Research

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.

Quotes from this article:

Without our assistance, time will not bring the right word to light; we must all work together on it. If, however, so much depends upon us, we may reasonably ask what they have made of us and what they propose to make of us; we ask about the education through which they seek to enable us to become the creators of that word. Do they conscientiously cultivate our predisposition to become creators or do they treat us only as creatures whose nature simply permits training? The question is as important as one of our social questions can ever be, indeed, it is the most important one because those questions rest on this ultimate basis. Be something excellent and you will bring about something excellent: be “each one perfect in himself,” then your society, your social life, will also be perfect.

Worth noting that the schooling of the time for all people was that there was free primary schooling for boys, girls did not receive as such (unless wealthy and then had governesses or private tutors or were sent to private boarding schools). So these are the contexts in which Stirner wrote.

Therefore we are concerned above all with what they make of us in the time of our plasticity; the school question is a life question. They can now be seen quite clearly; this area has been fought over for years with an ardour and a frankness which far surpasses that in the realm of politics because there it does not knock up against the obstructions of arbitrary power.

Apart from any other basis which might justify a superiority, education, as a power, raised him who possessed it over the weak, who lacked it, and the educated man counted in his circle, however large or small it was, as the mighty, the powerful, the imposing one: for he was an authority.

Education creates superiority and makes one a master: thus in that age of the master, it was a means to power. But the Revolution broke through the master-servant economy and the axiom came forth: everyone is his own master. Connected with this was the necessary conclusion that education, which indeed produces the master, must henceforth become universal and the task of finding true universal education now presented itself.

With education, its possessor became a master of the uneducated. A popular education would have opposed this because the people were supposed to remain in the laity opposite the learned gentlemen, were only supposed to gaze in astonishment at the strange splendor and venerate it. Thus Romanism continued in learning and its supporters are Latin and Greek. Furthermore, it was inevitable that this education remained throughout a formal education, as much on this account because of the antiquity long dead and buried, only the forms, as it were, the schemes of literature and art were preserved, as for the particular reason that domination over people will simply be acquired and asserted through formal superiority; it requires only a certain degree of intellectual agility to gain superiority over the less agile people. So called higher education was therefore an elegant education, a sensus omnis elegantiae, an education of taste and a sense of forms which finally threatened to sink completely into a grammatical education and perfumed the German language itself with the smell of Latium so much that even today one has an opportunity to admire the most beautiful Latin sentence structures, for example, in the just published History of the Brandenburg-Prussian States. A Book for Everyone.

This... is actually funny because the first thing that comes to mind are fucking multiple cases in German, which are also present in Latin. And I hate cases.

School was seen to be left behind by life since it not only withdrew from the people but even neglected universal education with its students in favor of exclusive education, and it failed to urge mastery in school of a great deal of material which is thrust upon us by life.

Stirner, talking about schools being silos before every single child was thrust into one.

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Anecdotally, there have been an abundance of punks employed in contract archaeology in the last forty years. Field archaeology traditionally relies on highly-skilled workers who accept low wages, unreliable hours and marginal living conditions who can also live and work communally (Morgan and Eddisford in press). While not all field archaeologists are punks, there is a relatively high acceptance of non-conformist dress and behavior in the commercial archaeological community.

The dress code part feels really superficial, especially for something written in 2015. Case in point, a lot of places that paid trash started relaxing dress codes. It's likely that a lot of them were doing so in order to "build solidarity" with the workers and "show them some autonomy" in spaces where it was decreasing.

The same is true of teaching; a lot of schools have relaxed dress code standards (for teachers) and have started making it possible for people with visible tattoos and piercings (to an extent) to participate in the field.

This doesn't mean, of course, that these people are "non-conformist" with regards to common social structures, politics, or institutions. There are a number of, for example, tattooed people who are on the far-right.

Similarly, Theresa Kintz’s The Underground, a radical zine published in the 1990s identified key issues for archaeological excavators, particularly low pay and high turn-over, and the classification of archaeological field work as undisciplined, performed by an alcoholic, childlike, “field animal” (Underground 1995; McGuire and Walker 1999).

A current equivalent to these past zines is The Diggers Forum, a publication from a Special Interest Group of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists with practical, yet political articles for “diggers” edited by London archaeologists. A recent issue of The Diggers Forum covered pay minimas for archaeologists (Harward 2014), how teeth are used in bioarchaeological analyses (Lanigan 2014), and the academic and professional divide and its impact on archaeological training (Everill 2014). While punks were generally accepted in developer-funded archaeology, a coherent, academic punk archaeology was not forthcoming until the 2013 “Punk Archaeology” conference organized by William Caraher in North Dakota. Even amidst other archaeologies of resistance and efforts to advance a more activist archaeology, punk archaeology is underutilized as a productive structure for bringing together disparate communities of practice in archaeology.

In the Punk Archaeology publication following the conference, William Caraher defines punk archaeology as a reflective mode of organizing archaeological experiences, one that celebrates DIY practices, reveals a deep commitment to place, embraces destruction as a creative process and is a form of spontaneous expression (2014:101-102).

There are many biographies, histories and ethnographies of punk rock (for some of these, see Laing 1985; Sabin 1999; Shank 1994), but the cultural legacies of punk rock and the mobilization of punk as a means of knowledge production has come only as punks have infiltrated the upper echelons of academia.

Sorry, what? No, I really have to disagree with this because most of the punk-to-academia pipeline has actually resulted in many former radicals becoming part of the institutions they originally rallied against. It's much the same as what happened with the student and youth movements, which had also been tied to many punk scenes. A lot of people in those spaces realised they could build careers from their movement work and did that instead.

