Research

Quotes from this book:

From Part I:

Remunerated joy, weekends off or annual holidays paid by the boss is like paying to make love. It seems the same but there is something lacking.

Hundreds of theories pile up in books, pamphlets and revolutionary papers. We must do this, do that, see things the way this one said or that one said, because they are the true interpreters of the this or that ones of the past, those in capital letters who fill up the stifling volumes of the classics.

They dream of orderly revolutions, neatly drawn up principles, anarchy without turbulence. If things take a different turn they start screaming provocation, yelling loud enough for the police to hear them.

Revolutionaries are pious folk. The revolution is not a pious event.

From Part II:

We are all concerned with the revolutionary problem of how and what to produce, but nobody points out that producing is a revolutionary problem. If production is at the root of capitalist exploitation, to change the mode of production would merely change the mode of exploitation.

A cat, even if you paint it red, is still a cat.

Capitalism and those fighting it sit alongside each other on the producer’s corpse, but production must go on.

The critique of political economy is a rationalisation of the mode of production with the least effort (by those who enjoy the benefits of it all). Everyone else, those who suffer exploitation, must take care to see that nothing is lacking. Otherwise, how would we live?

The hungry wretch harbours feelings of revenge when he sees the rich surrounded by their fawning entourage. The enemy must be destroyed before anything else. But save the booty. Wealth must not be destroyed, it must be used. It doesn’t matter what it is, what form it takes or what prospects of employment it allows. What counts is grabbing it from whoever is holding on to it at the time so that everyone has access to it.

Everyone? Of course, everyone.

And how will that happen?

With revolutionary violence.

Good answer. But really, what will we do after we have cut off so many heads we are bored with it? What will we do when there are no more landlords to be found even if we go looking for them with lanterns?

In its heavy objectivity, the everyday world conditions and reproduces us. We are all children of daily banality. Even when we talk of ‘serious things’ like revolution, our eyes are still glued to the calendar. The boss fears the revolution because it would deprive him of his wealth, the peasant will make it to get a piece of land, the revolutionary to put his theory to the test.

If the problem is seen in these terms, there is no difference between the wallet, land and revolutionary theory. These objects are all quite imaginary, mere mirrors of human illusion.

Only the struggle is real.

It distinguishes boss from peasant and establishes the link between the latter and the revolutionary.

Anyone who decides to organise my life for me can never be my comrade. If they try to justify this with the excuse that someone must ‘produce’ otherwise we will all lose our identity as human beings and be overcome by ‘wild, savage nature’, we reply that the man-nature relationship is a product of the enlightened Marxist bourgeoisie. Why did they want to turn a sword into a pitchfork? Why must man continually strive to distinguish himself from nature?

Part III:

Commodities have a profoundly symbolic content. They become a point of reference, a unit of measure, an exchange value. The spectacle begins. Roles are cast and reproduce themselves to infinity. The actors continue to play their parts without any particular modifications.

Anyone who escapes the commodity code does not become objectified and falls ‘outside’ the area of the spectacle. They are pointed at. They are surrounded by barbed wire. If they refuse englobement or an alternative form of codification, they are criminalized. They are clearly mad! It is forbidden to refuse the illusory in a world that has based reality on illusion, concreteness on the unreal.

Capital manages the spectacle according to the laws of accumulation. But nothing can be accumulated to infinity. Not even capital. A quantitative process in absolute is an illusion, a quantitative illusion to be precise. The bosses understand this perfectly. Exploitation adopts different forms and ideological models precisely to ensure this accumulation in qualitatively different ways, as it cannot continue in the quantitative aspect indefinitely.

The exploited almost feel nostalgia for this swindle. They have grown accustomed to their chains and become attached to them. Now and then they have fantasies about fascinating uprisings and blood baths, then they let themselves be taken in by the speeches of the new political leaders. The revolutionary party extends capital’s illusory perspective to horizons it could never reach on its own. The quantitative illusion spreads.

Of course, deep changes are being programmed in the code of illusions. But everything must be submitted to the symbol of quantitative accumulation. The demands of the revolution increase as militant forces grow. In the same way, the rate of the social profit that is taking the place of private profit must also grow. So capital enters a new, illusory, spectacular, phase. Old needs press on insistently under new labels. The productivity god continues to rule, unrivalled.

And when we stop counting we try to ensure that things stay as they are. If change cannot be avoided, we will bring it about without disturbing anyone. Ghosts are easily penetrated.

