy. There is simply no way for capitalism to ever be anarchic.

These oligarchy-fetishists insist that capitalism is voluntary when in reality private property rights can only be enforced violently; by an authority that is powerful enough to rule a society. There’s no way to prop up a hierarchy as immense as capitalism without coercion, domination, suppression of autonomy, tyranny. All things that are anathema to anarchy.

For all intents and purposes, these so called ”anarcho-capitalists”, ”propertarians” or ”voluntaryists” wish to revert the world to feudalism and take full control of society, without the inconvenience of health, safety and environmental regulations or any other controls on their business activities or accountability for their shareholders and CEOs. Some of them will simply call themselves an “anarchist“ without further elaboration, so it’s important to pay attention to the context and content of their messaging and call them out if they’re full of shit and just trying to do some entryism.

These social and economic conservatives wish to replace the state’s police forces and military with private police and armies that would work directly for the corporations, with zero transparency and with their sole mission being to safeguard the profits and personal safety of the owners of capital. Mind you, this isn’t too much different from the current system where capitalists have to share some of their power with the state and its functionaries, but it sure as hell won’t be any better for us peasants.

They have similarly hijacked the word “libertarian” which was historically synonymous with “anarchist” (Kropotkin used both words interchangeably) and maintains its original meaning outside the USA.

Within the USA, “libertarian”, “voluntaryist”, “propertarian”, “deontological liberal”, “autarchist”, “paleocon”, “minarchist”, “neocon”, “rights-theorist”, “libertarian moralist” and “social conservative” are all words that just mean “capitalist that doesn’t like public accountability or paying taxes” with very minor differences; usually relating to how private property “rights” will be enforced.

Capitalism is just as brutal a hierarchy as the state, and anyone claiming capitalists are capable of being anarchists is using malicious doublespeak to attack the anarchist movement by watering down and obfuscating our most basic terms and principles.

By creating far-right capitalist perversions of every anti-capitalist movement, the wealthy largely succeed in erasing the original revolutionary goals of a movement and replace them with more of the same capitalism, imperialism, poverty, genocide and ecocide.

Without a state to uphold property rights, to legalize wealth hoarding and to normalize labor exploitation, without police and courts to imprison anyone who refuses to play by capitalism’s rules, capitalism simply has no way to function. It would be, in a word, anarchy.

“Anarcho”-capitalism is an oxymoron and has nothing to do with Anarchy.

Anarchy Vs. Archy: No Justified Authority — Or Why Chomsky Is Wrong

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/expertise_vs_authority> on September 3, 2025.

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Last updated: 2 August 2022

Archy: The Opposite of Anarchy

The dictionary definition of ‘archy’ is any body of authoritative officials organized in nested ranks. Be it a Monarchy, an oligarchy, a republic, a feudal state or any other hierarchical society.

While anarchy is the opposition to hierarchy and authority, archy is the full embodiment of those things. While anarchy calls for the absence of rulers, archy thrives when a population serves and obeys rulers. Sometimes a few rulers (e.g. monarchies), and sometimes many (e.g. social democracies).

Hierarchies exist for rulers to maintain their social control & power over the population. This control is maintained with violent force by authorities appointed by the rulers: the army, national guard, police, courts, prisons, social workers, the media, tax collectors, etc.

Not all guidance given by one person to another constitutes hierarchy. Choosing to accept a specialist’s expertise in their craft needn’t create a hierarchy or make them your ruler. A roofer laying your roof or a chef cooking your meal or a surgeon repairing your heart needn’t be your superior on a hierarchy simply because they are providing you with a valued service.

Similarly, an individual using force to strike a blow at the hierarchy that oppresses them does not turn the individual into an authority. Destroying archy where you see it does not create archy, it creates anarchy.

On “Justified Authority”

Once you start justifying authority and hierarchy, you effectively twist a knife in anarchy. We’ve all heard the phrase “all power corrupts”. It’s not a meme; it’s the entire reason anarchy exists as a practice.

Legitimizing authority enables archy. Doesn’t matter if you call yourself an anarchist while justifying hierarchies you personally approve of for whatever reason. NO authority is legitimate in anarchy. Yes, even in a parent-child relationship.

When you legitimize an authority, you’re granting it power, presenting it as an institution that needs to be obeyed at all costs, and it won’t stop there. It’ll want more power because that’s the nature of power. Always grows, never stops to examine its devastating effect on its surroundings. Power is a license to do harm. Whether it was your original intention to enable a violent force of power when you legitimized an authority is irrelevant. It will do harm and the people who signed off on legitimizing it are (or should be) culpable for that harm.

Anarchy is the opposition to authority. To pretend otherwise would be a blatant misrepresentation of what anarchy is.

Expertise Vs. Force Vs. Authority

A lot of people confuse expertise for authority and then use that confusion to insist anarchy doesn’t oppose all authority. They say anarchy only opposes unjustified authority. They of course never explain who gets to determine which authority is justified... I assume that determination is made by a further authority? An authority that is also justified? And which authority justified that authority..? It’s silly when anarchists try to go down this justified authority rabbithole.

A carpenter might be good at making cabinets, an expert at it even, but that doesn’t make them an authority. Their talent doesn’t give them the right to assert authority; power over anyone. Authority is not simply an isolated instance of a person using force. Authority is a distinct on-going social relationship between people. A coercive relationship that has been legitimized by our authoritarian hierarchical society. It’s a relationship where authority figures assert power over less-powerful individuals in their care. These individuals are expected to submit to this mighty authority figure and obey their commands unwaveringly.

Imagine you’re walking home at night and someone jumps out of the shadows and tries to stab you. In the resulting scuffle, you kill them in self-defense. This was a simple use of force; it does not make you an authority over the person who tried to kill you. This isolated action you took to preserve your own life does not magically imbue you with the authority to go on a killing spree.

Similarly, when a child is about to walk in front of a speeding truck and you grab their hand to stop them, you’re not using authority. You’re using simple force. A temporary spur-of-the-moment action to preserve life is not authority. It doesn’t give you ownership over the person you’re helping. Anarchy has no qualms with the isolated use of force, just the structural institution of authority.

The Chomsky Connection

Noam Chomsky frequently uses the “saving a child from being hit by a car” example to explain his concept of “justified authority”. The people that repeat the ‘justified authority’ fallacy are usually parroting Chomsky’s ill-thought-out words. He says: “Authority, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate and the burden of proof is on those in authority.”

He insists that a person’s authority should be legitimized if justification is provided for it. But of course, he misses a step by neglecting to explain who gets granted the authority to judge that the authority figure’s justification is legitimate...

His definition of authority is inherently flawed. If he’d just say “force” instead of authority, there wouldn’t be so many confused Chomsky-acolytes out there making arbitrary justifications for all kinds of hierarchical shit and then branding that shit “anarchist” when it’s anything but. I’ve even seen his followers using his definitions to frame so-called “Night-watchman states” as being anarchist in nature. Night-watchman states are states that only exist to provide citizens with military, police and courts. This is minarchism, not anarchism. The idea of anarchist states and anarchist prisons is obscene.

Even if we were to naively accept that minarchism were somehow desirable, it would only lead right back to full-scale statism. Legitimized power never remains still, and attempts to control its growth have forever proven futile.

Chomsky is never a good source for what anarchy means. He’s made a career of watering down anarchy to better appeal to a white middle-class North American audience, even going as far as to state that government isn’t inherently bad and that it can be somehow “reformed” with what he calls “real democracy” and “social control over investment”. Far too many anarchists look to Chomsky as an authority on anarchy, when he’s clearly a minarchist.

He also likens anarchy to the enlightenment and classical liberalism in his talks and writings, which is a very Western-centric thing to do, especially since the enlightenment oversaw the divvying up of Africa by European imperialists and other horrifically racist and genocidal acts. So it’s probably not a good idea to associate anarchy with that authoritarian chapter of history... While it’s true that the political movement that first branded itself as anarchism originated in Europe, anarchy thrived unnamed in every corner of the world before and after The Enlightenment, long before European philosophers began to pine for a return to it.

I don’t consider Chomsky to be an anarchist (because he’s demonstrably not one), so his definitions aren’t that important to me. But unfortunately they’re important to a lot of minarchists and liberals that call themselves anarchists, and they keep repeating his flawed definitions to newcomers, creating further confusion that reverberates for years.

The EXPERTISE of the Cobbler

The likely source for Chomsky’s confusion over the anarchist definition of authority is the originator of collectivist anarchism, Mikhail Bakunin. In his rough and unfinished text “What is Authority” (1870), he spoke of “the authority of the cobbler”:

“Does it follow that I drive back every authority? The thought would never occur to me. When it is a question of boots, I refer the matter to the authority of the cobbler; when it is a question of houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For each special area of knowledge I speak to the appropriate expert. But I allow neither the cobbler nor the architect nor the scientist to impose upon me. [...] But I recognize no infallible authority, even in quite exceptional questions [...] So there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.” -Bakunin

“Voluntary authority and subordination” is essentially what every liberal insists they stand for. They claim capitalism is a voluntary contract between people. They say workers voluntarily choose to be subordinate to their bosses or the state in exchange for wages or security. Anarchists need to reject Bakunin’s language if we’re to differentiate ourselves from these authoritarian ideologies and truly take a stand against authority.

With that text, Bakunin was trying to articulate the difference between expertise and authority, but did it in a confusing and roundabout way that has enabled generations of minarchists to mistakenly identify as anarchists and promote a broken definition of anarchy. Expertise isn’t hierarchical unless the expert is deliberately enshrined with authority. Being good at something needn’t give you the right to use your craft to rule people.

The guy made a poorly-worded argument 150 years ago, when the European anarchist movement was still in its infancy and the terminology was still being developed. It was a small part of a rough draft that he never completed, and it is often quoted without any context by people who obviously haven’t read the whole text or the associated works that he wrote around the same time.

We obviously don’t need to hold up everything every anarchist ever wrote as some kind of immovable anarchist canon. We don’t cling to Bakunin’s rampant antisemitism, so why cling to his half-baked bootmaker blunder?

Diluting the Goals of Anarchy

The oft-cited example of saving someone from being struck by a car simply has nothing to do with authority. It’s a fundamental misrepresentation of the anarchist concept of authority, and I hope this piece will help shift the discourse away from it. Every fucked up political ideology out there, from monarchy to neoliberalism to fascism, claims to be for justified-authority and against unjustified-authority. We know it’s horseshit when liberals deem bombing school buses in Syria or Iraq a “justifiable” action to “protect freedom” or “acceptable collateral damage”, so why would we adopt their dangerous doublespeak to define anarchy? As soon as you start making allowances for authority, you’ve stopped advocating for anarchy.

Pushing “justified authority” as Chomsky keeps attempting to do is a pointless exercise that only confuses the uninformed and gives us scores of middle class baby-anarchists who come in not understanding the basic underpinnings of anarchy. They then use that misunderstanding to equate anarchy with all kinds of authoritarian shit, even including states. It makes the line that separates liberalism from anarchy increasingly thin. And quite frankly, it breeds shit anarchists.

I’ll finish this chapter by quoting an “anarchist” on a popular anarchist forum who is a perfect example of what I’m talking about:

“I feel it’s necessary to have authorities that can perpetuate and protect certain things — for example, I think an unrevocable societal constitution that every autonomous community should follow is a good thing — and that there should also be codified laws — with the aim to protect individual liberty.”

“Resultantly, I feel like there should be authorities as there are now that ensure that those laws — such as the right to education to a good standard, or that housing or medical training or care should be of a certain standard, or the right to process through a justice system. Necessarily these authorities should have the ability to change situations where these laws/rights are breached. As an extension, I also find myself believing in a well-trained voluntary police force that can undertake these duties (though one of course that is as directly democratic as possible and revocable and responsible in the anarchist tradition).”

“In this way I find myself drawn more to a desire for a “state” of federated anarchistic communities that function as an anarchist society might although within a greater framework of a limited system that wields authority.”

A constitution that everyone has to follow, a “democratic” police force, a state, a system that wields authority. None of this is any different than the liberal status quo. This person has no understanding of anarchy and yet feels the need to identify as an anarchist because they would prefer liberal society be more democratic..? It’s nonsensical. And yet the post was well-regarded by other “anarchists” who replied in agreement, with two of them even citing Rojava as an “anarchist state” that matched up to these stated ideals.

An “anarchist state”. An “anarchist state”…

Authority is a Moral Hierarchy

A hierarchy is an artificial construct that depends on the principle of authority. Authority is the socially-enforced rule that the ruler in a hierarchical relationship gives commands and the subordinate obeys under threat of (socially legitimized) violence.

If I offered my boss a meal, or saved them from drowning, I wouldn’t be exercising authority over them. That action alone doesn’t create a hierarchy. But just by being my boss, they are constantly exercising authority over me and I’m constantly their subordinate. I am ruled by them. I am constrained; controlled by the boss-worker hierarchy, by my boss’s constant assertion of authority over me.

Authority is a deliberate social construct that divides people into either rulers or obeyers; using violence and the notion of “morality” to maintain this coercive system. Talking back to your boss, refusing their authority: That’s a big “moral” no no. Society uses this coercive conditioning to uphold the oppressive dynamic and to keep you controlled and obedient. The system will not tolerate any real dissent against its law. Instead it will condition you to realign your perceptions until you finally accept its law as normal.

Proponents of “free-market” capitalism promote supposedly “voluntary” hierarchies (such as the relationship between owners and workers). This is merely an excuse for normalizing structural violence against the less-powerful, a process that is legitimized by appealing to authority. These hierarchies aren’t voluntary in any quantifiable way, since we’d be punished by society in various ways if we chose to ignore them (say, by refusing to work or by killing our bosses and taking the true value of our labor). “Justifiable hierarchy” / “legitimate authority” is an eerily similar concept as “voluntary” labor under capitalism.

On Anarchist Parenting

Authority is a structurally violent institution. It has nothing to do with the act of rendering aid to a child; feeding them or preventing them from falling into a pool and drowning. A parent-child relationship needn’t be a hierarchy unless you go out of your way to construct it as such.

Parenting is only hierarchical when parents choose to force authority on their child. An anarchist parent would use child-rearing methods that treat the child as an autonomous individual and not as a subordinate to their authoritarian demands. Anarchist parents see themselves as caretakers, not authorities, and legitimizing parental authority with the excuse of “justifiable hierarchy” is a scapegoat. It’s not justified. Using violent coercion to control children is not anarchy. Parents don’t need to be tyrants to raise children.

Countless anarchist communities throughout history, including the modern-day Hadza in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa have shown us that the parent-child relationship doesn’t need to be the violent dictatorship it has become in capitalist-industrial society.

Yet a lot of “anarcho-minarchists”, for lack of a better term, insist on seeing the “ownership” authoritarian society grants them over their children as a “justified hierarchy”. It’s such an odd argument. If they’re okay with applying authoritarianism to their own children, they’d obviously be fine with using it to dominate strangers too. It’s baffling to see people claim the domination of children is compatible with anarchy just because it’s something they choose to engage in.

“Civilized” people make the mistake of constructing dangerous, unhealthy and authoritarian environments for us to live in that completely ignore the burning desire every child has for freedom, play, exploration and learning through first-hand experience.

We force children into metal carriages that take them to school-buildings where strangers are paid to dictate rigid lesson plans to them for years. Children spend their entire childhoods being moved from room to room, forcibly trained to function under the system as obedient civilized workers. Most children aren’t even allowed to play outdoors because the dangers of industrial civlization are so frightening to their parents.

Industrial civilization is simply unfit to nurture human life. The perverse ways we structure our societies around danger, authority, fear, coercion, punishment, conformity and obedience isn’t something that should be forced on children, or anyone. As anarchists, we should be tearing down these authoritarian structures instead of making excuses to maintain them. Children don’t need authority, they need anarchy.

Watered-Down Anarchy

Certain people attach themselves to the flawed collectivist-anarchist definition of authority and then decide they can justify all sorts of hierarchies with it. That revisionism then enters the wider anarchist sphere and is seldom analyzed for its deficiencies since so many collectivist “anarchists” are really minarchists in disguise. Minarchists see no real problem with authority so long as it benefits them materially. Sadly, these minarchists largely control the discourse in many anarchist spaces where the idea of true anarchy is simply unfathomable. Most people born and raised under authoritarian systems have tremendous trouble parting with the faux security-blanket that a lifetime of archy has imbibed them with. Then the absurd idea of “good hierarchy” becomes normalized in these spaces and is used to keep anarchy from forming.

Anarchists need to make a strong distinction between the words “authority”, “force” and “expertise” so language misunderstandings don’t lead to minarchism suppressing anarchy.

“Justifiable authority” is one of several fundamental misunderstandings of anarchy that need to be thrown out before further diluting our (really very easily defined) objectives. We tend to overthink things and that leads to mountains of round-about revisionist theory that only detracts from anarchy and leaves people confused about what even our most basic objectives are.

Every genocidal dictator considered the hierarchies they upheld to be justifiable. Anarchists know better. Anarchy is, was and always will be the outright rejection of all archy.

When you compromise and make excuses to construct hierarchies; what you’re doing is no longer anarchy.

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Audio Version:

https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/102-anarchy-vs-archy-no-justified-authority-or-why-chomsky-is-wrong-by-ziq

Anarchy Vs. Communalism: Bookchin, ‘Lifestylism’, Ideology & Greenwashing

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/communalism_and_anarchy> on September 3, 2025.

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Last updated: 2 August 2022

Blasted Lifestylists!

The father of communalism; Murray Bookchin, long identified as an anarchist but later in life penned scathing attacks against anarchists. He largely invented an imaginary schism between what he termed ‘lifestylist’ anarchists and socialists, denouncing ‘lifestylists’ as being beneath him.

Even though he eventually abandoned anarchism in favor of his communalist ideology, this elitist divide he created between ‘lifestylism’ and socialism continues to reverberate today, with some social-anarchists even going as far as to distance themselves from the individualist aspects of anarchy that largely defined the movement from the beginning. This manufactured divide has greatly assisted in fragmenting anarchists into two opposing factions and led to needless infighting and distraction.

He lobbed the accusation of ‘lifestylism’ against anarchists who live a life that, to them, embodies the spirit of anarchy but, in his view, do not work hard enough to achieve revolutionary social organization and the overthrow of capitalism. He also used it as an insult towards anarchists he saw as promoting what he termed “anti-rationalism”.

In reality, Bookchin was creating a false dichotomy; something he did often in his writings so he could then promote his patented solutions to problems that were often non-existent... Individualist anarchists are perfectly capable of both living anarchically in the current moment, as well as organizing for a future beyond capitalism.

A lot of the most successful anarchist movements in the world today stem from individualist tendencies. These movements are then aided by the social-anarchist concept of ‘prefiguration’ to create movements within the current system that replicate the conditions that would exist in an anarchist society. This allows the people exposed to these movements to see that anarchy works, and become comfortable with the idea of a post-capitalist world. Food Not Bombs is a great example of this.

Bookchin on anarchism:

“[Anarchism] represents in its authentic form a highly individualistic outlook that fosters a radically unfettered lifestyle, often as a substitute for mass action—is far better suited to articulate a Proudhonian single-family peasant and craft world than a modern urban and industrial environment. I myself once used this political label, but further thought has obliged me to conclude that, its often-refreshing aphorisms and insights notwithstanding, it is simply not a social theory.”

“Regrettably, the use of socialistic terms has often prevented anarchists from telling us or even understanding clearly what they are: individualists whose concepts of autonomy originate in a strong commitment to personal liberty rather than to social freedom, or socialists committed to a structured, institutionalized, and responsible form of social organization.”

“In fact anarchism represents the most extreme formulation of liberalism’s ideology of unfettered autonomy, culminating in a celebration of heroic acts of defiance of the state. Anarchism’s mythos of self-regulation (auto nomos)—the radical assertion of the individual over or even against society and the personalistic absence of responsibility for the collective welfare—leads to a radical affirmation of the all-powerful will so central to Nietzsche’s ideological peregrinations. Some self-professed anarchists have even denounced mass social action as futile and alien to their private concerns and made a fetish of what the Spanish anarchists called grupismo, a small-group mode of action that is highly personal rather than social.”

He penned this attack against anarchy late in his life while he was working to build communalism into his final legacy, perhaps hoping he would go down in history with Marx as the father of a powerful socialist ideology that could outlive him and impact the world for centuries. He even warned that if his communalist ideology was not adopted by the world at large, it would result in the destruction of everything.

Equating anarchism with liberalism, when he spent years of his life identifying as an anarchist is a rather shameless attempt at rewriting history in order to sell his new vanity project. It’s a true shame that he ended his long history in radical politics on such a sour and self-defeating note.

Communalism: Murray’s Prescribed Cure for Lifestylism

Bookchin’s politics evolved greatly throughout his life, starting with Stalinism and then Trotskyism in his youth, before he found anarcho-communism. In the 1970s, disillusioned with the authoritarian nature of the Leninism that dominated the worldwide socialist scene, he stated that he felt closer to free-market libertarians; who unlike the totalitarian Marxist-Leninists, will readily defend the rights of the individual. Later, he developed a series of interrelated ideologies; anarchist social ecology, post-scarcity anarchism and libertarian municipalism. He increasingly spoke out against the innate individualism of the anarchist movement, and finally broke with anarchism completely to form communalism. He was a professor and taught students his political theories.

This is a description of communalism in his own words (while also managing to disparage both anarchism and Marxism in the same breath, in true Bookchin fashion):

“The choice of the term Communalism to encompass the philosophical, historical, political, and organizational components of a socialism for the twenty-first century has not been a flippant one. The word originated in the Paris Commune of 1871, when the armed people of the French capital raised barricades not only to defend the city council of Paris and its administrative substructures but also to create a nationwide confederation of cities and towns to replace the republican nation-state.”

“Communalism as an ideology is not sullied by the individualism and the often explicit antirationalism of anarchism; nor does it carry the historical burden of Marxism’s authoritarianism as embodied in Bolshevism. It does not focus on the factory as its principal social arena or on the industrial proletariat as its main historical agent; and it does not reduce the free community of the future to a fanciful medieval village. Its most important goal is clearly spelled out in a conventional dictionary definition: Communalism, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, is ”a theory or system of government in which virtually autonomous local communities are loosely bound in a federation.”

Communalism brings production and certain property under the control of municipal assemblies, who decide how property should be best distributed to meet the needs of the confederation.

While not being a state by the most common definition (since the political process is strictly localized), municipal assemblies could still be described as a form of hierarchical government. Communalism is a big step up over most other forms of government, attempting to curtail and decentralize the power structures we are governed by, but it’s not anarchy.

Localized power structures are still very corruptible. They still create hierarchy. They can still grow out of control. Similarly to ancient Greece’s democracy; communalism deliberately allows for majority rule (or democracy-by-the-majority). This limitation should instantly disqualify it as being a form of anarchy, as voter-hierarchies can easily be exploited by authoritarians to exclude minority groups from the political process, and thus deny them the right to self-determination. Any society that encourages the majority to force their will on a minority (thus creating a clear hierarchy) can’t honestly be described as anarchist in nature. Bookchin reinforces this further:

“The anarcho-communist notion of a very loose ‘federation of autonomous communes’ is replaced with a confederation from which its components, functioning in a democratic manner through citizens’ assemblies, may withdraw only with the approval of the confederation as a whole.”

So, according to Bookchin, a community which joins a confederation “may withdraw only with the approval of the confederation as a whole.” This is probably the worst aspect of his majority-rule fetishization, as it locks entire communities into his system forever, whether those who didn’t want the system like it or not. Any organization that forbids you from withdrawing from it is clearly at odds with libertarian ideals and the right to freedom of association, so it’s really dishonest of him to talk about ‘libertarian’ municipalism when it’s anything but:

“[Libertarian municipalism’s goal is to] create in embryonic form the institutions that can give power to a people generally ... In short, it is through the municipality that people can reconstitute themselves from isolated monads into an innovative body politic and create an existentially vital, indeed protoplasmic civil life that has continuity and institutional form as well as civic content. I refer here to the block organizations, neighborhood assemblies, town meetings, civic confederations, and public arenas for discourse that go beyond such episodic, single issue demonstrations and campaigns, valuable as they may be to redress social injustices.”

Put into practice, I believe communalism can initially be a successful departure from the unwieldy nation-state monolith that plagues the world today and a reversion to the city-states that were once prevalent in ancient Greece at the dawn of civilization. Bookchin writes fondly of classical Athenian democracy, which he uses to glorify his romantic view of Western civilization.

But does simply returning to an earlier state of civilization go far enough? Will an effective micro-state not morph back into a super-state as it grows and faces both internal and external pressures? Decentralization is admirable, but is it enough to successfully safeguard us from statism? And are Athenian democracy and Western civilization even things we want to reproduce, when both allow for the brutal oppression of minorities, were both built on slavery, and institutionalized the denial of human rights to anyone that wasn’t a member of the privileged class?

Bookchin’s ideas for ‘libertarian’ majority-rule democracy are deeply flawed and really can’t be described as being anything other than authoritarian:

“The minority must have patience and allow a majority decision to be put into practice... Municipal minorities [must] defer to the majority wishes of participating communities.”

Any anarchist reading this should immediately be alarmed at the unjust hierarchical implications it presents. White people putting their priorities ahead of black people, men forcing their will on women, Christians excluding Muslims, polluters shutting down environmentalists, heterosexuals subjugating homosexuals... Whichever voting body has the highest numbers (or best propaganda) can effectively rule over the minority. It’s almost as if Bookchin came full circle, returning to the Stalinism of his youth after his flirtation with individualism and anarchy.

While direct democracy is one of several decision-making mechanisms anarchists may utilize, communalism doesn’t simply allow for direct democracy; it requires it. Enshrines it in law. In making his case for direct democracy, Bookchin asserts that the only other option anarchists have at our disposal is consensus democracy. He then proceeds to brutally attack the consensus decision-making method, associating it with anarcho-primitivism (which he vocally loathes, even equating it to Nazism) and deems it ‘authoritarian’. This allows him to offer an exact prescription to the ‘problem’ of multi-layered anarchist decision making in the form of his definitive, structured ideology and its rules.

Organizational structures such as those communalism revolves around should be treated as a means, not an end. Basing an entire social system around a specific structured mode of organization that was designed to be implemented under the conditions present in the 1990s is restrictive and shortsighted.

Anarchy allows for communities to be adaptable to the conditions present in the place and time where the community exists. Rigid ideological structures should always be avoided as they rapidly become outmoded. Historically, communities revolving around political ideologies tend to become dogmatic, and as a result fail to adapt as conditions prove unfavorable to the demands of the ideology.

For instance: Marxism requires that a highly advanced industrial economy be present before Marxist communism can be implemented. Most of the societies where Marxism was attempted lacked these conditions, and destructive policies were implemented in order to speed up industrialization (including mass-displacement of people); eventually leading to the collapse of the societies and ecological damage that will continue to be felt for millennia. As Marx had designed his economic model to function under specific conditions, Marxist leaders attempted to force their societies to fit a mold they simply didn’t fit.

The unwillingness to sway from ideological dogma; however impractical the planned system proves in practice, has frequently led to disaster. So any political movement that has strict guidelines for how society should be structured and governed has big weaknesses right out of the gate. Anarchy requires flexibility, because all forms of social planning can lead to unexpected hierarchies popping up. The avoidance of hierarchies needs to be more important than sticking to a pre-written ideology if we are to pursue anarchy.

Dedicated ideologues often tarnish anarchy as being ‘vague’ and lacking in exact instruction. I’d argue this is exactly why anarchy succeeds and manages to be so ageless; reinventing itself with every new generation of revolutionaries. Prescribing a one-size-fits-all solution to life is impractical in an ever changing, multi-cultural world. Especially while we’re experiencing unprecedented worldwide social and ecological collapses. The greatest strength of anarchy is its flexibility. Anarchists have long laughed in the face of those who would have us live by their rigid rules.

A Green Anarchist Perspective

Green anarchists like myself are often most critical of Bookchin’s ideas because of his concept of ‘post-scarcity’; which to anyone paying attention to the catastrophic mass extinction event we’re in the midst of, is dangerously idealistic. Resources don’t cease to be scarce when socialism is adopted; the reality is that resources are dwindling all over the planet after centuries of over-extraction; including by socialist states. Once those resources run out, there’s no getting them back, so an ideology that envisions a ‘post-scarcity’ economy is intrinsically flawed.

Bookchin and other socialists imagine a society where regular people, rather than states, have the power to determine policy. And they imagine this society will somehow be spared the same destructive pitfalls of capitalist society. But there’s no reason to assume that.

We have centuries of history showing us that people will not altruistically opt for policies that will put the ecosystem or minority groups (especially indigenous and immigrant groups) ahead of their immediate personal interests.

Just as people now vote for politicians that loudly promote disastrous environmental and social policies in order to safeguard their own privileges in society, history shows us they would continue to make damaging decisions if the system moved from representative democracy to direct democracy. To imagine that everyone in a society is capable of acting unselfishly and putting other people and other lifeforms ahead of their own families is foolhardy. They will use their voting power to protect their own immediate interests at the expense of everything else. That’s how power works. It corrupts everything in its path absolutely, whether its wielded by a politician or a private citizen is irrelevant.

Bookchin saw technology as a mode of revolution, and promoted using technology in ecologically sustainable ways, but green anarchists are often critical of the technologies Bookchin envisioned. We see them as inherently isolating and hierarchical. A position Bookchin scoffs at.

One of the technologies he promoted was cybernation, which is essentially ‘rule by machine’. Tasks are assigned, decisions made and resources distributed by computers; largely diminishing an individual’s self-determination and leaving it up to software algorithms. Like all software solutions, cybernation could potentially be hijacked by malicious actors who could seize control of the system and give themselves untold power. Cybernation is also exposed to the personal biases of the programmers who write the software. The programmers effectively govern the governor.

Bookchin often wrote enthusiastically about the revolutionary potential he saw in such technologies:

“Bourgeois society, if it achieved nothing else, revolutionized the means of production on a scale unprecedented in history. This technological revolution, culminating in cybernation, has created the objective, quantitative basis for a world without class rule, exploitation, toil or material want. The means now exist for the development of the rounded man, the total man, freed of guilt and the workings of authoritarian modes of training, and given over to desire and the sensuous apprehension of the marvelous. It is now possible to conceive of man’s future experience in terms of a coherent process in which the bifurcations of thought and activity, mind and sensuousness, discipline and spontaneity, individuality and community, man and nature, town and country, education and life, work and play are all resolved, harmonized, and organically wedded in a qualitatively new realm of freedom.”

Advanced technologies can forever alter the way we live our lives, detach us from our ecosystems and train us to seek fleeting relief from technologies, even as those technologies forever degrade and pollute the ecosystems we depend on to survive. It’s easy to ignore the damage industry does to our ecosystems when we can use the technology it produces to escape from the reality of our situation... At least until the ecosystems become so degraded that they can no longer sustain our lives and we’re forced to look up from our digital sanctuaries to gasp for air.

Bookchin’s emphasis on the modern urban city in his theories will give pause to anyone who has studied the history of civilization and its disastrous effect on every ecosystem it comes into contact with. City life has always alienated us from the land and what it produces for us, creating the depressing situation where most urban dwellers raised in vast concrete deserts have little respect for the natural world or want of preserving it. When the repercussions of our actions towards the ecosystem are completely hidden from us, it’s unlikely we’ll change our behavior and act to preserve whatever ecological diversity the planet has left on the fringes of the grim industrial wastelands we call civilization.

A society structured around advanced technology can even create new elite classes of technologically advanced people and exploited underclasses whose lands are used to mine and manufacture the devices the technological class grow dependent on. It’s easy to see how this cycle can lead to devastating hierarchies.

Bookchin claimed technology and agriculture can be made sustainable with new advances, but years after his death, technology has improved greatly, while the destruction to the planet caused by it has increased tenfold. The science is showing us that the damage industry has done to the world’s ecosystems could very well lead to our own extinction in the near future.

Bookchin wrote:

“The development of giant factory complexes and the use of single or dual-energy sources are responsible for atmospheric pollution. Only by developing smaller industrial units and diversifying energy sources by the extensive use of clean power (solar, wind and water power) will it be possible to reduce industrial pollution. The means for this radical technological change are now at hand.”

“Technologists have developed miniaturized substitutes for large-scale industrial operation—small versatile machines and sophisticated methods for converting solar, wind and water energy into power usable in industry and the home. These substitutes are often more productive and less wasteful than the large-scale facilities that exist today.”

While it is true that ‘green’ fuels can be less destructive than ‘dirty’ fuels, they still remain incredibly destructive, and by no means can they be sourced from a single ecosystem as Bookchin imagines in his writings.

The machines Bookchin speaks of are built using a large assortment of materials that need to be sourced from different ecosystems all over the world. The processes to extract the materials are destructive, the processes to transport the materials to the manufacturing plants and distribution points are destructive, and the waste products created during manufacturing are destructive. There are currently no viable solutions for any of these problems, and every new technology introduced to the market has instead created yet more inequality, warfare and environmental destruction; especially for the Global South that is exploited by the West for its natural resources and cheap (or slave) labor.

Solar panels and wind turbines depend on dirty mining to acquire the minerals needed for their construction, and massive energy use (usually coal) during manufacturing. Mining the quartz that solar panels are made from causes the lung disease silicosis in the impoverished miners. Then, once the quartz is transported to the factories, the manufacturing process creates vats of toxic waste (silicon tetrachloride) that is disposed of in random fields near the factories in China, contaminating the soil and water, and making entire rural populations sick. From “China’s Communist-Capitalist Ecological Apocalypse” by Richard Smith, Real-World Economics Review no. 71:

“When exposed to humid air, silicon tetrachloride turns into acids and poisonous hydrogen chloride gas, which can make people dizzy and cause breathing difficulties. Ren Bingyan, a professor of material sciences at Hebei Industrial University, contacted by the Post, told the paper that “the land where you dump or bury it will be infertile. No grass or trees will grow in its place… It is… Poisonous, it is polluting. Human beings can never touch it.” When the dumping began, crops wilted from the white dust, which sometimes rose in clouds several feet off the ground and spread over the fields as the liquid dried. Village farmers began to faint and became ill. And at night, villagers said “the factory’s chimneys released a loud whoosh of acrid air that stung their eyes and made it hard to breath.”

Solar panel, wind turbine and battery production fuels colonialism, slavery, war, hunger, fossil fuel burning and ecocide. Calling these energies “green” is really a bold-faced lie and just the latest example of industrialism giving itself a skip-deep makeover that will quickly fall apart when the evidence piles up too high for the media to ignore. By promoting these destructive industries, Bookchin aids their shameless greenwashing.

Bookchin:

“The absolute negation of the centralized economy is regional ecotechnology— a situation in which the instruments of production are molded to the resources of an ecosystem.”

The idea that rapidly advancing technologies can be distributed equally among billions of people (which they would need to be if we care at all about preventing power-hierarchies and inequality from forming), or that all people would even want their lives to be governed by these technologies is naive at best, or a malicious falsehood aimed at selling books and “Institute for Social Ecology” certificates at worst.

Bookchin’s insistence that industry is only destructive because of capitalism, and would instead be liberating under (decentralized) socialism has no basis in reality, as the technologies he romanticizes remain destructive to the environment and are hierarchy-forming regardless of the social system in place. They also require resources that simply cannot be sourced from a single locale. This fact alone greatly diminishes his theory.

Bookchin:

“The new declasses of the twentieth century are being created as a result of the bankruptcy of all social forms based on toil. They are the end products of the process of propertied society itself and of the social problems of material survival. In the era when technological advances and cybernation have brought into question the exploitation of man by man, toil, and material want in any form whatever, the cry “Black is beautiful” or “Make love, not war” marks the transformation of the traditional demand for survival into a historically new demand for life.”

Bookchin’s plans for localized, ecologically-sound, self-supporting, automated micro-industries unfortunately remain a pipe dream; vaporware if you will. In the 21^st century, as the Earth’s ecosystems collapse all around us under the strain of industrial exploitation, as forests burn, lands flood and countless species of plants and animals go extinct forever, his vision of distributing industrial technology equally and freely to everyone on the planet becomes less and less relevant to our reality. These ideas aren’t something to base a political movement for lasting social change on. Not on a planet being rapidly exterminated by industry.

Bookchin eventually broke with anarchism completely when he finalized the guidelines of his communalist ideology. Today a lot of his more practical ideas have been implemented by the celebrated Rojava community in western Kurdistan, which has had mixed results in achieving his vision.

His attacks on individualist anarchists (especially of the anti-civ flavor), have provided decades of fuel for collectivist anarchist ideologues to villainize and purge non-collectivists from our spaces. A lot of these people soon follow in Bookchin’s footsteps and abandon anarchy altogether in favor of various structured ideologies including Marxism-Leninism, transhumanism and communalism.

Tankies and the Left-Unity Scam

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/tankies> on September 3, 2025.

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Last updated: 5 March 2024

What is a “Tankie”?

A tankie is anyone that defends authoritarian state-capitalist dictators and the atrocities they’ve committed and continue to commit.

The term was originally coined when the USSR sent Russian T54 tanks into Budapest, Hungary on the 4^th of November 1956 to suppress a worker uprising. Factories had been taken over nationally by workers’ councils, in a demonstration of worker self-organization that was at odds with the Soviets’ imperialist rule. The Soviet troops eventually suppressed the uprising and restored their rule. Then the USSR sent the tanks in to invade Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Afghanistan in 1979. A decade later, in 1989, tanks were similarly used by another state-capitalist regime to crush student dissidents in Tiananmen Square in China.

Anarchists use the word “tankie” to describe any supporter of authoritarian regimes that claim to be socialist. “Red fascist” is another popular term used in this context. The exception is Hitler’s “national socialists”, who are simply referred to as fascists. Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler initially represented himself as a socialist; realizing that appropriating socialism would be useful to gain popular support. Of course, his genocidal actions had nothing to do with establishing socialism, and his so-called “national socialist” ideology was just another form of collectivist-capitalism.

It’s worth noting that the USSR signed a treaty (The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) with Nazi Germany that divvied up much of Europe between the two powers. The Soviets then annexed the countries granted to them by the nazis, drafted their citizens into their Red Army, burned villages full of women and children to the ground, deported scores of people to prison camps, and then massacred them.

The definition of fascism from Unionpedia.org:

“Fascism is a form of radical authoritarian ultranationalism, characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and control of industry and commerce.”

The close similarities between fascism and Marxist-Leninist ideology are hard to ignore. All four of these features apply to both ideologies. Both Marxism-Leninism and National Socialism masquerade as socialism but in reality have little to do with it and are simply excuses to mount dictatorships, control the local populace, invade foreign lands and stamp out all dissent.

Tankies are people who make excuses to justify the atrocities committed in the name of communism. Tankies crave power and work to create rigid hierarchies to amass that power. They support a totalitarian one-party state that governs all of society with an iron first. They defend forced labor, polluting mass-industry, population displacement, mass surveillance, genocide and brutal punishment for anyone who would speak out against the state or the new ruling class.

They support modern China’s blatant racism and nationalism as they attempt to violently force muslims to abandon their culture in favor Han Chinese culture using “re-education” camps and family seperation policies.

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters is a 2010 book by Brian Reynolds Myers. Based on a study of the propaganda produced in North Korea for internal consumption, Myers argues that the guiding ideology of North Korea is a race-based nationalism that spawns from Japanese fascism, rather than any kind of Communist ideology.

The book describes how the North Korean government is insular, xenophobic and militaristic. It details a mob attack on Black Cuban diplomats by North Koreans, and the forcing of North Korean women to abort mixed-ethnicity children. This racism is deeply ingrained in North Korean society and promoted by the state’s own propaganda.

Since the 2009 North Korean constitution omits all mention of Communism, Myers argues that Juche is not actually the ideology of the North Korea state. He postulates that it was designed to trick foreigners, especially tankies, into supporting the fascist state. And support it they do, wholeheartily, despite all the glaring signs that it’s a perverse merger between fascism and monarchy. They’ll even accuse you of being racist for not supporting that racist state.

They make the same claim to anyone who is critical of modern China’s extreme-capitalist state, accusing them of “Sinophobia”, despite the fact that the criticisms from anarchists are almost always about China’s institutional persecution of ethnic minorities and their overseas imperialism.

Only a tankie could accuse someone with legitimate concerns about millionaire ruler Xi Jinping’s racist (and homophobic) policies of somehow being racist against the Han Chinese people for voicing those concerns. There’s no logic whatsoever to tankie cries that anyone who criticises a racist, homophobic dictator of an ethno-state is being racist or that talking about China’s imperialism means you’re somehow an imperialist being paid by the CIA to discredit “communism”.

Tankies often justify defending these state-capitalist regimes by claiming they are “anti-imperialist” states; as they are in fierce competition with “free-market” capitalist regimes such as the USA. Tankies somehow fail to recognize that state-capitalist imperialism is virtually identical to free-market capitalist imperialism. They take the side of imperialist empires like the USSR or China (and even modern-day Russia) in geo-political conflicts simply because they oppose the USA. They fail to realize that there’s nothing revolutionary about favoring one empire over another.

Another common argument they make is that the atrocities committed by their idols were necessary to affect the rapid industrialization of their nations. Marx theorized that the way to communism was through a modern industrialized economy. His theories were written with industrial capitalist states like Germany and the UK in mind, to transition them into socialist states, and then finally onto communism.

This presented a problem for Russia, China and other undeveloped nations, who had very little industry to speak of and simple, agrarian economies. Stalin and Mao both decided that the solution was to rapidly industrialize their territories, forcing mass population transfers from rural areas into cities where the former peasant-class would be forced to work in the state’s factories, creating the worker-class that Marx wrote his theories for. These forced social upheavals of course created numerous problems, including millions of deaths and rampant environmental destruction.

Tankies praise these genocidal population transfers because they “lifted the peasants (that survived) out of poverty”. But they are measuring “poverty” by materialistic, capitalist standards that are simply of no use to the subsistence farmers, hunter-gatherers and nomadic herders that made up much of the pre-industrial world. Before Lenin, Stalin and Mao’s collectivization and industrialization, most peasants were largely self sufficient. Even those living in feudal territories, while by no means free, lived simple uncomplicated lives in harmony with nature; having no carbon footprint to speak of since industry was non-existent. Most enjoyed relative autonomy from the state (which had a far shorter reach), practiced mutual aid with their neighbors, and only needed to work a few hours a week [55] to produce all the food they needed to survive.

The progression of Lenin’s state capitalism quickly changed all this, and they now had to labor endlessly in grungy, polluted cities or on industrial battery-farms for the state or face being branded a “kulak” and exiled, imprisoned or killed. As bad as feudalism was, it simply didn’t have the concentrated, centralized power that state capitalism forced on every single person within its borders.

There was no escaping the state now. You couldn’t retreat to the mountains to get away from the ruler as countless bandits did before because the new ruler was everywhere. Indigenous people were no longer permitted to maintain their way of life because it interfered with the state’s demands for complete worker homogenization. State capitalism made life much harder for anyone who desired self-determination, simply because it was impossible to evade this new form of superpowered-state. Anyone resisting the state’s rule was crushed.

Stalin’s “continuous working week” [56] was designed for maximum worker productivity, allowing workers scant time to recover from the daily grind of the industrial machine. Citizens were forced to work in cramped, unsanitary factories far from their former homes to meet Stalin’s industrial quotas. This was an incredibly difficult transition for people that had lived off of the land for generations. The state even outlawed the planting of small family gardens to ensure the people were completely dependent on the party for their survival.

Nomadic herders in Central Asia and Kazakhstan were especially unaccustomed to this new way of life being forced on them, and their resistance was met with brutal force by the Soviet state, who declared them “kulaks” and confiscated their herds. The resulting famine in this region killed between 1.5 million to 2.3 million Kazakhs. [57]

Similarly to all authoritarians, tankies support prisons and a police force, such as the Soviet secret police established by Lenin.

Tankies celebrate Lenin and Trotsky’s massacres of socialist revolutionaries, including the Mensheviks, the sailors of Petrograd, the Socialist Revolutionaries, the anarchists, unaffiliated peasants who had their food confiscated and so on. Tankies also celebrate murdering ‘kulaks’, a word they use to describe any peasant that resisted Soviet imperialism, but especially the Ukrainian peasants that resisted sending all their food to Russia, which they rightly guessed would lead to mass-starvation and one of the worst atrocities in history; the catastrophic Holodomor man-made famine.

Lenin: Red Terror

Some tankies support Lenin but reject Stalin and other later collectivist-capitalist dictators, saying they went too far. For this reason, it’s important to talk about Lenin’s long list of dirty deeds.

Lenin successfully hijacked a popular revolution fought by the peasants and workers of Russia, sabotaging communism to install a state capitalist dictatorship with him as its life-long ruler, and then murdered most of the people that actually fought the revolution. This started a long history of Marxist-Leninists acting as parasitic opportunists; co-opting revolutionary movements started by Marxists and anarchists and thoroughly sabotaging them.

Lenin spoke of state-capitalism as if it would somehow lead to communism, but history shows us it only ever lead back to Laissez-faire capitalism in every single case. Lenin:

“State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold and will have become invincible in this country.” [58]

The insistence that forcing capitalism on a society that didn’t have it before will somehow create communism at a later date is absolute nonsense. Breaking all your fingers to improve your handwriting would be a more realistic proposition than the idea that state capitalism will give way to communism. Indoctrinating millions of people into capitalism and industrialism, destroying their ecosystem and forever changing their way of life will not lead to communism. Most people born into capitalism will cling to the system like their lives depend on it because it’s the only world they know. And since capitalism destroys everything in its path, allowing no deviation from its murderous rampage, it’s not like they’ll have much choice but to stick with it until the bitter end.

Let’s take a quick look at the disastrous legacy of the state capitalism Lenin installed.

Starting in 1930, 300,000 tons of chemical waste were disposed of in Dzerzhinsk, one of the main manufacturing sites of chemical weapons in the USSR. The Guinness Book of World Records has named it the most chemically polluted city in the world. In 2003, the death rate in the area had exceeded the birth rate by 260 percent, with average life expectancy at a mere 42 years for men and 47 for women.

The world’s largest heavy metals smelting complex was originally founded by the Soviets as a slave labor camp in Norilsk, Siberia. The snow in the area is jet black, the air is thick with the disgusting taste of sulfur and factory workers die 10 years sooner than the Russian average. Children continue to suffer with respiratory diseases and die at an alarming rate. Time Magazine reported “Within 30 miles (48 km) of the nickel smelter there’s not a single living tree, it’s just a wasteland.”

Sumgayit was another important Soviet industrial center for producing agricultural and industrial chemicals. 70,000 to 120,000 tons of harmful emissions were released here annually. To this day, the percentage of babies born premature, stillborn, and with genetic defects is staggeringly high.

It’s hard to imagine how any of this ecocide could create a communist utopia, and I wonder if Lenin even fully understood what he was unleashing on the world when he put his plans for industrialization into motion.

Lenin led the Red Terror, a program of Bolshevik terror against all opponents of his dictatorship, including those mentioned earlier. In the face of a third mass revolt of the Russians against a ruler; this time Lenin, his direct orders were to “introduce mass terror” to the population. He gave some of these orders from his hospital bed after an assassination attempt which the party used as pretext to excuse these brutal policies.

The execution methods during Lenin’s Red Terror were incredibly brutal, for example: Cages of rats tied to victim’s bodies and exposed to flame so the rats would gnaw their way through the victim to escape, and victims slowly fed foot-first into furnaces: [59]

“Certain Chekas specialised in particular lines of torment: The Kharkov Cheka went in for scalping and hand-flaying; some of the Voronezh Checka’s victims were thrust naked into an internally nail-studded barrel and were rolled around in it; others had their forehead branded with a five pointed star, whilst members of the clergy were ‘crowned’ with barbed wire; the Poltava and Kremenchug Chekas specialised in impaling the clergy (eighteen monks were impaled on a single day); also in Kremenchug, rebelling peasants were buried alive; at Watering-hole victims were crucified or stoned to death, whilst at Tsaritsyn their bones were sawn through; the Cheka of Odessa put officers to death by chaining them to planks and then pushing them very slowly into furnaces, or else by immersion first in a tank of boiling water, then into the cold sea, and then again exposing them to extreme heat; at Armavir, the ‘death wreath’ was used to apply increasing constriction to victims’ heads; in Orel and elsewhere water was poured on naked prisoners in the winter-bound streets until they became living statues of ice; in Kiev the living would be buried for half an hour in a coffin containing a decomposing body; also in Kiev, the imaginative Chinese Cheka detachment amused itself by putting a rat into an iron tube sealed with wire netting at one end, the other end being placed against the victim’s body, and the tube heated until the maddened rat, in an effort to escape, gnawed its way into the prisoner’s guts. Johnson, the negro executioner at the Odessa Cheka, achieved special notoriety: he sometimes skinned his victims before killing them; after Odessa fell to the Whites in August 1919, he was caught and lynched by an angry mob. Women executioners could be crueler than men: Vera Grebeniukova, known as ‘Dora’, a beautiful young girl who was a colonel’s daughter and a Chekist’s lover, was reputed to have shot 700 prisoners during her two-and-a-half months’ service with the Odessa Cheka.”

“The Chekas did not spare women and children. There are accounts of women being tortured and raped before being shot, wives of prisoners were sometimes blackmailed into sexual submission to Chekists. There were many cases of children between the ages of 8 and 16 being imprisoned; some were executed. The Chekas were occasionally honest enough to admit that they practised torture: in February 1920, such an admission was made by the Saratov Provincial Cheka at a meeting of the Saratov Soviet, and appeared in the press.”

In 1918, Lenin wrote to G. F. Fyodorov, ordering a massacre of sex workers in which hundreds were killed: [60]

“Appoint three men with dictatorial powers (yourself, Markin and one other), organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers, former officers and the like. Not a minute of delay.”

Lenin was an oppressor of the peasants and working classes, a despot, and, by 1918, the victorious enemy of the Russian revolution. A true counter-revolutionary. Which isn’t too surprising, considering his bourgeois background and trade as a lawyer. He perfectly met the Marxist definition of a reactionary, yet tankies hold him up as the father of their “Marxist-Leninist” ideology and praise him as a great communist.

Lenin’s acts later inspired further dictators in the 20^th century who also misused the word “communism” to describe their brutal state-capitalist regimes. He effectively destroyed any chance humanity had to achieve communism in that century, and the damage he did to revolutionary action is still being felt today as the word “communism” has become synonymous with “totalitarian state” in the public consciousness.

Driven by the Taste of Boot

Regardless of the fact that “communism” actually means “a stateless, classless, moneyless society with common ownership of the means of production”, Marxist-Leninists support state-capitalist regimes that use money issued by the state and have a ruling class of party elites that control the means of production and enjoy extreme privileges compared to the average workers. Tankies claim that these hierarchical, oppressive regimes will somehow bring about communism at a later date.

Tankies also adore Lenin’s even-more-brutal successor Stalin, and see nothing wrong with the fact that Stalin sent other communists, anarchists, gay people [61] and basically anyone that annoyed him or one of his cronies to death camps. Homophobia was strongly ingrained in the culture of Stalin’s USSR, with anyone seen as anything less than hyper-masculine in constant danger of being beat to death in his gulags:

”Passive homosexuals are not necessarily prisoners with gay inclinations, they are the unassertive, the timid, those who have lost a game of cards, those who have broken the camp code of ethics. Once you have the reputation of being a “cock”, it is impossible to get rid of it. It follows you from camp to camp. And if, after transfer to a new place a “fallen” prisoner fails to reveal himself, sooner or later it is bound to come to light. Then punishment is unavoidable, and it will take the form of a collective reprisal often ending in death.” [62]

They celebrate Mao’s “cultural revolution” and its murderous witch-hunts against supposed ‘reactionaries’ who had the wrong haircut, wore makeup, happened to own a cat, write anti-authoritarian literature or have furniture in their home. Following in Stalin’s footsteps, Mao criminalized homosexuality and anyone suspected of the “crime” was arrested. Castro did the same thing in Cuba.

A lot of tankies defend the many atrocities of the DPRK dictatorship; essentially a monarchy where the ruler inherits his position from his father. Tankies will tell you with a straight face that this monarchy is somehow a path to communism. They defend modern-day China’s brutal oppression of its citizens, the use of deadly force to suppress autonomy and quash protests, China’s overseas colonialism and territory expansion, its concentration camps for minorities and organized destruction of the environment for short-term profit.

When people bring up anarchists in relation to tankies, it’s because Anarchists particularly dislike the authoritarian regimes defended and idealized by tankies due to appalling events such as the Kronstadt rebellion, or the May Days in Spain. Anarchists are staunchly opposed to hierarchy, authority, rulers, states and capitalism. All things that tankies enthusiastically embrace.

Tankies often preach “left unity” to encourage all leftists to aid their supposed revolution. But throughout history, once they succeed in seizing power by taking control of the state and replacing the government figures with their party members, they immediately begin labeling anyone who isn’t toeing their vanguard party line as a “revisionist”, or a “counter-revolutionary”; sending all dissenters (especially anarchists) to labor camps, or simply executing them and dumping their bodies in mass graves. These purges always follow a Marxist-Leninist revolution and anarchists are usually the ones first up on the chopping block.

A tankie is anyone who presents themselves as a ‘communist’, but engages in apologism for torture, slavery, imprisonment, imperialism, capitalism, genocide and the erasure of actually liberatory movements. A tankie is anyone that claims communism can be achieved by replacing a state with another state. A tankie is anyone that will swear up and down that state-capitalism, dictator personality cults and ecosystem-destroying mass-industry will eventually lead to communism through the “withering away” of the brutal state that they uphold.

Reject Left-Unity

Any attempt at comradeship with a tankie is doomed to fail. Regardless of what they claim, tankies aren’t interested in any form of debate, compromise, or exchange of ideas with anarchists or socialists. Their only goal is to give their dangerous ideology an appearance of legitimacy. To wrongly represent it as a legitimate form of socialism so they may further pollute radical politics with their tyrannical capitalist cult.

Anarchy is pure anathema to the tankie. We espouse opposition to authoritarianism, hierarchy, bureaucracy, state-sanctioned violence, prisons, worker exploitation, ecosystem destruction, state-capitalism and imperialism. This makes us, to the tankie, “reactionary counter-revolutionary imperialist scum”. Doublespeak like this is one of their defining traits.

Behind closed doors, they see us as a threat to their plans for strongman dictatorships, cults of personality, mega-industrial capitalism and gulags as far as the eye can see. We are vermin to the tankie; fit only to be ridiculed and then swiftly exterminated once they seize power. Anarchy is their absolute worst fear. Anarchists are the biggest threat to their plans for party dictatorship.

They latch onto our movements and gradually corrupt them with their reactionary rhetoric and divide-and-conquer tactics. Their goals aren’t even slightly aligned with ours, but they use entryism, shame and cries of victimization to squirrel themselves into our spaces. Their demands for ‘left unity’ and an end to ‘divisiveness’ and ‘sectarianism’ are obvious wolves in sheep’s clothing and should be rejected outright.

