Research

Quotes from the named essay in Queering Anarchism:

Anarchists (should) understand the importance in opposing the regulation of sexual and gender behavior by governments and other allied forces such as the church and capitalism. In fact there has been a long history of anarchism as a movement and a philosophy recognizing and embracing the pivotal importance of sexual and gender liberation. Within this history there has been a prominent role of queer anarchist sex radicals who kept this significant engagement at the forefront of the anarchist movement and philosophy. Yet despite the pioneering anarchist sex radicals at the turn of the century and those during the heyday of the (gay, feminist, black) liberation movements of the sixties and seventies, there has been an increasing trend by the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) liberation movement toward embracing the government and its role in regulating sexual and gender behavior. And this current “liberation” movement has worked in complicity with the state simply to broaden and reform the definitions and social norms of sex and gender, as well as focus on the assimilation of LGBT within the State through marriage reform, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and by enacting laws that seek to entrench and empower the police and incarceration system through increased funding and engagement through hate crime legislation. And so we see a liberation movement that moved from a focus on fighting the state and its associated systems of corrupt police, politics, and social norms to a liberation model complicit with a state and its allied power structures that makes no excuse regarding its control, regulation, definition of, and legal boundaries regarding, sexual behavior and gender identity and expression.

Yep, anarchists should understand this. But honestly, anyone with a desire to liberate people should recognise that liberation does not happen through reform. It cannot. That's impossible. You do not liberate people by forcing them into assimilation.

In 1897 Berlin, the German sexologist and sex radical Magnus Hirschfeld and several colleagues formed the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (SHC)—the world’s first homosexual rights organization. The members of the SHC were radical intellectuals who helped create new understandings of homosexuality and championed new political goals and ideas as well as strong critiques of oppressive social norms and values. During this first wave of sexual liberation many of these radical intellectuals shaped new understandings and forms of same-sex political and social consciousness that had immediate and long-term impacts on the lives of European people.

Why did the Europeans come at sexuality from this direction? And how? Because it's fascinating to see that it blossomed in a different way, but I want to know more about how this direction occurred.

Within the United States, unlike Europe, the politics of sex radicals did not arise from a blossoming homosexual rights movement. Instead, it arose from the anarchist movement of the time. Anarchist sex radicals like Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Leonard Abbott, John William Lloyd, and Benjamin R. Tucker wrote books, articles, and lectured across the United States regarding same-sex love. Emma Goldman [1869–1940] is without question the first person to openly lecture on homosexual liberation (emancipation) and openly supported Oscar Wilde against his persecutors. Though not an anarchist himself, Magnus Hirschfeld praised Emma Goldman as the “first and only woman, indeed, one could say the first and only human being, of importance in America to carry the issue of homosexual love to the broadest layers of the public.” The US anarchists of this time were unique in articulating a political critique of American social and legal rules as well as the societal norms that regulated relationships. In this effort, and through leveraging the anarchist movement of the time, they were able to center homosexuality within the political debate. By doing so, they created a fundamental shift in the sexual, cultural, and political landscape of the United States, not only during their time but also for decades to follow. As Terence Kissack notes: “The anarchist sex radicals were interested in the ethical, social and cultural place of homosexuality within society, because that question lies at the nexus of individual freedom and state power…The anarchist sex radicals examined the question of same sex love because policeman, moral arbiters, doctors, clergymen and other authorities sought to regulate homosexual behavior.”

I wonder why it is that anarchism seems to have lost (neglected?) its history of queer folks or supporting queer folks.

Coincidental with this decline in the anarchist movement we saw the rise of the Communist Party (CP) as the primary vehicle of the left. > Sex radicals of this period began to work under a left that was dominated by the CP, which marginalized the ideas and ideologies of their anarchist predecessors. The CP was an organization that, contrary to the anarchists, enforced uniformity of belief and action. And in regards to homosexuality, the CP had a policy of discouraging membership of gays and lesbians who refused to be silent about their private lives (clearly a 180 degree reversal from the beliefs and actions of anarchist sex radicals like Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman). In theory the CP enacted the first “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy” against homosexuals, even though many prominent sex radicals and homosexuals of the left were members of CP.

Just... no wonder a lot of communist parties feel unsupportive to queer folks? This isn't at all surprising.

The first political organization formed in wake of the Stonewall riots was the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). The organization was named in honor of the National Liberation Front, the Vietnamese resistance movement, and as a gesture toward the unity of the struggles of blacks, the poor, women, and the colonized in the “Third World.” One early flyer, distributed in the Bay Area in January 1970, proclaimed, “The Gay Liberation Front is a nation-wide coalition of revolutionary homosexual organizations creating a radical Counter Culture within the homosexual lifestyles. Politically it’s part of the radical ‘Movement’ working to suppress and eliminate discrimination and oppression against homosexuals in industry, the mass media, government, schools and churches.”

STAR advocated for an inclusive gay liberation that strongly embraced trans rights, nurtured homeless street youth, and worked to create a communal trans family unit. They worked to dismantle the very state institutions of a capitalistic society that they deemed responsible for their oppressions. In a publication by STAR, they noted in closing: “We want a revolutionary peoples’ government, where transvestites, street people, women, homosexuals, Puerto Ricans, Indians, and all oppressed people are free, and not fucked over by this government who treat us like the scum of the earth and kills us off like flies, one by one, and throw us into jail to rot. This government who spends millions of dollars to go to the moon, and lets the poor Americans starve to death.”

Both the GLF and STAR formed during the early stages of this third wave of sexual liberation but were undone by ideological factions within the gay liberation movement. In the case of STAR and the budding trans liberation portion of the movement the severe fractionation of the movement unveiled itself at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day rally. The bitterly public feud—Sylvia Rivera storming the stage to speak out for imprisoned Trans folks and street youth, Jean O’Leary of the Lesbian Feminist Liberation condemning men who impersonated women for entertainment and profit, and Lee Brewster of the Queens Liberation Front castigating lesbians for their refusal to let drag queens be themselves—thereby exposed the dramatically contrasting views on the meaning of gay liberation. In the case of GLF, it was a move from multi-issue movement building to a single-issue, white-dominated, legislative-focused vision dominated by GLF’s successor, the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA).

This really is proof that a movement that leaves trans people behind? Is not useful for anyone. The fact that Jean O'Leary was the first lesbian to be embraced by the Democratic Party (serving on the DNC board for twelve years), highlights the fact that there were intentions to separate people.

She derided trans and non-binary people at the Liberation Day Rally and was rewarded with safety by the Democrats. These parties are not for us, they never were, and they never will be.

And in addition, single-issue organisations are fucking pointless. Especially those run by white people.

The way the queer liberation movement has gone, nothing will make me hate the word queer and how inclusive it is.

However, from the mid seventies onward the anarchist-style liberationist framework became less important to the dominant gay and lesbian organizations, who increasingly favored an ethnic model that emphasized community identity and cultural difference (as originally championed by the homophile movement). Today we can see that marriage equality is a core example of identity-based politics and operates to the exclusion of others desiring nontraditional families and relationships not requiring state sanction or regulation. In essence, sexual liberation evolved from the precept of the anarchist liberationists into an assimilationist and identity-based liberation of “different but equal under the law of the State.” During the middle part of this period as the mainstream LGBT organizations, media, and communities embraced assimilation within a capitalistic society, there was the ever-present undercurrent of radical social change organizations such as ACT UP, OutRage, and others that embraced “queer,” not LGBT, as an identity label that pointed to separatist and non-assimilationist politics.

For me, it is clear that any so-called liberation movement for the trans community today is, like its gay and lesbian counterparts, entrenched within an assimilated and capitalistic framework. And in this liberation framework the trans community is still securing its liberation to the same wagon of its gay and lesbian counterparts. If we are to liberate society and ourselves from the tyranny against those who traverse gender and sex, we liberate ourselves from the mental and physical constructs that manipulate us into subordination for the benefit of the “greater good of society, religion, and state.” It is now time for the trans community to embrace and continue the militant and revolutionary paths our trans elders laid down for us if we are seeking revolutionary (rather than reformist) changes. So a key tenet of trans liberation lies within the liberation of one’s self (and others) from the tyranny of the state, religion, and society; and equally important—from our own self-imposed tyranny.

The heart of this point was reinforced at a recent demo protesting the hypocrisy of Human Rights Campaign, where one of the chants included the words “Fuck you HRC.” Several people asked with all seriousness, “Are we allowed to say that?” Then when the first police car came, they were convinced that the police were called because of our using the words “Fuck You.” In reality the cops didn’t really give a damn what we were chanting about. Clearly on the surface this is all kind of silly and a nit, except for the fact that the reaction and fear of this trans person typifies the implicit warnings of Emma Goldman—that the tyranny, or fear of such tyranny, by the state has a profound impact on our actions and our behaviors. This clearly ties in very closely with our goal of achieving trans liberation.

Quotes from the named essay in Queering Anarchism:

My doctoral thesis centered on how middle-class young residents of Tehran, Iran, experience themselves as citizens and consumers in relation to theocracy, democracy, and neoliberalism within their practices of using satellite television and the internet. It is very curious to me now that I was influenced by so many theories that were themselves influenced by anarchist ways of thinking without the word “anarchism” every really being uttered. This reveals a lot, I think, about our education and wider social systems in the United States and their ignorance and anxieties about approaching anarchism. There is so much work clearly derived from and aligned with anarchist approaches that does not call itself that.

