Research

Quotes come from this article:

A cursory reading of the literature on social movements and organizations in the 1960s and 1970s reveals this fact. The leadership of the American Indian Movement was rife with informants; it is suspected that informants were also largely responsible for the downfall of the Black Panther Party, and the same can be surmised about the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Not surprisingly, these movements that were toppled by informants and provocateurs were also sites where women and queer activists often experienced intense gender violence, as the autobiographies of activists such as Assata Shakur, Elaine Brown, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrate.

Perhaps it's for this reason that so many of the people who continually topple our movements enable gendered violence, and we continue to ignore them to our detriment.

Maybe it isn’t that informants are difficult to spot but rather that we have collectively ignored the signs that give them away.

Twelve years later, and I feel like 'maybe' isn't strong enough. Definitely. We can spot the informants, or even people we perceive may become informants, because of what they do. Look at some of the folks on BreadTube, like Beau. He was convicted of alien smuggling, which involved a bunch of young women from Eastern Europe. For his own benefit, he knowingly exploited vulnerable women. Never once has he made amends (if that's even possible), never once has he even admitted it without couching it in leftist language and trying to get people to feel sorry for him.

We know what these people look like, and we keep giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Time and again heterosexual men in radical movements have been allowed to assert their privilege and subordinate others. Despite all that we say to the contrary, the fact is that radical social movements and organizations in the United States have refused to seriously address gender violence as a threat to the survival of our struggles.

Europe also refuses to acknowledge gendered violence, and our orgs are rife with abusers who have never been made to be accountable. In fact, this is why I am deeply suspicious of "accountability processes." They always seem to re-traumatise the victims and enable the abusers.

We’ve treated misogyny, homophobia, and heterosexism as lesser evils—secondary issues—that will eventually take care of themselves or fade into the background once the “real” issues—racism, the police, class inequality, U.S. wars of aggression—are resolved. There are serious consequences for choosing ignorance. Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).

Yep, though I feel like racism fits both things viewed as 'secondary' and as a 'real' issue, depending on the group you're in and the context of the discussion.

Several times he stated that his heart had been broken. He especially lamented all of the “young ladies” who left Common Ground as a result of Darby’s domineering, aggressive style of organizing. And when those “young ladies” complained? Well, their concerns likely fell on sympathetic but ultimately unresponsive ears—everything may have been true, and after the fact everyone admits how disruptive Darby was, quick to suggest violent, ill-conceived direct-action schemes that endangered everyone he worked with. There were even claims of Darby sexually assaulting female organizers at Common Ground and in general being dismissive of women working in the organization. Darby created conflict in all of the organizations he worked with, yet people were hesitant to hold him accountable because of his history and reputation as an organizer and his “dedication” to “the work.” People continued to defend him until he outed himself as an FBI informant. Even Rahim, for all of his guilt and angst, chose to leave Darby in charge of Common Ground although every time there was conflict in the organization it seemed to involve Darby.

Wow, it's like this shit is on repeat all the fucking time. Even without people being FBI informants, we still continually see orgs enabling people who act this way. So fucking tired.

Maybe if organizers made collective accountability around gender violence a central part of our practices we could neutralize people who are working on behalf of the state to undermine our struggles.

Maybe, but we also need to know that accountability and victims' needs have to work together. An accountability process, as so often happens, that involves anything that directly hurts a victim is less than worthless.

Informants are hard to spot, but my guess is that where there is smoke there is fire, and someone who creates chaos wherever he goes is either an informant or an irresponsible, unaccountable time bomb who can be unintentionally as effective at undermining social-justice organizing as an informant. Ultimately they both do the work of the state and need to be held accountable.

YEP. This can also be extended to incorporate a lot more people who continually sew discord, especially those who try to take over groups amidst the chaos.

Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and Elaine Brown, each at different points in their experiences organizing with the Black Panther Party (BPP), cited sexism and the exploitation of women (and their organizing labor) in the BPP as one of their primary reasons for either leaving the group (in the cases of Brown and Shakur) or refusing to ever formally join (in Davis’s case). Although women were often expected to make significant personal sacrifices to support the movement, when women found themselves victimized by male comrades there was no support for them or channels to seek redress. Whether it was BPP organizers ignoring the fact that Eldridge Cleaver beat his wife, noted activist Kathleen Cleaver, men coercing women into sex, or just men treating women organizers as subordinated sexual playthings, the BPP and similar organizations tended not to take seriously the corrosive effects of gender violence on liberation struggle.

Examples of gendered violence in the BPP.

Her experience as the only woman to ever lead the BPP did not exempt her from the brutal misogyny of the organization. She recounts being assaulted by various male comrades (including Huey Newton) as well as being beaten and terrorized by Eldridge Cleaver, who threatened to “bury her in Algeria” during a delegation to China.

Refers to Elaine Brown's experiences.

These narratives demystify the legacy of gender violence of the very organizations that many of us look up to. They demonstrate how misogyny was normalized in these spaces, dismissed as “personal” or not as important as the more serious struggles against racism or class inequality. Gender violence has historically been deeply entrenched in the political practices of the Left and constituted one of the greatest (if largely unacknowledged) threats to the survival of these organizations.

It is 2022, and this is still true.