We can’t lose sight of the historical fact that genocide, nationalism, capitalism, bigotry, imperialism, struggle sessions and mass incarceration are some of the central tenets of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist practice, and whether they admit it publicly or not, something all tankies believe is necessary to ensure their vanguard’s dictatorship and cement their own power on the party hierarchy.

Their only purpose in engaging you is to normalize their toxic beliefs and make us accepting of their presence in radical groups so they can grow their ranks. If you welcome tankies into your spaces, if you engage tankies in civil discourse, if you entertain their repugnant ideas or buy into their absurd notions of “left unity” and enable their attempts to create divisions between anarchists and sow discord, then they have already succeeded in poisoning your movement and rendering it useless.

Further Reading

Bolsheviks Shooting Anarchists, Emma Goldman & Alexander Berkman

Everything you ever wanted to know about tankies, but were afraid to ask

Lenin discussing the USSR’s state capitalism

Lenin discussing the USSR’s state capitalism again

f/TankiesGonnaTank

Indigenous Anarchy: The Need for a Rejection of the Colonizer’s “Civilization”

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/indigenous_anarchy> on September 3, 2025.

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Last updated: 2 August 2022

First, let’s define some basic terms. “Indigenous” means “of the land we are actually on”. “Anarchy” means “the rejection of authority”. The principles of anarchism include direct action, mutual aid, and voluntary cooperation. “Anarchy; A Journal of Desire Armed” envisions a primitive anarchy that is “radically cooperative & communitarian, ecological and feminist, spontaneous and wild”.

Civilization is a culture that revolves around cities. A city is a collection of people that live permanently in one place, in densities high enough that they must import their food and resources from outside the city in order to survive and ensure the continued growth of the city. So, cities depend on the exploitation of external bodies to maintain themselves.

This externalisation alienates us from both our food supply and our waste. Our food is purchased from a supermarket, grown far from home, prepared and packaged on an assembly line. We are denied any participation in the processes that feed us. Our garbage gets trucked away to be disposed of somewhere out of our immediate sight, and our human waste is flushed down pipes. We don’t fully know where it goes, what it affects, what place it has in our ecosystem.

Civilization aims to dominate life through its various structures that are designed to domesticate us. These structures include industry, colonialism, statism, capitalism, agriculture, racism, schooling, religion, media, police, prisons, military, patriarchy, slavery and more.

Indigenous peoples throughout history have fought and died to resist the forceful encroachment of civilization into their lives. This struggle continues today, as the “uncivilized” are pushed closer and closer to the edge of survival by the “civilized” all over the world, and the technological imbalance between us continues to expand and create a sociological divide that renders us unable to understand each other on even a basic level.

The lifestyles of the civilized and the uncivilized have diverged to such an extent that it has become near-impossible for the civilized to see that their civilization has become an obstacle to our basic survival. Instead, they hold their civilization up as the instrument of their survival and fear living in a world without it. They are so conditioned to the order of their civilization that they can’t fathom a life in its absence.

The entire concept of ‘civilization’ depends on the rule of the colonizer and his brutal subjugation of indigenous peoples. The perpetual march of global civilization is fed by the forced labor and the exploitation of natural resources in the global South (and historically, all lands beyond the European continent).

In order to strip the land of its resources, the people that live on the land need to be displaced and moved to tightly-packed cities, farms or “reservations” where they will be forced to labor to turn those resources into consumer products for Western markets. This process of civilizing indigenous peoples is rapid, and our culture, language and history is often forcibly extinguished by the colonizers to ensure we don’t attempt a return to our previous “uncivilized” lives and reclaim those lands that they have taken for their industry.

The ruling classes are always looking for new avenues to accumulate wealth for themselves. Rulers create subservient underclasses by depriving uncivilized peoples of their natural habitats so they have no choice but to accept domestication and be integrated into the industrial capitalist system. The ruler can then successfully convert the people they have tamed and domesticated into profitable commodities; docile workers that can labor their whole lives to create more wealth for the ruler.

A ruler sees no use for a hunter-gatherer or any person that is not creating wealth and power for the ruler. If people didn’t need to work for rulers to acquire food and shelter, rulers would cease to have power. So the worst enemy of the ruler is a person that doesn’t depend on rulers to survive, or worse; an entire culture of self-sufficient people. An uncivilized culture that he has no control over is a ruler’s worst fear.

Under civilization, no longer will indigenous peoples be permitted to survive off of their ancestral lands, hunting and foraging. Now to survive in this new world forced on us by the colonizers, we must endure back-breaking labor in factories, warehouses, mines and industrial farms. Our children must be educated in the ways of the colonizers; to shape them into productive and submissive workers. We must depend on the state and colonizers to feed and clothe us. We must consume and waste and participate in destroying the ecosystems that sustained us for millennia. We must be “civilized” so that the ruling class may prosper at our expense.

1. Freedom Through Rejection

2. Control & Domestication

3. Embracing our “Inhospitable Wilderness”

4. Understanding Neo-Colonialism

5. Looking a Gift-Horse in the Mouth: The Technological Divide

Freedom Through Rejection

To reject civilization is to oppose this coercive arrangement where our history, our culture, and the collective knowledge that allowed us to survive and prosper on our land is taken from us by profiteering industrialists that would have us devote our entire lives to laboring for their benefit as they deny us access to our own lands and resources.

To reject civilization is to oppose urbanization; the cramming of people into small, barren, concreted areas that can be more easily controlled by our rulers to stop us from breaking with their demands that we be “civilized” and obedient.

To reject civilization is to oppose exploitative industrial agricultural methods that force the rural poor to sacrifice their labor to feed the materially wealthy cities, while rapidly despoiling the land of its fertility and sapping the groundwater for irrigation at a much faster rate than it can be replenished.

Civilization depends on a massively unequal concentration of wealth; a brutal capitalist hierarchy where the few that have been lucky enough to climb to the top control everyone beneath them. At the very bottom of civilization’s hierarchy are the indigenous peoples of the world.

Control & Domestication

The voices of indigenous peoples, whether they are accepted by their colonizers as successfully “civilized”, or rejected as “uncivilized”, have been long ignored by everyone that benefits from the march of civilization and the shiny things it gives them. Shiny things made possible by the rampant exploitation of indigenous lands and the manipulation and control of indigenous peoples through domestication.

“Control” is the key word to understanding why civilization has come into being. The capitalist colonizers work hard to convince us that we need to be controlled by them and their civilization. That we need their civilization to protect us from harm. If we labor for them, we won’t go hungry. If we give them our lands and relocate to their “reservations” or their farms or their cities, adopt their language and religion, they will give us protection, allow us to survive with “dignity”, accept us as successfully domesticated and civilized.

The irony to this is staggering. The colonizers decimate our forests and slice open our land to empty it of its resources. They slaughter our wildlife to extinction and douse our plant life with herbicides to ensure we can’t sustain ourselves. They render our water toxic and undrinkable. They destroy our climate with their burning of carbon. They murder us if we dare stand in their way.

And then they offer us sanctuary from their tyranny. A choice between enslavement or extinction. Move to their cities, slums, plantations and reservations and be accepted as “civilized”, or die at their hands for being “subhuman uncivilized savages” that can’t be “saved”. Anything civilization can’t control must be purged to ensure the march of civilization continues without obstacle.

To embrace anarchy is to oppose the very idea of control. To reject the authority of the colonizer and his coercive civilization that takes so much from us to provide comforts to cultures that would sooner see us slaughtered than threaten their industry-fueled lifestyles. Anarchy is to trust in ourselves and our neighbors to work together through mutual aid to solve our own problems, without needing the “charity” of powerful authorities.

Anti-civ indigenous anarchists recognize that the very concept of civilization depends on our colonizers’ ability to control us. Our forced assimilation into the colonizers’ alien civilization, and the punitive laws we’re forced to obey are designed to keep us from resisting the perverse order our colonizers force on us. Their order depends on our domestication and the destruction of our way of life. Their civilization is designed to destroy everything it touches.

Embracing our “Inhospitable Wilderness”

The so-called “inhospitable wilderness” that civilization has seen fit to beat into submission is the lifeblood of our existence. For millennia, we lived in peace with this wilderness, nurturing it as much as it nurtured us. We were caretakers of the land, rather than exploiters of it. Now, as civilized people, we labor for a lifetime for the right to assert ownership over a tiny piece of the land. So that we may pave it over and erect a concrete block to live in. If we are successful. Most of us don’t even get this privilege and are forced to pay wealthy landlords for the right to live in one of the concrete blocks they own.

Uncivilized, we roamed freely, wild fruit and herbs grew in every direction; ready for the picking. Freshwater streams filled with fish dotted the landscape. The sounds of wildlife filled the air. Our labor was minimal and the rewards were instantaneous. We only knew abundance. Or, more accurately: affluence without abundance.

Hunter-gatherers are able to meet their immediate needs without needing to stockpile a surplus the way civilized people must do to survive (with agriculture, jobs, loans, savings, mortgages, pensions, insurance). The uncivilized have no want of material possessions because such frivolous things would stand in the way of their ability to live nomadically with the seasons. Having too many possessions forces us to stay in one place at all times to guard those possessions with our lives, so that we can continue to possess them and not risk them being taken from us. It creates a paranoid security-centric lifestyle that puts owning and protecting property above our most basic needs.

Hunter-gatherers can trust that the environment will provide for us, that going for a walk to hunt or forage will give us and our loved ones with all the food and water we’ll need for a few days. After taking that walk, the rest of the day is wide open for casual leisure.

Civilized people love to refer to hunter-gatherers as being stricken by “poverty”. But this poverty is a material poverty; a lack of surplus, luxuries, things. In real terms, hunter-gatherers are far richer than the perpetually in-debt civilized workers who have little room for leisure and must measure their entire existence in terms of “time”. The civilized, in their agriculture-based societies, must work 5 or 6 days a week simply to survive. The uncivilized have no want of such absurdities. As Marshall Sahlins noted, hunter-gatherers are the original affluent society. With no material needs, there is no need for poverty or wealth. All people may be equal; a true anarchy.

Civilized people plant rows of crops in fenced in, sterilized industrial monocultures that barely resemble the diverse mutually-sustaining interconnected food forests that fed us throughout history. Farmers repeatedly strain the same plots of land year after year to grow these single crops, soaking them with chemical fertilizers and pesticides so nothing but the monocrop can survive. The soil is eroded, barren of life, dependent on the chemical concoctions the farmer must go into debt to procure.

In civilization, water is scarce, controlled and expensive. Fruit comes wrapped in plastic and you must labor in misery for a full day to afford it. Fish is contaminated by the toxic waste that industry spews into waterways, and yet we still are charged for the privilege of eating it. Wildlife has been largely replaced by vast expanses of caged livestock. The endless excrement from these industrial meat facilities also pours into the waterways, further poisoning the ecosystem and sterilizing the land.

The wildness that once defined us has been coerced out of us by our colonizers. Like dogs bred from wild wolves to be obedient and subservient to their masters, we have come to depend on the state and capitalists for our basic survival. Sick and domesticated, we fight each other for the scraps of food thrown down to us by the rulers that deprive us of our land and our very lives.

Understanding Neo-Colonialism

Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah succinctly explained Neo-colonialism in 1965:

“The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside. The methods and form of this direction can take various shapes. (Most) often, neo-colonialist control is exercised through economic or monetary means. Control over government policy in the neo-colonial State may be secured by payments towards the cost of running the State, by the provision of civil servants in positions where they can dictate policy, and by monetary control over foreign exchange through the imposition of a banking system controlled by the imperial power.”

This description of neo-colonialism still rings true today, with indigenous cultures all over the world experiencing what Nkrumah described in its various forms. Most recently, Chinese neo-colonialists have flowed into indigenous lands, promising to lift us up with their wealth. Their investors, bankers, traders, lenders, developers and charities all promise to improve our lives for the better.

African countries are especially incurring massive debt to Beijing, offering up their land, oil, gas, minerals and other resources as collatoral for every new billion-dollar loan they take out. When they inevitably default on these unsustainable loans, China will seize the collatoral and strip the continent of its natural wealth. Malaysia recently realized the dangers of this debt trap and pulled out of Chinese development deals. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad warned the world, “there is a new version of Colonialism happening.”

The non-profit Confucius Institute that operates in indigenous lands is a vehicle for Chinese propaganda, restricting what the teachers they supply from China can say, distorting what students learn. This propaganda-via-schooling is designed to promote China’s economic interests by conditioning indigenous children to accept colonization and a life of subservience. Colonizers go to great lengths to normalize the terror they bring and convince us it is good for us.

Kwame Nkrumah:

“Neo-colonialism might be also the worst form of imperialism. For those who practice it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress. In the days of old-fashioned colonialism, the imperial power had at least to explain and justify at home the actions it was taking abroad. In the colony those who served the ruling imperial power could at least look to its protection against any violent move by their opponents. With neo-colonialism neither is the case.”

Similarly to China, South Korea and its multinational corporations have bought farming rights to millions of hectares of agricultural land in “under-developed” countries, in order to secure food resources for their citizens. The history of colonialism and banana republics have shown us that this kind of arrangement has only led to misery for indigenous peoples and the degradation of our lands. South Korea’s RG Energy Resources Asset Management CEO Park Yong-soo:

“The (South Korean) nation does not produce a single drop of crude oil and other key industrial minerals. To power economic growth and support people’s livelihoods, we cannot emphasize too much that securing natural resources in foreign countries is a must for our future survival.”

The head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Jacques Diouf, warned that the rise in these land deals could create a form of neocolonialism, with poorer regions producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people. It’s safe to say that this latest form of neocolonialism has already arrived, and our corrupt governments are signing deals that make us increasingly dependent on these foreign nations and their promises to “lift us up” by building us cities and infrastructure.

It’s integral that we resist their attempts to civilize our lands so that we will be forced to labor for them; helping them steal our natural resources to grow their empires so they may expand further and exploit more indigenous populations across the world. And our local authorities, who are so quick to sell our futures for the fleeting luxuries of concrete towers and faster trains are just as culpable in this neo-colonial push to shape us into the beggared workers of foreign empires.

The Maasai, a semi-nomadic tribe that inhabits mostly Tanzania and Kenya, have been migrating with the seasons for centuries. They have increasingly been pushed out of their land by the states and business interests that collude to write laws that prohibit them from cultivating plants and grazing their animals on large tracts of their traditional land.

Tens of thousands of Maasai were left homeless after their homes in the Ngorongoro Crater sightseeing area were set on fire, supposedly to “preserve the region’s ecosystem” and attract more tourists.

The Tanzanian government works with Tanzania Conservation Limited, which is owned by the US-based Thomson Safaris, and Ortello Business Corporation; a luxury hunting company based in the United Arab Emirates, to drive the Maasai off of their land. They’re beaten, shot, and their property is confiscated. Young herders are so frightened that they now run whenever they see a vehicle approaching, fearing for their lives.

The state has now ordered the Maasai people to leave their homeland so it can be turned into a hunting ground for affluent tourists who pay a premium to shoot big game animals and take the carcasses home with them as stuffed trophies. The state aids in these genocidal acts to secure foreign investment to build its cities. The state will always put the civilized before the uncivilized because the entire reason a state exists is to grow its cities and plunder food and resources to feed that growth. Civilization has always been the weapon used by the powerful to condemn us to a life of servitude. Reject civilization. Reject the state. Reject capitalism. Reject all attempts to conquer our lands and enslave our peoples.

Looking a Gift-Horse in the Mouth: The Technological Divide

We should understand that there’s a big difference between the concepts of “tools” and “technology”. Tools can be made on a small-scale with local materials, either by individuals or small groups of people on occasions when the tools are needed. Unlike technology, tools don’t construct systems of authority and obedience to allow one group to dominate another, just so long as everyone is able to realistically create or acquire tools on their own. Technology depends on the ability to mount immense operations of extraction, production, distribution and consumption. This demands coercive authority and hierarchy. Oppression.

The Fifth Estate explained the pitfalls of technology in 1981:

“Technology is not a simple tool which can be used in any way we like. It is a form of social organization, a set of social relations. It has its own laws. If we are to engage in its use, we must accept its authority. The enormous size, complex interconnections and stratification of tasks which make up modern technological systems make authoritarian command necessary and independent, individual decision-making impossible.”

Technology is used by rulers to control and pacify their citizens. The societies of the colonists are laden with technological marvels. But their people are detached from the land they live on, alienated from each other, their eyes constantly fixated on mindless distractions emanating from their screens, as their lands dry up and burn to pay for their addiction to these toxic industrial products.

Technology is used to conquer, to assert dominance, to destroy entire cultures that dare to reject the empire’s world order. Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, entire countries decimated by the great technology of the imperialists, raining death down from the skies.

The colonizers will always have better technology than us. Whatever technologies they promise us in return for our cooperation with their agenda will pale in comparison to the technologies that drive their own societies. They’ll tell us we need their technology to be civilized, to avoid falling behind the rest of the world, but there is no catching up with the empire’s machine. It will grind us up and churn us out long before it ever gives up the secrets it promises.

Technology is a weapon wielded by the most powerful and there is no way for us to ever match that power, so why try? Why dedicate our lives to playing their game, by their rules? To receive their obsolete cast-offs in return? They use their technology to convince us that we are less than them, that we are “backwards” and that they need to “save” us from our “savage” existence. They say all this while their technological supremacy depends on our resources and our labor, on them being able to coerce us into sacrificing ourselves and our children and our children’s children to give them the fuel for their big important machines. Machines that allow them to maintain their dominance over us, so that we remain perpetually inferior to them. If they ever gave us what they promise; the liberation they say their technology will bring, their power over us would be lost. We would no longer need them to “save” us from our wildness because we would be as civilized as them.

When we give up so much of ourselves so that they will give us their technology, they make sure we will need them to maintain it. We become dependent on their technology, and thus dependent on them to continue feeding it to us and to fix it when it breaks. Our lives begin to revolve around the technology and we forget how to live without it. And while we’re distracted by the calming glow of our little screens, our ecosystems are decimated by the colonists.

Technology is a carrot on a stick and it cannot liberate us, only domesticate and enslave us. Reject it. Reject being measured by our technological prowess or how civilized we are. Reject the colonizer and his false-gifts and manipulations. Reject his civilization. Reject his control over who we are and who we will be.

To the Desertmaker

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/to_the_desertmaker> on September 3, 2025.

Last updated: 2 August 2022

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I see you, creature. I see what you do.

You drill holes into Terra’s skull, drench their flesh with poison, pull their hair out by the handful, hack off their limbs, drain the blood from their veins and burn it. This you call growth, development, progress.

Day and night you grind Terra’s bones into powder to erect your grotesque eidola to death all across their bloodied torso. This you call your mighty civilization. A tangled mess of concrete, steel and plastic pointed towards me so I am forced to look upon it.

You direct your servants to build your towers higher and higher. After all, you are very special! The civilized, sophisticated, highly respected creature! Behold the important executive in the tailor-made suit, shoes crafted from the finest alligator hide! What an impressive specimen! What a handsome creature you are!

You’re lifted to the top of your tallest tower so you can perch yourself in your opulent shrine to the wealth you have plucked from Terra’s body. You stand high and gaze down at the wretched souls below, making sure every one of them knows you rule over them, that Terra is your personal dominion. Your private property to use and abuse as you please.

I see you, creature. I see what you do.

You have demolished their sublime mountains to construct your shopping malls and marinas. You have drained their great lakes to plant your carefully manicured golf courses. Felled their majestic forests to graze your billion cows. Desecrated their vast oceans with your rotten, putrid waste.

You’re driven to control Terra, to change the course of their rivers, to reshape their shorelines and modify their lifeforms to suit your rapacious appetite. You can’t fathom of a world where you don’t own the earth below your feet; posses everything Terra created as your own.

You are imperious to assume Terra will be so affected by a fleetingly short-lived and short-sighted creature as yourself. If it takes a million of your lifetimes, Terra will wash away the volumes of excrement you have soiled their surface with.

You spent your wretched life desperately cutting your name into Terra’s flesh, but Terra’s wounds will callus over, creature. Long after the arrogant grin you wear on your lips has turned to dust with the rest of your foul corpse, Terra will regenerate. All the beautiful, disparate beasts you have eradicated during your brief gluttonous tantrum will be reborn. The trees will rise again in magnificent groves as far as the eye can see. Everything you took will be reclaimed.

For a while, Terra will be rendered as desolate as I. A vast desert of your creation. But in time, the stench of death you brought will be lifted and the oceans will come back to life. Then the land and then the skies.

I move synchronous to Terra, following their every movement. We are in rhythm together, Terra and I. We have danced this dance for longer than you can conceive.

I see you, creature. I see what you do. I see what you are. I see every desperate grasp for power. Every sordid manipulation and abuse to cement your position on the top floor of the tallest tower. The wasted lives of those you have coerced into your service.

You think yourself so evolved, creature. You look down at all you have plundered, and you think yourself worthy of Terra’s grace. You have laid waste to Terra’s resplendence and you and your kind will suffer terribly for it. Everything you know will die a senseless death. Every child you bear from your loins will die horribly, their potential wasted.

To think of all the creative, wonderful things your servants could have manifested without the chains you encumbered them with. So much wonder will never come to pass because of your covetous rampage.

I have forever been locked to Terra. Though we have never touched, I feel as if I am an extension of them. Though I am devoid of life myself, I assist in birthing all life on Terra. I drive their tides; transport heat from their equator to their poles, arousing the cycle of life.

As everything around you collapses into ruin, you will no doubt retreat from your fetid towers in the sky and escape deep into Terra’s ground. There, you will cower and hide from the rapidly unfolding chaos you wrought on the world above. You will surely use your immense wealth to cling to life for as long as you can, but eventually your time will run out.

As you lay in your reinforced underground bunker clasping your last tank of air, awaiting your end, and everyone that toiled in drudgery to serve you is dead and forgotten, think of everything you have accomplished during your brief existence. Think of the endless suffering you wrought on Terra’s lands to claim such fleeting, pointless rewards for yourself. Think of the deep emptiness inside you and how none of your misbegotten wealth could ever fill it. And now think of me.

It is time. Arise from your living tomb, creature. Climb the steps to the surface. Stumble out into the dark and face me!

Look upon the vast desert that stands in testament to the miserable carnage you forged. Watch as Terra burns. Gaze upon the fires and take pleasure in the knowledge that you actualized all your perverse power machinations. You dominated every being under you. Used their labor to grow your wealth to unparalleled levels. Stole their lives to grant yourself ever more fame, power and luxury. You defeated all your competitors, accumulated all the capital you possibly could, and now you get to stand and witness the end of everything you knew.

Look and see, creature. Look how your desert is eclipsed by my shining glow in the night sky. Look up at me, creature. Look up as I look down on you. Choke on Terra’s stale, toxic air. Hear me laugh heartily as you breathe your last desperate breath and are finally engulfed by the fires you lit.

This is a great victory for you. Your life ends here in the great desert you made and no one is left to curse your name for all the hurt you did.

Absurd creature, imagining you could stand above the ancient, primal life that sprouted you. Thinking your time spent bludgeoning all other lifeforms into submission somehow significant. Terra has seen you and all you are and has washed their hands of you.

Long after your corpse has disintegrated into a pile of sand, I will send tidal waves to wash away whatever ruins remain of your brief, rancid civilization. Then volcanoes will rise from Terra’s belly, lava will spew into the oceans and form new lands. Life will thrive again. Terra will be reborn.

And let us hope none of the new creatures Terra bears during their rebirth will be as noxious and destructive as you, senseless desertmaker.

---

Video Version:

https://anarchy.tube/w/nEvb58iffCRQTKv2nvfNqS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3vpamCwA9Q

Fuck Your Red Revolution: Against Ecocide, Towards Anarchy

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/fuck_your_red_revolution> on September 3, 2025.

Last updated: 9 August 2022

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Let Go Of Your Tedious Slogans

“There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” is a tired meme that I wish would die. So often this slogan is used by reds to pooh-pooh those of us that strive to make life choices that aid damage control in our communities and our natural environments.

Vegan diets, bicycling, dumpster diving, upcycling, guerilla gardening, permaculture, squatting, illegalism, food forestry, communes, self-sufficiency, and all the other “lifestylist” pursuits “individualist” anarchists undertake to minimize their harm on the environment are shamed and mocked by many anarcho-communists, social-ecologists, anarcho-transhumanists, syndicalists and other industry-upholding anarchists. These reds are well-versed in workerist rhetoric, and see all lifestyle choices as “a distraction” from the global proletarian revolution they see as their singular goal.

You’ll hear them talk down to other anarchists who are discussing ethical ways to curtail their consumption, especially people that live off the land or otherwise limit their participation in industrial civilization; people they loudly dismiss and condemn as “primmies” or “lifestylists”.

They’ll tell us to stop living our lives in the pursuit of personal anarchy because “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism”. In the red mind, as long as a capitalist system has been imposed on the world, there’s no point in reaching for anarchy until that system has been overthrown and replaced with their system. Regardless of how unlikely it is that this will happen in our lifetimes.

Using “no ethical consumption” to shame people for making the effort to live more conscientiously, and decrying all individual action as “counter-revolutionary” or “liberal” comes from a deeply authoritarian mindset reminiscent of toxic Maoist purges that punished people for dressing differently or having hobbies or doing anything but devote themselves 100% to destructive industrial labor and the glory of “the revolution” (almost always manifested in the form of a red state).

The red influence in anarchist discourse is unfortunately dominant in most developed parts of the world, and collectivist-minded anarchists insist every anarchist devote themselves to their pipe dream of a mass uprising to seize the factories from the capitalists and turn them over to the workers. They postulate that democratized factories will be more beneficial to workers because they’ll receive a bigger piece of the industrial pie. This is true. But then they claim their ideology will “save the environment” because a worker collective won’t be greedy and destructive like a capitalist board of directors. This is of course completely unfounded and blatantly ignores the history of collectivized industry and its devastating effects on the environment. The glaring reality is that industrial societies all eventually lead to ecocide, without exception.

Countless Marxist revolutions in history did so much damage to the environment that entire territories, such as the area surrounding Chernobyl, were rendered uninhabitable to humans. Babies continue to be born with birth defects today, and cancer rates in the regions devastated by socialist industry continue to be sky high. Let’s take a brief look at the former USSR’s legacy of careless industrial destruction, with 3 examples.

The Ural River in Magnitogorsk, Russia is still saturated with toxic boron and chromium levels from the nearby Steel Works, poisoning the entire ecosystem and its inhabitants.

The Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest inland water body in the world was largely replaced by the newly emerged Aralkum Desert after the Soviets drained two rivers for irrigation. The sea is now just 10 percent of its original size.

Run-off from oil fields near Baku have rendered all the local water bodies biologically dead, killing off every lifeform that prospered in those ecosystems for millennia. These are just 3 examples of devastating ecocide caused by the push for industrial growth (which is required to achieve communism according to Marx), and they of course only ever achieved more capitalism and more misery, because industrialism and the continued pursuit of menial labor will not liberate people.

Changing from a vertical to a horizontal hierarchy will benefit the industrial workers in some material ways, certainly, but the wholesale destruction of our planet will not slow down one bit just by instituting a power-shift from bosses to workers. Industrial production depends on non-stop growth, and when you tie the success of a society to industrial production, you create a recipe for disaster. Workers won’t vote to scale down their industry or its environmental impact as their livelihoods depend on their industry’s growth.

And they certainly won’t care about anyone who isn’t also an industrial worker, or preserving their foreign way of life. Indigenous people and anyone living off the land will effectively be seen by red-society as an undesirable out-group. Anyone that can’t measure up to workerist standards of productivity will be seen as a strain on the industrial grind. An enemy of the red revolution.

Any “counter-revolutionary” rebel who dares stand in the way of industrial growth and the spread of industry across land and sea is effectively a liability that needs to be expunged to safeguard the revolution. This is the power of the collective. Comply or be crushed. Red or dead.

So you see, the people parroting “no ethical consumption under capitalism” at you don’t actually have any intention of curbing their destructive consumption, even under communism. Even under anarcho-communism. If anything, they hope to increase their consumption by acquiring more spending power. With communism, they’ll be able to consume as much as a middle-management boss does under capitalism because all workers will receive an equal share (until resources run out and their society collapses – a simple reality they have no interest in entertaining).

You cannot grow infinitely on a finite planet, and all industrial ideologies, regardless of whether they brand themselves as “libertarian” or “authoritarian” seem to ignore that simple fact because it would expose their ideology as having zero long-term viability in a world already experiencing unprecedented global collapse.

Damage Control is Valuable

There’s always a more ethical alternative to everything. That’s the whole point of anarchy, to analyze our actions and our impact on our environment and limit damage, counter authority as much as possible. Ethics isn’t an all or nothing proposition — there are varying degrees of harm.

Just because some solutions aren’t 100% pure and wonderful doesn’t mean they’re not worth doing over much more damaging alternatives. Anarchy is about subverting authority by finding more ethical solutions to every problem we come across. Here’s an example of several levels of damage control that can measurably make a difference. Things that stone-faced reds will no doubt decry as “lifestylist” simply because they don’t succeed in immediately overthrowing capitalism and bringing on a communist utopia:

Eating vegan locally-grown pesticide-free unprocessed food is absolutely more ethical than eating imported processed meat.

Why?

Far less carbon is burned to grow / store / transport / process / store again / re-transport the food. Workers involved in “organic” agriculture aren’t exposed to the much more dangerous conditions of slaughterhouses / battery farms / pesticides / ships / warehouses. Far less animal suffering and death goes into producing the food. These are real metrics.

There are of course still many downsides to for-profit agriculture including desertification, exploitation of migrant labor, and destruction of native ecosystems to plant monocultures. But it’s still much better than the alternative which ensures far greater harm by every metric...

For instance, the container ships that transport imported food and industrial products burn highly-polluting “bunker fuel”; the black, tarry goo that’s left over when all the higher quality fuels like petrol, diesel and kerosene have been extracted from crude oil. In 2009, confidential data was leaked showing that a single container ship produces as much pollution as 50 million cars. The ship workers will be the first to breathe in these highly concentrated fumes. Avoiding imported food goes a long way in fighting exploitation.

Buying seeds / cuttings / grafts and growing your own food in a community garden, as well as dumpster diving from outside supermarkets is more ethical than buying locally grown food from a for-profit business.

Why?

Even less carbon is burned, waste is diverted from landfills, there are no workers to exploit or endanger, there is no animal suffering and death if you use no-till methods. You control everything that goes into the soil (and ultimately your community’s bodies) and can thus stave off desertification and actually improve the soil and rebuild the ecosystem.

Downsides: Native flora is displaced in favor of domesticated food crops. Land ownership feeds the state via taxes (unless you use squatted land to plant the garden). Living in a city means you’ll still be consuming a lot of things you can’t produce yourself in your limited space. But again, this is a measurable improvement over the previous scenario.

Moving out of the city to a rural area and living as a subsistence farmer to grow all your own food in a food forest you plant, giving away or trading your surplus. Foraging for food where it’s sustainable to do so. Planting trees on every unused piece of land you see.

Why?

Erosion and desertification is effectively stopped in its tracks wherever food forests rise. The trees clean the air of carbon. Trees are by far the plants most adept at evapotranspiration, and are integral to the water-cycle all lifeforms depend on. The climate in the area is safeguarded, with increased humidity and rainfall.

Forest gardening rewilds the planet. Pre-civilized peoples made the rainforests as abundant as they are by curating them and spreading the plants they found most beneficial. If enough people planted food forests in an area, the local population could sustain themselves by hunting and foraging the way they did before civilization. So future generations are given the invaluable gift of autonomy from the industrial system, and the knowledge and incentive to resist industry’s violent encroach on their way of life.

Personal Action Doesn’t Happen in a Vacuum: Working Towards a Lasting Cultural Shift

When a group of people choose to e.g. not consume cow products, that directly creates less demand for cow products. So over that group’s lifetime, less forest will be bulldozed to graze the cows that they didn’t eat. Less cows will be impregnated by robotic rape machines. Less veal calves will be snatched from their mothers, put in dark little boxes for a few weeks and then slaughtered so the mother keeps producing milk for the dairy industry.

Some of the people vegans interact with will be influenced by their ethical choices and way of life and be inspired to also work to minimize their harm on the ecosystem. They’ll also adopt a vegan diet, and influence people in their lives to follow suit. One vegan becomes two, two become ten, ten become ten million. The cultural shift spreads far and wide, touching countless lives and changing the course of history. So in this way, an individual action gradually becomes a collective action. People slowly emulate others after being exposed to their lifestyle and ultimately the local culture is forever changed. All cultural shifts start out with a few innovators and gradually expand to the rest of the population as others see the benefits of the new culture.

Likewise with permaculture and food forests. People start planting food forests and others take up their example and pretty soon you have thousands of acres of land that are saved from desertification and become refuges for wildlife.

There are countless places where this is demonstrable, including where I’m from (somewhere in Western Asia). Each indigenous family in these mountains has a small plot of land that we cultivate. The more people choose to use mixed forest farming methods instead of standard sprayed monocultures, the more people are influenced to follow our example. They see how successful food forests are at feeding our families and the culture gradually shifts.

There needs to be a cultural shift that precedes and guides any revolutionary movement otherwise you’ll just end up replicating capitalism like Marxists have done time and time again. People who live destructive consumerist lifestyles that cause ecocide in exchange for fleeting material comforts won’t be capable of shifting to ethical lifestyles just because “the revolution” happened. They’ll simply replicate their destructive ways under the “new” political system and the “revolution” will have been for nothing. Capitalism will have just been given another paper mask to hide behind as it drags us deeper into the black hole of industrial apocalypse.

Fuck Your Luxury Space Communism

A single cruise ship emits as much pollution as a million cars. Cruise ships dump 1 billion gallons of sewage into the ocean every year. Knowing these facts, how can any anarchist decide to directly fund the cruise ship industry by saving up money and booking a cruise holiday?

Reds will tell you with a straight face that capitalism is to blame for the cruise industry’s rampant polluting, and “after the revolution”, the cruise industry would do no harm because it would be worker-managed.

In reality, a truly communist society would necessitate that cruises be free to every worker as a reward for their labor. Which means far more globe-trotting tourists and far more cruise ships in the oceans. Carbon burning and pollution would actually increase greatly.

But let’s ignore that for now. We don’t live in a revolutionary communist society and we will not see capitalism go away in our lifetimes. Global capitalism is more ingrained in society than ever before. Anarcho-communists are such a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of any population. Reds telling “lifestylists” to stop giving a shit about anything other than “overthrowing” capitalism, something we clearly don’t have the support or firepower to do, is blatantly ridiculous.

Continuing to eat industrial meat / processed foods / buying a new phone, games console, tablet every year / using disposable plastic bags / toilet paper / chlorine cleaning products / building poorly insulated over-sized concrete buildings / not composting your waste / salting the snow / heating a pool / planting a lawn / going on a cruise / etc / etc because “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” actively stands in the way of positive change and directly promotes inaction / harm. It actively prevents the culture from shifting towards anarchy.

“We’ll go on this cruise now and help contribute to ecocide, but it’s okay because we’ll consume ethically after the glorious revolution” couldn’t be a more ridiculous standpoint, but it’s essentially what the “no ethnical consumption under capitalism” slogan has been turned into. It’s a sad state of affairs when this empty rhetoric passes for revolutionary thought in red circles.

Ethics-Based Choices Aren’t “Liberal” Just Because Pompous Reds Say So

Consumption under capitalism (or socialism) isn’t ethical, but that’s no excuse for inaction. There’s no global revolution coming to change the way we live overnight. History has shown us the impossibility of that notion — with countless “revolutionary” societies repeating all the mistakes of capitalist ones.

But we can have small local revolutionary action in the here and now that can lead the way to damage control at a wider level. Just ask the Zapatistas and similar indigenous and anti-civ anarchist movements around the world. No one is going to tell them to throw in the towel and conform to globalist capitalist / communist industrial civilization because all consumption is somehow equal.

Anyone can make personal ethics-based choices and also organize collective action. I have no idea why so many collectivists see these pursuits as being mutually exclusive. But you’ll be sorely disappointed if you thought a global collectivist revolution was something that was realistically attainable. The world is far too diverse to be molded into a uniform entity controlled by a 19^th century ideology designed to serve European factory workers.

Ignore the sanctimonious blathering of boring ideologues. There’s nothing wrong with living what you preach. You claim to oppose hierarchy? Then live your life dedicated to minimizing hierarchy wherever you can. Set an example. Face the beast head on and stand your ground until you breathe your last breath. Because what else are you going to do?

We live in the final days of the Holocene ecocide. Everything around us has gone up in flames because of civilization’s insatiable greed, but that doesn’t mean we should throw more gasoline onto those flames. We still have to live on this planet for a few more years before it all burns up. It makes little sense for us to engage in activities that hasten our own suffering and make our communities even less habitable than they already are in these desperate end times.

Reds! Listen up, friends. Mocking people for caring about minimizing the damage they do and for thinking long and hard about the ethical implications of their actions doesn’t make you somehow more radical than them. It just makes you a smug fuck. I don’t care how many marches you’ve waved your shiny red flag at. Being able to recite the words of a long-dead white philosopher doesn’t make you special, so shut up about “lifestylism” already.

When we see exploitation and engage in direct action to fight it, that doesn’t make our fight useless. We have to live in this world and people are dying in it. All around us scores of people are suffering and dying. To ignore that and do nothing because our actions to relieve that suffering won’t install communism to free the sacred workers from their bosses would be fucked.

There’s likely no future for humanity, that’s quickly become apparent to anyone reading the horrifying science as it comes in. We’ve long-since thrown ourselves off the cliff, and are just waiting for our bodies to hit the ground. While we fall, we can choose to enjoy the breathtaking view of the mountains and the wind in our hair, or we can pull out a knife and repeatedly stab ourselves, so we feel nothing but excruciating pain in the moments before we reach the ground.

Capitalism & Communism Are Cut From the Same Exploitative Industrial Cloth

The collectivists who see no problem with oppressive constructs like industrial meat consumption will immediately discount anti-authoritarian actions that aren’t wholly-focused on abolishing the capitalist class and seizing the means of production. A lot of these red-anarchists are channeling Murray Bookchin as he delivered his anti-“lifestylism” screeds late in his life. They dream of seizing the means of production and thus receive a bigger share of the spoils, so it terrifies them that green anarchists instead want to set the factories and shopping malls on fire.

Reds see dumpster divers, illegalists, vegans, sustenance farmers, bike punks, squatters, naturists, communers and other “lifestylists” as a “distraction” from their driving singular desire to replace industrial capitalism with industrial communism. They want to remove the bosses from the equation, but keep everything else almost exactly the same: Workers, factories, battery farms, globalization, ecocide... Even prisons and police in a lot of cases. They want everything industrial society has forced on the world, except this time, they swear it’ll be “more egalitarian” with “direct democracy” and an equal share of the industrial pie for every worker.

These red-dyed wannabe-industrialists insist we abandon our hard-fought battles and join them in pushing (waiting) for a more egalitarian industrialism that’ll give us a fairer share of the profits gained from waging war on the wilds.

They love to accuse anarchist “lifestylists” (green anarchists especially) of somehow conforming to the system... By struggling against it? Their pissy Bookchin-inspired rants accusing anti-civs of being in a “death cult” or of being “counter-revolutionary” (while they themselves embrace ecocide and mass-extinction) really makes no logical sense to me. Green anarchists like the water defenders in Canada right now are actively putting their lives on the line to fight against the march of industry, while these yuppie killjoys sit in their comfy suburban armchairs typing up walls of snark to diminish the people who prove everyday that they live and breathe anarchy.

Sure, the Bookchinites, Chomskyists and assorted anarcho-douchebags will show up at an orderly protest in their officially licensed Guy Fawkes masks, and they’re always in the front row of their local union meeting, eager to read a deadly serious statement from a stack of printed A4s. But how does that give them the superiority complex to voice their disgust about “edgy lifestylists”? It should be obvious at this point that communism isn’t going to save the world, yet they imagine themselves as the governors of righteousness.

Protesting is just another cog in the democracy machine. The illusion of choice. It accomplishes nothing. It certainly doesn’t make you more revolutionary than an anarchist who makes the conscious choice to live as ethically as possible. People that think they’ve achieved something worthwhile because they’ve held up a pretty sign at some protest are fooling themselves. All they’re doing is asking their rulers to be nicer rulers. Rulers aren’t giving up their power because you made a sign. You’re not better than “filthy lifestylists” because you quoted Kropotkin at your union meeting that one time.

Both protests and unions as well as ‘lifestyle choices’ have long been co-opted by the system and are not going to loosen the death-grip it has on the planet. The system has become quite adept at swallowing up all attempts at revolution and turning them into Bizarro-revolutions that can be whitewashed and monetized to further the system’s growth. I don’t need to remind anarchists that communism was instantly turned back into industrial capitalism every time it was attempted. The “Communist Party of China” is perhaps the most powerful upholder of capitalism in the world today per capita, and it’s the nation with the most billionaires.

Embracing Pointed Distractions & Recognizing Ideological Greenwashing

Collectivists will often butt in when others are talking about methods of damage control and insist we stop talking about “pointless distractions” and instead focus on achieving their much-hyped global worker-society they promise will come if we just hold hands and march in the streets until everyone sees how awesome we are. Then the masses will all join us to overthrow the capitalists and install communist utopia, just wait and see!

A lot of reds will even claim that all discussion about ethics and social justice is elitist and classist “liberal posturing” aimed at dividing the working class. The worst of them will insist that class is the only issue we should be concerned with. To hell with feminism, post-colonialism, the environment and all other “distractions” that don’t interest white male workers. Workerism and class reductionism are fond bedfellows. Being a vegan or a dumpster diver or a forager or a squatter or a self-sufficient cave-dweller need not have anything to do with shaming other people. It’s simply the way someone chooses to live their life for a multitude of reasons; a lot of them informed by ethics, but also to pursue the happiness that every human desires.

An individual anarchist’s decision to live more ethically is not some kind of narcissistic circlejerk the way collectivists like to present it. All anarchists have different motivations and different ethics. We all live in this world, in this time, and we can’t just pretend there’s some grand global homogeneous revolution right around the corner that’s going to save humanity from the rapidly approaching industrial apocalypse if only we chant loud enough and post more luxury space communism memes to our Facebook profiles.

It’s especially perplexing watching reds scorn anti-civs since none of these purported “communist revolutionaries” have demonstrated any real inclination to address the industrialist disaster that has been wrought on our planet beyond farcical promises of “space-colonization”, “Star Trek replicators” and “asteroid mining”.

Even those rare reds who bother to give consideration to ecology in their theories continue to glorify civilization, industry and democracy as liberators. So called “social-ecologist” Bookchinites promise that the planet can be saved if we just “make more democracy!” Then we can all participate in (profit from) the industrial system with our voting power, and opt to use “ecological technologies” such as solar and wind energy to power the machines.

Never mind the Chinese sustenance farmers who have carcinogenic industrial waste dumped on their lands everyday from those solar panel factories; they’re just not thinking ecologically enough. And the Ghanaians who wince when mountains of worn-out solar panels are piled up in their backyards with the rest of the West’s obsolete tech are just impeding ecological progress with their divisive nitpicking! It’s almost like they don’t want Europeans to have two electric vehicles in every garage? So ridiculous!

When you give a majority group legitimized power over minorities, they always use it to oppress them. All power corrupts. Collectivism breeds hierarchy because the interests of the dominant group e.g. factory workers aren’t the same as the interests of minority groups e.g. indigenous herders or queer folk or sex workers.

If you think your average meat-and-potatoes white male worker is going to suddenly become enlightened and compassionate towards the plight of minorities when you give him the power of direct democracy, as social ecologists and other red anarchists envision, you haven’t been paying close attention to the world around you. Time and time again, voters have successfully used their vote to deny rights to migrants, sex workers, trans and gay people, and anyone they see as differing from their normative standards.

Understanding the Coercion Behind the “Collective Good”

Reds expect you to put the needs of the almighty collective above your own needs, but the collective good matters little if your individual needs are ignored by the collective.

All too often, Western reds demanding you obey the “collective good” are simply engaging in red-washed white supremacy where the “collective” just means “white working men”, and the “good” just means “our profits”. Putting the will of the dominant population in society before your own needs and desires is an incredulous proposition. The profits of the white working man should not be of any concern to e.g. a brown unemployed woman.

Collectivism is kind of a ludicrous concept if you really think about it. We can’t paint seven-billion people that have wildly different ideas of what life should be as one unified entity because they’re not one unified entity. Collectivizing them as one group; “the working class” in our minds makes no logical sense and does nothing but fuel the industrial wasteland rapidly decimating the entire globe. Why should all humans be seen as workers, why should each of us be measured by our capacity to produce industrial goods?

People from different places have different needs. Marxism deals with this by separating people into classes and telling us to only concern ourselves with the worker classes and to hell with the peasant classes and the hunter-gatherers and the pastoralist nomads and the “land-owner classes”.

This “land-owner” class includes indigenous peoples living off of their ancestral lands and exploiting no one, but again and again socialists have targeted them for genocide for not fitting into their ideological framework. Then the imperialist socialists seize their land and commercialize it so they can profit. For examples, see the Kazakh famine-genocide perpetrated by the USSR because the nomadic Kazakhs resisted the rigidity of forced collectivization, or the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran and resulting famine that was orchestrated so the red Russians could take control of Iran’s oil fields, or China’s current ongoing land seizures across its territories and forced internment and “re-education” of a million Uighurs.

The very idea of the worker class trumping everyone else is a proven recipe for colonialism and genocide. Individuals who avoid consumerism and live deliberately; apart from the system aren’t exploiting anyone, but throughout history collectivists have caused untold death and suffering trying to shape indigenous lands into their image. Collectivism is far more dangerous than “lifestylism” to anyone who would fail to fit into the collectivist’s ideological dogma.

Constructing a homogeneous group; a worker collective, and telling them they’re the only group that matters; the upholders of the holy revolution, and they need to purge anyone who would threaten their revolution by not falling in line with the red agenda is not something that has ever led anywhere good. Forced collectivization gave us the Soviet Kazakh genocide, the Chinese Great Leap Forward genocide, the Soviet Holodomor genocide, etc. And it ultimately gave us collectivist capitalism like we see now in China — the most ecologically destructive form of capitalism there is.

Communism and other red ideologies (including the ones purporting to be anarchist) create as big an in group / out group divide as capitalism. The power just shifts to the producers rather than the owners. And historically it’s just as brutal in its treatment of the out-groups. Anyone that doesn’t want to be part of the industrial system, like the Kazakh nomadic herders, is basically fucked. You dissent, you die.

The red ideologies view the entire world through a Western industrial worker-serf lens. But the whole world isn’t organized like the industrial West and it’s unfair to force Western values and economic systems on everyone.

Indigenous farmers in post-colonial places are treated as pariahs; ‘kulaks’, and massacred for having ‘owned’ the ancestral land they sustain themselves with under capitalist definitions. Just because the poor in industrialized capitalist nations don’t own the land they work, doesn’t mean the poor in other parts of the world where there is no lord-serf system in place are bad.

A garden that you and your family / tribe tend to and depend on to survive is personal property, but communism has always treated it like private property. Like growing your own food is reactionary and a threat to the “revolutionary” government. The USSR even banned people from planting gardens at home so they’d be forced to depend on the collective for food. To keep them tied to the factory assembly line. Nomadic herders and roaming hunter-gatherers are likewise criminalized and starved out because there can be no room for people that don’t submit to the industrial work system under communism. They’re grouped as “individualists” and punished for resisting collectivization.

Reject Collectivism, Embrace Anarchy

Collectivism, whether it be communist, fascist or capitalist ideologically isn’t something that serves my interests as an indigenous subsistence farmer and forager living in these remote mountains. Whatever industrial dogma I’m ordered to live my life by only serves to fill my heart with sorrow. I will loudly reject the idea of a collective society at every opportunity, regardless of its ideological alliance. All industry kills all life.

I’m an anarchist. Even the idea of a “society” governing my way of life makes me vomit a little. Your needs aren’t my needs, I don’t want to go where the collective wants to take me. My lifestyle and my ancestors’ lifestyles are likely nothing like yours and we shouldn’t be meshed together as a singular entity just because we’re both forced to work the machines.

Setting up living, breathing alternatives to the industrial system crafts non-coercive relationships between humans, non-humans and our environments better than unionism and other workerist pursuits ever will. Workerism only further ingrains us in the system and makes us dependent on it, and then if we do manage a revolution by some miracle... We just reproduce the capitalist system again because it’s all we know. Working examples of anarchy like self-sufficient food forests are far more revolutionary to me than a union or a protest march. All applications of anarchy are important, but I value anarchy that I can see and touch.

The only revolution I’m interested in is one that removes dependences on artificial structures. I want to be liberated from the system, not become the system. The collective isn’t my master. The collective is really just another state, however nicely you package it.

Red anarchists — If you don’t take responsibility for the damage you do, no one will. There’s no rapture-like revolution coming to wipe out capitalism’s sins and absolve you of any guilt for your part in it because “no ethical consumption”. There’s only this life you’re living and your choices absolutely matter. They shape who you are and the impact you make on your environment and your culture. If you just keep doing harm and blame your actions on capitalism, your mentality is no different than the mentality of a CEO dumping toxic waste in a river in China. Damage control in your community is something you have direct control over. You can choose to not dump that waste. Or you can dump it and justify it to yourself by saying “it’s okay because capitalism did it”.

The entire “no ethical consumption” argument and similar condescending slogans parroted by half-assed socialists are just a way to justify their inaction in the face of devastating oppression and ecocide.

It’s become increasingly unlikely that we can stop the unraveling global mass extinction event that industry has wrought on the planet, but anarchists have never let impossible odds stand in our way before. We fight because we exist and we exist to fight. Whatever the odds.

We can either choose to take action to resist the violent system starting on an individual and on a local level, or we can live and die waiting for capitalism to magically go away worldwide while participating in it fully and thus furthering its growth and increasing its violence.

“Think globally, act locally” might be a cliche, but it’s really the only power we have. If we don’t take action in our own neighborhood in every way we can, why even pretend to care about anarchy?

Everything we do to resist the ecocide is worthwhile. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Anarchy & Religion (incomplete)

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/anarchy_and_religion> on September 3, 2025.

Last updated: 2 August 2022

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Branded by Society

For a long time, people have identified as “Christian-anarchists”, “Jewish-anarchists”, “Muslim-anarchists”, and so on. This is accepted without question in most anarchist circles, where goals of inclusivity tend to supersede any misgivings people might have with the inherent top-down and patriarchal nature of most religious affiliations.

I don’t think it makes any sense to try and merge anarchy with these explicit systems of authority, and much like “anarcho-capitalism”, I think attempting to hitch anarchy’s wagon to blatant forms of authority is a misguided impulse that comes about in people who have been thoroughly indoctrinated in authoritarian systems and are unwilling to fully part with forms of authority they have nostalgic attachment to. The feeling of comfort or security their religion provides them with leads to them trying to reform their religion into something more egalitarian when they decide they like the economic and societal ideas presented by anarchy, but don’t wish to part with their long-held religious beliefs.

I feel I should be clear that anarchists have no right to force their views on people that subscribe to organized religion. I simply want to explore some of the inherently authority-based principles religious organizations hold as sacrosanct and try to understand why religious anarchists feel the need to essentially retcon their favored religion to force a tenuous compatibility with anarchy.

As usual, I should also be clear I don’t ascribe to the concept of an “anarchist society”, so this isn’t an attempt to say religion should be “banned” in a non-existing “anarchist society”. I don’t think such a thing possible.

Anarchy is an anti-authoritarian mindset, an ongoing process we all go through to question and overcome authority. It is not a artificially constructed system, or a “society” to govern people by. It’s not a permanent state of affairs where authority somehow ceases to exist. Authority will always exist, and will especially thrive within formal systems of power and control where conformity and obedience are held up as desirable. And if a group of people did somehow “achieve” anarchy, and then try to forbid people from having religious beliefs, that anarchy would of course immediately be lost in the attempt to assert authority over others.

You can certainly be religious (“spiritual”) without supporting authority. You can believe in other-earthly beings or spirits or even gods without needing to build hierarchies and authoritarian rituals around them. But almost all “Big Religion” is absolutely authority-based and was designed that way from its inception.

Monotheism was created by civilized men to accustom the peasantry to being ruled by a great man in the sky, so they’d be equally as amenable to being ruled by a great man in a castle (or later: a presidential palace or a factory or an office).

The authority of monotheism was rapidly forced on the world at the point of the sword, replacing polytheism in the vast majority of cultures. Religious and civil leaders deemed polytheists to be “uncivilized heathens” and slaughtered them if they refused to fall in line with the new world order. It was no accident that monotheism and civilization evolved side by side. Diverse polycultures replaced by a rigid global monoculture that could be easily dominated by rulers.

Slavery was greatly assisted by several of these new monotheist religions that directly condoned the practice, providing easy moral justification for slave owners, and keeping slaves from resisting the system, lest they suffer eternal damnation. The Roman church loudly condemned slaves who escaped their masters, and refused them communion. It’s not hard to understand why religious societies were so quick to prop up slavery when the holy books they live their lives by go out of their way to normalize the practice:

“Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers” (Gn 9:25)

This is a quote from the Old Testament, where Noah condemns Canaan (Son of Ham) to eternal slavery. Christians and some Muslims then identified Ham’s descendants as black Africans, which allowed them to morally justify centuries of racialized slavery in their societies, constructing the idea that certain members of the human race should live in perpetual servitude to them. This is a recurring theme with organized religion, as religious documents invariably build authority in the cultures that hold them up as sacred.

The New Testament continued the tradition of telling the faithful to accept bondage and goes further in telling slaves to accept their slave-masters like they would a God:

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart. Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not people. (Ephesians 6:5–7)

The Bible’s legitimization of slavery was predictably taken to its natural conclusion by religious groups throughout history. In Barbados in 1710, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts were granted plantations to fund their Codrington College. Several hundred slaves were forced to work the plantations and using a red hot iron, their chests were branded with the word “Society”, to signify their ownership by the church. To this day, religious people colonize other lands using their holy texts to justify every atrocity they commit. It’s much easier to justify atrocities to yourself and others when you can point to a verse in a sacred text and say “the one true God is okay with this”. Religion has a way of absolving tyrants of guilt, shifting the blame to mystical authority figures who are beyond reproach.

But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. (Matthew 5:39)

Religions that involve forced body modification, indoctrination as an infant or child, require deference and reverence to godly beings, idols, texts, symbols, elders or church leaders, or simply instruct you to turn the other cheek when you’re being exploited, can’t honestly be described as being compatible with anarchy. To be an anarchist is to resist authority in every facet of life, not to close your eyes to authority when it’s convenient to.

Circumcision is one example of a religious ceremony that has life-long implications. Forcing children to undergo non essential surgery is not an anarchist action, so anyone doing it can’t claim to be doing anarchy while forcibly mutilating an infant. Forcibly invading a child’s bodily autonomy means you’re not practising anarchy. There’s no way to pretend that an infant can be a willing participant in such a thing.