I like this in that it shows that there are a lot of actions that are anarchic in their structure but not necessarily called anarchist. However, I think the direction that is understood is... odd? Yes, anarchism isn't discussed in US schools (or, honestly, in anyone's school systems). But I think the better lesson to take from this is that there are a lot of behaviours that can be anarchic and not everyone needs to call themselves an anarchist.

From the beginning, I approached anarchism with a good deal of skepticism, especially in the ways that anarchist scholars until recently unproblematically talked about (human) nature in essential terms.

This is hilarious to me because so many other scholars did this exact same thing? Like, across the whole political spectrum. This is so common. Why be skeptical of it only in regards to anarchism? Anyway.

Groups to keep names of: - Anarchist Social Theory Club (ATSC) at Mary Washington College (now University of Mary Washington); - Richmond Indymedia; - Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS); - Richmond Queer Space Project (RQSP); - Queer Paradise.

Within the academic world, anarchist perspectives have recently inspired and been inspired by a variety of radical theoretical frameworks, including queer theory, feminism, critical race theory, and radical environmentalism.

Just... even if this isn't the purpose of this person's essay, the attempts to constantly frame anarchism within academic contexts is infuriating. Anarchism was not meant for academia; it doesn't even fit within that structure, which is hierarchical to its core. Academia seeks to shove things into boxes, and anarchism seeks to bust out of them.

The two are just... not really compatible, as everything stands then and now.

Prefigurative politics demands that activists adhere as much as possible to the world they would like to see in how they live and act in the world today. As such, it presupposes equality and imagines a collective subject of resistance, rather than arguing for individual rights that can be added into the existing statist status quo. The processes of politics are as important as the result, involving the employment of non-hierarchical, participatory, and consensus-based models of action. The result is a dynamic vision of utopia as an ongoing process, rather than as a goal that can be achieved through granting individual rights.

My biggest gripe with this is 'activists'. This implies that all people who are working towards prefigurative politics are activists, and that's... what is the point? Activism is a necessary tool, but why are we clinging to the title of activist? For what purpose?

Besides, people who do not see themselves as activists engage in prefiguration all the time through the development of community spaces and within their own families. They just hope that their prefiguration can somehow impact the world (and anarchists particularly believe it to be a positive method -- this is something that I strongly agree with).

Even people who are not anarchists tend towards prefiguration in spaces that are still hierarchical. Sometimes it's positive (as in building the school community you want to see that decreases or removes punitive punishments); sometimes it's negative (perpetuating hierarchy without working against it).

Re: The RQSP

Queer Paradise reemerged in November 2002 as a leased office space in a location just a few blocks away from the first space. From the beginning, there were conflicts and concerns about the extent to which this space had the effect of de-radicalizing the group. Some members considered this new kind of space to be very conventional and un-queer, but it was ultimately consensually agreed to largely because it would be a more publicly visible space that might be more accessible and safe for new potential members.

Previously it had been in a "large warehouse," which enabled them to design it as necessary and depending on who was there.

There were other ways in which a de-radicalization of the project was happening in this moment, for example in the change of RQSP from an underground to a nonprofit organization. While group members actively tried to maintain the nature of the organization, any official state-sanctioned organization must adhere to certain rules, including having a hierarchical power structure.

The first mission statement identified the goals of the RQSP as: - To provide a space to promote community among queer-identified people and encourage queer activity in Richmond. - To provide free meeting space for queer-positive groups who work to challenge heterosexism, sexism, ableism, racism, and classism. - To educate on queer and related issues through pamphlets, speakers, conferences, queer cultural activities, and a lending library.

The new, more generalized mission statement associated with the second space was: “The Richmond Queer Space Project maintains a queer-friendly space and resource center, promotes queer culture in Richmond, and links queer experience to the wide spectrum of social justice work.”

The state’s largest mainstream LGBT rights organization, Equality Virginia, had organized a rally and was set to have its members and allies speak on behalf of gay marriage rights, and the members of RQSP spent a considerable amount of time and energy debating whether and how to be involved. Ten members were set to deliver a strong anti-marriage statement, but other members of the collective did not want to antagonize the mainstream LGBT movement in the presence of the larger threat of the bill. They rewrote the speech in a way that could establish a temporary ground of affinity with the LGBT marriage movement, while at the same time including the collective’s own beliefs of marriage as a normalizing institution.

This is something that I'm so tired of. Why are we giving up (or obscuring) our values for the sake of these people, especially when those organisations are more likely controlling the narrative rather than expressing the views of the majority.

Participation in this event provided opportunities for building connections, by establishing temporary ground while broadcasting a critique of marriage and state control, but it also led to the most severe conflict, ultimately leading to the demise of the group. Some members ended up feeling betrayed about the conciliatory tone of the speech, criticizing it as a form of assimilation politics, and ended up forming a separatist “queer posse” within RQSP. The members who had supported rewriting of the speech were also left with ill feelings about the queer separatists, expressing that their actions were divisive, lacked an ethics of care, and were overly dismissive of the concerns of the LGBT activists. Basically, what ensued was a divisive form of identity politics, of who was queerer than whom, within a project that was consciously attempting to be opposed to identity-based political divisiveness.

Here is a perspective that very frequently people who are willing to be conciliatory often neglect: Why is it that the so-called mainstream cannot find ways to include people beyond themselves? Why is it that they create an environment that is hostile to people, even people who might ally with them? This is something I'd genuinely like to understand because it seems like the same old story on repeat at this point; the so-called "fringe" must acquiesce to the needs of "the many" while "the many" does nothing but leave us out, demanding that we assimilate, as if we're forcing them to do something beyond "support liberation of all people."

It doesn't make sense, and it honestly never will.

The split also represented a breakdown in processes of consensus building. The processes of consensus building around participation in this event were time-and-energy-draining, and ultimately unsuccessful. I think this brings up an important question of whether consensus-modeled groups should always have agreement as their goal. Perhaps the irreparable fracture that developed during this moment could have been avoided if members could have agreed to a temporary ideological separation, with the idea that RQSP did not need to have a singular ideological vision.

Perhaps. This is something to consider.

Age appeared as a divisive issue. One of my interviewees, an older male member of the collective at thirtysomething, argued that the younger members tended to be more narrowly focused on using RQSP as a platform for carrying out queer activist projects, that the older members were more focused on creating a space and a community, and that those in between often felt stretched in both directions. I think that age is an important, underrepresented source of conflict in anarchist politics, and particularly so in the United States where the scale of the movement is so small and discontinuous through time that there aren’t the same kinds of cross-generational ties there can be in other radical activist cultures.

This is so entirely true, and I think it forgets to underscore why age (even seemingly small gaps) are so important to understand.

And a lot of it kind of comes from an assumption, I think, when we're younger that we need to be seen doing something. Except we don't. Yes, we need to be doing something, but it definitely doesn't have to be hyper-visible. It can sometimes be quiet.

It's not that all young people do this (I didn't), but this stereotype continues to proliferate. And it's not surprising that a lot of the "I want to build community" folks are mostly 30+ or burnt out young people.

Race and racism, also, were important issues, as RQSP consisted primarily of white radicals and Queer Paradise was situated within a Richmond neighborhood that was the product of long-term segregation. The neighborhood consisted mostly of a combination of long- term poor African-American and affluent gentrifying white and African-American residents. The tensions from these changes made RQSP members feel at times like white colonists and at other times totally excluded from the narrative of urban decline and renewal in the neighborhood.

Lastly, there were important issues having to do with scale and the limits of radical activism in a small, relatively conservative southern city like Richmond. During its existence, RQSP had as few as ten and as many as about thirty members. For those in the collective who were seeking to make the space more accessible, it was shocking that the group didn’t grow beyond that. A trans-identified member of the collective told me that he had recently wanted to start a chapter of Gay Shame in Richmond, but given the small size of the mainstream visible gay community in Richmond, it seemed wrong to start an organization that would serve to critique it. Such a statement, I think, has important implications on the nature and extent of radical queer politics possible in certain kinds of places.

A question I have, when combined with the aforementioned feeling of betrayal and the conciliatory nature toward the supposed mainstream group, did they realise that they were building a space where criticism couldn't happen?

Because if you start silencing yourself as a result to "play nice" with a supposed mainstream group (and I'm starting to doubt they ever were the true mainstream for queer people), you run the risk of silencing yourself in-house and silencing your members.

The long-term sustainability and dynamism of our movements and spaces depend on admitting our limitations and learning from the critical gap between the ideals and enactment of our projects.

I agree with the sentiment, and it's also what fuels the questions I keep asking about conciliatory gestures with incremental political groups.

Quotes from the titled essay in Queering Anarchism:

I have a memory. It was 1984: a presidential election year in the United States. We had a mock election in school. To learn about the process? To start practicing early? I was eight years old. Only one person in our class voted for Walter Mondale against Ronald Reagan. When these results were read aloud, the girl in front of me turned around and pointedly asked, “It was you, wasn’t it?” It wasn’t.

After school (that day? another?) a boy from my class asked me if I was a Democrat or a Republican. When I said, “Neither,” he was perplexed. “You have to be one or the other,” he responded, with all the assurance of one stating an obvious and unquestionable truth. “Well, I’m not,” I insisted. I knew you didn’t have to be; my parents voted, but they didn’t identify themselves with either party. In my mind’s eye, this boy’s face screws up with outraged and frustrated disbelief. “You have to be one or the other!”