Institutionalising knowledge (and allowing it to be institutionalised) has done nothing valuable for us, especially from people who understood DIY and punk scenes.

Other contributions to Punkademics note the friction of subscribing to an anti-authoritarian, punk ethos while operating within a hierarchical bureaucracy, yet also identify critical pedagogy as a means toward liberation from capitalism and corporate globalization (Miner and Torrez 2012; Haenfler 2012).

How... does this make sense, especially considering people within the realm of critical pedagogy have directly called out other so-called "critical educators" for applying a label to themselves to do nothing but careerism? Like... even if I may have some issues with Macedo, check his intros to the 50th anniversary edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Pedagogy of Freedom.

The hierarchical bureaucracy pushes people out unless they toe the line, and they will even close down radical seminars in the event that someone passes away (Freire) instead of hold them in his honour and bring in other critical pedagogues.

Like, if you're a punk or anarchist in academia, you should be working on breaking down the walls, not hiding behind them.

Beyond a critical pedagogical stance, the attitude and sensibility of punk can be productively used to regenerate and energize academic research (Beer 2014).

It could be, but I'm not seeing these things in academia. In fact, we've been seeing the total opposite happening. There are only small pockets (usually of individuals) doing this kind of work.

I'd love to highlight the irony that this person is associated with the ARG in Loughborough University and while the group they're most associated with outside of both does small useful aid? The ARG does little, if anything, to break down the walls that exist within academia. (This is also still true, even if they participate in groups outside... unless they're expropriating resources and making all information free-to-access or helping build grants for students who want to make their work open access... but they're not.)

This inner paradox is playful, complex, and resists simple classification, a slipperiness that should be familiar to archaeologists.

Familiar to people who frequently classify things they don't understand as related to religion, even without evidence? Okay.

Jim Groom, frustrated by the limited capabilities of educational and professional software content management systems coined the term edupunk in May 2008 to encompass an alternative methodology of using social networking sites and other internet resources to build a distributed, interactive and flexible platform for teaching, research, and collaboration.

A lot of teachers and academics did this, especially as groups were provided. CMS started to build up "safe" platforms for students (such as Edmodo) as early as 2008, and it was one of the most flexible for corporate-promoted.

Yet, a lot of social media platforms got in on the game and started working to develop CMS/LMS. Google's best known for both creating Google Classroom and acquiring Blogspot.

What's fun, though, is how often academics overlook what primary and secondary teachers are doing; a lot of what they do in their classes actually starts with us, but they seem to ignore us entirely because they think we're not on their level.

Yet these engagements are limited—edupunk specifically addresses digital technology within a higher education classroom.

This limitation is both unnecessary and self-imposed, but sure. (Academics aren't very creative, even when engaging with creative structures.)

The investigation of punk spaces as anti-heritage, sites of rebellion, ruin, of temporal remixing and nostalgia reveals the productive, provocative, instability of a punk archaeology.

This would've been the more interesting area of discussion.

While experimental archaeology has long been a method of investigating the materiality of the remains of the past, it is rarely tied to a political archaeology. The more radical experiments, including James Deetz's re-envisioning of living history museum Plimoth Plantation as an archaeological laboratory, hinted at this potential—there were complaints of the barefoot hippies that replaced the prim pilgrim ladies surrounded by antiques (Snow 1993).

Excuse me, you think that Plimoth Plantation is radical? Like, they are the most sanitised version of colonisation, and... you call them radical? This news article came out in 2020, highlighting all the ways in which that statement is absolutely laughable.

It may have been experimental (especially for a museum), but it was most certainly not radical.

The basic principles of punk archaeology reflect an anarchist ethos: voluntary membership in a community and participation in this community. Building things–interpretations, sites, bonfires, earth ovens, Harris Matrices–together. Foregrounding political action and integrity in our work. It is the work of the punk archaeologist to “expose, subvert, and undermine structures of domination...in a democratic fashion” (Graeber 2004:7).

Here's a thing left unaddressed in any area of this article: Who is doing the "building" and "interpreting?" There is little discussion about the seeming lack of Indigenous people who are disproportionately impacted by modern archaeology (and anthropology), especially across the Americas. This is most certainly true with regards to the thousands of unmarked graves found only in Canada and the fact that there are going to be vultures dressed as "helpful excavation companies" looking to make profit on their suffering.

Where is that discussion? Why isn't it discussed? Why do you overlook that and not even mention it in a few of your sentences?

To realize this praxis we must engage in what Orton-Johnson (2014) terms “small-citizenship”--small-scale, local projects and their accompanying online spaces that enable participants to feel a sense of connection to their community and to the past, with especial attention to marginalized and disenfranchised peoples.

Oh, oops. I should've read to the end for the one whole afterthought sentence. Great work!

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I lauded the anarchists for their absence from the struggle against gentrification and landlords, even as I heard about the squat evictions and the solidarity attacks that followed, even as I walked through the neighborhoods where a creative and hostile graffiti culture kept the developers at bay. I made tired jokes about vegan burritos, even as the food distribution centers and groups multiplied across the city without needing the direction of any central committee.

I used to treat organizing like a try-hard student treats a group project. Other radicals’ ideas, activity and efforts were only Good if they were useful to whatever campaign I was working on. My friends helped out here and there, but they lacked commitment to the organization and would fail to return to meetings after completing the project they helped with.

I'm glad this person reflected on this and understood why their perceptions were wrong because this is why we don't like organising with people/groups like this. If you don't understand us? If you don't take time to understand us? You're not going to get why we help when we do and why we drop when we're done; it's not a lack of commitment on our part, since it's a lack of recognition on yours.