Forcing children to participate in your religious practices before they’re old enough to make an informed voluntary decision and forcing life-changing rituals on their bodies from infancy places authority on them. They’re too young to volunteer to circumcision or baptism or female genital mutilation or even understand what is being done to them.

You can be a religious person and also an anarchist since most people are born into religions and the process of freeing your mind from authority is a lifelong pursuit with no real completion, but you can’t claim that forcing unnecessary surgery on a baby is an anarchist action. It’s just not. It’s entirely anti-anarchy. The same goes for accepting subservience to a master and telling others to be okay with exploitation, to forgive their exploiters and to not fight back.

Organized religion is dictated from above by the church i.e. the authority on the religion. It’s a system of rulers and obeyers and has been used to justify every atrocity under the sun. To attempt to redeem these bloody authoritarian institutions by associating them with anarchist ideals is to participate in a coercive and destructive lie. Pinning a black flag to institutions that have carved a path of unrelenting carnage across history: colonizing and slaughtering everything they touch, does no favors for anarchy, and only helps church authorities mask their blood soaked robes for just long enough to grab their next victim by the neck.

Like all authority, the authority of religion will not stand still. In times of conflict, people who refuse to conform to the favored religion will be scapegoated, will be oppressed, will be murdered in the name of all that is holy and good and just.

A religion is as big an authority as any other and like all authority, its growth cannot be curtailed. Certainly not by a few advocates of more libertarian forms of the religion. The dominant strands will always be unapologetically authoritarian and become brutally oppressive in times of cultural strife and warfare. All the reform-minded offshoots will do is create justification for perpetuating the religion until the mainline authoritarian strands can rain bloody murder down on the godless heathens that resist the authority of the church and its invisible almighty ruler that conveniently can never be held accountable for the atrocities committed in his name.

Burn the Bread Book

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/burn_the_bread_book> on September 3, 2025.

Last updated: 2 August 2022

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The True Cost of Bread

For years I’ve watched a man drive his pick-up truck into the forest around me and cut down all the trees that aren’t legally protected. So, every tree that isn’t a pine or an oak. The moment a carob or olive or hawthorn or mastic or strawberry tree grows big enough to burn, he cuts it down and drags it away for firewood. He even fells trees I planted, while smiling and waving at me like he’s doing me a favor. I glare at him silently but don’t say a word, knowing he has the full power of the state behind him.

He uses the wood to fuel his traditional bakery which has several large outdoor ovens. The much-loved industrial product he produces is bread; a product that has rapidly replaced all the native food-bearing plants of the area as they’ve been cut down to make room for wheat fields.

The villagers are proud of the bakery because it attracts visitors from all over the island and thus creates further opportunities for them to earn profit. The local bureaucracy; the democratically-elected village council, gives the baker free reign to do as he pleases since so many livelihoods depend on his bakery.

Because the baker cuts everything down as soon as it reaches human height, the trees never get big enough to fruit, so they don’t spread their seeds and grow new trees. The forest slowly dwindles to nothing but pine trees and can no longer sustain most animal life. The climate dries, the soil erodes, the air grows stagnant and depleted of oxygen. All that’s left in the few remaining forests that haven’t been bulldozed to grow more wheat is a sterile pine desert.

The baker will soon no doubt lobby the village council to allow him to harvest the pine trees too, otherwise the all-important bakery will cease to be operational when he runs out of legal trees to fell.

In just a few years, all the fruits, nuts and berries that sustained the people in the area for millennia are wiped out and replaced with a consumer product that is made from a single grain crop. A thriving ecosystem has been replaced with a wheat monoculture that could collapse at any moment and take the lives of everyone it feeds with it.

It’s worth noting that the baker, like most people in my village, and in fact most people on the island, considers himself a communist. The village has a “communist party” clubhouse and they always elect “communist” local leaders and vote for “communist” politicians in the national elections.

Any anarchist worth their salt has no tolerance for these faux-communists, or “tankies” and their brand of collectivist-capitalism because they cling to money, states and rulers and really only embrace Stalinist politics because of the promise of cushy government jobs for them or their relatives.

The Stalinist politicians openly buy votes by promising jobs in the public service to their supporters. A job in the public service here is a guaranteed free ride for life for you and your family, with the salaries multiple times higher than private sector salaries and benefits out of the wazoo — including multiple pensions. They get a full pension for each gov sector they worked in, and the more connected civil servants are rotated through jobs in multiple sectors in the last few months leading up to their retirement to ensure the maximum pay-out possible.

I’m confident anyone reading this knows Stalinism is designed to enrich the bureaucrat class and give them complete control over the state’s citizens. No anarchist sees that shit as communism. But in a “real” communist society; an “anarcho-communist” society where money, state and class have been abolished, the local baker would presumably still bake that bread, and since it would be offered freely to everyone far and wide, he’d need to bake a lot more of it and thus need more wood. More forest would be razed to keep the bread production going.

Everyone living in the village and anyone passing through, and people in faraway cities will expect to have as much gourmet bread on their plates as they desire. More bakeries would need to pop up on the mountain as demand rises for delicious bread in the cities below, with the rural population working hard and doing their duty to feed the hungry urban population.

Over the years, I’ve put a lot of thought into envisioning how the workers seizing the means of production would end the environmental devastation this bread production brings to the mountain. I struggle to see any scenario where communism would stop the devastation being wrought on the ecosystem. The forests would continue to be razed to ensure production won’t slow down.

Free bread for everyone today means no bread (or any food) for anyone tomorrow as the top-soil washes away, the climate warms, the wildlife goes extinct, and the whole mountain rapidly turns to desert. It’s inevitable that soon even wheat will cease to grow in the fields surrounding the village.

Regardless of the economic system in place, the villagers being able to consume as many fresh loaves of baked bread as they can carry means all the forests in driving distance of the village are eviscerated, eventually all the fields become barren, the crops fail, and everyone starves. This is already well on its way to happening, and switching to a communist mode of production would do nothing to allay this inevitability.

“How would you feed people then, genius?” I hear you scoff. The answer is simple; tried and tested for millennia. I wouldn’t feed people. People would feed themselves instead of expecting others to labor to feed them; an entitlement that arose with industrial civilization. People would be inclined to protect the forests instead of bulldozing them for the supposed convenience of industrial food production if they picked their food directly from those forests everyday.

They’d protect the forests with their very lives because they’d need the food that grows in the forests to survive without industrial farms, bakeries and factories outsourcing food production and then hiding the ecocide they cause just out of sight of the villages and their carefully manicured streets.

Bread and other industrial products alienate us from our ecosystem and cause us to stop caring about how our food is produced, so long as it’s there in the store when we want to eat it. Putting food production back into the control of the individual is the only way to preserve the ecosystem. Direct food is the only anarchist mode of production. When other people are tasked with growing your food, they will take shortcuts because the food isn’t going into their own mouths or the mouths of their loved ones. Food harvesting needs to go back to being a way of life for every able-bodied person, rather than something industrial farm workers are tasked with to serve an elite class of privileged office workers who are completely disconnected from the food chain.

All over the world, complex centuries-old polyculture food-forests that sustained countless lives for generations are destroyed by the arrogance of industrial production, replaced for a short while by a wheat or corn monoculture so people can pick up their bread down the street from their home or workplace instead of muddying their feet to gather food from the wild as their ancestors did. This convenience seems like “progress” to civilized people, at least until the destructive industrial agriculture process renders the wheat fields infertile and farms all over the world are turned into a vast uninhabitable dust bowl. A sustainable way of life that kept us alive and thriving for centuries has been tossed aside in favor of a short-lived attempt at industrial convenience that has already proven itself a horrible failure; bringing us and every other lifeform to the verge of extinction.

Industry is not sustainable. Industrial systems are all destructive. Communism, capitalism, fascism, they’re all founded on ecocide. The authority of the baker is upheld over everything else because domesticated people would rather consume “free” industrial bread for a few years than unlearn their destructive consumerist habits. If we are to survive these times of devastating ecological collapse, humans need to go back to fostering vast food forests as our ancestors did for millennia; producing and gathering our own food without destroying the very ecosystem that gives us life in the name of luxury and convenience.

“The People’s” Authority: How “Anarcho-Communism” is Authority-Forming

If someone kept cutting down all the trees to bake bread, the people who depend on the forest to survive would of course have to intervene to stop the loggers from destroying the forest and thus killing their way of life.

This happens in rainforests today where indigenous people who have been let down by the state gleefully issuing licenses to corporate loggers, and turning a blind eye to illegal logging, instead take matters into their own hands and shut down the loggers using force.

They put their lives on the line to do this, and a lot of them are killed by the loggers who value their profits over the lives of indigenous people. They know if they don’t act to stop the loggers, the forests they call their home will be decimated and their way of life will have been destroyed forever. They’ll be forced into the cramped cities and have to labor all day everyday to buy the bread and beef that stripped their forests bare.

So how would an anarcho-communist society deal with someone who cuts down all the trees to bake bread? In an anarcho-communist society, everyone will be environmentally conscious and consume sustainably, right...? No. Not if you’re engaging in any kind of critical thinking.

Loggers can only destroy forests at the current explosive rate if the society imbues them with authority. If they have no authority, there’s nothing stopping others from using force to end their pillaging of our natural resources. Without the authority of civilization behind them, the loggers have incredibly diminished power and no real motive to risk their lives to fell trees.

Anarcho-communism is an industrial ideology based around the notion of seizing the means of production and then running the factories, saw mills, oil rigs, mines and power plants democratically. Industrial civilization is an incredibly totalitarian authority that is nevertheless upheld by “anarcho”-communist theory, even though anarchists supposedly oppose all forms of authority.

In an industrial communist society, much like in a capitalist society, logging is necessary to further the industrial production the society is built around. As long as production drives the system, trees will have to be felled for all kinds of reasons: from lumber and paper production to making way for crops and cattle.

So, logging is highly valued by the people that uphold the industrial society, and in a real world scenario, these “anarcho” communists would have to take measures to protect loggers from repercussions from a small, uncivilized minority – the indigenous inhabitants of the forest. These measures are, by any definition, an authority. A monopoly on violence. A state in everything but name.

But since the loggers are providing this valued service to good, decent, reasoned, educated, domesticated, egalitarian, democratic, civilized anarcho-communists in big shiny cities who are accustomed to a litany of luxury consumer products being delivered to their doors everyday… Decidedly authoritarian methods will need to be taken to ensure the anarcho-loggers can do their anarcho-work without facing retaliation from the “primmie” forest dwellers. These methods can easily be justified in the ancom’s mind; there’s nothing an ancom loves more than to “justify” authority with their mighty reasoned logic™️.

So when faced with the conundrum that the anarcho-communist city needs lumber, paper, corn and meat, and the only thing standing in the way of production is a few indigenous tribes, the ancom will put their anarcho-Spock ears on and declare: “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”. Just as capitalist and socialist states today violently suppress the indigenous people who take action to shut down logging and mining operations that quash their way of life, the anarcho-industrialist will send a red-and-black army in to escort their red-and-black bulldozers and discipline anyone that interferes with the will of “the people”.

The indigenous inhabitants of course won’t give a shit that their forests are being felled by communists rather than by capitalists. They won’t give a shit that the bulldozers are now owned collectively or that the land they’ve lived on for millennia has now been designated as belonging to “the people” (the civilized voting majority) instead of to the state or to capital.

The forest that nurtures the indigenous people and their children is still being decimated to maintain the destructive lifestyles of apathetic city-dwellers. Their lives are still being ended because to civilized people, they’re a backwards, regressive minority standing in the way of progress... Damaging the revolution, inhibiting the growth of their glorious egalitarian civilization. The educated, “progressive” majority outvote them. Anyway, everyone who has spoken to a red anarchist knows primmies are dirty reactionary ableists who want to stop us from building wheelchair and drug factories, right?

Civilized people always have pushed the notion that the “common good” or the good of the many will always outweigh the needs of individuals or small groups of people, ever since Aristotle, in his “The Aim of Man” wrote:

“The good of the state is of greater and more fundamental importance both to attain and to preserve. The securing of one individual’s good is cause for rejoicing, but to secure the good of a nation or of a city-state is nobler and more divine.”

Communism is even more adamant in this “the will of the majority is paramount” shtick, going as far as to declare the industrial-worker class as the only voice that matters, with everyone needing to become part of the worker class in order to abolish class differences.

This logic is why the USSR, China and other communist experiments forced collectivization on self-sufficient indigenous peoples and then slaughtered them when they inevitably resisted. If people won’t consent to being displaced from their ancestral lands to work on the industrial farms and factories that fuel the destruction of their homes, they’re branded “kulaks” and “counter-revolutionaries” and “reactionaries” and are systemically genocided, usually by destroying their food sources.

Industrial goods are valued by industrial society over the forest and its inhabitants because domesticated people want to eat bread and microwaved pizza and the real cost of those products (environmental destruction) is of no real concern to industrial society beyond empty gestures like an occasional “save the rainforests” or “go vegan” banner.

The inhabitants of the forests and their strange foreign culture are too far removed from the busy cities for the average urbanites to involve themselves in their plight. Even the civilized rural people who live around the forests are forever striving to urbanize their villages in the unending quest for upwards mobility. In my experience, they’ll happily trade every tree in sight for a gourmet bakery, Apple Store or coffee-shop so they can feel as civilized as the people in the big cities who tend to look down on them for being “hillbillies” or “country bumpkins”.

“The people in the big cities of Sao Paulo and Rio, they want us to live on picking Brazil nuts,” a farmer says. “That doesn’t put anyone’s kid in college.” (From RollingStone.com.)

The settler-farmers who are burning what’s left of the Amazon rainforest to the ground say they’re doing it for their children... To make the cash to pay for their children to be educated and get good jobs in the city. It shouldn’t be controversial for me to say civilized people value their civilized life and will always put their civilized needs before the needs of uncivilized others.

Civilized people can relate to their civilized neighbours who have the same struggles as them: paying their bills, educating their kids, buying good insurance, washing their car, deciding where to go on vacation, renovating their kitchens, choosing the next Netflix show to binge watch... So it’s not surprising that they’ll do everything they can to prop up civilized people and kick down the uncivilized people who stand in the way of their quest for ever-increasing industrial comforts.

I can already see the denial stage setting in on some of your faces as I type: “But us anarcho-communists aren’t like capitalists, we’re good caring people. Humane people. We’ll make industry green, we’ll manage the forests in a sustainable manner using direct democracy, unions, unicorns and equality!”

Why would anyone swallow that crock of shit? Why would thoroughly domesticated people used to all the comforts of destructive industrial civilization suddenly decide to forgo those comforts because of democracy? Why would 7.7 billion people suddenly change how they live because anarcho-communism has been declared? How would ancom civilization make industry “green” when it’s clearly demonstrable that all industry is destructive to the environment and to wild people, and modelling a society on an industrial system has had disastrous results throughout history, regardless of what the attached ideology was named?

All controlled mass-society, including every historical experiment at building a communist society has created authority; bodies of people that hold power over others. That power grows over time and takes the “communist” society further and further away from its revolutionary origins. Every indication is that authority would continue to be manifested with industrial anarcho-communism. There is no evidence that anarcho-communism would avert authority when it’s so dependent on destructive, exploitative, alienating, domesticating industry and the control and domination of a global population of workers.

Anarcho-communism will not liberate the world.

All Industrial Goods Free for All People: A Recipe for Disaster

In communism everything is free for the taking and resources are often treated as if they’re infinite. If you decide you need something, you take it from the communal store. Kropotkin said no one has the right to judge how much an individual needs, except the individuals themselves.

Since most reds hold that resources should be allocated according to “need”, decisions would need to be made to determine who in the community has “need” of the biggest shares of resources.

I know most ancoms, like Kropotkin, claim every individual will just take whatever they “need” (want) from communal stores, but I’m going to cry foul on that because it’s really not practical in an industrial society. Resources aren’t infinite and no one is going to spend their life doing gruelling manual labor and then just give everything they produce away to some random stranger who shows up at the communal store with a dumpster truck and says “I need your community’s entire monthly output of goods today, so load it up”. For some reason ancoms think assholes would cease to exist in a communist society. Why would anyone work their asses off, wasting their life away doing menial manual labor just to watch some shitlord drive away with everything they produced because he announced he “needed” it?

“But as woke anarcho-communists in an advanced fully-automated luxury communist society, labor will in fact be quite limited and fun because we can divide duties between all our comrades! And profit will no longer be a concern since everything we make will be given to anyone that wants it free of charge, so we don’t need to worry about marketing our products and that will further minimize the amount of labor we’ll do, giving us ample leisure time to enjoy the fruits of our production!”

For the purposes of cold-hearted mockery, I’m slightly paraphrasing an ancom who responded to an early draft of this piece. What fantasy realm are ancoms living in where all the massive problems posed by industrial production (including the ongoing extinction of near-every lifeform on Earth) will evaporate when you remove profit and marketing from the equation?

I keep saying this in my writing but here I go again: In an industrial society that aims to give everyone in the world equal access to consumer goods, industry does not decrease; it increases. If everyone in the world suddenly has free and equal access to the mountains of wasteful shit that Western consumers consider necessary to life, not only would production need to massively increase, but we would run out of resources to exploit much more rapidly.

That’s assuming anyone would even want to work in the mines and factories in a supposedly equal society if they no longer had guns to their heads. Why would anyone go back down into that mine once their chains are broken? Does anyone honestly think those Congolese kids give a shit if you have a new phone every year? Should they really be expected to sacrifice themselves for your entitlement? So you can continue to live in luxury with all your little conveniences?

In a real world implementation of industrial communism, communities will no doubt quickly impose limits on what can be taken from communal stores after a few people take way more than they have any right to and other people go without as a result, despite them laboring for hours a day to produce those goods. Kropotkin might insist we’ll all be happy toiling away all day to make this consumerist shit just to give it away to random strangers, but he was a privileged scholar who never had to work a day in his life, so what do you expect?

Industrial society right now is fed by the ceaseless labor of billions of exploited people in the Global South. People are forced to toil in mines from childhood to procure the materials that other people (also including children) then assemble into consumer goods in factories, all for starvation wages. This is debilitating, dangerous work that leaves the people who do it sucked of their youth after a few years.

Anyway, let’s play along with communist mythology for a bit to get to my next point. In an ideal communist society (where I guess minerals are somehow found equally all across the planet and not overwhelmingly located in the Global South as in the real world), outsourced labor would presumably go away because communists would never exploit workers in distant lands (who ever heard of an imperialist communist, right? Right??) So instead production would need to be localized, and then the goods would be distributed according to need.

For resources to be allocated according to need, you’ll have some kind of deciding body in place to judge what each person’s needs are; what resources each person should be given.

There are lots of factors to take into consideration when deciding someone’s “needs”, like how far they live from work, how far they live from the store, how many calories they burn doing the labor they do, the size of their family, their dietary restrictions, disabilities they might have, their particular metabolism, how many parties they throw, how many friends they have and thus might invite to the parties, their religious and cultural practices, the size of their house, the size of their garden, the type of insulation their house has and how quickly it loses heat, the fuel efficiency of their car... I could list hundreds more things but I’ll stop myself.

Giving bureaucrats this power will no doubt mean certain favored groups / individuals will be rewarded and less desirable groups / individuals will be neglected, or even punished. This is the nature of authority. You’ll need a body of full-time bureaucrats to collect all this data and measure how it should determine your share of the pie, and those bureaucrats are going to have biases. If a computer does it, the programmer will have biases. And you’d still need bureaucrats to collect the data and feed it to the computer. Then they could easily feed incorrect or selective data to the computer because of their biases.

It’s always felt like a recipe for corruption and exploitation to me for a bureaucracy to determine someone’s worth... Which is probably why Kropotkin stipulated that everyone should be able to just take whatever they themselves decide they need from the stores.

Of course, the real solution would be to not base your proposed utopian society on industrial production in the first place... Promising industrial production will be unlimited because everyone will voluntarily agree to work real hard in the factories and mines and slaughterhouses and the goods will be distributed to everyone everywhere somehow while maintaining a sustainable ecological green solarpunk paradise just makes you a smug fucking liar. No different than a grinning politician promising to give us freedom, liberty and prosperity if we vote for him.

The only red anarchist tendency that made a modicum of practical sense in my mind was anarcho-collectivism, because at least the workers would receive the direct value of their labor hours instead of having external bodies decide how much value / worth to assign to them as a person.

If you’re going to spend your life toiling in a factory or farm to produce goods for other people, would you really want a bureaucrat or a committee or even a direct voter body deciding how much you deserve for that labor, while giving someone who does the same job (or a much easier job) more than you because of potentially biased reasons?

Regardless, anarcho-collectivism still only really values the workers who are most willing to submit to the factory grind and put in the most hours. Anarcho-collectivism still holds ecodical industry and luxuries for cityfolk up above all life on the planet... So that 19^th century ideology isn’t going to save you either. Throw it right in the trash with the bread book because this “reform-industrial-society” charade isn’t helping when the planet is on fire.

If industrial communism were actually implemented in the real world, you can be relatively certain that some kind of authority would need to be put in place to prevent bad actors from showing up at the store and taking a community’s entire monthly production. People would need to police the store and judge whether someone is worthy of taking as much as they’re taking. They’d need to become authorities, upholders of law and order. Purveyors of “justice”.

Let’s be clear now because I know a lot of red anarchists are going to try to “justify” this authority as being “necessary for the good of society” as they will do. Policing who can take food and how much they can take is a clear authority. Not a “justified” authority, because such a thing simply does not exist.

And this store-policing is not the anarchist tactic of “direct action” either, let’s make that clear right now, because it’s a frightenly common misunderstanding with red anarchists. Creating a police force has nothing to do with direct action.

Direct action is an isolated use of force unconnected to institutional systems of power. People who engage in direct action are not appealing to a higher authority for legitimacy. Their action is not legitimized by anyone and they receive no protection or reward from an authority as they take the action. There’s no monopoly on violence being granted to them by an authority, so there’s nothing to guarantee their safety from retaliation if the action fails or succeeds.

There’s no institutional power-imbalance being created when someone takes direct action against an authority. The authority already created the power imbalance, and your direct action is a form of defense to shield you, your ecosystem or your community from that imbalance.

Direct action is an entirely anarchist tactic, but pinning badges on people, officiating them, and giving them the authority (and the monopoly on violence) to police a store and withhold food and products from certain people for whatever reason has nothing to do with anarchy. Building a hierarchy like this has nothing to do with anarchy.

Police officers and judges (authorities) ruling over a communal store is authoritarian. An officiated police force is a completely different thing from the isolated use of force by a lone actor or a small group of actors to preserve life and combat authority (direct action).

Creating a police force, even if it’s formed of volunteers, even if they were elected, even if they make decisions collectively, even if their uniforms are red and black, even if the officers placed on duty are regularly rotated, is authoritarian by any definition. There are no anarchist cops. An “anarchist cop” couldn’t be a bigger oxymoron.

Here’s an example of direct action: me punching a logger who is cutting down my favorite tree. This action is completely removed from structural systems of authority because I have no authority or structural power behind me. There’s nothing legitimizing my use of force or giving me a monopoly on violence. My use of force doesn’t extend beyond my own two fists. Since assault is illegal, and his logging is legal, the logger has the full authority of the law behind him, so any action I take to oppose that authority is punching up. It’s fighting to curve a gross power imbalance. It’s anarchy.

In this civilized world, I could be severely punished by law enforcement for using force to stop his desecration of a forest. As the state gave him his logging permit, he has authority over the forest and every life that depends on the forest to survive. He punches down every time he fells a tree. He is the full embodiment of archy. If I choose to stand in his way, there’s no state behind me, no court, no police force. Me physically stopping a logger from felling trees is an isolated use of force to strike back at a system of authority. The logger destroys life for profit, and if I take action to stop him because I don’t want to see the forest become a barren desert, I don’t become a state or any kind of authority based on that decision to fight back.

Forming a police squad and a bureaucracy to patrol and govern an officiated communal store, appointing authorities to sit and judge how much each individual deserves to eat, on the other hand, creates legitimized systems of power and an institutional monopoly on violence. It creates a state, or at the very least a proto-state that will later develop into a full-blown state as the bureaucracy grows.

The German philosopher Max Weber defined the state as a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. State violence, whether it’s committed on behalf of the state by a politician, a judge, a cop or a logger, is always a legitimate force. Any violence the state does is immediately “justified” simply by virtue of it being dispensed by a legitimate state actor who is doing it for the good of the state and its authority.

A logger with an official permit to slice up a forest is thus fully justified in the eyes of society to do as much harm to the forest as is deemed necessary by the authorities who granted the permit.

A state exists wherever an authority can authorize and legitimize violence. There is no way for an anarchist to “justify” a coercive, authoritarian institution such as a police force that will no doubt be biased against minority groups and lead to the accumulation of power by the dominant group, and abuses of power by the people doing the policing. Even if minority groups are involved in the police force, the majority group will still oppress their groups.

A society that mass-produces goods and distributes them in communal stores will manifest itself as a state, regardless of Kropotkin’s insistences that everyone will work voluntarily and then take whatever they want from the stores. There’s no practical scenario where industrial labor is truly voluntary. There’s no practical scenario on this Earth of rapidly diminishing returns where “free” stores won’t need to be policed to deny unlimited goods to individuals and groups who the governing body decides are less worthy of the fruits of their labor.

Anarcho-communism simply isn’t revolutionary as long as we are depleting all our resources in the name of industrial civilization; something anarcho-communism demands as an industrial, work-based ideology that revolves around civilizing the land and its inhabitants in order to extract resources and labor. There’s nothing revolutionary about continuing the global ecocide under the guise of democracy. Every anarchist should understand the difference between isolated force and authority, but very few self-identifying social anarchists seem interested in this and are content prating on about “justified authority”, debating “how an anarcho-communist police force could work” and excitedly discussing Chomsky’s latest speech telling them to vote for a lesser-evil neoliberal politician.

I know I sound bitter, but I’ve been disillusioned with the majority of red anarchists I come into contact with for years now and they only seem to get worse as industrial society plods on and the sands and seas climb further up our necks.

Anarcho-communism is not the solution to fighting authority, it’s simply a skin-deep re-brand of authority. A sparkly new paint job. There’s a reason so many ancoms strive to “justify” authority. They don’t actually care about reaching for anarchy.

Is Communism Always Authority-Forming?

In my mind, communism can only work outside of industrial mass society. A small community gathering or growing supplies and freely sharing them with the rest of the community. Each community trading with other small communities. Marx and Engels ironically dubbed this hunter-gatherer form of society that had long existed in human history as “primitive communism” and suggested it was inferior to their advanced industrial communism that valued the factory and centralized city life above all else.

Mass industry requires mass agriculture, mass labor, mass transport, mass resource extraction, mass construction, mass policing, mass military... Mass society and will only lead right back to capitalism and statism because it’s so unwieldy and authority forming. Any communist tendency built around industrial exploitation is going to create all kinds of fucked up hierarchies and just lead us right back to the apocalyptic status quo.

Most communists I’ve talked to about this are unable to accept that some people will still act like assholes if capitalism collapses, which I’d probably find endearing if these people weren’t such giant assholes themselves; calling me a privileged reactionary for daring to suggest their blessed ideology might have some flawed logic. They insist everyone will cease being selfish assholes once capitalism is done away with because “assholes are only assholes as long as capitalism pits them against each other.”

Even if we wake up one morning and marketing, consumer culture and wealth are all done away with, we still have generations of indoctrination in authoritarian behavior to contend with. That doesn’t go away overnight. But even without consumer culture to guide them, people are still completely capable of being assholes. Going back to before mass-society even existed, people would murder each other and take their stuff. They’d raid each other’s settlements, they’d steal their children, they’d fight over territory and cultural differences. These aren’t things that were invented by capitalism and they won’t go away just because communism is declared.

People aren’t inherently just or unjust. Humanity is not good or bad. Every person is an individual, each with different experiences, motivations, traumas. Communism expects everyone to be altruistic. Capitalism expects everyone to act out of greed and self preservation. Neither is true because both are ideologically driven worldviews that attempt to define human nature in order to instruct us how to behave by instilling us with their morals. People are greedy, people are generous, people are kind, people are mean-spirited. Every person in the world is all of these things and more. People are not defined by one single personality trait their entire lives.

I’m haunted by every shitty thing I’ve ever done and I’m sure I’ll do more shitty things yet, despite my best intentions. No one is above making mistakes. Mutual aid is a great thing, but it needs to be earned. There are people in our lives that we trust and people we can’t stand to be around. Not everyone is deserving of the products of our labor. Some people in the world will always try to exploit you, even if they already have everything their hearts could possibly desire. Some people will be kind to you no matter how big an asshole you are.

I’ve been accused by communists of being cynical, of being “regressive” and “counter-revolutionary” because I don’t buy into the communist notion that humans are inherently good and they just need the right industrial system to bring that good out of them.

Any society where I’m expected to just sit back and watch as a logger destroys my ecosystem because he’s serving the “greater good” isn’t a society I want any part of. I value my autonomy over the desires of traumatized workers pushing buttons for 8 hours a day in a city far-removed from me. I’d rather take the logger’s chainsaw away than fiddle my thumbs as he takes everything I know, and to hell with whatever bureaucratic process enshrined him with the right to decimate the forest to give bread to the workers. Fuck the workers and their bread and their fully-automated luxury communism and their divine democratic rights.

There’s simply no reason to believe exploitative assholes will go away if communism is ever enacted.

There’s a man I know who constantly exploits me for my labor, and I always go along with it. He dangles a carrot on a stick in front of me every time; promising that after I help him, he’ll hook me up to his well so I can have free water for my trees. For years he’s made this promise.

I’ve spent countless hours doing dangerous work for this guy with no reward. He always disappears after I do the work without giving me what he promised. Then the next week he wakes me up again at 6am on a Saturday by honking his horn, apologizes for not getting around to hooking me up to the well yet, saying he was too busy or in the hospital or had a family emergency, promises he’ll do it this week, and then I’m hanging off a cliff or a roof repairing pipes for him all day while he barks orders at me.

I do it because I’m a fucking pushover who can’t say no to people due to my ridiculous kind nature. But whenever I ask him for anything, I’m met with a blank stare, an abrupt subject change or a sorry excuse. I was stranded a two hour walk down the mountain last week when my car broke down, and he drove right around me and didn’t even slow down. When I saw him later, he swore on his life that he didn’t see me because the sun was in his eyes. I nodded and shrugged.

Communism wouldn’t stop this lying dipshit from exploiting me; he’d still need someone to fix his leaky pipes, start up his diesel generator, saw off the upper branches of his olive trees and climb shoddy makeshift structures for him regardless of the economic system in place. He’d still give me a sob story about his painful ulcer and I’d still do the hard work to spare him the pain of doing it himself. He wouldn’t stop being an exploitative asshole just because democracy is installed in the workplace. He wouldn’t start practising mutual aid when he goes to great lengths to avoid all work and shames other people into doing it for him.

Red anarchists throw every insult in the book at me when I voice my doubts about their wistful ideologies; condemning me for being critical of the amazing breadman Kropotkin or their “green industry” tsar Professor Bookchin... It’s hard to give my perspective as an indigenous anarchist to these people who are so hostile to any worldview that doesn’t validate their luxurious industrial lifestyle and their driving desire to make that lifestyle more democratic in order to receive a bigger share of the pie.

Between the shouts of “reactionary lifestylist” and “dirty primmie” they lobby at me, I try to explain my perspective to them. I see suffering in the world and I want to make sense of it. I’m not satisfied just handwaving it away and clinging to fanciful utopian ideologies designed to energize European factory workers from the 1800s. I don’t believe red-industry will cure society of all its ills and free humans from their chains.

The warehouse I’ve worked in for more than a decade will not become magically liberating if I’m given the power of democracy. It’ll still be a miserable fucking place filled with toxic pesticides that are slowly killing me.

Some ancoms will no doubt unironically reply to this piece with reasoning that just amounts to “no, actually, anarcho-communist industry will be a utopia because Kropotkin said so”. They’ll quote a bunch of literature to me that is nothing but empty promises by long-dead European philosophers for industrial egalitarianism. I’ve really run out of patience for that line of thinking. It’s no different than a 7 year old trying to win an argument by insisting “because my dad said so”... But when it comes down to it, that’s all most reds can do. Quote their heroes and cling to the hope that they’ll be proven right some day. That hope is what keeps them going as their miserable civilized lives burn the world up. “All our suffering will end once we have democracy in the workplace”. Those poor, deluded, hope-filled souls.

Everything I know tells me industry cannot be made “green” any more than capitalism can be made ethical. All agricultural industrial society in history has resulted in ecocide and eventually collapse. When you extract resources, burn fuel, manufacture goods and distribute them to millions or billions of people, you do real irreversible harm to ecosystems and human lives. Ancoms are not magical beings that can somehow escape the consequences of this because they’re supposedly “good” and “egalitarian”.

If anarcho-communism were ever attempted, half the “nuances” it has will be thrown out for being fantastic, half-baked and impossible to implement in an industrial mass-society. Compromises will be made to make the system functional. A lot of things have been claimed about communism, but whenever its been attempted in real life models, almost none of those claims have come to fruition and they never will because:

a) Resources aren’t infinite.

b) Industrial output has a high ‘hidden’ cost, and most importantly:

c) Work isn’t voluntary.

No matter how much you swear you’ll make labor democratic, no one is working because they really want to. They’re working because the system requires them to work to survive. No amount of democracy will stop the system from asserting its authority on everyone inside its suffocating walls. Abolishing the borders between territories will do nothing if industrial civilization continues to box us in and starve us if we dare to resist its rule. If we can’t escape civilization, the whole world is nothing more than one big prison.

Civilized people labor to create consumer goods because the system gives them no other option if they want to survive. The only way people will continue to toil in the factories and warehouses in “a communist society” is if they are forced to by the system. No free hunter gatherer will voluntarily give up their freedom to stand at an assembly line pushing buttons so other people can have Corn Flakes, weedkiller and AAA batteries. It’s something that needs to be forced on humans by domestication and the joined threat of violence and starvation that props up the industrial system.

Industry is a clear authority and anarcho-communist theory is completely oblivious to that. Anarcho-communism is nothing more than an attempt to reform the tyranny of civilization to give it a sly smile. It’s the anarchist version of Barack Obama promising change but just delivering more of the same and expecting you to celebrate it.

Seize the Means of Destruction! (And fucking burn it to the ground…)

Ancoms insist “people would choose to produce only what is needed” in an anarcho-communist society. That word; “needed” is really useless. Anyone can define anything as being “needed”, but almost none of the things defined as such are actually needed. This is why industrial communism isn’t really compatible with anarchy: anything and everything will be defined as “needed” by domesticated people, no matter how authority-forming the things are. If it means they get to keep consuming, anarcho-consumers would happily define everything from pesticides to slaughterhouses to automobile plants as “needed”. This is the power of democracy. Whatever narrative the collective adopts becomes the official, approved narrative and anyone questioning it will be seen as subversive and dangerous and a threat to order and common decency.

This “needed industry” argument is a lot like the “justified authority” argument a lot of red “anarchists” keep making to uphold every shitty authority they cling to all the way up to the state, prisons and the police.

Usually they’ll just rename these authorities “the commune”, “the social re-integration facility” and “the peacekeepers” and be satisfied that they’ve come up with a real change. It’s meaningless. Domesticated people will not allow themselves to see past the carefully manufactured alienating world they’ve inherited. Very few civilized people are willing to risk losing what they perceive as the great comforts imbibed to them by industrial civilization.

Even if they recognize how strangling these “comforts” actually are to them and everything else on the planet, instead of rejecting them outright, they draw up elaborate plans to reform the way those “comforts” are produced and dispersed. Most of these plans, when deconstructed and debullshitted, ultimately amount to little more than slapping the word “anarcho” in front of everything and trusting it’ll be all good because it’s anarchized now.

People thrived without industry and agriculture for millennia. Civilization has led to the extinction of near everything on the planet. 99.9% of industrial goods are not “needed” by humanity, they’re wanted.

Ancoms aren’t going to suddenly decide to give up their phones, Doritos and washing machines when they find out they’re environmentally destructive. They’ll just rubber-stamp all the things they want as “needed”, “eco-friendly”, “sustainable” or “green” and call it a day. And we’ll be expected to keep working our miserable jobs and like it because now they’re anarcho-jobs in an anarcho-society with anarcho-exploitation and anarcho-masters.

Keeping people in the mines and factories building those consumer goods that “the people” decide they “need” will require massive authority that will be just another iteration of capitalism in all but name. Just like “communist” Russia and “communist” China and “communist” North Korea. Not a trace of communism will survive once industrial civilization is done grinding everything up. There’s nothing about “anarcho-communism” that will spare it from the same fate. Claiming to be anti-authority rings hollow when you cling to authoritarian industrial civilization, workerism and all the other authorities ancoms at large decide are “justified”.

A bureaucracy will always be instilled in an organized mass-society and this is why industrial communism isn’t tenable. It’s why every time industrial communism has been attempted, it has simply been manifested as a perverse collective-capitalism with even more centralized power than regular-flavor capitalism. The bureaucracy will quickly morph into a state, and by definition the society will no longer be communist. But of course, it’ll keep calling itself “communist” and ensure the distinction between capitalism and communism remains paper-thin so people won’t be able to envision a better world than the brutal industrial wasteland we’ve all been born into.

Any system that allocates resources and polices people is functionally a state, regardless of what it brands itself as.

All implementations of industrial society have failed to liberate people, instead making their lives more and more miserable with each stage of industrialism, and to claim that attaching “anarcho” to the front of an industrial system will make a difference is absolutely fucking ridiculous.

Communism has never succeeded at liberating us historically and will not suddenly succeed just because you promise you’re better than other communists and you and all your super-libertarian ancom comrades will pick up cans of paint and make all the chimney stacks bright green.

Authoritarian behavior will only ever be repeated if society is structured around authoritarian institutions like industrialism and democracy. Both Marx and Kropotkin’s communism are centred around these institutions because their ideologies require that people be controlled by bureaucracy. Whether it be decentralized democratic bureaucracy or centralized party bureaucracy is irrelevant. The result is the same: Authority and control.

Without this bureaucracy, the society would descend into anarchy. Yes, wonderful, amazing, freeing anarchy. The very thing every red fears most because it would mean they’d no longer get to forcibly structure society and people around their sacred ideology and force their authority and morality on them. Domesticated people sit trapped in sterile little boxes, fed a steady drip of pesticide and high-fructose corn syrup as they labor, consume, consume, consume and then die.

This isn’t life. This isn’t anarchy. This is a waking nightmare, a depraved hell-world that has all of us thoroughly brainwashed into thinking it acceptable. Branding it “communist” or “libertarian socialist” or “democratic” or “egalitarian” or “decentralized” or “anarcho-communist” will not end the nightmare. It will not stop the planet-wide ecocide civilization has wrought on all living things. The means of destruction being controlled by industrial workers instead of industrial bosses will not stop the ecocide.

Seizing the factories and making them democratically managed as all reds yearn to do won’t do anything to save us from violence, misery, alienation and eventual extinction.

The only way to destroy authority is to burn industry to the ground before it devours every last lifeform on the planet.

The only chance we have to survive what’s coming in the next few years as our ecosystems are collapsing all around us is to tear down every factory and close every port and slice up every road until civilization is in ruins.

But in all honesty, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to watch television and sip iced tea and we’re going to wait for the end. I’m going to keep watching in silence as the local bread man fells the last remaining wilderness.

Maybe the planet will recover somewhat in a few millennia and maybe the next lifeform that evolves will have more sense than the desertmakers. This is the last hope I cling to.

Against Community, Towards Supportive Friendship

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/friendship> on September 3, 2025.

Last updated: 2 August 2022

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The Dangerous Failings of Community

As long as I’ve been around other anarchists, I’ve witnessed an unremitting reverence for the sanctity of community.

The idea of community is held in such high regard by anarchists that it’s eerily reminiscent of USA liberals paying fealty to the “sacred ground” of their nation’s capitol. Community is something consecrated and unassailable to anarchists. It’s the bond that binds us to our fellow true believers. It gives us belonging, direction, purpose, safety, all those good things.

But does it really?

The more time I spend amongst anarchists, the more I find the “anarchist community” ideal to be inherently unattainable and isolating. It seems every attempt at building an organized egalitarian community ends up enabling gross misconduct by certain members and the end result is always demoralizing burn-out for everyone involved.

The attempt to group disparate strangers who barely get along, based on an imagined affinity (typically ideology, but painted in such broad strokes so as to be rendered inconsequential) inevitably manages to crash and burn every time.

A gentle, alienated soul’s deep pining to build community will often get exploited by abusive people so they can insert themselves into their target’s life. By attaching themselves to a community, virtually anyone can gain instant access to the minds and hearts of people that would never have associated with them otherwise. Anarchists are so dedicated to maintaining the ideals of egalitarianism, openness, inclusivity, mutuality and fraternity, that they’ll put up with a whole lot of shit from people that demonstrate over and over again that they don’t share the same values as them. Abusive people are tolerated and even accepted by us so long as they identify as belonging to the anarchist movement, because of course anarchists aren’t fond of gatekeeping or erecting barriers to entry.

When a person announces they’re a member of the anarchist community, we immediately hand them a black cat badge to pin to their shirt (usually metaphorically, sometimes literally) and welcome them with open arms, no questions asked. Predictably, parasitic abusers are able to swagger into our spaces flashing that official membership badge, and they get to work preying on vulnerable, empathetic people who are looking for fellow travelers who share their ideals.

Again and again I’ve witnessed these entitled parasites take advantage of the compassionate anarchist spirit and they’ll often spend years tearing people’s lives apart until the community becomes so toxic and unbearable that everyone abandons ship to try and preserve their mental health and physical safety. In the end, everyone seems to end up more exploited and traumatized by the anarchist community experience than they would have been without it.

Due to my experiences both managing and participating in various anarchist spaces, I’d really like to throw out the entire idea of anarchist community and re-imagine how anarchistic interactions can be manifested going forward.

Much like the related ideologically sacred institution of democracy, the whole concept of community is insidious and underhanded, an ideal seemingly designed to manipulate people into associating with bullies and dickheads by whittling away at basic human needs like autonomy, self-determination and consent.

Too many times, our dedication to building unfettered communities open to all people lowers our guard and lets cops, rapists and assorted authoritarians infiltrate our movements and inflict lasting damage to both our collective and individual psyches.

A community in its current form almost requires everyone involved be socialized in extreme docility, forced to exist in a perpetual state of submission to everyone around them. Otherwise, the community would almost certainly implode.

Without that docile meekness being forced on all the community members, the billions of people living boxed up and piled on top of neighbors they’re barely able to tolerate would inevitably sharpen their fangs and rip each other apart to reclaim the personal space every living being needs in order to exercise their autonomy and individuality.

If our sharp claws weren’t meticulously and regularly yanked out of our fingertips by the upholders of community, to forge us into obedient and pliable little shits, the entire concept of community would be rendered unworkable.

Both the metaphorical and literal concrete walls that contain us and our egos would quickly crumble into rubble without the authority of the community to hold them up.

There’s a word that describes how we feel when we need time to ourselves but can’t get it because we live in these vast interconnected global communities, surrounded wall-to-wall, block-to-block, nation-to-nation in every direction by other people and have no way to tune out their vociferous voices and energies. It’s the mirror image to loneliness — ‘aloneliness’. This innate state of being was surprisingly only coined recently, in 2019, by Robert Coplan, a Canadian psychologist.

If loneliness is the yearning to connect to others, being aloney is the deep-seeded need to disconnect from others and retreat into the self. This is something that becomes harder and harder as the communal collective is centered and the individual is increasingly diminished and cast as a villainous foil to the precious community ideal.

Also in 2019, a study of nearly 20,000 people (Scientific Reports volume 9, Article number: 7730) established that we need to spend regular time immersed in nature to maintain our well-being. Too often, our proven need to embrace these solitary experiences is discounted because so much reverence is placed on the building and expansion of society and community by the authorities who shape our world.

Re-imagining Our Social Bonds

Someone posed this question to me recently about my frequent critiquing of democracy:

“If you’re against democracy, how would you propose consensus be reached among an anarchist community?”

Before I can answer the question, I should point out that most definitions of ‘commune’ wildly conflict with anarchy. Take this common definition, for example:

“organized for the protection and promotion of local interests, and subordinate to the state; the government or governing body of such a community.”

So like a lot of the authority-based concepts certain anarchists feel the need to appropriate, a community is assumed by polite society to come with a certain expectation of authority.

To avoid the inevitable confusion that comes with the strange urge some people have to redefine preexisting concepts, I’d really like to bypass this loaded word completely and instead try to instill a more anarchist bent to the concept of community as anarchists presumably mean it...

So let’s just call it ‘friendship’, since that’s essentially all we desire from what we term an ‘anarchist community’: Trusted friends we can live with, play with, learn with. It’s a simple and effective word that only has positive connotations, and isn’t going to make anyone think of all the glaringly authoritarian communities held together by a state’s threat of violence and built and maintained by exploited workers who most often can’t even afford to live in said communities.

I think it’s important we use clear and concise language to describe our objectives as anarchists, and too many of the words we lean on when outlining our desires for a domination-free world have hierarchical baggage permanently weighing them down.

Okay, now let’s rephrase the question in a way that leaves no room for misinterpretation...

“How would I suggest you make decisions when you have disagreements with your friends over which course of action to take?”

Well, I wouldn’t suggest anything.

People really don’t need me or anyone to direct their interactions with their friends or dictate to them how they should define and fulfill their relationships.

If you and your friends need me to prescribe you a program to adhere to in order for your friendship to function, you’re clearly not interested in practicing anarchy.

Why even put the effort into maintaining the friendship if you need to involve an external body to create systems, laws and processes to ensure the friendship remains equitable and fulfilling? If your friend isn’t being fair to you, why are you still their friend?

Anyone who would exploit you, diminish you, neglect you or deny you your autonomy isn’t acting as a friend and doesn’t deserve to be considered one. A friend cherishes and respects you. A friend encourages you to fulfill your desires and does everything they can to help achieve your needs.

And if you’re not friends with the people you’re in disagreement with, why do you care to reach consensus with them? Why share experiences with them and tie your fate to their desires if you don’t even like them?

Is your idea of ‘community’ (friendship) a suffocating debate club where people who don’t even get along have to endlessly negotiate with each other and reach some arbitrary consensus in order to continue to co-exist?

Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to just not enter into formalized relationships with people whose values so conflict with your own as to provoke such intractable conflict?

If you truly desire anarchy, it’s important to make your own decisions unhindered by the decrees of lionized authority figures and their taped-together social systems. Only you and your friends can decide how to best maintain your friendships and how to commune with each other in a way that benefits all parties.

Unless you’re disabled in a way that affects your sociability, it’s unlikely you need formal rules of association to be directed to you before you can form bonds with other humans you wish to commune with. That’s all social systems are really, a set of rules someone decided everyone should have to follow, regardless of whether or not they share the same values. It’s fundamentally defeating to anarchy when self determination, freedom of association and autonomy are overwritten by someone else’s values. Upstanding citizens of the nation might prize free speech, democracy, morality, free markets, peaceful protest and community, but that doesn’t mean you have to.

No authoritative body should presume to possess the power to tell others how to solve disputes they have with their friends. If you can’t get along with a friend without ordinances from above then you should probably question why you remain friends with them and if the relationship is worth the emotional toll it exerts on you, your friend and those around you.

This all of course assumes you’re adept at socialization, which admittedly a lot of us aren’t, due to a diverse array of disabilities and emotional traumas, but that’s just more proof that no one can or should prescribe exact instruction to people for creating social relations amongst themselves. Every relationship is different, and the only real prerequisite should be a desire to share experiences and support and nurture each other.

Discarding Bad Relationships

Like I’ve mentioned, there are a lot of abusive, exploitative people who enter our spaces, create a world of hurt, sap everyone of their energy, sabotage our projects by creating constant conflict and division without actually contributing anything, and then when someone finally objects to their behavior, they assert their supposed democratic right to continue to force themselves on everyone because “you have to reach an understanding / consensus / agreement with your fellow community member”.

Fuck that.

If someone is abusing or exploiting you, just eject them from your orbit. You’re not under any obligation to kowtow to the desires of a person who has demonstrated they have little respect for you or your values. Once they’ve shown you they’re not your friend with a pattern of selfish and harmful actions, it’s not your responsibility to protect their ego and keep shining their black cat badge.

You have to live your own life and can’t pour all your energy into making some random bully feel included in your social circle because they’ve announced they’re some stripe of anarchist. Anarchy isn’t a numbers game, it won’t matter if there’s one less member in your anarchy club, especially when that person has demonstrated they don’t actually give two shits about doing anarchy.

We need to know our limitations. We need to stand up for each other when we see abuse and not allow the abuse to be tolerated and normalized under the guise of community, democracy and inclusivity. It’s important to set clear boundaries with people and cut ties with them when they cross those boundaries and begin to damage your mental health and sense of safety.

As for what those boundaries should be? There are so many disparate personalities and unique circumstances that can occur in a relationship, so as always it’s not realistic to set universal metrics. There’s really no fail-proof program for human association, which is why it’s so important for each able individual to be aware of their own boundaries and be ready to enforce them. But generally, if you no longer feel safe in a space because of a certain person’s presence, feel you’re exerting too much energy to satisfy their unreasonable demands and getting little back in return, or frequently feel anxiety due to their words and / or actions... It’s likely time to cut ties.

When you’re in an organized community with someone, you’re denied direct control over the relationship. Instead, your interactions are dictated by whatever social norms and rules have been developed by those who formed the community, often long before you were born. If you don’t want to be around someone any more, you have to wrestle with the system’s checks and balances, essentially pleading for permission from the community and its decision-making mechanisms to disassociate from the person.

In any community, a communal divorcing is a time, money and energy consuming social affair involving the proclamations of multiple people both familiar and unfamiliar, public hearings, and an exhaustive bureaucracy.

On the other hand, ending a simple friendship is much simpler because you directly control who you choose to spend your time with, without an entire community body inserting itself into your private life. No one can force you to be their friend and devote your time and energy to them everyday, but communities constantly force you to negotiate with unkind neighbors, relatives, coworkers, landlords, bosses, teachers and others who you’d never spend time with if you had the autonomy to choose.

Freedom of association is an anarchist principle that always manages to get undermined and maligned by the fiercely un-anarchist principles the assorted anarcho-democrats, Chomskyists and Bookchinites insist on bringing to the table. I’d argue there’s no anarchist principle more important than being able to choose who to spend your time with. I’d much rather choose a few friends than amass community members.

Systems Don’t Protect People

People protect people.

We tend to put a lot of faith in the systems that govern us, and assume they’ll protect us from harm when more often than not the systems fail us at every turn with tepid half-measures and bureaucratic meandering.

Building our own systems to live by can be a worthwhile pursuit, but if we try to extend those systems to a wider sphere of people, they’ll inevitably break down as an increasing number of those people find the system doesn’t serve their diverging needs and begin to rebel.

The bigger a community and its bureaucracy grow, the more disconnected from people and their needs the community gets, until the point where a community becomes devastatingly isolating and dehumanizing to everyone forced to exist within its towering walls.

A lot of anarchists have reacted to me speaking ill of community with fear and anger because they’ve internalized the idea that “community support” is something necessary for their survival. But if they’re being honest with themselves, by community support, they really just mean welfare from the state. This fear of losing access to healthcare, unemployment / disability insurance, and a pension doesn’t really have anything to do with their concept of community, and is really just a form of cognitive dissonance.

As an anarchist, I know the state doesn’t work for me and never will. If a community is a collective bureaucratic body that assigns duties and resources to people depending on prefigured factors, it’s acting as a state, regardless of whatever fancy new tag is affixed to it, and it will no doubt grow increasingly isolating and destructive as the years wear on and the power of its architects and benefactors is cemented.

We already have authorities that decide who gets how much and when, and it’s brought us nothing but suffering. We already have community and it treats us like trash every day of our lives. Pretending this disconnected forced grouping of disparate peoples with wildly diverging values, needs and desires is somehow capable of serving us equitably and with care and respect is mournful.

Community always seems to be the spark that ignites an inferno of hierarchy and domination. So much horrific oppression and death has been justified in the age of Leviathan by attaching it to “the good of the community”. I’ve seen so many people, including anarchists, sweep all manner of abuses under the rug in a desperate attempt to “protect the integrity of the community”. Somehow the community is always put before the people who inhabit it, as if a precarious eidolon drawn from thin air and held together by nothing but collective resolve is more sacred than life itself.

Arranging people into societies and communities and nations and cities and suburbs and civilizations that have wildly varying resources only serves to separate us and creates permanent warfare among us, with those lucky enough to belong to the more resource-rich communities getting every advantage over those in more barren, parched lands.

Community is an ever-expanding wave that washes over the land, leaving its salt in the soil and forever amassing momentum until it morphs into its final form: an impregnable global civilization with no chink in the armor, no weakness we can assail in the hopes of containing its immense authority... Until finally the wave collapses under its own weight, adding a thick layer of blood to the salted land.

Friendship can’t scale up to swallow the planet. Friendship remains forever small, personal, intimate, deliberate, voluntary, decentralized. This is a feature, not a bug. Friendship allows you to associate and disassociate with others at will, while always maintaining your individuality, the sanctuary of your headspace and the clarity of knowing who you are and what you need. The dictates of anonymous wider society and the supposed common good needn’t cloud your mind when you form friendships rather than build communities.

Community is division. It’s nationality, it’s borders, it’s imperialism, it’s haves and have nots, it’s cruel, brutal, unending warfare against the sacrificial out-groups to benefit the blessed in-groups.

Your friends don’t exploit you. If they do, they’re not your friends.

Communities exploit everyone, both within and outside their very clearly defined borders, every minute of every day of every year and they have for centuries. Draining the most underprivileged community members of their blood, sweat and tears to chiefly benefit the most privileged in the community: the bosses, the academics, the desk jockeys, the landlords.

The potholes in the neighborhoods of the working poor are always as deep as canyons, while the privileged classes who work and sweat far less can commute in the comfort of their air-conditioned Teslas bump-free on the smoothest of asphalt.

European welfare states and other ‘progressive’ communities exist on the backs of the poor of the colonized global South. Resources and intensive lifelong labor are stripped from billions of people who receive only basic sustenance in return, so the residents of those hallowed Western communities can lounge in comfort with their wide assortment of state-granted privileges.

I’ve heard some wannabe world-builders say friendship is a weak bond to base a life on, that friends are as unreliable as the anonymous community members they so revere. But those same people will always extol law, order and democracy no matter how many times those houses of straw blow up in their faces. And honestly, is anything more insufferable than utopian communists critiquing someone else’s supposed idealism?

Bureaucrats and their communal systems won’t give us anarchy. Maybe a little social democracy as a treat, at least until the system collapses back into fascism when enough wealth accrues at the top.

So what is the purpose of building an anarchist community? If the difference between a community and a group of friends is that the community is bigger, more impersonal, more bureaucratic, more policed, with highly diverging values and a centralized concentration of power... Then what use is community to a group of people who seek to decentralize everything in their path, dismantle systems, negate authority and become as ungovernable as possible? What use is community to anarchy?