Democrat or Republican? Gay or straight? Man or woman? Capitalist or anticapitalist? Anarchist or archist?

Us or them?

Anarchist politics are usually defined by their opposition to state, capitalism, patriarchy, and other hierarchies. My aim in this essay is to queer that notion of anarchism in a number of ways. To queer is to make strange, unfamiliar, weird; it comes from an old German word meaning to cross. What new possibilities arise when we learn to cross, to blur, to undermine, or overflow the hierarchical and binary oppositions we have been taught to believe in?

In many ways, I think we've been stuck with a definition of anarchism that is very white, very cishet, very abled, very male, and very Eurocentric. We need to expand beyond that to understand aspects of anarchism in a different light.

Hierarchy relies on separation. Or rather, the belief in hierarchy relies on the belief in separation. Neither is fundamentally true. Human beings are extrusions of the ecosystem—we are not separate, independent beings. We are interdependent bodies, embedded in a natural world itself embedded in a vast universe. Likewise, all the various social patterns we create and come to believe in are imaginary (albeit with real effects on our bodyminds). Their existence depends entirely on our belief, our obedience, our behavior. These in turn are shaped by imagined divisions. To realize that the intertwined hierarchical oppositions of hetero/homo, man/woman, whiteness/color, mind/body, rational/emotional, civilized/savage, social/natural, and more are all imaginary is perhaps a crucial step in letting go of them. How might we learn to cross the divide that does not really exist except in our embodied minds?

Queering might allow recognition that life is never contained by the boxes and borders the mind invents. Taxonomies of species or sexualities, categories of race or citizenship, borders between nations or classes or types of politics—these are fictions. They are never necessary. To be sure, fictions have their uses. Perhaps in using them, we may learn to hold them lightly so that we, in turn, are not held by them.

Conventional lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender politics is based on opposites: we an oppressed minority and they the privileged majority. In this version, the problem is inequality and the answer is legal protection. Queer theory troubles this, suggesting instead, in my mind, that the problem comes from belief in the identities. The thing about opposites is that they depend on each other to exist: straight is not gay, gay is not straight and bisexuality still confuses people. This leads to all sorts of possibilities for control—we learn to ask ourselves and each other, is he really...? Is she really...? Am I really…? We’re encouraged to believe that our sense of gender and who we fancy tell us who we are and where we fit in a sexual hierarchy imagined to already exist. Whereas a state-oriented LGBT politics tries to challenge the hierarchies of hetero/homo, cis/trans, while keeping the identities, queer politics might ask how the identities themselves might already be state-like with their borders and policing.

I have similar questions about anarchist and other identities. How much energy that could go into creating other-than-state-like ways of living gets lost to efforts to appear anarchist enough? I know I’m not the only one who suffers from anarcho-perfectionism! Likewise, I’ve seen loads of energy go into arguments about whether so and so is really anarchist or not, or such and such is really anarchism.

I yearn for honesty, complexity, and compassion. I don’t want to be asked, or told, to choose from a list of options already defined, already decided, already judged. I want to have a discussion. Connection. Intercourse. A chance to listen and to be listened to: giving and receiving, receiving and giving. Let’s experience different possibilities for identities, for relationships, for politics. Let’s meet.

So, is cooperation better than competition? Is queer better than straight? Are those the right answers? Is that how I should live my life?

I feel like the first question is something that isn't... actually said? So it feels out of place, but the sentiment of the rest (choosing binaries) is still fine.

The way I see it, at the moment anyway, neither queer nor anarchy is about finding the right answers or working out the right way to live. Both are about the experience of connecting with others, with self. I almost always find it harder to connect with someone who is insisting that their story is the story, their truth the truth. Where’s the space left for my story, my truth? Your story, your truth? How can different people, different creatures, different stories and voices learn to fit together if any one story tries to take up all of the space? Like the Zapatistas, I want to live in “a world where many worlds fit.”

To hold tightly—to shame, resentment, or any emotion or any story of how the world really is—is to be held tightly. This is not freedom. To hold gently is to be held gently. This, to me, is freedom. No opposition, no tension, between intimacy and spaciousness. Instead, there is a gentle dance that comes from a deep stillness.

To become anarchist, to become queer, is not easy. To learn to cross lines, to see that the lines are not even real, is a radical transformation for those of us who were raised to believe in them. But it need not be a struggle. Struggling against the world as it is, struggling against my experience, gets in my way. Sure, the world is not the world of my dreams. Why should it be? To stop my pain, or yours? Running from pain is a noisy affair. It distracts.

Here’s a queer proposal: the state is always a state of mind. It’s putting life in boxes and then judging it in terms of those boxes, those borders, as if they were what really mattered. It’s trying to get other people to do what you want them to do without so much regard for their needs, their desires. It’s self-consciousness, self-policing, self-promotion, self-obsession. It’s anxiety and depression. It’s hyperactivity stemming from the fantasy that being seen to be doing something is better than doing nothing, even if what you’re doing might cause more harm than good. It’s resentment at self and others for not doing it right, for not being good enough. It’s the belief that security comes from control. And it’s a source of tremendous suffering in the world.

I don't know if I buy this proposal because... so much of the state is tangible in my life. As an immigrant who has (overt) conditional ability to exist within a State, these borders and boxes really do matter. Having to be constantly aware of them is harmful, and knowing that they often stop me from doing things I would otherwise want to because there is a lot of fear. I think the State is less a 'state of mind' but that it infiltrates our states of mind all the time, even we we're least expecting it.

I find the use of anxiety, depression, and hyperactivity odd and misplaced here. Perhaps less so anxiety or depression because there is a lot of anxiety and depression built up within the walls of the State that acts as triggers for many people, but I don't think that hyperactivity really fits in the conversation being had.

Perhaps this whole area could've been redirected to make the point, which is salient; this feels really conflicted in its organisation.

It’s also something I do. When I look inward, when I meditate, I can see how much the mind is attached to individualistic stories of myself: as important, as weak, as wonderful, as useless, as victim, hero, or villain. The stories fluctuate and change form. And when I believe them, they affect all of my relationships. I, too, can perform the state.

Again, I feel like this is clumsily making a point that would otherwise be really interesting. We do often want to control people into "doing right," and it is a way of "performing the State," but... Hm. Something still feels off, as if individualistic choices (to meditate) are going to be the answer to individualistic behaviours.

They can help, no doubt. But we need combinations of actions and behaviours. It kind of misses what accountability beyond the self would look like and how that could function. (Not in any kind of self-flagellating way, either. We do this all the time when we discuss things with our friends, but we need more social tools to be able to ask questions to help people get to the root of things when they need to.)

And when I again get caught up in my own thoughts, my own desires, my own stories about who I am, and who you are, what should have happened, how the world should be…then I see so little outside the dramas of my own mind. Everything I see, everyone I meet, I reinterpret through the lens of those fictions. I take myself and my beliefs very, very seriously. Just like the State.

I'm very 'yes and no' about this part. Because I understand how I can view some people through the lenses that are hard to take off, to not give them the necessary space to just be, and that has been something I have worked hard to unlearn throughout my life (especially once I started getting into teaching and youth liberation).

But I also feel that it's not "just like the State" because you rarely have power in that space; it definitely can be "in service of the State," which is something teachers have to fight back against all the time. What, I think, we need to watch for is the potential that this harms people within our organisations and groups, how often it happens to people without it being recognised.

But also, it needs to be understood that this viewpoint is something that is very easy for abusers to manipulate. And they have. There's a delicate scenario that needs to be understood, and we need to do more collective work in making that happen.

Is it radical to hate myself for that? Is it radical to hate “cops,” “capitalists,” “politicians,” “racists,” or “homophobes” for that? In my own experience, the two are intimately intertwined. Inseparable.

This is a strange way to end this, and I'm not fully on-board with this idea. Unless your experiences are genuinely inseparable, in which case you may want to explore that.

It isn't radical for us to hate ourselves for working through the lessons our world and lives have taught us. However, I think it is unfair to liken that to hating cops, capitalists, politicians, racists, or homophobes. Honestly, it's nonsense.

Is it that you have control over someone else? Do you perpetuate those systems through your own actions and behaviours? If someone is working against cops and doesn't hate them, that doesn't bother me; however, people have very real reasons for hating them, and telling that "it's not radical" does nothing to deal with either the existence of the police or why they have that hatred in the first place. The same is true for all the other groups of people.

Quotes from the named essay in Queering Anarchism:

Feminism has had an ongoing internal argument regarding minimizing or maximizing the meanings of the differences between men and women. Now we are seeing the influence on many anarchists and feminists of newer ideas about gender (e.g. queer theory) that question the idea of a concrete concept of “woman” and “man,” even “male” and “female.” Yet some radical or anarchist feminists and lesbians remain stubborn about questioning the usefulness of a category called “woman.”

The essay starts out this way, and I largely agree. I hesitate to say "anarchist feminists," but that is possibly because my own experience has largely been that they have been the most accepting of "gender transgressions" (along with the general trans community).

Yet, there is far too much reliance upon material of the past. We are constantly citing people who made these precise distinctions (because they were so prominent in their own history) and not reckoning with how that history impacts us today.