Race further complicates the ways in which gender violence unfolds in our communities... She points out how Common Ground failed to address white men’s assaults on their co-organizers and instead shifted the blame to the surrounding Black community, warning white women activists that they needed to be careful because New Orleans was a dangerous place. Ultimately it proved easier to criminalize Black men from the neighborhood than to acknowledge that white women and transgender organizers were most likely to be assaulted by white men they worked with. In one case, a white male volunteer was turned over to the police only after he sexually assaulted at least three women in one week. The privilege that white men enjoyed in Common Ground, an organization ostensibly committed to racial justice, meant that they could be violent toward women and queer activists, enact destructive behaviors that undermined the organization’s work, and know that the movement would not hold them accountable in the same way that it did Black men in the community where they worked.

And still, these tactics are also at play.

The women he dated were amazing, beautiful, kick-ass, radical women that he used as shields to get himself into places he knew would never be open to such a misogynist. I mean, if that cool woman who worked in Chiapas, spoke Spanish, and worked with undocumented immigrants was dating him, he must be down, right? Wrong.

It's amazing how often a lot of men (particularly cis men) use their partners to traverse the world, throwing us away when no longer useful. And sewing discord between us all.

But his misogyny didn’t end there; it was also reflected in his style of organizing. In meetings he always spoke the loudest and longest, using academic jargon that made any discussion excruciatingly more complex than necessary. The academic-speak intimidated people less educated than him because he seemed to know more about radical politics than anyone else. He would talk down to other men in the group, especially those he perceived to be less intelligent than him, which was basically everybody. Then he’d switch gears, apologize for dominating the space, and acknowledge his need to check his male privilege. Ironically, when people did attempt to call him out on his shit, he would feign ignorance—what could they mean, saying that his behavior was masculinist and sexist?

Why is this shit still happening?!

Reviewing old e-mails, I am shocked at the number of e-mails from men I organized with that were abusive in tone and content, how easily they would talk down to others for minor mistakes. I am more surprised at my meek, diplomatic responses—like an abuse survivor—as I attempted to placate compañeros who saw nothing wrong with yelling at their partners, friends, and other organizers.

So many examples follow from here, but all these things. Still happening, keep happening, keep getting enabled. No wonder we're all so fucking tired.

Most of those guys probably weren’t informants. Which is a pity because it means they are not getting paid a dime for all the destructive work they do.

Lmao, but true.

What’s more paralyzing to our work than when women and/or queer folks leave our movements because they have been repeatedly lied to, humiliated, physically/verbally/emotionally/sexually abused? Or when you have to postpone conversations about the work so that you can devote group meetings to addressing an individual member’s most recent offense? Or when that person spreads misinformation, creating confusion and friction among radical groups? Nothing slows down movement building like a misogynist.

Everyone I know, including myself, has left groups due to their enabling abuse, due to them putting forth more support for rapists and abusers than they do their victims... I've left the IWW for this shit multiple times, I've refused to participate in other similar labour orgs because they immediately started dumping work on me and leaving my needs unmet. And I've talked to dozens of women and queer folk who've felt the same.

They've also supported serial harassers, abusers, and rapists far more than they ever did us. And a lot of these misogynists are also anti-migrant, choosing to fuck us up for simply being from somewhere else.

What the FBI gets is that when there are people in activist spaces who are committed to taking power and who understand power as domination, our movements will never realize their potential to remake this world. If our energies are absorbed recuperating from the messes that informants (and people who just act like them) create, we will never be able to focus on the real work of getting free and building the kinds of life-affirming, people-centered communities that we want to live in. To paraphrase bell hooks, where there is a will to dominate there can be no justice, because we will inevitably continue reproducing the same kinds of injustice we claim to be struggling against. It is time for our movements to undergo a radical change from the inside out.

YEP. And have we learned this? Not yet.

We don’t have to start witch hunts to reveal misogynists and informants. They out themselves every time they refuse to apologize, take ownership of their actions, start conflicts and refuse to work them out through consensus, mistreat their compañer@s... Our strategies don’t have to be punitive; people are entitled to their mistakes. But we should expect that people will own those actions and not allow them to become a pattern.

Things I wish people would recognise.

Quotes from this post:

tl;dr: Prioritize long-term impact on the community’s safety over Twitter engagement

Pretty sure this'll get covered, but this is so much broader than just Twitter engagement. It's this desire to build celebrity around work that should just get done. The push for always needing credit and putting yourself in the way rather than just doing the work.

Make sure all information you publish is 100% verified.

Apply this across the board.

Work with Local Anti-Fascists

This is something that can be easily applied across a range of work. We need to be building more connections between local spaces, making it harder to disrupt everything we do. Our local spaces should be hubs that have multiple branches (internally and externally).

They are working with other community groups to ensure that the exposé does not cause collateral damage.

This is with regard to waiting on publishing something (especially because you're not in the local area), but it's something that should apply to abuse victims. Let them come forward when they need or want to.

There is a distinct lack of care in a lot of spaces, and that needs to be front and center always.

Publish Anonymously

I think this is true of other areas, but for a range of reasons beyond just safety.

Don’t Chase Clout or Career

Apply this across a board, too. We may live in a capitalist hellscape that requires we have cash, but don't do your work into careerist or clout-chasing trash.