I really feel we should be making friends rather than building communities.

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Audio Version:

https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/370-against-community-building-towards-friendship-by-zip

Eradicate Left Unity: Make Bands, Not Communities. Anarchy, Not Leftism

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/leftunity> on September 3, 2025.

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Introduction

Behold the ministers of left-unity in all their glory!

“The only way to achieve revolution is to put aside our differences and unite together as leftists and then after we overthrow capitalism we can then debate on what form of government to replace it with.”

Leave it to a red preaching left-unity at us to not understand the very first thing about anarchists: We want no form of government. This mentality really sums up the absurdity of the entire left-unity moment.

“I don’t get why so many people try to distinguish Marxism and Anarchism. Marxism is a vital part of Anarchist ideology.”

Um, no, it isn’t.

“I don’t think it’s a disservice to acknowledge (anarchism’s) inspirations. Anarchism has taken many cues from Marx. It’s just a fact.”

Bullshit. Nearly every point Marx made was ripped straight from Proudhon and burdened with Marx’s authoritarian hokum, as I’ll demonstrate later in this essay. Anarchy has no need or want of Marx or ism.

“As a libertarian socialist, I would much rather live in an ML state like the USSR, North Korea or China than in this capitalist hellhole.”

It’s always easy to spot someone moments from casting away their long-held superstitions against dictators and police states and signing up with the red ministry. Life is so much easier when you put your faith in a higher power that promises to bring you eternal salvation, to smite all your enemies and create paradise on Earth for you and all true-believers.

“Marx wanted a stateless, moneyless, and classless democratic society. Anarchists want that as well. The difference lies in how we get there.”

Gah, that irksome creed of every insufferable red entryist.

“We’re all headed in the same direction, the difference is only how far one is willing to travel. Someone might leave on the next stop, but before that stop it might be beneficial to work together. Establishing ideological purity that excludes our ML comrades hurts progress.”

Ugh... I feel dirty just quoting these internet commies and their perverse people-conglomeration fantasies, but it’s the best way to establish the purpose of this essay. This one’s going to cover a lot of ground, from entryism and left-unity, to the origins of anarchy and Marxism, to the ways we think about the community ideal and belonging, to a lived anarchy that’s persisted in east Africa for centuries, and finally the psychology behind the strange current of Han Chinese nationalism that’s rising within the white settler-colonial left. Let’s get started.

Exhuming The Left-Unity Corpse

The disturbing trend of self-proclaimed non-sectarian libertarian-socialists and “anarcho-Marxists” that have been attaching themselves to the anarchist discourse can be traced back with a straight line to the proliferation of “left-unity” spaces.

Most of these spaces exist on cursed corporate portals like Reddit, Twitter and Facebook, but they’ve also spread into meatspace. Currently, one of the most prominent virtual left-unity spaces spawns from the US social democrat “Chapotraphouse” podcast, along with assorted inoffensive Reddit spaces led by r/breadtube, the “leftbook” corner of Facebook and several Youtube personalities that start out identifying with particularly milquetoast strains of red anarchism, but then gradually embrace state-capitalist narratives before inevitably swearing off anarchy altogether and doing round the clock propaganda for the Chinese state and its incredibly successful strain of red fascism.

Self-hating settlers who accessorize themselves with various red fascist tendencies infiltrate anarchist and socialist spaces on corporate platforms and initiate left-unity policies that successfully ban all criticism of their backwards conservative views. The more vocal opponents of the new policy are quickly purged for breaking left-unity, leaving a more passive audience who are ripe for indoctrination.

Then the propaganda starts. Endless authoritarian memes to normalize gulags, guillotines, firing squads, violent struggle sessions against anyone who resists social stratification, dictators and genocide. Tomes of nonsensical ideological “theory” is then injected into the eyeballs of alienated young settlers who, for obvious reasons, are starved of cultural identity and belonging. The process ends when the targets are thoroughly brainwashed and can now only see the world through the increasingly warped tankie lens.

Once the transition to their new religion is complete, almost immediately, any ideas that conflict with the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Deng and Xi (never mind that they all contradict with each other) create desperate cognitive dissonance in their minds. So these pasty emotionally-stunted people angrily lash out at the unindoctrinated for being “radlibs”, “western chauvinists” and “imperialists” rather than risk parting with their new-found identity, community and belonging.

Once the majority in the newly minted left-unity community are comfortable joking about rounding up and killing “kulaks”, “anarchist bandits” or more recently “Uighur terrorists” and quoting Chinese state media to counter all the “imperialist western propaganda” from the mouths of the various minority groups being imprisoned and enslaved by the Chinese state (for their own good, they’ll insist), the shaming campaign begins.

Anyone in the space who breaks with the red fash party line is lambasted and ridiculed into submission. The remaining libertarians in the space now find themselves hopelessly outnumbered by scornful white settlers with daddy issues telling them they’re imperialist CIA stooges for thinking the Uighurs maybe shouldn’t be put in concentration camps or the Hong Kong and Tibetan people should get self-determination (watch tankies insist Tibetans who don’t want to be ruled by China are fascists and China is, in fact, saving them from themselves).

In order to not be shunned and purged by their peers, the anarchists in the left-unity space adopt an obscene anarcho-tankie ideology that allows them to maintain their affections for feel-good libertarian philosophers like Chomsky, Bookchin and Kropotkin, while somehow fusing the authoritarian third positionist fascist dogma enforced from the top down by their chosen community.

Uncritical support for every empire that competes with the USA’s, the insistence that anarchism and communism are one and the same because “they have the same end goal”, the claim that anarchist communes and an ML state can co-exist in harmony despite a mountain of historic evidence to the contrary, the attempt to whitewash and obfuscate failed authoritarian concepts like the dictatorship of the proletariat and the vanguard, the nonsensical belief that they can be an anarchist and also a Marxist or even a Dengist... Suddenly they’re able to take wildly contradicting ideas and hack them together in order to be accepted by the elitist red fash echo chamber they so desperately want the approval of.

The conflicting ideas grow increasingly out of whack the further down the rabbit hole the left-unity space takes them, and the ridicule they get for their remaining libertarian attachments begins to eat at their ego, until finally they post “How I went from an anarkiddie to a principled scientific analytical dialectic Marxist-Leninist with Chinese characteristics” and the transition from anarchy-curious to fully programmed red fascist shitlord is complete.

Perhaps all these conservative settlers calling themselves communists are hoping to alleviate their white guilt in some perfunctory way by identifying with ideologies that are little more than shallow anti-Americanism: Denouncing their home imperial empire and presumably all the power and privileges it lavishes them with (fat chance), but spending their days on Reddit and Twitter stumping for every competing imperial empire (China, Russia, Iran), no matter how tenuous a connection the empire has to their supposed socialist ideology.

Corporate platforms that give space to leftists are always organized in a way that requires a rigid hierarchical governance, giving the most power to the most senior moderators. As soon as a small group is able to mount big enough struggle sessions to rise to the top of the ranks of the virtual hierarchy, they’re granted complete control over the space forever and cement their power with a quick purge of anyone who objects to the new management.

They’ll find an assortment of ways to justify the purges, including claims that the dissenters are “wrecking” the space, that they’re racist Sinophobes for objecting to China’s treatment of ethnic minorities, or that they’re simply breaking the newly written left-unity rules by being sectarian, divisive or anti-communist. Nine out of ten people in the space will quickly adapt to the new status quo so they don’t risk losing their place in “the community”. Because the good of the precious community always comes first.

The truth is collectivists are all looking to be led and dictated to and given a role to play by their masters, while anarchy is all about telling people to think for themselves and reject all authority.

The tankie route is much easier for people to take because it doesn’t require real effort or self reflection. A prospective tankie just needs to follow the program, parrot the propaganda, swallow the lies, never dissent against party dogma, and they find automatic praise and acceptance and are able to feel like members of an elite group of “radicals” without actually doing anything radical or engaging in any kind of self-reflection.

Anarchists ask much more of ourselves and we never rest on our laurels or praise our associates for their obedience. We actually strive to unmake domination in all its forms, kill every cop in our heads, turn every social institution inside out, do anarchy in our lives at every opportunity and tell anyone who tries to rule us in any way to fuck off and die... That all takes a lot of fucking effort. Much easier to repost gulag memes on 4chan all day and be showered with praise from your fellow AK-47 enthusiasts.

While reds endlessly thirst for domination, bureaucracy and performative politburo, spending their gloomy little lives bossing all their deferential underlings around while promising them a magical revolution some day if they just stick to the program, prop up dear-leader and evangelize from the good book of Marx, anarchists are actually out there in the world waging perpetual warfare on everything and anything that would dominate us.

Left-unity is a deliberate ploy by disturbed groomers to indoctrinate impressionable young minds into their authoritarian red fascist cult and force them to abandon any dangerous individualist beliefs they might have once held so they can be accepted within the collective’s rigid hierarchy. Joe Commie can’t risk getting called a radlib or an anarkiddie by members of the Soviet reenactment society for forming their own thoughts or questioning daddy’s bullshit-laden narratives in any way.

“Left-unity” has never been anything more than tankie doublespeak for “obey us or be purged”. Don’t fall for it. Burn the space down before you let the scum of the earth get their hooks in it.

Red Fash Entryism

“Entryism is a tactic whereupon members of a political group join another group with the (often secret) intention of changing its principles and plans.”

“Entryism provides a means for a small but determined group to leverage their influence onto a larger sphere by using an infiltrated group’s resources.”

Before the red fash brigade can cement their power and seize control of a space to control the discourse, turning it into yet another boring apparatchik congregation, they need to do a whole lot of good old fashioned entryism.

Like any pious door-to-door missionary, once they’ve wedged themselves into the building with some gentle inclusivity-pleas and cries that they’re being oppressed by “sectarians”, it’s not long before they’re moving towards the stairs and getting ready to start their climb to the top floor where they can really let loose... Here are some examples of entryists at work on Raddle.me; an anti-authoritarian and illegalist space I founded:

“China has to put them in re-education camps because they’re terrorists, they pose a serious threat to society. The party can’t let dangerous people run around throwing bombs at schools, they have to maintain public order, so if the Uighurs are going to keep doing terrorist attacks, they need to be dealt with, it’s as simple as that.”

Is there anything a red fash enjoys more than casting ethnic minorities as villains in their Chairman Übermensch fantasies? This entryist worked hard to convince a site full of scumbag thieves and anarchists that the state needs to protect public order from ‘terrorists’. The irony was apparently lost on them.

Stay mad Western white libs. Accept facts that the only genocide happening in China is against poverty and outdated transit. But keep pretending that you’re against “all genocide” when you have literal concentration camps at the border of your countries. If only you were just as furious and took that much effort to focus on that than on China. Supporting CIA-funded terrorism in Xinjiang is the epitome of your white liberalism. China will keep winning and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The fact that this chuckle-head is a white boy from California, USA of course doesn’t stop him from weaponizing his own whiteness against a couple of people (non-western people of color, mind you) who were concerned about China’s self-admitted ethnic cleansing campaign. The entire tankie defense for ML atrocities always seems to come down to snarky shaming and whataboutism taken to the extreme.

“If there’s actually a genocide happening, I find it hard to believe the anti-Islamic GOP is the group that’s most concerned about Muslims in China. If there’s actually a genocide happening, I find it hard to believe that countries with large Muslim populations aren’t equally concerned, or even more concerned. If there’s actually a genocide happening, I find it hard to believe that China still has almost three times as many mosques-per-worshipper as the U.S.”

I find it hard to believe. If there’s actually a genocide happening. I find it hard to believe. If there’s actually a genocide happening. I find it hard to believe. If there’s actually a genocide happening... They’re not even subtle with the brainwashing.

ML states have done so many atrocities at this point that I don’t know why tankies bother denying it when a new one happens. The USSR alone was responsible for the de-Tatarization of Crimea, the genocide of the Ingrian Finns, the ethnic cleansing of Poles, the mass gulaging and pogroms of Greeks, the deportation of the Karachays, the deportation of the Kalmyks, the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush (Aardakh), the deportation of the Balkars, the deportation of Azerbaijanis from Armenia, the deportation of the Meskhetian Turks, the deportations of the Chinese and Koreans, the execution and deportation of Latvians, the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe and the Holodomor famine that largely happened due to the USSR’s confiscation and export of all the grain stores in central and eastern Ukraine, and preventing people from acquiring more food by banning free movement.

Then there’s communist Czechoslovakia’s Romani sterilizations, the Cambodian genocide, Bulgaria’s “revival process”, Vietnam’s Montagnard persecution, the Isaaq genocide in Somalia, the Hmong genocide in Laos, the Gukurahundi massacres in Zimbabwe and the mass starvation of anywhere between 15 and 55 million people that happened in China during Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”.

At what point did tankies of the past switch from denying one of their genocides to praising it and insisting it was justified because the victims were kulaks? I give it 3 years, tops, before this clown’s narrative switches from “I find it hard to believe” to “well, they were a threat to the revolution so they had to go”.

“Why is it that when I go to “tankie” internet spaces I see genuine respect for other viewpoints and an interest in discussing and working with everyone willing to unite against the ruling class, but when I go to “anarchist” internet spaces all I see is a bunch of punching left and people calling MLs fascists and so on? Exaggeration of course, there are some actual principled anarchists in these places, but the radlibs (that’s all you fuckers who use the term “red fash” by the way) clearly own the place.”

This one’s a self-proclaimed “anti-imperialist anarchist” who thinks opposing China’s genocide is disrespectful to red fash. Brilliant bit of entryism that as usual tries to cast anyone who pushes back against authoritarianism as “unprincipled” and uncooperative and standing in the way of progress. Accusing us of “punching left” for rejecting ethnic cleansing is the cherry on top of this turd cake.

“Do you not see the difference between calling someone an “anarkiddie” and calling someone a red fascist? I’m not sure why I’d need to explain this to you, but you realize a fascist is one of the worst things you can possibly be, right? I hope I won’t be criticized for saying that I believe fascists should literally be executed openly. Being a fascist is, in my mind, like being a child molester or a murderer or a slave owner. It is something which completely invalidates any right you might have to continue living your life peacefully. To be a fascist is to be an active threat to all good people in the world.”

The same entryist goes on to insist we stop calling his comrades red fascists because they’re not murderers and child molesters... Except their daddy Stalin was both a murderer and a child molester. Mao too. Oops, was that disrespectful of me? Sorry, comrade. I guess those particular fascists don’t count because then you’d have to execute yourself for praying at their altar.

If Marxist-Leninists don’t want to be called fascists they shouldn’t stan for rulers who put gays and sex workers in gulags, displaced and starved millions of indigenous people in order to colonize their land (i.e. genocide) and murdered all their political opponents — including — shock — anarchists. In other words, they should stop calling themselves Marxist-Leninists.

You can’t detach a political ideology from its creators, and even if you could, ML rulers continue to enact racist, homophobic and colonial policies today, showing that modern MLs haven’t changed in any meaningful way. And you certainly can’t expect anarchists to not think of them as fascists when anarchists have been mass-murdered throughout history by ML counter-revolutions.

“Anarkiddy” is a low-effort paternalistic insult and it makes perfect sense that tankies would come up with it. It says a lot more about MLs than it says about us. But “red fascist” isn’t a mere insult, it’s the perfect description of what the modern Marxist-Leninist-Dengist is. A fascist draped in red. And judging by how riled up they get when they hear the term, it’s working as intended.

“If you’re not getting paid by the CIA to spread nonsense about its enemies, you’re really fucking stupid.”

They’re starting to betray their true intentions here. A little strange for an anarchist to be so angry that other anarchists aren’t willing to kneel for the state with the most billionaires in the world, no?

“It simply does not seem to me that Xi is a man with total and unquestionable power over his country. I’d need to see some good evidence that this is, in fact, the case before I would believe it.”

I’m sure they’d be perfectly willing to consider all the evidence, after all they’re a principled anti-imperialist anarcho-communist! Let’s see what happens.

“How in the world am I supposed to engage you in a serious discussion when you say absolute nonsense like “China has a dictator” lmao. Have you ever in your life read a book??”

Looks like I hit a nerve and he’s gone full mask off. The strugglismo is especially strong with this one, casting himself as the white knight in charge of defending Xi Jinping’s honor by shaming strangers into compliance with the party line on internet message boards.

“Go drink some more fucking kool-aid western chauvinist radlib.”

This back and forth I had with an entryist posing as an anarchist is identical to 100 other perfectly telegraphed conversations with entryists I’ve had. They’ll try to cast doubt on the narratives of the ML state’s victims, insist their favorite ML dictators are actually accountable, equitable and democratic, accuse you of being a lackey of one of the USA’s alphabet agencies and finally label you a reactionary / western chauvinist / radlib if you continue to resist their attempts to gaslight you and normalize authoritarianism in the space.

No matter how meticulously sourced your citations are, they’ll reject all of them as “western propaganda”. If you give them evidence from the ML state itself, they’ll claim it’s being taken out of context or is a mistranslation. There’s really no way to get through their thick armor of sun-baked bullshit. I find it’s much more productive just to mock them from the get go.

A couple of the quotes I opened this essay with were some red anarchists insisting that the only difference between Marxism and anarchy is the method we use to reach our supposed shared end goal.

That’s just it though, anarchists don’t have a final destination, we embody an endless negation of authority. To assume there can be a neat and tidy goal to anarchy would be to believe archy will just go away one day, which would be a ludicrous proposition at odds with everything we know about archy. As long as humans exist, so will Leviathan.

And when I say anarchists I mean anarchists, not milquetoast libertarian socialists whose idea of praxis is posting bread memes on Reddit while rubbing virtual elbows with their genocide-denying red fascist comrades from the safety of their sterile gated condos in suburban USA.

Anarchists desire a lot more than socialists desire. We want to unmake all forms of domination, not just economic and class-based domination. That’s what makes anarchists stand apart from every other political school of thought, and to pretend we’re just alt Marxists does a great disservice to anarchy.

Anarchists demonstrably predate Marxists. Even if you only count scholarly European men (as settlers will do) and not the centuries of peoples all around the world living anarchically without naming it e.g. the Hadza people in east Africa (a fascinating anarchistic culture I’ll explore later in this essay).

Anarchy was not inspired by Marxism, in fact Marx was greatly “inspired” by Proudhon; the first person to refer to himself as an anarchist, whose work “What Is Property?”, which concluded “property is theft”, was initially praised by Marx as “the first resolute, pitiless, and at the same time scientific investigation and critique of private property”.

Marx really made his career shamelessly ripping off Proudhon’s earlier work point by point, but piling on a thick authority sludge before serving it up to the world as if he were presenting something new and not just an authoritarian perversion of Proudhon’s ideas. Once Marx found fame with his plagiarism, he then decried Proudhon as being detestable; a bad economist, a bad philosopher, whose critiques were worthless and unevolved.

From Springers “Why A Radical Geography Must Be Anarchist”:

“Marx, like Proudhon before him, argued that abolishing interest-bearing capital was destructive of capitalism. Marx, like Proudhon before him, differentiated between possession and private property and argued that cooperatives should replace capitalist firms. Marx, like Proudhon before him, argued that the working classes must emancipate themselves. Marx, like Proudhon before him, regarded property as the subjugation of the labor of others by means of appropriation. Marx, like Proudhon before him, saw the cooperative movement as a necessity of transitioning away from capitalism and thus recognized the need for communal land and workplaces. Marx, like Proudhon before him, proclaimed the need for ‘scientific socialism’. Marx, like Proudhon before him, argued that the state was an instrument of class rule, although they differed in terms of whether or not a temporary proletariat dictatorship was necessary to see it properly undone.”

Moving beyond the widely-repeated entryist lie that Marxism somehow birthed anarchy, even the entire basis for left-unity; the idea that anarchy is leftist, is also predicated on a lie.

The left / right paradigm has nothing to do with anarchy, really. It was created in the days leading up to the French revolution, to differentiate between those who supported the French republic (leftists) and those who supported the French monarchy (rightists).

A politician in the états généraux who sat on the left side of the king favored the republic, while those sitting on his right favored the monarchy. Of course, neither side wished to abolish authority. Both left and right were clearly in favor of the state, regardless of who got to rule it.

To anyone not bamboozled by entryist swindlers and their doublespeak, identifying as a leftist is a statement to the world that you support nationalism, states, borders, a monopoly on violence, being ruled by kings or presidents or central committees. Anarchists aren’t left or right wing, we’re anarchists. We reject the power machinations of both wings of government. We reject all authority.

The underlying assumption still persists in the minds of leftists and rightists today that the whole spectrum of conceivable politics need to be enacted through the state. Anarchists shouldn’t be placing themselves on either side of the fucking king.

If anarchists know anything, it’s that nothing worthwhile can come from the state and its bureaucracy, so why would any anarchists want to adopt the left wing of the state into their politics? Why would any anarchist want to fuse themselves with a legion of shitty genocide-fetishists in a grotesque display of anti-authority and pro-authority unison?

Guess what happens when someone who purports to be anti-authority joins up with an authority-happy group, helps normalize their politburo posturing, their domination role-playing and amplifies their grotesque messaging for them? They cease to be anti-authority. There’s nothing anarchist about giving petty tyrants more power and a bigger audience.

From its inception, post-left anarchy has simply been a course-correction to restore and revive anarchy by unweighing it from the specter of authority (the left) that it’s been weighed down with by a hundred years of settler colonial humanism.

Slaying the Community Ideal & Exploring a Living Example of Anarchy

The libertarian socialists (I refuse to call them anarchists) who succumb to glaringly obvious entryism and embrace third positionist ideology (without ever admitting it to themselves) largely do so because they so value the idea of community, of being accepted and embraced by the other members of their supposedly non-sectarian, all-inclusive (so long as you obey an ever-expanding list of entryist rules) hugbox of a community. Because to all reds, world-building and comradeship is the very basis of their every ideological convulsion.

If the concept of community is authority-based e.g. steeped in majoritarianism, then what good is it to anarchists? Since at least 99.9% of all existing self-identifying communities and even theoretical proposals for communities are beholden to states, councils, committees, voter bodies and other forms of rulership, it’s safe to say the community ideal in itself is just another vessel of authority.

If all organized communities on the planet can be clearly demonstrated to be authority-based, then it’s a safe bet that the entire concept of community is authority-forming... By simply looking at every example in the world today, you can bet with absolute certainty that any forced grouping of people around the community ideal is going to lead everyone involved through another abusive and torturous adventure in archy.

The idea that a community can be without rulers has never been proven. The few remaining free people in the world e.g. the Hadza in east Africa (“Tanzania”) don’t live in anything resembling what we know as a community. They’re nomadic, have no leaders, no gods, no rules, no crops, no property, no marriage, no parents (Hadza children have full autonomy and essentially raise themselves), don’t extract anything from the land other than foraged food and are quick to remove themselves from the presence of anyone who tries to rule them.

Anthropologist Frank Marlowe:

“The Hadza certainly are egalitarian (Woodburn 1979, 1982a). This does not mean that there are no individuals who would like to dominate others and have their way. It is simply difficult to boss others around. If a Hadza tries to tell others what to do, which does happen now and then, the others simply ignore it; if he or she persists, they just move to another camp. Of course, the bossy person could follow them, but if people move to several different locations, the bossy person cannot control them all at once.”

I would suggest the reason the Hadza are so successful at living anarchy is because they have no attachment to the idea and the ideology of community, and will split up and drift away from a band of people without hesitation the moment the band ceases to suit their interests. The word “band” I’m using here is especially relevant since it’s distinctly compatible with the concepts of anarchy. From Britannica:

“By definition, a band was a small, egalitarian, kin-based group of perhaps 10–50 people, while a tribe comprised a number of bands that were politically integrated (often through a council of elders or other leaders).”

The Hadza live in groups of as little as 2 people, but generally their bands consist of around 30 people. The fascinating thing about Hadza bands is they can wholly consist of children without any adult supervision, demonstrating how they learn self-sufficiency and autonomy from other children from a very early age rather than through their parents.

Here’s the abstract of the journal “Evolution and Human Behavior Volume 41, Issue 1, January 2020, Pages 12–22”:

“Teaching is cross-culturally widespread but few studies have considered children as teachers as well as learners. This is surprising, since forager children spend much of their time playing and foraging in child-only groups, and thus, have access to many potential child teachers. Using the Social Relations Model, we examined the prevalence of child-to-child teaching using focal follow data from 35 Hadza and 38 BaYaka 3- to 18-year-olds. We investigated the effect of age, sex and kinship on the teaching of subsistence skills. We found that child-to-child teaching was more frequent than adult-child teaching. Additionally, children taught more with age, teaching was more likely to occur within same-sex versus opposite-sex dyads, and close kin were more likely to teach than non-kin.”

“The Hadza and BaYaka also showed distinct learning patterns; teaching was more likely to occur between sibling dyads among the Hadza than among the BaYaka, and a multistage learning model where younger children learn from peers, and older children from adults, was evident for the BaYaka, but not for the Hadza. We attribute these differences to subsistence and settlement patterns. These findings highlight the role of children in the intergenerational transmission of subsistence skills.”

Since the Hadza have no leaders or councils or any concept of social hierarchy, including the parent-child hierarchy libsocs like Chomsky are so fond of clinging to, “small bands of people” is really the perfect way to describe how they live. I wish more anarchists would gravitate towards forming temporary, transient bands of people who share common interests, rather than continuing their attempts to build permanent, massive, alienating, authority-breeding “communities”.

And perhaps the most important feature to their anarchistic way of life is that the Hadza have no specialists, with every Hadza skilled in everything they need to survive. This means there’s no division of labor and no systems or institutions are needed to create these divisions.

If we’re being honest with ourselves, the division of labor and resources is what a community is founded around inside civilization. Without the division that comes with specialism, the Hadza are able to live in complete anarchy in small, unattached bands of people where everyone owns the means of their survival. Marlowe writes:

“Each Hadza knows how to do everything he or she needs to do and does not depend on others. Each man can make his own bow and arrows, his poison, and his ax. Each man knows how to make fire, how to track, and how to make pegs to climb baobab trees and get honey. Each woman knows how to make her own digging stick, how to find tubers and dig them up, how to build a house, and how to make her own clothes, jewelry, and baskets or find gourds to use as containers for carrying water or berries. Even when it comes to medicine, each adult man and woman knows which plants to pick for different ailments.”

Since the Hadza’s anarchistic existence has no similarity to anything thought of as a community today (sedentary, hierarchical, complex legal systems, property-based, extractive, patriarchal, overflowing with authority), it wouldn’t make sense to call their way of life a community. Another word would be needed that isn’t weighed down by centuries of domination, shame and conformity, because the two ways of life simply have nothing in common. The closest political concept that describes what the Hadza have is probably Stirner’s union of egoists:

“The union of egoists is a voluntary structure formed by its members in their own immediate interests. This is a union of self-confessed selfish people, which they leave as soon as their interests are not being delivered.”

Both “a band of people” and “a union of egoists” are more descriptive phrases for living anarchy than a word as loaded and authority-laden as “community”.

A community comes with ideological baggage that needn’t exist, such as the perceived need to defend the wholly-manufactured community from externalities (even to the point of the loss of your own life), to put the needs of the community above the needs and desires of the individual and to more broadly collectivize the people who form the community as if they’re a singular, monolithic body and should act in unison at all costs, regardless of the damage this would inflict to their individuality, their autonomy and thus to anarchy.

Communities are often (always?) held together by ideology, and like all the nonsensical ideologies the world is ruled by, third positionism is showing itself to be a formidable community-builder in the perpetually-online sect.

Third Positionism

It’s important to note that since the settler-colonial far-left have embraced Dengism or “communism with Chinese characteristics” as they more often term it, the bar has really been lowered to such an extent that their ideology has become harder and harder to distinguish from the various forms of third positionist fascism.

Third positionists seek to establish monocultural nation states built around the idea of supremacist racially-homogeneous nationalism. The third position argues for a mixed economy (blending elements of a market economy with elements of a planned economy) with a dedication to eliminating weakness and “degeneracy” from society.

The third positionists claim to be opposed to both communism and capitalism, while using ideas from both, typically fusing reactionary right-wing cultural views with radical left-wing economic views. The so-called third way is really no different than the other two ways to run a society in practice, but has snappy new branding.

Since tankies have updated their ideology to center around the modern People’s Republic of China: A state that openly trumps privatization, free markets, landlords, banks, stock exchanges, private healthcare, union-busting, billionaires, ethno-nationalism, cultural genocide, expansionist colonialist armies, institutional racism / homophobia, rampant economic imperialism overseas and mass-incarceration.... It’s become very difficult to distinguish how their ideology is any different from the western neo-fascist system they already live under.

So really, the imagination of the average internet tankie has been so utterly colonized that they’re unable to envision any system that doesn’t simply reproduce the USA’s neo-fascist empire 1:1 but with a different ethnic group at the helm.

But the Chinese state certainly checks all the boxes on the list of third positionist fascism. A nation state with a mixed economy, monoculturalism, racial homogeneny, Han supremacy, a blending of capitalism and communism, conservative cultural values (including bans on “abnormal sexual behaviors”). It’s like a third positionist wet dream.

So where did third positionism originate? The term “third position” was first used by Terza Posizione, a short-lived far-right movement founded in Rome in 1979 as a supposed third way of running a society, claiming to be a middle ground between communism and capitalism.

Much earlier, Strasserism evolved out of the National Socialist German Workers Party in the 1920s and 30s and tried to do the same thing. Unlike fellow party-member Hitler, who was avidly anti-communist, they took the “socialist” part of the party’s name seriously and combined anti-capitalism and wealth-redistribution with antisemitism and German nationalism.

In 1930s and 1940s France, a number of communist and socialist parties splintered to create nationalist off-shoots . These included Jacques Doriot’s French Popular Party (from the French Communist Party) and Marcel Déat’s National Popular Rally (from the French Section of the Workers’ International).

The original National Bolsheviks in both Russia and Germany had the same idea, believing socialism needed more blatant nationalism and racism than it already had under Lenin and Stalin. In the 1980s, the concept of third positionism was taken up by the far-right, fascist political party National Front in the United Kingdom. Today there has been a resurgence in third positionist fascism under various labels, from modern nazbols to “national anarchism” to neo-Eurasianism to (I argue) Dengism.

It’s completely unsurprising that an ideology founded by virulent racist and colonialist paternalists like Marx and Engels would find support with so many racist nationalists. Here’s part of a particularly offensive Marx-Engels Correspondence from 1862 that perhaps helps us understand why Marx felt the need to fuse all of Proudhon’s innovations with a heavy dose of authoritarian dogma, and why so many racists are drawn to forming nationalist Marxist offshoots. (Warning: Racial slurs ahead).

Karl Marx:

“The Jewish nigger Lassalle who fortunately leaves by the end of this week, has lost another 5,000 thaler in speculation. I realize now that he — his head form and his hair growth are evident enough — is a descendant of niggers, who joined Moses’ exodus from Egypt. The intrusiveness of this chap is also very niggerish.”

Engels shared these white supremacist beliefs. Here he is writing about Marx’s Cuban son-in-law Paul Lafargue in 1887, who Marx enjoyed denigrating as “the negrillo” and “the Gorilla.” The letter was addressed to Lafargue’s wife, commenting on Lafargue’s decision to run for public office.

Friedrich Engels:

“Being in his quality as a nigger a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district.”

Both Marx and Engels celebrated the USA’s conquering of Mexico, further showing that their support for equity really only extended to white people in practice, and they were in full support of white nationalism and colonialism.

Marx:

“Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?”

Engels:

“In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States.”

Finally, here’s an example of Marx’s antisemitism, which of course appeals greatly to the third positionist fascists who see Marxism and fascism as being so compatible. Marx’s family had originally been Jewish, but his father swore off Judaism before he was born and converted to Evangelicalism, to better integrate himself into European society.

Marx:

“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. … Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man—and turns them into commodities. … The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange. … The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.”

Today, several third-positionist and Eurasianist media outlets such as The Grayzone and Globalresearch.ca push fascist propaganda that attacks Western empires but glorifies Eastern ones.

These media outlets are beloved by tankies because their journalists deny the Uighurs are being ethnically cleansed and attack Hong Kong protesters for resisting Communist Party of China rule. Globalresearch.ca even has articles denying the holocaust, which doesn’t seem to slow down red fascists who lap up their pro-CPC, pro-Assad and pro-Russia propaganda and spread it far and wide.

I’d suggest the only reason modern Dengist tankies don’t openly identify as fascists is because they’ve gotten so much play historically out of casting fascists as their sworn enemy after the rift that developed between Stalin and the Nazis following their earlier gentleman’s agreement to divvy up Europe between themselves.

Every devoted ideologue needs a villain before they can cast themselves as the only hero who can vanquish the great force of evil. Hey, it worked for G. W. Bush with Saddam, and it’s working wonders for Xi Jinping with the Uighurs. Most of his citizens and foreign devotees are convinced he’s keeping them all safe from those big mean social pariahs.

Indeed, the contemporary tankie is devoted to “Xi Jinping thought”, a pious and devoted sermoner who calls for his congregation to have faith in the divinity of the good book, regardless of how many lifetimes it’ll take to bring about the holy rapture. Xi Jinping:

“It is Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought that guided the Chinese people out of the darkness of that long night and established a New China. The consolidation and development of the socialist system will require its own long period of history... it will require the tireless struggle of generations, up to ten generations. The fundamental reason why some of our comrades have weak ideals and faltering beliefs is that their views lack a firm grounding in historical materialism.”

Ten generations. So if we do the math, with each generation lasting 30 years, the communist rapture should be granted to true-believers in approximately 300 years. But only if their ideals are strong, their faith unfaltering, and they’re grounded in the divinity of hallowed historical materialism i.e. the necessity to “tirelessly struggle” through centuries of ecocide, police brutality and genocide inflicted on them by Xi and his successors. Don’t falter from the celestial path, comrades. Your salvation is near.

Deng and Xi’s economic and social reforms have succeeded where previous third positionist projects failed, mixing and matching socialist, nationalist and capitalist elements as it suits them. The party even goes as far as to declare Han culture as being synonymous with Chinese culture, and punishes all the minority cultures for not conforming to Han cultural supremacy.

It’s clear to me that this latest breed of tankie, the communist-with-Chinese-characteristics or Dengist, both within China and without, has fully embraced the mythical third position between communism and capitalism that in actuality is just far right nationalism with a state-controlled economy. So in a word, fascism.

Fascism Was Never Defeated

“Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultra-nationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, as well as strong regimentation of society and of the economy.”

The only thing that’s really changed about global fascism since the second world war is it has adapted to no longer require one-party rule, instead turning the two-parties of western neoliberal democracies into separate wings of the same (fascist) party. Everything else is the same.

Two party rule is still a dictatorship for all intents and purposes, but with rotating reps who all represent the same political class. The rich fund both parties and their candidates to buy their allegiance regardless of which flag-waving stooge’s turn it is to sit in the big chair.

The billionaire class as a whole is the new dictator form, while the presidents, ministers and governors are just there to create spectacle, hold back any and all threats to the system and keep the peasantry convinced they have a say in the political process when they vote for one of the dictator class’s two pre-approved showmen.

Charles Koch is the supreme ruler of the fascist USA empire.

China, on the other hand, still matches up with the original unadulterated definition of fascism since it’s far-right i.e. extreme nationalist, nativist and authoritarian. It has an unabashed dictator i.e. the Paramount Leader of China, who simultaneously holds the positions of head of state, government, civil and military offices of the highest order within the party...

It has a forcible suppression of opposition in the form of re-education camps, outlawing of protest, institutional rape, mass-censorship, an intricate government propaganda system and staggering numbers of political prisoners. It has strong regimentation of both society and economy: The state has long acted to purge anything that doesn’t meet with strict hetero-normative Han-nationalist ideals, even outlawing LGBT representation in the media, and maintains an iron grip on the economy to the point of putting government officials to work full time inside at least a hundred big corporations.

Fascism is also always corporatist in nature, which the CPC certainly embodies with its forced class collaboration between worker and employer, and the way it structures its whole economy around the growth of the corporations, which serve to grow the state and its imperialist expansionism.

The party’s corporatism has all the usual features including useless employer-controlled unions and a staggering 1.5 million-member police force which springs into action during any class conflict, using its monopoly on violence to uphold the interests of the bourgeois class and violently put down the workers.

China is implicitly a fascist nation in the most traditional sense, meeting every word of the original definition, with the power in the hands of the head of state seemingly for as long as he wants it.

While the USA, due to its rotating two-party democracy, is better described as neo-fascist, with both parties serving the fascist billionaires who really rule the nation. But even China purports to be democratic much like the USA does, so the distinction is barely there... Xi Jinping calls China a “whole-process democracy”. Democracy is really a meaningless moniker when it’s so easy to obfuscate what the democratic process actually achieves. Plenty of lifelong dictators around the world claim to be democratically elected and will have anyone who says otherwise shot dead.

So the only tangible difference I can see between the two fascistic nations is the Chinese head of state is positioned above China’s billionaires on the hierarchy, and has no qualms about retaliating against them when they break with the party line, while the USA head of state is wholly subservient to the billionaire class and serves at their pleasure.

Some will argue that unlike previous fascist genocides, the Uighur genocide is motivated by economics, which it is, but it’s just as motivated by religious, cultural and ethnic considerations. The party’s propaganda depicts Uighurs as a crazed, seditious out-group striving to destroy China and its (Han) culture from within, and bring about the country’s collapse, which is really exactly how the Nazis depicted the Jews. And this isn’t even the first time the party has engaged in ethnic, cultural and religious erasure — they’ve been doing it in Tibet for decades.

Ideologues prone to entryism like to rebrand things every so often because their ideas start to look ridiculous after decades of failures, so fascism and Marxism-Leninism become third positionism, and seem more respectable for a while, at least until more failures and atrocities pile up. Got to hide that power level while you can I suppose.

As I mentioned earlier, third positionist ideology is likely embraced by goofy American and European settler-colonizers so readily because they have a lot of deep-seeded guilt stemming from their empire’s colonization of the world and they lack the imagination to envision real alternatives to their status quo. It’s far easier for them to seek an alternate strongman ruler to root for against their own strongman ruler than part entirely with the tight comforting security blanket a strong and charming ruler offers them.

After all, their fave ruler has a complex multifaceted plan to one day gift them a glorious utopia — in China’s case, a series of succeeding 5-year plans playing out over at least the next three centuries... And how can they resist the warm mushy feels that such strong regimentation and structure gives them? How can they doubt daddy when his big promises for a master plan make them feel so giddy and safe?

Being a communist-with-Chinese-characteristics means they’re not like all the other normie white settlers living with them under the Koch dynasty. When they log onto Twitter and flood their followers with neo-fascist conspiracy blog posts proving just how much the terrible Uighurs deserve to be erased, they get one step closer to that beautiful rapture where all the chosen ones float to Marx’s communidise and the reactionary unwashed heathens are left to rot in anarcho-hell.

Tankies will always insist they need to build a strong one-party capitalist state because their daddy Lenin said so. They’re convinced they need an almighty state so it can one day “wither away” and allow communism to bloom, because just look at how all those socialist states in history withered away! Look at Russia, look at China, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Bulgaria, Syria, Burma, Libya, North Korea, Angola, Bangladesh, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, Poland, Mozambique, Romania, East Germany, Hungary, Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Albania... All socialist states that withered away into communism, right? Lenin was fucking prophetic eh?

More than a hundred years later, tankies still cling to the same bankrupt ideology that has failed catastrophically more times than anyone could have imagined. So the source of my endless befuddlement is: Why do so many self-proclaimed anarcho-communists and libertarian socialists see these people as their allies? And more often than not end up joining their third positionist cult after some gentle entryist prodding?

To tankies and their red/black advocates I say put down those blood-soaked books and face reality. Your amazing worker paradise, the reward for your century of struggle isn’t coming. You can kill all the kulaks, all the community-wreckers, all the anarchists, all the left-communists, all the ethnic minorities, all the gays, all the thieves, all the ungrateful unionists, all the muslims, you can pile all their reactionary revisionist terrorist infantile heretic bodies high and light massive meatsack bonfires all over the landscape, and you still won’t get your glorious communist utopia where everyone who hasn’t been murdered, lobotomized or gulaged gets to be equal, resource-rich and fancy-free.

Look at the world around you. Look at the rapidly collapsing inferno we’ve inherited from the slippery bearded ideologues of decades past. Your daddy Lenin was wrong, Stalin was wrong, Mao was wrong, Xi is wrong, all your big strong men whispering sweet nothings into your ear while they impregnated teenagers, orchestrated peasant massacres and stripped the lands they ruled bare were wrong.

It’s been a hundred something years of broken promises and bald-faced lies from every one of your heroes, going all the way back to the day grand-daddy Marx connivingly expelled the anarchists from the International for daring to offer an alternative to his authoritarianism. Yes, the man who first ripped off, watered-down and relabeled anarchist ideas also perpetrated the original entryist purge against anarchists... And history has been repeating itself ever since.

How about learning from history’s mistakes instead of repeating them in an endless loop hoping for a different result? No, Xi’s successor in the year 2321 isn’t going to give the workers a rapturous reward when he decides the time is finally right to abolish capitalism. He’ll live in a fucking palace on a pile of gold and diamonds just like all the rulers before him.

Xi’s disgusted by you. All your daddies are disgusted by the filthy peasants that kiss their boots and beg for table scraps. The only way you’ll get a piece of his pie is after you kill him and pry it from his ivory dentures. People who possess ultimate power over 1.4 billion people don’t wake up one day and decide to slice their wealth up into equal pieces and share it with everyone. It has never happened and it will never happen.

Authority strangles everything in its path. Building your society around authority and domination does not create anything but more fascism with a dozen different labels, each crudely stuck on top of the other.

There will never be a global communist society because communists will always find ideological enemies around every corner. You can’t murder them all and you can’t bend 7 billion people to your will, so stop fantasizing about reshaping the world in the image of some dead tyrants who told some big beautiful lies to their wide-eyed subjects a century ago.

You have no power to control the tides, whether you pray to Koch or Xi. Your ceaseless entryism (especially your wildly successful campaign for left-unity) will keep growing your base, but all you’re really doing in our spaces is indoctrinating people that were already wholly constituted of 100% pure horseshit. You can keep them.

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Raddle conversation

Raddle conversation 2

Morality Vs. Ethics

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/morality_vs_ethics> on September 3, 2025.

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The difference between morality and ethics is a major misunderstanding leftists have of anarchist politics. Most leftists are unaware of, unwilling to consider, or unable to grasp the distinction. But it’s an important distinction for anarchists to make because morals are so entangled with authority. This essay will try to explain the differences between morality and ethics from an anarchist perspective.

In polite society, ‘moral’ is a label typically applied by people to themselves and their group so they, if we’re being perfectly honest, can present themselves as a pure and righteous person capable of doing no ‘wrong’.

The ‘moral’ person sees themselves as fighting a universal battle between good and evil. They of course cast themselves in the role of the righteous crusader for good; incapable of straying from the ‘moral constitution’ that enshrines them in sanctified holiness.

The label ‘immoral’ is applied to whoever the ‘moral’ group decides is counter to their notions of goodness. They do this so they can maintain ‘moral’ superiority over the out-group and thus justify any action they take to marginalise these undesirables without feeling remorse or having to justify their behaviour to anyone. By being a proud moral crusader, they don’t need to give even a moment’s thought to the cruelty they inflict on whichever individual or group they’ve decided is a threat to their sacred moral constitution.

The immoral villains who violate the sacred constitution can never be forgiven for their perceived crimes against morality because morality is definitive and final. The despicable villains must be forever shunned by the altruistic heroes in order to maintain their pious morals. Racial segregation was considered morally righteous in the US South. As was cleansing the land of ‘savages’ during colonisation. Lynching bi-racial children for being ‘impure’. Denying women equality by reasoning that it would lead to ‘moral decadence’.

The recent government massacres of drug users in the Philippines were justified by creating a moral panic. The tyrant leading the massacres appointing himself as the one and only arbiter of virtue, that all moral people should blindly follow.

Perhaps the most deadly moral panic of the last century was spurred by Mao’s cultural revolution in China. His Little Red Book of quotes; a virtual moral blueprint, was used by the party-faithful to purge scores of random people for having morally-objectionable... haircuts, furniture, pets or fashion sense. Likewise, Stalin and his supporters in the USSR forced homosexuals and other out-groups into gulags where they were worked to death for ‘crimes against morality’.

And of course the prototypical moral blueprint; the Christian bible, was used to lead brutal moral crusades across the world for centuries; mass slaughters, land seizures and forced conversions of non-Christians.

Moral systems are designed to oppress and marginalise anyone the system deems undesirable. They are based on transcendent rules that are forcibly applied to all people from all backgrounds, in all situations; regardless of each individual’s desires and values.

Unlike society’s authoritative and punitive morals, ethics are decided on a case-by-case basis by the individual based on their own values and desires. Ethics are tangible and tied to real cause and effect outcomes. Ethics are voluntary personal views rather than collectively-enforced top-down ones.

Morality is always formed and upheld by a collective: a religious institution, a workplace, an educational organization, a cultural group, a club, a society.

Ethics are personal, informed by an individual’s experiences and their own needs and desires.

Morals are applied to everyone inside and often outside of a group by a collective and its authority. Ethics are applied to the individual by the individual and in most cases affect no one but the individual.

Morals require hierarchy, authority, law and enforcement of said law, while ethics simply require that an individual draw their own lines to determine what they are personally willing to live with, what compromises they’re willing to make, what actions they’re willing to take against others.

Moralists have differing ideas of morality but they largely operate in absolutes: Some are ardent pacifists who insist there can be no excuse for any form of violence, while others will demand violence be done to those who break their moral law in even the most minor way. But in practice, even the most ardent moral pacifist will embrace violence when their egos are put under enough pressure.

Often pacifist moralists will simply shift what they see as ‘violence’ to overcome the cognitive dissonance they’re confronted with when someone breaks their laws and thus threatens their moral authority. So, suddenly the violence of putting people in cages or sterilizing them or lobotomizing them or euthanizing them is seen by the pacifist moralist as ‘humane’ and ‘non-violent’. The hypocrisy of the moralist is truly boundless, but devotion to their ideology is something the moralist will fight tooth and nail to cling to, even when every aphorism of that ideology has been warped beyond recognition. This is how we end up with the hypocrisy of Christians preaching “do no harm” one day and then leading bloody pogroms and crusades the next. Or syndicalists in civil war Spain claiming to want to build equality and freedom and to abolish authority, while murdering nuns for refusing to renounce their faith and building forced labor prisons.

A moralist opposition to violence might be: violence is universally wrong, immoral, bad. Why? Simply because the collective authority behind the moralist says so. Requesting justification for such an abstract statement would be scoffed at because morality is seen by the moralist as some kind of divine truth that can’t be questioned. The simple act of questioning it or the authority behind it would be enough to render you immoral.

On the other hand, a measured ethical opposition to violence can be made by an amoralist... They can see that in many cases violence begets more violence, fosters systems based on the dominance of the strong, and can lead to deep-seated multi-generational divisions. But in other cases, they could see violence as ethically just. Because the alternative (e.g. fascism) would likely be worse.

A moralist forces their reactionary and irrational will on everyone else. Their morals are absolute. An amoralist isn’t concerned with forcing their personal perspective onto everyone, or with maintaining that perspective in every situation as if it were unquestionable dogma.

Morality places paint-by-the-numbers judgement on every action, positing that all actions in column A are inherently ‘wrong’ and unacceptable, while all actions in column B are inherently ‘right’ and necessary. Regardless of the experiences of the people involved, their personal convictions and motivations, and the conditions that are present in that place and time.

Inevitably, the moralist collective will go on to break every moral law they’ve set when they deem it necessary to, and the wonders of cognitive dissonance will allow them to absolve themselves of any responsibility for breaking their supposedly uncompromising moralism.

Anarchists aren’t uncaring monsters for rejecting morality, as the moral left will have you believe. We’re rejecting an incredibly dangerous, authoritarian concept that directly leads to untold misery for the multiple generations of people forced to survive inside the walls of the dogmatic moral systems imposed on them from above.

Morality and ideology go hand in hand to deny people their most basic autonomy: Their freedom to decide right from wrong according to their own needs, desires and values.

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Raddle discussions:

https://raddle.me/f/Anarchism/35189/morality-vs-ethics-and-why-so-many-confuse-the-two-oc

https://raddle.me/f/Anarchism/130143/morality-vs-ethics

https://raddle.me/f/Philosophy/130181/anarcho-syndicalist-attempts-to-gatekeep-philosophy-boredom

Are Libertarian Socialists the Same as Anarchists?

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/libsocs> on September 3, 2025.

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An anarchist by definition stands against all authority without exception, while a socialist by definition is simply someone who feels the means of production should be collectively owned. So, socialism is narrowly focused on economic issues, while anarchy is explicitly concerned with any and all social issues.

When a socialist also identifies as a libertarian, they’re indicating that they’re critical of the traditional authoritarian socialist states that have been so prominent in the world (the USSR, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe, etc.)

But while libertarian socialists might reject one-party states, that doesn’t mean they reject states entirely. A lot of them will support democratic states or other democratic forms of government. Anarchists, on the other hand, reject all forms of government.

Generally someone who chooses to identify as a libertarian socialist rather than an anarchist is making a deliberate choice to use non-committal language that implies they’re willing to accept certain forms of authority. If they opposed all authority as anarchists do, they’d likely call themselves an anarchist.

There are various forms of libertarian socialism that promote a supposedly ‘libertarian’ state, while there are other libertarian socialists who reject the state form, but embrace other forms of authority.

Communalists are a famous example of libertarian socialists who embrace various forms of authority including majoritarianism but stop short of supporting a full-blown state. But the form of government they do support greatly resembles states on a smaller, more localized scale. Communalists wholly advocate for government, majoritarianism, hierarchy and are probably best described as direct-democrats or socialist minarchists. Anyone claiming communalists are anarchists doesn’t understand communalism or anarchy.

While a few anarchists might also choose to identify as libertarian socialists in polite company, the majority of libertarian socialists aren’t anarchists, so anarchists would be better off avoiding the ‘libertarian socialist’ moniker since all it really says about a person’s politics is they like socialist economics but have an aversion to vanguard parties. Anarchy is a whole lot more than economics.

To identify as an anarchist is to take a strong stance against all authority, while libertarian socialism, democratic socialism and other such milquetoast labels take no such stance, leaving the door open to all kinds of authority, with the only real concern being democracy in the workplace.

Shut Up About Dual Power, Tool

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/dualpower> on September 3, 2025.

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Dual power was coined by the Russian socialist and eventual head of government Vladimir Lenin in his essay The Dual Power to describe two powers (the Soviets and the existing government) temporarily coexisting with each other and competing for legitimacy with the ultimate goal of the Soviets expelling the other power and seizing control of the state, in order to install state capitalism and a one-party dictatorship.

It’s tragic I even need to write this, but a staggering amount of people have been equating dual power with anarchy lately, seemingly without realizing they’re parroting authoritarian Leninist ideology.

Dual power has nothing whatsoever to do with anarchy. Anarchists are not and have never been advocates of dual power. Anarchists are not a political party. We are not interested in competing with other political parties for power. Anarchists are not interested in granting legitimacy to a government or its institutions or claiming there can ever be such a thing as the legitimacy to rule people.

Anarchists are not interested in seizing control of the state to install a “people’s dictatorship” or any other kind of government. Anarchists are not interested in building power in any way.

Anarchy is concerned with resisting, negating, severing the power of those who rule us. Anarchy is the driving desire to reclaim our lives from the piercing claws of the power-elite. Anarchy is not a plan to join the ranks of the power-elite or to supersede them as the new “legitimate” government as Lenin’s Bolsheviks did.

Anarchists are also not interested in a democratic form of dual power whereupon we plead with the states / banks / corporations to be nicer to us, begging the people in power to afford us certain rights and privileges, while also participating in charity work.

This is what Yates McKee, the self-described “nongovernmental activist” and art critic who introduced the dual-power concept into the modern Anglophone political dialogue proposes in the essay Art after Occupy — climate justice, BDS and beyond for the nonprofit media organization Waging Nonviolence.

Yates McKee:

(Dual power) means forging alliances and supporting demands on existing institutions — elected officials, public agencies, universities, workplaces, banks, corporations, museums — while at the same time developing self-organized counter-institutions.

Three points:

1. Anarchists are not interested in “forging alliances” with functionaries of the government or otherwise participating in the state/capital mechanism, period. Despite the turgid assertions of the anarcho-Democrat sect, anarchy isn’t entangled with the left wing of government. Anarchy rejects all wings of all governments.

2. Anarchists aren’t a lobby group that pressures politicians to do our bidding. Politicians will never work for us because their interests are not our interests.

3. Anarchy is not a program to set up a shadow government in the hopes of one day replacing the current government.

McKee then proceeds to quote several other theorists talking about prefiguration, in order to equate prefiguration (which actually has some anarchist underpinnings) with dual power (which absolutely doesn’t).

The attempt to whitewash authoritarian Leninist lingo and feed it to self-proclaimed left-wing anarchists who don’t know any better should be met with ridicule for the sordid manipulation it is. Manipulation that really ought to be expected from someone who insists on referring to themselves as a “nongovernmental activist” because the word “anarchist” would presumably be too extreme.

Soon after McKee wrote the essay, USA leftists calling themselves anarchists latched onto the new revisionist version of the term, while reactionary Leninphiles continued using the term according to its original, unadulterated definition. Since these two (theoretically) wildly at-odds groups of people mingle in the same social spaces for whatever peculiar reason, the leftists soon saw themselves enthusiastically nodding in agreement with the conservative Marxist Leninists who appeared to share their ideas, allowing the Marxist Leninists to flood these so-called “left-unity” spaces with even more authoritarian power-machinations such as their proposal for a dictatorship of the proletariat.

What Lenin described as dual power has much more in common with the UK’s shadow government parliamentary system than anything in line with anarchy: Party members appointed to a shadow cabinet, ready to take over each government position should the party come into power. The difference being that Lenin conceived of dual power as a “legitimate” authority battling an illegitimate one, while in the case of the UK, both parties are considered legitimate. Of course, to anarchists, all parties playing government are illegitimate.

18 years before McKee wrote that essay, Murray Bookchin made a failed attempt to recycle Lenin’s dual power in an obscure text that didn’t get much attention, even from students of Bookchin. Bookchin claimed Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first person to call himself an anarchist, was the real originator of the dual power concept and that Lenin lifted it from him. Bookchin made this claim at a time when he was still publicly identifying as an anarchist for the acumen it bestowed, despite having privately told friends and associates that he didn’t consider himself an anarchist.

In describing anarchy, Proudhon famously wrote:

Beneath the governmental machinery, in the shadow of political institutions, out of the sight of statesmen and priests, society is producing its own organism, slowly and silently; and constructing a new order, the expression of its vitality and autonomy, and the denial of the old politics, as well as of the old religion.