By the time I had finally burned out of my organization and started hanging with my friends again, I had become so accustomed to organizational processes that it took me years to repair my relationships enough to begin to see and understand how anarchists organized. At first, the informality felt like a mess; I couldn’t keep track of who was doing what unless I was directly involved and needed to know. And that was difficult to adjust to, especially when I could see projects everywhere but still didn’t really know who might help me find a way in.

This is a difficulty for anarchists, too. If we move, we're looking for our new connections. It's why we often jump into established groups to see what they're up to and how we can help.

But it also shapes your attempts to integrate into community and how you view community. It's not just a bunch of people to preach at; it's people to get to know, to work with, and figure out how you can mutually build.

*> When I was a Leftist organizer, the movement that I imagined myself to

be building was always something exterior to my life — something that took place outside of myself, my friends and their projects, the spaces that we inhabit. But “the” movement isn’t elsewhere.*

This is something we want people to realise. If the movement is 'outside' of you, then are you really doing anything or building something worth having? Just because something doesn't impact you directly (e.g., a form of bigotry) doesn't mean that it's outside you because, even if we're individualised? We're a collective.

Anarchy, on the other hand, is a flawed and centerless constellation of relationships, which is to say anarchy is built on affinity, trust, and reciprocal knowledge. Pittsburgh anarchist scenes are just as fragmented as the Left. It is true that “we” do struggle to sustain coordination and momentum, beyond the intermediate term. Like every movement, anarchy waxes and wanes. I couldn’t care less. Any communist or anarchist who believes that revolt in the united settler-states actually depends on the strength of “the Left” is deluding themself. Revolt happens with or without us. So rather than waste my time obsessing over the strength of some organization or ideology’s influence in a given region, I’d rather learn more projectual approaches that might contribute to conflictuality. I know some of you reading this are studying this framework as well, and I look forward to discovering your projects, wherever they may incite or strike.

It’s about navigating social life & conflict with the intent to find accomplices through what we do, rather than what we say.

This world is ending. No global revolution is coming to save us. What worlds emerge is dependent on the particular trajectories the collapse will traverse in each region. Empire will survive in the places where workers still prioritize the needs of the techno-industrial economy – be it capitalist or communist – over the needs of the world they inhabit.

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Revolutionary anarchism is the program of a self-organized, cooperative, decentralized, and thoroughly democratic society. All social needs will be provided by a network of voluntary, self-managed associations. This means the overthrow of all forms of oppression, including, but not limited to, the domination of the working class, women, gays and lesbians, African Americans, Latinos, youth, neo-colonies, and nature. Self-organization of the people is both our vision of a new society and our program for reaching the new society.

This may be from 1997, but it's still something that a lot of anarchist groups overlook: We need to be explicit in talking about ableism and disability because it often goes entirely overlooked. This is as true now as it was in the 90's. (I get that it says "not limited to," but disability needs to have a stated position far more than it's ever had, especially now.)

Anarchism’s mistakes occur within a basically liberating vision. They include:

• ultimatism, the idea that one can abstain from limited, reform struggles,

• anti-organizationalism, opposition to organization,

• permeationism, the idea that anarchist institutions can grow up within an authoritarian society and supplant it without a revolutionary struggle, and

• opportunism, the idea (as in the Spanish revolution) that, under emergency conditions, one can join the state to defend it from anti-democratic enemies, instead of building an alternate to the state (such as federations of popular councils).

Ultimatism: I think that there are degrees to which one can or should abstain from reform struggles; this is very much the case with things like single-issue politics that actually can harm people and leave them in worse positions. Just because a reform helps some people does not mean it helps enough (or that it won't cause harm), and we need to leave room for people to make that decision. Otherwise, we may end up chasing a bunch of single-issue struggles and exhausting ourselves (as has been the case).

Anti-organisationalism: Any anarchist that is opposed to organisation is genuinely confused, full stop.

Permeationism: Agreed. This is where I think we need to spend more time with the insurrectionary anarchists.

Opportunism: This is also true. Dual power is far more effective, and people are recognising it. They're also seeing how organisations that had developed within the community to meet the community needs but shifted to support a political candidate have fallen apart (e.g., Chile, Greece in 2021).

We must learn from other traditions of struggle, such as Black nationalism or feminism or ecology, but what we learn must be integrated into revolutionary anarchism. What matters is not anarchism as a label but anarchism as a vision and a program.

Especially, Marxism should be seen as an opponent of anarchism. Whatever value its parts may have, Marxism was meant to be a total vision, a combination of economics, politics, historical analysis, and philosophy.

This is actually one of the struggles I have with elements of Marxism, as I can appreciate individual pieces but not the total vision. This also means that those individual parts that I do like are things that can be acquired from elsewhere, as it's likely what Marx (and Engels) did.

But I also struggle with the "Marxism is an opponent." While I see a number of people labelling themselves Marxists who I would not work with under any conditions (see: anti-Roma Marxist in my national government), there are some who I do believe have good intentions.

Despite historical defeats, Marxism remains a living danger. As radicalism increases, Marxism is likely to revive, due both to its strengths (its large body of theory and practice) and weakness (its authoritarianism, which many find attractive). Anarchists must work at analyzing, discussing, and refuting Marxism.

And we're also seeing this with contemporary Marxist-Leninists (particularly within North America and Europe). There are a lot of people interweaving "human nature" into it, claiming that we need centralisation and some version of authoritarianism in order to ensure people "act accordingly."

