Research

From this book:

Introduction (Josh MacPhee)

There is no doubt that advertising is a form of pollution and corporations are shitting in our heads. It is one of the main social forces that convince us that the status quo is both natural and inevitable and that nothing can be done to change it. More than the messaging of any particular billboard, subway poster, or corporate commercial wrapping a city bus, the overarching ideology of advertising is that the best—and increasingly only—use for any form of shared space is as a conveyor belt bringing us from one point of purchase to another. A walk through Times Square in New York City exposes how dystopian this can get. Even the ground and sky are littered with messaging, with advertising cacophony taking over more than two-thirds of what the eye can see, never mind sound, smell, and physical encroachments. It’s not a huge leap to image that as things continue on their current trajectory, much of our world will look and feel like this.

This. It's hard to avoid, even in places where there are so few obvious billboards. It's sneaked into tiny alcoves and the backs of seats; it's plastered on the sides of trams and buses, making it even more difficult to find the doors.

I often use the term “shared” space instead of the more popular “public” because it is time we interrogate our dependence on the binary conception of public vs. private. First, it’s increasingly foggy as to what is public and what is private anymore. Almost all space is privatized to some extent. In addition, what does public actually mean? A public is a group of people with shared beliefs and ideology. But if you attempt to unpack what everyone sharing a common space have in common, it is that they are all subjects of an external sovereign, the state. In the twenty-first century, public space is space managed by the state. And most people on our planet live in contexts where they have little to no control over the state, and the apparatus that administers our lives is increasingly unaccountable to the subjects it supposedly represents. So public no longer means what it is commonly understood to mean. How can public space be public if it is almost wholly constituted by a power beyond our reach and control?

I've also found that I don't like the terminology around 'public' and 'private', especially as it forms a false dichotomy within people's thoughts. You see this in discussions around schooling, where people will hold something that is 'public' (though still managed and dictated by the State) as being better than that which is 'private', even if the goals are the same or shared while the managers appear to be different.

In the early 2000s, street art deftly moved from being an interesting and quirky form of opening up space to think and wonder on the street—What is that pink elephant doing there? How come everywhere I look it says, “You Are Beautiful?”—to just another way of advertising. Whether by artists looking for a shortcut to gallery careers or corporations mimicking and recuperating “street” aesthetics, the need to lead the viewer to a commercial exchange hollows out any other possible interpretation of the work.

This is something that I also noticed when it came to cities hiring 'street artists' to create murals. While it was pleasant to see that these artists who had so much talent were being asked to create for the places they lived in, it should've started prompting questions: What messages are they sending? What messages are in their work? What is the city going to allow in this space? What is going to be "acceptable" street art?

I love street art, and I love murals. But it's increasingly common for them to be beautiful co-opted artworks rather than the subversive elements they once were.

Subvertising is no different. We are so trained by years of looking at our commercialized landscape, that it’s likely most people read hacked ads as the real thing, and fail to fully process any detournement. This is especially true for hacks that mimic the design, aesthetic, and logotypes of the original. When a company like McDonald’s has invested billions of dollars over a seventy-year stretch to ensure that their golden arches mean very specific things, it seems woefully naive to think that a comparative handful of “McMurder” subvertising exploits could ever affect the dominant reading. More likely viewers of a McMurder or Murder King T-shirt simply get a subconscious urge to eat French fries.

I'm glad that this is something that is going to be dealt with straight away because, while I love subvertised things, it does have the opposite impact because we're so trained into seeing these things as they originally were. We see the shapes, we see the colours, we lose the message.

Although extremely simple in form and seemingly contentless, his refusal to replace the advertisements with other direct messaging—be it called art or not—may ultimately say more than any didactic ad hack can.

This is something that I've noticed as being an interesting way of saying something and nothing at the same time. Even if the space is blank or filled with shapes, you can still make it aesthetically pleasing enough that people don't miss what was there; it definitely does a bit more than replacing something with something similar.

Overnight they [StopPub] completely defaced and destroyed advertisements throughout the [Paris Metro] system, obliterating corporate messaging from many stations all together. Unlike Seiler’s more genteel and nuanced critique, there was no possibility of confusion here: all advertising must be destroyed.

Destruction also sends a very loud and clear message.

Chapter 1: PR-opaganda

(Note: This book needs to play with font casing to make their jokes more clear. I thought it was an accident that there was a hyphen instead of trying to highlight that PR and Propaganda come from the same space and are effectively the same thing.)

Chapter starts with quoting liberally from this post and this website, which I want to read. It also focuses on Edward Bernays and public relations/propaganda.

Indeed, for Bernays, the conspicuous manipulation of the masses by means of propaganda was seen not just as inevitable and benign, but important and necessary. It is a claim that rests on the idea that the mass of people—the public—are dangerous when left to their own devices, but also that certain individuals—and only these individuals—are talented enough to guide the rest. Where subvertising activists posit outdoor advertising as undemocratic (in that there is no collective control over it), Bernays suggests that public relations are vital part of a democratic society.

They go one to show that Bernays had a deeply different understanding of democracy, whether or not it made sense; effectively, he said that in order to have an democratic society, people needed to be manipulated into specific behaviours. Which would indicate that society isn't actually democratic (in common understanding of the term) if people are being manipulated into making decisions, which eliminates the freedom they have.

For Bernays, a smoothly functioning society was one marshaled around consumption; he viewed the American way of life and the capitalist system of production as completely entwined. Though he occasionally uses examples of other ways that propaganda can be used, Bernays has a special place for propaganda that promotes what he claims to be the civilising influence of capitalism. He also argues that good advertising is not simply propaganda for an individual product, or even for an individual company, but for the entire system of consumption.

This should, then, be worrisome for a lot of us in how advertising influences our decisions. And honestly, it should be part of the consideration when radical organisations participate in the same strategies and systems. Even if they aren't inherently good or bad, even if they are innately neutral, we should at least still be thinking about how we use those tools and whether or not we're building a way for people to break out of them.

