Research

Quotes from this book:

Prologue

Juan Vilar—perhaps the most prominent and one of the internationally best-known anarchists in Puerto Rico—also faced numerous trials and retrials during this year. Yet, rather than try him for being an anarchist involved in the murders, Puerto Rican and U.S. authorities charged him with violating public morality. If these authorities could not jail him as an anarchist linked to the March violence, they would do so for publishing what they considered pornography—a story about a priest raping a child.

Seems a common thing that authorities will do.

Introduction

In Puerto Rico, anarchists expressed their concerns and visions through their own brand of cultural politics. Some anarchists published collections of their poetry, complete with calls for revolutionary uprisings. Others published plays and short stories that highlighted class antagonisms, promoted worker revolts, and celebrated revolutionary violence to destroy the last vestiges of bourgeois society while planting the seeds for a new egalitarian future. Women—especially teenage girls—figured prominently in anarchist and leftist culture. Anarchist cultural politics included more than fiction. Anarchists also worked in educational realms to create schools and learning opportunities for both adults and children. Related to this was their consistent anticlericalism against one of the perceived central pillars of cultural authoritarianism in Puerto Rico dating to the days of Spanish rule: the Roman Catholic Church. Anarchists in Puerto Rico joined these educational experiments, anticlericalism, and literary works with critiques of the island’s political economy that was increasingly subservient to U.S. interests. As a result, anarchists forged a cultural politics directed against Puerto Rican and U.S. colonial rulers to promote an antiauthoritarian spirit and countercultural struggle over how the island was being run and the future directions that it should pursue.

While cultural politics reflected one way that anarchists engaged in debates over Puerto Rico–specific issues, many of these cultural debates were actually linked transnationally. For instance, when leftists in Puerto Rico staged plays, they were mostly written by leftists in Cuba, Spain, and the United States. When they engaged in anticlerical actions, they did so as part of a broader international movement of freethinkers that included globally famous activists such as the Spanish-born, Puerto Rican–raised Belén de Sárraga—a freethinking radical who spoke throughout the island in 1912. Thus, this book explores how cultural politics both reflected the island-specific reality that anarchists encountered, as well as the role that cultural politics played in larger transnational radical movements.

Coming back to this.

Just as migrant anarchists from the island helped to internationalize the movement wherever they went and to discuss interna- tional topics upon return to Puerto Rico, the international press functioned the same way. Puerto Rican columns helped readers in New York and Cuba understand their situations in larger transnational dimensions. At the same time, readers of these newspapers in Puerto Rico read critiques of their own situation while coming to understand that they faced cultural, economic, and political struggles similar to those of their comrades abroad. As a result, for much of the early twentieth century, the Cuban and the New York anarchist press functioned as the Puerto Rican anarchist press. Thus, we cannot un- derstand “Puerto Rican” anarchism by focusing only on the island. Rather, anarchists across the Caribbean and along the East Coast of the United States functioned in overlapping networks. As a result, anarchists in Puerto Rico did not operate in global isolation.

Coming back to this, too.

Throughout Latin America, anarchists emerged in countries that had been politically independent since the 1810s and 1820s. By 1898, Cuba and Puerto Rico were the only Spanish colonies left in the hemisphere. Cuba would become independent in 1902 but still suffer under various aspects of U.S. rule and coercion. In 1903, Panama became the newest independent country after seceding from Colombia, but the ten-mile-wide swath cut through the middle of the country for construction of the Panama Canal would be controlled by the United States, and the Republic of Panama became essentially a U.S. protectorate.

Interesting discussion on how anarchism spread through US colonies.

Rather, Boricua anarchists, unlike anarchists anywhere else in Latin America (with the exception of the Canal Zone), operated in a colonial setting where legal, political, and educational systems were run or overseen by the U.S. government. Meanwhile, the island was increasingly taken over by U.S.-based big business, while the island’s labor movement became a colonial offshoot of the U.S.-based AFL.

More discussion.