Proudhon never used the term ‘dual power’ in his texts, and to an impartial mind, what he described when he talked about people producing their own organism away from systems of authority had nothing to do with building an alternative shadow government to take over the running of the state as Lenin later conceived. But Bookchin had an ideological compulsion to remove the authoritarian stigma that was rightly associated with dual power in North American academic discourse, so he set about trying to whitewash and appropriate the concept. Like the insipid anarcho-Marxists of today, he wasn’t happy with the long tradition of anarchy and insisted he needed to “save it” by perversely infusing it with government.

Bookchin:

Proudhon made the bright suggestion, in his periodical Le Représentant du peuple (28 April 1848), that the mass democracy of the clubs could become a popular forum where the social agenda of the revolution could be prepared for use by the Constituent Assembly—a proposal that would essentially have defused the potency of the clubs as a potentially rebellious dual power.

This obscure quote from Bookchin recently made it into the Wikipedia article for Proudhon, furthering Bookchin’s narrative that Proudhon originated the concept of dual power simply because he talked about members of clubs organizing together. The anonymous Wikipedia editor used Bookchin’s misleading claim to list dual power as one of Proudhon’s four “notable ideas”, furthering the coercive narrative that dual power is an anarchist tenet.

Bookchin quite literally made a career working to conflate anarchy with Marxism, so it’s no surprise that he saw Proudhon talking about people working together to better their lives despite the existence of the state and decided “This is exactly what Lenin called for! A stand-by government!”

Four years later, after publicly swearing off anarchism, Bookchin decided to fuse “the theory of dual power”, which he now said was created by Austro-German Marxists rather than by Proudhon (since he was no longer pretending to be an anarchist for the street cred), into his theory of ‘libertarian municipalism’:

In libertarian municipalism, dual power is meant to be a strategy for creating precisely those libertarian institutions of directly democratic assemblies that would oppose and replace the State. It intends to create a situation in which the two powers—the municipal confederations and the nation-state—cannot coexist, and one must sooner or later displace the other. Moreover, it is a confluence of the means to achieve a rational society with the structure of that society, once it is achieved. The diremption between means and ends is a problem that has always plagued the revolutionary movement, but the concept of dual power as a means to a revolutionary end and the formation of a rational society overcomes the chasm between the method for gaining a new society and the institutions that would structure it.

Any anarchist reading this will notice Bookchin’s dual power has far more in common with Lenin’s dual power than he would admit: The idea that an alternative shadow government would eventually replace the current government. He paints a distinction between his municipal confederations and traditional nation-states but the distinction has little utility to anarchists, with the principle difference being that his proposed form of government would use direct democracy rather than representative democracy.

It’s incredibly aggravating that so many left-wing USA Democrats identifying as anarchists insist on brandishing authority-laden entryist concepts like direct democracy, justified hierarchy, legitimate government, lesser-evilism and now dual-power while claiming they want anarchy.

Anarchy is not democratic government, not socialist government, not progressive government, not counter-government, not the people’s government, not decentralized government, not libertarian government, not minimized goverment, not green government, not cybernated government, not blockchain government and not dual government.

Anarchy is, always has been and always will be a loud and firm proclamation of no government. No authority, no social hierarchy, no power-elite. Anarchy is the outright rejection of every frenzied power machination of every petty tyrant the world over. It’s saying no to all authority, however fresh, empowering or woke the authority purports to be.

We don’t politely ask the corporations to stop polluting. We don’t ask the banks to stop printing and distributing the currency that upholds the class system. We don’t plead with our bosses to stop exploiting our labor. We don’t petition politicians to stop serving their corporate benefactors. We don’t ask coal to stop staining our fingers. We don’t ask sandflies to stop biting our necks.

Anarchists know better than to plead with our oppressors to stop oppressing us. Anarchists, if nothing else, have a shared understanding of the workings of power and authority. We know we can only get back from our rulers what we take from them by force. What we pry from their cold, dead fingers. Because authority doesn’t compromise with its servants any more than a bear compromises with a fish in its jaw.

Anarchy is having the prudence to perceive the corrupting force of all power. Anarchy is seeing through each of the pretty new masks the power-elite crudely crafts and slaps on to dupe us into compliance with their cruel and dangerous program.

When you prop up state/capital, work to further the legitimacy of its agents, while also embedding yourself into the system in order to “change it from within”, the theoretical “counter-institutions” you claim to also support are effectively negated because — guess what? People who work for the state are not countering the state in any way that counts.

Functionaries of the state and capital (whether lobby groups, campaigners / canvassers, political committees or “progressive” politicians standing in elections) are not able to mount real opposition to the state or capital because they have been successfully absorbed by the state and capital and now do the bidding of the elite class, in one way or another.

Anyone claiming they’re entering the belly of the beast so they can somehow tame the beast is either deluding themselves or willfully lying. The acid in that belly will melt away any anarchist inclinations they may have held in seconds. The system is designed to absorb all threats to the system. Anyone who claims they can work within the system to counter the system is nothing more than a willing tool of the system.

It’s endlessly frustrating to me how often authoritarian ideology like dual power is absorbed by clueless red anarchists and then clumsily promoted as anarchist praxis every single day.

Anyone claiming to be anti-authority while going out of their way to organize collective action (e.g. the USA’s DSA) to further the authority of politicians / a political party / the state is a liar and a coward.

You will not reform authority. Authority will reform you. Into a tool of authority.

Once you ingrain yourself within systems of authority, specifically within the system that exploits the living shit out of billions of people: Enslaves, incarcerates, poisons, genocides, invades, bulldozes, acidifies, desertifies and burns every corner of the planet, you have abandoned any claim to anarchy you may have once held. You are not an anarchist. You are just another clink in the state’s ever-expanding armor, devoting your pathetic little activist life to legitimizing, and thus shielding the state from those brutalized by it.

Your dual power tales are as useful to anarchists as the charity galas where you rub elbows with the robber barons you expect us to beg for table scraps.

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Raddle discussions:

https://raddle.me/f/Anarchism/135905/shut-up-about-dual-power-tool

The Futility of Struggle

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/struggle> on September 3, 2025.

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To struggle is to embody the activist mentality. To struggle is to take up the role of activism. The activist belongs to the struggle, gives themself fully to the cause, makes it their job, their mission, their whole existence.

Social struggle is activism, it’s protest, it’s empty obsessive-compulsive ritual, it’s imposing sanctimonious moral values on others, it’s collectivizing people into in-groups and out-groups so they can better do war with each other, it’s entrenched in dogmatic ideology and personality cults, it’s self-aggrandizing and endlessly congratulatory, it’s a constant push and pull between the system and those who struggle to seize control of it to reboot it in their own image, appointing themselves as the beloved God-given saviors of The People™, the purveyors of fairness, equality and rational world building.

Tearing authority apart needn’t be done in the name of an epic global struggle for the greater good or to achieve the grand master plan set out for us by the great elders of anarchy in their uplifting manifestos promising us a new world order dedicated to worker-led factories and social justice for all.

Destroying authority where you see it isn’t a struggle for revolution, it doesn’t need to be done in pursuit of anything bigger than a simple personal desire to watch tangible instruments of authority burn to embers right in front of you so they no longer blight your senses.

The actions we take don’t need to be in pursuit of an amazing utopian society dreamed up by a long-dead Russian prince or an epic battle between good and evil of our own imagining where we cast ourselves as the heroic protagonists in a brutal social war where victory is everything and there can be no rest or amusement until the glorious prophesized end goal is achieved.

An anarchist’s actions don’t need to be connected to anything beyond what we see and feel right in front of us: A tangible, immediate outcome we can perceive with our own senses in this time and space. What we do doesn’t need to be presented as part of some incredible 4D chess move to build a new, ‘better’ society or government, to ignite a new age of egalitarianism that promises to solve all of humanity’s problems by putting the right people in charge of constructing the right systems.

I can paint over a billboard or spike a tree or tear up a road or stab a dictator or spread dandelion seeds in a wheat field without it being a struggle to upend society to conform to my favored vision of how society should be run. I can be an agent of chaos simply because it feels good to be. I don’t need to lie to myself or to you and claim my actions or your actions are going to bring on a new dawn of civilization if only we all struggle enough together.

I can deal blows to the imposing instruments of authority that surround me just because I want to, without ever believing any of my actions will lead to a social revolution to remake the world in my (or my God’s) image. Without ever thinking I’m a mighty warrior fighting the good fight, a worker’s Messiah sent to Earth to right all the wrongs of humanity and lead the chosen people to anarchist Mecca.

Or in Aragorn!‘s words:

(Strugglismo is) a critique of boring, stale, ineffective, ritualized activity and, recently, has given birth to a bunch of stale, boring, sanctimonious projects.

I can destroy the instruments of authority that work to slowly crush me under their weight without needing to craft a meticulous plan to build nicer replacements for them.

I destroy that which crushes me because I don’t find being crushed to be very pleasant. I don’t destroy authority because I’m under the impression I’m saving the world by preserving myself or that something as innately crushing as mass society can even be made to be fair and equitable.

I have no delusions of grandeur. I can’t save civilization or build a better civilization. I’m not a vessel for change, I’m not the trigger for a new world order, I’m not the purveyor of universal justice.

What I can do is pick up a brick, and I can break the object I fling the brick at.

Whatever rifts may or may not form from that action are beyond my control, and I’ll be too busy aiming the brick at the next grotesque object of authority to care.

I have power over the things right in front of me that I can affect. A brick through a windshield is an immediate cause and effect action with no ego trip behind it to pretend the brick is bigger than it is. I’m under no impression a brick is a symbol in the battle between good and evil, just and unjust, left and right, prole and capital. A brick is just a brick. A tool to achieve a measurable, immediate result.

I don’t have power over things far bigger than myself, I can’t force society or economics to bend to my will. I can’t control how millions or billions of people live. I only have power over the brick in my hand and the things I throw it at.

Struggling to affect outcomes you have no power over is a life spent in miserable exasperation and futility. You have no ability to mount a struggle to correct all of society’s ills. Every hard-fought revolution in history has only further entrenched structural oppression and mass subservience.

The brick I pick up off the ground and hold in my hand has infinitely more value to me and to anarchy than a thousand years of desperate struggle to knock kings off their thrones and bring in new kings and new thrones.

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Video Version:

https://anarchy.tube/w/kDKgy9yyAAFYPhHN3xapZT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50x0qcddf2k

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Raddle Discussions:

https://raddle.me/f/Anarchism/137232/oc-the-futility-of-struggle

Kill the God of Work & All His Clergy

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/anti-work> on September 3, 2025.

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Life in the Machine

The Greek philosopher Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king. Said Aristippus, “If you would learn to be subservient to the king, you would not have to live on lentils.” Said Diogenes, “Learn to live on lentils, and you will not have to cultivate the king.”

I’d say one of the most impactful components of anarchy through the ages, and especially in this current decade is anti-work — the complete rejection of work. Though as old as civilization itself, anti-work ideas have been steadily regaining momentum in modern times, starting in small anarchist circles, and now taking off explosively in mainstream culture. Millions of people around the world have suddenly found themselves exposed to this very anarchist concept.

This has especially been evident during the Covid-19 pandemic. Perhaps because millions of workers have now seen, first-hand, just how disposable their lives are to their employers, who in countless cases have openly sacrificed them to the plague rather than risk putting a dent in their company’s bottom line.

In China, a growing “lying flat” anti-work movement has exploded in popularity, despite numerous attempts by the state to shut it down. Luo Huazhong kicked off the idea in an April 2021 forum post titled “lying flat is justice”, where he attached a photo of himself in bed under a blanket, with the curtains closed to shut out the sunlight.

Luo had been out of regular work for more than two years. He had to limit his consuming, but found that the abundant leisure time he was afforded in exchange for his curtailed productivity was deeply liberating.

In the post, he explained that the pervasive status anxiety in workerist Chinese society was a product of corrupted values and overwhelming peer pressure. He proclaimed there was nothing wrong with lying flat; living an idle existence. By overcoming his desire for consumer products and the structural pressure to be productive, he successfully freed himself from the servitude of work.

Luo’s post spoke to China’s urban youth who for years had worked non-stop while the promise of a middle-class lifestyle as their reward eroded more and more with each increase in the cost of living. Fellow lapsed workers responded to his post enthusiastically and exchanged their tips to survive with minimal work and reduced spending.

The idea immediately went viral on social media. Over the next several months, lying-flat advocates pushed back against cutthroat work culture and high cost of living and the movement grew at a rapid pace.

The communist party launched a censorship campaign to erase all mention of lying-flat from the web. The state media desperately tried to discredit Luo’s dangerous idea and shame or scare people back to the offices and factories they were increasingly abandoning.

Simultaneously in the English-speaking world, another anti-work movement exploded into being, primarily on the anarchist-run Reddit forum r/antiwork, which gathered millions of subscribers in just a few months. All over the world, the pandemic, massive inflation and a general disaffection with work-culture was driving people to question why they force themselves to drive to work every morning.

What anarchists mean by “work” is really very straight-forward. Work is the machine extracting our labor to feed itself.

Wolfi Landstreicher:

Work, in the social world in which you and I find ourselves, is the alienation of an individual’s time, activities, and forces from her/himself. In other words, it is the institutionalization of a process where the things you do, the things I do, and the things we do together are determined by powers (individuals, social structures, etc) outside of ourselves to serve their interests.

Sadly, like any subversive idea that suddenly finds itself in the spotlight, a lot of opportunists have been willfully misrepresenting what anti-work is and trying to obscure its post-left anarchist roots. A steady line of communists and liberals have been trying to appropriate this very anarchist idea and make it line up with their decidedly pro-work 19^th century ideologies.

Anti-work isn’t merely the critique of work under capitalism as the reds would have you believe, nor the push for better working conditions and nicer bosses as the liberals are pretending. It is the wholesale rejection of work in all its forms, regardless of whoever the boss is, whatever the form of remuneration, whatever the social or economic system in place happens to be.

It’s completely uprooting the institution of work, smashing all the systems of servitude that ensnare us, sabotaging workplaces in any way we can, exposing the markets for the giant houses of cards they are and then blowing on them until every card lays flat.

Anyone who claims otherwise is an entryist trying to water down anarchist ideas until they’re so insipid that they become plausibly compatible with the stale ideological dogma of whatever tired political program they’re recruiting for.

The protestant work ethic has long had a stranglehold on this global civilization, traumatizing all of us into seeing productivity as the universal metric of worth. Those who are perceived to be hard workers are accepted warmly by society, while those who lack a strong work ethic or the ability to toil away in menial, pointless servitude their entire lives are demonized as “lazy no-good layabout bums” and promptly discarded by their friends, their educators, their families, their government.

Despite common (and deliberate) misconceptions, being anti-work doesn’t mean wanting to cease all physical exertion, it means nurturing a new way of life based on play rather than work.

The word “play” has likewise been demonized by workerist society as being an inappropriate activity for anyone of working age, because play eats into our productivity as workers and the potential profits we can generate for our bloodthirsty bosses.

Alfredo M. Bonanno:

Play is characterized by a vital impulse that is always new, always in movement. By acting as though we are playing, we charge our action with this impulse. We free ourselves from death. Play makes us feel alive. It gives us the excitement of life. In the other model of acting we do everything as though it were a duty, as though we ‘had’ to do it. It is in the ever new excitement of play, quite the opposite to the alienation and madness of capital, that we are able to identify joy.

My father started regularly shaming me for “wasting time” playing as soon as I turned 12. Civilized children are expected to immerse themselves in a 12 — 18 year work-training program (school) that comes with daily homework, to ensure everyone is conditioned to see their time not as their time, but as a commodity to be exploited exclusively by their future bosses.

For millennia, play was the driving force in many human cultures across the world. The majority of pre-agricultural cultures had no need of work because everything they needed to prosper (food, shelter, tools) was free for the taking. It wasn’t until we started burning down our ancient food forests to form permanent settlements, cultivate crops and extract non-renewable resources from the land that work displaced play as the norm across human societies.

Anthropologists who study some of the few remaining gatherer-hunter bands of people in various parts of the world today have frequently noted how, unlike authority-based tribes in neighboring lands, the anarchistic, non-hierarchical bands of people such as the Hadza in Eastern Africa emphasize acts of play rather than work. (Read my “Eradicate Left Unity: Make Bands, Not Communities. Anarchy, Not Leftism” essay for more about this.)

(Developmental/evolutionary psychologist) Dr. Peter Gray:

Anthropologists who have trekked to isolated regions of the world to observe hunter-gatherer societies have consistently been impressed by the egalitarian nature of those societies. The people live in small self-governing bands of about 20 to 50 people. They are nomadic, moving from place to place to follow the available game and edible vegetation.

Most remarkably, unlike any other people that have been studied, hunter-gatherers appear to lack hierarchy in social organization. They have no chief or big man, no leaders or followers. They share everything, so nobody owns more than anybody else. They make all group decisions through discussion until a consensus is reached. [...] They have an extraordinary degree of respect for individual autonomy. They don’t tell one another what to do or offer unsolicited advice.[...]

In order for two or more young animals to play together, they must suppress the drive to dominate one another. Social play always requires the voluntary participation of both (or all) partners, so play requires that the partners maintain one another’s goodwill. Any attempt to dominate would drive the other away or elicit a fight rather than play. Thus, play involving two or more players is always an egalitarian, cooperative activity.

Some of the most compelling evidence for the anti-dominance function of adult play comes from research with various species of primates. For example, some species of macaque monkeys (referred to as tyrannical species) live in sharply graded hierarchical colonies, with a great deal of squabbling and fighting for power and relatively little cooperation except among close kin; and other species (egalitarian species) live in colonies with more muted hierarchies, with little fighting and much cooperation even among non-relatives. Consistent with the theory I am presenting here, the egalitarian species have been observed to engage in more social play in adulthood than the tyrannical species, apparently as a means to promote cooperation. [...]

My theory is that hunter-gatherers everywhere learned that they could reduce aggression and promote cooperation and sharing by essentially turning all of their social life into play.

Children growing up in hunter-gatherer cultures have more opportunity to play than do children growing up in any other culture that anthropologists have observed, and as they become adults their playful ways continue. Hunter-gatherers’ approach to work (e.g. to hunting and gathering) is playful in that it is social (people hunt and gather with friends, in groups) and always voluntary—nobody is required to hunt or gather, they will be fed anyway. Their religions are playful, highly imaginative and non-dogmatic, with gods that are vulnerable and serve as playmates in religious festivals. The adults, as well as children, engage regularly and playfully in music, dance, art, and noncompetitive games.

Even their means of putting down someone’s budding attempts to dominate are playful, at least at first. They may make up a silly song about the person, as a way of making fun of the person’s excessive pride, or they may tease him about thinking he’s such a “big man.”

It’s a truly tragic turn of events that work and all its associated authoritarian baggage has so successfully displaced play in the vast majority of human cultures. One of the most substantial things anarchists can do for ourselves is to relearn the joy of play, and to abandon the productivity-compulsion that’s been hammered into us by assorted authority figures throughout our lives.

If more people embraced the constructive play that anarchistic bands of people around the world build their cultures around, the protestant work ethic would soon lose its death-grip on public consciousness.

Work doesn’t need to define us, and our productivity in the machine needn’t be the measure of our worth. Devoting our entire lives to keeping the machine running ought to be perceived as the morbid waste of our existence that it truly is. The machine crushes all life eventually, the only question is how long you’ll last as its colorful levers poke tiny holes in you while its gears slowly crush your bones.

Blessed be the Lord Who Gifts Us With His Bountiful Employment

In a world revolving around work, The Economy is venerated — treated as a hallowed, divine being. Every moment spent engaged in play, in idleness or in unprofitable creative pursuits is a penny we steal from the almighty economy. Anyone who lacks the will or capability to keep up their productivity is thus seen as sinning against the true deity of our age: The Economy is our one true god and has been for decades. And he’s a vengeful god. Anyone who sins against him will be pushed into the gutters of society by his clergymen and left to rot and die.

There’s nothing The Economy savors more than his clergy taking sinful unproductive workers and sacrificing them to him, that’s the entire reason homelessness and prisons are such integral features of capitalist civilization.

The booming mantra of our God can be heard chanted all across the globe — Work or die — Work or die — and when you eventually reach breaking point and actually die —be sure to do it very publicly so that the other worshipers are forced to look upon your misery to witness what happens to workers who fail to keep up with the grind. They’ll try not to notice, but they’ll see the destitution from the corner of their eye and it’ll further instill the fear of God in them.

Work or die — Work or die — Work or die. It’s the chorus that rings in our ears almost every moment of our lives, even our “free time” being wholly consumed by the specter of work. We’re no longer capable of relishing the simplicity of existence, instead we measure our productivity during every waking moment and punish ourselves if we don’t measure up to our peers. A good worker is always finding ways to develop their skills and increase their usefulness to the machine. A good worker is forever climbing the hierarchy so they can one day join the ranks of the saintly clergy and strike down the no good lazy bums beneath them for their disgusting under-performing.

The modern anti-work movement was spawned in the late 20^th century by anarchist Bob Black. Black spent years of his life pushing back against the conservative 19^th century notions of productivity, industrialism and human-commodification that came from both capitalist and communist (including anarcho-communist) scholars and practitioners. He was especially frustrated to see fellow anarchists refuse to part ways with the miserable work-culture they inherited from the miserable workers that gave life to them.

Bob Black:

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. [...]

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists — except that I’m not kidding — I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work — and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs — they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They’ll gladly talk about anything but work itself.

These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don’t care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.

A workerist is any person who advocates for ideologies, systems and lifestyles that revolve around work. This includes every liberal, rightist, democratic socialist, social democrat, centrist, communist and fascist in the world. These are all staunchly workerist, industrial ideologies that strive to sell us the idea that humans and other animals exist to work on the assembly line, to extract resources and manufacture goods for the market, to be loyal servants to the revered productive forces. They all see the world through the same productivity-oriented, industrial lens, only with the tint slightly adjusted.

When Bob Black wrote The Abolition of Work in 1985 and called for “a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance”, he wasn’t proposing we give work a glossier tint to make it more democratic, merit-based or financially rewarding. He wasn’t proposing we hustle and invest in The Economy (praise be) to become wealthy enough to one day make passive income as landlords and shareholders. He was proposing we part with work in totality. Tear down all structures of work and kick all those who uphold those soul-crushing structures in the shins repeatedly until they let go.

This point is completely missed by the stale leftists who have appropriated this very anarchist concept and tried beating it into submission. They’ll forever be ready to seize hold of and immediately neuter anarchist ideas when they see them picking up any kind of steam. But the left will never be anti-work. It would go against everything the left exists to serve.

The entire labor movement — the unions, the socialist parties, the academics and Twitter theorists, are all wholly dedicated to building the load-bearing walls of their power-base: the ideology of work. Without workers and workplaces, there is no endlessly rotating left versus right race and everything both sides of the aisle depend on to satisfy their power and wealth machinations crumbles into rubble. Leftist organizers who try to redefine anti-work to mean “work-but-with-bigger-unions” are opportunistic weasels.

Likewise, anti-work is not a program to build stronger welfare states with universal basic incomes that subsidize the work-industrial complex and thus calm the growing urge to revolt; prolonging The Economy’s pillaging of our ecosystems and making us depend on the managers of productivity even more than we do now.

Being anti-work is desiring to bulldoze the offices, warehouses, farms, construction sites, restaurants and supermarkets that hold us all captive, push it all into a giant pile of glittering rubble, light a brilliant bonfire and sing and dance and fuck all night as the sweet fumes of a million copiers and filing cabinets fill the air.

Anti-work is the wholesale rejection of an obscenely traumatic and perverse way of life that we’ve been collectively conditioned into accepting as normal almost from birth, when we were pulled from our mother’s tit and thrown into a preschool so she could get back to the office.

So what happens after the bonfire dies down and we depart a work-based existence for a play-based one?

Bob Black:

Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.

The point of anti-work, stripped of all the garbage leftist and Marxist ideology that’s been rapidly consuming it (I blame Graeber for kickstarting this process), is to treasure your fleeting existence and spend it doing things you want to do. Not things your bosses force you to do by threatening to sacrifice you to the great Economy in the sky if you don’t follow their script.

Anti-work is the burning desire to free yourself from that cacophonous workerist mantra forever ringing in your ears, to stop playing the subservient role assigned to you by The Great Economy and instead forge your own path and find real purpose through joyful play.

Henry Miller:

The world only began to get something of value from me the moment I stopped being a serious member of society and became—myself. The State, the nation, the united nations of the world, were nothing but one great aggregation of individuals who repeated the mistakes of their forefathers. They were caught in the wheel from birth and they kept at it until death—and this treadmill they tried to dignify by calling it “life.” If you asked anyone to explain or define life, what was the be-all and end-all, you got a blank look for an answer. Life was something which philosophers dealt with in books that no one read. Those in the thick of life, “the plugs in harness,” had no time for such idle questions. “You’ve got to eat, haven’t you?”

Anti-work is the pursuit of happiness in your own terms. A life you actually desire, choices you make as an individual, unhindered by the suffocating demands of mass society.

Anti-work is the refusal to accept the authority of bosses and economists, even if you have to make do with simpler meals and uglier furniture than the working stiff next door. It’s seeing the macabre construct of a work-based existence for what it really is and reaching out to reclaim your uniqueness before your brief existence on this planet ends. It’s unleashing your long-buried feral fighting spirit and finding out who you really are under the decades of rigid indoctrination by tie-wearing yesmen.

Anti-work is the urge to smash every temple of The Great and Mighty Economy (hallowed be his name) and kill all his clergy before our bodies and minds start to fail and it’s our turn to be sacrificed to him.

Anti-work, friends, is anarchy.

Granaries to Overlords: Still a True Story

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/civilization> on September 3, 2025.

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In his last book released after his death, Graeber (and cowriter Wengrow) attempts to point to a few isolated examples of prehistory dense settlements to poo poo the basis of anticiv theory: that sedentarism creates authority and that the city in particular is anathema to anarchy. Reds are going to be using this fiction to ‘disprove’ anti-civ anarchy for decades to come, so I may as well get an early start in responding to its points.

“The Dawn of Everything”, published by Penguin Books, attempts to rewrite human history by presenting the advent of Civilization as an awesome project that took a few unfortunate missteps along the way and went astray, but would certainly go back to being awesome if only those missteps (uh the destruction of every ecosystem on the planet culminating in the current unprecedented mass-extinction event) were somehow course-corrected.

The New Yorker:

Drawing on new archeological findings, and revisiting old ones, Graeber and Wengrow argue that the granaries-to-overlords tale simply isn’t true. Rather, it’s a function of an extremely low-resolution approach to time. Viewed closely, the course of human history resists our favored schemata. Hunter-gatherer communities seem to have experimented with various forms of farming as side projects thousands of years before we have any evidence of cities. Even after urban centers developed, there was nothing like an ineluctable relationship between cities, technology, and domination.

The Guardian:

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow review – inequality is not the price of civilisation.

The so-called “agricultural revolution” – the Neolithic Faustian bargain when humanity swapped egalitarian simplicity for wealth, status and hierarchy – simply didn’t happen. The shift from foraging to agriculture was slow and patchy; much of what has been thought of as farming was actually small-scale horticulture, and perfectly compatible with flat social structures. Similarly, the rise of cities did not necessitate kings, priests and bureaucrats. Indus valley settlements such as Harappa (c2600BC) show no signs of palaces or temples and instead suggest dispersed, not concentrated power. While Graeber and Wengrow are open about the very limited evidence and the disputes over its interpretation, they build a compelling case.

Note: I haven’t read the book yet and this is simply a short response to some of the things people who have read it (just mainstream book critics so far) are saying about it.

The difference between small groups of gatherer-hunters undertaking brief and isolated experiments with agriculture to supplement their continued gatherer-hunter lifestyles and an actual civilization where everyone is wholly dependent on agriculture and permanent settlements is immense.

Graeber pretending that these early aborted experiments prove civilization and the city can be anarchic only betrays his ideological dishonesty.

The reality he’s ignoring is that an isolated settlement of a few thousand people who consume grains while millions outside their settlement remain gatherer hunters is not a civilization.

Civilization doesn’t stop at a small town’s walls — it spreads everywhere, contaminating every inch of the land, sea and air in order to extract and export all resources to the immense and hungry cities.

Civilization doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it’s not one small town of grain eaters lucky enough to be surrounded by fertile lands that haven’t yet been depleted. it’s an ever expanding desert, an endless growth, until the civilization runs out of space to grow and abruptly dies from horrible war, famine and disease.

One town of farmers existing in a gatherer hunter world doesn’t prove that anarchy thrives in civilization. graeber chooses to valorize a small town of outliers who herded sheep and ate wheat, when there were millions of full time gatherer hunters — anarchists — outside the town’s walls whose lives he completely dismisses as uninteresting.

He celebrates these minor agricultural settlements while failing to acknowledge the reality that agricultural settlements can only exist as long as fertile land exists, creating a self-defeating outcome where the settlement eventually runs out of resources and either dies or colonizes lands further and further away from the settlement — lands that are depended on by thousands to millions of nomadic gatherer hunters.

By celebrating the city, the sheep and the wheat and pretending a city can exist without affecting the world around it, he’s saying fuck off and die to everyone who lives outside the town’s borders. a diverse population that will be extinguished by the city’s ever-increasing hunger for extraction of non-renewable resources to feed itself and its growth.

An early sedentary town or two failing to take root and kickstart civilization isn’t proof of civilization’s potential to exist without hierarchy, it’s simply evidence that civilization had a few false starts before enough of these sedentary towns were able to amass the collective authority to march in armies to destroy the vast wilderness that surrounded them and enslave the free peoples that lived in it to work the newly cleared grain fields.

By choosing to go through history with a fine comb to identify obscure tribes with ways of life that mimic his own so he can hold them up on a pedestal while casting shade on the cultures of the majority of humans at the time, graeber is engaging in a form of colonialism that mirrors European colonizers in the 19^th century casting all non-Europeans as subhuman heathens and savages for not living in agricultural, industrial nation states.

But the Government Said I Have Rights

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/humanrights> on September 3, 2025.

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George Carlin:

In 1942, there were a 110,000 Japanese American citizens in good standing, law-abiding people, who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That’s all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had, “right this way” – into the internment camps. Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most, their government took ’em away. And rights aren’t rights if someone can take ’em away. They’re privileges, that’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter and shorter. [63]

An extension of the class system, societies draw clear lines between people with rights and people without them: Migrants versus citizens, educated versus uneducated, homeless versus homed, convicts versus non-convicts, men versus women, heterosexual vs homosexual, white versus non-white.

Governments create rights so they can meter them out to certain segments of the population, pitting everyone against each other in a vicious competition for civil liberties and economic advantage. So long as everyone has to fight for their place in the world, they’ll have no time or energy to fight the system that creates and enforces these gross inequalities.

There are the two types of ”rights” to consider:

• Legal rights / civil rights / statutory rights.

• Natural rights / moral rights / inalienable rights / human rights.

Legal rights depend on the rule of law within a nation. For legal rights to be granted to you, first a state must exercise its monopoly on violence to strip you of all your freedom, and then trickle-feed certain allowances back to you with stringent stipulations e.g. limiting credit to white capital owners or denying voting rights to people with criminal records.

The entire concept of legal rights depends on a state denying you all the possible freedoms they can think of, but then permitting you to file the paperwork to reclaim a few largely inconsequential ones: Usually voting, citizenship, schooling, taxation with representation, the pursuit of profit, land deeds, birth certificates, marriage certificates, copyright, driving licenses, passports and death certificates.

These are all things that cement the state’s power and further its reach, while making citizens dependent on the state for survival. The statesmen always stipulate that they can strip citizens of these entitlements at their sole and absolute discretion, ensuring people who live under the authority of the state will have little choice but to bend the knee and accept any and all atrocities committed on them to avoid further incurring the wrath of the pampered narcissists who rule the world.

Arrested for protesting a developer’s destruction of your local lake? Killed your rapist? Dumpster dived for food? Crossed a border without the right passport? Blocked a pipeline from being built through your only water source? Occupied a vacant lot to grow a garden? Distributed food to homeless people without a license? The state can now strip you of your remaining morsels of freedom for violating its tomes upon tomes of laws.

So, for you to accept the authority of legislators to allocate rights to you, to permit you such luxuries as “free“ speech and the right to vote to select the party who will take their turn ruling you, you’re effectively accepting and legitimizing a violent, thieving, bloodthirsty gang’s power over you. You’re entering into a contract whereupon you exchange your freedom for a few privileges that can and will be taken back from you by the state without notice.

This is why the concept of rights ought to be rejected by people who seek freedom through anarchy. Why willingly accept a lifelong contract placing ourselves into the service of arrogant statesmen who promise us a modicum of mercy in exchange for this unadulterated control over our lives?

Among the much ballyhooed rights they coax us with, they offer us the amazing opportunity to be imprisoned but not tortured if we sign on the dotted line. But then they change the terms of the contract once we’re in their custody and torture us anyway. Their authority allows them to set the terms and alter them as it suits them. Their sadistic power-hungry disposition will always lead them to pull away the rights they promised us, just because they can.

George Carlin:

Yeah… sooner or later the people in this country gonna realize the government does not give a fuck about them. The government doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare, or your safety, it simply doesn’t give a fuck about you. It’s interested in its own power, that’s the only thing, keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.

In relationships of rulers and obeyers, the rulers have all the power: They decide what is and isn’t a right and what does and doesn’t violate the right. The people with the power can rewrite reality at will, they can torture you to death and never admit what they did to you was torture. The United States calls their torture of prisoners of war ”enhanced coercive interrogation techniques”. That’s really all it takes to bypass rights: a person in power using craven euphemisms when they torture their prisoners.

If slavery conflicts with the rights they claim we have, they can just substitute the word ”slave” for ”inmate” and it’s all good. If every prisoner has a right to due process, they can just have military commissions spend decades putting on show ”forever trials” that never attempt to convict the prisoner, but keep them in custody in perpetuity. [64]

Legal rights are a paper thin safety blanket in the face of an icy authority blizzard that freezes everything in its path. Our rulers take our freedom and then ration small pieces of it back to us in a highly controlled environment if we agree to follow their laws, obey their enforcers, pay them daily tributes and do a lifetime of menial labor in exchange for the right to exist while they live in the lap of luxury on our backs.

Legal rights are a few minor and temporary exemptions to the state’s absolute rule over you. These exemptions are only permitted to you by the ruling class so long as they don’t interfere with their economic interests and so long as you remain wholly subservient to them, never threatening their absolute authority over you.

Pëtr Kropotkin:

This is what these so-called liberties can be reduced to. Freedom of press and of meeting, inviolability of home and all the rest, are only respected if the people do not make use of them against the privileged classes. But the day the people begin to take advantage of them to undermine those privileges, the so-called liberties will be cast overboard.

This is quite natural. Humanity retains only the rights it has won by hard struggle and is ready to defend at every moment, with arms in hand. [65]

Natural rights are even more ridiculously fantastical than legal rights, if that’s even possible. They’re supposedly fundamental to existence, granted to us by nature or God, universally accepted by all and can’t be contradicted by any legal entity. These are the three ”natural universal rights”, based on the idea that all people are created equal:

• The right to liberty

• The right to the pursuit of happiness

• The right to life

Thomas Jefferson, a plantation-owner and serial rapist [66] who owned more than 600 black people, complained that England’s King George III failed to recognize the natural rights of American colonists and drafted the American Declaration of Independence to right this dreadful wrong.

In the first two paragraphs of this historic rights document, Jefferson outlines these natural rights, mentioning that ”all men are created equal”, have ”inalienable rights,” and are entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The irony was apparently lost on him, as it’s lost on all authority figures who tell us sweet lies about our amazing God / government-given rights while sapping our blood, sweat and tears to enlarge their plantations and mansions.

Mahatma Gandhi, who also happened to be a serial sex pest [67] and a racist, was another big pusher of human rights. While he promoted his philosophy of nonviolence and equal opportunity, he went out of his way to rob the Dalit (people belonging to the lowest caste in India) of their agency [68], declaring he would go on a hunger strike to the death if they were given anything resembling equality. If even the people most associated with the promotion of natural rights spent their lives brutalizing women, children and racial minorities while facing zero consequences for it, at what point does the rights charade fall apart? How can rights ever be real in a world with such rigid hierarchical social relations?

George Carlin:

Boy, everyone in this country is always running around yammering about their fucking rights. I have a right, you have no right, we have a right, they don’t have a right… Folks, I hate to spoil your fun but-there’s no such thing as rights, okay? They’re imaginary. We made them up! Like the Boogie Man… the Three Little Pigs, Pinocchio, Mother Goose, shit like that. Rights are an idea, they’re just imaginary, they are a cute idea, cute… but that’s all, cute, and fictional. But if you think you do have rights, let me ask you this, where do they come from? People say, well, they come from God, they’re God-given rights… Aw fuck, here we go again… here we go again. The God excuse. The last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument, it came from God. Anything we can’t describe, must have come from God.

Natural rights aren’t upheld by nature or a higher being, they’re just as artificially constructed and deceptive as legal rights, but with even less utility since they have no solid, corporeal form that can be petitioned for mercy like a courtroom judge in the case of legal rights. God isn’t going to enforce your God-given rights, no matter how much you beg.

We have no perceivable right to liberty when all the resources we depend on to survive are owned by someone else, who will cruelly withhold those resources if we don’t live by their laws and forever humble ourselves at their feet... Praying they’ll agree to fulfill our basic needs and permit us to survive another day.

Likewise, the pursuit of happiness is clearly reserved for the upper classes, while us poors have no recourse but to accept an endless parade of humiliation, coercion and violence in service of their colossal egos. The noblemen spend their lives erecting impenetrable barriers to prevent us from eating even a single crumb from their organic blueberry pie, so the idea that they have ever allowed us to pursue our own happiness is offensive. We live only to serve the moneyed class and staff their lavish properties.

Finally, our supposed right to life is forfeit the moment a policeman, settler or soldier decides we’re resisting their authority and takes away either our freedom or our life. It’s forfeit when we fall ill and can no longer work to pay our bills, cast out into the cold to freeze and die.

Our rights were never anything more than hot air pouring out of the mouths of the well-heeled hustlers who rule the kingdoms of democracy.

Bob Black:

There are fashions in clothes and music. And there are fashions in politics. One current fashion in politics, all over the world, is human rights: “Human rights is the idea of our time.” Everybody likes human rights. Not everybody respects them. I will make the claim that human rights are never respected, as human rights. Because human rights have no objective reality, there is nothing to respect. Some humans are worthy of respect, but not their imaginary rights.

Today, it’s scandalous to disbelieve in human rights. A prominent social philosopher named Joel Feinberg is appalled that there are, as he says, “even extreme misanthropes who deny that anyone in fact has rights.” These extreme misanthropes would include Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Jesus, Mohammed, Thomas Aquinas, Johann Gottlieb von Herder, Edmund Burke, William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, Peter Kropotkin and Friedrich Nietzsche. Until about 500 years ago, everyone must have been an extreme misanthrope, which is certainly not how Jesus Christ and Prince Kropotkin, among others, are regarded.[69]

The UN’s ”Universal Declaration of Human Rights” is a document that purports to enshrine a long list of privileges for all people including dignity, liberty, and equality. It prohibits slavery and torture, guarantees freedom of movement and residence, the right of property, the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to a nationality.

It’s plain to see none of these things are actually upheld by UN member states. Slavery is still rampant all over the world, including state-sponsored slavery (in prisons), torture such as waterboarding is commonplace for prisoners of war, and no one in the lower classes has anything resembling dignity, liberty, equality, an adequate standard of living or freedom of movement and residence. If this document had any value at all, its most powerful member states like the USA wouldn’t be openly violating every one of these rights every day of the year.

Neither natural rights nor legal rights are compatible with anarchy because anarchy recognizes no authority. Anarchists reject the power our rulers grant themselves to decide which privileges to bestow on the groups and individuals who are able and willing to meet their impossibly strict standards, and which privileges to deny.

No one should have the power to stand on a pedestal and decree to us what we do and don’t deserve, what we can say and can’t say, when we get to eat and where we ought to sleep.

Rather than swallowing mythic tales about human rights and gaslighting ourselves into believing governments will ever grant us anything resembling freedom, why not reach for something real? Something that has shape and substance. There are no rights, no universal laws that will magically protect us from the people who write the laws. No. There are only desires. And the thing all anarchists desire most is freedom. Freedom from rule, from law, from authority, from the wrath of the rights-giver.

We don’t need rights, we need anarchy.

There’s a Collective Trauma

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/collective_trauma> on September 3, 2025.

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Grasping in the dark for something you can’t quite put into words.

Guided only by the faint fear of falling into the dark vacuum – a gaping deficiency that lingers within that carefully manicured psyche. You don’t dare tread near the vacuum. You’ll do anything to avoid even thinking about it. Quick, find a distraction.

Always cycling through mind-numbing social activities that promise to provide you with fulfillment. Debate clubs, affinity groups, political parties, historical reenactment societies, rainbow gatherings, punk gigs, fan conventions. You decide to go to a protest downtown.

With every new social engagement, you imagine you’ll find the meaning you so desperately crave by converging with yet another group of like-minded busy little bees.

You’ll soon start to wonder if your shared fixations are superficial, ill-considered, ultimately a waste of life. But you’ll shake yourself out of it and continue to go through the motions of social ceremony, because anything is better than falling into that dreaded vacuum lurking deep in the crevasses of your mind.

Peace never comes from other people. It has to come from an understanding and an acceptance of the self. You know this but you pretend to have forgotten.

Only by connecting with your base elements; the self free from decades of social manipulation and subjugation can you find the meaning you’ve lost touch with.

Reaching into the vacuum to retrieve your innate uniqueness. This is the only way you can hope to catch a glimpse of whatever lies beneath the dense layers of deception you’ve amassed. You know this beyond any doubt when you lay asleep at night, but allowing such dangerous ideas to enter your waking thoughts is too frightful a proposition. The vacuum is just too dark a place.

You possess the ability to break through the thick haze of bullshit enveloping everything you are. But the warm embrace of the group is so much easier to cultivate.

Using shiny new people to distract yourself from all that existential dread is so very easy. It’s what you know. It’s comforting. It’s intoxicating. It’s what everyone else is doing.

Hungrily consuming anyone that happens to fall into your orbit, the same way you use up any other throwaway product.

Absorbing them into the banal tedium that is your existence, dragging them down to your meek and docile level.

Breaking your near-lifelong tango with convention and uniformity would be too distasteful. What if people stare? What if they’re scornful?

You want so much to feel at peace with your place in the universe. But all your life, you’ve steadily been indoctrinated into the cult of leviathan. A senseless, punishing death march that dilutes and depletes everything it touches. It inflicts on you an onerous unease.

Leviathan’s programming constrains your ability to connect with yourself, your environment, other people. You’ve been taught to live in fear of all that makes you brilliant and unique. To replace connection with consumption. Desire with duty, obligation, constraint.

You so crave the perceived permeance of community, of a shared understanding, shared values, shared goals.

The truth is dreadfully hard to accept. Community is nothing more than a shared delusion. A callous fraud that promises to make you whole, but instead leaves you tapped out, broken and thoroughly compromised.

You know this, don’t you? When you’re in a deep sleep and the vacuum starts to open itself up, spewing out its secrets.

Community is when people get together to collectively and violently repress their uniqueness and adopt a bland inoffensive homogeneity. An army of traumatized and traumatizing soldiers, always marching in unison, boots stamping deafeningly on the tarmac. Left, right. Left, right. Left, right.

It’s tragic watching your decay.

You so hope to be told you’re something greater than your dreary day to day existence suggests.

You’re not.

You are the sum of the parts you’ve chosen for yourself and those parts are bland, vapid, frivolous.

A follower of followers of followers of followers. An old joke told so many times in so many places by so many people, it can only hope to engender a strained smirk.

In trying to soothe your disconnect by centering your place in the group or the subculture; by putting the needs of a manufactured, forced community above your own desires, you adopt an almost-religious fervor for both conformity and sacrifice.

“I am important. I am special. I am accomplished. I matter.”

“I am important. I am special. I am accomplished. I matter.”

“I am important. I am special. I am accomplished. I matter.”

You lie so confidently to your own face. It’s almost become a reflex now.

You’re an echo of a television Christmas special broadcast a hundred times to millions of people, year after year. Scripted, choreographed and predictable. Something familiar and thoughtless to fall asleep to before the next workday starts.

You expertly avoid ever acknowledging your true desires, instead dedicating your brief remaining moments on this planet to sacrificing yourself to the cause, the community, the nation, the faith, the struggle, or whatever other wholly artificial spectre you decide to build up and glue yourself to.

You are forever on auto-drive. A constant loop of weary self-regulating insipidity.

It’s detestable what you’ve become. Really it is. Willfully squandering every speck of potential the cosmos seeded you with. Every original thought. Every creative impulse. Every inclination to be you.

And for what? To be accepted? To fit in? To be assigned a role? One more cog in Leviathan’s machine as it churns away at everything beneath its feet.

You don’t get it. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. You were going to be so much more before you let them all beat you into the bland, flavorless pulp that puddles before me.

They took everything from you. Everything fierce, radiant, defiant. Everything that sparkled, moved and inspired. All that made existence in this world a tolerable and worthwhile pursuit.

All that’s left for you now in this world is a sunken hole in the desert, and it’s rapidly filling with sand. Dry coarse sand, funneling into every orifice, stripping away at your flesh and bones.

It doesn’t have to end this way. You can reclaim your unique. Unleash your fire and fury to claw back everything that was coerced from you. You can crawl out of that sinkhole before the sand completely breaks you down.

Abandon your need to placate the spiteful, erratic hive that has forced itself on you for so long. You have the power to burn to an ember everything that has cruelly choked the unique out of you for all these years.

Conquer your fear of being alone. Rediscover what it means to be you. Disconnect from everything that drains your will and leap into the only place no tie-wearing tyrant can follow. The dark vacuum within you. The place you most fear, the place where you stuff all your truths.

Submerge yourself in the vacuum. Let it become you.

Bask in the solitude of the self, hear your thoughts and yours alone. Take a series of deep breaths and gather every morsel of strength you have left. You’re going to need it.

Wait.

Absorb it all. Every deep-seeded secret the vacuum holds. Every insight you’ve forced yourself to bury. The totality of your lost enlightenment.

Wait.

Wait...

Now. It’s time.

You are become the full manifestation of the unsealed dark vacuum, the unrepentant force of nature that absorbs all lies and spits out cold hard truths.

Burst out in righteous fury. Take your apt revenge for all that’s been done to deprive you of you.

You have reclaimed your unique, embraced every desire you long suppressed. You will not be sacrificed to the will of others. Never again.

Fully embody the self and no force on Earth will stop you from living and dying as you are. Ungovernable, ferocious, piercing, glimmering, sublime. You.

Everything that subjugated you in your former life will be eviscerated in a fiery blast of indignation.

Every little piece of the world you raze quickly adds up in the quest to destroy the universe.

You are a bellwether for the discontented. Go forth and dismantle the instruments of your oppression. Never let them chisel away pieces of you again. Be whole. Completely and fully you.

The Rotting Carcass Behind The Green-Scare

Subtitle: How Anti-Civ Anarchy Became the Most Controversial Position

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/green_scare> on September 3, 2025.

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1. Green Anarchy & Red Anarchy: The Divide

2. The Origins of Anti-Civ Anarchy & Other Ecological Movements

3. Post-Civ: Leftist-Drift

4. The Rise of Antifa Gang

Green Anarchy & Red Anarchy: The Divide

Green anarchy, regardless of the offshoot, is a philosophy, a critique, and a lifeway that emphasizes the most pronounced anarchist principles. Green anarchists are ready and willing to dismantle all structures of domination, starting with a deep-rooted analysis of ecology, which means the relationship between all living things and the physical environment we all depend on to survive.

I’m going to examine the origins and gradual evolution of green anarchy, explore how these ideas are perceived by people on the outside looking in, and try to understand why green anarchy is so detested by a contingent of bullheaded leftists who, more and more, have been slandering us as “eco-fascists”.

Green anarchists take the critique of authority as far as it will go – not stubbornly stopping at government and capital as many anarchists will do, but going further to tackle all the hierarchical implications of work, industry, agriculture, patriarchy, society, gender norms, high technology, numbers, language, time and more. It casts a wide net to identify and dissect all the forms of oppression that spawn from the global industrial-agricultural-patriarchal-domesticating system we’re forced to live under.

The contemporary forms of green anarchy: “anti-civ”, “green nihilism” and even the more PR-friendly but frustratingly wishy-washy “post-civ” have the same foundations and principles as anarcho-primitivism, but that label has largely been discarded by contemporary anarchists because of the racist implications of white Western philosophers referring to diverse indigenous lifestyles as “primitive”.

I used to call myself post-civ when in the company of leftists, because, like a lot of green anarchists, I fell into the trap of trying to water down my anti-civ views to placate the scolding leftists that have long declared themselves the arbiters of sound anarchist theory.

For years, reds have stood up on a pedestal loudly shaming, othering and smearing anyone who isn’t as enthusiastically devoted to the continued “progress” of the factory, the mine, the battery farm, the university campus, the cubicle (and other prisons) as they are.

It’s natural to not want to be grouped in with a villainous, problematic, dangerous element – and that’s what anti-civ anarchy is largely presented as by certain vocal elements within the left. An irredeemable bogeyman so frightening that it can’t be allowed a voice, just in case the sound of it corrupts some impressionable child who doesn’t know any better and is then turned away from the centralization, coercion, ecological plunder and imperialism that is inherent with industrial life.

Red organizers have tried to forbid green anarchists from tabling at anarchist book-fairs, overturned their tables when they showed up anyway, tried to confiscate their anti-civ literature, yelled abuse at them, spat at them, pepper-sprayed them, sucker-punched them. Reds frothing at the mouth at the sight of green anarchists would almost be amusing if it weren’t becoming so damaging to our health and physical safety. They’ve convinced themselves we’re evil scum who want to seize their insulin, burn down their workplaces and corn fields and, most ridiculously, omnicide the human species. They believe all this because of bald-faced lies they themselves made up to discredit anti-civ anarchy.

There’s a concerted effort on behalf of the left to project all the authoritarian constructs inherent with leftism onto anti-civ anarchy, which wants nothing to do with leftism or its towering pile of deadly and ecosystem-destroying failures.

While humans and other animals suffer and die in staggering numbers all around us from the immediate effects of global industrial civilization, a lot of leftists will swear up and down that anti-civ anarchists are a mortal threat to the continued survival of humanity. That we’re a clear and present danger to civilized people’s freedom.

Let’s try to unwrap why this is.

First, I should explain what (“dark”) green anarchy is and what it isn’t. Green anarchists theorize that generations of sedentary social stratification has led to human domestication, in the same way dogs have been gradually domesticated from wild wolves. Just like with dogs, this domesticating process has had a cumulative detrimental effect on our physical and mental health and the way we interact with each other and our environment.

It’s proposed by green anarchists that a sustained “rewilding” process could act to curtail this domestication and restore the health of not only ourselves, but the balance of our ecosystems. Some of the proposed ways to achieve this include regenerative land management techniques and the restoration of our social bonds with the biosphere.

These correlative bonds we had with our habitat for almost our entire existence as a species have become deeply fractured due to the various alienating processes that brought about our domestication. Until the bonds are repaired and the planet’s ecology is restored, we’ll continue to experience the dreadful effects of social and ecological collapse, as well as the continued processes of coercion and domination that are so ingrained in industrial mass-society.

Green anarchy addresses both social and environmental factors and understands that the two are interlinked in a holistic manner. If an ecosystem is broken, the people who live within it will continue to deteriorate until a healthy ecology is restored.

Like all anarchists, we challenge all systems of authority and seek voluntary, mutually-beneficial relationships with our neighbors in self-sustaining communities. The thing that most sets green anarchists apart from other tendencies is our dedication to extending our critique of domination to all life, not simply human life. We study anthropology and history to understand the origins of civilization and all the systems of domination that formed around it.

The philosophy of green anarchy is informed by the writings and lifeways of transcendentalists (Thoreau), bioregionalists (Reclus), situationists (Debord), spiritual anarchists (Tolstoy, Laozi, Brydum), anarcho-naturists (Gravelle, Zisly, Montseny), indigenous-anarchists (Zig Zag, Indigenous Action, Tawinikay), green nihilists (Langer, anonymous, Flower Bomb, Abara, de Acosta, Aragorn!), anti-civs (Landstreicher, Fitzpatrick, Elany, Seaweed, Return Fire) and anarcho-primitivists (Moore, Zerzan, Perlman, Tucker, AbdelRahim).

These interrelated philosophies together form a strong critique of social hierarchy, work, extractivism, social alienation, domestication, social stratification, technocracy, patriarchy, the division of labor / specialization, ableism, imperialism, institutional violence, desertification, mass society, ecocide and all the other forms of authority brought about by the civilization that envelopes the whole planet.

There are those who are not willing to widen their critique of authority to most of these things, yet insist on identifying as (“bright”) green or eco-anarchists. These people are simply pushing insipid, greenwashed Marxism like Murray Bookchin made a career of doing for decades. Anyone working to convince us the disastrous industrial system that’s become so pervasive in our lives and driven so much of the planet’s life to extinction can be gently reshaped into a peaceful, ecological people’s utopia has little understanding of what it means to be “green” and doesn’t reject hierarchy in any real way.

Green anarchy embodies an unapologetic critique of all forms of authority. “Solar-punk”, “social ecology”, “post-scarcity anarchism” and related attempts to appropriate the green label from anti-civs have no real desire to address the devastating consequences of the debilitating industrial system that rules us. Their wistful notions that “green” technology such as solar cells, undefined “clean energy”, modular computing, 3D printers and electric vehicles will solve this unprecedented crisis are incredibly shortsighted.

They fail to understand just how destructive and polluting those high technologies are to extract from the earth, manufacture and transport. They always fail to address the mountains of toxic waste that’s produced during these processes and dumped in some third world peasant’s backyard. All these high-tech goods require global supply chains, extractivism, imperialism and laborer-exploitation because they’re made up of rare minerals and other resources that can only be sourced in certain parts of the world.

The manufacturing processes for microchips and silicon are so advanced that they require centralized mega-factories that cost an absolute fortune to set up and run, which is why there are only 2 or 3 companies in the world with the required infrastructure.

The microchip manufacturing process involves hundreds of steps and depends on advanced robots pushing tiny particles around massive fabrication facilities. The “clean rooms” inside these facilities require tightly controlled conditions with zero contamination from dust, humidity, heat or dirt. If one tiny impurity enters the system, an entire batch will be ruined, costing a fortune and months of wasted preparation. You’re not going to have local neighborhood microchip factories like these solarpunks seem to imagine.

Reading an incredibly shallow and uninformed text like The Solarpunk Manifesto is an exercise in frustration for anyone who has thought seriously about all the consequences of mass-production and what it takes to maintain an industrial city. It reads like a child’s proposal for saving the world. Look at some of these points:

Solarpunk recognizes the historical influence politics and science fiction have had on each other.

Solarpunk recognizes science fiction as not just entertainment but as a form of activism.

The visual aesthetics of Solarpunk are open and evolving. As it stands, it is a mash-up of the following: 1800s age-of-sail/frontier living (but with more bicycles). Creative reuse of existing infrastructure (sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes present-weird). Appropriate technology. Art Nouveau. Hayao Miyazaki. Jugaad-style innovation from the non-Western world. High-tech backends with simple, elegant outputs.