The impression that Marxism “works” because of China or Cuba or (retrospectively) Russia, and that anarchism “does not work” because it has never built a lasting free society, will be attractive to many. It is hard for people to believe in their own ability to create a new, just society, when states have been so successful in co-opting and crushing such efforts. Many find it easier to believe in authoritarianism because it seems to “work.” Unfortunately, this lack of confidence may appear even among anarchists.

The mainstream of anarchism has historically opposed capitalism in favor of a cooperative, nonprofit, self-managed, economy — that is, libertarian (or anti-authoritarian) socialism. To win this goal requires the participation of the international working class, but it also requires the participation of all oppressed people.

This is something I feel like we're losing sight of. Yes, we're building new networks of mutual aid in some cases, but it's... not enough. People will talk and talk about mutual aid, but I'm not seeing it being done.

The most revolutionary forces are likely to be found at the intersection of various oppressions — such as Black workers or working women. These are least corrupted by the relative privileges and benefits which the ruling class uses to buy off potentially rebellious people.

I still see a lot of people who haven't moved on from this, but here are a few things:

1. Include disabled and queer people in these statements. While there's no limiting factor, we just need to say it because otherwise people forget and overlook it because we're often ignored unless we can be propagandised into heroic figures or demonised.
2. I'm tired of the "least corrupted" kind of thing because it plays into tokenising people, which can mean being easily led astray by the first voice you hear from a marginalised group, even if that person's a problem. It's happening right now with anarchists and some ML nationalists (who are literally harming anarchists!) in former colonies... Just because that was the first voice they found from an area with few people speaking out.

One thing Westerners (especially white Westerners) need to wrap their head around is that sometimes a marginalised person can be wrong, and you need to investigate that. Many of us have grown up having "representation" pushed at us, which isn't inherently bad (because we do need it!), but it has been co-opted (see: the queer Latina with as many intersecting marginalised identities as possible being a CIA ad). Listen critically, see who else is talking about the same things or how they respond to that person, explore farther. We cannot afford to get stuck in these traps.

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First, I agree that anarchism has failed in the sense that there has been no worldwide anti-authoritarian revolution, or even a successful anti-authoritarian revolution in one country. Second, I agree that the anarchist movement has not been very impressive in developing its theory, and that its efforts to explain its defeats have not been fully convincing. Third, I agree that it is not possible to carry out an anti-authoritarian revolution in one country alone.

I'm not sure why people find these failures to be a problem within anarchism? We should expect to fail, especially when faced with such a great enemy. What we should do is actually address these failures.

For example, if an anti-authoritarian revolution is not possible to carry out in one country alone? Then perhaps we need to be better at global organising, which is atrocious and still harmed by people's misconceptions of others and the hierarchical superiority that some western anarchists see themselves as having.

These failures highlight problems to solve rather than highlighting how anarchism is entirely a failure.

... but let’s be clear about something: Marxism has also been a failure, and an abysmal one at that. There is today no international classless, stateless society that Marxism advocates and predicts, nor is there socialism (or even a dictatorship of the proletariat), even in one country. In my opinion, Marxists did lead a proletarian revolution in Russia in 1917, only to strangle it ruthlessly in the year or so afterward and to build in its place one of the most monstrous and violent state-dominated societies the world has ever seen. Is this any less of a failure than that of anarchism? If anything, it is more so: anarchism doesn’t have the blood of many tens of millions of people on its hands.

Marxism has been “successful” only if one fails to see, or willfully obscures, the fact that Marxism did not carry out anything like the socialist transformations they predicted, but bourgeois, that is, pro-capitalist ones which, whatever their achievements, resulted in the torture and murder of millions of people.

Of course, we can support bourgeois revolutions, just as we may support various bourgeois reforms under capitalism, but we should not dress up bourgeois revolutions in anti-authoritarian clothes. Nor should we transform ourselves into bourgeois revolutionaries just because bourgeois revolutions have been successful and anti-authoritarian ones have not.

Marxism’s attempts to understand itself, both as an ideology and in terms of its practical results, has been sadly deficient. Marxism has shown itself to be totally incapable of grasping what it has actually accomplished and what it really is. Marxist analysis of Communist revolutions and the societies they have created range from bald-faced apologetics to self-serving excuses, rarely getting close to a serious explanation. The best Marxism has been able to do are the state-capitalist analyses of the Communist system, such as those of Tony Cliff in Great Britain and Raya Dunayeskaya and C.L.R. James in the US. And neither of these, nor any of the other less insightful analysis, has even tried to address the responsibility of Marxism itself for this very system. Indeed, one of their chief aims is to SAVE Marxism from being judged by and rejected because of the gruesome regimes it has created. For a worldview that claims to be self-conscious, in contrast to the “false consciousness” that afflicts everyone else, this is not very impressive.

Beginning in 1918, no methods were too vile, too dishonest or ruthless, in the Communists’ campaign to slander, isolate and destroy every left-wing organization, tendency, and individual that dared even to criticize them, let alone actually oppose them. They had millions of dollars at their disposal which they used to finance newspapers, magazines and books, in fact, an enormous worldwide propaganda apparatus. They had an army of agents, not just diplomats and spies but world-famous intellectuals, who repeated every lie, no matter how absurd, and every slander, no matter how outrageous, about those labeled “anti-Soviet.” All left-wing critics and opponents of the Soviet Union and the particular policies it advocated at any given moment were denounced and, where this was feasible, killed, as counter-revolutionaries, fascists and agents of Hitler.

Most important for our purposes, virtually all of the political trends to the left of the Communists — anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, left-wing socialist, Trotskyists — were either destroyed or politically marginalized.