Consider The Implications of Your Language & Actions

Glad to see this explicitly listed because far too many people lean on other hierarchies to dunk on folks. It's fucking oboxious.

Quotes come from this excerpt of a book:

Thinking back to all of the writers who started publishing around the same time as I did, there are so many whose voices I had thought would be the dominant ones for decades to come—yet they fell silent or, if not silent, never matched or in any way came close to the achievement for which they were earlier acclaimed. There are just as many others whose voices seemed negligible to me, whose work I’d still call unsurprising, yet it continues, like the writers themselves, to thrive and be published widely. And there is a third group, of modest accomplishment at the start, who have managed to differently surprise me by becoming better. I now see how much more powerful stamina can be than talent; or to say it another way, how powerless talent is, on its own, without stamina—rather like what is said about the body once the soul has left it, though I don’t believe in the soul. I do believe in stamina.

First, I wonder how many of those people who he thought were going to be big voices were people who had no support or the structures silenced them. How often do people fall silent because they have nowhere to go, no one to work with, and no safety net? It's more common than people would like to believe.

The same applies to the second and third group. How many of them were people who either had access (e.g., via nepotism) and didn't have to worry about anything? Who had extra support? How many of them had stable lives with few worries?

Having stamina is one thing, but talking about what allows us to have it is an entire other.

Take praise when and if you can get it, but don’t forget that it was never the point—or, if it was, then you’ve confused devotion with celebrity, which is a sometime by-product of the devotion that the committed making of art equals, but celebrity has nothing to do, in the end, with the making of art, let alone its value.

Something I wish more people would recognise. Trying to pull this status is a problem. We all have things to share, knowledge to spread, stories to tell. Why do so many focus on clout? On celebrity status? It's unnecessary.

There’s also a kind of stamina that doesn’t, initially, involve perspective at all, a stamina fueled by urgency, which is to stamina as adrenaline is to the body, enabling us, for a moment, to perform at levels we didn’t know we were capable of, or that we take at the time for granted.

True. There are a lot of times where I need to write, even if I don't end up publishing it.

Meanwhile, youth fades, as do the energies that came with it. So the challenge is how to maintain stamina, past youth, and without having to be routinely visited by crisis.

What about those of us who struggled through youth without the supports that others had? Some of us have and maintain the 'stamina' or 'energy', but we have no time. We have no focus because we're forced to put it elsewhere.

And why do we continue this thing of looking fondly back at youth? As if we have nothing to look forward to?

How to avoid repeating ourselves, how to keep seeing things anew, how to separate habit from habit’s predictability—and how to find the stamina to do so?

Why do we have to see everything anew? This presumes a requirement to be unique and different and... do something else. Sometimes it's okay to do the same thing twice. Or thrice. Maybe it'll be, as time goes on, inherently different.

Some of us have stories that we've been repeating forever simply because people won't listen.

Quotes from this book:

I don't like this essay, and it feels as if it's very "progress is a linear progression." It isn't. Progress has cycles, and they overlap.

One might suggest an even darker possibility. A case could be made that even the shift into R&D on information technologies and medicine was not so much a reorientation towards market-driven consumer imperatives, but part of an all-out effort to follow the technological humbling of the Soviet Union with total victory in the global class war: not only the imposition of absolute U.S. military dominance overseas, but the utter rout of social movements back home. The technologies that emerged were in almost every case the kind that proved most conducive to surveillance, work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman or Guy Debord imagined, they have been employed in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. Information technology has allowed a financialization of capital that has driven workers ever more desperately into debt, while, at the same time, allowed employers to create new “flexible” work regimes that have destroyed traditional job security and led to a massive increase in overall working hours for almost all segments of the population. Along with the export of traditional factory jobs, this has put the union movement to rout and thus destroyed any real possibility of effective working-class politics. Meanwhile, despite unprecedented investment in research on medicine and life sciences, we still await cures for cancer or even of the common cold; instead, the most dramatic medical breakthroughs we have seen have taken the form of drugs like Prozac, Zoloft, or Ritalin—tailor-made, one might say, to ensure that these new professional demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy.

As always, I'm not fond of people talking disparagingly with regards to medications that help with mental health issues and/or cognitive disabilities. While Ritalin certainly does not work for me, I also know that other ADHD medications still make it possible for me to do the things I want to do even when I don't have to actively be engaged in "the system."

I don't think most people understand what it's like to sit down and try to read books, any and all, and not even be able to focus on the words in front of your face because your brain simply won't let you with everything else happening around you (and not because you're thinking about other things, though that is a form of distraction most people can resonate with). I don't think most people understand what it is to have your whole life halted by pondering whether or not you should even be alive. We should be more careful about the narratives that we launder into left spaces, even if our so-called "greats" did it for us.

Are there discussions to have about how psychiatry is used and abused in order to punish people? Yes, but that argument rests within similar conversations to the medical system as a whole and the prison industrial complex. So that final line in this section really annoys me, especially coming from someone as lauded as Graeber has been.

ANYWAY, I think there is something to the bolded part. This part, which I do think has some merit, is also why I find the final line to be nonsensical and absurd. Are those things used to control? Certainly, they have been.