It’s not that propaganda, public relations, outdoor advertising, or the intersections of all three are inherently evil. It’s just that the system of production they have been so adept at promoting throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is responsible for economic crises, resource wars, widening inequality, and, perhaps most alarmingly, environmental destruction on a global scale.

Chapter 2: Advertising Shits in Your Head

Chapter starts off discussing this article and Special Patrol Group's Ad Hack Manifesto. It also mentions this interview with Darren Cullen.

Perhaps one reason a comparison with pollution is apt is the way that advertising can accumulate in the environment—a sort of commercial clutter. And it is as background environmental accumulation that advertising can be most harmful.

If this happens in a visual medium, which often tends to be more passive in the day-to-day (unless something catches our attention and we focus on it)... Then what about other somewhat passive media? Listening? Sometimes browsing the internet and reading email? Twitter? How does it fit there?

More names mentioned: JK Galbraith (The Affluent Society) and researchers Benedetto Molinari and Francesco Turino.

Advertising may be exceptionally adept at creating needs, but it is singularly bad at meeting them, at making good on its promises. Critics claim that unsatisfied needs are a cause of unhappiness. Furthermore, they posit a new form of cyclical consumerism that follows the “I eat because I’m unhappy” model: the more anxious and depressed we are, the more we must consume; the more we consume, the more anxious and depressed we become.

Chapter ends with a quote from the 'left-leaning' think-tank Compass. (Just by looking at the cover of the report, I'm curious to see how a 'left-leaning' think-tanks wants to "get the balance right" with advertising.)

Chapter 3: Society's Story

Chapter starts with a quote from Louis Wirth from this lecture.

Advertisers like to profess that advertising only reflects existing cultural values, that their ads merely hold a mirror up to the world—any horror we might see was already there anyway. While this is undoubtedly true in one sense, subvertisers argue it’s the emphasis advertisers place on certain of these innate values over others that’s harmful. Again, the advertisers’ assertion to the public that they have no real influence appears to be at odds with the claims they make to their clients.

If advertisers want to make that claim, they're wrong. Anyone should be able to recognise that advertisers can and should interrupt these harmful values, but they choose not to for the sake of continued relationships and profit. Advertising is one of the most lucrative industries. Yet advertisers seem content to let companies get away with any harmful values rather than put a stop to it, when they could.

They are center stage with options that they choose to never use.

Jordan Seiler points out that the stories that are told by those interests are rarely, if ever, some “of our more interesting goals for ourselves as a society, like community, taking care of our children correctly and education.”

The cited location for that quote was unavailable, but I accidentally found this article from 2021 and this one from 2020.

Continues to reference other websites, such as this one. And more accidental finds include this set of interviews (by one of the authors).

This book feels like it's giving me more work to hunt stuff down rather than more information in one place.

Studies have shown that placing greater emphasis on extrinsic values is associated with higher levels of prejudice, less concern about the environment and weak concern about human rights. The values displayed in advertising reflect the values of those creating advertising: the economic elite. It is perhaps not surprising that most advertising is designed to appeal to extrinsic values. As subvertisers point out, that should be of concern to anyone who wants to promote anything other than individualistic consumption, because our values influence our behaviours.

A further cause for concern is that these values work in opposition: if a person has strongly held extrinsic values, this will diminish their regard for intrinsic values and vice-versa. Not only do advertisements place an emphasis on extrinsic values, but by repeatedly emphasising those values, it serves to strengthen them. Again, we don’t even need to be persuaded to buy the product: simply by seeing messages with extrinsic values emphasised, we can subconsciously buy into those values.

I'm curious as to how correct this is or how this kind of study was done. In saying this, it's pertinent to mention that the book also references this study.

Chapter 4: Rights to the City

Chapter starts off quoting from this article.

One member of the Special Patrol Group (SPG) tells a story about one of the first times they went out to do ad takeovers on the London Underground. As they were slotting a subvert over the original ad in an ad space, a commuter interjected and blustered at them: “You want arresting! Why don’t you just pay for your advertising, like everyone else?” It serves to neatly illustrate both the perceived sanctity of the private nature of these public spaces—that anyone interfering with them should be arrested—and also the misconception that these spaces are somehow open to all. The reason the SPG were subvertising is because not everyone can afford to access those spaces.

I don't think people realise how inaccessible and unaffordable those advertising slots are. They are really expensive, and they often require already established relationships to access them (especially the better ones).

Like, putting up posters is illegal in some places, which makes no sense. Why should we not be able to put up posters? Why should we be banned from putting up stickers? How do those make places worse than McDonald's ads?

There is no such thing as a free bench.

Partially taken from here.

Goes on to talk about Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey and the right to the city.

Chapter 5: Bani-shit

In 2015, Grenoble, France, became the first city in Europe to ban outdoor advertising; 326 advertising spaces were replaced with community noticeboards and trees. The mayor’s office stated it was “taking the choice of freeing public space in Grenoble from advertising to develop areas for public expression” (perhaps an explicit reference to a right to the city?).

While helpful, what are the regulations and structures around what can be published on those boards? Are there people or institutions who take control of them? We have "public" boards where I am, but they require express permission of people who have keys. They are routinely graffitied because of how absolutely pointless they are, for they refuse to host anything beyond city publications.

So I have to ask whether or not Grenoble genuinely provides an "explicit reference to a right to the city" in their views, values, and policies. Because not all cities do this, and it's a worry that people should have when the State (or elements of it, such as local and district governments) start making these decisions.

At first glance it may appear that advertising bans are a positive step, but academic Kurt Iveson questions the rationale for them. Though some activists may see their work as anti-authoritarian, he claims the cities that have introduced bans may be doing so in order to reassert the dominance of the state. He suggests a ceremonial normative model of public space, which privileges civic order above private commercial interests, but also views the public as a passive audience for “ceremonial, monumental and architectural displays, which might exercise a civilising influence.” State-led advertising bans are concerned with “the aesthetic integrity of the public realm… rather than its democratic accessibility.”