Second, throughout the hemisphere, anarchists constantly adopted global anarchist ideas and adapted them to fit national and subnational realities. For instance, anarchists in Cuba adapted anarchism to fit the reality of a large Afro-Cuban population. Peruvian anarchists did the same to fit the subnational reality of that country’s large indigenous population, while anarchists in Brazil were challenged to adapt ideals to fit Afro-Brazilian populations as well as migrant workers from throughout Europe. One finds no such adaptation to fit ethnic diversity in Puerto Rico. Rather, the island’s anarchists were mostly homegrown and from a wide racial representation. Until 1898, anarchist influences arrived in Puerto Rico with Spanish migrant workers. However, large, consistent Spanish migration to the island ended with the war. In fact, the 1910 U.S. Census found that out of a total population of over 1.1 million people on the island, there were only 11,766 residents who were foreign born. While 56.3 percent of these were born in Spain, over 7,400 of the total foreign born arrived before 1901. While Spanish laborers and anarchist activists continued to migrate in the early 1900s to anarchist outposts throughout the Caribbean, such as the Panama Canal Zone, Cuba, and southern Florida, they did not migrate to Puerto Rico. And, unlike the fresh waves of Spanish and Italian anarchists who reinforced the ranks of anarchists in Cuba, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and the United States, no such international reinforcement occurred in Puerto Rico.

Worth looking into further.

Thus, anarchists never jumped on the nationalist, Puerto Rican independence movement bandwagon. To do so would have been to fall into the “servitude” about which Bakunin warned. After all, anarchists had been burned before on this issue. In neighboring Cuba, anarchists supported the war for independence against Spain from 1895 to 1898, seeing it not as a nationalist war but an anticolonial war. Throwing off colonial shackles seemed like a legitimate anarchist endeavor to achieve collective freedom. Yet after 1898, Caribbean anarchists saw how Cuban independence had been hijacked by political and economic leaders in Cuba, the symbols of the war for independence had been co-opted by the state, and Cuban leaders had colluded with their U.S. allies. As a result, most anarchists in Puerto Rico wanted nothing to do with those pushing for independence from the United States. This was the danger of a Boricua concept rooted in patriotism and nationalism: one elite-run state replacing another that lacked any regard for the interests of the popular and laboring classes; all it could offer were hollow symbols and empty words that would mask a new kind of authoritarianism.

Other aspects of that discussion to have.

Chapter 2: Radicals and Reformers

For anarchists in Puerto Rico, the messages were clear. They tried to tell their fellow workers that being involved in elections was a bad idea, that politics was nothing but a shell game. Politicians offered promises to get votes, only to renege on them once elected. And working-class politicians? What did voters really think one or two prolabor politicians could accomplish in a political system designed to benefit capitalists? And, just what did workers really think could be accomplished if somehow working-class candidates did take over the towns and the legislature? Did they really think that the United States would stand by and allow legislation to be passed that would harm the capitalists’ bottom line? Thus, as did their brethren around the world, anarchists in Puerto Rico waged a war against electoral politics. But in this new colonial era, antipolitics agendas had larger anti-imperialist implications by rejecting not only elections but the relationship between the island’s elected representatives, the U.S. government, and an entire electoral system founded on the U.S. model.

Useful for conversations around electoral politics.

He came to believe that Puerto Rican workers should no longer affiliate with the SLP and began to consider aligning with the AFL. The AFL pursued “pure unionism,” seeking immediate economic gains for workers through peaceful negotiations with employers whenever possible. The AFL also rejected worker-based political parties and engaging in electoral politics.

The AFL didn't engage in electoral politics? That's an interesting assumption. I wonder how they got there.

In an open forum to the pueblo productor (producing class), Saturnino Dones asked workers if they knew it was the capitalists, politicians, and religious figures who organized the festivities—and thus grew wealthy from worker expenditures. “These are the working people’s enemies!” In both Cuba and Puerto Rico, anarchists viewed carnival as a capitalist spectacle that garnered profits for businessmen while offering a safety valve for pent-up mass frustration. The appraisal pointed to another issue that anarchists in post-Spanish Cuba and Puerto Rico were encountering: how to gain not only political separation from Spain but also cultural and religious separation from the legacies of Spanish colonialism if the working masses were ever going to create new, truly liberated societies.