Every now and then politics come to the fore. Capital often invents ingenious solutions. Then social peace hits us. The silence of the graveyard. The illusion spreads to such an extent that the spectacle absorbs nearly all the available forces. Not a sound. Then the defects and monotony of the mis-en-scene. The curtain rises on unforeseen situations. The capitalist machinery begins to falter. Revolutionary involvement is rediscovered. It happened in ’68. Everybody’s eyes nearly fell out of their sockets. Everyone extremely ferocious. Leaflets everywhere. Mountains of leaflets and pamphlets and papers and books. Old ideological differences lined up like tin soldiers. Even the anarchists rediscovered themselves. And they did so historically, according to the needs of the moment. Everyone was quite dull-witted. The anarchists too. Some people woke up from their spectacular slumber and, looking around for space and air to breathe, seeing anarchists said to themselves, At last! Here’s who I want to be with. They soon realised their mistake. Things did not go as they should have done in that direction either. There too, stupidity and spectacle. And so they ran away. They closed up in themselves. They fell apart. Accepted capital’s game. And if they didn’t accept it they were banished, also by the anarchists.

It has become blatantly obvious that confrontation at the level of production is ineffective. Take over the factories, the fields, the schools and the neighbourhoods and selfmanage them, the old revolutionary anarchists proclaimed. We will destroy power in all its forms, they added. But without getting to the roots of the problem. Although conscious of its gravity and extent, they preferred to ignore it, putting their hopes in the creative spontaneity of the revolution. But in the meantime they wanted to hold on to control of production. Whatever happens, whatever creative forms the revolution might express, we must take over the means of production they insisted. Otherwise the enemy will defeat us at that level. So they began to accept all kinds of compromise. They ended up creating another, even more macabre, spectacle.

Part IV:

This idealisation of work has been the death of the revolution until now. The movement of the exploited has been corrupted by the bourgeois morality of production, which is not only foreign to it, but is also contrary to it. It is no accident that the trade unions were the first sector to be corrupted, precisely because of their closer proximity to the management of the spectacle of production.

Man’s poverty, the consequence of exploitation, has been seen as the foundation of future redemption. Christianity and revolutionary movements have walked hand in hand throughout history. We must suffer in order to conquer paradise or to acquire the class consciousness that will take us to the revolution. Without the work ethic the Marxist notion of ‘proletariat’ would not make sense. But the work ethic is a product of the same bourgeois rationalism that allowed the bourgeoisie to conquer power.

The only way for the exploited to escape the globalising project of capital is through the refusal of work, production and political economy.

But refusal of work must not be confused with ‘lack of work’ in a society which is based on the latter. The marginalised look for work. They do not find it. They are pushed into ghettos. They are criminalised. Then that all becomes part of the management of the productive spectacle as a whole. Producers and unemployed are equally indispensable to capital. But the balance is a delicate one. Contradictions explode and produce various kinds of crisis, and it is in this context that revolutionary intervention takes place.

So, the refusal of work, the destruction of work, is an affirmation of the need for non-work. The affirmation that man can reproduce and objectify himself in non-work through the various solicitations that this stimulates in him. The idea of destroying work is absurd if it is seen from the point of view of the work ethic. But how? So many people are looking for work, so many unemployed, and you talk about destroying work? The Luddite ghost appears and puts all the revolutionaries-who-have-read-all-the-classics to fright. The rigid model of the frontal attack on capitalist forces must not be touched. All the failures and suffering of the past are irrelevant; so is the shame and betrayal. Ahead comrades, better days will come, onwards again!

But revolutionaries are dutiful people and are afraid to break with all models, not least that of revolution, which constitutes an obstacle to the full realisation of what the concept means. They are afraid they might find themselves without a role in life. Have you ever met a revolutionary without a revolutionary project? A project that is well defined and presented clearly to the masses? Whatever kind of revolutionary would be one who claimed to destroy the model, the wrapping, the very foundations of the revolution? By attacking concepts such as quantification, class, project, model, historical task and other such old stuff, one would run the risk of having nothing to do, of being obliged to act in reality, modestly, like everyone else. Like millions of others who are building the revolution day by day without waiting for signs of a fatal deadline. And to do this you need courage.

With rigid models and little quantitative games you remain within the realm of the unreal, the illusory project of the revolution, an amplification of the spectacle of capital.

By abolishing the ethic of production you enter revolutionary reality directly.

It is difficult even to talk about such things because it does not make sense to mention them in the pages of a treatise. To reduce these problems to a complete and final analysis would be to miss the point. The best thing would be an informal discussion capable of bringing about the subtle magic of wordplay.

It is a real contradiction to talk of joy seriously.