And there it is. We should be questioning the authoritarianism behind city bans. (This is also one of the softest ways of putting it. Even my mild concern was harder hitting.)

He also questions the motives behind the bans, and points out the ban in São Paulo has only been partial: at the same time as the Clean City Law was introduced, the city signed a contract with JCDecaux to provide advertising-funded bus shelters. By eliminating the haphazard clutter of billboard advertising, it’s entirely possible that the Clean City Law will benefit the companies that hold a monopoly on advertising infrastructure, which is slowly being reintroduced in a “controlled manner.” This effectively eliminates the competition and means that a few big companies are once again allowed to dominate.

And there it is, too. If you ban it, you can reintroduce it in a controlled manner.

Everything here comes from this zine:

Introduction

The maintenance of this world depends on the interalization of the former, and the total suppression of the latter. This suppression comes in many obvious forms: arrests, raids, grand juries, informants, snitches, CCTV, cut wages, firing, conspiracy charges, solitary confinement, eviction. But the suppression of revolutionary violence requires much more than jails and police, it requires an ideological veil to mask the very existence of that violence.

The former: Violence against everyone that is enacted on the daily, that limits our freedom and hinders our liberation. (Examples given include: Gay bashing and direct violence against queer folks, rape and sexual assault, bureaucracy, mandatory work, lack of healthcare, landlordism, and the prison industrial complex.)

The latter: Violence that liberates people. (Examples: A murdered homophobe, expropriated food, riots behind bars, work avoidance, and squatting.)

How many times must dead martyrs be pulled from their graves and paraded before our eyes? How many new phrases can the leftist filth develop in their attempts to convince us that this-or-that group is inherently peaceful, loving, passive? How many times must our experiences, our very lives, be used to silence revolt, to justify police action, to prove that violence is “privileged” and “fucked up?”

All of these questions are things we still need to grapple with, honestly. I am tired of seeing martyrs (old and new) being dragged around and their memory being smashed into pieces as we fail to do anything that would get us closer to any of the liberatory goals they may have had. I am tired of seeing martyrs being made out of people who should've been left the fuck alone to live rather than die to police brutality and state violence.

I'm also tired of the constant desire to frame everything as peaceful in order to be accepted. Who cares if something is peaceful when everything done to us is perpetual violence? For a long time, I've not been able to care. I still don't. I'm tired of civility, of respectability politics, of doing everything to look like the "good guy" (and being labeled as heinous things) while it's clear who the villains really are.

Until the last rapist is hung with the guts of the last frat boy

My favourite sign off ever.

Anarcha-Feminists Take to the Streets

Movements that we are the most proud of in our left histories – Black Power, Queer Liberation, Women’s Liberation, etc. – were quite literally crafting a future reality that looked very promising. As these movements crumbled or weakened we can see how aspects of these struggles that lacked a critique of authoritarian (and especially State) power fell into the arms of liberalism. Liberalism assumes and maintains the delusion that a government or any kind of higher power is necessary and responsible for looking after us, to ensure that all is peaceful and equal.

I still think one of the most obvious movements in my lifetime has been that of assimilationist politics poised as left politics (e.g., marriage equality). A lot of distraction into goals that not everyone shared (marriage) and away from things that would've liberated everyone (de-privileging marriage in the many different ways it exists).

That wouldn't have been it by itself, but the desire of (mostly middle-class and/or property-owning) queer folks to assimilate into traditional society has not helped many of us (those who do not wish to get married, those who cannot get married, those who have nothing, those who are migrants, etc).

And so identity politics entered the scene, stage Left. Post-colonial, feminist, and especially queer politics that once fought for autonomous power distinct from normative society became a sad shadow of its formal self as they became a politic about recognition within society, which made these movements dependent on the structures responsible for their unique tribulations.

Identity politics are one of the most infuriating things because they are necessary in order for us to be able to fully analyse and discuss situations, but they have been so thoroughly co-opted by people seeking to put us back under state control. Liberals want everyone to diversify for recognition and representation, which aren't inherently awful goals. But who cares if the cop arresting someone is a cis white man or a trans Black woman? That isn't useful representation.

We do not want a feminism that looks like a social worker behind a desk with concerned eyebrows. We want a feminism that stays up late at the kitchen table convincing us that we deserve better. We do not want a feminism that will put us up in a run down state shelter for a short while until we’re “back on our feet.” We want a feminism that will break back into our house we were just kicked out of and tell the land lord he’ll have hell to pay from a mob of angry bitches if he attempts eviction again.

This and this:

And when one of us is raped and murdered for our gender we definitely do not want more empty calls for “justice” and quiet candle-lit vigils. We want a feminism that acts from a much wider range of emotion and expectation. We want a visible expression of exasperation, anger, and frustration that makes obvious that we are finished with these routines: the routines of violence against women and queer people, the routines of quietly shaking our heads at these tragedies, the routines of asking for change. We want a feminism that is not afraid to try new things, that is dynamic enough to know that at times healing comes in the form of vengeance and change comes in the form of destroying what destroys you.

No one got anywhere by being polite, by being civil, by playing the game of respectability politics.

Great ruptures and new worlds are in store, but we can not be passive spectators in creating our new selves. Kill the liberal in your head. There are no excuses now for not exchanging numbers, saying hello on the street and building relationships where we plan, scheme, and push each other out of victim-hood by being the toughest comrades possible in our common struggles and, perhaps more importantly, in our uncommon struggles.

Safety is an Illusion: Reflections on Accountability

Except I don’t believe in accountability anymore. It should be noted that my anger and hopelessness about the current model is proportional to how invested I’ve been in the past. Accountability feels like a bitter ex-lover to me and I don’t have any of those... the past 10 years I really tried to make the relationship work but you know what?