Not directly comparable, but pride parades today.

From 1900 to 1904, armed groups from the Republican and Federal parties took turns physically attacking one another and any other political force with whom they disagreed. In San Juan in 1902, for instance, armed mobs led by the Republican José Mauleón attacked Federal supporters. The FLT accused Mauleón of violently assaulting union members too. They appealed to the governor, but to no avail, prompting the union to reject the governor’s claim that there was nothing he could do. Actually, the police did step in, but to arrest FLT leaders, among them Romero Rosa and Cirino. Romero Rosa seems to have been a particularly attractive target of the mob violence. Roving bands not only bruised him but also abused his daughters. During another FLT event, Gómez Acosta—a founder of Ensayo Obrero and El Porvenir Social as well as a labor leader and friend of Cruz, who wrote the prologue to Cruz’s anarchist poetry collection Fragmentos—was shot at by vigilantes, miraculously escaping the eight shots fired at him. Throughout May, the anti-FLT violence reached such proportions that one contemporary charged that the assaults were “converting the city of San Juan into a frightful state of anarchy.” Apparently, though, some anarchists were willing to resort to violence themselves. In 1902 in the midst of the political violence rocking the island, anarchists were accused of planting a pipe bomb that exploded in the southeastern city of Humacao, killing a servant who was taking a break.

Anti-union violence of old.

In addition, the AFL rejected involvement in politics and forming of working-class political parties—an antipolitics stance preached by anarchists.

This keeps getting said, but many members of AFL moved into political parties quite effectively. So how true was it?

While the AFL had no problem with democratic politics and elections, they didn’t want the union effort to be diverted toward political campaigning for working-class parties.

Ah, here it is. Because they had no problem with bourgeois political parties.

Meanwhile, as the FLT leadership praised U.S.-style democracy, anarchists were less sure of that democracy, fearing that U.S. ideals of equality and liberty (ideals shared by both anarchists and the American creed) were merely a veneer hiding a government that worked in tandem with its capitalist class. Along these lines, anarchists distrusted all electoral politics, not just workers partaking in them.

Which the AFL explicitly didn't.

In this Puerto Rico–specific colonial context, when anarchists rejected democratic politics they were also showing skepticism about the larger U.S. project of “Americanizing” the island. Within this skeptical view, anarchists were suspicious of the role that the AFL was playing in the Americanization of the Puerto Rican workforce. Anarchists questioned whether the AFL had the island’s workers and future in its best interests.

And this makes sense. If the AFL is joining, then it's also part of the Americanisation of the island.

While anarchists fretted about U.S. political initiatives and their impacts in Puerto Rico, they also began to question the impact of the AFL, its leader Samuel Gompers, Santiago Iglesias (Gompers’s key representative in Puerto Rico), and other issues related to the impact of the U.S.-based workers movement on the island. Wherever the AFL emerged, it generally encountered anarchist opposition because of the AFL’s willingness to work with employers for wage improvements and the union’s perceived close links to the U.S. government. In anarchist eyes, such collaboration undermined the drive for social revolution. After all, how many labor leaders could be said to have dinner in the White House, as Gompers and Iglesias had done? On the U.S. mainland, the AFL also engaged in “nativist” labor organizing by seeking to restrict membership to U.S. citizens and attacking foreign workers. That nativist versus internationalist vision of the labor movement often brought the AFL and anarchist groups to verbal blows. Puerto Rico, though, was an odd case. Neither citizens nor foreigners, Puerto Rican workers occupied a unique position for both the AFL and the anarchists.

And here it is!