Part V:

The exploited also find time to play. But their play is not joy. It is a macabre ritual. An awaiting death. A suspension of work in order to lighten the pressure of the violence accumulated during the activity of production. In the illusory world of commodities, play is also an illusion. We imagine we are playing, while all we are really doing is monotonously repeating the roles assigned to us by capital.

When we become conscious of the process of exploitation the first thing we feel is a sense of revenge, the last is joy. Liberation is seen as setting right a balance that has been upset by the wickedness of capitalism, not as the coming of a world of play to take the place of the world of work.

It is impossible to make the revolution with the guillotine alone. Revenge is the antechamber of power. Anyone who wants to avenge themselves requires a leader. A leader to take them to victory and restore wounded justice. And whoever cries for vengeance wants to come into possession of what has been taken away from them. Right to the supreme abstraction, the appropriation of surplus value.

The world of the future must be one where everybody works. Fine! So we will have imposed slavery on everyone with the exception of those who make it function and who, precisely for that reason, become the new bosses.

No matter what, the bosses must ‘pay’ for their wrongs. Very well! We will carry the Christian ethic of sin, judgement and reparation into the revolution. As well as the concepts of ‘debt’ and ‘payment’, clearly of mercantile origins.

That is all part of the spectacle. Even when it is not managed by power directly it can easily be taken over. Role reversal is one of the techniques of drama.

Qualitative, not quantitative, accumulation must substitute capitalist accumulation. The revolution of life takes the place of the merely economic revolution, productive potential takes the place of crystallised production, joy takes the place of the spectacle.

Part VI:

We work all the year round to have the ‘joy’ of holidays. When these come round we feel ‘obliged’ to ‘enjoy’ the fact that we are on holiday. A form of torture like any other. The same goes for Sundays. A dreadful day. The rarefaction of the illusion of free time shows us the emptiness of the mercantile spectacle we are living in.

Part VII:

The revolutionary movement will also have to fight its battles. Not just the traditional ones against capital but new ones, against itself. Boredom is attacking it from within, is causing it to deteriorate, making it asphyxiating, uninhabitable.

Let us leave those who like the spectacle of capitalism alone. Those who are quite happy to play their parts to the end. These people think that reforms really can change things. But this is more an ideological cover than anything else. They know only too well that changing bits is one of the rules of the system. It is useful to capital to have things fixed a little at a time.

Then there is the revolutionary movement where there is no lack of those who attack the power of capital verbally. These people cause a great deal of confusion. They come out with grand statements but no longer impress anyone, least of all capital which cunningly uses them for the most delicate part of its spectacle. When it needs a soloist it puts one of these performers on stage. The result is pitiful.

Part VIII:

When it is outside the dominion of capital, play is harmoniously structured by its own creative impulse. It is not linked to this or that performance required by the forces of the world of production but develops autonomously. It is only in this reality that play is cheerful, that it gives joy. It does not ‘suspend’ the unhappiness of the laceration caused by exploitation but realises it to the full, making it become a participant in the reality of life. In this way it opposes itself to the tricks put into act by the reality of death—even through play—to make the gloominess less gloomy.

There are times in history when science exists in the consciousness of those who are struggling. At such times there is no need for interpreters of truth. It emerges from things as they are. It is the reality of the struggle that produces theory.

Part IX:

Revolutionary organisations have difficulty in understanding this. They impose a model that reproduces the reality of production. The quantitative destiny of the latter prevents them from having any qualitative move to the level of the aesthetic dimension of joy. These organisations also see armed attack in a purely quantitative light. Objectives are decided in terms of a frontal clash.

The community of joy is structured in this way. It is a spontaneous way of coming into contact, fundamental for the realisation of the most profound meaning of play. Play is a communitarian act. It rarely presents itself as one isolated fact. If it does, it often contains the negative elements of psychological repression, it is not a positive acceptance of play as a creative moment of struggle.

Basically, the way capital is physically organised at the present time makes it vulnerable to any revolutionary structure capable of deciding its own timing and means of attack. It is quite aware of this weakness and is taking measures to compensate for it. The police are not enough. Not even the army. It requires constant vigilance by the people themselves. Even the most humble part of the proletariat. So, to do this it must divide the class front. It must spread the myth of the danger of armed organisations among the poor, along with that of the sanctity of the State, morality, the law and so on.

It indirectly pushes these organisations and their militants into assuming precise roles. Once in this ‘role’, play no longer has any meaning. Everything becomes ‘serious’, so illusory; it enters the domain of the spectacular and becomes a commodity. Joy becomes ‘mask.’ The individual becomes anonymous, lives out their role, no longer able to distinguish between appearance and reality.