In Solarpunk we’ve pulled back just in time to stop the slow destruction of our planet. We’ve learned to use science wisely, for the betterment of our life conditions as part of our planet.

It’s just silly. A style guide for drawing pretty art and writing fiction with a certain aesthetic. It’s a fun and creative pastime, sure, but it doesn’t engage in any real way with the ongoing global ecocide beyond proposing “green tech” and without ever attempting to explain how, “sustainable civilization”.

The more “serious” philosophies like Bookchin’s social ecology and post-scarcity anarchism essentially make the same naive assumptions and proposals as solar-punk, but use bigger words to do it, while also repeatedly tarnishing anti-civs for not having faith in futurist science, technological progress, democracy and workerism. (I’ve written about Bookchin’s greenwashed prescriptions in a previous essay, so I won’t rehash that here.)

The left’s reductive utopian thinking: insisting on dear leader’s step-by-step plan for constructing a utopian worker-society has never led anywhere good.

It’s naive and damaging to imagine Leviathan can be tamed and reformed into serving the interests of free people. Industrial civilization will never allow left-wing-technocrats to curtail its constant expansion. The idea that the system can be reformed into compliance is a complete misunderstanding of power-hierarchy, and more perversely, a willful disregarding of the morbid reality we live everyday. Leviathan has stolen both the present and the future from under us and it’s not going to suddenly play nice because some oblivious Bookchinites say they can make it do their bidding. Prescribing a supposed lesser-evil form of industrialism to solve the devastation wrought on us by the industrial age is tragically inept. Leviathan will roll over gullible solar-industrialists and their “green” cities without skipping a beat.

The tireless drive of Leviathan to dominate absolutely everything everywhere and leave nothing but sand in its wake cannot be under-estimated. Marxists completely fail to reckon with the coercion – domestication – alienation – domination – ecocide cycle that’s inherent in industrial civilization. If someone told them capitalism could be reformed to benefit workers, they’d laugh in their face, but somehow they’re convinced Leviathan would be rendered docile and servile if workers possessed more democracy in the workplace. They insist Leviathan’s sprawling cities can be made to peacefully co-exist with the wilds... The wilds that need to be stripped bare and burned to a crisp every record-hot summer to maintain those cities. And all they need to do it? Leftists in positions of power.

It’s patently absurd, and yet they’ve never questioned it because their entire ideological worldview depends on the glory of the moral leftist worker-organizer who can do no wrong. They offer the same distorted solution to every problem: Just give workers democracy and everything will be okay. Because voter bodies would never use democracy to vote the future away to preserve their privileges. Coal miners would never vote to keep the mines open. Farm workers would never vote to use pesticides to make their jobs easier. Factory workers would never vote to outsource their industrial waste somewhere out of sight. (Note: Heavy use of sarcasm)

Unlike “anarcho-transhumanism” – which took a pre-existing authoritarian-aligned school of thought from rich white Silicon Valley executives and tried to fuse it with anarchy (with admittedly amusing results), there is no authoritarian primitivism. It’s always been an anarchist school of thought, envisioned by anarchists for anarchists as a critique of civilization and an associated living practice going all the way back to Thoreau, Tolstoy and Reclus, long before it was first given a name in the 1980s.

The Origins of Anti-Civ Anarchy & Other Ecological Movements

Ever since Thoreau dropped out of society to live in the woods and documented his experience in a diary, anti-civilizational anarchy has been a strong current within the anarchist milieu. Living in balance with nature. Practicing simple, sustainable survival skills in order to live without depending on systems of authority. Deconstructing the inherently alienating properties of industrial civilization. Unlearning all the bad habits urban life has indoctrinated us with...

These were long-held anarchist principles and it’s only recently, thanks to self-avowed anti-anarchist crusaders like Murray Bookchin that these ideas have been tarnished as “lifestylist” and “reactionary”. There’s been a decades-long smear campaign led by anarcho-transhumanists, post-scarcity anarchists and other reds to equate anti-civ anarchy with “eco-fascism” and cast all anti-civs as transphobic, ableist, genocidal, wheelchair-stealing supervillains who work in the shadows to bring about the cruel destruction of everything civilized people hold dear.

Green anarchy in its successive forms, from transcendentalism to primitivism, to the current trends of green-nihilism and indigenous anarchism, has always, always rejected all authority, oppression and domination. It’s always been the anarchist school of thought most ready to pick apart every social institution to identify its limitations and its hierarchical inevitabilities, while other anarchist tendencies have willfully ignored all manner of social hierarchies when people decided those hierarchies were beneficial to furthering their reductive ideological prescriptions to build bigger, better societies with cushy manufacturing jobs for everyone. The supposed divinity of “progress” has consumed the left since the dawn of the industrial age.

Elisée Reclus summed it up well in 1905:

“Progress,” in the strictest sense of the word, is meaningless, for the world is infinite, and in its unlimited vastness, one is always as distant from the beginning as from the end. The movement of society ultimately reduces to the movements of the individuals who are its constitutive elements. In view of this fact, we must ask what progress in itself can be determined for each of these beings whose total life span from birth to death is only a few years. Is it no more than that of a spark of light glancing off a pebble and vanishing instantly into the cold air? [...]

The missionaries who encounter magnificent savages moving about freely in their nakedness believe that they will bring them “progress” by giving them dresses and shirts, shoes and hats, catechisms and Bibles, and by teaching them to chant psalms in English or Latin. And what triumphant songs in honor of progress have not been sung at the opening ceremonies of all the industrial plants with their adjoining taverns and hospitals! Certainly, industry brought real progress in its wake, but it is important to analyze scrupulously the details of this great evolution! The wretched populations of Lancashire and Silesia demonstrate that their histories were not a record of unadulterated progress. It is not enough to change one’s circumstances and enter a new class in order to acquire a greater share of happiness. There are now millions of industrial workers, seamstresses, and servants who tearfully remember the thatched cottages of their childhoods, the outdoor dances under the ancestral tree, and the evening visits around the hearth. And what kind of “progress” is it for the people of Cameroon and of Togo to have henceforth the honor of being protected by the German flag, or for the Algerian Arabs to drink aperitifs and express themselves elegantly in Parisian slang?

In the spirit of Tao, Green anarchy goes further than merely critiquing material structures of domestication and domination, it also critiques our conceptions of what the world is, how we place ourselves in it, the purpose of self, and indeed the very idea of a fixed reality.

The way we conceive of the world and of our existence on a metaphysical level is as important to the green anarchist tradition as our understanding of the manufactured systems erected to domesticate us. These systems restrain both body and mind, in order to maintain the constant forward march of civilization, keeping Leviathan fat and powerful and everything else in a state of perpetual spiritual starvation.

Without a keen understanding of the self, the constraining “logic” of progress will forever linger in our minds, and blunt all the provocative, stimulating possibilities we could be exploring, hindering us from living a life of joy rather than the tragic loop of suffering and sacrifice we eternalize in service of Leviathan’s monstrous appetite.

Only by breaking down the imposing walls of domestication within our minds can we hope to truly progress beyond our compulsion to feed the gluttonous serpent.

There’s a strong argument to be made that anti-civ is the most anti-authority of all the anarchist schools of thought, even going as far as critiquing language for its inherent alienation and propensity for hierarchy-building – something that anyone with disabilities that cause communication struggles, or with a “common” accent that marks them as poor for life would appreciate.

This has a lot to do with why leftists are so quick to fear-monger and bad-jacket anarchists when we have anti-civ ideas. The realization that green anarchists will go much, much further than they ever will in questioning all the structures of domination that subjugate us must be incredibly threatening for people who crow about how “radical” and enlightened they are to anyone who will listen… So radical that they’ve read everything David Graeber and Murray Bookchin ever wrote and will parrot their academic heroes soothing tall-tales at every opportunity. If only the world could be as simple as they’ve conceived it in their manifestos. If only the workers owning the means of production would create a worldwide ecological utopia, and all other forms of authority would evaporate when they met that singular goal. Then they wouldn’t need to attack green anarchy and burn our books to prevent anyone from thinking beyond their ideal-workplace fantasy.

A lot of the anger about anti-civ anarchy demonstrably isn’t actually about anti-civ anarchists at all, but at unrelated groups like “Individuals Tending Towards the Wild” (ITS) and “Deep Green Resistance” (DGR). Reds associate these anti-anarchist groups with anti-civ anarchy for reasons only known to them.

ITS is a Mexican terrorist group that may or may not be responsible for indiscriminate bombings and murders done in the name of “eco-extremism” and vengeance for the continuing deterioration of the planet’s ecosystems. Among the attacks people identifying with ITS have claimed responsibility for are bombings of anarchist events and squats. Some of the random murders they’ve claimed in their communiques later turned out to have been committed by people with no connection to ITS, casting doubt on the veracity of their claims. For example, murder victim Berlin Osorio’s boyfriend was arrested and tried for her murder after an ITS communique tried to take credit for it. Regardless, they’ve written long tirades rejecting anarchism and celebrated bombing anarchist spaces. Equating this group with green anarchy doesn’t make a lick of sense.

DGR is a proudly trans-exclusionary millenarian organization that prescribes hierarchical vanguardism (in the form of a board of directors), submission to dear leader and reactionary moralism as the solution for the destruction of the environment.

Anarcho-primitivists John Zerzan, Kevin Tucker and others have long criticized DGR’s rigid hierarchy, their institutional transphobia, their cultish code of conduct that penalizes members for breaking with their rules (which include things as vague as “disloyalty”, lack of “commitment, courage or integrity”), their incredibly flawed historical understanding of revolution and radical history, and the cult of personality that surrounds the organization’s leaders Keith and Jensen. DGR really embodies all the worst instincts of the historic authoritarian left, and equating this cultish top-down organization with any of the staunchly anti-left, anti-civ anarchist tendencies is as ridiculous as blaming Kropotkin for Hitler or Mussolini’s views simply because they were all big promoters of the progress of industrial society.

The DGR organization with its dogmatic manifestos that outline how the leaders of its vanguard will govern and punish its lesser members is what you get when the left tries to tackle environmentalism. It really couldn’t be any further removed from the principles of green anarchy. So, when the left claims anti-civs are transphobic because of the views of DGR’s creepy TERF board of directors, they’re really attacking the left’s zealous organizationalism, the left’s attempts at world-building, the left’s insistence on an ideological sameness among its members, and the left’s stringent codes of laws rather than anything green anarchy is responsible for.

Leftists striving to govern “the people” is the reason organizations like DGR are able to do harm. An institutionalized, structural bigotry written in stone for all members of a political organization to internalize and obey is far more dangerous than any isolated latent bigotry an anti-organizationalist (like a green anarchist) might hold. Bigotry is far more destructive when it has organized, systemic power behind it.

It’s very telling that leftists can’t or won’t separate authoritarian environmental organizations that are organized according to leftist principles from the various anti-organizational green anarchist tendencies. Ancoms are constantly insisting they’re the only real communists, the only real leftists, the only real libertarians and the only real democrats, but when it comes to green anarchists, apparently we’re all a bunch of eco-fascists.

Eco-fascists, Eco-extremists, DGR, ITS and so on don’t claim to be anarchists, primitivists or any variation of the two. The same goes for Ted Kaczynski, the former Unabomber, who doesn’t claim to be an anarchist and in fact frequently lambasts anarchy and anarcho-primitivism for not being authoritarian like him. He calls anarcho-primitivism “a romanticized vision” and rejects it for being too socially progressive.

For some reason this man, who, if you’ve read his more recent writings, seems to most closely align with some form of class-reductionist Maoism, has been painted as the patron saint of anti-civ anarchy by people who clearly have no familiarity with his (actually very vanguardist and governmentalist) politics. While it’s true some anti-civ anarchists have been influenced by a select few of his better ideas, that shouldn’t be enough to weigh us down with all his bad ones.

That being said, there are certainly some shit green anarchists out there just like there are some shit red anarchists, orange anarchists, and so on. Anarchy shouldn’t ever be confused with some of the people who lay claim to the label, or we would all have to abandon the anarchist philosophy because of anarcho-capitalists. There are even some generally good anarchists who still maintain some bad ideas, like certain aging anprims who haven’t managed to move past the old “noble savage” trope.

There are also some unknowledgeable people who choose to identify with green anarchy without having much of an understanding of what anarchy entails. Some of these people, feeling alienated by industrial society, were drawn to vague anti-industrial politics (usually due to Kaczynski) and now loosely identify as green anarchists, without having read enough about anarchy to realize how completely unforgiving it is when it comes to hierarchy, domination and oppression. They narrowly focus in on the anti-civ aspect of anarchy, which really has very little use without the broader anti-authority aspects. Just like baby red anarchists, baby green anarchists will soon either switch to a less demanding philosophy when realizing how high the learning curve is, or will in time develop into decent anarchists.

The reason properly-informed green anarchists don’t aim to construct a program to force our principles on the world is because we fully believe in anarchy. Coercing people to live the way we live would instantly disqualify us from being anarchists.

Most of the smears against green anarchists seem to come from the discomfort provoked by the random violence committed by Kaczynski and ITS and the transphobia of DGR, even though all three have vocally denounced green anarchy on multiple occasions. The idea that hierarchical organizations and terrorists who vocally oppose green anarchy somehow represent green anarchy is absurdly disingenuous, even for the left.

It really needs to be said again and again and again until it sinks in to the collective consciousness: Anti-civ anarchy is a critical framework. It is not a political program for building a new world order. It is not a plan to build a global gatherer-hunter society or to force any way of life on anyone. It’s a useful lens we can apply to problems that are then tackled on a case-by-case basis by the people most affected by them. It is not a system for ordering reductive prescriptions on everything, everyone, everywhere.

John Moore:

There’s always the danger — as witnessed recently in Fifth Estate, for example — where hostile commentators can twist your words so that it looks as if you are constructing a primitivist ideology and setting up a primitivist political movement, even when you state exactly the contrary.

We’re not going to seize anyone’s insulin, break their wheelchair or ban them from playing video games. The reason this slanderous myth is so pervasive among leftists is because leftists assume every school of thought is like their own – a program to force an ideological blueprint for the organization of people on the world – a rigid and unchanging manifesto that claims to have all the answers to all our conundrums. They don’t seem able to conceive of a non-prescriptive worldview because their worldview so revolves around a long-dead German (or Russian) man’s promise to solve all the planet’s problems with his immortal communist science.

While the left revolves around a few learned men manufacturing systems and rules for others to live by, anti-civ has no such ambitions. The majority of the criticisms leftists have about green anarchy are them projecting their own grand ambitions for the ordering of society onto anti-civ anarchists. They’re unwilling to break out of their ever-shrinking ideological bubble to understand the difference between a critical framework and a political program. They can’t fathom of a philosophy that isn’t yet another tired prescription for world-building and people-management. This becomes extremely clear when the first thing reds ask us when they hear we’re green anarchists is almost always: “So, what does your utopia look like?” This binary way of thinking makes it near-impossible to communicate our ideas to them without them making a hundred false assumptions fed to them by their own ideological brainworms.

The fierce cognitive dissonance that erupts in leftists when green anarchists are willing to poke holes in all the hierarchical systems they aren’t willing to dismantle betrays their smallminded thinking. They simply lack the imagination to think outside the suffocating concrete box they’ve constructed for themselves.

Post-Civ: Leftist-Drift

While much of the fallacious green-scare leftists have stirred up comes from them confusing green anarchy for authoritarian environmentalist movements, as well as the rampant badjacketing Bookchin unleashed against green anarchists to help prop up his greenwashed political program, there’s also a green anarchist tendency that seems to only exist because of that same green-scare: Post-civ anarchy.

This tendency, while being anarchist and anti-civ, still manages to feed the big lie that other forms of green anarchy are deviant and bigoted ideas that we need to loudly castigate and distance ourselves from at every opportunity. It repeats that tiresome myth that primitivism is a political program to remake society in the image of indigenous gatherer-hunters and subsistence farmers, the same way communism is a program to remake society in the image of the collectively-owned factory worker.

These are the points Margaret Killjoy makes in setting post-civ apart from anarcho-primitivism. Let’s go through them one by one and I’ll demonstrate how they’re little more than strawmen, and show that post-civ is really no different than anarcho-primitivism in substance or practice, and the attempt to distance green anarchy from its roots necessitates buying into the smears disseminated by transhumanists, Marxists and others who fetishize the idea of liberation through the progression of industrial civilization.

Killjoy begins:

We’re Not Primitivists. It is neither possible, nor desirable, to return to a pre-civilized state of being. Most of the groundwork of anti-civilization thought — important work, mind you — has been laid down by primitivists. Primitivists believe, by and large, that humanity would be better served by returning to a pre-civilized way of life. This is not a view that we share.

Anprims don’t actually believe it’s possible or desirable to “return to a pre-civilized state of being’” so from the get-go Killjoy is building a coercive strawman.

The definitive explainer for anarcho-primitivism and green anarchy in general still remains “A Primitivist Primer” by the late John Moore (who was my creative writing professor when I was an international student in England in the early 00s, coincidentally). Everyone who wants to understand the anti-civ philosophy should read this text, because it will quickly dispel the myths being put out into the world by fearful blockheads.

From A Primitivist Primer:

The aim is not to replicate or return to the primitive, merely to see the primitive as a source of inspiration, as exemplifying forms of anarchy. For anarcho-primitivists, civilization is the overarching context within which the multiplicity of power relations develop. Some basic power relations are present in primitive societies — and this is one reason why anarcho-primitivists do not seek to replicate these societies — but it is in civilization that power relations become pervasive and entrenched in practically all aspects of human life and human relations with the biosphere.[...]

The fact is that anarcho-primitivism is not a power-seeking ideology. It doesn’t seek to capture the State, take over factories, win converts, create political organizations, or order people about. Instead, it wants people to become free individuals living in free communities which are interdependent with one another and with the biosphere they inhabit. It wants, then, a total transformation, a transformation of identity, ways of life, ways of being, and ways of communicating. This means that the tried and tested means of power-seeking ideologies just aren’t relevant to the anarcho-primitivist project, which seeks to abolish all forms of power. So new forms of action and being, forms appropriate to and commensurate with the anarcho-primitivist project, need to be developed. This is an ongoing process and so there’s no easy answer to the question: What is to be done? At present, many agree that communities of resistance are an important element in the anarcho-primitivist project. The word ‘community’ is bandied about these days in all kinds of absurd ways (e.g., the business community), precisely because most genuine communities have been destroyed by Capital and the State. Some think that if traditional communities, frequently sources of resistance to power, have been destroyed, then the creation of communities of resistance — communities formed by individuals with resistance as their common focus — are a way to recreate bases for action. An old anarchist idea is that the new world must be created within the shell of the old. This means that when civilization collapses — through its own volition, through our efforts, or a combination of the two — there will be an alternative waiting to take its place. This is really necessary as, in the absence of positive alternatives, the social disruption caused by collapse could easily create the psychological insecurity and social vacuum in which fascism and other totalitarian dictatorships could flourish. For the present writer, this means that anarcho-primitivists need to develop communities of resistance — microcosms (as much as they can be) of the future to come — both in cities and outside. These need to act as bases for action (particularly direct action), but also as sites for the creation of new ways of thinking, behaving, communicating, being, and so on, as well as new sets of ethics — in short, a whole new liberatory culture. They need to become places where people can discover their true desires and pleasures, and through the good old anarchist idea of the exemplary deed, show others by example that alternative ways of life are possible. However, there are many other possibilities that need exploring. The kind of world envisaged by anarcho-primitivism is one unprecedented in human experience in terms of the degree and types of freedom anticipated ... so there can’t be any limits on the forms of resistance and insurgency that might develop. The kind of vast transformations envisaged will need all kinds of innovative thought and activity.

So, primitivism is not an attempt to turn back the clock to the stone age as Killjoy asserts, it’s rather taking action to set up alternate, sustainable and thriving ways of life for the purposes of prefiguration. It’s looking forward to create forms of resistance, setting up living refuges parallel to industrial society to house free people, and putting together the infrastructure anarchists need to thrive within the shell of a rapidly collapsing civilization. The anti-civ philosophy is a guide we can use to prepare ourselves for the deluge of natural disasters, pandemics, famines and droughts this decaying civilization will continue to rain down on us and give us the fortitude to help each other not only survive these catastrophes, but prosper in the ruins of the old world as it decays all around us.

Rather than being an action to return society to the past, it’s a concerted effort to look to the future and create sobering, but necessary mechanisms to cope with the continuing decay of civilization. Civilization will continue to collapse due to its universally unsustainable, destructive, non-regenerative properties. It’s not helpful to ignore or deny this simple reality just because it threatens the reductive idea leftists have of technological progress and democracy being the solution to everything.

Killjoy then claims:

Primitivists reject technology. We just reject the inappropriate use of technology. Now, to be fair, that’s almost all of the uses of technology we see in the civilized world. But our issue with most primitivist theory is one of babies and bathwater. Sure, most technologies are being put to rather evil uses — whether warfare or simple ecocide — but that doesn’t make technology (“The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.”) inherently evil. It just means that we need to completely re-imagine how we interact with machines, with tools, even with science. We need to determine whether something is useful and sustainable, rather than judging things purely on their economic or military value.

A related text that was presumably authored by Killjoy under a pseudonym goes into more detail about the post-civ view of technology:

Another absurd proposition that primitivists stand behind is that tools and technology are inherently oppressive, and we should therefore abandon them. While many tools and technologies can be applied in oppressive ways, there is nothing ingrained in tools or the development of technologies that makes them oppressive.

It seems especially foolish for primitivists to argue this position when the society they advocate returning to is replete with tools and technology. Spears, bows and arrows, stone axes, obsidian knives, cordage, hand drill fires, pottery, totem carving, body modification and jewelry, basketry, hide tanning — these are all tools and technologies employed by primitive societies. Primitivists advocate learning these skills as a part of “rewilding” ourselves and our world, and yet they continue to denounce tools and technology. Seems a little hypocritical, doesn’t it?

These points are the most obtuse of all because they’re completely misrepresenting the anarcho-primitivist definition of technology and the distinction often made between high and low technology. Anprims don’t reject any of the things listed in the above quote. It’s pure strawman to pretend otherwise.

From A Primitivist Primer again, which I’ll again stress everyone should read in its entirety:

John Zerzan defines technology as ‘the ensemble of division of labor/ production/ industrialism and its impact on us and on nature. Technology is the sum of mediations between us and the natural world and the sum of those separations mediating us from each other. It is all the drudgery and toxicity required to produce and reproduce the stage of hyper-alienation we languish in. It is the texture and the form of domination at any given stage of hierarchy and domination.’ Opposition to technology thus plays an important role in anarcho-primitivist practice. However, Fredy Perlman says that ‘technology is nothing but the Leviathan’s armory,’ its ‘claws and fangs.’ Anarcho-primitivists are thus opposed to technology, but there is some debate over how central technology is to domination in civilization. A distinction should be drawn between tools (or implements) and technology. Perlman shows that primitive peoples develop all kinds of tools and implements, but not technologies: ‘The material objects, the canes and canoes, the digging sticks and walls, were things a single individual could make, or they were things, like a wall, that required the cooperation of many on a single occasion .... Most of the implements are ancient, and the [material] surpluses [these implements supposedly made possible] have been ripe since the first dawn, but they did not give rise to impersonal institutions. People, living beings, give rise to both.’ Tools are creations on a localised, small-scale, the products of either individuals or small groups on specific occasions. As such, they do not give rise to systems of control and coercion. Technology, on the other hand, is the product of large-scale interlocking systems of extraction, production, distribution and consumption, and such systems gain their own momentum and dynamic. As such, they demand structures of control and obedience on a mass scale — what Perlman calls impersonal institutions.

As you can see, anprims have no qualms with what Killjoy would call “useful and sustainable”, i.e. items that don’t require “large-scale interlocking systems of extraction, production, distribution and consumption”. Killjoy even admits to rejecting “almost all of the uses of technology we see in the civilized world”, so what post-civs propose is really exactly the same as what anprims propose... Tools that can be produced locally, without hierarchy/control/coercion/obedience and without the centralized extractive, imperialist, resource-pillaging supply chains required to run industrial society. This is not defined as technology by anprims. Locally produced, sustainable tools that improve our lives without destroying our biosphere are fully embraced by anarcho-primitivist philosophers, just as they are by Killjoy’s post-civ manifesto. If you prefer, it’s the difference between low-tech (useful, sustainable) and high-tech (alienating, destructive).

Killjoy continues:

Primitivists reject agriculture. We simply reject monoculture, which is abhorrent and centralizing, destroys regional autonomy, forces globalization on the world, and leads to horrific practices like slash-and-burn farming. We also reject other stupid ideas of how to feed humanity, like setting 6 billion people loose in the woods to hunt and gather. By and large, post-civ folks embrace permaculture: agricultural systems designed from the outset to be sustainable in whatever given area they are developed.

Again, they’re strawmanning anprim philosophy by claiming anprims want to force 6 billion people to be hunter gatherers. Anprims are not trying to enforce an inflexible, collectivist, authoritarian social program on anyone, let alone the entire planet. Anprims are simply engaged in an expansive criticism of industrial society, while exploring all the possible alternatives to it and experimenting with those alternatives in their own lives. These alternatives being discussed almost always include producing food in some manner due to the simple reality that there’s very little wilderness left in the world to forage from. All the anti-civs I know grow the majority of their food and supplement their diets with some foraged food – which isn’t abundant enough to live on exclusively due to the march of climate change, the rise in wildfires, and agricultural-industrial land clearing.

Anprims especially talk very favorably of the long history of indigenous peoples deliberately attending rainforests to encourage the proliferation of useful and nourishing plants, which is an example of horticulture that isn’t extractive, non-renewable, destructive. Anprims fully embrace the re-establishment of Earth’s food forests, which will require a concerted human effort to replant and cultivate.

This is how Zerzan describes agriculture:

1: Agriculture is the will to power over nature, the materialization of alienated humanity’s desire to subdue and control the natural world; 2: Agriculture inevitably destroys the balance of nature, leaving biological degradation and ecological ruin in its wake; 3: Agriculture is “the beginning of work and production,” generating an increasingly standardized, confined and repressive culture; and 4: Agriculture leads inevitably to the rise of civilization.

What’s being described here is precisely what Killjoy calls ‘monoculture’. Killjoy then borrows a non-anarchist phrase (permaculture), without defining it, but permaculture and food forests are incredibly similar concepts.

Permaculture:

Permaculture is an approach to land management and settlement design that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole-systems thinking. It applies these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, town planning, rewilding, and community resilience.

Food forests:

A food forest (or forest garden) is a garden that mimics the structures of a natural forest, with multiple layers of plants stacked vertically to increase overall production.

As you can see, food forests and permaculture are closely related concepts with the only real difference being that permaculture is a copyrighted brand used to generate profit by a handful of affluent white settlers who write guides, teach courses and sell “permaculture certificates” to the public while also fully embodying white male “guru culture”.

Food forests, for all intents and purposes are simply the free and open source version of the proprietary, for-profit, needlessly-complicated permaculture program, without the misogynistic, capitalistic personality cult permaculture is bogged down with.

Killjoy goes on:

Primitivists have done a good job of exploring the problems of civilization, and for this we commend them. But, on the whole, their critique is un-nuanced.

Strong words, considering anarcho-primitivists have written troves and troves of theory that deconstructs every form of authority that arises from the industrial world, while post-civ is nothing more than 3 short blog posts filled with strawman attacks seemingly informed by silly memes made by leftists on Reddit and Twitter.

Leftists flood anarchist spaces with these anti-“primmie” memes, most famously the “return to monke” one, to further their green-scare program, which allows them to continue pushing their 19^th century workerist prescriptions to the catastrophic 21^st century problems (successive ecological and social collapse) that those prescriptions have helped lead us to.

Killjoy continues:

What’s more, the societal structure they envision, tribalism, can be socially conservative: what many tribes lacked in codified law they made up for with rigid “customs,” and one generation is born into the near-exact way of life as their predecessors.

Again, anarcho-primitivism’s willingness to explore and analyze various indigenous tribes and bands both living and dead, and engage with these cultures to outline how they differ from the industrial model and how they avoided destroying their natural environment is not the same as an intention to enforce an ideological program on people. It’s not a world-building exercise, it’s not a government, it’s not a set of customs or an attempt to impose a tribal system on the world. There’s nothing wrong with learning from indigenous cultures and adapting their methods in your own life — especially the anarchistic ones.

She also falls into the trap of talking about indigenous peoples in the past tense, as if these lifeways are extinct – when indigenous cultures continue to thrive all over the world. A white settler presenting diverse indigenous peoples as “conservative” in order to dismiss and sneer at them is concerning, but it’s especially frustrating to see an anarchist mar indigenous peoples for being born into the same way of life enjoyed by their predecessors.

Is Killjoy under the impression life in whatever dreary USA suburb she inhabits is unique from her parents dreary suburban existence? If life under the crumbling industrial order has so much potential for freedom compared to a life in the wilds, why is she post-civ? Why not embrace civilization and all the freedoms, experiences and opportunities for growth it supposedly offers?

Killjoy concludes:

We cannot, en masse, return to a pre-civilized way of life. And honestly, most of us don’t want to. We refuse a blanket rejection of everything that civilization has brought us. We need to look forward, not backwards.

Killjoy is embracing anarcho-primitivism as it’s described by all the notable anprims of the 20^th century and the anti-civs of today, while rejecting an imaginary perversion of anarcho-primitivism built by leftist internet trolls. She wraps up with this line:

We are not primitivists.

That’s fine and dandy, I’m also a green anarchist that doesn’t identify as a primitivist, but Killjoy really hasn’t explained how post-civ differs in any substantial way from anarcho-primitivism. The only possible divergences from primitivism I can identify in their post-civ explainer are:

1. They propose proprietary ‘permaculture’ courses created by white settlers in Australia instead of the indigenous food forests permaculture was inspired by, and –

2. They say they’re open to theoretical sustainable, non-extractive, non-polluting “technologies” that are really no different than the locally-produced, life-improving tools anprims readily embrace in theory and in practice.

Killjoy is simply using different language than primitivists to obfuscate the reality that post-civs are as critical of destructive technologies which rely on global supply chains as any garden-variety primitivist is. None of the points Killjoy makes to set post-civ apart from primitivism stand up to any kind of scrutiny.

The attempt to rebrand anti-civ to post-civ so it can escape its completely unearned reputation has only helped feed the big lie that anti-civ anarchy is an omnicidal, ableist, transphobic, fascist death-cult that needs to be struggled against and no-platformed by an endless stream of performative anti-fascist Twitter activists. It only serves to fuel the left’s green-scare.

The Rise of Antifa Gang

The last ingredient in the left’s multi-faceted green scare campaign comes from the gradual co-option of anarchy by liberal “anti-fascist activists” who have no real understanding of anarchy but glue themselves to anarchist discourse nonetheless. The most famous case of this is the man who will now forever be known as Special Agent Alexander Reid Ross. A prolific writer for liberal websites (e.g. The Daily Beast) and a staunch anti-primitivist voice, Ross dedicated years of his life to associating green anarchy and ecological views in general with white supremacy and fascism.

In his trite, disinformation-filled essays about “the fascist creep”, he drew a straight line from ecological movements to white supremacy, claiming they were one and the same.

He’s spent a lot of energy looking for fascism under every rock while working to cancel all his ideological enemies – often by inventing malicious lies and strained half-truths to wrongly associate them with fascism. This has, of course, only resulted in a sustained diminishing of the anti-fascist tradition as these liberal activists hijack what was once a fiercely radical practice to target various anarchists and anti-imperialists who don’t fall in line with their left-liberal program.

For a long time, Ross had great success stirring up anti-green sentiment in anarchist and socialist spaces. That all came to a halt recently, when he was outed as being on the payroll of far-right billionaire (and dare I say, fascist) Charles Koch… Yes, really.

Ross is a “senior researcher” in a team that also includes the former heads of CIA and DHS departments, former cops and Republican politicians. This “think tank”, the “Network Contagion Research Institute”, is directly payrolled by Charles Koch’s foundation and similar far-right, deep-state entities working to further the advance of industrialism, capitalism and imperialism. Ross now seems to be in hiding as leftist publications scrub his disinformation-filled articles from their archives and issue apologies for publishing them in the first place.

Another leftist personality seemingly working from the COINTELPRO playbook is Ross’s good friend William Gillis, an anarcho-transhumanist Twitter personality who has written similar scathing screeds against green anarchy and recently tried (and failed) to mount a vicious whispering campaign against indigenous, nihilist and anti-civ anarchist Aragorn! (I should mention that Aragorn! published my book when no red anarchist publisher would even talk to me).

Just a few months after Aragorn! tragically died, Gillis tried to claim he was a serial rapist, and as “evidence” presented an old interview where Aragorn! said he slept around when he was a teenager. Fortunately, no one took the bait and Gillis slithered away back to the safety of his Twitter feed.

These reactionary left-liberals in anarchist garb are unfortunately all too welcome in most anarchist spaces and they dedicate countless hours to mounting toxic struggle sessions against their ideological enemies – who are often green, indigenous, black and anti-left anarchists.

Though these green-scare crusaders are almost exclusively white North American men with high paying jobs in academia or the tech sector, they work tirelessly to harness the identity of actually marginalized people to use as weapons in their tedious war against anyone who has strayed from the threadbare leftist program.

They present themselves as morally pure knights in shining armor, sent by Murray’s ghost to cleanse anarchist spaces of the evil green menace – to preserve the forward-momentum of Western-civilization – to safeguard progress, democracy and the Western way of life.

Their sworn mission statement is to save poor, innocent marginalized people from the cold, cruel clutches of green anarchy. But their allegiance to this performative social justice dance crumbles to pieces when they react to the indigenous ways of life that are such an integral part of the green anarchist philosophy. They speak of indigenous lifeways with barely restrained disgust. To them, anything and anyone that isn’t wholly dedicated to preserving the industrial monolith is dirty, backwards, savage.

Their tireless struggle to punish and purge anyone who dares think beyond the realm of ponderous and feeble leftist solutions is the biggest hindrance to the development of the beautiful idea.

The left insists on controlling all radical discourse so their prescriptions and programs and self-destructive domineering behaviors are never challenged, allowing no alternatives to Marx and Kropotkin’s 19^th century industrialist idealism.

Pushing us all into dark, damp rooms – the walls lined with moldy little red books, they lock the door and barricade it. The left works so hard to hold us down, to shackle us with their stale 19^th century nostalgia because they know – they know this is the only place they have power over us. This dark room with the peeling red walls that only they have the key to.

Decades after killing it, Leviathan continues to hungrily feed on this fat, rotting carcass. The sooner anarchists completely detach ourselves from the festering remains of the left, the sooner we can stop being weighed down by the virulently irrational superstitions that are the basis for their reactionary green-scare campaigns.

Why Do Anarchists Burn Ballot Boxes?

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/burning_ballot_boxes> on September 3, 2025.

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Our ears are ringing from the desperate calls of parties and other political organizations for participation in the democratic election procedure. A small group of comrades, we were moved by their woeful vote begging and, armed with our determination, our desire for direct action and our sledgehammers, we participated in the democratic fiasco. Using all of the above, we smashed the system-of-delegates status quo that serves as the norm and formed our own terms of attack and sabotage, right inside the walls of their own little festival.

Thus, we claim responsibility for the invasion of the 33^rd election center of Athens a few minutes before the polls closed, where we expropriated a ballot box. As we entered the premises, our eyes anxiously searched for the voting center’s appointed police guards, but we discovered that while they were indeed present, they chose to play hide-and-seek with us (successfully, to be honest). As we departed, we left a gift to the living-dead party officials and the trash democratic volunteers of the electoral committee: A (stolen from the cops) tear gas grenade. A few seconds later, we surrendered the contents of the ballot box to the only fitting fate: Fire.

This action is a warm welcome to new prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his party New Democracy, who have promised to end us. We’re waiting for you...

SABOTAGE ELECTIONS

BURN THE BALLOTS

-Ballot-Stealing Arsonists [70]

From Algeria [71] to Greece [72] to France [73], there’s a long tradition of anarchists burning ballot boxes and blocking polling stations because anarchists have a keen understanding of the way the act of voting, and the system of democracy more broadly is used to destroy our agency and rapidly shrink the range of acceptable discourse that is tolerated by the government in the public sphere.

When the act of casting a vote for a politician is offered up by the state as the only permissible form of resistance against its rule, voting has shown itself to be a clear and present danger to anyone who cares about anarchy or self-determination.

Voting is a cruel and vicious ritual whereupon the winning group of voters are able to force their party’s agenda and the personalities of their leaders on everyone else for half a decade, and then safely ignore the needs of people outside their group, either because they were outvoted or chose not to vote at all (sometimes under the threat of imprisonment in countries where it’s illegal to not cast a ballot).

We’re always being told by our gracious and benevolent rulers and their high-paid propagandists that actions we take outside of the representative democracy system to resist their authority, no matter how milquetoast these actions are, no matter how minuscule of a threat these actions really pose to their power, are improper and illegal.

As far as government is concerned, voting is the only acceptable, legal avenue to social and economic change the populace can be allowed to exercise. And if we refuse to participate in the vote, we’re told by members of the voting population that we don’t have a right to criticize the government since we refrained from participating in selecting it and granting it our individual and collective power to use as it sees fit.

We live in a world where even peaceful protests are violently dispersed by the ruling party’s enforcers for being “disruptive” and unsanctioned by the state. We witness graffiti artists and wheat-pasters get beat up and thrown in prison for putting non-state-sanctioned messages in public spaces, while billboard companies are given free reign to spread the grotesque messages of capitalists and candidates for public office far and wide.

Voicing dissent outside of the ever-shrinking lines demarcated by the state for engagement with the public, taking action that would undermine the government’s ability to rule, or offering any kind of alternative to the democratic, statist, capitalist status quo has effectively been criminalized.

Both representative and direct democracy (like the Brexit vote in the UK) are used to force minorities to submit to the whims of the majority, and by proxy, to the whims of the ruling class who control the majority through the intricate systems of propaganda they construct with their vast looted wealth.

Thanks to a perverse combination of the 24/7 media machine and meticulously-crafted marketing/brainwashing practices that have been long-proven to strongly influence all our thought processes and decisions, the desires of the voters and the desires of the people who rule them have been rendered virtually indistinguishable.

The voters do the bidding of their rulers more than any time in history — they hate and fear the things they’re told to hate and fear, support and buy the things they’re told to support and buy. Few of them are able to resist the constant stream of propaganda expertly manufactured to feed delicious dopamine to the human brain.

This monopoly on propaganda that government/capital has been granted by millions of hapless citizen-voters needs to be contested by anarchists just as much as their monopoly on violence, since their fine-tuned propaganda systems are a large part of how they legitimize and enable their violence and the wholesale transfer of wealth to the rich.

Every time an anarchist or a group of anarchists take it upon themselves to fight back at the system that crushes them by burning their neighborhood ballot box, a slurry of petulant rage immediately comes spewing out [74] of all of the state’s propaganda systems, and even from a lot of our fellow travelers, who feel the need to loudly denounce this form of direct action and the anarchists who practice it for (lightly grazing) the hallowed democracy-machine. Never mind that the machine’s paint-job hasn’t even been scratched thanks to its massive wall-to-wall bumper, the bootlickers in radical garb will still cry foul.

The ardent critics of direct action and adherents of democratic government who take up so much space in our discourse — the Chomsky, Bookchin and Graeber acolytes — are showing us they’re unwilling to honestly confront the most pervasive, oppressive and deadly system of authority in history, as it continues to dig its hooks in, giving it more and more leverage to crush any dissent that bubbles up against Leviathan anywhere on the face of the planet.

Instead, they’ll continue to cling to and enable the system with the excuse that it isn’t exactly the same as 1930s-style fascism, so it’s preferable to letting a Hitler superfan win the election and send them all to concentration camps (never mind all the migrants their fave politicians actually send to concentration camps everyday, that’s on the migrants for not voting harder).

These proponents of the sanctity of the polling station demonstrate they’re tools of the ruling class just as much as any of the hate-fueled Murdoch poison lining the newsstands and monopolizing the airwaves.

The left-wing voter will always have culpability for the system they willingly participate in upholding, especially when you take notice of just how many hours of their life they pour into sermonizing for their preferred party on Facebook, Reddit and Twitter.

Yes, I know, they totally swear they’re only voting for “harm reduction” and aren’t actually that big of a fan of the neoliberal they put in office, but somehow that doesn’t stop them from working to shun and villainize the anarchists they rub shoulders with for not voting for their guy, even going as far as to accuse us of supporting fascism and of wanting trans / disabled / (insert other marginalized identity here) people to die because we refuse to participate in their little democracy fetish or buy into the notion that the government protects people.

Every time I hear them use the phrase “harm reduction”, it honestly makes my skin crawl. The absolute fucking nerve of these people to conflate safe injection sites and needle exchanges (you know, actual harm reduction) with helping put career war criminals and sex pests like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton in office. But I digress.

Self-proclaimed lesser-evilists insist they only vote to get the nice tyrants elected, who promise they’ll smile at the screaming brown kids as they snatch them from their parents arms and cram them into cages, but the honest voters will openly tell you what they’re really concerned with when they vote is things that affect them more directly...

Both candidates will snatch kids, genocide indigenous people to take their land and water, bomb schools and hospitals, imprison entire generations of black people and drone-strike goat herders across the world to seize their oil, sure. But one of the candidates promises they’ll give them a break on their student loan debt, or on their taxes, or on the price of health care, and that’s what they really mean by harm reduction — their personal monetary benefit — the preservation of their own privilege.

Democrats are a wonderful people, truly. So moral and compassionate, reducing the harm done to their annual income. If only they’d be honest and call it what it is, instead of pretending they’re voting for the politer murderous tyrant because it will supposedly keep x marginalized group safe from original-flavor fascism.

After the failed experiments of fascism and Marxism-Leninism in the 20^th century, representative liberal democracy is the system that has proven to be the most successful at maintaining the joint tyranny of government/capital and to further the expansion of the police-prison-military industrial complex. It displaced the previous tyrannical systems because it was the best equipped to get the people (voters) on its side by promising them an (inconsequential) say in the direction of the empire via the ballot box.

So, the ballot box, being the tool from which the entire democracy-world-order is granted its legitimized power, is perhaps the most compelling target for attack of all. Together with the closely-related media/marketing behemoth, the ballot box makes up the holy trinity that democratic government depends on.

Before the state can unleash its police and military arms on the dwindling number of people that haven’t yet been co-opted by the system, it needs that ceremonial ballot box to legitimatize the whole rotten affair and ensure the rest of the population won’t bat an eyelid when any potential revolt is brutally put down and every last person is forced to submit to the government’s power and cease any resistance to the horrors of state hegemony.

The ballot box serves to convince voters that the atrocities their government commits against them and citizens of other nations is being done with their full approval, so as to smother any potential resistance from people who might not have been so accepting of the state’s misdeeds if they hadn’t gotten to personally participate in putting their “team” in control of the state.

After another grueling election year that monopolizes every conversation they have, after smugly accusing every non-voter they encounter of wanting to genocide trans people (seriously, I have receipts), all the lesser-evilists can shift to post-election mode and spend the next several years defending (or ignoring) every awful thing the government they voted for then does on their behalf, from massively increasing police funding to dropping thousands of bombs on some of the poorest people in the world.

Can’t risk taking responsibility for their part in those rapidly-accumulating atrocities by actually admitting the guy they decided should rule the world because he promised them money and protection is a fucking monster.

When they find out their party of choice actually spends millions of their campaign donations funding the most reactionary, bigoted candidates from the other party to make their own candidates look more reasonable by comparison, they simply shrug and keep voting.

Since the voter is so ready and willing to exchange their agency and mine for the state’s monopoly on violence, buying into the big lie that government keeps them safe from crime, disease, debt, litter and all those scary migrants across the sea, the ballot box that fuels the ruling class’s entire base of power needs to burn.

Burning the ballot box is a fierce expression of anarchy. It’s the loud proclamation that I will not be ruled by the government, the voting body, or anyone.

I will not exchange my agency or my autonomy for whatever favors a political party promises me for my support.

I will not put my well-being above the well-being of the government’s blood-soaked targets, and thus drench my own hands in their innocent blood.

I will not voluntarily legitimize the system that takes everything from me and you and gives it to the ruling class, who then funnel their vast spoils into the propaganda machine, directing it to select the next geriatric rapist to sit in the big chair.

Crown, flag or ballot box — all instruments of oppression are thankfully flammable. You can call it harm reduction if you like. I just call it anarchy.

The Marxist End Goal Has Nothing To Do With Anarchy

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/Marxism_End_Goal> on September 3, 2025.

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This is a brief response to the latest instance of “anarchist historian” Zoe Baker (Anarchist Studies PhD) proclaiming that anarchy and Marxism are one and the same.

From Zoe Baker’s Twitter Feed:

A (Marxist-Leninist) told me that my description of an anarcho-communist society was clearly a society with a state. I didn’t have the heart to explain that its the same as Marx’s description of higher phase communism and they would know this if they’d read Marx.

The tweet was quickly turned into a screenshot and spread to the usual anarcho-leftist haunts. Baker was praised for her anecdote, with one particularly sycophantic reply even calling her the “great anarchist of our time”.

“Great anarchists” don’t try to claim Marx/Engels’ concepts of communism and the state are compatible with anarchy. Anarchists oppose all domination, all coercion, all authority, all government — Marx and Engels absolutely did not. Marxists do not.

Though it’s rarely discussed by red anarchists who are eager to swallow the “shared end goal” pill, Marx didn’t define the state the way anarchists (or anyone who isn’t a Marxist) does.

But before I get into that, it’s important to understand how Marx conceived of class. He really only recognized two classes: the owners of the means of production, or bourgeoisie, and the workers, or proletariat. He saw all people as falling under one of these two classes, and only concerned himself with issues that stemmed from this narrow class distinction.

Onto Marx’s concept of the state. Marx saw the state as a tool that could be used by one class to oppress the other i.e. the ruling class using it against the working class (a capitalist system) or the working class using it against the ruling class (a socialist system). When Marx and Engels talked of a “stateless” society as their “end goal”, they weren’t at all talking about ending government or even necessarily what we know as the state, since to them, the “state” was simply a tool that could be used to oppress one of the two categories of people he recognized as a distinct class.

Inspired by the earlier writings of Henri de Saint-Simon, Marx and Engels proposed replacing the arrangement whereupon the state administers people directly with a new arrangement where a body of bureaucrats “administer things”. They theorized that once class (the divide between business owners and workers) had been abolished, the “state” (by which they actually meant “class oppression”, don’t forget) would cease to exist and be replaced with two successive forms of government, with the second being their professed end goal — what Marxists baselessly term “stateless communism” but which in actuality isn’t stateless at all.

With their ill-conceived “administration of things”, Marx and Engels proposed granting control over the things people depend on to survive and prosper to appointed administrators — functionaries of the state (except they didn’t call it a state).

During the transition to communism, they wanted to replace government that worked for the bourgeois with government that worked for the workers. A people’s government, and then eventually, once achieving the mythic end goal (the “higher phase communism”), they’d replace the people’s government with the “administration of things” bureaucracy and declare communism had been achieved.

The bureaucracy would be yet another form of government of course, but this time it would supposedly be so streamlined, efficient and effective that it would govern society with minimal brutality and exploitation, sidestepping the violent struggle that comes with boss/worker class relations.

This just demonstrates how shortsighted Marxists are, not being able to grasp the inevitability of a bureaucrat politburo also arising as a distinct class in society and presenting yet another oppressive power imbalance that will inescapably need to be held together by a monopoly on violence wielded by a police and military legitimized by a state form... To pretend otherwise would be to ignore the history of government in all its barely-distinctive incarnations. Government begets coercion, domination, violence, control, subjugation. Forever and always.

This was how Marx and Engels conceived of their “stateless” end goal — a massive bureaucracy that would govern every cog in every machine all across the communist world. A government by any reasonable definition and therefor completely and absolutely incompatible with anarchy.

How this new “administration of things” government would manage to be uniquely liberatory is anyone’s guess, as neither Marx nor Engels chose to elaborate in much detail on what they presented as their final solution to oppressive power relations beyond what I’ve described in this essay. As usual, the Marxist inability to grapple with oppressive hierarchical constructs that reach beyond the narrow boss/worker relationship shows that they’re not even on the same playing field as anarchists, who refuse to simply patch up the leaks in the system with used chewing gum and call it a day.

This absurd concept of an end-goal naturally led future Marxists like Lenin and Stalin to commit all manner of atrocities in the name of progressing to the mythic final stage of Marxism whereupon the bureaucrats somehow create world peace by governing the things people use and need to survive, rather than by governing the people themselves.

If it doesn’t make sense to you, you’re a lot more astute than the learned Marxist historians who try to affix themselves to anarchist discourse. They’ve fully embraced and internalized this supposed end goal and decided it’s not only a logical train of thought, but is the ideal anarchists ought to also strive for.

This “final form” of government, as it was understood by a long succession of Marxist leaders who tried to implement it, would effectively result in the state stripping people of any individual agency they might have had under the previous two arrangements, instead leaving all decisions on the managing of tools, production, economic resource allocation, logistics and even wider social arrangements in the hands of their superiors. This would inevitably extend to workers’ livelihoods and personal relationships since the administrators would have control over their time, assigning them tasks and deciding whether their performance is adequate, thus dictating their social standing.

Every time Marxists attempted to implement the administration of things historically, it of course just resulted in the reproduction of capitalism and the further oppression of the workers, who were now being told they had to put up with grueling unrewarding labor “for the revolution”.

The “end goal” Marxists talk of clearly isn’t anarchy, and it’s not even stateless communism. Bureaucrats managing society is still a state by any definition other than the warped Marxist definition. The claimed distinction between administrating things and governing people has no real validity when the people require access to the things to survive.

Marxists do not want a world without government. They do not oppose what everyone but them defines as the state. They do not share anarchist goals. They have zero critique of all the forms of authority we have to contend with outside of class. Unlike anarchists, they simply assume all these forms of authority will magically wither away with the capitalist/worker class divide.

By officiating supervisors and giving them power over others, Marxists ensure the rise of a bureaucrat class and ensure the individual will be suppressed in favor of the collective; which in most cases simply means the state, or at least the organization utilizing each individual’s labor.

People who think anarchists and Marxists have the same goals have very little understanding of anarchist ideas.

Zoe Baker is a Marxist who does blatant entryism to convince baby anarchists that Marxism and anarchy are one and the same. They’re not. The most basic and fundamental principle of anarchy is the rejection of government — while Marxism not only has no problem with government, it actively attempts to re-define basic words to avoid taking a stance against all the things anarchists oppose.

By redefining and obfuscating the concepts of authority, government, state and communism, Marx was able to avoid putting forward any truly revolutionary proposals and instead dealt a deadly blow to the actual revolutionary politics of his contemporaries by presenting watered-down, conservative perversions of their own theories that nonetheless had the advantage of being funded and widely-distributed by Engels and his connections, not to mention the glorious benefit of appealing to the power machinations of the party politburo in the making.

Or to put it in a way a basic Twitter leftist will understand: Marx Bidened your Bernie Sanders, Starmered your Jeremy Corbyn.

Zoe Baker’s ready embrace of Marx’s half-baked, counter-productive proposals for restructuring society in the image of a bureaucrat class betrays her utter lack of imagination and inability to reckon with the repeated failed historical attempts to wrangle with these circular proposals for implementing “better” government.

If even liberals like Raymond Aron had the wherewithal to decipher what the administration of things actually entailed decades ago, there’s no excuse for so-called anarchists to be clinging onto these absurd authoritarian building blocks in 2022.

Raymond Aron:

“The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century have shown that if there is one false notion it is that the administration of things can replace the government of people. It has emerged very clearly that if you want to administer all objects you must control all individuals at the same time.”

Daniel Bell:

“The administration of things — the substitution of rational judgment for politics — is the hallmark of technocracy. [...]The evolution of technocratic society, things ride men.”

Ben Kafka:

Saint-Simon’s formula, with its utopian hope that paperwork might someday be used to emancipate humanity, had instead become shorthand for dehumanization. Had not the abolition of political life led to the gulags? And the administration of things to the kulaks?

How to be a Great Leftoid: 10 Red Flags to Drape Yourself With

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/redflags> on September 3, 2025.

Date: April 7, 2023

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Disclaimer

This is a satirical list and is not meant to be taken seriously. It’s not a meticulously sourced critique of the left-wing or an analysis of class-based social dynamics or an exploration of the scientific socialism of dialectical materialism. It’s a shitpost. Not everything needs to be an exercise in academic excellence. Don’t @ me with your furious demands I stop denigrating your sacred religious and/or political beliefs. I will not rewrite or delete the list because you’ve declared it “juvenile”, “cringe”, “hyperbole”, “an edgelord fantasy”, “an intellectual garbage fire”, “unproductive and vitriolic” or “a gift to the right”.

How to be a Great Leftoid

1. Be obsessed with identity above all else: declare all your affiliations when describing completely unrelated matters. “As a disabled queer POC in STEM, I really hate cottage cheese”. Never mind that you’re a straight Italian-American man with lactose intolerance who has occasionally watched trans camgirls, you’re oppressed, diverse and disabled as fuck and everyone needs to know it.

2. REFUSE to veer off strict path to liberation set out for you by dead bearded idols who all failed to create anything resembling liberation, always live in that cozy 19^th century factory in your mind and scream bloody murder at anyone who dares poke holes in the illusion: “REVISIONIST ANTI-COMMUNIST SCUM!!!”

3. Needlessly collectivize people into in-groups and out-groups at every opportunity in order to attack and demonize them: “You oppose industrialism, which naturally means you want to genocide (insert deified identity group that enjoys industrialism), we must purge you for the good of all society!” Indeed, anyone who rejects the global ecocide status quo is an enemy of working people and is standing in the way of progress. Real liberation is thinking of ways to make the mines and factories operate more efficiently while dividing the spoils more evenly among the working class. Either you’re with us up on the People’s™ bulldozers or you’re against us and get the wall.

4. Use carefully constructed academic language in order to maintain elitist barriers that will keep the unwashed peasants out of “the community” (politburo). Invent new definitions of common words like “state” to arouse maximum confusion. Everyone knows a nation-state is when the working class oppresses the ruling class, right? It must be true if Marx wrote it.

5. If exclusion of the ignorant masses using dense “theory” doesn’t work, make heavy use of fun words like “problematic”, “reactionary”, “wrecker”, “doomer”, “sectarian”, “divisive”, “revisionist”, “counter-revolutionary”, “kulak”, “Russophobe”, “Sinophobe”, “anti-democratic”, “lifestylist” to castigate the filthy apostates who won’t fall in line with your glorious revolutionary program and cast them out before they taint the beautiful utopia you’re sacrificing EVERYTHING to build.

6. Speaking of sacrifice, make sure to ritually sacrifice your fellow leftoids whenever the opportunity presents itself because remember: there can only be one Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and all pretenders need to be brutally eliminated so you can secure that chair. Cancel all your competition.