Note the intent. There is a reason many people who fit into any of these categories are quick to point out red-brown alliances (which are a real thing); it's because we will end up, at best, marginalised and left to struggle and, at worst, dead. That's not hyperbole. This is literally part of "left unity," and the only people demanding it are those who have a modicum of power or could see themselves as having a modicum of power.

In February, 1936, a coalition of liberal and left-wing parties and organizations known as the Popular Front won the elections held under the newly-formed Spanish Republic. Claiming the need to resist the imminent “Sovietization” of Spain, a group of fascist generals under the leadership of Francisco Franco revolted in July and, from various parts of the country, began to march on Madrid to crush the republic. In response, workers and peasants throughout Spain rose up to resist them. They not only organized militias that put up a determined and largely effective resistance. They also seized factories, workshops, the means of transportation and communication in the cities, the land in the countryside, and ran out the capitalists and landlords, their allies and agents. Not least, they set up collectives and councils to manage what they had confiscated.

While the fascist forces were being financed and armed by Hitler and Mussolini, the Republican government was internationally isolated. The US was officially neutral, while England and France pursued a policy of appeasement, that is, giving Hitler whatever he wanted in the hopes that he would leave their countries (and their colonial empires) alone. The only country that offered to aid the Spanish Republic was the Soviet Union, but at a price. In exchange for military and other assistance Stalin insisted that the social revolution in Spain be rolled back and that the revolutionary struggle there be transformed into a traditional-style war between two bourgeois armies.

There were two interrelated reasons behind Stalin’s policy. First, consistent with his theory of “Socialism in One Country,” (that is, the defense of state capitalism in Russia), he wanted to convince Britain, France and the US to form an anti-Fascist alliance with the Soviet Union and was worried that the Revolutionary events in Spain would scare them off. Second, following from his theory of the two-stage revolution, he had decided that the objective conditions in Spain were not ripe for a socialist revolution, but only a bourgeois one.

But in Spain, most of the bourgeoisie had fled and/or had sided with Franco and most of the state apparatus had collapsed. As a result, Stalin’s policy meant bringing back the institutions, including the police and standing army, of the old regime, seizing the land and factories from the peasants and workers, smashing the revolutionary organizations they had built and imprisoning and murdering thousands of leaders and militants of those left-wing organizations that opposed his policies.

Robbed of the revolutionary conquests, forced to submit to the oppressive conditions of the old system, and shorn of many of their leaders, the workers and peasants became demoralized. In part as a result, the Republican forces, deprived of the mass participation in revolutionary enthusiasm of the workers and peasants and forced to wage a traditional military campaign, were defeated.

Undoubtedly, the militias left a lot to be desired militarily (and probably could have profited from an increase in discipline and the coordination of their forces). But the liquidation of these outfits and the replacement by a traditional army, based on a traditional military hierarchy and discipline, was inseparable from the liquidation of the revolutionary conquests and the resulting political demoralization of the workers and peasants.

And all this, including the execution of their political enemies, was inseparable from the Stalinists’ view that the Spanish Revolution was, and had to be, a bourgeois one. Believing in the inevitability of the bourgeois revolution in Spain, the Stalinists did everything in their power to make sure that this, and only this, kind of revolution occurred.

One of the main reasons the Stalinist were able to do what they did in Spain and elsewhere was the fact that millions of people, both in Spain and around the world, believed that the Soviet Union was socialist, a workers’ state, some other kind of progressive alternative to capitalism, or, at the very least, the only force capable of waging a consistent fight against fascism. In other words, millions believed that if the Russians did or said something, it must be right.

To raise people’s political consciousness, including their understanding of the nature of Marxism and all authoritarian ideologies and social structures, is one of the chief tasks of anarchists and anti-authoritarians in general. But we won’t be able to do this if we become attracted to and begin to promote authoritarian ideologies because they’ve been more successful or have more impressive theory. It seems to me that it is of the very nature of anti-authoritarianism to be on the losing side of popular struggles for liberation until humanity achieves the transformation we envision. This is something we should be proud of, not something we should sell for the chance to emulate authoritarian revolutionaries.

I think it's the principles that we should be proud of, for the record; that's how this reads to me. It's that we haven't given up our principles of anti-authoritarianism in lieu of a "successful" revolution that liberates a few but continues to oppress many.

Anarchists often argue, or seem to argue, that humanity has always been ready for anarchism but has been thwarted by the actions of Marxists and other authoritarians. This downplays human beings’ responsibility for our own conditions. If the state is bad, where does it come from? If capitalism and other class societies are brutal and oppressive, why do they arise and why do we put up with them? Why do so many people believe Marxism’s claim to be liberatory, despite all the evidence to the contrary? This is one area in which anarchist theory, it seems to me, needs to be developed.

I actually agree with this. There is a lot of space for theory to develop within the realm of anarchism, and we're seeing much of this flesh out in the recent decades, especially from anarchists who traditionally come from more marginalised backgrounds. It's important that we don't lose sight of the lessons we're learning or being taught.

The problem with this concept of the “objective conditions” is that it is very abstract and obscures the actual realities of the countries to which it refers. Economic and social conditions in all countries are very uneven. No country is uniformly advanced: nor is any country totally backward. This is this especially the case since the development of imperialism, which has brought about a tremendous intermingling of economic, social, political and ideological forms. As a result, most imperialized countries have been characterized, and are still characterized by complex combinations of conditions, ranging from extremely archaic to extraordinarily modern. It is therefore very difficult to determine which country is or isn’t ripe for a particular kind of revolution.