In order to break out of the magic circle of the theatricals of commodities we must refuse all roles, including that of the ‘professional’ revolutionary.

Part X:

‘The owl takes flight’. May actions that start off badly come to a good end. May the revolution, put off by revolutionaries for so long, be realised in spite of the latter’s residual desire for social peace.

When we say the time is not ripe for an armed attack on the State we are pushing open the doors of the mental asylum for the comrades who are carrying out such attacks; when we say it is not the time for revolution we are tightening the cords of the straightjacket; when we say these actions are objectively a provocation we don the white coats of the torturers.

Part XI:

Let’s be done with waiting, doubts, dreams of social peace, little compromises and naivety. All metaphorical rubbish supplied to us in the shops of capitalism. Let’s put aside the great analyses that explain everything down to the most minute detail. Huge volumes filled with common sense and fear. Let’s put aside democratic and bourgeois illusions of discussion and dialogue, debate and assembly and the enlightened capabilities of the Mafiosi bosses. Let’s put aside the wisdom that the bourgeois work ethic has dug into our hearts. Let’s put aside the centuries of Christianity that have educated us to sacrifice and obedience. Let’s put aside priests, bosses, revolutionary leaders, less revolutionary ones and those who aren’t revolutionary at all. Let’s put aside numbers, illusions of quantity, the laws of the market. Let us sit for a moment on the ruins of the history of the persecuted, and reflect.

Quotes from this zine:

It is problematic that the left-wing scene itself has become an inscrutable mix of political projects and sources of income. Self-employed people do contract work for leftist publishing houses; left-wing magazines offer paid jobs; many of these jobs you only get if you have the right political connections… this goes as far as self-employed activists, who protest against nuclear power, banks or gene-technology for pay; paid by people who lack the time for protesting themselves. Once the boundaries between political engagement and earning money become blurry it becomes impossible to distinguish between what people actually think and what they propagate for professional reasons.

Many people of the ‘radical left’ work as organisers for trade unions or as lecturers at the university. A quote from a comrade in London: “When I attend meetings to ‘support cleaning workers’ half of the meeting consists of people because they are just about to write a freelance article about the topic or because they do a PHD on ‘migration and affective labour’ - or because they have a job or function within the union and are therefore required to participate. Later on in the pub this schizophrenia continues (“do you know what, I just have to finish this article for the Guardian, this then will give me more time to write more radical stuff” etc.).

I dislike the use of "schizophrenia" here and wish they'd chosen another way to describe this phenomenon instead of turning to ableism.

However, the sentiment still stands and is something I have long been frustrated by.

Nearly half of the former radical left will now be dependent on political party funding (mainly from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation of the ‘Partei die Linke’) or on doing professional ‘training against racism’ at schools, or ‘human-rights oriented children and youth work’, and so on.

The left movement as a whole pays a high price for such kind of individual careers, the negative repercussions on the ‘socio-political fabric” are grave. The political left is not external to the process of the extreme increase of social inequality in society; compared to the rest of society during the last years the income gap within the left will have widened even more. Individual careers on one side, increasing pressure and atomisation on the other side pushes more people towards individually feathering their own nests. The turn towards ‘Realpolitik’ in the radical left in the first half of the 1990s was enforced by people with an intellectual and finally social self-interest in the (improved/reformed) continuation of the social division of labour (e.g. Joachim Hirsch propagated in his “The National Competitive State” in 1995 “revolutionary politics are impossible”). Today left congresses are organised like university lectures, left speak and academic jargon have become indiscernible. And people like Roland Roth collaborate with the state intelligence service - see in more detail the book Gegnerbestimmung.

While more and more people turn their back on the state (see for example the falling election turnout), the formerly radical left has moved towards it and at various points it wasn't possible anymore to distinguish the left from state institutions. The left doesn't know their enemies anymore; the state security administrations become increasingly powerful in Germany, most of all the intelligence service [Verfassungsschutz] - and the formerly radical left share panels with representatives of these institutions or have their anti-racist pamphlets financed by it - even after the uncovering of the NSU!

It would be worth some separate research to see how many formerly left activists globally contribute on behalf of European and US-American foundations to the fact that movements of upheaval such as in Egypt are not getting out of control, that they orient themselves towards civil-society/democratic values and don't radicalise themselves through social conflicts. Also, a historical analysis of how the decline of movements result in institutionalisation, but how this institutionalisation was already present as ‘tendencies of professionalisation’ during the movement itself, could help us progress in this necessary debate; e.g. some research into the composition of the First and the Second International would be interesting (artisanal workers’ clubs vs. leadership of engineers and lawyers, who declared better state planning to be their main aim).