This is especially true in the general 'feminist movement'.

Meanwhile, identity politics have come under fire in anarchist circles, often characterizing identity-oriented projects as homogenous (represented only by each project’s most vocal proponents), and dismissing the importance of focusing on opposition to gender, sexuality, class, or racial oppressions. Yet that which is called identity politics often does involve essentialism, the idea that there are essential differences between two groups.

I have some questions here, but I'm not sure where to start. I don't inherently disagree (there have certainly been a lot of people "on the left" who've decried identity politics), but I've also been working in the past decade with people who understand identity-focused groups or spaces and the need for them. These people have traditionally been the people who were neglected by groups who "refused" to enable identity-focused groups or spaces and were forced to interact with a very white, very straight, very abled, or very cisgendered anarchist space.

In the case of feminism, those who most often get to speak for the “movement” are white with class privilege, and regularly marginalize the experiences of women of color and poor women, and exclude transgender/transsexual people when they organize around a universal concept of women. The standard radical feminist characterization of the way gender oppression (“patriarchy”) works legitimizes women’s exercise of domination (through capitalism or white supremacy, etc.), and makes men’s domination seem natural and inevitable.

This often happens, even when we start giving space to some elements of how oppressions work together (but simultaneously ignore or overlook others). As in, this happens even within marginalised communities, and it seems difficult to really expand upon that because some people tend to get too tied into wanting to discuss one element when we need to be recognising multiple.

For example, the "experience of women" will not ever be the same; this is something a lot of TERFs push, but it neglects that even women within the same "category" (however that's drawn) do in fact have different experiences of being women. It's strange that this isn't recognised because it would also make it even more clear that all women have different experiences, and we're only hearing from the smallest group of people who have the ability and privilege to take center stage. (Also something that wasn't really addressed in this piece: tokens.)

We’ve been made to believe that human subordination under the law is natural—that we need to be governed. The legitimacy of imposed government is also emphasized through the seemingly natural differences between people. The differences between people have been made significant so as to promote divisions based on domination and subordination. In doing so, those differences must be(come) clear-cut—a border must be drawn between the two, creating a dichotomy so there is no confusion about who is where in the hierarchy. This takes time, centuries even, to really harden our perception of human nature. It takes laws, but worse it takes discipline, primarily in the form of terror and violence, to pound a sense of hierarchy into us. > Despite the possibility that the state and capitalism may be able to function without these imposed borders, the borders must still be destroyed.

In reading this, I couldn't stop thinking about how this played out after Bacon's Rebellion, which cemented many of the race-focused laws in the US to further prevent white indentured servants (and other poor white folks) from empathising and fighting against the system with Black slaves.

To achieve liberation, we must reject the binary gender system, which divides us into two mutually exclusive categories. This gender system not only oppresses in the form of a hierarchy of categories, but also in terms of gender expression—holding up masculinity as superior and policing each person into their gender box. The significance of gender/sex differences must be exposed as a political construct, one which has been used to form a cross-class alliance among men, and to make heterosexuality and women’s roles and exploitation in (and outside) the home and family to seem natural.

Yes, but I also think this needs to extend in more ways. We need to reject binary systems and binary thought structures.

Much like I think this particular thought needs to extend to the children-adults dichotomy, especially as "women and children" tend to be the "protected" categories. We're seeing this how with absolutely horrifying surveillance tactics that are being put in place to supposedly do just that.

We can probably agree that gender stratum is an imposed social construct. We could take it further by questioning whether our concepts of the biological differences between female and male existed before hierarchy, and whether they at least have the same significance before Western culture interpreted the differences we understand today.

Statements like this require a lot more than the simple dichotomies given, even in terms of "Western culture." What we perceive today has not always been, and a lot of what has existed before (particularly in the 'classics' periods) was re-interpreted to fit the needs of people before us.

There's a lot of work to be done to unravel the harms that have been done in the name of using history as a means of control, and we need to understand that.

In discussing human nature, we need to be critical of the ways that certain concepts such as hierarchy, or a need for hierarchy, are made to seem natural.

Similar to the case of white people, when men participate in domination, they do themselves harm. While folks assigned male at birth who don’t comfortably fit into their assigned gender box are certainly affected by gender oppression, the ones who do conform (willingly or not) would also benefit from undermining the ways gender hierarchy has been naturalized through the socialization of boys and men. They can hardly be free, and the relationships they have with others cannot be fulfilling as long as emotions are suppressed, competitive masculinity has to be established, and inequality (if not abuse) must be maintained with women (and often children as well).

This essay is interesting but messy. But all of these points, yes.

In the sense that queer is unstable and destabilizing, it has much potential. Clearly the refusal to participate in privileging political relations would not be co-opted. We know that “LGBTQ” is co-opted just as feminism is, and therefore the potential lies in the ways in which queer is not co-optable. Where identity politics seeks inclusion for its respective group, it chooses participation in domination and reinforces binaries. Would a rejection of inclusion and participation be the antithesis of identity politics, even if it were a politics that focused on a specific group-based oppression?

Tangentially, one of the things that I feel is frustrating is how often people are willing to throw out the much more inclusive 'queer' in favour of a string of letters that all require people to figure out which letter they fit on (even though Q is queer).

And much of this is also partially a result of people saying that "queer is a slur" while simultaneously being okay with words like "lesbian" and "gay" (among others that have been reclaimed). In fact, I still see those thrown around far more often than 'queer'.

Quotes from this article:

Why? Why, when murder now is stalking in your streets, when dens of infamy are so thick within your city that competition has forced down the price of prostitution to the level of the wages of your starving shirt-makers; when robbers sit in State and national Senate and House, when the boasted "bulwark of our liberties," the elective franchise, has become a U. S. dice-box, wherewith great gamblers play away your liberties; when debauchees of the worst type hold all your public offices and dine off the food of fools who support them, why, then, sits Moses Harman there within his prison cell? If he is so great a criminal, why is he not with the rest of the spawn of crime, dining at Delmonico's or enjoying a trip to Europe? If he is so bad a man, why in the name of wonder did he ever get in the penitentiary?

Look how your children grow up. Taught from their earliest infancy to curb their love natures—restrained at every turn! Your blasting lies would even blacken a child's kiss. Little girls must not be tomboyish, must not go barefoot, must not climb trees, must not learn to swim, must not do anything they desire to do which Madame Grundy has decreed "improper." Little boys are laughed at as effeminate, silly girl-boys if they want to make patchwork or play with a doll. Then when they grow up, "Oh! Men don't care for home or children as women do!" Why should they, when the deliberate effort of your life has been to crush that nature out of them. "Women can't rough it like men." Train any animal, or any plant, as you train your girls, and it won't be able to rough it either. Now will somebody tell me why either sex should hold a corner on athletic sports? Why any child should not have free use of its limbs?

She does often make the (unnecessarily) common comparison between oppression and slavery of Black people, which is something I find absolutely infuriating about historic texts.

Quotes from the named essay, found in Queering Anarchism:

Further, anarchism isn’t solely centered on crushing structures like capitalism and the state (although we anarchists certainly want that). Rather, we seek to smash all institutionalized hierarchies. We reject all forms of coerced domination. But imagine if capitalism, the state, white supremacy, patriarchy, etc., were “removed” (if only it were that easy)? What would remain? Unfortunately, not much, one could imagine. Anarchists, then, might also be creative. We might try to create new ways of relating to each other, new ways of relating to the non-human world, new ways of loving, knowing, playing, etc. If we don’t create these new social relations, then we will likely fall back on the current ones, at worst, and will not realize our creative potential, at best. Anarchists are often creating new ways of living and relating in the here and now.

An anarchist queer theory might also begin by attempting to tear down the borders between “identities” (as well as unpack their very existence/use) by showing that people are complex (as is the world) and are not easily categorized—at least not honestly.

I think it would also be better at dealing with the 'grey' areas of identities, regardless of what they are.

These kinds of displays are often referred to as “the Oppression Olympics.” People in these situations seem like they’re playing a game together—a grand contest to assert who is more authentic, more oppressed, and thus more correct. It’s at this point where identity becomes fetishized; where essentialist understandings of people trump good sense; and where a patronizing belief in the superiority of the wise, noble savage often overrides any sense at all. Often this tactic of agreeing with “the most marginalized in the room” will be used as a substitute for developing critical analyses around race, gender, sexuality, etc. This tactic is intellectually lazy, lacks political depth, and leads toward tokenization.

There is a point to allowing our experiences of various forcefully assigned identities to be at the forefront of conversations. People do have different experiences based on these social constructions and we should take these differences into account. But when they become markers of authenticity and “correctness,” it poses a problem for anarchists. After all, we seek to dissolve hierarchical relations, not create new ones formed from the margins.

Queer theory has taken up the disconcerting task of putting identity—and by extension identity politics—under a destabilizing lens. An anarchist queer theory might give us more effective ways of relating than the Oppression Olympics (a set of games no one really wins anyway). And in an anarchist politics of sexuality and gender, this means that care needs to be taken not to invert existing hierarchies, much like the Oppression Olympics do—making more authentic voices out of some over others and creating new hierarchies to replace old ones.