For example, at the turn of the century Russia was considered by most revolutionaries, and certainly by Marxists, to be a “backward” country (indeed, most Marxists looked to Marxism as a means to modernize the country, which is what happened). Yet, as Leon Trotsky and others observed, this characterization was simplistic and obscured the concrete nature of Russian reality. While it was true that the vast majority of the people in what was then the Russian Empire were peasants who lived under barbaric conditions and that the country was ruled by an absolute monarch, etc., the country also contains some of the world’s largest and most technologically advanced factories, in part as a result of imperialism. Because of such industry, the country also contained a small but highly concentrated working class which had a tremendous amount of power at its disposal if only it chose to use it.

Many of these views about Russia "being backwards" still persist when discussing the revolution that took place and Marxist views in history books; it actually seems like it could've been one of those things that was co-opted as a way to explain why "things went wrong." It's curious.

As a result of all this, it is incorrect simply to say that Russia lacked the objective conditions for a socialist revolution. This is especially so when one considers not merely the objective conditions but also the subjective conditions, that is, the consciousness of the popular classes. Throughout the centuries, the Russian peasants, “normally” quiescent, profoundly conservative and under the domination of religious and ancient superstitions, periodically rose up in vast, powerful upheavals. Although generally led by someone who claims to be the true Tsar, as opposed to the “pretender” who occupied the throne, these uprisings threatened, for a time, the social structure, indeed the very existence, of the entire country. Moreover, the working class, only recently come into existence, was extremely receptive to revolutionary ideas, not only Marxism, but anarchism and anarchist-like programs as well.

This latter bit is actually pretty obvious when you think of the number of people who lived in exile, regardless of it being voluntary or forced. There are a lot of Russian names in socialist and anarchist movements, and it should be pretty obvious why that was.

It’s always easy, after the fact, to say that something happened of necessity, that is, that it was inevitable that things happened as they did. This is especially true of social and historical developments. Once some particular social event has occurred, it’s relatively easy to come up with a theory that appears to explain it. But to develop a theory that can predict social developments is something else again. This is a major weakness of bourgeois sociology and its radical manifestation, Marxism.

The same consideration applies to revolutions, especially so when we are considering revolutionary defeats. Once a revolution has been smashed, it sounds convincing to say that this was inevitable. The person who says this, particularly if he blames the defeat on “objective conditions,” comes across as scientific. The revolution was defeated and science, which at this level is deterministic, comes up with explanations to explain why this happened. By the same token, those who argue that the defeat was not inevitable appear to have their heads in the clouds. In short, reality is hard to argue against.

It's the same views that seem to side line "What if we tried [thing that isn't status quo]?" attempts, including alternative schools and educational/learning spaces.

In Spain, as we saw, Stalin assumed that the country was not ready for a socialist revolution but only a bourgeois one. He therefore ordered his agents and followers to dismantle the socialist aspects of the revolution, that is, to limit the revolution to the so-called bourgeois stage. But since revolutions can’t be so neatly divided in two stages or any other way, the Stalinist efforts to limit the revolution led to the destruction of the entire revolution, including the bourgeois one.

Something very similar happened in China. In the 1920s, as part of his struggle against his opponents in the Russian Communist Party, Stalin adopted the slogan “Socialism in One Country.” As we discussed, this meant foregoing attempts to encourage socialist revolutions in other countries in order to appease the imperialist powers into leaving Russia (and its state capitalist system) alone. This slogan was integrally connected to Stalin’s theory of the two stage revolution.

Sometimes I wonder why it is that the people who tend to mention "Socialism in One Country" are the same few people mentioned earlier as getting destroyed and marginalised. I feel like I rarely see it from anyone else, even people critical of Stalinism (and especially people engaged in Stalinism under another name).

Having decided that the objective conditions in China did not exist for a socialist revolution, Stalin urged the Chinese Communist Party to maintain an alliance with the leader of the bourgeois nationalists, Chiang Kai-shek, at all costs, in order to carry out the revolution in China. This meant subordinating the struggle of the Chinese workers to the interests of the Chinese capitalists, whom Chiang represented. Despite these orders, the workers mounted a wave of increasingly militant, widespread and coordinated strikes. In 1926, Chiang carried out a coup in the southern city of Canton and began his “Northern Expedition” to root out the reactionary warlords who controlled much of southern China. As Chiang approached the port city of Shanghai in early 1927, the workers there rose up to liberate the city. They mounted two general strikes, took over the city and set up a provisional government in March, 1927.

Chiang halted outside the city and began negotiations with local landlords and capitalists and representatives of the imperialists to seize control of the city. Consistent with his strategy of not scaring off Chiang and the Chinese bourgeoisie, Stalin directed the Chinese Communists to order the Communist-controlled unions to offer no resistance to Chiang and to have the workers bury their arms. Trusting their leaders, the workers did so. When Chiang entered the city, his troops slaughtered over 20,000 workers. Among other things, this led to the elimination of the most revolutionary workers, destroyed the Communist Party in Shanghai and ultimately led to the peasant-based strategy championed by Mao.

All of this is really well detailed in Chuăng #1 (2019). It really makes someone wonder what would've happened had Stalin actually supported radical people. Where would we be now?

The crucial point to understand here is that if revolutionaries decide before the fact that the objective conditions in a given country mean that the revolution is there “of necessity” will be a bourgeois one, they will act to oppose those struggles that go beyond the bourgeois revolution. In more graphic terms, they will become the executioner’s of the most revolutionary workers and peasants and will in all likelihood destroy the revolution altogether.