There is no such thing as accountability within radical communities because there is no such thing as community - not when it comes to sexual assault and abuse. Take an honest survey sometime and you will find that we don’t agree. There is no consensus. Community in this context is a mythical, frequently invoked and much misused term. I don’t want to be invested in it anymore.

This is also very true of people who wave flags of their marginalisation, hoping to escape the harm they've done. When someone partners with fascists and then immediately highlights that they're "a gay Asian man" (play a game of 'guess the far-right provocateur')? They are not in community with queer people; they are not in community with Asian people. They are not in community with anyone (except, perhaps, their fellow grifters and fascists). They are using their identity as a shield from consequences; they are claiming a community they have left for dead to avoid accountability.

I miss the days when it was considered reasonable to simply kick the living shit out of people and put them on the next train out of town - at least that exchange was clear and honest. I have spent too much time with both survivors and perpetrators drowning in a deluge of words that didn’t lead to healing or even fucking catharsis.

This is something that I've constantly hated about, for instance, structures of punishment in schools that claim some kind of humanism. It's a both-sides model, and it always harms the victim more than the perpetrator.

Ostracisation works, and we need to stop pretending it doesn't.

I am sick of the language of accountability being used to create mutually exclusive categories of “fucked up” and “wronged.” I find the language of “survivor” and “perp” offensive because it does not lay bare all the ways in which abuse is a dynamic between parties

This should be more clear for a lot of people who claim to fight misogyny after the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial. We saw this exact fucking dynamic, and we've seen it long before that trial ever happened.

Anarchists are not immune to dynamics of abuse - that much we can all agree on - but I have come to realize more and more that we cannot keep each other safe. Teaching models of mutual working consent is a good start, but it will never be enough: socialization of gender, monogamy - the lies of exclusivity and the appeal of “love” as propriety are too strong. People seek out these levels of intensity when the love affair is new, when that obsessive intimacy feels good and then don’t know how to negotiate soured affection.

That’s the thing about patriarchy: it’s fucking pervasive; and that’s the thing about being an anarchist or trying to live free, fierce, and without apology: none of it keeps you safe from violence. There is no space we can create in a world as damaged as the one we live in which is absent from violence. That we even think it is possible says more about our privilege than anything else. Our only autonomy lies in how we negotiate and use power and violence ourselves.

I have no words to add because this whole section is just spot on. As is this:

I really want to emphasize: there is no such thing as safe space under patriarchy or capitalism in light of all the sexist, hetero-normative, racist, classist (etc) domination that we live under. The more we try and pretend safety can exist at a community level, the more disappointed and betrayed our friends and lovers will be when they experience violence and do not get supported. Right now we’ve been talking a good game but the results are not adding up.

There's a reason a lot of multiply marginalised people continually keep getting stuck with this kind of work, too. There's a reason that we feel like we're constantly the ones cleaning up after everyone else, and it's largely because we are. We're not doing the work to ensure everyone's safety because we're also not doing the work to unlearn anything.

Accountability processes encourage triangulation instead of direct communication, and because conflict is not pushed, most honest communication is avoided. Direct confrontation is good! Avoiding it doesn’t allow for new understandings, cathartic release, or the eventual forgiveness that person-to-person exchanges can lead to.

Even when that's what someone has asked for, this often gets denied because other people "know better" and try to convince survivors/victims that they're being impulsive.

And especially this:

We have set up a model where all parties are encouraged to simply negotiate how they never have to see each other again or share space. Some impossible demands/promises are meted out and in the name of confidentiality, lines are drawn in the sand on the basis of generalities. Deal with your shit but you can’t talk about the specifics of what went down and you can’t talk to each other. The current model actually creates more silence: only a specialized few are offered information about what happened but everyone is still expected to pass judgment. There is little transparency in these processes.

There are so many times where I've watched organisations do exactly this. I've watched a branch of the IWW literally allow an abuser to continue working with them, even while the survivor was there. And they kept building walls to make sure they didn't work together. Rather than, y'know, kicking his ass to the curb.

The whole accountability process of that specific event was convoluted, too. It was confusing. No one knew how to handle anything because it wasn't clear. It was also never clear that the survivor wanted that kind of accountability process; it was just what was offered because that's what had been established as "being safe," and she didn't know how to fight back against that at the same time.

I’ve seen these processes divide a lot of scenes but I haven’t seen them help people get support, retake power, or feel safe again.

More times than I can count. And when I've seen people trying to deal with shit directly? And try to make stuff clear? They get silenced hard while the person who abused them gets a platform.

In the case of sexual assault I think retaliatory violence is appropriate, and I don’t think there needs to be any kind of consensus about it. Pushing models that promise to mediate instead of allow confrontation is isolating and alienating. I didn’t want mediation through legal channels or any other. I wanted revenge. I wanted to make him feel as out of control, scared, and vulnerable as he had made me feel. There is no safety really after a sexual assault, but there can be consequences.

And sometimes people need to feel the consequences of their actions.

The past few years I have watched with horror as the language of accountability became an easy front for a new generation of emotional manipulators. It’s been used to perfect a new kind of predatory maverick - the one schooled in the language of sensitivity, using the illusion of accountability as community currency.

Again, I'm reminded of this episode of The Fire These Times that Joey Ayoub did with Chuck Derry about the risks of psychologising Patriarch Oppression.

In it, Derry discussed that though the work he thought he was doing was initially helpful, he realised that he'd been giving abusive men more ways to manipulate their partners.

If someone hurts you and you want to hurt them back, then do it but don’t pretend it’s about mutual healing. Call power exchange for what it is. It’s OK to want power back and it’s OK to take it, but never do anything to someone else that you couldn’t stomach having someone do to you if the tables were turned.