But he should've spent more time focusing on the things that he had already brought up, as he had a stronger point there. Almost everything that we've seen developed in many of our lifetimes has come to be part of a surveillance system.

Here, I think our collective fascination with the mythic origins of Silicon Valley and the Internet have blinded us to what’s really going on. It has allowed us imagine that research and development is now driven, primarily, by small teams of plucky entrepreneurs, or the sort of decentralized cooperation that creates open-source software. It isn’t. These are just the sort of research teams most likely to produce results. If anything, research has been moving in the opposite direction. It is still driven by giant, bureaucratic projects; what has changed is the bureaucratic culture. The increasing interpenetration of government, university, and private firms has led all parties to adopt language, sensibilities, and organizational forms that originated in the corporate world. While this might have helped somewhat in speeding up the creation of immediately marketable products—as this is what corporate bureaucracies are designed to do—in terms of fostering original research, the results have been catastrophic.

The laundering of corporate sensibilities is a topic that I wish he would've spent more time on here. He really could've written multiple essays. Perhaps others can take up that mantle because there are a dozen or so topics here that would've done better with depth.

However, there's also the connections to things like the philanthropic foundations that I would've liked to see covered here, too. Certainly these 'titans of industry' who set up nonprofits to launder their images (people who it's clear Gates got his inspiration from) had an impact on how those structures inserted themselves into places they certainly should never have been (particularly outside the United States).

Here I can speak from experience. My own knowledge comes largely from universities, both in the United States and the UK. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative paperwork, at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have not only more administrative staff than faculty, but the faculty, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administrative responsibilities as on teaching and research combined. This is more or less par for the course for universities worldwide. The explosion of paperwork, in turn, is a direct result of the introduction of corporate management techniques, which are always justified as ways of increasing efficiency, by introducing competition at every level. What these management techniques invariably end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell each other things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of our students’ job and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors, institutes, conference workshops, and universities themselves, which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors. Marketing and PR thus come to engulf every aspect of university life.

It's also worth considering how this has funneled downward in the education industry, how it has become commonplace among K-12 teachers and has been introduced in numerous ways (purchasing corporate services, the development of charters and academies, hiring corporate outsiders, etc). PR and marketing are core to a lot of schools, including public ones.

The result is a sea of documents about the fostering of “imagination” and “creativity,” set in an environment that might as well have been designed to strangle any actual manifestations of imagination and creativity in the cradle. I am not a scientist. I work in social theory. But I have seen the results in my own field of endeavor. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have, instead, been largely reduced to the equivalent of Medieval scholastics, scribbling endless annotations on French theory from the 1970s, despite the guilty awareness that if contemporary incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or even Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the U.S. academy, they would be unlikely to even make it through grad school, and if they somehow did make it, they would almost certainly be denied tenure.

Why is it that everyone looks at these people as being so great when a lot of their work was definitely on the backs of people far more vulnerable than they ever would've been? And also for their relationships to harmful individuals (like pederasts)? It's perplexing.

Also perplexing is this idea of one person who will come up with these ideas in the way that Graeber talks about. Perhaps his time in academia got to him, but he often focuses in on one person when he should've been more aware of the collective endeavour.

There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical: it would seem society now has no place for them at all.

And who was allowed to be eccentric, brilliant, and impractical? Because it really feels, as always, your work aims to recognise your position within whiteness and patriarchy and suddenly drops those balls during analysis.

In the natural sciences, to the tyranny of managerialism we can also add the creeping privatization of research results. As the British economist David Harvie has recently reminded us, “open source” research is not new. Scholarly research has always been open-source in the sense that scholars share materials and results. There is competition, certainly, but it is, as he nicely puts it, “convivial”:

Convivial for whom? I feel like I might lose my mind asking this because we know that it wasn't "convivial" for people who were overtly harmed by academia and the competition of scientific discovery in the past. Was it "convivial" for Rosalind Franklin, whose work went largely unrecognised while the men who stole it from here was recognised? Was it "convivial" for the many Black women who were NASA computers and mathematicians when their work was obscured for all the white people (usually men)?

Who was this field convivial for? And how dare you even claim that. You should have known better by the time you published this piece.

Not only that, the person he quoted in this piece said this:

Convivial competition is where I (or my team) wish to be the first to prove a particular conjecture, to explain a particular phenomenon, to discover a particular species, star or particle, in the same way that if I race my bike against my friend I wish to win. But convivial competition does not exclude cooperation, in that rival researchers (or research teams) will share preliminary results, experience of techniques and so on … Of course, the shared knowledge, accessible through books, articles, computer software and directly, through dialogue with other scientists, forms an intellectual commons.

Did you ask your friend if they wanted to race you? Similarly, did you ask anyone if they wanted to compete with you in these "convivial competitions?" Or did you just do them? And for what purpose? It's absolute horse shit to ever talk like this, and it's even worse when the person doing so just outright uses this quote as if that's how everyone felt. Truly, it feels like only people who have structural power over everyone else feel this way.

It is worth discussing what "convivial competition" looks like, but it's also worth figuring out if it's consensual. If everyone has agreed to it (e.g., friendly ribbing between two people), fine. But often times, people (usually cis white men) perceive their "friendly" and "convivial" competition without considering the realities of the non-white people and non-cis men they're competing with. Many of us do not agree to those terms and have a different understanding of the world. It's necessary to consider that.