Finally bin the ‘precarity-ideologies’! No one has ever promised that in capitalism everyone will get a position and income according to their qualifications! Fulfilment in your work and profession has always been a privilege of the middle-classes. Whoever sees a guaranteed/permanent job according to one's university graduation as their special and individual right, rather than criticises the capitalist rat-race behind such promises and divisive structures, affirms capitalist competition. Instead of complaining about a lack of professional prospects, the ‘overqualified precarious’ should rather criticise the capitalist social relations around them!

You cannot simply proceed in a professional career and be ‘revolutionary’ in your free-time. We need our own structures as a material alternative to the ‘profession’; we need commonly organised living arrangements, collectives and (social) centres which would allow as a different way to approach ‘work’: to kick a shit-job if necessary; to work for a low-wage, because the job is politically interesting; to stir up a work-place collectively. Instead of ‘professionalisation’ and Realpolitik we have to advance the movement through a continuous international exchange.

Quotes from this article:

Immediate note is that I hate the use of 'dumbing down' in place of 'simplifying'.

I think the obvious answer is that we can’t. We need to recognize that language in our society is used as a tool of control, and the trend towards smaller vocabularies, simpler syntax, and shorter attention spans is one of the most effective forms of disempowerment ever devised.

Language needs to be a locus for revolution; it is a necessary weapon for all social struggles. Our duty as middle-class activists is to use our education to make complex language accessible, rather than passing off everything not immediately accessed with ease by the majority as inherently inaccessible.

A prohibition on what is understood as elitist language also assumes that people from poorer backgrounds with fewer opportunities for quality education either cannot or do not want to learn. In reality, attaining a good education is seen as a form of empowerment in many poorer communities, yet few activists attempt to diffuse that education when communicating with less privileged people. By avoiding academic language and analysis outside of their own circles, privileged activists maintain a relationship of dependency, in which they act as gatekeepers to knowledge, forever necessary to translate law, scientific studies, political analysis, et cetera, into “plain language.”

I have mixed feelings on this, though I agree with the overall sentiment. There is a lot of condescension about who is capable of using certain kinds of language and structures. There is a lot of condescension about who knows what.

But there are also areas that do require this, such as science communication. This is perhaps an area that I think more people could turn to for an adequate understanding of how to incorporate jargon and so-called "plain language." This is largely because there is an intent of many scientists to speak over those they're conversing with and to assume they are universally correct (pretending that culture does not impact them and their "objective" reality), and it really is a problem.

This is also an issue with a lot of philosophy and political communicators, though I suspect it's largely to con their audience and perpetuate their grift. It's not so much about simplifying the language to be accessible because they prefer to "sound intelligent" and to confuse (much in the way that con artists use language), based on our stereotypes. I do think these differences need to be more apparent in these kinds of conversations.

The other assumption inherent in the criticism is the idea that certain types of language are inherently elitist. Larger vocabularies and more complex syntax are in fact very helpful tools, though people require more education to be able to use them. It is not the language, but this country’s capitalist, racist education system that is elitist. The job of educated activists is to make that education accessible, and hand that language over as a popular tool. We don’t want made-for-the-masses Orwellian newspeak, we want languages that are liberated and demystified.

Wouldn’t it be more effective to subvert education, and educate subversion? To expose and overcome the patriarchal norm that makes an intellectual crime of asking: “What does that mean?” We should use the forms of language we’re comfortable with, academic or otherwise, as long as we do it lucidly, in a way that invites learning and sharing of that knowledge. Those around us would be better off for it. Similarly, we can benefit from learning the different types of language that other people use. Recognize the variety of languages, but upset the economic, racial, and gendered hierarchy in which these languages have been placed.

Quotes from this article:

It no longer seems necessary to me, therefore, that one should base his Anarchism upon any particular world conception; it is a theory of the relations due to man and comes as an offered solution to the societary problems arising from the existence of these two tendencies of which I have spoken. No matter where those tendencies come from, all alike recognize them as existent; and however interesting the speculation, however fascinating to lose oneself back, back in the molecular storm-whirl wherein the figure of man is seen merely as a denser, fiercer group, a livelier storm centre, moving among others, impinging upon others, but nowhere separate, nowhere exempt from the same necessity that acts upon all other centers of force,—it is by no means necessary in order to reason oneself into Anarchism.