This is how I often think about the ways in which I deal with things; it's also how I tend to reflect upon whether or not I do something to start. It's imperfect, but it has been really helpful to me.

Those inclined to use physical brutality to gain power need to be taught a lesson in a language they will understand: the language of physical violence. Those mired in unhealthy relationships need help examining a mutual dynamic and getting out of it, not assigning blame. No one can decide who deserves compassion and who doesn’t except the people directly involved.

This.

I want us to be honest about being at war - with ourselves, with our lovers and with our “radical” community - because we are at war with the world at large and those tendrils of domination exist within us and they affect so much of what we touch, who we love, and those we hurt.

This very concept is why it is so necessary that we spend a lot of our time unlearning these things, that we start seeing the harm we perpetuate in the ways we behave and the structures we support. If we don't do that, we're going to keep recreating the same issues under new systems. Will they look somewhat different? Yes. But they will still engage in many of the same harms.

Notes on Survivor Autonomy and Violence

There is a peculiar sort of discourse which surrounds the issue of accountability in anarchist or otherwise “radical” circles - one that takes for granted that anarchist men should receive treatment distinct from other men. When, in the anarchist milieu, a man sexually assaults a woman, the surrounding community will often engage in a process designed to hold the man accountable for his actions; in the name of “restorative justice” or a “safer” community, with the intent of keeping the individual from doing it again.

My contempt isn’t for any one of these goals, but rather for the idea that seems to regularly accompany them, being that - as opposed to non-anarchist men - anarchist men who commit sexual violence should first be approached from a standpoint of community repair. Whereas with other men, the knee-jerk reaction of many women (anarchist/radical or otherwise, but let’s here focus on the former) to these offenses would likely involve something resulting in hospitalization on the man’s part, anarchists are somehow given the benefit of the doubt, the opportunity to “work on their shit.” That is, after an assault takes place (quixotically and rather disturbingly, prior to such an offense, it seems, the subject is rarely directly broached, its importance rarely emphasized).

While noble, this is also somewhat paradoxical - if anything, shouldn’t men in these communities be held to a more immediate standard, given their implicit allegiance to certain ideals off the bat, and their (unfortunately, often falsely) assumed understanding and critique of capitalist patriarchy and its functions? Shouldn’t men in these communities be even more detested for falsely displaying comradeship for, and then afterwards still expecting it from, the survivors of their actions?

The answers are... yes and yes. If you profess to hold certain ideals and you work against them, you deserve to be held to a far higher standard.

That is to say: if his twisted understanding of anarchism (or any other radical or revolutionary politics) involves or excuses sexual assault, why does anyone owe him anything? Why then give him the benefit of the ideal?

We should not.

And if we do not believe that anarchist men have a better understanding of gender oppression than other men – that there is adequate basis for such an assumption – why the hell do we put up with them in our communities in the first place? To put it tritely, something has got to give. Our continued insistence on accountability neglects the fact that a shared politic should function as the bearer of that information and consequence before the assault takes place – and from there, step two should be as with any other man who commits sexual assault, wherein the perpetrator faces the same unpleasant consequences.

The fact that this even needs to be repeated a dozen times over is depressing, but it's correct.

What concerns me is what seems to be the automatic tendency towards one reaction versus another. What concerns me is the possibly cultivated mentality that these anarchist men, whose presence in a community would ideally be a self-evident assurance of their ability to keep themselves from raping women they claim to respect, should be given a special second chance that their very participation in the community should waive.

THIS. There is such little recognition that there are more options for responding. And why is it that we continually allow people claiming to be anarchists access to space where they engage in harmful behaviours toward other people?

To be certain, we are all guilty of indirectly/unintentionally perpetuating systems of oppression through subtle socialized behavior, and to this, a different response is perhaps warranted. Maybe this is the line between issues of language or social behavior and issues of direct physical attack. Maybe it’s the line between a naïve misunderstanding and the refusal to give half a fuck. But an outright act of physical violence deserves no such understanding. An intentional or even malicious disregard for consent doesn’t merit a conversation.

Okay, this is so good that I need to steal part of it to quote elsewhere.

Sexual assault and rape are not things that just happen. They are not merely individual transgressions. These acts are political – intentional perpetuations of a system of domination; a system which subordinates women on every level; a system which is always violent, hostile, and manipulative; a system which cannot be addressed by “fixing” individual perpetrators on a philosophical level and then welcoming them back into the arms of the community they attacked. And it was never just an attack, but always a deliberate reinforcement of patriarchal oppression. These systems necessitate self-defense as material as the manifestations it confronts.

This is one of the things that people need to grasp, and they needed to grasp it a thousand years ago (but I'll settle for today). Rape has always been a political act; it has always been an act of power. It has never been something that was just "Whoops, I didn't mean to" because even the "I didn't know" people should be able to read the room and recognise some form of discomfort (meaning that if you are of this group, you need to be working harder to stop your own actions and check in on the other person). Anyone passing that around needs to be pushed out of movement spaces immediately, especially if they're so hung up on basic fucking consent discussions. Red flags.

And what of revenge? A humanist critique posits that such a motivation is unhealthy or even illegitimate, and concepts of restorative justice follow suit. Perhaps revenge is even the opposite of accountability. But when we break windows, or advocate general/human strike, are we holding capital accountable, or enacting revenge upon it? In reaction to the constant attack of capitalist domination, aren’t all political actions ideally vengeful?

Our understanding of revenge is so fucked, and this is such a good set of questions to be thinking about it.

It has been said that, regardless of circumstance, violence is simply not the way to deal with conflicts “within the community”. Leaving aside for a moment the terrible nature of a community that clings to the performance of cohesion for the sake of its rapists’ safety, we must also be driven to analyze the role of honesty in our responses to these situations. Is it more honest, more direct, more real, to enact a visceral physical response – even revenge – or to engage in a lengthy pseudo-judicial “process”?

This is speaking the things I couldn't articulate in my own personal discomfort with these processes.