After the defeat and slaughter of the Chinese workers in Shanghai, a section of the Chinese Communist Party and eventually the party as a whole gave up entirely on organizing the working class and instead focused on the peasantry. But the result was not a spontaneous peasant uprising of the sort that powered of the French, Russian and Spanish Revolutions. The peasants in China did not spontaneously rise up, slaughter the landlords, seize the land and work it under their own direction. The Chinese Communist certainly organized peasant armies, but it would be more accurate to describe these as armies of peasants. The peasants were organized into formations that were firmly controlled by the Communists from the top down through officers and party functionaries.

Moreover, throughout most of the struggle, these armies did not attack the landlords and let the peasants seize and manage the land as they saw fit. Quite the contrary, consistent with the theory of the two-stage revolution, the Chinese Communist strategy centered on maintaining united front of all patriotic Chinese, including Chiang Kai-shek, the capitalists and landlords, in a purely nationalist struggle against the Japanese, who invaded Manchuria in 1931 and attempted to conquer the rest of China several years later. In the areas they controlled, the Communists merely limited the extent to which the landlords exploited the peasants by lowering rents and interest rates. All spontaneous peasant movements were either absorbed into the Communist armies or ruthlessly suppressed as “bandits.”

Even after the Japanese were defeated and the Communists turned their full attention against Chiang, the Communist pursued a purely bourgeois program and maintained firm, bureaucratic control over the peasants. Consistent with this, when their armies surround the city, the Communists did not urge the workers to rise up, throw out the capitalists and take over the factories. Instead, the workers were urged to remain at work under the firm control of the capitalists, who continued to exploit them as before and were assured by the Communists that their ownership and control of the factories would not be infringed. In fact, Mao advocated lowering wage rates and lengthening working hours in order to increase production.

It was not until the 1950s, that is, after the Communists had defeated Chiang and consolidated their power, that they moved to introduce land reform and expropriate the capitalists. Even then, these processes were well controlled by the Communist Party; at no point were the workers encouraged to form autonomous factory committees or given control over the factories; nor were the peasants given full and autonomous control over the land. Meanwhile, the capitalists were compensated for their property and often hired as managers at generous salaries to run their former plants, while their children were guaranteed entry into Chinese colleges and universities.

How is any of this consistent with communism? (It's... not.)

Rather than being a model for anti-authoritarians, the Chinese Revolution reveals the logic of Marxists’ attitudes toward methods. Unlike anarchists, Marxists are generally not restrained by particular scruples about the methods they employ. This is especially the case when they have the power of the state at their disposal. Whatever they may claim, they have always acted as if all means, no matter how brutal, dishonest and disgusting, are justified in their struggle against capitalism. These methods become ipso facto progressive because, they believe, they represent the proletariat, socialism and the liberation of all humanity.

But in politics, particularly revolutionary politics, you are what you do. If you claim to be an anti-authoritarian but decide, for whatever reason (perhaps because the objective conditions are not right), to try to carry out a bourgeois revolution, you are no longer an anti-authoritarian: you are bourgeois, that is, an authoritarian, revolutionist.

It is of the very nature of an anti-authoritarian revolution to be a worldwide phenomenon. We are, in fact, speaking of a transformation of the human species. It either happens relatively rapidly or it won’t happen at all. If the people in any one country, even an economically “advanced” one, carry out an anti-authoritarian revolution and it remains isolated, it will be defeated. There remains nothing that anti-authoritarians can do about this but to pick up and start over. > Adopting authoritarian measures, such as a standing army based on traditional centralization, hierarchy and discipline, will not save the revolution but will destroy it from within.

This perspective is not as far-fetched as it may seem. It should be clear that human society as it is currently organized is rapidly undermining the conditions for its own existence; among other things, it is destroying the planet on which we live. Human beings will increasingly be confronted with the need to make a radical transformation in the way we treat each other and the Earth as a whole. These two questions are thoroughly interconnected: we must stop viewing other human beings and the Earth as a whole as tools to increase our own individual and/or group power. Do we carry out this transformation or do we all get destroyed?

Quotes from this article:

Those experiments have followed different techniques. In reflecting on the Arab revolts underway I would like to propose three basic techniques of enlightenment. 1) An authoritarian technique, in which an enlightened elite, using the state, takes it upon itself to modernize an immobile, unruly mass presumed to be governed by arcane traditions; 2) a liberal technique, in which a modern state is seen to be crucial, but its elite is neither presumed to have monopoly over enlightenment nor power to make such a claim; 3) an anarchist technique, in which enlightenment is seen to come most reliably from below, through transformations of civic traditions rather than through state power or social engineering.

The common presumption that enlightenment has generated an alliance of knowledge and power describes in fact only one of those three techniques, namely the liberal technique, in which knowledge complements the otherwise partial power of the state. Knowledge here organizes a civic link between state and society, and in the process reduces for the liberal order the costs of policing and repressive needs. The two other techniques, by contrast, tend to set power and knowledge as substitutes rather than allies. The authoritarian techniques assume that having power furnishes the best means to accomplish any good, in which case there is less compelling need for knowledge, since power alone will do. Whereas in anarchist techniques, suspicion of the merit of power as means to ends, highlights the compensatory value of knowledge alone as the best means.

From a contemporary revolutionary perspective it is easy enough to recognize the two basic failures of the now exhausted authoritarian path to enlightenment: 1) that path has more magnified the authoritarian than the enlightened aspect of the state; 2) the authoritarian path hid from view a crucial social fact being asserted now openly in Arab streets everywhere, namely that enlightenment comes from below, not from above; that society has already become far more saturated with ethos of enlightenment than has its government.

But in the case of the Arab spring, we witness a rare likelihood that revolutions are reaching precisely their intentions: even governing orders now agree openly with virtually all revolutionary demands, except moving out of the way of the revolution.