Sufficient are a good observant eye and a reasonably reflecting brain, for anyone, lettered or unlettered, to recognize the desirability of Anarchistic aims. This is not to say that increased knowledge will not confirm and expand one’s application of this fundamental concept; (the beauty of truth is that at every new discovery of fact we find how much wider and deeper it is than we at first thought it). But it means that first of all Anarchism is concerned with present conditions, and with the very plain and common people; and is by no means a complex or difficult proposition.

There are, accordingly, several economic schools among Anarchists; there are Anarchist Individualists, Anarchist Mutualists, Anarchist Communists and Anarchist Socialists. In times past these several schools have bitterly denounced each other and mutually refused to recognize each other as Anarchists at all. The more narrowminded on both sides still do so; true, they do not consider it is narrow-mindedness, but simply a firm and solid grasp of the truth, which does not permit of tolerance towards error. This has been the attitude of the bigot in all ages, and Anarchism no more than any other new doctrine has escaped its bigots. Each of these fanatical adherents of either collectivism or individualism believes that no Anarchism is possible without that particular economic system as its guarantee, and is of course thoroughly justified from his own standpoint.

The notion that men cannot work together unless they have a driving-master to take a percentage of their product, is contrary both to good sense and observed fact. As a rule bosses simply make confusion worse confounded when they attempt to mix in a workman’s snarls, as every mechanic has had practical demonstration of; and as to social effort, why men worked in common while they were monkeys yet; if you don’t believe it, go and watch the monkeys. They don’t surrender their individual freedom, either.

Every Anarchist, as an Anarchist, would be perfectly willing to surrender his own scheme directly, if he saw that another worked better.

I see people quoting this line devoid of context, but the rest of the essay makes it feel sarcastic in tone.

My ideal would be a condition in which all natural resources would be forever free to all, and the worker individually able to produce for himself sufficient for all his vital needs, if he so chose, so that he need not govern his working or not working by the times and seasons of his fellows. I think that time may come; but it will only be through the development of the modes of production and the taste of the people. Meanwhile we all cry with one voice for the freedom to try.

Ah, once to stand unflinchingly on the brink of that dark gulf of passions and desires, once at last to send a bold, straight-driven gaze down into the volcanic Me, once, and in that once, and in that once forever, to throw off the command to cover and flee from the knowledge of that abyss,—nay, to dare it to hiss and seethe if it will, and make us writhe and shiver with its force! Once and forever to realize that one is not a bundle of well-regulated little reasons bound up in the front room of the brain to be sermonized and held in order with copy-book maxims or moved and stopped by a syllogism, but a bottomless, bottomless depth of all strange sensations, a rocking sea of feeling wherever sweep strong storms of unaccountable hate and rage, invisible contortions of disappointment, low ebbs of meanness, quakings and shudderings of love that drives to madness and will not be controlled, hungerings and meanings and sobbing that smite upon the inner ear, now first bent to listen, as if all the sadness of the sea and the wailing of the great pine forests of the North had met to weep together there in that silence audible to you alone. To look down into that, to know the blackness, the midnight, the dead ages in oneself, to feel the jungle and the beast within,—and the swamp and the slime, and the desolate desert of the heart’s despair—to see, to know, to feel to the uttermost,—and then to look at one’s fellow, sitting across from one in the street-car, so decorous, so well got up, so nicely combed and brushed and oiled and to wonder what lies beneath that commonplace exterior,—to picture the cavern in him which somewhere far below has a narrow gallery running into your own—to imagine the pain that racks him to the finger-tips perhaps while he wears that placid ironed-shirt-front countenance—to conceive how he too shudders at himself and writhes and flees from the lava of his heart and aches in his prison-house not daring to see himself—to draw back respectfully from the Self-gate of the plainest, most unpromising creature, even from the most debased criminal, because one knows the nonentity and the criminal in oneself—to spare all condemnation (how much more trial and sentence) because one knows the stuff of which man is made and recoils at nothing since all is in himself,—this is what Anarchism may mean to you. It means that to me.

And then, to turn cloudward, starward, skyward, and let the dreams rush over one—no longer awed by outside powers of any order—recognizing nothing superior to oneself—painting, painting endless pictures, creating unheard symphonies that sing dream sounds to you alone, extending sympathies to the dumb brutes as equal brothers, kissing the flowers as one did when a child, letting oneself go free, go free beyond the bounds of what fear and custom call the “possible,”—this too Anarchism may mean to you, if you dare to apply it so. And if you do some day,—if sitting at your work-bench, you see a vision of surpassing glory, some picture of that golden time when there shall be no prisons on the earth, nor hunger, nor houselessness, nor accusation, nor judgment, and hearts open as printed leaves, and candid as fearlessness, if then you look across at your lowbrowed neighbor, who sweats and smells and curses at his toil,—remember that as you do not know his depth neither do you know his height. He too might dream if the yoke of custom and law and dogma were broken from him. Even now you know not what blind, bound, motionless chrysalis is working there to prepare its winged thing.