It's also reminding me a lot of a video that was done about Vernal Faux Kin (anagram to protect against possible searches). He participated, along with some of his victims, in an accountability process that... seemed to have gone nowhere. He still continued harming them, and he still has space within the polyam community (as much as it can be considered a community -- I have disagreements with this framing of community). Mediation did not solve anything; mediation still leaves him there to harm people.

Mediation has enabled him to better understand how to harm them, even if it's not directly.

And this is something that is rarely discussed. We focus so much effort on these liberal ideas of accountability that we end up doing so little to ensure that people are safe in as many spaces as we can.

Most accountability processes force a violent perpetrator to “work on” his existence as male, his performance of masculinity. They aim to persuade him to adjust his role as a man. But patriarchy can only exist so long as it is performed - that is, so long as the role of the man is fulfilled. What we want, quite simply – as for with any other determinate role imposed by and in the service of capital – is for it to be destroyed.

THIS. This is it.

Dysphoria Means Total Destroy

This conflict between actual and impossible does not exist in a vacuum, but exists precisely because of the naming-constructing-creating that is this world. The world creates its own impossibilities by its incessant productive categorization, as nothing fits its own definition. Everything is perpetually scratching at the walls, blindly, without any purpose. The intolerability that surrounds everything is also a graininess in everything. The border reveals itself as not one but two, a pair of overlapping shadows. The impossible existing and the longed-for nonexistent intersect here. While this graininess exists everywhere, dysphoria marks where this graininess comes into conflict with gender, and by extension the world and our constitution as subjects. Beyond not fitting the category we were assigned (I am not-this), it is our continually failing to be (I am not-that). This is where the rhetoric of the liberal transfeminist fails. I wasn’t born this way, and I can’t ever be either. Not-this would imply that dysphoria has a similarity with despair, sharing the commonality of something else one could hope for. The not-that both stands in for and precludes that hope.

An Insurrectional Practice Against Gender: Considerations on Resonance, Memory, and Attack

I wish I could tell you that I became numb to the pain after all these years, but the news of the murder of another trans woman punches me in the gut every time it reaches me. Upon discovering details of Deoni Jones’s murder, I’m left gasping for air and for the words or actions to express my total hatred for the society that produces the rhythms of gender-maintaining violence and mourning that have come to characterize the only rhythm that is audible to those of us seeking a way out of gender’s terrible song.

This is a fucking gut punch of a beginning. Really good.

I fear this essay is nothing but another of those futile attempts. So many of us have tried these means and more to manage the crushing pain of gender in isolation, but there is nothing we could do short of collectively interrupting this rhythm and destroying gender in its entirety that will ease our heavy hearts.

I feel this reverberating through my bones.

There are certain practices that exist in the ways in which self-proclaimed “radical trans” people and “anarcha-feminists” of certain activist subcultures have set into motion in response to the question of gender. These include consent workshops, “trans 101”s, consent zines/workshops, and callouts of “fucked up” behavior internal to their subculture, in addition to dance parties and orgies. There is certainly nothing inherently wrong with any of these things, but if we take seriously the notion that we must destroy gender and all social relations of this society, there is clearly something lacking in the practice which only challenges gender at a level of language use and subcultural dynamics. If we abandon the leftist-activist model and accept the charge that “revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination, but by resonance” and writing that has further elaborated this thesis of an insurrectional music, we come to an understanding that there are at the very least a number of problems with thinking that these isolated methods alone could build a force to destroy gender. Such a practice falls short at both directly addressing the material manifestations of gender violence as well as creating practices that will resonate with the unthinkable pain we carry deep in our bodies. We must build a rhythm of struggle which resonates in our bodies and builds the links between attack, memory, and the gender terror we experience in daily life.

This so much. We need it.

It is simple enough to begin a discussion of insurrectional strategy with the notion of the attack. Yet many confuse this process with merely smashing a random bank and writing a communiqué telling the cops to fuck off. Of course, I’m not interested in condemning such a practice, I’m merely more interested in examining the ways in which various notions and methods of attack are positioned in relation to our memory and all of the emotions that have built up over time due to all of the gender violence we’ve endured. While it’s easy enough to mock candlelight vigils or the Trans Day of Remembrance, these moments function to create a continuity and rhythm of memory in relation to trans violence that many radical approaches to gender fail to do.

Paired with:

This is the rhythm of our memory and our collective fear and misery, which repeats with every murder, vigil, and Trans Day of Remembrance. An insurrectional practice which attacks the foundations of gender must also utilize the rhythms of memory and emotion, but toward the end of breaking the ideology of victimization and passivity that the former practices maintain.

Because it is easy to see these as lip service, and they often can be. But they are also memory, and we need that.

If we are to build a rhythm of bashing back, we must be steadfast in refusing to let the death of a trans woman go unnoticed. We must impose our own powerful rhythm, identifying the nodes of gender policing and violence in our local terrain of struggle and exacting our vengeance upon them, displacing the rhythms of fear, victimization, and empty gestures that continue to characterize current anarchist, feminist, or trans-activist responses to gender violence. Through connecting the terrain of our daily life to cycles of the struggle against gender violence, we make material our resistance and leave a material mark of our refusal of victimhood. If this practice is to resonate we must steadily build this rhythm and refuse to allow anyone to ignore the multiplication of trans death all around us, by means of media sabotage, graffiti, or a variety of other methods.

Article comes from here:

Though using the term ‘Dual Power’ to refer to such tactics appears sporadically in the 1990s (in the material of the group Love and Rage, for example), it’s unclear how exactly the association became so widely popularised over the last few years. What is clear is that this conception of Dual Power has nothing in common with the original usage, coined by Lenin, as a means of describing a condition of revolutionary potential.

Important as a reminder that Love & Rage had a factional split due to Chris Day and his tendency towards why anarchism has failed and promoting authoritarian ideas.