Folks who have desires that have been either literally outlawed and/or disapproved of culturally (not always an offense with less “consequences”) find themselves in a position of transgressing sexual norms when they practice their sexual desires (whether they “enjoy” challenging those norms or not). Challenging our own desires is an important step in trying to shed the institutionalized, directed, compulsory, organized, and controlled sexualities that have been made available to (and constituted) us. However, one can challenge institutionalized sexual categories and (available) expressions without necessarily having to swing the pendulum to the opposite side with their own sexual practices or with their expectation for others’ sexual practices. For instance, just because promiscuity is a non-normative sexual desire/practice doesn’t mean that to be in the act of challenging such norms that one must participate in promiscuity, per se. For instance, I can reject and struggle against the sexual/gender status quo without the need to physically embody/practice certain non-normative sexualities. Sexual acts themselves (or lack thereof) are not what we are challenging as queer radicals. We are struggling against sexualities and sexual acts being categorized and ordered into hierarchical systems that privilege certain practices/desires over others.

What’s peculiar about normative assumptions around sexuality and gender is their ability to be invisible. This is why we also need to struggle at the conceptual level; we need to not only smash the seemingly automatic jump to create and maintain status quos, but we also need to replace the notion of status quo with something else—perhaps an awareness of the very non-necessity of status quos governing consensual sexual practices and a very conscious understanding of the damage and limitations that these kinds of understandings can create and maintain.

One thing this means is defining in queer heterosexualities, to name perhaps one controversial example. A good question to bring this point home might be: Who is more oppressed, erased, and marginalized as a result of their sexuality—an upper-class white gay man living in the Castro or a poor, working-class heterosexual woman of color living in the Bible Belt who has a number of heterosexual relationships, is promiscuous, and is open about it and proud of it? Here we can imagine a heterosexual relationship perhaps being more marginalized in this context as compared to the non-heterosexual relationship that this scenario offers. This question doesn’t have an answer—there are a multitude of specific contexts that would affect both of these hypothetical relationships. What this question should do, however, is make obvious that heterosexual relationships aren’t always more acceptable or viable than non-heterosexual relationships. It may very well be that a non-heterosexual relationship that mirrors a normative heterosexual relationship may cause less trouble than a heterosexual relationship that involves non-normative sexual acts or manifestations of love that involve more than two people. I am not suggesting that other overlapping positions in society don’t affect these scenarios, of course they do. In fact, the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, nation of origin, location, culture, etc. will all affect whether someone’s style of loving is to be viewed as normative and acceptable or otherwise. This very fact highlights the point that the gender-specificity of a relationship (“straight” or “not”) isn’t always the axis of acceptance or not. We can see that there are very real ways that heterosexual relationships or styles of loving (or making love) can very much stand in opposition to the “normal,” whereas non-heterosexual relationships and ways of loving can very much mirror the “normal” and may not subsequently be scrutinized nor understood as “abnormal” (of course this will be heavily determined by multiple and overlapping positions, oftentimes typified by race, class, gender, and location). It makes sense then to develop “queer” as a relational term vis-à-vis the normal rather than an identity marker that’s just short for “LGBT” (or some lengthened version of the alphabet soup).

In queer theory, the very idea of the queer is a shifting terrain that cannot be pinned down to some single definition. Rather, queer can be understood as what is at odds with the “normal” or legitimate. This being the case, there is nothing in particular to which queer necessarily refers, which makes queer an identity without an essence. In this way, as demonstrated above, we can look for hierarchies within heterosexual relationships or ways of loving. A heterosexual relationship of two cisgendered and monogamous people who keep their sexuality indoors is quite different from heterosexual ways of doing relationships that involve non-monogamy, public BDSM, or selling sex for money.

I did a small survey at Syracuse University in the fall of 2010 and found that the overwhelming majority of students interviewed believed it was fine that children were raised by two people of the same sex if they were in one monogamous relationship. However, at the same time they also believed that children have no place in the home of someone who is heterosexual but has more than one relationship or is involved in a relationship that consists of more than two people. In this case, the genders within a relationship weren’t a factor for judging acceptable environments for children to be raised in, but the type of relationship was a factor. Same-sex relationships were fine, as well as heterosexual relationships, but only if they were otherwise normative. Both same-sex or heterosexual relationships that were non-normative, in this case involving either more than one partner or more than one relationship, were not deemed appropriate for raising children. Obviously with this scenario we can see how non-gender-specific ways of loving were the problem for those interviewed, not the gender involved.

Queer, by definition, is an ongoing and never-ending process, so this piece certainly isn’t intended to be the last word on queer thought or practice.

Quotes from the named essay, found in Queering Anarchism:

Marxist feminists, on the other hand, tended to locate women’s oppression within the economic sphere. The fight against capitalism was seen as the “primary” battle, as “the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.” Further, Marxist feminists tended to believe that the economic “base” of society had a determining effect on its cultural “superstructures.” Thus the only way to achieve equality between women and men would be to smash capitalism—as new, egalitarian economic arrangements would give rise to new, egalitarian superstructures. Such was the determining nature of the economic base. This argument was mapped out quite eloquently by Marx’s companion, Engels.

Out of the conversations between Marxist feminism and radical feminism another approach emerged called “dual systems theory.” A product of what came to be dubbed socialist feminism, dual systems theory argued that feminists needed to develop “a theoretical account which gives as much weight to the system of patriarchy as to the system of capitalism.” While this approach did much to resolve some of the arguments about which fight should be “primary” (i.e., the struggle against capitalism or the struggle against patriarchy), it still left much to be desired. For example, black feminists argued that this perspective left out a structural analysis of race. Further, where was oppression based on sexuality, ability, age, etc. in this analysis? Were all of these things reducible to capitalist patriarchy? And importantly, for this chapter, where were the experiences of trans folks—particularly trans women? Given this historical lack, feminism required a specifically trans feminism.

Transfeminism builds on the work that came out of the multiracial feminist movement, and in particular, the work of black feminists. Frequently, when confronted with allegations of racism, classism, or homophobia, the women’s movement dismisses these issues as divisive or “secondary” (as spelled out in the narrative above). The more prominent voices promoted (and still promote) the idea of a homogenous “universal female experience,” which, as it is based on commonality between women, theoretically promotes a sense of sisterhood. In reality, it means pruning the definition of “woman” and trying to fit all women into a mold reflecting the dominant demographic of the women’s movement: white, affluent, heterosexual, and non-disabled. This “policing” of identity, whether conscious or not, reinforces systems of oppression and exploitation. When women who do not fit this mold have challenged it, they have frequently been accused of being divisive and disloyal to the sisterhood. The hierarchy of womanhood created by the women’s movement reflects, in many ways, the dominant culture of racism, capitalism, and heteronormativity.

If you're wondering what this looks like, check out the exclusionary lesbians (sometimes referred to as being part of "political lesbians") and also TERFs. This is where they come from, and we've known this for a long time; people saw these people coming into existence before many of us were born, and they weren't quashed.

Also, among white people, this is what happens when you ally with people who share a goal with you but who don't give a shit about liberation. If they don't support liberation and are openly harming people, stay out of their orgs and work elsewhere.

Forces of oppression and exploitation do not exist separately. They are intimately related and reinforce each other, and so trying to address them singly (i.e., “sexism” divorced from racism, capitalism, etc.) does not lead to a clear understanding of the patriarchal system. This is in accordance with the anarchist view that we must fight all forms of hierarchy, oppression, and exploitation simultaneously; abolishing capitalism and the state does not ensure that white supremacy and patriarchy will somehow magically disappear.

This final sentence is why all the Berners were so fucking annoying. This is why class reductionism is doomed to failure. It does not address any of the root causes.

Tied to this assumption of a “universal female experience” is the idea that if a woman surrounds herself with those that embody that “universal” woman, then she is safe from patriarchy and oppression. The concept of “women’s safe spaces” (being women-only) date back to the early lesbian feminist movement, which was largely comprised of white women who were more affluent, and prioritized addressing sexism over other forms of oppression. This notion that an all-women space is inherently safe not only discounts the intimate violence that can occur between women, but also ignores or de-prioritizes the other types of violence that women can experience—racism, poverty, incarceration, and other forms of state, economic, and social brutality.

Written after the work of, and influenced by, transfeminist pioneers like Sandy Stone, Sylvia Rivera, and Rivera’s Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), the Transfeminist Manifesto states: “Transfeminism believes that we construct our own gender identities based on what feels genuine, comfortable and sincere to us as we live and relate to others within given social and cultural constraint.”

Surely everyone would benefit from breaking down the binary gender system and deconstructing gender roles—that is the work of revolutionaries, not fretting over what other people “should” or “shouldn’t” do to their bodies.

YEP.

Thus far, gender and feminist theory that includes trans experiences exists almost solely in academia. There are very few working-class intellectuals in the field, and the academic language used is not particularly accessible to the average person.

I think this has always been false because of what we deem to be theory. This 'theory' has often been excluded from academia (only being allowed in when acceptable and stole from people who articulated it). I think far more theory exists outside of academia than we give credit for existing, and we assume it's there because that's who is publishing the books.

Books are not the only example of theory. Research doesn't have to happen within academic spaces.