Quotes from this article:

Before I get started, here's a thing I don't like about Matt's work thus far: He conflates too much with everything else. He does not critique events, he derides them inherently; he does not recognise that most people do not follow the beliefs he claims and builds strawmen to knock down (or talks about the few examples that exist while ignoring the many who aren't examples of what he's discussing).

It must be nice to do that from one of the places with some of the less serious anarchists, with those who fail to even consider people outside of hegemonic power (in any capacity) until they need solidarity (and refuse to give it in return). For it's not their opinions that are ever addressed; they are seen as unworthy until they can be used as baton.

But if we are not struggling as an organised class at work, where should such affinity groups be engaged in struggle? Insurrectionists have typically advocated a politics of ‘constant attack’. They relish in the images of street fights with police, the lighting of fires, and looting of stores.

I'm sorry, what are you talking about? This is not how all insurrectionary anarchists even talk or think, nor is it constant the world over. And it's not that they relish in those images. I mean, you reference Alfredo Bonanno. He deliberates about whether it would've been better to shoot Montanelli in the face than the legs ("Why on earth did these dear children shoot Montanelli in the legs? Wouldn’t it have been better to have shot him in the mouth?" in Armed Joy).

He's not relishing in that image, he's discussing about which tactic was better, what happened subsequent to him being shot in the legs, what would've happened had they shot him in the head, and how heavy of a decision it would've been to do that. He then ends that part by saying: "Revolutionaries are pious folk. The revolution is not a pious event." I cannot see any form of relishing going on here, and it feels insulting to say that insurrectionary anarchists would think this way.

The people you're talking about? Are those who glorify violence as much as they do military action.

Even many anarcha-feminists, who often talk about the theory around Kill Your Local Rapist, do not want to hurt people. They think about the consequences of doing so, and that includes the consequences to themselves and their consciences.

It’s obviously a good thing to feed someone who is hungry and we have no objections to breaking the law, but this is a strange idea of freedom. It assumes the insurmountable permanence of a society based on the existence of bosses, governments, and commodities. It proposes that we act as if capital and the State can never really be overthrown through a concrete transformation of social relations in production. Things can’t be changed, they can only be subverted or defied.

No, it doesn't. The overwhelming majority of insurrectionists I have read or talked to have seen themselves as a line of defense, not the end-all-be-all of getting to an anarchistic world. This includes the very one you fucking cite and the very fucking passage you choose to cite him in: "We have seen that a specific minority must take charge of the initial attack, surprising power and determining a situation of confusion which could put the forces of repression into difficulty and make the exploited masses reflect upon whether to intervene or not."

Not everyone has to intervene in that manner. And he even defines what is meant by 'specific minority', which he says isn't all anarchists or the whole revolution. It's right there.

With the George Flloyd Rebellion the politics of insurrectionary anarchism was put to a serious test.

It really wasn't.

The insurrectionists were presented with a nation-wide uprising which broke from legality and the control of any organisation.

Let's go back to that "specific minority" of people Bonanno mentions. Does this sentence make sense with that part of insurrectionist theory? I don't think so. Because not everyone in the street wants to participate in insurrectionary actions.

The ‘CHAZ’ (which, in reality, was never able to develop beyond a cop-free block-party) quickly stagnated, with no clear aims other than maintaining the occupation. The affinity groups attempted to maintain the rage, but were unable to encourage the rebellion in a revolutionary direction.

He cites an article from CrimethInc that talks about this and still walks away with that basic ass understanding? How do you walk away with that limited critique after you read this part (and the bits after): "At the same time, when the police are still so powerful and the ruling class that they serve is scrambling to legitimize them in the public eye, establishing a cop-free zone involves challenges and risks."

CrimethInc even mentions how these tactics have been used against Exarchia in Greece (which, for the record, goes unmentioned). The same applies to anything else outside the United States.

And even if you read Black Rose's critique and discussion, they don't refer to anyone as insurrectionary anarchists. Because I don't think many, if any, of those people aligned themselves to that theory. They also highlight really big issues (e.g., "no decision making process" and "failure of white ally politics"). It's a brutal misreading and misunderstanding of a theory if you're basing it on one thing in the United States.

All manner of cranks and adventurists were attracted to the project.

That's because this wasn't insurrectionary anarchism in action. I do not know how hard this is to understand, but it feels willful at this point.

Ultimately, a few armed individuals (having appointed themselves as a ‘patrol’) fired on and killed a few black teenagers speeding by in their car. Amidst the fog of uncertainty, vague reports spread on social media, exciting those who equate the use of arms with militancy. The killings were initially lauded in some insurrectionist corners of the internet as a successful case of ‘revolutionary self-defence’ against ‘right-wing infiltrators’.

Is there a point where we actually discuss these things? Instead of tossing them around to play gotcha points and neglecting that, while these are examples of right-wing and/or white supremacy in action, it doesn't fit into what is actually described by insurrectionary anarchism? And again, still requires people to actually align themselves with it?