But I do need to come back to this one day, which is where Dual Power is mentioned in a guiding document.

Real dual power is inherently unstable, given it represents an active threat to the power of governments and capitalists. In both the Russian and Spanish cases, the circumstances of dual power were ended by inevitable confrontations. In Russia the Provisional Government was overthrown in favour of an increasingly authoritarian Bolshevik government (initially legitimised under the banner of ‘all power to the soviets’). In Spain the revolutionary committees, having failed to smash the State beyond repair, or fully socialise production, were subsumed by the Popular Front, and eventually crushed by a liberal-Stalinist coalition within the Republican government they had helped revive.

Like Proudhon, and contrary to the revolutionary anarchist view, the proponents of Dual Power argue that we can improve our position under capitalism, and ultimately achieve anarchy, by cobbling together whatever resources we can muster and managing them in an autonomous, cooperative manner. In practice, this would mean the better off among us providing goods and services to those of us who are worse off (a form of service provision often confused with the concept of ‘mutual aid’) and cooperative businesses competing with traditional firms on the market.

Historically, this strategy has been a loser, for reasons that were well articulated by anarchists and Marxists alike. As workers, we have barely anything to share amongst ourselves. Meanwhile, the capitalists have everything. They will always be able to out-compete the cooperative sector. The logic of the market will always pressure the worker-owners of those co-ops – that is, of cooperatively managed private property in the form of firms – to worsen their own conditions, lower their own wages, reduce the quality of their products, and raise prices for consumers in order to survive.

The advocates of Dual Power avoid the whole question of what victory looks like. Even if the Dual Power strategy could achieve a situation of real dual power (as articulated by Lenin), our goal as anarchists is to eliminate capital and the State, not to exist ‘outside of’ or ‘parallel to’ them as a ‘second power’. Clearly, at some point, we would need to expropriate capital, and this would naturally invoke the response of the State, which both depends on and reproduces class society.

One of the more frustrating things I notice when people discuss Dual Power as they do is that they often don't discuss how, if you're building a parallel 'second power', they plan to fight the 'first power' when it comes into direct competition.

And this isn't so much as just going "we arm ourselves" (another problematic position and slogan among, in particular, US anarchists). How do you protect the 'second power' without turning into the power you oppose?

We do need to expropriate capital. The question is how? And how do we prepare?

Yet counter-power – power within traditional capitalist firms, against the bosses and the government, capable of seizing control over the economic life of society, putting it in service of human need, and forcefully defending this transformation of social relations – is rarely addressed by the champions of Dual Power. Here there is also a fundamental weakness in the Dual Power vision of reform, as it is our structural position within capitalist firms (which require our labour) that allows us to exert leverage over the bosses and the governments which serve them.

This was linked in the article, and I need to remember to go back.

Article from here:

Names to look into: Luigi Galleani, Amédée Dunois,

In Bulgaria, the FAKB led relevant experiences that involved urban and rural unionism, cooperatives, guerrillas and youth organization: “the FAKB consisted of syndicalist, guerrilla, professional and youth sections which diversified themselves throughout Bulgarian society”. It also helped found and strengthen organizations such as the Bulgarian Federation of Anarchist Students (BONSF); an anarchist federation of artists, writers, intellectuals, doctors and engineers, and the Federation of Anarchist Youth (FAM), which had a presence in cities, towns and all the big schools.

Between 1941 and 1944, an anarchist guerrilla group fought fascism and allied with the Patriotic Front in organizing the insurrection of September 1944 against the Nazi occupation. Meanwhile, with the Red Army replacing the Germans as an occupying force, an alliance was established between the right and the left — called the “red-orange-brown alliance”—who brutally repressed the anarchists. The workers were forced to join a single union, linked to the state, in a policy clearly inspired by Mussolini, and in 1945, at a FAKB congress in Sofia, the communist militia arrested the ninety delegates present, which did not prevent the FAKB newspaper, Rabotnicheska Misl, from reaching a circulation of sixty thousand copies per issue that year. At the end of the 1940s, “hundreds had been executed and about 1,000 FAKB members sent to concentration camps where the torture, ill treatment and starvation of veteran (but non-communist) anti-fascists [...] was almost routine”. Thus ended the experience of the FAKB, which began in 1919.

This bit just reminds me of when I lived in Italy and complained about how the only unions I could work with were part of the state machine and did little more than make enough noise to keep people placated. And that was in 2017-2019.

Quotes taken from the essay in The Utopia of Rules of the same title:

At the time, I found this experience extremely disconcerting. Having spent much of my life leading a fairly bohemian student existence comparatively insulated from this sort of thing, I found myself asking my friends: is this what ordinary life, for most people, is really like? Running around feeling like an idiot all day? Being somehow put in a position where one actually does end up acting like an idiot? Most were inclined to suspect that this was indeed what life is mostly like.

I know this is largely rhetorical, but the answer is yes. There are so many things that we are put through at any given time that are meant to drain us, that are meant to make us feel inept, that are meant to be confusing and time-consuming and infuriating.

This is something I'm going through with regards to immigration, which makes no sense. I have to file taxes for 2021 (a year in which I made exactly no money) because I legally could not work and get an income, and the immigration office knows this because they didn't okay my residence permit until the beginning of 2022. Yet, for some reason, because I obtained a piece of paperwork okaying me to be a contractor in 2021? Which I needed to get my residence permit? I need to file taxes.

For a year I literally couldn't work. All of this to renew my card, which is only expiring because it's related to the expiration of my lease. Meanwhile, my residency permit doesn't actually expire for another two years. Like, yes. It is all meant to make us feel entirely absurd and ridiculous; it is designed to make us jump through hoops all the time so we're too fucking tired to do anything else.