The state had a different view. In his 1903 annual report on conditions in Puerto Rico, Governor Hunt concluded “[t]he fact remains, however, that there has been in the past four years a slow but steady increase in the wages of the ordinary laborer which, with improved sanitary conditions and greater personal liberty of action, have greatly improved his condition. The cost of living has increased to some extent, perhaps, there being complaints of this fact, but, on the other hand, the peon lives better than formerly and has developed a greater earning capacity.” Anarchists must have found this amusing, especially considering the reality they faced. If conditions were so much better, then why did so many islanders flee Puerto Rico to find jobs in Hawai’i, Ecuador, Mexico, or the United States? Ultimately, they believed that Iglesias’s ineffective lobbying efforts undermined the workers cause. In fact, it is not difficult to imagine how watching the AFL-FLT begging for governmental help and protection must have weakened the image of the union in certain workers’ eyes, especially when actual conditions on the ground did not appear to improve following such groveling.

Again, the absolute absurdity that is AFL.

Besides seeing the FLT leadership as an ineffectual lackey of U.S. administrators, anarchists also believed that the AFL as a whole had a bias against Puerto Rican workers, despite the cozy relationship between Iglesias and Gompers. For instance, in 1906 and 1907, anarchists challenged the AFL-linked Cigar Makers International Union (CMIU, or the International). The CMIU was a highly structured union with an abundance of rules coupled with a high initiation fee of three dollars and weekly dues of thirty cents. High fees were leveraged by negotiators who achieved good pay and conditions for members, strike funds, and travel loans, as well as sickness, unemployment, and death benefits. The CMIU was attempting to expand it organizational reach throughout the cigar industry in South Florida and Puerto Rico. In 1908, the union slashed fees to try to attract Tampa workers. For years, the International had campaigned for recognition in Puerto Rico. However, operators feared the combined impact of the CMIU, the FLT, anarchists, and the tradition of parejería. In January 1907, the island’s tobacco workers voted to align themselves with the CMIU. Yet, anarchists were not pleased with this development and had worked to prevent the CMIU’s arrival. Anarchist opposition rested in part on issues of autonomy. They saw CMIU encroachment as a battle to determine who would control labor agitation in general and strikes in particular. Always suspicious of centralization, anarchists feared that local initiatives would fall prey to dictates from a central CMIU union hall that answered to AFL headquarters in the United States.

This distrust of a distant CMIU-AFL monopoly and control worried anarchists on another front. Anarchists criticized how the International charged equivalent dues regardless of a worker’s location. Thus, worse-paid workers on the island paid the same fees and followed the same by-laws as better-paid workers in Tampa, New York, and New Orleans. In essence, Puerto Ricans paid a higher proportion of their wages to the union than their compatriots on the mainland. As one writer noted, the so-called “international” union seemed more interested in mainland-based workers, and should really be referred to as the Unión Internal, not Internacional. Likewise, writing to Havana from Arecibo, Venancio Cruz charged that such practices undermined labor organization on the island, fostering worker apathy. In short, were such unions truly internationalist in scope or were they merely manipulating “internationalist principles” in a larger labor movement power play against Puerto Rican workers? When Cruz published similar criticisms in the FLT’s Unión Obrera, the CMIU fought back, charging that such criticisms undermined all union efforts. In fact, the CMIU slandered Cruz, accusing him of being a secret agent of the factory operators whose words were designed to divide the tobacco workers. Anarchist conspiracy theories were being realized: any anarchist who criticized the CMIU or the AFL ran the risk of being labeled an agent provocateur or a scab.

See: Why we should be cautious of things like the AFL-CIO even today!

A clear snapshot of the love-hate relationship between AFL-linked organizations and Puerto Rico’s anarchists can be seen in a three-month span in mid-1909. In April, a columnist took to the pages of ¡Tierra! to attack Iglesias and earlier harsh words that Iglesias had uttered against Caribbean anarchists. Iglesias had called anarchists pícaros (rogues). In response, this writer called Iglesias a sell-out and a hypocrite: “you were one of them [an anarchist], with the difference that you lost your old work shoes while we, with dignity, kept ours.” The charge of Iglesias having sold out and become part of the labor aristocracy was reinforced in the same column when the writer, building on Iglesias’s history of meetings with Washington politicians, accused Iglesias of “aspiring to suck the Washington dairy from [President] Taft’s teat.”