Along with addressing the points as stated? Because the CrimethInc article he links says that DeJuan Young described experiencing attacks from white supremacists and others who infiltrated (not discussed in this article). It also fails to engage with this element of the Black Rose article, reading: "One of the most disturbing and important lessons from the CHOP is the need to develop well-organized and effective collective self-defense. On the night of Juneteenth, there were literally thousands of people in the space, many of them tourists and party goers."

The same article continues, "The first shooting was not the result of vigilante anti-protest political violence but violence that sprang from sources internal to the CHOP zone. In the days that followed, several more shootings took place in and around the zone. Though the shooters and motives are largely still unknown, it appears likely that a majority of the shootings were the result of interpersonal violence and gang retaliation."

And if we look back to Bonanno, he states: "It is precisely the comrades that are available for action who make up the specific minority. They will be the ones to prepare and realize the insurrection in the ways and forms which the experience of the revolutionary struggle as a whole has transmitted to us, taking into consideration the recent modifications of the State and the bosses. The method cannot fail to take account of minimal organizational forms of the base which will have to solve the various problems that will arise during the insurrectional preparation. In these organizational forms the responsibility for the work to be done must obviously fall on the revolutionary anarchist comrades and cannot be left to goodwill or improvisation. At this stage the very rules of survival impose the indispensable conditions of security and caution. The urgency of action puts an end to pointless chatter."

I wonder why he might say this. Could there have been any historical context for the development of his thought? Maybe some overtly authoritarian organisations in the 70s who kept pushing the working class out? Or any kind of heavy military shit going on in the 80s? Context matters for what people say and think.

Gilet Jaunes (Yellow Vest) movement in France

Can someone tell me what the ideology of the Yellow Vests was? And what happened to them over time? Because it takes only a few minutes to find out that, while anti-government, they weren't inherently a movement of anarchists. Or insurrectionary anarchists, at that.

Oh, and bonus because this is hidden in a citation:

One can’t help but recall the uncritical enthusiasm demonstrated by many insurrectionary anarchists during the 2014 Euromaidan uprising in Ukraine. Not only was there little interest in the political character of the struggle, but even in the influential presence of far-right elements. People were in the streets, in violent conflict with the brutality of the State… Molotovs were being thrown! ‘What else is there to a revolution?’ This is how an ‘anarchist’ thinks when they are not concerned with class struggle and the need to transform the structures of production and distribution.

Which ones? Because guess what, that shit wasn't true for where I am. Most anarchists of all ilks in Eastern Europe knew better. So let's try again: Who are you criticising here? Because I'm noticing a theme, and it's often for English-speaking anarchists (and some Western ones) to grab hold of movements that they don't understand and to support them uncritically.

Wanna guess what? I can do that with the Anarchist Federation and their uncritical support of the Trucker Convoy in Canada (something suspiciously missing, which I suppose is perhaps because of how overtly right-wing that was and how nonsensical it was that someone in London thought it was at all a left-wing protest), but that doesn't mean it applies to all anarchists. Just like other left-wing groups have held onto the Dutch farmers or have decided to be anti-Ukraine. There are moments where, yes, we need to criticise people for grabbing onto any right-wing movement as if it's a fucking lifesaver (it isn't); it's also worth recognising who is actually involved.

Should I blanket all anarchists for uncritically supporting things we definitely shouldn't? Or should I make examples of the ones who do that, which proves the point that not all of us uncritically support shit? I think the latter proves more useful.

The pamphlet is notable, however, in that – when not simply reducing our class struggle politics to either a strawman of conservative syndicalism, or an opportunistic tailing of social movements – it concedes so much to the mass-anarchist analysis.

So do most insurrectionary anarchists, if you'd bother to spend any time talking to them at all.

... And I can't continue commenting because it turns into something devoid of context and substance, focusing on who Bonanno quotes and how right the author might be about the position he's taken.

Quotes from here:

Neo-anarchism is a modern conception of anarchism largely informed by the feminist and peace movements of the 70s, the environmental movement of the 80s, the alter-globalisation movement of the 90s, and the Argentinian uprising of 2001; which coined the term horizontalidad (‘horizontalism’) to describe the movement’s rejection of representative democracy, the use of general assemblies to coordinate activity, and converting abandoned or bankrupt factories into cooperative businesses.

Reading to the end of the article, I'm confused. Why is he singling out these specific movements when talking about 'neo-anarchism'? And why is 'neo-anarchism' the chosen term, rather than being something that actually would linguistically make sense (as in, something that has changed and is different from classical anarchism)? What is he meaning by this?

Because there are... multiple definitions that I've encountered for 'neo-anarchism', and I don't know which one he's trying to choose. (And all of them, I find deeply inadequate and unnecessarily confusing.) If you're detailing 'lifestyle anarchism', then say that; that's at least clear and unlikely to cause confusion.

But again, why these movements? By choosing to highlight these movements, you're showing quite a bit of your ass here: Classical anarchism rarely, if ever, engaged in feminism (whole hosts of anarchists thought women didn't belong anywhere in the movement; people quote James Guillaume as if he was so valuable to the movement, but he thought anyone feminine didn't belong). Classical anarchism barely touched on the environment and was responding largely to industrialisation, when it did talk about it, and it often neglected the impacts on a lot of people with regards to the other movements (or simply was out of date to deal with events happening in the 90s, 2000s, and so on).