Ask a method? Do you ask Spring her method? Which is more necessary, the sunshine or the rain? They are contradictory—yes; they destroy each other—yes, but from this destruction the flowers result.

Each choose that method which expresses your selfhood best, and condemn no other man because he expresses his Self otherwise.

Quotes from the named essay, found in Queering Anarchism:

Both anarchism and queer activism have long challenged anti-pleasure ideology. Through decades of social struggle, the two overlapping movements have come to share an embrace of the insurrectionary possibilities of pleasure, a rejection of social controls and formal hierarchies in favor of mutual aid networks and DIY community building, the use of direct action, and a culture of resistance. Pleasure activism manifests itself in any number of these cross currents.

Harm reduction has long been recognized as a movement with roots in anarchist direct action.

I think this author needs to define what they understand as "harm reduction," since there are a lot of liberals (and leftists) throwing this phrase around telling us that "voting for Biden" was an example of harm reduction (when it ostensibly was not). And I remember those ideas being floated in the early 2010s, too.

So if it's about genuine harm reduction by providing space for people to be safe while doing something that has the potential to hurt them (e.g., providing needle exchanges for intravenous drug users), that needs to be made more clear.

Such gestures of freedom are a fundamental part of anarchist practice. “You may already be an anarchist,” Crimethinc suggests. “Whenever you act without waiting for instructions or official permission, you are an anarchist. Any time you bypass a ridiculous regulation when no one’s looking, you are an anarchist. If you don’t trust the government, the school system, Hollywood, or the management to know better than you when it comes to things that affect your life, that’s anarchism, too. And you are especially an anarchist when you come with your own ideas and solutions."

I like this, but it feels disjointed from the beginning (mostly because there wasn't an explanation of what was intended by 'harm reduction', so that threw me).

To make sense of Scalia’s dissent, it is useful to look back to thirteenth-century Christian theology, specifically St. Thomas Aquinas’s categorization of “luxuria,” signifying crimes against nature in which masturbation signaled the beginning of a slippery slope leading to sodomy, adultery, and bestiality. For Aquinas and the rest of the “every sperm is sacred” crowd, masturbation is a sort of gateway pleasure, like marijuana is to heroin. It is not very dangerous in and of itself. Yet left to the active imagination, it is capable of opening doors to a vast arena of possibilities.

Over the years, this prohibitive logic only gained steam. The nineteenth-century Temperance Movement sought moral reform and the prohibition of the consumption of alcohol. The Eighteenth Amendment of the US Constitution was ratified in January of 1919. The era set in motion a cavalcade of unintended consequences as markets for alcohol consumption moved from legal, regulated commerce into the providence of an unregulated black market, which involved illegal approaches catering to market demand. Violence and crime followed. What did not occur, however, was the reduction of the consumption of alcohol. By 1933, the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed. Throughout the period, a queer public commons took shape in places, such as San Francisco, where prohibition was not enforced.

Intriguing. The connection between Prohibition and queerness in the US would be fun to explore.

Faced with increased attacks on social movements under the new administration, a number of groups fought back. The Black Panthers organized a food program to support their community in Oakland. The Young Lords, a Bronx-based direct action group of the same vein, organized a number of forward-thinking, audacious acts of direct action aimed at cultivating a more responsive system of public health for social outsiders. In 1970, the group took over Lincoln Hospital. The group’s list of demands included calls for Spanish-language translation for services, acupuncture to aid detox services, and a consumer bill of rights. Most would later become common practices and policy.

One of the early members of the Young Lords was Sylvia “Ray” Rivera, a leader in the transgender movement. Rivera was also a veteran of Gay Activist Alliance and the Street Trans Action Revolutionaries (STAR). Much of the gay liberation impulse shared common cause with the anarchism of the era. Pleasure activist Charles Shively described “indiscriminate promiscuity as an act of revolution.” Through this organizing, gay liberationists challenged the social system, rather than embrace marriage, militarism, and law and order social policies. Instead, the movement fought homophobia, sexphobia, and anti-pleasure ideology. It borrowed from Wilhelm Reich’s argument that anti-sex politics support the docile bodies linked to fascism as well as anti-sex ideology;[163] such thinking only fuels abstinence-oriented policies, sexualized and racial fear, prohibitive politics and disconnection from the body.