Even gay and lesbian movements have a history of leaving trans people behind—for example, the fight for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which does not protect gender identity. Again we saw a hierarchy of importance; the mainstream gay and lesbian movement often compromises (throwing trans folks under the bus), rather than employing an inclusive strategy for liberation. There is frequently a sense of a “scarcity of liberation” within reformist social movements, the feeling that the possibilities for freedom are so limited that we must fight against other marginalized groups for a piece of the pie. This is in direct opposition to the concept of intersectionality, since it often requires people to betray one aspect of their identity in order to politically prioritize another. How can a person be expected to engage in a fight against gender oppression if it ignores or contributes to their racial oppression? Where does one aspect of their identity and experiences end and another begin? Anarchism offers a possible society in which liberation is anything but scarce.

Hierarchies within liberatory movements do not liberate anyone. Chances are, the people calling for them recognise that they will lose power or extended access if more people are allowed in. It's a system of control.

Anarchists need to be developing working-class theory that includes an awareness of the diversity of the working class.

A lot of anarchists who are part of hegemonic demographics need to start working on recognising where they stand and how they've thrown a lot of us under buses. (And we all need better understanding of how we're leaving people behind.)

Quotes from this zine:

Most anthropologists regard the beginnings of agriculture as the inception of civilization. It was this first act of control over the land that brought human beings to think of themselves as distinct from nature, that forced them to become sedentary and possessive, that led to the eventual development of private property and capitalism. But why would hunter/gatherers, whose environment already provided them with all the food they needed, lock themselves in place and give up the nomadic foraging existence they had practiced since the beginning of time for something they already had? It seems more likely – and here, there are anthropologists who agree – that the first ones to domesticate themselves did so in order to brew beer.

I don't want to be that person, but who? Like, I'm genuinely curious to read more about that kind of idea or development, and you're throwing this shit with no sources. (And I'm not about to say anthropologists are bastions of knowledge or perfection, but I'd really like to see evidence about this when such a claim is made.)

This is one of the first things I found, and it only says "to grow carbs." While beer is made out of the same sorts of things, it indicates a shift of diet and not a propensity for alcoholism. Meanwhile, this one outlines drug use in other cultures (though, rather than taking it at its word, it is a jumping off point), but the author does mention that band societies engaged with it on a different level than people settling in towns and cities.

This drastic reorganization for the sake of intoxication must have shaken tribal structure and lifeways to the root. Where these “primitive” peoples had once lived in a relaxed and attentive relationship to the providing earth – a relationship that afforded them both personal autonomy and supportive community as well as a great deal of leisure time to spend in admiration of the enchanted world around them – they now alternated periods of slavish hard labor with periods of drunken incompetence and detachment. It’s not hard to imagine that this situation hastened, if not necessitated, the rise to power of masters, overseers who saw to it that the toilsome tasks of fixed living were carried out by the frequently inebriated and incapable tribespeople. Without these chiefs and the primitive judicial systems they instituted, it must have seemed that life itself would be impossible: and thus, under the foul auspices of alcoholism, the embryonic State was conceived.

While I can see the point being made, something about this feels either too generalised or ahistorical. Ancient societies that had alcohol also saw excessive drinking as a problem. Not all societies immediately started getting drunk out of their minds?

Again, I'd really like to see research behind this or additional sources where I can read more, but there is nothing of the sort in this zine (nor is their an online component to visit for more information).

Another perspective that might actually help out here is that people were domesticated by wheat (though I've never really explored that outside the handful of mentions of Yuval Noah Harari's work). It's an interesting concept to explore.

Either way, evidence would be nice.

... but as every historian knows, the spread of civilization was anything but voluntary. Lacking the manners and gentleness of their former companions in the wild, these savages, in their drunken excesses and infringements, must have provoked a series of wars – wars which, sadly, the lushes were able to win, owing to the military efficiency of their autocratic armies and the steady supply of food their subjugated farmlands provided.

This is really falling on the Noble Savage trope in order to highlight problems, which I think is a poor direction to go when you can make the same point without using it.

The first collection of laws, the Code of Hammurabi of Babylon, decreed a daily beer ration in direct proportion to social status: beer consumption went hand-in-hand with hierarchy. For example, workers received two liters while besotted priests and kings got five. [For an interesting thought experiment, ask yourself how much alcohol – and of what grade – you get now, and what that says about your position in society.]

What do you say if a person... doesn't drink? In this manner, either you're going to be moralising them as superior or you're going to imply they're not getting enough.

Either way, this is an interesting structure, though the point feels hit and miss. While it'd be interesting to explore and understand beer's importance in the hierarchy, there is quite a lot of information left unsaid: What was the importance of beer in this time (beyond the mere conjecture of "some historians")? Which historians are you referring to? It'd be nice to have references to look through because it honestly could be interesting to explore, but it's left unsaid.

Only those human beings that still lived in harmony with wilderness, such as the indigenous peoples of North America and some sectors of Africa, remained alcohol-free – for a time.

Is this strictly true, though? And even if they didn't have alcohol, they did have access to mind-altering plants.

But what's being missed in this discussion is the point that should be said bluntly: colonisers used alcohol as a way to interfere in Indigenous cultures. This is too vague for the point they're claiming they're making, and it's dancing around it too much. It's weird.

I'm also interested in why the author doesn't mention: - Sura (from the Indus Valley), which is a beverage brewed of rice meal, wheat, sugar cane, grapes, and other fruits; - Pulque, balché, or xtabentún (from Mesoamerica); - Chicha (from South America)

And then there's this bit of revival from the Palawa people in Tasmania, which the author couldn't have predicted at the time of writing (though it's obvious it could've happened with the frequent Noble Savage tropes being tossed about).

Another thing: Why the focus on beer as opposed to wine? (And when discussing peoples who were most likely predominantly drinking wine, why is that detail omitted? It's intriguing.)

It’s no exaggeration, then, to say that alcohol has played a key role in the epidemic of fascism, racism, statism, imperialism, colonialism, sexism and patriarchy, class oppression, ungoverned technological development, religious superstition, and other bad stuff that has swept the earth over the past few millennia.

... So has the medical profession. Correlation does not equal causation. Alcohol is not the inherent problem, and I'm saying that as a person who rarely (if ever) has any. Has it been used as a tool for colonisation? Of course. Does that mean that it didn't exist in cultures beforehand? That's false and ahistorical; it's also telling when you're willing to redefine "alcohol" to mean beer (while other forms existed).

It's also telling that the author didn't want to consider how it was used in other non-European cultures. Then again, this comment is meant to be strongly worded and to push you into associating it with fascism: "As for other links between alcohol and far-right/fascist activity – perhaps the reader will recall where Hitler initiated his takeover of Germany."

Yet, the fact of the matter is that Hitler didn't drink much. He didn't abstain, but he drank very little. It doesn't matter, though. People would find ways to make nonsensical connections regardless (as they have with painting and vegetarianism), and this is equally as rubbish.

It’s not widely remembered that strict vegetarianism and abstinence from drink have been common in radical circles for many centuries.

It's also been common among non-radicals and conservatives, you absolute weirdo. What a load of garbage moralising. Does eating meat make you a fascist? No. Does eating a lot of it perpetuate industrial-scale farming of animals, which harms the planet? Yes, especially if everyone's doing it.

Can you make a salient point at all?

On the other side of the coin – can you imagine how much more progress we would have made in this struggle already if anti-authoritarians such as Nestor Makhno, Guy Debord, Janis Joplin, and countless anarcho-punks had focused more energy on the creation and destruct ion they loved so dearly, and less on drinking themselves to death?

Can you imagine what a world would be like if people didn't pathologise everything? Can you imagine what it'd be like to literally fight for everything against multiple armies, knowing that the Bolsheviks had executed the people acting as your subordinate commanders? Which was the case for Makhno (who died of tuberculosis).

And what about people who were known to have depression, as is the case of Debourd? And we are aware that Janis Joplin didn't drink herself to death but overdosed on drugs? Yet, we don't know why, though we know people suspect her overdose wasn't accidental.

Interesting that, rather than compassion, it's moralising again and again; there's a demand that they should've stayed alive to serve us (instead of us taking up their mantel). It's obvious and telling that so many people don't want to engage in elements of actual mental health or chronic illness/disability, which are communities that frequently overlap.

These polemics are more harm than good. They're inaccurate and nonsensical.

All the same, we can learn from this past, as from each other, if we apply our imaginations and a keen eye for pattern.

While patterns are important for learning, not all patterns are meaningful. This assumed pattern is littered with holes; the only pattern that can functionally be followed is that of how settler colonialists used alcohol (and other drugs) to subjugate and control people.

But there are also people among the ancestors of those we claim to be subjugated who state that even this mentality removes agency from their people, which I think is important to consider. (It should not, however, be used as a way to deny the actions of our ancestors.)

Even if you do decide that this history of alcoholism is “the” truth, for heaven’s sake don’t waste time looking back into the past for some long-lost state of primitive sobriety that – for all any of us know – may not even have existed.

Then what was the point of your polemic? To infuriate the readers with gaps and inciting language instead of inform them? To then undermine it all by directly contradicting the usage of your beautiful uses of the frequently referenced Noble Savage tropes? What is the purpose in any of this?

Those drunken despots and beer-bellied bigots may destroy their world and smother beneath their history, but we bear a new future in our hearts – and the power to enact it in our healthy livers.

Again with the moralising. It's always easier to insult and deride people and their vices rather than create spaces where reliance upon them decreases. I genuinely am frustrated by people like this.

Side note to the whole piece: Why use the word "civilisation" at all?