I would also highlight that classical anarchism really struggled considering its lack of care and consideration for any of these concepts, particularly with regards to race (which was left out here, as race-focused Civil Rights Movements also informed modern anarchism). It's also worth pointing out that queer liberation was part of this, which was also tied into disability justice movements. Some people mentioned it, but there was a lot of eugenics in classical anarchism (which hit a lot of people in all three of these groups).

I know there's limited space to consider these things, but they are all really important to include in how modern anarchism is being developed as we go along. It's also worth recognising how often a lot of people get written out of anarchism for focus on certain topics, and this is no different.

And it's also important to not simply denigrate these movements when there are others that a lot of lifestylists tend to refer back to, like communes.

Anarchists have generally agreed that the appropriate form of decision making depends on the circumstances concerned, and frequently endorsed variations of majoritarian voting; particularly in mass organisations based on commonalities other than close-ideological affinity, such as unions. The focus for anarchists has generally not been the form of decision-making, but instead the principles of free association and solidarity. Furthermore, though anarchists have always stressed the right of the minority to be free of the majority’s coercion, it is even more important that the great majority be free of minoritarian rule or sabotage.

True, many of our ideas are based around how decisions are made and our relationships to those decisions (and what we can do in response to them).

The fundamental limitations of the ‘public occupation’ or ‘autonomous zone’ , and the defeats which have followed from these limitations, have led some former advocates of the strategy to make a notable transition from neo-anarchism to parliamentary politics. Though inexplicable to some outside observers, the change is easily understood when we consider neo-anarchism’s peculiar view of ‘direct democracy’, or ‘horizontally organised spaces’, as the defining characteristic of anarchism, and not a theory of libertarian revolution against the State and capital.

Where, though? And what kind of public occupations are you talking about?

The EZLN (who do not describe themselves as anarchists but are people who many anarchists look toward for inspiration) have been largely successful in configuring occupation of space, even though they may often have to protect themselves from the government and other outside forces. This is, often, one of the ideas that people have when they think about these spaces.

However, when we look at examples in the United States, there are... problems. And many of them stem from a failure of people to unlearn the toxicity that resides within their own skulls. These examples tend to end in a handful of ways: with the fatal deaths of people (often people of colour, particularly Black people) at the hands of people (frequently white men) "protecting" the community or with some form of legal recognition (e.g., legalised squats).

Legalising squats often happens in Europe, too. However, a more common tactic is that people here tend to lose their squat because the government finds a "legitimate" reason to bulldoze it (see: ROG in Ljubljana).

And here's some more fun pieces of information for you to add to this context: I saw no one outside of Eastern Europe even talk about Slovenia. No one. Internationalism doesn't happen with the US, with Canada, with Australia or New Zealand, or with Western Europe. So again, I have to ask: Where? Which ones? And why don't these occupations succeed?

And why is so much solidarity expected from people outside of those named locations, who ask for international solidarity and are met with silence or hostility? It's telling.

If we accept the idea of anarchism as proposed by the neo-anarchists, there is no fundamental contradiction between anarchism and involvement in parliamentary politics.

Oh, "neo-anarchists" are referring to those who go to more liberal directions of politicking. I don't agree with this at all and think that this is a useless conflation of terminology and tactics. It also feels strangely as if it's denigrating whole hosts of ideas that classical anarchism left out, that have been pushing their way into a largely patriarchal anarchism that has refused to see us, and now we're being denigrated by someone trying to play with words and conflate positions.

More recently we have witnessed the absurdity of a self-proclaimed ‘libertarian socialist’, Gabriel Boric (who touts his association with Chile’s radical student movement), ascending to the presidency in the aftermath of a militant popular uprising.

Instead of ceding or handing over ways of talking about things (or creating confusing and conflicting terminology), why not call these people for what they are? Liberals. They are not any form of anarchist, new or otherwise. They are people who drape themselves in radical movements (even if they were there) to gain access to the power they seek. They're grifters or co-opters.

They are not anarchists. We can denounce them without giving them a title that confuses people.

The reality is that there is no way to fully ‘prefigure’ anarchy and communism through ‘directly democratic’ spaces of ‘autonomy’. Anarchism requires a specific anarchist movement and anarchist practice. Though we must certainly organise ourselves from the bottom up, with a consistent federalist structure, we can not simply bring about our ideal by ‘living anarchisticly’ or relating to one another as ‘horizontally’ as possible. Similarly, the content of anarchism can not be limited to the structure of our movement – its content of revolutionary class struggle must be maintained.

I think there's a balance to be struck, and we need to strike it. Not that we need to concede to party politics, but we need to recognise that some people can only 'live anarchistically', and many of you aren't doing shit to make it easier for us to go beyond that.

I've said this before: As a migrant, I don't have the stability to do a lot of outward anarchist stuff because I can be deported or have my visa denied for my views. Tell me, what are my fellow anarchists doing to prevent that? And not just for me, but for others.

Once again, there are a lot of conflicting variables that a lot of Western anarchists refuse to engage with because honestly? Most of us never have to deal with them, so we do fucking nothing to actually make it possible for people beyond the simple actions of engaging with each other through horizontal methods or doing what little we can.