In Islamic history, for example, what would later be called "anarchism" or "liberalism" occasioned old realities in which a substantial part of the civic order either lived independently of the state or generated serious limits to the reach of the state in society.

The crumbling authoritarian enlightenment, with its vanguardist and paternalist propositions, lies in a number of dynamics: vanguardism, as we already knew from Frantz Fanon, often expressed lack of knowledge by the vanguard, who eventually become ruling elites, of their own society. In its later phase, vanguardism became pure paternalism: distance of governing elites from the people became lack of interest in knowing the people. Amidst this disinterest the old vanguardist authoritarianism is expunged of its anti-colonial, progressive, Third Worldist claims; and out of its ashes there emerges a cold, paternal authoritarianism, disinterested in any form of peoplehood, and governed openly by an avowed marriage of business and state elites.

Okay, I need to spend a lot more time with Frantz Fanon. He keeps coming up in so many things I'm reading.

Enlightenment as a goal could be approached using different techniques. In the grand revolutions of the Arab spring, the liberal interpretation of the enlightenment fights an authoritarian interpretation, with the aid of an anarchist method--that is to say, with the aid of familiar civic traditions, now discovered again to be natural venues for expressing the organic and embedded nature of the enlightenment. This is why these revolts are entirely against the authoritarian state, but not against any old cultural tradition.

Quotes from this article:

“In a colonized country, it’s quite difficult to convince people of non-authoritarian, non-state solutions. You encounter, pretty much, a strictly anticolonial – often narrowly nationalist – mentality,” laments Nimer.

In Palestine, elements of popular struggle have historically often been self-organized. Even if not explicitly identified as “anarchism” as such, “[p]eople have already done horizontal, or non-hierarchical, organizing all their lives,” says Beesan Ramadan, another local anarchist, who describes anarchism as a “tactic” yet questions the need to attach a label.

“It is already there in my culture and in the way Palestinian activism has worked. During the First Intifada, for instance, when someone’s home was demolished, people would organize to rebuild it, almost spontaneously. As a Palestinian anarchist I look forward to going back to the roots of the First Intifada. It did not come from a political decision. It came against the will of the PLO.” Yasser Arafat declared independence in November 1988, after the First Intifada began in December 1987, Ramadan says “…to hijack the efforts of the First Intifada.”

The Palestinian case has been further complicated in recent decades. The landscape of largely horizontal self-organization in the First Intifada, was displaced in 1993 with the signing of the Oslo Accords and the top-down Palestinian Authority (PA) they created. “Now here in Palestine,” Ramadan observes, “we don’t have the meaning of authority that other people defy…We have the PA and the occupation, and our priorities are always mixed up. The PA and the Israelis [are on] the same level because the PA is a tool for the Israelis to oppress the Palestinians.” Nimer also shares this view, arguing it has now spread much more widely and that many now see the PA as a “proxy-occupation.”

“Being an anarchist doesn’t mean having the black and red flag or going black bloc,” Ramadan points out, referring to the established anarchist protest tactic of wearing all-black clothing and covering faces. “I don’t want to imitate any western group in the way that they ‘do’ anarchism…it is not going to work here, because you need to create a whole consciousness of the people. People don’t understand this concept.”

Honestly, this extends far beyond Palestine. Way too many people assume there are certain ways to 'do' anarchism. The goals that anarchists share can often be done by a range of tactics and strategies, and we need to recognise which ones work and which ones don't. (We also need to spend some time on mundane building in order to build this consciousness.)

This lack of a unified anarchist movement in Palestine could come as a result of the fact Western anarchists never really focused on colonialism. “[Western writers] didn’t have to,” argues Budour Hassan, an activist and law student. “Their struggle was different.” Nimer also adds: “For an anarchist in the US, decolonization might be a part of anti-authoritarian struggle; for me, it’s simply what needs to happen.”

Importantly, Hassan extends her own understanding of anarchism beyond positions merely against state or colonial authoritarianism. She refers to Palestinian novelist and Arab nationalist Ghassan Kanafani, noting that although he challenged the occupation, “…he also challenged patriarchal relations and the bourgeois classes… This is why I think we Arabs – anarchists from Palestine, from Egypt, from Syria, from Bahrain – need to begin reformulating anarchism in a way that reflects our experiences of colonialism, our experiences as women in a patriarchal society, and so on.”

This matches a lot of the conversations I've been having with people who aren't white cis men. There are so many more people to look to beyond the handful that we engage with, especially throughout history. (There's a reason why people keep saying that white western anarchists are a problem and they don't want to work with us; this is merely one chunk of that.)

Name: Ghassan Kanafani

“As Palestinians, we need to establish the connection with Arab anarchists,” Ramadan says influenced by her reading of material from anarchists in Egypt and Syria. “We have so much in common and, because of the isolation, we end up meeting international anarchists who sometimes, as good as their politics are, remain stuck within their misconceptions and Islamophobia.”

For Ramadan, nationalism also represents a significant problem. “People need nationalism in times of struggle,” she concedes, “[But] it sometimes becomes an obstacle… You know what the negative sense of nationalism means? It means you only think as Palestinians, that Palestinians are the only ones who are suffering in the world.” Nimer also adds, “You’re talking about sixty years of occupation and ethnic cleansing, and sixty years of resisting that through nationalism. That’s too long, it’s unhealthy. People can go from nationalist to fascist, quite quickly.”

Back in Ramallah, Nimer reflects: “I’m often pessimistic, but you can’t discount Palestinians. We could break out at any moment. The First Intifada began with a car accident.”