Throughout the period, activists came to build a movement around the recognition that abstinence is unsafe, repression unhealthy. As queer theorist Eve Sedgwick explained, “There is an ethical urgency about queer theory that is directed at the damage that sexual prohibitions and discriminations do to people.”

One of the primary activists involved with the early syringe exchange programs in New York was Greg Bordowitz, who worked with ACT UP’s syringe exchange committee. Bordowitz reveled in ACT UP’s ethos of pleasure. “Looking back on it now, it was a place you could have romance. Well, everybody was in love with everybody. There was this intense sense of comradeship and closeness. We were all brought together and felt close because of the meaningfulness of the work, and the fact that people were dying, and people in the group were getting sick. It created this feeling, a heightened intensity. Emotions were very powerful within the group, and they were on the surface of the group. Often people would cry in meetings, or people would get enraged in meetings. It was intense that way. And also, that fuels Eros. That fueled attraction that—people clung to each other, not necessarily in a desperate way, but people found comfort in each other. They enjoyed each other.” For members of ACT UP, pleasure was a resource.

Yet over the years, syringe exchange programs would increasingly become entwined with departments of health, funding, and the pitfalls of the nonprofit industrial complex. Today much of harm reduction is about evidence:

• Science
• Linear thinking
• Positivism
• Collaboration with health departments
• Service provision and struggles—against co-optation
• Funding

But where did the pleasure go? The plenary of the ninth Social Research Conference on HIV, Hepatitis C and Related Diseases, Australia, 2006, was titled: StigmaPleasurePractice. Here participants asked, “Why is it difficult to consider pleasure in drug policy and practice? What are the consequences for practice? How might a greater focus on the pleasures of drugs invigorate harm reduction?”

I genuinely feel like... all of this is what happens the moment the State, non-profits (sometimes acting on behalf of the State but also formed under the auspices of the State), and academia get involved. They drain the energy and relocate everything to somewhere else, meaning the core values and messages are distorted.

And there's just a lot of assimilation that takes place, too.

To start the process, it is useful to reconsider the ways direct action practices inform movements for social and sexual freedom, including anarchism, sexual civil liberties activism, and by extension harm reduction. “I joined Sex Panic! because there’s no group making the same connections between the renewed sexual repression of the past several decades,” explained Chris Farrell in 1998. “The failure of the left to identify pleasure as a political principle worth fighting for does a lot to explain the moribund state of progressive politics.” Here Farrell calls for the activists to “return sexual pleasure to the progressive agenda....Until the left learns the function of the orgasm, our fight against repression is doomed.”

Throughout the movement, leaders such as housing works co-founder Keith Cylar, helped keep the expression of pleasure as an integral component of harm reduction. Squatter Louis Jones started Stand Up Harlem within the same spirit of anarchism. “That to me felt so incredible. You talk about emotions. I just felt such pleasure. Everyone thinks about pleasure in terms of decadence, but there was more to it than that. I was moved…It brought fulfillment. I felt animated. We were living together, sleeping together, and working for change.” Yet, more to it, “[u]sing was dying with dignity—with dignity because it was my choice. No one was making it for me. I took a stand for those I knew who chose drugs when they were facing death.” Jones recognized that when facing death, there were those who “would want to cop in the midst of all that pain.” He explained: “For some it was just to get that old familiar, this old feeling, relationship, lover, what have you. This pain relief that the doctor might not give or it might not be enough. It was on your own terms. The liberty was what I was elated about—the choice without shame. That was what I was doing.”

Building on these lessons, one can come to see components of an agenda for pleasure, care, and just human relations. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud rejected Puritan mores by suggesting that everyone has some form of perversion in them. There is no shame in it. This is part of being human. Yet shame exists and causes harm. To do away with shame and the repression it fuels, pleasure activists push to transform the social order. Yet, to be effective, the process must include a respect for self-determination, choice, and pleasure. If we do not acknowledge the importance of pleasure, we risk mirroring the prohibitive politics we reject. Without justice, there can be no pleasure. After all, what we are protecting is a right to social imagination that rejects both paternalism and positivism, while opening spaces for alternative social relations and ways of embracing experience outside the realm of the rational experience. The failure of the political left to articulate a pro-pleasure argument is nothing short of a failure of the political imagination. It leaves a huge void to be occupied by moralists. There is another route—one built through practices in pleasure, justice, and freedom.

Quotes from the named essay in Queering Anarchism:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes from the named essay in Queering Anarchism:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: The RQSP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps. This is something to consider.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes from the titled essay in Queering Anarchism:

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

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

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

Us or them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes from the named essay in Queering Anarchism:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes from this article:

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

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

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