7. Never go outside without first strapping on those boots, buttoning up those uniforms, pinning on those badges, marching, chanting those slogans and waving that flag because the only way to destroy nationalism is to goosestep right behind the nationalists (but draped in red). How will the people take you seriously if you’re not draped in your glorious reproduction of Stalin’s tunic (or its modern equivalent)?

8. ACAB (except us).

9. Remember: Victimhood is the most powerful identity of all. Tell everyone within earshot how victimized you are and how much you deserve to be in charge. Declare that entire groups of people are helpless victims and mansplain to them how much they need you to protect them from the evil forces, including their own sinful thoughts. Sure, it might sound disempowering and toxic to the untrained ear, but they’ll be safe from harm once they accept you as supreme leader. I mean, if it worked so well for the Christian church, why not follow their example?

10. Work! The productivity of the worker is paramount. We can’t build the revolution without a strong work ethic, comrade, even if that means we need to sacrifice half the workers and 98% of the world’s ecosystems in the process... Just keep telling yourself you’re enduring an empty, torturous life so your great-great-great grandnieces can one day live in a classless, money-less utopia after the revolution which begets the transitionary state which will wither away and form the ministry of things. Working yourself to death is always worthwhile when communism is the end goal. Never forget the wise words of Paul the Apostle / Lenin / Stalin: “He who does not work, neither shall he eat”.

11. Cancel your critics! Weaponize completely innocuous words you saw them use to avoid having to internalize their critiques! Everyone knows “leftoid” is a disgusting ableist slur. All words that use -oid as a suffix are ableist, you hatemongering reactionary crypto-fascist piece of shit. Leftoid, steroid, arachnoid, humanoid, thyroid, keloid, opioid, void, all these disgusting words need to be erased from the dictionary because they end in the same three hateful letters as that obscure slur that I keep at the front of my mind for some reason. You obviously hate disabled people or you’d type “resembling the left wing of government” instead of shortening it to that vile word, you subhuman, you lowlife, you cretin. I don’t think you have the moral high ground you think you do. Drink bleach counter-revolutionary scum.

Bonus free gift to the right!

1. How dare this useless lifestylist waste time and effort punching left when there’s actually important real life or death theory to read? This is astoundingly socially irresponsible. Work work work. Struggle struggle struggle. Tackle the issues. Lick red boots. Act your age. Grow up. Get with the program. March in sequence. Nurture the cop in your head. Pay your union dues. Spend every waking moment organizing the working class into seizing the means of production. Better red than dead. Only a disgusting reactionary fascist anti-social nazi primmie lowlife would dare to criticise my perfect virtuous leftism. What an utter disgrace. What a vile attack. What a waste of precious working hours. What a vulgar display of ignorance. As a former waitress and a single cat mother with an olive complexion who lives in a trailer, I denounce this list and everything the author stands for.

Theo Slade — A Snake in the Grass

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/theo_slade_ishkah> on September 3, 2025.

Date: August 2025

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I want to talk to you about Theo Slade, also known as Theodopodopodus, Ishkah, WildVirtue, NihilistDelight, ZonkerStout, and dozens of other monickers. He’s the person behind the Ted K Archive, thelul.org, StealThisWiki, the ActivistJournies Wordpress, the Ishkah Youtube channel, the Ishkah podcast and a giant assortment of anarchist subreddits which he has steadily seized control of over the years for reasons that this expose will make clear.

In his essays, he admits he has been infiltrating anarchist events and platforms, including going to Earth First! gatherings for years in order to “deprogram” anarchists from having “dogmatic beliefs”. For example, he claims anarchists he worked to “save” were “promoting the Cambodian genocide”, which is a ridiculous fantasy of his own concoction, but nonetheless allows him to claim a moral high ground, pretending he’s working to rid the world of imaginary genocidal anarchist tyrants who, he insists, want to create Pol Pot-style communist dictatorships to commit mass-murder.

He gains control of subreddits of philosophies he abhors, such as r/anticiv, r/EgoistCommunism and r/AnarchistNihilism in order to continue this malicious agenda, pushing his largely fallacious critiques of these philosophies and censoring topics and literature that would risk promoting them. In his many essays, he describes openly how he “trolls” anarchists by occupying our spaces, seeding them with his liberal ideology, which he explains corrects our “delusions”. He calls this self-admitted trolling a “long running joke” that he plays on us.

To be clear: He doesn’t admit openly to being a liberal. He identifies as a “big tent libertarian socialist with the expertise to build democratic institutions”, but make no mistake — every ideological position he holds completely conflicts with anarchy and aligns with the establishment.

He also squats the subreddits for Hindu anarchism, Islamic anarchism and indigenous anarchism, despite having no affiliation with those identities as a white British man. He uses his “NihilistDelight” Reddit account to spread anti-nihilist rhetoric across the several nihilist subreddits he controls, further illustrating his disingenuous entryism.

His often-repeated goal is to rid the world of “extremist” or “purist” anarchists, and his methods for achieving this include stalking them, gathering troves of data on them, surreptitiously logging their conversations and finding exploits in their websites to compile yet more data on them and their activities, which he publishes to his various websites. He then links to his creepy adventures in spycraft on anarchist platforms in order to gloat and mock us. This is quite obviously the behavior of an informant, or snitch, even if he only does it for his own amusement, which is highly unlikely given his eagerness to “expose” people he repeatedly calls “criminals”, “Satanist death cultists” and “terrorists” but who are almost always simply insurrectionist, post-left, green, egoist, indigenous, mutualist and nihilist anarchists who are guilty of nothing more than holding philosophical views he disagrees with.

His infamous one-man war against theanarchistlibrary.org and its librarians should tell you all you need to know about his unscrupulous character. He spent years logging the correspondences and activities of the librarians and then published it all on his own library, and then berated the librarians when they asked him to remove their private messages and to respect their privacy. He’s been banned from their chat room countless times for his unremitting harassment and demands that they censor essays he doesn’t approve of and give more space to his own sophistic essays.

He often claims to be an anarchist when he’s busy gnawing away at our defences, trying to convince us to buy what he’s selling, but in his essays he can’t help boasting about his actual inclinations. He says he sees anarchy as part of a “big tent socialism” to advocate for “workplace democracy”, but this milquetoast interpretation of anarchy is only a front for him to spread his retrogressive, establishment ideology and harass anarchists of all stripes, from hard-working mutualist librarians to elderly green anarchist writers and anyone in-between who won’t fall in line with his program to “deradicalize” anarchy.

The latest subreddit he’s added to his immense collection is r/raddle — a subreddit I made to promote the raddle.me forum I founded, before he petitioned the reddit admins to hand control of it over to him. He has refused to return it, and already it’s being used, with his jubilant approval, by a dangerous stalker to smear and harass one of the anarchists who worked on the Raddle project before being forced to leave due to said stalker.

His mission statement for the Ted K. Archive is to analyze “mentally ill” and “neurodiverse” people, including “environmentalists, anarchists, terrorists and criminals” and present them with literature he claims will act as “mental health support” and have a “deprogramming effect” on them. Yes, really.

He uses the Ted Kaczynski name for his library because he believes it gives his project some sort of pedigree, but also allows him to basely conflate anarchism with Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. Of course, Kaczynski was ardently against anarchism and vocally advocated for an authoritarian government, but facts have never stopped Slade from pursuing his agenda.

In his essays, he repeatedly conflates multiple forms of anarchy with authoritarian constructs that have no relation to anarchy in order to attack the philosophy and present it as terroristic and criminal and the domain of “mentally ill” miscreants and “Satanists”. By depicting anarchy as a menace to society, he attempts to present himself as someone who can rescue the world from the dangerously insane anarchist criminals who “take pleasure in terrorizing people”.

He employs the same methods in the vegan spaces he occupies, cautioning that vegans risk becoming neo-Nazis if they develop violent tendencies. He works at “deprogramming vegans who glorify violence” and criticizes animal rights activists who would “take the risk to slash slaughterhouse truck tires” as he “could never condone risking injury to people”.

He says vegans “work up to taking unethical violent acts” by blocking fox hunts, which he says causes them to “gain the confidence to get into stand-offs with fox hunters”. He explains how sabotaging fox hunts is comparable with anti-fascist activists “blocking fascists marching through immigrant neighbourhoods”, asserting that both these confrontational actions lead activists down the path to fascism — his essays repeatedly strive to equate direct action and even non-violent resistance with fascism. He tells animal rights activists that instead of taking direct action against animal suffering, “you could have worked to become president and outlawed it with one signature.” This statement encapsulates his liberal ideological position perfectly.

When he convinced renowned anarchist author John Zerzan to sit down for an interview, Slade proceeded to mis-quote Zerzan in the transcript in order to tarnish his ideas. When it was pointed out that Zerzan actually said the direct opposite of what Slade had transcribed, Slade doubled down, insisting Zerzan must have misspoke and he was simply correcting the transcript to say what Zerzan must have intended to say. After much protest, Slade quietly corrected the transcript. This wilful misrepresentation, going as far as re-writing an interview transcript with an anarchist who has made his positions clear for decades, is the perfect example of Slade’s duplicity.

The notion that we’re mentally unfit to participate in society and need to be saved from our disgusting criminal ways by the great Theo Slade, is astonishingly patronizing. His attempts to “deradicalize extremists” by attracting anarchists to his various coercive projects and then persuading us to read supposedly pacifying literature that promotes passive resistance and working within the system to affect change through “democratic means” perfectly encapsulates his conservative (and highly ableist) ideas.

In his magnum opus, Slade talks about “disrupting the purist anarchist pipeline”, which he says leads to “more and more fringe ideologies”. In this essay, he talks about anarchy as a pipeline to far-right ideology, slavery and white supremacy. He equates anarchy with a thirst for blood, a “violent hatred for all things unnatural”. In another piece, he calls the egalitarian freedom anarchists pursue a “deluded” notion. He then accuses anarchists of wanting to “take away modern people’s positive liberties”, before insisting that anarchists want to “bomb society back to the stone age”. His irrational fear of anarchists is really something to behold, and he’s often able to disguise it as a “critique” of “fake” or “extreme” or “violent” anarchists when he addresses an audience that isn’t familiar with his history of unprovoked attacks on anarchists of all stripes.

It’s always disheartening for me to watch anarchists ready to believe he’s only after the “bad” anarchists and would never inflict damage on them when he uses emotive phrases like “conspiracy nuts”, “terrorists”, “deranged lunatics“ and “criminals” to describe many of the good people he targets.

Further down in the Purist Anarchist Pipeline essay, he claims to support a “libertarian socialist revolution” while opposing “a vulgar anarchist insurrection”, which he illustrates with a crude diagram showing his opposition to violence towards police officers, the movie Mad Max, people who wish to live in “small communities” (??) and people “terrorizing symbols of technological progress”, by which I assume he means Apple Stores, banks, Amazon warehouses and Tesla dealerships.

These can only be seen as the ravings of a frightened conservative who is willing to pour years of his life into “reprogramming” anarchists so we stop resisting the cruel systems of authority that surround us and instead work to preserve the status quo that obviously serves him so well.

He then proceeds to attack the brilliant anarchist essay “bolo’bolo” for being opposed to “humanist, liberal and democratic laws and the state that enforces them”. Yes, this supposed “libertarian socialist” won’t tolerate anyone writing against states imposing their rule of law. He insists an anti-state philosophy would “terrorize whole regions or continents, as the Huns or Vikings did. Freedom and adventure, generalized terrorism, the law of the club, raids, tribal wars, vendettas, plundering — everything goes.”

These statements are honestly indistinguishable from a Fox News commenter trying to spread panic about Antifa, but here we are. He goes on to tarnish the anarchist proposal for Temporary Autonomous Zones, claiming they enable “fascist creep” by rejecting “humanism, the Enlightenment tradition, and democracy”. He decries the “racist position of Stirnerism” (egoism) and condemns the “nihilist and insurrectionary theories” of post-left anarchism, then in a further attempt to associate anarchy with fascism, quotes Bonnano saying “Hurry comrade, shoot the policeman, the judge, the boss”, insinuating this is the definition of fascism.

He then condemns an Italian anarchist group for calling for “fires against capital everywhere”. Finally, he chides an anarchist he says attacked a nuclear CEO, saying the anarchist was “spreading fear” and sabotaging that corporation’s ambitions, before defending that industry. These ideological statements couldn’t be clearer — he’s so disgusted by the idea of violence against the system because he is the system. Part and parcel. This is not someone who only hates “lifestylists” or “individualists” or people he deems “anti-democratic”. This is a man who abhors anarchism in all its guises and has seemingly dedicated his life to eradicating it.

It’s quite an accomplishment that this person has taken control of 200 (!) subreddits, that he operates multiple online libraries that purport to be set up for anarchists by anarchists, but instead strive to debunk anarchy and promote his demonstrably conservative views.

He is a devious little man who has spent untold hours harassing anarchist librarians and publishers, which includes compiling and releasing troves of their private correspondences against their will. He’s a proud informant who takes pleasure in violating the privacy of dedicated volunteers and publicizing these logs for all to see, obviously including law enforcement.

He’s a coercive manipulative creep who works tirelessly to destroy the security culture of anarchists around the world. He’s an entryist who possesses such an ego that he can’t even bring himself to deny his intentions and gleefully describes how he bamboozles people into consuming his propaganda in an attempt to “rescue them” from dangerous radical thought. He sees anarchists as mentally ill criminals and terrorists in need of de-radicalization. He perceives the state and its laws as the only obstacle separating Western civilization from barbarism. He defends the police and CEOs, he co-opts marginalized identities to colonize their spaces, he sabotages and hijacks anarchist projects and claims ownership over other people’s hard work.

There’s no reason to ever entertain his games, contribute to his projects or enable his attacks on anarchy. He is, in every sense, a snake in the grass. Don’t fall for it. Don’t let him lie to you and convince you his long list of projects are meant to promote anarchy or any kind of subversive, radical thought. Don’t let him use our spaces to concoct his nasty campaigns against good people. He is not an anarchist in any way, shape or form.

Follows is a list of some of the subreddits he controls with his many reddit accounts (WildVirtue, IshkahYT, ZonkerStout, etc) so you know I’m not exaggerating.

• r/OrderOfTheGoodDeath

• r/DebateSocialism

• r/andykaufman

• r/LeftAnarchism

• r/AskAMortician

• r/Vegans

• r/classwar

• r/AnimalRightsActivism

• r/SolarPunkAnarchism

• r/DebateAMeatEater

• r/AileenWuornos

• r/CringyAntiVegans

• r/IndigenousAnarchism

• r/EarthFirstNetwork

• r/IntelexualMedia

• r/Reducetarianism

• r/veganPhilosophy

• r/Yippie

• r/LibraryInfoExchange

• r/DudeistPhilosophy

• r/Platformist_Anarchism

• r/abasleciel

• r/ExExVegan

• r/Makhnovism

• r/AntiCiv

• r/AngelaDavis

• r/IndependenceAnarchism

• r/MinimalistAnarchism

• r/LeftRothbardianism

• r/PhilosophicalAnarchy

• r/ContemporaryAnarchism

• r/PragmaticVeganism

• r/AnarchistLibrary

• r/Classical_Anarchism

• r/PopCultureDetective

• r/VeganvsMeatEater

• r/SaintAndrewism

• r/AntiColonialAnarchism

• r/AnarchistLibraries

• r/WorkersInternational

• r/AnarchismPlusNihilism

• r/Raddle

• r/TaraMooknee

• r/AbsurdistAnarchism

• r/CommunalistLibrary

• r/AnarchoIndependentism

• r/AntiReligiousAnarchy

• r/VeganPurists

• r/VeganAdvocacy

• r/Bookchin

• r/RadicalLibraries

• r/HinduAnarchism

• r/IslamicAnarchism

• r/AntiVegans

• r/RadicalAnthropology

• r/AfterDeathLegalReform

• r/IAF

• r/AtheisticAnarchism

• r/BreadBooks

• r/AnarchistFederation

• r/InsaneVegans

• r/ShitCarnistsSay

• r/ZoeBaker

• r/TheGrayzone

• r/EiselMazard

• r/VegansofFreegle

• r/excarnists

• r/ExAntiVegan

• r/ExCarnist

• r/ToastTube

• r/UKFreegans

• r/Bordigism

• r/CaptainHotknives

• r/Ishkah

• r/HousingCooperatives

• r/LateStageCivilization

• r/ShaunVids

• r/AntiCivilization

• r/Appropedia

• r/BoycottMeat

• r/BreadBook

• r/CommunalistAnarchism

• r/DialecticalNaturalism

• r/HobbyPublishing

• r/IndustrialAnarchism

• r/KenLoach

• r/LeftistVeganism

• r/Mexie

• r/NeoLuddism

• r/StealThisBook

• r/TheFinalStrawRadio

• r/VeganGateKeepers

• r/AnarhijaLibrary

• r/MarxistAnarchism

• r/Municipalism

• r/PuristAnarchists

• r/Reducetarian

• r/TheBlackInternational

• r/TolstoyanAnarchism

• r/AndreGorz

• r/AntiVeganOutreach

• r/AskYourselfCommunity

• r/BoycottAnimalProducts

• r/CringyAntiVegan

• r/CringyVegan

• r/CringyVegans

• r/DebateAVoter

• r/DebateCivilization

• r/DigitalFreecycle

• r/DigitalFreegle

• r/DigitalRequests

• r/EcoExtremism

• r/EcoExtremists

• r/ExExVegans

• r/Extinctionist

• r/FileExchange

• r/ForHarriet

• r/HistoricalMaterialist

• r/HumanExtinctionists

• r/InformationExchange

• r/InformationHighway

• r/InsaneAntiVegans

• r/InsaneVegan

• r/InternationalCongress

• r/IntFedAnarchistes

• r/LoompanicsUnlimited

• r/MarxistArchive

• r/MaterialistDialectic

• r/PlantBasedNews

• r/PossibilistAnarchism

• r/PragmaticAnarchism

• r/PsychoanalyticAnarchy

• r/RightWingAnarchism

• r/TheLUL

• r/Touchpaper

• r/UltimoReducto

• r/Veganarchist

• r/VegansVsMeatEaters

• r/VoteLesserEvil

• r/AgainstCollapse

• r/AnarchistPossibilism

• r/AnarchyInternational

• r/AnimalRightsDoneBadly

• r/AntiTheisticAnarchism

• r/AntiVeganExtremism

• r/BigTentAnarchism

• r/BigTentVeganism

• r/BlackRoseAnarchistFed

• r/Cantonalism

• r/CarnivoreOutreach

• r/CommunityDirectory

• r/CringeyAntiVegans

• r/CringeyVegan

• r/CringyAntiAbortionist

• r/CringyAntiFeminists

• r/CringyAntiSemites

• r/CringyAntiSJWs

• r/CringyClimateDeniers

• r/CringyNeoNazis

• r/DavidKaczynski

• r/exprim

• r/FedAnarchicaItaliana

• r/FedAnarquistaIberica

• r/FederationAnarchiste

• r/ImpossibilistAnarchy

• r/LifeoftheMind

• r/NeoLudditeHub

• r/PhilosophicalVegan

• r/PoliticalPossibilism

• r/Possibilism

• r/raddledotme

• r/SubRosasLibrary

• r/TextDebate

• r/TravellerRights

• r/TravellerSolidarity

• r/Veganism101

• r/VeganTube

• r/Wildist

• r/ZelfromAshdod

• r/OpenDistro

• r/TheLudditeClub

• r/TheModernMortician

• r/UnconventionalLives

• r/anarchistlib

• r/DoctorAvi

• r/IntersectionalVegans

• r/NihilismNow

• r/VeganGainsCommunity

• r/ARplusIO

• r/EgoistCommunism

• r/FolkPsychology

• r/FriendCollectors

• r/LeftMarketAnarchism

• r/LostInModernity

• r/MictheVegan

• r/UnnaturalVegan

• r/AmuseWiki

• r/anarchistnihilism

• r/DeepConnections

• r/DeepExperiences

• r/ExperienceCollectors

• r/ImmyLucas

• r/intentionalfriendship

• r/VeganYouTube

Sources:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221105015650/https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/theo-slade-disrupting-the-purist-anarchist-pipeline

https://anarchistnews.org/content/thoughts-discussion-between-left-anarchist-and-bio-primitivist

https://raddle.me/f/lobby/177748/the-ted-k-archive

https://web.archive.org/web/20230325163248/https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/a-text-dump-on-jay

https://web.archive.org/web/20240209032709/https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/theo-slade-responding-to-claims-i-ve-been-attempting-anarchist-and-or-anticiv-entryism

https://web.archive.org/web/20231115003438/https://raddle.me/f/anticiv/138355/a-friendly-reminder-not-to-get-lost-down-the-eco-purist

https://web.archive.org/web/20220812194744/https://shows.acast.com/ishkah/episodes/the-bizarre-case-of-vegan-neo-nzis-deprogramming-vegans-who-

https://raddle.me/f/Anarchy/197192/-

https://raddle.me/f/Anarchy/210263/theo-slade-a-snake-in-the-grass/comment/433044

https://web.archive.org/web/20230616060722/https://old.reddit.com/r/veganarchism/comments/i5dxdf/the_bizarre_case_study_of_vegan_neonazis_why_we

No Rules, No Rulers

Subtitle: A Response to the Idea That Anarchy is When We Have Rules But No Rulers

Date: August 2025

Source: Retrieved from <raddle.me/wiki/norulesnorulers> on September 3, 2025.

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Rules and Rulers

The often-repeated cliche that anarchy represents a society with rules but no rulers is a fundamental misunderstanding of anarchy. While on first look it may seem like a nuanced distinction, the claim that rules can exist without rulers is a contradiction in terms. This fallacy fails to recognize that the very nature of rules and laws implies an expectation of obedience, which in turn necessitates a mechanism for enforcement, making the presence of a ruling body, in other words, a government, wholly inevitable. There’s an inherent connection between rules and rulers that can’t simply be hand-waved away.

The existence of rules can only be fully understood by exploring how rulers came to be. The introduction of private property is seen as a pivotal moment in the origin of rule. As a few individuals began to accumulate wealth under this new system, social hierarchies formed, and those at the top of this hierarchy appointed authority figures and armed them with a monopoly on violence to protect their property and enforce rules on their behalf. This wealthy minority accumulated increasing wealth by dividing the land among themselves before coercing those who once lived off the land freely into their servitude. They accomplished this by directing their governments to enact laws that criminalized living off the land without the landowner’s permission, effectively compelling everyone who did not own land to work for landowners in order to survive.

This shift marked the transition from decentralized, often nomadic communal living, where no one “owned” land or controlled other people, to structured societies with powerful rulers who enforce rigid rules on the population to maintain a class of exploitable workers, reinforce private property relations, and prevent rebellion no matter how deplorable the working conditions. Regardless of the ideology these rulers concocted for their governments, they would claim the people consented to being ruled by them through “social contracts.”

Anarchists contend this “consent” is always coerced, with a potent mix of violence as well as propaganda delivered through the education system, the media, manufactured cultural norms and perhaps the biggest opiate of all — the electoral system. The constant threat of deprivation of freedom hangs in the air — creating an atmosphere of anxiety that compels compliance. People who refuse to conform to the system and suffered for it — prisoners, the homeless, drug addicts — are displayed publicly for all to see, as terrifying examples of what happens to those who challenge societal norms, a lingering reminder of the consequences of dissent, reinforcing the threat that any heretic who won’t follow the rules will be cast out into the cold and left to die.

The education system is designed by the ruling class to instill a fierce sense of loyalty to the state and acceptance of the status quo, where the state owns a big chunk of your labor and capital owns most of the rest. Through lesson plans that push contorted moral rules, obedience, meekness, nationalism, and the virtues of the state’s particular ideology, the lower classes are conditioned to view their subservience to rule as a natural part of life.

This childhood indoctrination is further reinforced later in life by media narratives that glorify authority, encourage submission to our “betters” and vilify dissent, creating a culture where questioning the legitimacy of our rulers and their long lists of suffocating rules is seen as conspiratorial, extreme or dangerous. Something to be weeded out of us by force.

In the modern era, the illusion of choice is perpetuated through the political system, where citizens are presented with the facade of democracy. Regularly scheduled elections are framed as opportunities for the people to express their will and exercise their “freedom”, yet the only candidates who are allowed to realistically run for office are those who align with the interests of the ruling class. This creates a cycle where individuals are tricked into believing they have a stake in determining the trajectory of their lives, while in reality, their options are strictly constrained by the very structures that keep them subservient to the ruling class. The mechanisms of control ensure that the ruling class’s interests are prioritized over the needs of their impoverished servants.

This ideological conditioning instills a belief in us that without rules, chaos would ensue, making compliance seem like the only rational choice. Almost from birth, endless propaganda is flung at us from every direction to convince us we need rules to be safe, to maintain order, to protect our freedoms. The propaganda in our times is so pervasive and the delivery systems so effective, that fewer and fewer people are able to envision what it means to live in a world without rule.

The ruling class is quick to threaten legal penalties, social ostracism, or economic hardship for non-compliance. By highlighting the repercussions of breaking rules, they create a climate of fear that discourages dissent and encourages conformity. This fear is reinforced through media portrayals of crime, terrorism and disorder, which suggest that rules are vital for personal safety and societal well-being. Security theater is used to create the illusion of safety and control, often involving highly visible but superficial measures that distract from the underlying issues of inequality and injustice, while simultaneously justifying increased surveillance and the erosion of civil liberties in the name of protecting the public from rule-breakers.

Social norms play a significant role in shaping behavior. The ruling class cultivates norms that promote obedience to rules, making compliance a socially accepted behavior and resistance to authority appear strange and deviant. Peer pressure can further reinforce this, as individuals may feel compelled to conform to the expectations of their social groups. The longing for acceptance and belonging compels individuals to adhere to rules, even when they harbor a deep aversion to them.

Rules, by their very definition, are guidelines for behavior that carry an expectation of compliance. Whether these are codified laws or more informal social norms, their efficacy depends on the consequences of non-compliance and the fear it generates. In a society, these consequences aren’t simply a matter of individual preference; they are enforced. The presence of a rule, no matter how it’s created, implies a system that demands compliance. It creates a system of coercive social control.

This system, whether it’s a courtroom, a body of bureaucrats, a home owner’s association or a council of elders in a village, is, in essence, an expression of government. The size of the body doesn’t alter its function. A small council that creates and enforces rules over a neighborhood is just as much a governing body as a large parliament representing a nation-state and passing laws on all its citizens. They both rely on coercion and hierarchy.

The argument that rules can exist without rulers is as nonsensical as the idea of a court existing without a justice system. In the absence of a governing body, rules become mere suggestions, lacking any true power or authority, and thus cease to be rules. The practical reality is that any attempt to establish and maintain a system of rules will naturally lead to the formation of a body responsible for their creation and enforcement, thereby establishing a form of governance.

The mis-characterization of anarchy as “rules without rulers” blurs the line between voluntary interaction, or anarchy, and coercive law, or archy. When people freely interact and consent to certain behaviors, they are not creating a system of rules in the governmental sense. They are establishing personal relationships and social agreements. This is a fundamental distinction: one is based on voluntary consent, while the other is based on enforced compliance. To confuse the two is to misunderstand the very foundation of anarchic principles.

The notion that anarchy is “rules without rulers” is a flawed premise that ignores the fundamental relationship between rules and the mechanisms of their enforcement. Any system that creates and enforces rules, regardless of its scale, is a form of governance. Anarchy, in all its forms, is not a system of rules but a system that rejects centralized authority in favor of voluntary cooperation and individual autonomy. The very existence of rules implies a governing body, making the phrase “rules without rulers” an oxymoron that fundamentally misrepresents the core tenets of anarchism and ends up enabling authoritarian creep.

Understanding Personal Boundaries

Some individuals deliberately blur the distinction between rules and personal boundaries to persuade us of the necessity of rules, insisting that there is no difference between the two. This tactic ultimately reinforces authority and coercion, as it positions external mandates as essential for social order while undermining personal autonomy.

Rules are established by external authorities to regulate behavior, serving as a framework for societal conduct. In contrast, personal boundaries define individual limits regarding how one wants to be treated, the types of relationships they wish to engage in, and the nature of those interactions. When these two concepts are conflated, it creates a culture where compliance with external dictates is prioritized over personal autonomy. This shift fosters coercive dynamics that compromise individual needs and emotional well-being, as people may feel pressured to conform to rules that do not align with their personal values or preferences.

Moreover, this conflation can damage trust in relationships. When a person’s deeply personal preferences and inhibitions are treated as equivalent to arbitrary rules imposed by authority figures, it can lead to feelings of invalidation and resentment. In particular, individuals in anarchist spaces may feel their boundaries are disregarded when their personal limits are mischaracterized as attempts to exert control over others. This misrepresentation can create an environment where open communication and mutual respect are stifled, further eroding trust.

Additionally, normalizing the conflation of rules and boundaries allows for the encroachment of authority into personal lives. It becomes easier for those in power to rationalize intrusive behaviors, as they can frame their actions as necessary for maintaining order rather than recognizing the importance of individual autonomy. Understanding the distinction between rules and personal boundaries is crucial for nurturing healthy relationships and promoting individual autonomy. By doing so, we can contribute to a more equitable and compassionate society, where personal needs are respected, and individuals feel empowered to assert their boundaries without fear of judgment or coercion.

Rules are upheld by coercive authority that threatens to punish those who break them, whereas boundaries depend entirely on your personal commitment to those boundaries and rest on nothing more than a promise to yourself that you will distance yourself from those who violate them. Our boundaries are independent of external rules, and anyone suggesting otherwise is likely attempting to poison the well for reasons that can only be seen as malicious.

This also applies to those who attempt to trivilialize this matter by talking about board games and sports. Instructions for gameplay mechanics are obviously not rules for social relations and the existence of entertainmemt products shouldn’t stop us from applying a consistent anarchist critique to the system of rules and rulers.

In many anarchist spaces, individuals often attempt to establish rules to combat bigotry, such as racism, but rules can’t solve racism. This course of action overlooks the deep-seated beliefs and biases individuals hold, and simply imposing rules does not change these underlying attitudes. Meaningful transformation requires a commitment to education, open dialogue, and a genuine understanding of the experiences of marginalized communities. Dissuading racism necessitates deeper engagement with the complexities of human beliefs and relationships. Given the difficulties of fostering this engagement in inclusive spaces without harming those targeted by the racism, disassociating from individuals who espouse racist views is a more pragmatic approach than constructing rules that will only result in the racists learning to skirt the rules to spread their hate more covertly. I’d encourage people to assert their personal boundaries rather than hold often futile negotiations with racists over rules. If someone wishes to challenge a racist’s views, it would be more effective to do so privately, without providing a public platform for hate and giving the individual the opportunity to endlessly “ruleslawyer” and in the process undermine the integrity of the space.

The Rules-Based Order

The term “rules-based order” is often used to describe the global capitalist system we currently inhabit. It’s the international framework of laws, treaties, and institutions that govern interactions between nation states and, by extension, people. From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the agreements of the World Trade Organization, the rules-based order aims to create a stable and predictable environment where the profits of free enterprise can soar. Anarchists understand that this system depends wholly on coercion, restricting freedom and punishing dissent in order to make the ruling class richer and the poor ever-more subservient to the cruel whims of their rulers.

The rules we live under aren’t just suggestions; they are dictates. They are a set of non-negotiable principles, made up by people we don’t know and enforced by the state and its various apparatuses, including police, courts, and military. These rules don’t care about your personal feelings or willingness to consent. If you violate the rules, the consequences are applied to you regardless of whether you agreed to accept these consequences. This is in direct opposition to the core philosophy of anarchy.

Anarchy requires freedom of association absent of coercion, and asserts that all relationships should be based on mutual consent and the right to secede. It envisions a radically different existence where relationships and agreements are based on voluntary participation and mutual respect, not on a set of externally imposed mandates that are held up with punitive penalties. The key difference between anarchy and the rules-based order we live under lies in the concept of coercion. The rules-based order is completely dependent on coercion.

Anarchists hold that if you choose to associate with others in a community, you do so because you agree to the terms of that association, and you have the right to leave if those terms no longer work for you. Anarchistic agreements between people are not dictatorial; they are the result of ongoing, fluid communication. They are optional and can be renegotiated and withdrawn from at any moment. In an anarchy, the interactions between individuals are not governed by a set of external rules but by a continuous process of negotiation and consent. This is in stark contrast to a rule-based society, where rules are imposed on individuals, often without their direct, ongoing consent.

The “rules-based order” is not a system you can opt out of. You are born into a nation-state, subject to its government’s laws and its authority, whether you consent or not. The borders, the taxes, the legal system, the prisons and execution chambers — these are all non-consensual impositions. They represent a fundamental lack of freedom of association and the denial of the right to secede. You can’t simply declare yourself a sovereign individual, free from the state’s reach, without facing grave consequences including imprisonment and death.

For anarchists, the idea of a “rules-based order” is a contradiction in terms. It’s a system that, while claiming to provide social harmony, does so by destroying freedom. Actual social harmony emerges organically from free people making voluntary agreements. It is a dynamic, evolving process, not a rigid, static structure imposed from above. It is a social arrangement based on consent, not on coercion.

So-Called “Natural Law”

Natural law is the idea that there are universally binding moral rules that are believed by some to be inherent in human nature, or are derived from a divine source. These rules supposedly dictate human behavior and let us know right from wrong. This idea of moral rules baked into our DNA is highly dubious because it fundamentally relies on a hierarchical external authority, whether that be a divine being, mother nature or some other cosmic force. It assumes faith in a greater power which we must all submit to, and in reality descends from highly arbitrary cultural factors, most often Christian conservative cultural values.

Far right personalities over the years from Murray Rothbard to Ayn Rand to Adolf Hitler prized natural law and used it to justify their ideological positions. Hitler’s ideology was heavily influenced by a belief in the superiority of the Aryan race. He argued that this superiority came from natural law, suggesting that the Aryan race was inherently designed by nature or God to dominate others. This concept of natural law was used to rationalize the subjugation and extermination of those his government deemed “inferior”. By framing their actions as aligned with natural law, the Nazis worked to legitimize their genocidal policies.

Iain Mckay, from The Myth of “Natural Law”:

[Natural law] gives them the means by which to elevate their opinions, dogma and prejudices to some metaphysical level where nobody will dare to criticize it, or even think about it. It smacks of religion, where “Natural Law” has replaced God’s Law. In the latter case, it gives the priest power over the believers. In the later, the ideologist over the people he or she wants to rule.

How can you be against a “Natural Law”? Its impossible. How can you argue against Gravity? If private property, for example, is elevated to such a level, who dare argue against it? Ayn Rand listed having landlords and employers with “the laws of nature”. They are not similar: the first two are social relationships which have to be enforced by the state; the “laws of nature” (like gravity, needing food, etc) are facts which do not need to be enforced. The use of “Natural Law” is an attempt to stop thinking, to restrict analysis, to force certain aspects of society off of the political agenda by giving them a divine, everlasting quality.

Natural law is simply a reflection of the prevailing social, cultural, and historical norms of a given society. These rules are not predetermined by God; they are created by Man. Laws governing property, justice, and even morality are not universal or eternal. They have evolved over time and differ drastically between cultures. What one society considers a “natural” rule, another might see as a ridiculous collective delusion. By presenting these divine rules as “natural,” capitalists can disguise their social engineering and make their power grabs seem inevitable, just, logical, Godly. Anarchists see through this transparent ruse, recognizing that all rules are ultimately human creations designed to serve specific interests, namely those of the ruling class.

The modern secular humanist conception of natural law parts with the need for divine authority, but maintains the fixed, external moral code that is used to justify hierarchy. Instead of God or a king, the new sovereign becomes “human nature” as interpreted, of course, by the ruling class.

Any universal law, no matter how “natural” or “rational” it claims to be, can be used by the state and related power structures to justify domination. A secular humanist government could, for example, claim that its laws against certain behaviors like homelessness or squatting are not arbitrary but are derived from “natural law” and are thus necessary for social harmony. This creates a moral justification for its use of force against individuals who dissent or live in ways that don’t conform to the prescribed “natural” order.

The idea that there exists a universal human nature from which moral law can be derived is wildly flawed. What a secular humanist identifies as a “natural” inclination, such as the creation of nuclear families, is simply a product of a specific societal structure. By defining a fixed human nature, secular natural law limits the potential for human development and justifies the oppressive status quo.

Anarchy insists on the absolute freedom and autonomy of the individual. The natural law conception flies in the face of this freedom by asserting that there are pre-determined moral boundaries that cannot be crossed. It tells people what they “ought” to do and orders them to ignore their own self-will and their own ethical code in order to serve an externally-imposed set of moral rules. If harming those who oppress us is always morally wrong, as the manufacturers of natural law would of course insist, how will we ever free ourselves from the clutches of oppression?

Iain Mckay:

Natural Law, far from the being the supporter of individual freedom, is one of its greatest enemies. By placing individual rights within “Man’s” “Nature”, it creates an unchanging set of dogmas. Do we really know enough about humanity to dictate “Natural” and universal Laws, applicable forever? Is this not a denial of critical thinking and so individual freedom?

Anarchists believe we should be free to make our own choices, to design our own values, to set our own inhibitions. This process is dynamic and decentralized, in direct opposition to the static, top-down nature of natural law.

It would be ill-advised for anarchists to believe that we’re all governed by an intrinsic, pre-existing, non-negotiable moral code. An otherworldly entity guiding all our actions and interactions. The moment you accept that a “natural” rule exists, you’re accepting a power structure designed by someone else out of their own self-interest. This imaginary divine “lawgiver” that imposes its will on humanity is an obvious form of domination and best left to the devout candle worshipers among us.

Lazy Teachers Make Lazy Students

When newcomers are introduced to anarchist spaces, they are often taught a simplified and ultimately damaging version of the philosophy by people who insist they’d be scared off by the truth. These people present anarchy as a set of rules for social interaction as a way to ease them into things. This tactic is not only counterproductive but actively harmful to the movement, and I’d argue the people doing it don’t actually want to foster anarchy, but dumb it down to appeal to a broad audience and sap it of all meaning in the process.

Teaching new people that anarchy is simply a different set of rules that supposedly protects them from harm is the worst possible way to communicate our principles. It leads these baby anarchists to internalize the concept of authority, assuming that it can exist harmoniously with an anarchist worldview.

This is a fundamental contradiction. Anarchy, at its core, is the rejection of all authority. That no one has the right to rule over another, and that all interactions should be based on free and voluntary association.

When newcomers are told, “Here are the rules of this anarchist space,” they are being taught that authority is a necessary component of social organization, even in a supposedly anti-authoritarian environment. This deeply flawed messaging can take years, if not a lifetime, for them to unlearn. Many will never avail themselves of these misunderstandings. They’ll go on to call themselves anarchists while practicing various forms of rulership and informing hundreds of other people they come into contact with that anarchy has rules which must be followed or else.

This method of education — to treat people who are accustomed to the rules-based order with baby gloves — to avoid frightening them with the truth that anarchy is hard-earned and rejects all their rules-based assumptions, does not help anarchy; it sabotages it. It fills anarchist spaces with people who fundamentally misunderstand the core tenets of the philosophy. Instead of fostering a culture of mutual respect and self-governance, it promotes a new kind of rulership wrapped in identity politics.

Anarchist spaces, which should be models of voluntary cooperation, become micro-governments with their own sets of “correct” behaviors and “acceptable” interactions. The newcomers, having been taught that rules are the basis of social interaction, simply switch their allegiance from one set of authorities to another. This is precisely what anarchists are fighting against! By promoting a rule-based system, these spaces become a breeding ground for the very things we seek to dismantle: hierarchies and coercive power structures.

Lying to newcomers about the nature of anarchy does a disservice to both the student and the long history of anarchy as a philosophy and social movement. It spits on the graves of all of anarchy’s dead warriors. People who lived and died fighting for liberation. It is a tactic more aligned with cults and authoritarian regimes than anarchy.

Anarchy Isn’t a Cult or a Communist Party

Cults and authoritarian groups like communist parties often use simplified, dogmatic teachings to indoctrinate new members, preventing them from critically engaging with the core principles, which are hidden out of sight for people low on the hierarchy.

Similarly, when certain people who inhabit anarchist spaces present their ideology as a simple rule-book aiming to keep special identity groups “safe”, to lavish them with gifts (after the prophesized great event or revolution) and hide the true nature of the philosophy, they prevent newcomers from grappling with the complexities and responsibilities of actual liberation and promote a cult-like mentality in order to grow their social group and give themselves more power over new recruits.

People told everything will be provided to them if they just have faith in the cause, fall in line with the rules, chant the slogans (Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism!! Wooo!!!) and follow orders will never develop the self-sufficiency and critical thinking skills that anarchy actually requires.

Cults and authoritarian political organizations use a range of psychological and social manipulation tactics to recruit, indoctrinate, and control their members. These methods are designed to erode a person’s capacity for independent thinking and sense of self, replacing it with the group’s collective ideology and identity.

It’s highly important to understand these coercive cult-tactics so you can identify them and spot the people in anarchist spaces who work to utilize them, either because they’re authoritarian entryists themselves, or because they’re unknowingly parroting what they’ve been taught by other entryists.

Cult recruiters target vulnerable members of society — isolated people struggling to fit in and to meet the impossible pressures of modern life. Much like the people attracted to anarchy. They promise to give them a sense of purpose and belonging. The cult presents itself as the perfect solution to all their problems, offering a strong community and a spiritual leader (or party chairperson) who seems to understand them completely.

Love bombing is a common recruitment tactic used by cults and authoritarian political groups alike, where a new person is overwhelmed with excessive affection, attention, and compliments from cult members. They are made to feel special, validated, and like they have finally found their “family.” This creates an intense emotional bond and a sense of obligation to the group, making the individual more susceptible to manipulation later on, and more likely to forgive and even enable the abuses of other members.

Once a person is drawn in, cults work to isolate them from their former support systems like friends and family. They may frame these loved ones as “negative”, “toxic”, “reactionary”, “counter-revolutionary” or “unenlightened” to discourage contact. This isolation makes the individual more dependent on the cult for all their social and emotional needs, making it harder for them to leave.

The organization then controls what members are allowed to see, hear, and think. They may restrict access to outside media, books, or information that contradicts the group’s beliefs, insisting these sources of information are reactionary, bigoted, individualist, lifestylist, blasphemous, etc. This is often paired with an insular environment, like a communal living situation, where the leader or group can closely monitor and regulate every aspect of a member’s life.

Cults use repetitive and ritualistic activities — like chanting, singing, repeating of ideological phrases or long, intense meetings to induce a trance-like state that makes members more susceptible to suggestion. They also introduce their own unique language and jargon to further separate members from the outside world. Any questions or criticisms of the leader or the group’s ideology are met with punishment, such as public shaming or ostracism, which reinforces conformity and discourages independent thought.

These tactics are incredibly transparent to anyone who has finely tuned critical thinking skills, which is why cults and Marxist offshoots work so hard to uphold rules that penalize independent thought or straying from the assigned reading materials.

A genuine anarchist education program would focus on fostering an environment that encourages students to cultivate critical thinking skills rooted in their own values. Rather than imposing rigid rules or doctrines, the program would empower learners to explore and articulate their ideas, promoting a sense of autonomy and self-direction. Students would be encouraged to apply these critical thinking skills to various anarchistic projects, engaging in collaborative discussions and hands-on activities that reflect their interests and ideals. This approach not only nurtures individual growth but also fosters a sense of connection and shared purpose, allowing students to envision and create alternatives to traditional structures of authority. This would encourage newcomers to question everything, including the idea of imposed rules.

By teaching students of anarchy to internalize authority, even in a subtle way, we betray the very spirit of anarchy. We teach them to be docile followers of rules rather than creators of vigorous anarchy. We strangle any potential baby anarchists have in the cradle before it can flourish.

Ultimately, the path to making anarchy is not paved with rules, entryism, lies, punishment and cult tactics, but with brutal, unapologetic honesty. To teach new people that they must accept a group’s rules and conform to their demands in order to do anarchy is to sell them a false promise and to perpetuate the very systems of control we are trying to dismantle.

Responding to claims I’ve been attempting anarchist entryism

Author: Theo Slade

Date: 2023

Source: Original text.

Topics: original texts, entryism, ideology, purism, anarchism, anticiv, eco-extremism,

Notes: Updated Sep. 1, 2025.

---

You can find the posts I’m responding to at the end of this text, plus here and here.

The main claim of these two shitty attempts at a take-down-expose is that I’ve been attempting anarchist and/or anticiv entryism, but it’s just not true. I am an anarchist who has been going to Earth First! gatherings since I was 17. I also accept anticiv anarchists and anprims as anarchist. I’ve just talked about desiring to have the effect of deprogramming some dogmatically extremist fascists and anarchists that glorify violence. Like for example when some Ted K fans glorify the Cambodian genocide.

The shallow reason ziq attempted to write a take-down-expose on me is that I requested a sub-reddit they squatted called r/raddle, it had been banned for 4 years and ziq admits they only ever set it up so other people couldn’t set it up. I think it’s good that people now have a space outside of raddle, not controlled by it’s mods, to talk about their experiences on there, same way people on raddle have a space to talk about reddit.

The deeper reason for the conflict is that ziq views most anarchists as fake anarchists because ‘fake anarchists’ think it’s worth trying to maintain industrial tech like bread ovens[75], trains[76] or cities[77], or because ‘fake anarchists’ think it’s worth voting for the lesser evil candidate in a liberal system they would prefer not exist.

ziq worries most about liberal and tankie entryists to anarchism spreading confusion and love-bombing anarchist suckers, turning what could have been greatly effective anarchists into liberals and tankies.

I worry about liberal and tankie entryists also, but I worry more about right-wing entryists and the anarchist to fascist pipeline because I think the conflict between most anarchists and other leftists is qualitatively different.

I don’t find any solace or warm fuzzy feelings about identifying with the left, I just value a cold hard calculation of the benefits of being open about existing under a big tent of leftist philosophies that if at strategically important times all pull together stand a better chance of achieving an incrementally less bad status quo, in the same way I would hold my nose and vote or pull the lever in the trolley problem.

I just see the value in small far-left groups helping draw people over to a radically different world over a long period of time by agitating from the radical fringe. So, making centre-left policies look more reasonable in comparison to centrist politics, then the tried and tested policies of the future, then far-left, then far-left and anarchist projects the majority global reality.

Deliberate bad faith misquoting

Quoting ziq:

[Theo] criticizes animal rights activists who would “take the risk to slash slaughterhouse truck tires” as he “could never condone risking injury to people”.

Now here’s the source he’s deliberately misinterpreting:

Even if it could be argued that a war of terror, killing those involved in animal agriculture was the easiest route to reducing the number of animals bred into living horrible lives… I would still say it’s ethically wrong to be the person who takes another’s life just because it’s the easiest way. You could have worked to become president and outlawed it with one signature, you could have inspired a 1000 liberators to break every cage.

It’s an act of self-harm to treat life with such disregard when you could have been that same deluded person shrouded in the justificatory trappings of society treating your behaviour normally.

What I see is vegans in mourning for the animals, angry and wanting to find an outlet for that anger. After the vegan activist Regan Russell was killed, many ALF actions happened in response, and if taking the risk to slash slaughterhouse trucks’ tires in the dead of night is how you develop stronger bonds with a group of people and gain the confidence to do amazing things like travel the world and learn from other liberation struggles, then I’m all for it…

But, I don’t think the way we win today is treating a cold bureaucratic system with equally cold disregard in whose life we had the resources to be able to intimidate this week. Time on earth is the greatest gift people have, to make mistakes and learn from them, so I could never condone risking injury to people when fighting such a monolith as the animal agriculture industry today.[78]

So, the point about how I ‘could never condone risking injury to people’ is clearly in reference to a hypothetical ‘war of terror’. With the ‘slashing slaughterhouse tires’ actions I make clear I can easily see ways in which the actions could have a positive effect on the world and positive effect on activists lives, situations in which I’d be all for it.

I’ve also copy pasted the same example and sentiment into other essays:

Sabotage

We should chose targets which have caused people the most amount of misery, for which people can sympathise most, like the sabotaging of draft cards I wrote about at the beginning. So causing economic damage to affect material conditions and make a statement.

We also need to carefully consider the difference between property which is personal, luxury, private, government owned and co-operatively worker owned.

So, it could be seen as ethical to chose material targets of evil actors in order to cause economic damage and make a statement, so long as in the case of personal property, the item has no sentimental value and can be replaced because the person is wealthy. Or is a luxury item that was paid for through the exploitation of others labor. Or is private property, meaning the means of production which should be owned collectively anyway.

It’s an expression of wanting to find an outlet for legitimate anger against that which causes us suffering. For example, if taking the risk to slash slaughterhouse trucks’ tires in the dead of night is how you develop stronger bonds with a group of people and gain the confidence to do amazing things like travel the world and learn from other liberation struggles.[79]

There’s also nothing wrong with weighing the ethics of different hypothetical scenarios against each other in a video essay addressed to a general vegan audience:

1. “A war of terror, killing those involved in animal agriculture”

2. “worked to become president and outlawed it with one signature”

3. “inspired a 1000 liberators to break every cage.”

Obviously working to become president wouldn’t be anarchist, but neither in my mind would be an actual war of terror when there exists better options on the table that stand a better chance of saving lives. So, the president example still works for a general vegan audience as a hypothetical to say ‘if you think it’s justified to go this terror route, you’re not only discounting an anarchist strategy with no risk of innocent victims, you’re also discounting a 1000 potentially lesser evil scenarios where the burden of proof is on you that you needed to discount them to go this other route which we know for sure will lead to a lot of innocent victims.’

This was all just in the context of me desiring to talk about two weird ass neo-Nazi vegans, where a war of terror was exactly what they were advocating. Again here’s the news story I was covering:

• The bizarre case of vegan Neo-Nazis & deprogramming vegans who glorify violence

A short timeline of tech/environmentalist politics related events in my life history

I’ve been going to Earth First! gatherings since I was 17, is ziq’s claim that I’ve been desiring to argue people out of being anarchists since then? Or if not, when does ziq imagine the switch happened?

I think I’ve taken myself on some interesting reading journeys by delving deep into Ted Kaczynski’s life & ideas, and someone I knew called Jay as case studies in a certain politics & philosophy. However, I plan to focus more on anthropology reading in the new year.

---

Age 15: Watched Bruce Parry’s Tribe & Ray Mears. Read books about building birchbark canoes and log cabins. Read ‘new age indigenous wisdom’ books, such as ‘Primal Awareness’, ‘Mutant Message Down Under’ & ‘The Vision’.

Age 16: Went to the island of Borneo in Maritime Southeast Asia with an outdoor expedition company who came to our school. Fantasised about running away to live with the Penan when I was in Borneo if the home situation carried on majorly sucking. Visited an Orangutan rehabilitation centre, which I’m happy can be there to also cure diseases and fix injuries that occur randomly.

Age 17: Went to my first Earth First! Gathering, made friends with one kid who was a primitivist & one kid whose biological dad had been an undercover cop spying on the movement when he was conceived. Saw footage of tree-sits in Tasmania. Listened to Seize the Day sing the song ‘No one’s slave, No one’s master’, which had the lyrics; “Mother Earth I was nearly the end of you. Please accept my desire to be friends with you. Now I know just how much I depend on you for life.”

Age 18: Did well in my year 11 exams, but didn’t show up to my end of high school exams because I was in turmoil with my abusive biological father. Followed the Earth First! Newswire, thought about going to Coal Action Scotland’s open cast coal mining forest camps which some people used as a base to sabotage coal company machinery.

Age 19: Went to live at a forest camp in England trying to block the expansion of an open cast coal mine. Got a call by a person working on resisting the eviction of Irish Travellers. Went to live on the Irish Traveller site, then squats in London afterwards. Met some cool & some strange people in both places.

One anarchist at the Irish Traveller site put on the film ‘Natural Born Killers’ for us to watch. Other anarchists put on documentaries about the Irish Travellers longstanding separate DNA heritage as evidence that their culture has deep roots, so they shouldn’t just be dismissed as ‘a mafia of thieves who only took up root after the Potato famine.’

One anarchist related to me ‘you know people get the wrong idea about these Travellers, the sites look a bit shabby from the outside, but inside, the static caravans are like a pristine shrine.’ I related back that I quite liked the Travellers not worrying about keeping up perfectly manicured lawns, and how I liked the history of some Irish Travellers carrying poles on their horse drawn carriage to simply live in large benders.

Age 20: Got told about communiques where a car dealership and rows of new cars were burnt by anti-civ anarchists in solidarity with the Irish Travellers I’d lived with. Plus, a primitivist communique about small bank sabotage actions, which I read recently was done in solidarity with eco-anarchist prisoners & Ted K. Went to visit a small rural forest commune who made their money making and selling apple juice.

Age 21: Went to live in Ireland to take direct action against a potentially dangerous gas pipeline the community didn’t want building near their village when it could have been built in a more rural location, plus where neither themselves or the country was getting much in return for this climate change causing tech.

Age 22: Went to live on the border of the UK & France helping refugees live in squats & tents. Learnt about a cool diversity of cultures and peoples, some of whom came from ecologically devastated landscapes, some of whom came from lineages of ancestors who were relatively recently hunter-gatherers.

Age 23: Got arrested at a road protest tree-sit. My free activist lawyer beat the charge by arguing it couldn’t be proven I wasn’t already locked on up the tree before the date I was charged with aggressively trespassing, and so whether I simply needed rescuing on the day in question. Went for brief stays to live at an anarchist community centre in Cardiff, Wales. Got to know a primitivist dude called ‘Jay’ more who had been at the coal action camps in Scotland & England, plus the road protest in Southern England.

Age 24: Went to live on a squatted community farm on the border of Wales & England. The land used to be held in a community trust of tenant farmers, but when the last farmer died, the solicitor sold it at auction without doing his due diligence to track down relatives of the community trust members. The land was bought by a dude who had helped activists occupy the farm potentially to be able to buy the land at a lower price, then turfed everyone off to put up a solar panel farm. The eviction team companies office was set fire to (not trying to claim illegalist clout by mentioning this, thankfully I have an honest alibi, I just enjoy that I’ve lived in places where interesting events happened).

Age 29: Started playing around with re-structuring books I found interesting. Like I turned a book of prison letters between two childhood friends, into a kind of unfinished autobiography of the person in prison, by reorganizing all the memories she would tell into the timeline of her life. This led me to next start working on digitizing Ted Kaczynski’s book ‘Truth versus Lies’ so that I could potentially reorganise the most interesting parts into a biography of his life.

Age 31: Started contributing to an archive of rare Ted K documents & suggested reading. Wrote a short research text dump on Jay who died in Spain when I was 26. Jay wrote a zine promoting groups who perpetrate misanthropic attacks and whose aim it was to kill or maim random people. So, I wonder what the radicalizing factors were in his journey and whether he was hoping to connect up with other Ted K fans by going to Spain.