All quotes come from this article:

Because forests play a significant role in the Earth’s carbon balance, governments are willing to employ policies that affect forest carbon fluxes as a strategy to combat climate change. This was the case for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). To prevent the costs of compliance from rising inexorably, countries opted for a variety of instruments they could use to meet their self-imposed targets, including forestry activities. With this in mind, this review’s focus is on forest economics and policy as they relate to the role of the forest sector in mitigating climate change.

Feel like there should be a huge red flag on "prevent costs of compliance from rising inexorably," seeing as they only wanted to deal with financial costs and leave the rest of the costs for everyone else (including financial).

Emissions trading occurs when there is an official cap on GHG emissions, and emitters that exceed their individual targets can purchase emission reduction permits in the compliance (mandatory) market from those who are below their emissions target. A carbon offset then refers to an emission reduction or equivalent removal of CO2 from the atmosphere that is realized outside of the compliance market but can be used to counterbalance GHG emissions from the capped entity.

This bit here should highlight the futility of "carbon offsets." Companies can continue emitting at higher rates, as long as someone else sells them their reduction permits so that they can be "on target." The language used here to kind of obscure that there is nothing 'external' to the compliance system is a bit ludicrous. It's technically external, but they are actions that are done in order to mitigate the emissions being done.

There's also the fact that most people and companies are going to look toward the cheapest projects in order to be "carbon neutral." They aren't doing much to cut their emissions or take responsibility for their harmful practices, but they will provide money to people planting trees in order to "offset" their emissions. This is functionally meaningless.

It's also a bit farcical, because due to relationships between governments and NGOs, they can also certify other offset measures and credits. These measures can then be purchased by the very people and companies who are over-emitting. I suspect this is what the feel-good companies and NGOs help with in order to stay open. Carbon offsets still profit on environmental destruction, even if they provide resources for "prevention" and "development."

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 from this article:

Forty years ago Bernard Bailyn remarked that American historians of education had carried out their work "in a special atmosphere of professional purpose" and had made the history of the public school the focus of their investigations. Lawrence Cremin seconded that observation and added that, for all intents and purposes, the history of American education had been "the history of the public school realizing itself over time." In the tradition of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley that self-realization of the American public school was portrayed as a progression from local roots to state-wide systems. It became synonymous with the evolution of school government from local control on the district and ward levels to direction and oversight by state administrators. For many school professionals and historians that progression meant progress. They saw it as overcoming local control which they regarded as a relic of the past denoting an endorsement of inequality, dis- crimination, and special privilege. It persuaded them to see the solution to the schools' problems in strengthened state and, eventually, federal control.

In ethnically and religiously homogeneous states and colonies with an established church like Prussia and Massachusetts the central government's influence over education, limited as it was, made itself felt more readily than in colonies of greater ethnic and religious diversity. There, the role of local agencies of civil society, assisting parents in providing elementary schooling for their children, was more pronounced. The prevalence in the colonies, and later in the United States, of social diversity, whether ethnic or religious, and the vastness of space in rural areas laid the foundations for the strong hold of local control in matters of elementary schooling.

A closer look at the German-speaking countries of premodern central Europe will show that, as in Europe generally, schooling had its beginning for a chosen few as a Latin education under the patronage of churches, princes, or local landlords. For most of the population, however, instruction in the vernacular in reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion, if it took place at all, remained a matter of parental responsibility in the home. In this educational task parents were aided by neighbors and relatives and prodded and supported by their churches and synagogues, their civil communities and, in rural areas, by their patrons, the manorial lords. Civic corporations, called Schulsozietdten or school societies, constituted school districts and carried most of the financial burden. Though in Prussia the Crown, as the head of the established church, had been indirectly involved in school sponsorship; it was not before the late eighteenth century that it asserted its role as an active source of educational policies. Until then schooling had been very much a responsibility of parents and civil society.

For settlers in the English-speaking colonies of North America the circumstances of migration and settlement largely determined the arrangements they made for schooling. In Massachusetts, for example, anxiety for collective survival in a precarious physical, as well as social, environment had prompted the provincial government six years after its landfall to authorize the funding of Harvard College to assure an advanced Latin education for their future secular and religious leaders. Within another six years it assigned responsibility for the elementary education of children to parents and masters of indentured servants. It took another five years for the General Court to step in once more and order towns of fifty families or more to appoint teachers for English reading and writing schools and towns of one hundred families or more to open a Latin grammar school to prepare boys for Harvard College. The Court thus imposed upon Massachusetts towns its vision of a state-wide educational system, even though Boston, Charlestown, Dorchester, and a handful of other towns, prodded by their local ministers and other concerned community leaders, had already hired Latin schoolmasters before Harvard College opened its doors.

As the following paragraphs will show, the pressure to consider a more active role for the state in education came not from teachers, parents, or local taxpayers but, as with Jefferson and Humboldt, from philosophers, statesmen, authors, and politicians. They initiated a debate over the desirability of state or national systems of education. They argued that only by gathering up and providing unified direction of their countries' educational energies could governments cope with the demands of economic modernization, social integration, and political stabilization. They asked that schooling be raised from its many diverse local levels to one of common effort and goals.