Quotes from this zine (which is also part of Gabriel Kuhn's Sober Living for the Revolution):

Drink, like caffeine or sugar in the body, only plays a role in life that life itself can provide for otherwise. The woman who never drinks coffee does not require it in the morning when she awakens: her body produces energy and focus on its own, as thousands of generations of evolution have prepared it to do. If she drinks coffee regularly, soon her body lets the coffee take over that role, and she becomes dependent upon it.

I would love for anyone who thinks like this to spend a minute in the brain of a person with ADHD. I say this because, as a person with unmedicated ADHD (who used to have medicine for it but no longer can because ADHD diagnoses do not cross borders when you move and it is unnecessarily difficult to access medication because adults with ADHD are treated as drug seekers), the best "replacement" (which isn't a replacement) that I have is caffeine.

This is why I will forever say that disability needs to be accounted for when discussing these issues, since they never are. (And by the way, this also includes addiction.)

If some sober people in this society do not seem as reckless and free as their boozer counterparts, that is a mere accident of culture, mere circumstantial evidence.

As a person who doesn't like alcohol, might I say that it's because the culture around drinking is presumed as being "fun" and "lighthearted," while those of us who choose not to drink get hounded for being boring? (Ironically, we also tend to leave people alone for choosing their vices; meanwhile, the amount of times I've been harassed for not drinking because it's seen as "abnormal" should indicate something.)

Alcohol, like Prozac and all the other mind-control medications that are making big bucks for Big Brother these days, substitutes symptomatic treatment for cure. It takes away the pain of a dull, drab existence for a few hours at best, then returns it twofold. It not only replaces positive actions which would address the root causes of our despondency – it prevents them, as more energy becomes focused on achieving and recovering from the drunken state. Like the tourism of the worker, drink is a pressure valve that releases tension while maintaining the system that creates it.

This is appalling. There are ways to discuss the ways that Big Pharma makes money off of these medications and how it manipulates some (certainly not all) people into using them, but it is disgusting to insinuate that someone would not need them. There are a number of people who have said they "finally feel like themselves" while taking anti-depressants, making them realise that elements of depression were part of their brain chemistry. I don't think it's fair to make people endure misery because someone thinks Prozac is a "mind-control" drug. Get the fuck out of here with that shit.

Alcohol, though I don't enjoy it, is not inherently bad. Again, we need to be recognising the way we treat it and how people profit from it.

Also, this is just so fucking ahistorical it hurts. Alcohol has been around for centuries in multiple forms. So let's try talking about how capitalism has co-opted things like alcohol and has thus turned it into something that makes people miserable. Because that does happen.

In this push-button culture, we’ve become used to conceiving of ourselves as simple machines to be operated: add the appropriate chemical to the equation to get the desired result. In our search for health, happiness, meaning in life, we run from one panacea to the next – Viagra, vitamin C, vodka – instead of approaching our lives holistically and addressing our problems at their social and economic roots. This product-oriented mindset is the foundation of our alienated consumer society: without consuming products, we can’t live! We try to buy relaxation, community, self-confidence – now even ecstasy comes in a pill!

Question: If you dealt with erectile dysfunction before medications to help with that existed, what would you do? Should you have existed in Ancient Greece or Rome, you would've worn a talisman with a rooster on it. Had you existed in the 13th century, you would've been told to ingest a wolf's penis.

I hate to break it to you, but we've been medicating such things for a long time. It just so happens that Viagra works (unlike consuming the genitalia of "high libido" animals), and it allows people to... oh, engage with sex. Engage with pleasure.

Y'know, something your first paragraph claims you also support. (It's also far more ethical to consume Viagra than to kill a wolf for its penis.)

Also, what's wrong with Vitamin C? It helps repair body tissues and is useful for bodily functions and immune systems. But I guess have fun dying of scurvy?

“Life sucks – get drunk” is the essence of the argument that enters our ears from our masters’ tongues and then passes out of our own slurring mouths, perpetuating whatever incidental and unnecessary truths it may refer to – but we’re not falling for it any longer!

My issue thus far is that the people writing this particular article have not addressed how alcohol actually makes us miserable or is used in ways to respond to misery. Yes, I have also heard "life sucks, get drunk," but at least I can adequately put forward an example of capitalism pushing people into drinking-to-forget: The Wine Mom.

Why is it that they're handwaving things that are fine but aren't addressing the things that aren't?

Speaking of sex, it’s worth noting the supporting role alcohol has played in patriarchal gender dynamics. For example – in how many nuclear families has alcoholism helped to maintain an unequal distribution of power and pressure? (All the writers of this tract can call to mind more than one such case among their relatives alone.) Th e man’s drunken self-destruction, engendered as it may be by the horrors of surviving under capitalism, imposes even more of a burden on the woman, who must still somehow hold the family together – often in the face of his violence. And on the subject of dynamics …

This is something they could've spent more time on because the interactions between alcohol and sex are worth exploring.

Maybe exploring how disability, queerness, etc interact with alcoholism would've been a good idea. Instead of insulting disabled people or people with mental health needs.

In certain circles, especially the ones in which the word “anarchy” itself is more in fashion than any of its various meanings, freedom is conceived of in negative terms: “don’t tell me what to do!” In practice, this often means nothing more than an assertion of the individual’s right to be lazy, selfish, unaccountable for his actions or lack thereof.

Then perhaps we need to be considering what kind of anarchist circles we're in? And expanding beyond them. If anything, these people sound like the making of right-libertarians and so-called "anarchist"-capitalists. I wouldn't be shocked if that's the direction they went.

Also, because many of the anarchist groups I'm part of do not have a high number of cishet men, they often don't have this issue. Even when people drink, they don't have this problem. Could it possibly be an issue of patriarchy? I think that's likely. (Also, it definitely is an issue of whiteness.)

In such contexts, when a group agrees upon a project it often ends up being a small, responsible minority that has to do all the work to make it happen. These conscientious few often look like the autocratic ones – when, invisibly, it is the apathy and hostility of their comrades that forces them to adopt this role. Being drunk and disorderly all the time is coercive – it compels others to clean up after you, to think clearly when you won’t, to absorb the stress generated by your behavior when you are too fucked up for dialogue. These dynamics go two ways, of course – those who take all responsibility on their shoulders perpetuate a pattern in which everyone else takes none – but everyone is responsible for their own part in such patterns, and for transcending it.

Interestingly, the groups I've been a part of have seen this dynamic from two core demographics: wealthier individuals and white cishet men. That's who is frequently leaving work for everyone else, regardless of amount of alcohol consumed.

But we need to be care about concepts like "to think clearly when you won't," as that can easily lean into ableist structures. It really starts giving way to the ability to deny people autonomy (or to speak over people while claiming they should be autonomous) because of their perceived intelligence. This is a major issue that anarchists struggle with, and it's not helped by how often we still laud a few key figures (who also were eugenicists). Scientism/rationalism is still too rooted in our movement, and that's a problem.

Passing judgment on others for decisions that affect only themselves is absolutely noxious to any anarchist – not to mention it makes them less likely to experiment with the options you offer.

You literally did that through moralising medication while claiming you were talking about it from an "anti-capitalist" perspective. You cannot call something a "mind-control" drug without passing judgement on others for using it. Big Pharma doesn't care if you call it that, but people who need it do.

Especially in the case of those who are struggling to free themselves of unwanted addictions, such solidarity is paramount: Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, is just one more instance of a quasi-religious organization filling a social need that should already be provided for by anarchist community self-organizing.

Agreed. This is why I continually say that the core of what we should be doing is building community, building networks, building spaces that help people meet their needs.

Because that is needed to protect people before anything else.

Besides, most of us who are not substance-addicted can thank our privileges and good fortune for this; this gives us all the more responsibility to be good allies to those who have not had such privileges or luck – on whatever terms they set.

You can thank your "privileges and good fortune" for not being substance-addicted (though, I bet some of you are addicted to substances that aren't necessarily seen as a problem), but some of us have avoided addiction to alcohol or drugs through experience. What's wonderful is that you vaguely mention (as pointed out) the impacts of alcoholism on others, but you forget that some of us are victims of abuse by alcoholics.

I don't think my "good fortune" for being in that scenario. It wasn't a "privilege" to be abused by a person who was an alcoholic. This is also why we're going to perpetually come at sobriety in the wrong way; we're not actually thinking about what is happening.

We're moralising instead of understanding.

The social impact of our society’s fixation on alcohol is at least as important as its mental, medical, economic, and emotional effects. Drinking standardizes our social lives, occupying some of the eight waking hours a day that aren’t already colonized by work. It locates us spatially – living rooms, cocktail lounges, railroad tracks – and contextually – in ritualized, predictable behaviors – in ways more explicit systems of control never could. Often when one of us does manage to escape the role of worker/consumer, drinking is there, stubborn holdover from our colonized leisure time, to fill up the promising space that opens. Free from these routines, we could discover other ways to spend time and energy and seek pleasure, ways that could prove dangerous to the system of alienation itself.

Yes but also no. Here are some things: 1. We should deal with how alcohol was used as a tool for colonisation because it definitely was. However, we also need to understand how and when it was not a tool for colonisation and has been part of people's cultures. 2. Social drinking is far older than we realise, and it's not inherently a Bad Thing. I don't have a problem with social spaces such as cocktail lounges and bars/pubs, but I do have a problem that certain activities I love (comedy, writing, music) are always positioned in those spaces (and if not inside them, always has a bar nearby). 3. Union organising has too often been located within bars and pubs, and I suspect this initially started out as a way to exclude people because of who was seen as an "acceptable patron" of those spaces. It's also prohibited a lot of the labour movement because it keeps people, including those in the IWW, from understanding their position in the community and how they need to interact with everyone in order to succeed. (Also, union leadership generally doesn't really care.)