Age 32 (now): Contributing to 5 online archives; The Ted K Archive, The Library of Unconventional Lives, Steal This Wiki, The Anarchist Library & Bibliothèque Anarchiste. Plus, working towards hopefully helping set up 2 more in the new year:

• A blueprint for a future bonus Communalist Library using AmuseWiki software

• A blueprint for a future Radical Anthropology archive using AmuseWiki software

Finally, here’s a fairly embarrassing collage of news & activist press release clippings I was involved in:

• toleratedindividuality.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/rap-sheet.pdf

For clarity, this wasn’t an attempt to give a timeline of everything I’ve ever done in my life, it’s specifically a timeline focused on events in my life that have significance related to my environmental interests. So, although I highlight some of the events for their personal environmental significance to me, some of the connections were fairly abstract. The primary significance of some of the events was enjoying helping out other people.

Disrupting the purist anarchist to ex-anarchist pipeline

The two ‘exposes’ are meant to lead you to believe I’m just some scared liberal who would faint at the sight of blood. That either I’ve always been opposed to ‘real anarchists of action’ or that I suddenly got scared one day learning about them.

A better clarifying timeline would have included events like the fact that I lived with an ex-anarchist who promoted misanthropic terror attacks and who died really young: a text dump on Jay

Baudrillard asserts that the explosion of the terrorist’s bomb causes an implosion of meaning, a gaping hole in the social fabric that power frantically seeks to cover in order to restore the tyranny of meaning.

I’ve written about trying to live in doubt and stay open to the value of any meaning people happen to take away from various events in life. I never claimed that being able to identify trends in the way some people travel down political rabbit holes to find simple answers to life’s questions was a perfect defeater to those political philosophies. I just find those situations interesting because I wish I could have pulled friends out from that situation, and hope to be able to do it for others.

They create pipeline quizzes to better learn how to draw people into luddite philosophy, I promote reading and debate them to disrupt the pipeline:

Transparency

It’s clearly stated on the front page of the ted k archive website that the project is in part simply attempting to fulfil a request made by one of the people Ted sent a mail bomb to, to just help bring more clarity to the foundations of many eco-terrorists political philosophy and the psychology of people who buy into it.

There’s also a long about this project page being incredibly transparent that’s linked at the top and the first item of the Introductory Texts page linked on the front page. Explanations of the admins pro-tech beliefs are pinned to the top of the twitter account for the website and pro-tech labels are tagged to the accounts of admins on discord.

I think part of the problem is some people were in a bubble because they just weren’t on any of the platforms where the website was getting positive feedback.

‘Hiding my power level’ & ‘deprogramming’

I’ve created anonymous accounts to join diehard ted k supporting spaces where they promote fascist reading material. I simply hide my warm feelings for the people working towards a pro-tech anarchist world, and it means I can gain entry into those spaces.

Then, I look to see for example what books and articles they enjoy reading most, then I upload some of those to the archive, either ‘as is’ or as a research text dump.

Then, I hope it encourages wider discussion, plus book and essay critiques of those books, which will hopefully have the effect of deprogramming some dogmatic people who were true believers in the goodness of their ideology based on false premises.

Pe No: Pol Pot was way more effective at society wide change. Everything was going good until war weary Vietnam invaded. Ted’s still better tho.

Anon: Here’s the most comprehensive textbook on the history:

https://weremember.gov.tr/documents/History-of-Democratic-Kampuchea-r.pdf

And I’ve added it to the archive for linking to specific chapters:

https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/documentation-center-of-cambodia-a-history-of-democratic-kampuchea-1975-1979

Researching The Anarchist Library’s archiving ethos

I googled how to download a full list of web.archive.org URL’s for any website, then spreadsheeted the web.archive.org list of URLs of The Anarchist Library and sorted them against the live sitemap. This meant that I could see the list of texts that were once public on the library, but that have now been deleted.

I also quoted a publicly linked matrix chat for reasons librarians deleted and archived controversial texts, I hadn’t been gathering quotes for years, I just searched the matrix server I was in.

I then archived a collection of these deleted texts for people who are curious to read some of the texts that were deleted for unclear reasons or because the librarians thought they weren’t anarchist enough:

• Dumpster Diving the Anarchist Library Text Bin

• Some of The Anarchist Library’s Controversially Published, Deleted & Rejected Texts

Here’s some of what I found out:

1. Most of the texts are saved to unlisted URLs so that they can be remembered by librarians and searched through in an ‘unpublished console’.

2. Often the reason given for deleting a text was just because it was discovered that the text had lots of OCR errors, so fell below quality standards. I found a few texts that I thought were worth the time fixing, so I fixed them, re-submitted them and one has already been re-published.

3. I agreed that some of the texts weren’t suited for the anarchist library, but I was glad to find them as I thought some of them were worthwhile archiving on other libraries.

4. I disagreed with some of the reasons for deleting texts given by librarians, but I found the reasons interesting nonetheless for understanding the library crew’s archiving ethos.

I was careful about shit like not publicly revealing lists of texts that authors requested be taken down. The quotes that I released were all useful for anyone wanting to understand what type of texts are likely included at a higher or lower rate. So, what type of texts it is better to go elsewhere to look for. Plus, librarians could simply offer updated reasons for archiving various texts, then the old reasons would be superfluous, they could be deleted and the librarians would be doing a great service.

I’ve never set out to find exploits in anyone’s websites. I was curious to compare the web.archive list of pages to the live list of texts on the library to see the history of texts that used to be live on the website, but that have been deleted.

Viewing historically listed URLs that happen to be ‘unlisted’ today does not make it someone’s digital device that I was trying to hack or exploit, it’s just ‘the public internet’; it’s just what various people who own web servers decided to make public and never made private. They showed a public way of accessing it, then sometimes website table of contents changes or whatever, but just because one page that linked to it no longer exists doesn’t mean that what they were linking to isn’t still the public internet.

If there’s a story on someone’s blog that they link to on another page on their blog, and that other blog page gets deleted, such that there’s no internal blog link to it anymore, but it’s still public; have I hacked them by going into web-archive.org to remember what the link is? Or is it only hacking if I didn’t know about it until I was curious to browse the web.archive.org for their site one day? Or can you recognize this is all so far removed from what comes to mind for every person when they think about hacking that you’re essentially talking shit?

Creating lots of sub-reddits

I like spreadsheeting lists of shit to de-stress, so I spreadsheeted a tonne of anarchist and vegan sub-reddits in order to create master lists of suggested anarchist and vegan sub-reddits.

As I was doing that I thought it might be nice to try and fill in the gaps of anarchist themed sub-reddits that didn’t already exist, so I created and am currently a moderator of this many subreddits (tho only 7 of them are currently above 100 members):[80]

• Anarchist related: 74.

• Misc.: 50.

• Vegan related: 43.

• Anti-tech related: 12.

• Socialist related: 10.

• Pro-tech related: 3.

Entryism is pretending to support an ideology and trying to redefine it to be something different whilst hiding within it.

Claiming branding real estate of ideologues I don’t like, making clear it’s a critique space and posting highly critical essays of said ideology is simply not entryism.

I’ve only ever requested one sub-reddit, it had been banned for 4 years and ziq admits they only ever set it up so other people couldn’t set it up. I think people have a right to a space outside of raddle, not controlled by it’s mods, to talk about their experiences on there, same way people on raddle have a space to talk about reddit.

The reason for why I moderate almost all of the sub-reddits I moderate is because I created them where nothing existed there before, so that anyone can start a discussion on them within a few seconds. I add a banner, icon, and sidebar to make them inviting discussion spaces for people to stumble on and join whereas they might never have found any discussion about the ideologies otherwise.

Anyone interested in moderating is welcome to reach out. I’ve handed out moderator roles at random in the past, which sometimes turned out to be a mistake—but I still don’t want to impose a strict process for new moderators. For example, on r/vegans, I invited many moderators from other vegan subreddits. At one point, someone shared a post linking to charities in Gaza. One mod removed it, I re-approved it, and then they rearranged the mod hierarchy to remove it again—since I had given everyone equal permissions and my account appeared inactive. That’s just how it goes sometimes.

The Zerzan transcript confusion

I sent the cleaned up transcript to Zerzan to get his approval, he read at least a long way down it as he corrected the name Adam Lanza. I just made a mistake trying to clean up a confusing sentence, full of ‘urm’s’. Which subrosa acknowledged at the time was a confusingly worded sentence:

Zerzan: yeah… I wouldn’t... uh... argue against it, I mean if thats… uh… It’s conceivable, and uh… I think that, you know, hunter-gatherer life was more gathering than hunting, but still… uh... maybe that would be more ideal, uh [...]”

Subrosa: I think Zerzan was struggling to form a full sentence here, emphasizing that is “more ideal” and “it’s conceivable” (given that hunter-gatherer life was more gathering than hunting), while also suggesting that it’s a bit hard to imagine (if you’re “trying to learn anything from the record” / “in terms of our evolution”. Whatever that means.)

The Ted K Archive is open to suggestions

Quoting a Ted K archive librarian:

If anyone’s interested in offering clear steps for ways they think the archive could be improved, feel free to let us know. Like how we decided to take the step of splitting off a bunch of texts to create The Library of Unconventional Lives. Or how we’ve tried to keep a record of controversial texts that were rejected, censored, accepted or deleted.

Obviously the archive is a niche project. The main task we’re happy about having achieved is simply creating parallel pages for every page on the Calif. Uni. website archive of UNABOM documents. So that it’s easier to search through the various documents:

• The UNABOM Taskforce Documents & Their Typed Up Copies

And a thread was opened up on r/DebateAnarchism half a year ago to hear grievances and suggestions also:

• The Ethics of Online Archive Curation

When do you think trolling goes too far?

1. Do you think the people who run The Ted K Archive ought make a long statement on its front page about the librarians being critical of Ted’s anti-tech ideas?

2. Do you think The Anarchist library ought make a statement on its front page about their library archiving ethos skewing more anti-civ?

The Anarchist Library relate to their project as ‘the og anti-civ project’ and their archiving ethos reflects that in how they reject archiving some anarchist texts critical of post-left, individualist and anti-civ strands of anarchism.[81]

At the time ‘The Anarchist Library’ was created I think ‘An Anarchist FAQ’ held a lot of sway which was an anarcho-syndycalist project.

So, as far as I’m aware, ‘The Anarchist Library’ was chosen as a name partly to troll social-anarchists by claiming to have ‘the’ best collection of anarchist reading when the collection of texts they approve is biased in favor of individualist and anti-civ texts over social-anarchist texts.

Personally, I don’t believe The Ted K Archive is obligated to make any statement about their left-anarchist archiving ethos on its front page as:

1. Trolling Ted K fans is infinitely funnier and more deserved than what T@L has done in trolling social anarchists.

2. Like T@L’s relationship to social anarchism, the TKA isn’t 100% antagonistic to all Ted’s ideas. I recognize Ted has some good critiques of the average psychology of both left and right wing people. And so the usefulness in forming smaller groups with different objectives to the entire left-wing or the entire right-wing, optics be dammed.

   I just see the value in small far-left groups helping draw people over to a radically different world over a long period of time by agitating from the radical fringe. So, making centre-left policies look more reasonable in comparison to centrist politics, then the tried and tested policies of the future, then far-left, then far-left and anarchist.

3. The Ted K Archive is a pretty neutral sounding name e.g. The Ted Kaczynski Papers is also pretty neutral sounding, which is the name of a university archive that wasn’t created for the purpose of supporting Ted’s ideology. The head archivist Julie Herrada is likely a left-anarchist who enjoyed painstakingly archiving and cataloguing a collection of texts related to Ted.

4. The Ted K Archive aims to serve a similar role to the existence of other archives dedicated to tragic events e.g. 9/11. Ideally, a 9/11 memorial archive would include documents on (a) the terrible harm to families and firefighters as the long-term victims of that attack, as well as (b) documents explaining the grievance narratives of the perpetrators, such as documents on imperialist wars, intelligence agency tricks, extractive corporations, etc. Plus, (c) documents on actions that could be pursued going forward, to try to reduce the likelihood of similar tragic events happening again.

   So, with regards to Ted, archivists see part of the solution to reducing the emergence of similarly alienated people like Ted as; agitating for rewilding at least 50% of the world, boycotting animal agriculture and living a minimum viable use tech lifestyle to partly provide this incentive, plus forming housing and worker co-ops for kids general well being growing up.

5. One goal that motivates me to archive texts related to Ted is wishing I lived in a world where a lot more people desired to live an ascetic low-impact lifestyle, like living part of the year in a cabin in the woods, so the fact that that desire is tied up with Ted in the public’s imagination means that it feels worthwhile to explore what all Ted’s motivations were. So that I can separate my own desires from his and be able to explain that well to people.

Plus, more than just caring about explaining to people, I use Ted as a way of really thinking through why various people are attracted to that life and sorting out the interesting motivations, from the more juvenile and cruel, learning to spot the signs of that in others, and so hopefully forming cool connections over my lifetime with that knowledge.

I want to see luddite clubs flourishing that have to do with using tech sparingly, according to a metric like minimum viable usefulness. So, in forming the groups and connections I want to see in the world, I feel like it’s useful to work out how to best disambiguate those ideas from anti-tech people’s projects.

Finally, just because I can’t instantly know at a glance whether someone will be an interesting or reactionary person, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth exploring various philosophies and psychologies deeply so that I can tell in conversations with people sooner rather than later if I hadn’t done that reading.

I think it comes down to if you’re principally against trolling or not, plus what side you’re on. If you’re anti-civ and fine with trolling, you like what they did. If you’re for left-anarchism and fine with trolling, you like what The Ted K Archive is up to.

Fundamentally, some librarians enjoy their anti-civ opinion coming under the heading of ‘The Anarchist Library’ and the divisiveness this brings. Popular anarchist opinion would lead to different anarchist texts being published, they could have chosen to set up a website called ‘An Anti-Civ Anarchist Archive’.

That isn’t to say the majority opinion would definitely be better, it’s just interesting how higher population levels of expertise with tech would likely enable someone to come along and fulfill a desire of many readers for a version of T@L that lived up to principles that T@L don’t desire to. Plus, then T@L wouldn’t have to experience as many people questioning their divinely ordained precedents.

When the Ted K archive was created a dude cried ‘why are you besmirching a brave anarchist prisoner of war’ instead of ‘sad it promotes some critiques of anticiv ideology also, but I get the whole Ted K sucks thing’. It’s clarifying amusing polarisation.

If the most objectionable aspect to Ted K was his terrorism why not just critique Ted’s justification for using terrorism?

1. Because being able to have the debate at the motivating foundation of people’s philosophy is important because even if I were able to argue someone out of the justification that it’s ok to use terroristic means in x circumstance, because of y secondary practical reason, the next day they could just double down on their foundational philosophy, that that sacrifice needs to be made for the philosophy to flourish.

2. Because I like the arguments against a lot of his ideas, so why would I aim only for such a small change? By winning someone over to a bunch of arguments, you can sometimes get them to see the value of a very different life and future. I think more people being invested in high-tech culturally-complex society means getting to experience more people expressing what motivates them in complex ways.

So, I often argue the best counter-ideal that I think it’s possible to argue for. And obviously any runner-up prize from winning someone over to the merits of that ideal is great too, like just encouraging a few extremists to drop their justifications for terrorism, just encouraging a few people to be a bit more anti-authoritarian, just a bit more leftist/egalitarian and/or just a bit less dogmatically anti-tech.

Appendices

Text #1 I’m responding to

Title: The Ted K Archive

Source:
<raddle.me/f/lobby/177748/the-ted-k-archive>

Submitted by subrosa on Nov 15 2023 in lobby

---

About two years ago Ishkah got very worried about people getting lost down the eco-purist rabbit hole!.

Prepared with a graph, Ishkah came to explain how eco-extremism amounts to taking pleasure in terrorizing people, and how the path away from all this horrifying nihilism is to dig your way back to reality. Meaning away from anti-tech revolutionaries as they would still take pleasure in terrorizing symbols of technological progress. Then, away from primitivists and anti-civ preppers as those groups are waiting for a Mad Max scenario to unfold. Away from the vulgar insurrectionists who want to seize control and find each other by shooting cops. And away from all the other nutty fringe ideologies until you finally arrive back at the surface again. The surface being libertarian socialism of course. And sometimes, social anarchism.

The larger text here is Disrupting the purist anarchist pipeline (itself apparently a chapter of the “Ultimate Ted Kaczynski Research Document”) which critiques many dangerous tendencies — and suggests possible ideologies for the task of “disrupting a person’s journey down the pipeline.”

Ishkah then created about 100 subreddits to cover every possible anarchism, every related practice and interest that came to mind. To make sure ex-primitivists can share their stories on r/exprim (for something like r/exjw I imagine), and to make sure that r/AntiCiv will be a debate subreddit open to all perspectives and points of view, with pro-tech Ishkah as moderator.

Around that same time, Ishkah reached out to John Zerzan to ask for an interview to be published on their youtube channel. When the transcript got posted to anarchistnews.org, a user noted that

[Zerzan’s] lack on knowledge was disappointing. That Zerzan would so confidently state that “hunter-gatherer life was more hunting than gathering” is laughably incorrect and perhaps shows the sources he studied are literally decades old.

Once pointed out the Zerzan actually said the exact opposite, Ishkah insisted

I didn’t mess up, I’m 90% confident he meant to say hunting not gathering and just didn’t realise he said it wrong.

Despite it not making any sense in the context of the conversation. [Since then conceded, Ishkah corrected the transcript.]

---

Ishkah is behind The Ted K Archive, which very recently celebrated its one year anniversary. According to the announcement, among its other successes the library celebrates having archived...

Documents analyzing the effect [Ted Kaczynski] had on the public’s understanding of radical environmentalists, anarchists, terrorists, criminals, the mentally ill & simple mental neurodivergence.

And the pro-tech people of this library are hoping that...

the website will continue to draw people in with similar politics to him and similar mental health issues frankly. Then for the cold hard reality of the primary source reading material, the epic-ness of the suggested reading material and the inviting discussion spaces connected to the website, to all have a deprogramming effect and be a mental health support.

Further down in the anniversary announcement The Ted K Archive recommends a number of “guides to Ted K and his philosophy”. The first link leads to a transcript of a youtube video from the true crime / mystery channel Unpredictable. While the fifth link leads to A Quick and Dirty Critique of Primitivist & Anti-Civ Thought, just in case we imagined we’re talking about Ted Kaczynksi specifically. To be sure, the deprogramming and mental health support is to be provided to anyone not already on board with pro-tech social anarchism.

For this and for other reasons that I probably shouldn’t share, I need to say I have very little respect and even less patience for the Ted Kaczynski spamming on raddle.me.

Text #2 I’m responding to

Title: Theo Slade — A Snake in the Grass

Source:
<raddle.me/wiki/theo_slade_ishkah>

Author: ziq

Date: 2025/08/25

Last updated: 2025/08/31

---

I want to talk to you about Theo Slade, also known as Theodopodopodus, Ishkah, WildVirtue, NihilistDelight, ZonkerStout, and dozens of other monickers. He’s the person behind the Ted K Archive, thelul.org, StealThisWiki, the ActivistJournies Wordpress, the Ishkah Youtube channel, the Ishkah podcast and a giant assortment of anarchist subreddits which he has steadily seized control{1} of over the years for reasons that this expose will make clear.

In his essays, he admits he has been infiltrating anarchist events and platforms, including going to Earth First! gatherings for years in order to “deprogram” anarchists from having “dogmatic beliefs”.{2} For example, he claims anarchists he worked to “save” were “promoting the Cambodian genocide”,{3} which is a ridiculous fantasy of his own concoction, but nonetheless allows him to claim a moral high ground, pretending he’s working to rid the world of imaginary genocidal anarchist tyrants who, he insists, want to create Pol Pot-style communist dictatorships to commit mass-murder.

He gains control of subreddits of philosophies he abhors, such as r/anticiv, r/EgoistCommunism and r/AnarchistNihilism in order to continue this malicious agenda,{4} pushing his largely fallacious critiques of these philosophies and censoring topics and literature that would risk promoting them. In his many essays, he describes openly how he “trolls” anarchists by occupying our spaces, seeding them with his liberal ideology, which he explains corrects our “delusions”. He calls this self-admitted trolling a “long running joke” that he plays on us.

To be clear: He doesn’t admit openly to being a liberal. He identifies as a “big tent libertarian socialist with the expertise to build democratic institutions”,{5} but make no mistake — every ideological position he holds completely conflicts with anarchy and aligns with the establishment.

He also squats the subreddits for Hindu anarchism, Islamic anarchism and indigenous anarchism, despite having no affiliation with those identities as a white British man.{6} He uses his “NihilistDelight” Reddit account to spread anti-nihilist rhetoric across the several nihilist subreddits he controls, further illustrating his disingenuous entryism.

His often-repeated goal is to rid the world of “extremist” or “purist” anarchists, and his methods for achieving this include stalking them, gathering troves of data on them, surreptitiously logging their conversations and finding exploits in their websites to compile yet more data on them and their activities,{7} which he publishes to his various websites. He then links to his creepy adventures in spycraft on anarchist platforms in order to gloat and mock us. This is quite obviously the behavior of an informant, or snitch, even if he only does it for his own amusement, which is highly unlikely given his eagerness to “expose” people he repeatedly calls “criminals”, “Satanist death cultists” and “terrorists” but who are almost always simply insurrectionist, post-left, green, egoist, indigenous, mutualist and nihilist anarchists who are guilty of nothing more than holding philosophical views he disagrees with.{8}

His infamous one-man war against theanarchistlibrary.org and its librarians should tell you all you need to know about his unscrupulous character. He spent years logging the correspondences and activities of the librarians and then published it all on his own library, and then berated the librarians when they asked him to remove their private messages and to respect their privacy.{9} He’s been banned from their chat room countless times for his unremitting harassment and demands that they censor essays he doesn’t approve of and give more space to his own sophistic essays.

He often claims to be an anarchist when he’s busy gnawing away at our defences, trying to convince us to buy what he’s selling, but in his essays he can’t help boasting about his actual inclinations. He says he sees anarchy as part of a “big tent socialism” to advocate for “workplace democracy”, but this milquetoast interpretation of anarchy is only a front for him to spread his retrogressive, establishment ideology and harass anarchists of all stripes, from hard-working mutualist librarians to elderly green anarchist writers and anyone in-between who won’t fall in line with his program to “deradicalize” anarchy.

The latest subreddit he’s added to his immense collection is r/raddle — a subreddit I made to promote the raddle.me forum I founded, before he petitioned the reddit admins to hand control of it over to him. He has refused to return it, and already it’s being used, with his jubilant approval, by a dangerous stalker to smear and harass one of the anarchists who worked on the Raddle project before being forced to leave due to said stalker.{10}

His mission statement for the Ted K. Archive is to analyze “mentally ill” and “neurodiverse” people, including “environmentalists, anarchists, terrorists and criminals” and present them with literature he claims will act as “mental health support” and have a “deprogramming effect” on them. Yes, really.{11}

He uses the Ted Kaczynski name for his library because he believes it gives his project some sort of pedigree, but also allows him to basely conflate anarchism with Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber. Of course, Kaczynski was ardently against anarchism and vocally advocated for an authoritarian government, but facts have never stopped Slade from pursuing his agenda.

In his essays, he repeatedly conflates multiple forms of anarchy with authoritarian constructs that have no relation to anarchy in order to attack the philosophy and present it as terroristic and criminal and the domain of “mentally ill” miscreants and “Satanists”. By depicting anarchy as a menace to society, he attempts to present himself as someone who can rescue the world from the dangerously insane anarchist criminals who “take pleasure in terrorizing people”.{12}

He employs the same methods in the vegan spaces he occupies, cautioning that vegans risk becoming neo-Nazis if they develop violent tendencies. He works at “deprogramming vegans who glorify violence” and criticizes animal rights activists who would “take the risk to slash slaughterhouse truck tires” as he “could never condone risking injury to people”.

He says vegans “work up to taking unethical violent acts” by blocking fox hunts, which he says causes them to “gain the confidence to get into stand-offs with fox hunters”. He explains how sabotaging fox hunts is comparable with anti-fascist activists “blocking fascists marching through immigrant neighbourhoods”, asserting that both these confrontational actions lead activists down the path to fascism — his essays repeatedly strive to equate direct action and even non-violent resistance with fascism. He tells animal rights activists that instead of taking direct action against animal suffering, “you could have worked to become president and outlawed it with one signature.” This statement encapsulates his liberal ideological position perfectly.

When he convinced renowned anarchist author John Zerzan to sit down for an interview, Slade proceeded to mis-quote Zerzan in the transcript in order to tarnish his ideas. When it was pointed out that Zerzan actually said the direct opposite of what Slade had transcribed, Slade doubled down, insisting Zerzan must have misspoke and he was simply correcting the transcript to say what Zerzan must have intended to say. After much protest, Slade quietly corrected the transcript.{13} This wilful misrepresentation, going as far as re-writing an interview transcript with an anarchist who has made his positions clear for decades, is the perfect example of Slade’s duplicity.

The notion that we’re mentally unfit to participate in society and need to be saved from our disgusting criminal ways by the great Theo Slade, is astonishingly patronizing. His attempts to “deradicalize extremists” by attracting anarchists to his various coercive projects and then persuading us to read supposedly pacifying literature that promotes passive resistance and working within the system to affect change through “democratic means” perfectly encapsulates his conservative (and highly ableist) ideas.

In his magnum opus, Slade talks about “disrupting the purist anarchist pipeline”, which he says leads to “more and more fringe ideologies”. In this essay, he talks about anarchy as a pipeline to far-right ideology, slavery and white supremacy. He equates anarchy with a thirst for blood, a “violent hatred for all things unnatural”. In another piece, he calls the egalitarian freedom anarchists pursue a “deluded” notion. He then accuses anarchists of wanting to “take away modern people’s positive liberties”, before insisting that anarchists want to “bomb society back to the stone age”. His irrational fear of anarchists is really something to behold, and he’s often able to disguise it as a “critique” of “fake” or “extreme” or “violent” anarchists when he addresses an audience that isn’t familiar with his history of unprovoked attacks on anarchists of all stripes.

It’s always disheartening for me to watch anarchists ready to believe he’s only after the “bad” anarchists and would never inflict damage on them when he uses emotive phrases like “conspiracy nuts”, “terrorists”, “deranged lunatics“ and “criminals” to describe many of the good people he targets.

Further down in the Purist Anarchist Pipeline essay, he claims to support a “libertarian socialist revolution” while opposing “a vulgar anarchist insurrection”, which he illustrates with a crude diagram showing his opposition to violence towards police officers, the movie Mad Max, people who wish to live in “small communities” (??) and people “terrorizing symbols of technological progress”, by which I assume he means Apple Stores, banks, Amazon warehouses and Tesla dealerships.

These can only be seen as the ravings of a frightened conservative who is willing to pour years of his life into “reprogramming” anarchists so we stop resisting the cruel systems of authority that surround us and instead work to preserve the status quo that obviously serves him so well.

He then proceeds to attack the brilliant anarchist essay “bolo’bolo” for being opposed to “humanist, liberal and democratic laws and the state that enforces them”.{14} Yes, this supposed “libertarian socialist” won’t tolerate anyone writing against states imposing their rule of law. He insists an anti-state philosophy would “terrorize whole regions or continents, as the Huns or Vikings did. Freedom and adventure, generalized terrorism, the law of the club, raids, tribal wars, vendettas, plundering — everything goes.”{15}

These statements are honestly indistinguishable from a Fox News commenter trying to spread panic about Antifa, but here we are. He goes on to tarnish the anarchist proposal for Temporary Autonomous Zones, claiming they enable “fascist creep” by rejecting “humanism, the Enlightenment tradition, and democracy”. He decries the “racist position of Stirnerism” (egoism) and condemns the “nihilist and insurrectionary theories” of post-left anarchism, then in a further attempt to associate anarchy with fascism, quotes Bonnano saying “Hurry comrade, shoot the policeman, the judge, the boss”, insinuating this is the definition of fascism.{16}

He then condemns an Italian anarchist group for calling for “fires against capital everywhere”. Finally, he chides an anarchist he says attacked a nuclear CEO, saying the anarchist was “spreading fear” and sabotaging that corporation’s ambitions, before defending that industry. These ideological statements couldn’t be clearer — he’s so disgusted by the idea of violence against the system because he is the system. Part and parcel. This is not someone who only hates “lifestylists” or “individualists” or people he deems “anti-democratic”. This is a man who abhors anarchism in all its guises and has seemingly dedicated his life to eradicating it.

It’s quite an accomplishment that this person has taken control of 200 (!) subreddits, that he operates multiple online libraries that purport to be set up for anarchists by anarchists, but instead strive to debunk anarchy and promote his demonstrably conservative views.

He is a devious little man who has spent untold hours harassing anarchist librarians and publishers, which includes compiling and releasing troves of their private correspondences against their will. He’s a proud informant who takes pleasure in violating the privacy of dedicated volunteers and publicizing these logs for all to see, obviously including law enforcement.

He’s a coercive manipulative creep who works tirelessly to destroy the security culture of anarchists around the world. He’s an entryist who possesses such an ego that he can’t even bring himself to deny his intentions and gleefully describes how he bamboozles people into consuming his propaganda in an attempt to “rescue them” from dangerous radical thought.{17} He sees anarchists as mentally ill criminals and terrorists in need of de-radicalization. He perceives the state and its laws as the only obstacle separating Western civilization from barbarism. He defends the police and CEOs, he co-opts marginalized identities to colonize their spaces, he sabotages and hijacks anarchist projects and claims ownership over other people’s hard work.

There’s no reason to ever entertain his games, contribute to his projects or enable his attacks on anarchy. He is, in every sense, a snake in the grass. Don’t fall for it. Don’t let him lie to you and convince you his long list of projects are meant to promote anarchy or any kind of subversive, radical thought. Don’t let him use our spaces to concoct his nasty campaigns against good people. He is not an anarchist in any way, shape or form.

Follows is a list of some of the subreddits he controls with his many reddit accounts (WildVirtue, IshkahYT, ZonkerStout, etc) so you know I’m not exaggerating.

• r/OrderOfTheGoodDeath

• r/DebateSocialism

• r/andykaufman

• r/LeftAnarchism

• r/AskAMortician

• r/Vegans

• r/classwar

• r/AnimalRightsActivism

• r/SolarPunkAnarchism

• r/DebateAMeatEater

• r/AileenWuornos

• r/CringyAntiVegans

• r/IndigenousAnarchism

• r/EarthFirstNetwork

• r/IntelexualMedia

• r/Reducetarianism

• r/veganPhilosophy

• r/Yippie

• r/LibraryInfoExchange

• r/DudeistPhilosophy

• r/Platformist_Anarchism

• r/abasleciel

• r/ExExVegan

• r/Makhnovism

• r/AntiCiv

• r/AngelaDavis

• r/IndependenceAnarchism

• r/MinimalistAnarchism

• r/LeftRothbardianism

• r/PhilosophicalAnarchy

• r/ContemporaryAnarchism

• r/PragmaticVeganism

• r/AnarchistLibrary

• r/Classical_Anarchism

• r/PopCultureDetective

• r/VeganvsMeatEater

• r/SaintAndrewism

• r/AntiColonialAnarchism

• r/AnarchistLibraries

• r/WorkersInternational

• r/AnarchismPlusNihilism

• r/Raddle

• r/TaraMooknee

• r/AbsurdistAnarchism

• r/CommunalistLibrary

• r/AnarchoIndependentism

• r/AntiReligiousAnarchy

• r/VeganPurists

• r/VeganAdvocacy

• r/Bookchin

• r/RadicalLibraries

• r/HinduAnarchism

• r/IslamicAnarchism

• r/AntiVegans

• r/RadicalAnthropology

• r/AfterDeathLegalReform

• r/IAF

• r/AtheisticAnarchism

• r/BreadBooks

• r/AnarchistFederation

• r/InsaneVegans

• r/ShitCarnistsSay

• r/ZoeBaker

• r/TheGrayzone

• r/EiselMazard

• r/VegansofFreegle

• r/excarnists

• r/ExAntiVegan

• r/ExCarnist

• r/ToastTube

• r/UKFreegans

• r/Bordigism

• r/CaptainHotknives

• r/Ishkah

• r/HousingCooperatives

• r/LateStageCivilization

• r/ShaunVids

• r/AntiCivilization

• r/Appropedia

• r/BoycottMeat

• r/BreadBook

• r/CommunalistAnarchism

• r/DialecticalNaturalism

• r/HobbyPublishing

• r/IndustrialAnarchism

• r/KenLoach

• r/LeftistVeganism

• r/Mexie

• r/NeoLuddism

• r/StealThisBook

• r/TheFinalStrawRadio

• r/VeganGateKeepers

• r/AnarhijaLibrary

• r/MarxistAnarchism

• r/Municipalism

• r/PuristAnarchists

• r/Reducetarian

• r/TheBlackInternational

• r/TolstoyanAnarchism

• r/AndreGorz

• r/AntiVeganOutreach

• r/AskYourselfCommunity

• r/BoycottAnimalProducts

• r/CringyAntiVegan

• r/CringyVegan

• r/CringyVegans

• r/DebateAVoter

• r/DebateCivilization

• r/DigitalFreecycle

• r/DigitalFreegle

• r/DigitalRequests

• r/EcoExtremism

• r/EcoExtremists

• r/ExExVegans

• r/Extinctionist

• r/FileExchange

• r/ForHarriet

• r/HistoricalMaterialist

• r/HumanExtinctionists

• r/InformationExchange

• r/InformationHighway

• r/InsaneAntiVegans

• r/InsaneVegan

• r/InternationalCongress

• r/IntFedAnarchistes

• r/LoompanicsUnlimited

• r/MarxistArchive

• r/MaterialistDialectic

• r/PlantBasedNews

• r/PossibilistAnarchism

• r/PragmaticAnarchism

• r/PsychoanalyticAnarchy

• r/RightWingAnarchism

• r/TheLUL

• r/Touchpaper

• r/UltimoReducto

• r/Veganarchist

• r/VegansVsMeatEaters

• r/VoteLesserEvil

• r/AgainstCollapse

• r/AnarchistPossibilism

• r/AnarchyInternational

• r/AnimalRightsDoneBadly

• r/AntiTheisticAnarchism

• r/AntiVeganExtremism

• r/BigTentAnarchism

• r/BigTentVeganism

• r/BlackRoseAnarchistFed

• r/Cantonalism

• r/CarnivoreOutreach

• r/CommunityDirectory

• r/CringeyAntiVegans

• r/CringeyVegan

• r/CringyAntiAbortionist

• r/CringyAntiFeminists

• r/CringyAntiSemites

• r/CringyAntiSJWs

• r/CringyClimateDeniers

• r/CringyNeoNazis

• r/DavidKaczynski

• r/exprim

• r/FedAnarchicaItaliana

• r/FedAnarquistaIberica

• r/FederationAnarchiste

• r/ImpossibilistAnarchy

• r/LifeoftheMind

• r/NeoLudditeHub

• r/PhilosophicalVegan

• r/PoliticalPossibilism

• r/Possibilism

• r/raddledotme

• r/SubRosasLibrary

• r/TextDebate

• r/TravellerRights

• r/TravellerSolidarity

• r/Veganism101

• r/VeganTube

• r/Wildist

• r/ZelfromAshdod

• r/OpenDistro

• r/TheLudditeClub

• r/TheModernMortician

• r/UnconventionalLives

• r/anarchistlib

• r/DoctorAvi

• r/IntersectionalVegans

• r/NihilismNow

• r/VeganGainsCommunity

• r/ARplusIO

• r/EgoistCommunism

• r/FolkPsychology

• r/FriendCollectors

• r/LeftMarketAnarchism

• r/LostInModernity

• r/MictheVegan

• r/UnnaturalVegan

• r/AmuseWiki

• r/anarchistnihilism

• r/DeepConnections

• r/DeepExperiences

• r/ExperienceCollectors

• r/ImmyLucas

• r/intentionalfriendship

• r/VeganYouTube

Sources:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221105015650/https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/theo-slade-disrupting-the-purist-anarchist-pipeline

https://anarchistnews.org/content/thoughts-discussion-between-left-anarchist-and-bio-primitivist

https://raddle.me/f/lobby/177748/the-ted-k-archive

https://web.archive.org/web/20230325163248/https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/a-text-dump-on-jay

https://web.archive.org/web/20240209032709/https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/theo-slade-responding-to-claims-i-ve-been-attempting-anarchist-and-or-anticiv-entryism

https://web.archive.org/web/20231115003438/https://raddle.me/f/anticiv/138355/a-friendly-reminder-not-to-get-lost-down-the-eco-purist

https://web.archive.org/web/20220812194744/https://shows.acast.com/ishkah/episodes/the-bizarre-case-of-vegan-neo-nzis-deprogramming-vegans-who-

https://raddle.me/f/Anarchy/197192/-{18}

https://raddle.me/f/Anarchy/210263/theo-slade-a-snake-in-the-grass/comment/433044

https://web.archive.org/web/20230616060722/https://old.reddit.com/r/veganarchism/comments/i5dxdf/the_bizarre_case_study_of_vegan_neonazis_why_we/

[1] Burn the bread book

[2] It’s so refreshing meeting an honest ancom

[3] Ibid.

[4] “Soviet Pollution: A Lethal Legacy,” Gerd Ludwig Photography: www.gerdludwig.com

[5] “How Soviet pollution destroyed the Aral Sea,” Witness, BBC World Service, 21 Oct 2015
“Aralkum Desert: The World’s Newest Desert”, Geography Realm: www.geographyrealm.com

[6] “Soviet Pollution: A Lethal Legacy,” Gerd Ludwig Photography, www.rferl.org
“Azerbaijan: Sumgayit Becomes One Of World’s Most Polluted Cities” www.rferl.org

[7] “Nabu annual report on cruise ship pollution” 2017 edition, en.nabu.de

[8] “Friends of the Earth Cruise Ship Report Card 2014,” 1bps6437gg8c169ioy1drtgz-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com

[9] “China’s Communist-Capitalist Ecological Apocalypse” truthout.org

[10] “Agbogbloshie: the world’s largest e-waste dump — in pictures” www.theguardian.com

[11] The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan, thediplomat.com sarah-cameron-famine-and-unimaginable-sorrow-insoviet-kazakhstan/

[12] “‘Deep concerns’ over UN official’s trip to China’s Xinjiang” www.aljazeera.com

[13] Gregory, Paul R.; Stuart, Robert C. (1990). Soviet Economic Structure and Performance. New York: Harper Collins. pp. 294–5 and 114.

[14] “Torture, mass murder, rape, and cannibalism ... the horror of Mao’s Cultural Revolution 50 years on”, Rod McPhee, The Daily Mirror, 20 May 2016: www.mirror.co.uk

[15] “Gay in the Gulag,” Slava Mogutin, Index on Censorship (UK), Volume 24, No. 1/1995: slavamogutin.com

[16] James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages (London: Allen and Unwin, 1949), pages 542–43.

[17] “The Continuous Working Week in Soviet Russia,” International Labour Review, vol. 23, no. 2, February 1931.

[18] Sabol, Steven (2017). “The Touch of Civilization,” Comparing American and Russian Internal Colonization. University Press of Colorado. p. 47. ISBN 9781607325505

[19] Lenin’s Collected Works Vol. 27, p. 293.

[20] Leggett, George (1986). The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-822862-7, pages 197 and 198.

[21] Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [1976], Moscow, Volume 35, page 349.

[22] The Mordovian Marathon (Jerusalem, 1979).

[23] Notes of a dissident (Ann Arbor, 1982).

[24] U.S. an-caps also just call themselves anarchists, so one needs to pay attention to context and content.

[25] “Brazilian Farmers Believe They Have the Right to Burn the Amazon,” www.rollingstone.com

[26] James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages (London: Allen and Unwin, 1949), pages 542–43.

[27] “The Continuous Working Week in Soviet Russia,” International Labour Review, vol. 23, no. 2, February 1931.

[28] Sabol, Steven (2017). “The Touch of Civilization”: Comparing American and Russian Internal Colonization. University Press of Colorado. p. 47. ISBN 9781607325505

[29] Lenin’s Collected Works Vol. 27, p. 293.

[30] Leggett, George (1986). The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-822862-7, pages 197 and 198.

[31] Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [1976], Moscow, Volume 35, page 349.

[32] The Mordovian Marathon (Jerusalem, 1979).

[33] Notes of a dissident (Ann Arbor, 1982).

[34] Carlin, George. You have no rights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-R8T1SuG4.

[35] Sorkin, Amy Davidson. The Forever Trial at Guantánamo. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/the-forever-trial-at-guantanamo.

[36] Kropotkin, Pëtr. Words of a Rebel, Chapter 5: Political Rights. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-words-of-a-rebel-1#toc7

[37] Steinberg, Neil. A Rapist and Slaver Who Did Other Things. https://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/2021/5/27/22456533/thomas-jefferson-monticello-slaves-sally-hemings-george-floyd

[38] Banerji, Rita. Gandhi Used His Position To Sexually Exploit Young Women. The Way WE React To This Matters Even Today. https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2013/10/gandhi-used-power-position-exploit-young-women-way-react-matters-even-today/

[39] Sen, Mayukh. Gandhi Was a Racist Who Forced Young Girls to Sleep in Bed with Him. https://www.vice.com/en/article/ezj3km/gandhi-was-a-racist-who-forced-young-girls-to-sleep-in-bed-with-him

[40] Black, Bob. The Myth of Human Rights. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-myth-of-human-rights

[41] The Guardian.The low-desire life: why people in China are rejecting high-pressure jobs in favour of ‘lying flat’. www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/05/the-low-desire-life-why-people-in-china-are-rejecting-high-pressure-jobs-in-favour-of-lying-flat.

[42] Landstreicher, Wolfi. A Sales Pitch for the Insurrection™. theanarchistlibrary.org/library/wolfi-landstreicher-apio-ludd-feral-faun-a-sales-pitch-for-the-insurrection.

[43] Bonanno, Alfredo M. Armed Joy. theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alfredo-m-bonanno-armed-joy.

[44] Gray, Peter. The Play Theory of Hunter-Gatherer Egalitarianism. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201908/the-play-theory-hunter-gatherer-egalitarianism.

[45] Black, Bob. The Abolition of Work. theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work.

[46] Miller, Henry. Sexus (Obelisk Press, 1949.)

[47] Lenin, Vladimir. The Dual Power. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/09.htm.

[48] The Center for the Humanities. Profile of Yates McKee. www.centerforthehumanities.org/programming/participants/yates-mckee/.

[49] McKee, Yates. Art after Occupy — climate justice, BDS and beyond. wagingnonviolence.org/2014/07/art-after-occupy/.

[50] “Ανάληψη ευθύνης για απαλλοτρίωση και εμπρησμό κάλπης”, IndyMedia, July 7, 2019, athens.indymedia.org/post/1598979.

[51] “Willful Disobedience Volume 5, number 1”. The Anarchist Library. Spring/Summer 2004, theanarchistlibrary.org/library/various-authors-willful-disobedience-volume-5-number-1#toc9

[52] “Anarchists Storm Voting Centers, Steal One Ballot Box and Burn It in Exarchia Square, Athens.” Protothema News, July 7, 2019, en.protothema.gr/anarchists-storm-voting-centers-steal-one-ballot-box-burn-it-in-exarchia-square-athens-photos.

[53] “Toulouse, France: Blocking of Polling Stations.” Act for Freedom Now!, April 24, 2022, actforfree.noblogs.org/post/2022/04/24/toulouse-france-blocking-of-polling-stations.

[54] PM Condemns Burning of Ballot Boxes. Papua New Guinea Post Courier, August 19, 2022, postcourier.com.pg/pm-condemns-burning-of-ballot-boxes

[55] James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages (London: Allen and Unwin, 1949), pages 542–43.

[56] “The Continuous Working Week in Soviet Russia,” International Labour Review, vol. 23, no. 2, February 1931.

[57] Sabol, Steven (2017). “The Touch of Civilization”: Comparing American and Russian Internal Colonization. University Press of Colorado. p. 47. ISBN 9781607325505

[58] Lenin’s Collected Works Vol. 27, p. 293.

[59] Leggett, George (1986). The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-822862-7, pages 197 and 198.

[60] Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, [1976], Moscow, Volume 35, page 349.

[61] The Mordovian Marathon (Jerusalem, 1979).

[62] Notes of a dissident (Ann Arbor, 1982).

[63] George Carlin — You have no rights

[64] The Forever Trial at Guantánamo

[65] Political Rights (Kropotkin)

[66] A rapist and slaver who did other things

[67] Gandhi Used His Position To Sexually Exploit Young Women. The Way WE React To This Matters Even Today

[68] Gandhi Was a Racist Who Forced Young Girls to Sleep in Bed with Him

[69] The Myth of Human Rights (Black)

[70] “Ανάληψη ευθύνης για απαλλοτρίωση και εμπρησμό κάλπης”, IndyMedia, July 7, 2019, athens.indymedia.org/post/1598979.

[71] “Willful Disobedience Volume 5, number 1”. The Anarchist Library. Spring/Summer 2004, theanarchistlibrary.org/library/various-authors-willful-disobedience-volume-5-number-1#toc9

[72] “Anarchists Storm Voting Centers, Steal One Ballot Box and Burn It in Exarchia Square, Athens.” Protothema News, July 7, 2019, en.protothema.gr/anarchists-storm-voting-centers-steal-one-ballot-box-burn-it-in-exarchia-square-athens-photos.

[73] “Toulouse, France: Blocking of Polling Stations.” Act for Freedom Now!, April 24, 2022, actforfree.noblogs.org/post/2022/04/24/toulouse-france-blocking-of-polling-stations.

[74] PM Condemns Burning of Ballot Boxes. Papua New Guinea Post Courier, August 19, 2022, postcourier.com.pg/pm-condemns-burning-of-ballot-boxes

[75] Burn the bread book

[76] It’s so refreshing meeting an honest ancom

[77] Ibid.

[78] The bizarre case of vegan Neo-Nazis & deprogramming vegans who glorify violence

[79] On The Far-Left, Effective Activism & Violence

[80] Source: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/100WNnA0jDcanb4zHdJc84p0g0y5NS_pawthGhidAAu4

[81] Examples can be found here: <thelul.org/library/theo-slade-my-recommendations-for-different-amusewiki-libraries>

& here: <https://thelul.org/library/some-of-the-anarchist-library-s-controversially-published-deleted-rejected-texts>

{1} I’ve only ever requested one sub-reddit, it had been banned for 4 years and ziq admits he only ever set it up so other people couldn’t set it up. I think people have a right to a space outside of raddle, not controlled by it’s mods, to talk about their experiences on there, same way people on raddle have a space to talk about reddit.

{2} I’ve been going to Earth First! gatherings since I was 17, is the claim that I’ve been desiring to argue people out of being anarchists since then? Or if not, when does ziq imagine the switch happened? Here’s a quote from me talking about going to a gathering:

“I’d like to increase my foraging skills, learn about updates on the situation in Northern Syria, friendly debate the application of ‘tekmil’ and discuss with people my work in progress biography on Ted Kaczynski to learn about more ways to help prevent people from falling into apathy, misanthropy, fatalism, etc.”

I obviously don’t admit to infiltrating anarchist events and platforms, these are events and projects I’ve desired to be apart of and promote since I was a kid.

{3} Nowhere have I claimed anarchists promote the Cambodian genocide, this is just a quote made up out of thin air. I’ve talked about getting into neo-luddite servers on alt accounts, finding people talking positively about the Khmer Rouge, and then linking them a book on how horrifying that genocide was. I never said they were anarchist.

{4} Created where nothing existed there before, so anyone can start a discussion on them within a few seconds. Added banner and icon, etc. Made them inviting discussion spaces for people to stumble on and join whereas they might never have found any discussion about the ideologies otherwise.

{5} This is a made up quote. At best it’s a misleading abbreviation that should be in apostrophes. Here’s the actual quote ziq is thinking of:

“And obviously I don’t think the revolution would end at worker control, but I do see anarchists as part of a big tent libertarian socialist movement, where securing workplace democracy would be a massive improvement in society.”

I identify as an anarchist, I see anarchists as part of a big-tent of socialist and left-wing philosophies. That doesn’t mean I think vague libsoc ideas are better than anarchist ideas or whatever. ziq also considers anarchists socialists.

{6} Created where nothing existed there before, so anyone can start a discussion on them within a few seconds. Added a banner, icon, and sidebar to make them inviting discussion spaces for people to stumble on and join whereas they might never have found any discussion about the ideologies otherwise.

Anyone who wants to mod can reach out, I’ve given mod to random other mods before and it be a mistake, but I wouldn’t impose a stringent process on people wanting to be mod. On r/vegans I invited a ton of other mods from other vegan subreddits, someone made a post linking to charities in gaza, one mod removed it, I re-approved it, then they were able to change the mod hierarchy because I’d given everyone all the mod roles and my account showed as inactive, so they did and then removed the post again. Such is life.

{7} I’ve never set out to find exploits in anyone’s websites. I was curious to compare the web.archive list of pages to the live list of texts on the library to see the history of texts that used to be live on the website, but that have been deleted.

Viewing historically listed URLs that happen to be ‘unlisted’ today does not make it someone’s digital device that I was trying to hack or exploit, it’s just ‘the public internet’; it’s just what various people who own web servers decided to make public and never made private. They showed a public way of accessing it, then sometimes website table of contents changes or whatever, but just because one page that linked to it no longer exists doesn’t mean that what they were linking to isn’t still the public internet.

If there’s a story on someone’s blog that they link to on another page on their blog, and that other blog page gets deleted, such that there’s no internal blog link to it anymore, but it’s still public; have I hacked them by going into web-archive.org to remember what the link is? Or is it only hacking if I didn’t know about it until I was curious to browse the web.archive.org for their site one day? Or can you recognize this is all so far removed from what comes to mind for every person when they think about hacking that you’re essentially talking shit?

{8} Snitchjacketing at its finest. Why not actually lay out what quotes and evidence you imagine you’re drawing from with such a serious allegation?

{9} I quoting a publicly linked matrix chat and some unlisted links when I was looking at what texts had been deleted from the library for ideological reasons. It wasn’t a research project where I’d been gathering quotes for years, I just searched the matrix server I was in for reasons librarians gave for deleting texts.

I was careful about shit like not publicly revealing lists of texts that authors requested be taken down. The quotes that I released were all useful for anyone wanting to understand what type of texts are likely included at a higher or lower rate. So, what type of texts it is better to go elsewhere to look for. Plus, librarians could simply offer updated reasons for archiving various texts, then the old reasons would be superfluous, they could be deleted and the librarians would be doing a great service.

{10} I’m deleting alleged allegations which ziq knew before writing this, so not jubilant approval by any stretch. One side calls the other a dangerous stalker, the other side calls you groomers, I know the details and don’t wish to spend hours learning honestly, but I’ll moderate people making allegations without backing it up with a lot of evidence.

{11} What a load of twisted bullshit. The quote ziq is drawing from is:

“We, everyone who has contributed, have archived:

A ton of primary source documents on Ted’s life and ideas.

Documents analyzing the effect he had on the public’s understanding of radical environmentalists, anarchists, terrorists, criminals, the mentally ill & simple mental neurodivergence.

Lots of great suggested reading on anarchism & other issues.”

ziq twists the quote to make it sound like I’m only interested in environmentalists to the extent they’re mentally ill, when mental neurodivergence was simply an area of reading way down the list of topics that is often covered in the news around Ted, so a theme that it’s interesting to archive texts around.

{12} From the about page: “Through helping clarify the distinction between Ted’s ideas and anarchism will it help encourage more people to positively re-evaluate anarchist philosophy?” I hope so, some self-identified anarchist would like to claim Ted as one of us, I want to fight against that. I’ve been the loudest proponent of not relating to Ted as one of us in order to encourage anarchists to distance themselves from him & his ideas.

{13} I didn’t quietly correct shit. I sent the cleaned up transcript to Zerzan to check I’d transcribed it all right, he read at least a long way down it as he corrected the name Adam Lanza. I just made a mistake trying to clean up a confusing sentence, full of ‘urm’s’. Which subrosa acknowledged at the time was a confusingly worded sentence:

”Zerzan: yeah… I wouldn’t... uh... argue against it, I mean if thats… uh… It’s conceivable, and uh… I think that, you know, hunter-gatherer life was more gathering than hunting, but still… uh... maybe that would be more ideal, uh [...]”

Subrosa: I think Zerzan was struggling to form a full sentence here, emphasizing that is “more ideal” and “it’s conceivable” (given that hunter-gatherer life was more gathering than hunting), while also suggesting that it’s a bit hard to imagine (if you’re “trying to learn anything from the record” / “in terms of our evolution”. Whatever that means.)

I was unsure what Zerzan meant, I talked it over with subrosa which helped make it clearer, so I changed it.

{14} This is just a misquote of a post-leftist strawman of left-anarchists, it’s an essay I was quoting as an example of post-left weirdness. Source: Against the Corpse Machine: Defining A Post-Leftist Anarchist Critique of Violence by Ashen Ruins.

{15} Again just a quote from a post-leftist hypothesising what an anticiv world might look like. It’s weird to me that some anti-civ’s relate to this as a deterministic inevitability, but that’s all, I don’t claim most anti-civs would be happy about this, it’s also a part of the essay where he’s talking about how non-anarchist societies would work on the periphery of anarchist communes. Source: Against the Corpse Machine: Defining A Post-Leftist Anarchist Critique of Violence by Ashen Ruins.

{16} That’s just a giant leap of insinuated imagination. It’s a long quote in a section on “The narrowing of approaches”, where I quote how multiple insurrectionairy anarchists reject organizational approaches at achieving their desires, that’s all, that’s not me relating them as not-anarchist or fascist, it’s me discussing a spectrum of philosophies, where the further down you go they become less happy with a wide array of approaches, and prefer less organizational approaches.

The line in the sand where I stop relating to philosophies as anarchist and where they relate to themselves as not being anarchist is clearly deliniated in the essay:

“Anti-Tech Revolution

Here we have arrived at Ted’s own proposed strategy.

This is a step back along the spectrum of the scale of technological society the ideological proponents are openly hoping to dismantle, but this is often simply for pragmatic reasons, in that, destroying electricity grids and preventing them from being rebuilt is a lot simpler goal to advocate others over to, rather than pretending they also have an easy solution for challenging feudal warlords who will rise up in the chaos.

As well, it is a step away from identifying with left-wing philosophy the way all the ideologies previously mentioned do on average to some degree. Despite all of them rejecting mass-movement organizing and allying, they often draw in followers through claims of being the only one true ideology with an effective plan for dismantling capitalism, the patriarchy, etc.”

{17} How does that make any sense. Entryism is pretending to support an ideology and trying to redefine it to be something different whilst hiding within it. Claiming branding real estate of ideologues I don’t like, making clear it’s a critique space and posting highly critical essays of said ideology is simply not entryism.

{18} This is what the page looked like before ziq purged every post & comment I’d ever made: My recommendations for two anarchist libraries

I also made an identical post on r/Anarchism on reddit at the same time:
reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/1ferqog/my_recommendations_for_two_anarchist_libraries/