To put it crudely: it is not so much that bureaucratic procedures are inherently stupid, or even that they tend to produce behavior that they themselves define as stupid—though they do do that—but rather, that they are invariably ways of managing social situations that are already stupid because they are founded on structural violence. This approach, I think, has the potential to tell us a great deal about both how bureaucracy has come to pervade every aspect of our lives, and why we don’t notice it.

Now, I admit that this emphasis on violence might seem odd. We are not used to thinking of nursing homes or banks or even HMOs as violent institutions—except perhaps in the most abstract and metaphorical sense. But the violence I’m referring to here is not abstract. I am not speaking of conceptual violence. I am speaking of violence in the literal sense: the kind that involves, say, one person hitting another over the head with a wooden stick. All of these are institutions involved in the allocation of resources within a system of property rights regulated and guaranteed by governments in a system that ultimately rests on the threat of force. “Force” in turn is just a euphemistic way to refer to violence: that is, the ability to call up people dressed in uniforms, willing to threaten to hit others over the head with wooden sticks.

Sometimes I would like to think that more people have gotten to the point of recognising bureaucracy as being violent, but then I inevitably run into someone who seems to think that it's necessary for... some reason ("we need to know who lives here").

But even so, it's not just physical violence (though it can be); it's psychological and economic violence. There is so much violence that builds up. Stress, anxiety, frustration, anger, sadness, loss. Bureaucracy severely damages us physically and mentally.

It's also expensive, unnecessarily so. It's intentionally prohibitive. It's racist. It's xenophobic. It's misogynist. It's ageist. It's ableist.

As an anthropologist, I know I am treading perilous ground here. When they do turn their attention to violence, anthropologists tend to emphasize exactly the opposite aspect: the ways that acts of violence are meaningful and communicative—even the ways that they can resembles poetry. Anyone suggesting otherwise is likely to be instantly accused of a kind of philistinism: “are you honestly suggesting that violence is not symbolically powerful, that bullets and bombs are not meant to communicate something?” So for the record: no, I’m not suggesting that. But I am suggesting that this might not be the most important question. First of all, because it assumes that “violence” refers primarily to acts of violence—actual shovings, punchings, stabbings, or explosions—rather than to the threat of violence, and the kinds of social relations the pervasive threat of violence makes possible. Second of all, because this seems to be one area where anthropologists, and academics more generally, are particularly prone to fall victim to the confusion of interpretive depth and social significance. That is, they automatically assume that what is most interesting about violence is also what’s most important.

Is it accurate to say that acts of violence are, generally speaking, also acts of communication? It certainly is. But this is true of pretty much any form of human action. It strikes me that what is really important about violence is that it is perhaps the only form of human action that holds out even the possibility of having social effects without being communicative. To be more precise: violence may well be the only way it is possible for one human being to do something which will have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom they understand nothing. In pretty much any other way in which you might try to influence another’s actions, you must at least have some idea about who you think they are, who they think you are, what they might want out of the situation, their aversions and proclivities, and so forth. Hit them over the head hard enough, and all of this becomes irrelevant.

It is only when one side has an overwhelming advantage in their capacity to cause physical harm that they no longer need to do so. But this has very profound effects, because it means that the most characteristic effect of violence, its ability to obviate the need for “interpretive labor,” becomes most salient when the violence itself is least visible—in fact, where acts of spectacular physical violence are least likely to occur. These are of course precisely what I have just defined as situations of structural violence, systematic inequalities ultimately backed up by the threat of force. For this reason, situations of structural violence invariably produce extreme lopsided structures of imaginative identification.

These effects are often most visible when the structures of inequality take the most deeply internalized forms. Gender is again a classic case in point. For example, in American situation comedies of the 1950s, there was a constant staple: jokes about the impossibility of understanding women. The jokes (told, of course, by men) always represented women’s logic as fundamentally alien and incomprehensible. “You have to love them,” the message always seemed to run, “but who can really understand how these creatures think?” One never had the impression the women in question had any trouble understanding men. The reason is obvious. Women had no choice but to understand men. In America, the fifties were the heyday of a certain ideal of the one-income patriarchal family, and among the more affluent, the ideal was often achieved. Women with no access to their own income or resources obviously had no choice but to spend a great deal of time and energy understanding what their menfolk thought was going on.

This kind of rhetoric about the mysteries of womankind appears to be a perennial feature of such patriarchal arrangements. It is usually paired with a sense that, though illogical and inexplicable, women still have access to mysterious, almost mystical wisdom (“women’s intuition”) unavailable to men. And of course something like this happens in any relation of extreme inequality: peasants, for example, are always represented as being both oafishly simple, but somehow, also, mystically wise.

The second element is the resultant pattern of sympathetic identification. Curiously, it was Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, who first observed the phenomenon we now refer to as “compassion fatigue.” Human beings, he proposed, are normally inclined not only to imaginatively identify with their fellows, but as a result, to spontaneously feel one another’s joys and sorrows. The poor, however, are so consistently miserable that otherwise sympathetic observers are simply overwhelmed, and are forced, without realizing it, to blot out their existence entirely. The result is that while those on the bottom of a social ladder spend a great deal of time imagining the perspectives of, and genuinely caring about, those on the top, it almost never happens the other way around.

Whether one is dealing with masters and servants, men and women, employers and employees, rich and poor, structural inequality—what I’ve been calling structural violence—invariably creates highly lopsided structures of the imagination. Since I think Smith was right to observe that imagination tends to bring with it sympathy, the result is that victims of structural violence tend to care about its beneficiaries far more than those beneficiaries care about them. This might well be, after the violence itself, the single most powerful force preserving such relations.

Why are we so confused about what police really do? The obvious reason is that in the popular culture of the last fifty years or so, police have become almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture. It has come to the point that it’s not at all unusual for a citizen in a contemporary industrialized democracy to spend several hours a day reading books, watching movies, or viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police point of view, and to vicariously participate in their exploits. And these imaginary police do, indeed, spend almost all of their time fighting violent crime, or dealing with its consequences.