I definitely agree that our social focus on alcohol is a major problem for us, though.

With any luck, you’ve been able to discern – even, perhaps, through that haze of drunken stupor – that this is as much a caricature of polemics in the anarchist tradition as a serious piece. It’s worth pointing out that these polemics have often brought attention to their theses by deliberately taking an extreme position, thereby opening up the ground in between for more “moderate” positions on the subject. Hopefully you can draw useful insights of your own from your interpretations of this text, rather than taking it as gospel or anathema.

Actually, no. If you're trying to satirise a polemic (which is what you're doing when you're making a caricature), it needs to be clear. It's not, and it still isn't.

Why? Because of this moralising statement about people with alcohol addiction.

But you also can't find "moderate" ground when your polemic is maintaining beliefs that harm people (e.g., "mind-controlling" drugs) and advocating for a decrease in health standards (e.g., the point about vitamin C).

Plus, we don't need caricatures that do this because we already have enough conspiracy theorists in the world who harm people through their own medical malpractice, and anarchists should be working to ensure that we don't contribute to that.

Quotes from this article:

There are many mysteries of the academy which would be appropriate objects of ethnographic analysis. One question that never ceases to intrigue me is tenure. How could a system ostensibly designed to give scholars the security to be able to say dangerous things have been transformed into a system so harrowing and psychologically destructive that, by the time scholars find themselves in a secure position, 99% of them have forgotten what it would even mean to have a dangerous idea? How is the magic effected, systematically, on the most intelligent and creative people our societies produce? Shouldn’t they of all people know better? There is a reason the works of Michel Foucault are so popular in US academia. We largely do this to ourselves. But for this very reason such questions will never be researched.

I should clarify the Yale socio-cultural anthropology department was, at that time, in an unhappy state. If they were known outside New Haven for anything, at that time, it was for their unique institutional culture, epitomized by the habit of some members of the senior faculty of writing lukewarm or even hostile letters of recommendation for their own graduate students—students who, I might note, were on average of a clearly higher intellectual calibre than the faculty, but lived in a climate of fear and intimidation as a result. (Needless to say it was the same clique who wrote the hostile letters who suddenly stopped speaking to me.) Matters were complicated by a grad student unionization drive that met with unrelenting hostility from this same dominant clique: union organizers had been screamed at, received abusive emails, been object of all sorts of false accusations, even been threatened with police; there were multiple outstanding student grievances and complaints against such behavior and even one pending NLRB case. At the same time the students themselves were deeply divided about the merits of the union. Junior faculty were caught in the middle. For my own part, I made the strategic decision to avoid internal Yale politics, and focus on larger targets (such as the IMF). In New Haven, I concentrated my efforts on teaching, and on mentoring and protecting my own students—who, I am proud to report, are almost all now pursuing successful academic careers.

When the time came in 2004 for the normally routine promotion to “Term Associate” (an untenured position that would lead in four years to tenure review), this same handful of senior faculty tried to deny me reappointment, despite uniformly positive external reviews (one by Laura Nader) and strong student evaluations (I had taught some of the most popular courses in the department’s history). They told the dean I had not done enough committee work—but when challenged were forced to admit they had not given me any. Informed they couldn’t simply fire me without warning, they solicited, and were granted, special permission to review my case again after a year—and this time, at their insistence and as far as I know in violation of all precedent, without external or student input.

1. There is a near total gulf between the way many (most?) anthropologists view situations in their field areas, where they tend to identify with the underdog, and in the academy, where they tend to instinctually take the side of structures of institutional authority. There is little doubt that most of my detractors would have come to exactly the opposite conclusion about what must have “really happened” in my case had I been a young scholar and political dissident in Indonesia or Mozambique who was dismissed from his job with no reason being given.

This is kind of hilarious as a point because that article by Colleen Morgan discussed how archaeologists (most frequently put in the anthropology department in the United States and sharing many of the same structures) are uniquely radical.

But this is the same reality that I also faced as an anthropology student. They seemed to side with the underdog but would always support institutional hierarchy when push came to shove; they're not that much different across academia, honestly. (Just that they feign support for the underdog first.)

3. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of social class. I was told by one ally at Yale that my problem was that owing to my proletarian background and general comportment, I was considered “unclubbable.” That is, if one is not from a professional-managerial background, one can be accepted by one’s “betters,” but only if one makes it clear such acceptance is one’s highest life aspiration. Otherwise, ideas or actions that among the well-born would likely be treated as amusing peccadillos—such as an embrace of anti-authoritarian politics—will be considered to disqualify one from academic life entirely.

Many academics like the trappings of working class people (for example) but don't want to deal with us. That's just a fact.

7. Children of the professional-managerial classes, as Tom Frank recently pointed out, tend to lack any ethos of solidarity. Solidarity is largely a value among working class people, or among the otherwise marginalized or oppressed. Professional-managerials tend towards radical individualism, and for them, left politics becomes largely a matter of puritanical one-upmanship (“check your privilege!”), with the sense of responsibility to others largely displaced onto responsibility to abstractions, forms, processes, and institutions. Hence frequent comments from ostensible leftists that, in protesting my irregular dismissal, I was revealing an arrogant sense of entitlement by suggesting anthropology somehow owed me a job in the first place (I got similar reactions from some academic “leftists” when I was evicted from my lifelong family home at the instigation of Police Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism, after Occupy Wall Street. “Oh, so you think you have some kind of right to live in Manhattan?”) I find it telling, for instance, that of the few who did reach out in practical terms in the wake of my dismissal, and ask if there was anything they could do to help me find employment, the majority were African-American: i.e., people who came from a tradition of radicalism where people are keenly aware that sticking one’s neck out could have severe personal consequences, and that therefore, mutual support was necessary for survival. Many of elite background offered public moral support, but few if any offered me practical help of any kind.

Not at all surprising in any way at all. Similarly, the people who tried to help me after one of my schools decided not to renew my contract (after offering to me and then making a last minute decision because "the owner didn't sign it") were all locals who made significantly less money than me in the same place.

None of the other non-local teachers did anything other than offering me platitudes. I know who I stand with.

8. The (tacitly authoritarian) insistence on acting as if institutions could not possibly behave the way the anthropology department at Yale did in fact behave leads almost necessary to victim-blaming. As a result, bullying—which I have elsewhere defined as unprovoked attacks designed to produce a reaction which can be held out as retrospective justification for the attacks themselves—tends to be an effective strategy in academic contexts. Once my contract was not renewed, I was made aware that within the larger academic community, any objections I made to how I’d been treated would be themselves be held out as retroactive justification for the non-renewal of my contract. If I was accused of being a bad teacher or scholar, and I objected that my classes were popular and my work well regarded, this would show I was self-important, and hence a bad colleague, which would then be considered the likely real reason for my dismissal. If I suggested political or even personal bias on the part of any of those who opposed renewal of my contract, I would be seen as paranoid, and therefore as likely having been let go for that very reason… And so on.

There is, to an extent, a degree to which I identify with Graeber. Granted, he actually lost none of his status (and even grew in status) once he left the US. That's about where I stop, but I totally identify with his job loss.

But not everyone can have the same star power to escape similar situations. I don't blame him for this, but it is frustrating.

9. The truth or falsity of accusations is often treated as irrelevant. There seems a tacit rule not just of the academy but almost all aspects of professional-managerial life that if a superior plots to destroy an underling’s career, this is considered disagreeable behavior, certainly, but consequences are unlikely to follow. If the victim publicly states this happened, however, this is considered unforgivable and there will be severe consequences—whether or not the accusations are correct. Similarly if accusations are directed against an underling, even if they are proven false, the underling is usually assumed to have done something else to have earned the rancor of the accuser. So in a way the veracity of the accusations is again beside the point and making too much of a fuss about it is considered bizarre.

10. Prejudice in favor of institutional authority also allows authorities to easily get away with indirect forms of dishonesty aimed at falsifying the facts. To this day, most academics who have heard of my case appear convinced I was simply denied tenure, which of course makes my protests of political bias seem bizarre and self-serving, since most junior faculty are denied tenure at Yale. Almost no one knows that in fact it was a highly unusual non-tenure procedure where rules were changed for my case and my case only. Why? One reason is because Yale authorities kept making statements that implied, but did not quite state, that it was a tenure case. For instance when the New York Times ran an article about my dismissal, the author mentioned in passing it was not a tenure case, but also included a quote from an ally of the senior faculty which basically would have made no sense had it not been one (she said it was telling that I “personalized” the case rather than seeing it as being about Yale tenure policy). The ploy was effective and most of those who read the article appear to have been left with a false impression of what happened. But this was only possible because of their own bias: for all the leftist posturing, most American anthropologists, presented with a confusing Rorschach-like welter of evidence, appear to have decided it was more likely that an activist scholar had unreasonably politicized a routine academic decision, than that a notoriously conservative department could possibly have changed the rules to get rid of radical who was actively engaged in organising direct actions to disrupt trade summits and discomfiting the powerful in other actual, practical, ways.