Lmao. It's hard not to be amused by intracommunity disagreements.

From the anarchist point of view, workers seemed reluctant to join the labor movement in any meaningful way, and then only if joining would garner them a few cents increase in wages. In 1905 in the midst of strike activities in Caguas, Río Grande, Carolina, and Arecibo, Pablo Vega Santos wrote to his comrades in Havana, lamenting what he saw around him. He criticized other workers for so willingly joining carnival celebrations, wasting their time, money, and efforts for a bourgeois celebration. Such festivities, he asserted, illustrated workers’ indifference to the need for a larger social revolution. Here they were, their fellow workers in need of their support and solidarity, but instead they chose to partake in carnival parades and drunken revelries that only benefited the elite.

Okay, but... Was there a consideration that perhaps people who worked their asses off wanted to have fun? I'm genuinely curious because it seems like a constant that people who act as activists think everything's serious.

And even when there are issues worth critiquing (e.g., a man participating in a parade smacking a child for throwing a confetti bomb into a coach), a desire to push for absolute seriousness is infuriating to me. There are criticisms about excessive drinking to be made and how that often plays a part in the abuse of others (generally children, women, and queer folks), but it's also worth recognising that not all drinking is equal (a glass of beer on occasion? isn't the same as excessive consumption).

Osorio claimed that Puerto Rican workers were quick to complain about low wages that didn’t provide enough food for the family but once Saturday evening rolled around they chose to forget these problems by going to taverns to concentrate on the appropriate billiards posture or to carouse with loose women.

It's an interesting thing to see that this is how taverns and pubs were viewed, considering how important they were in organising elsewhere.

Almost to the detriment and exclusion of other people who don't feel comfortable in them for whatever reason (e.g., IWW meetings in pubs).

Chapter 3: Anarchist Alliances, Government Repression

By 1910, the state of public education in Puerto Rico was dismal, but not that different than Cuba, which had also been a recipient of U.S.-guided public-school reform for a decade. In Cuba, the United States created a new education system modeled after the School City experiment in New York, which provided basic instruction, including civics and trades. Such approaches were replicated in Puerto Rico, where U.S. officials viewed public education as a central tool to Americanize Puerto Ricans and make the island a bilingual, bicultural resource linking the United States and Latin America. Thus, not only were students to learn trades but also civics (e.g., saluting the U.S. flag each morning), industrial education, and especially English.

SIGH.

However, such efforts had limited success. A decade after liberation from Spanish rule, both islands had public-school attendance rates hovering around 31 percent. In 1910, over 404,000 Puerto Ricans between six and twenty years old lived on the island, but only 31.6 percent attended school: 35.1 percent of six- to nine-year-olds, 47 percent of ten to fourteen-year-olds, and 13.1 percent of fifteen- to twenty-year-olds. In the second decade of U.S. rule, school enrollments and attendance dropped significantly. While 207,010 students enrolled and 155,830 students actually attended in the 1913–14 school year, these figures fell to 155,657 and 116,779 for 1916 and 1917, respectively, even though the number of teachers and schools increased over the same period. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church and a variety of Protestant churches operating under the American Missionary Association ran schools across the island. The latter in particular were part of the U.S. Americanization project and targeted “training” in manual arts.

Screaming.

In Puerto Rico, this effort to found rationalist schools was left largely to the anarchists and some of their socialist allies. In Cuba from 1909 to 1912, Ferrer’s execution energized the anarchist community, which launched fund-raising drives to create rationalist schools and hire teachers to guide the children. The larger anarchist community around Havana, complete with its own press, was in a much stronger financial and political condition to start schools. The furor over Ferrer’s execution was no more timid in Puerto Rico, but lacking large numbers of activists as well as their own newspaper, anarchists struggled to cobble together whatever they could to create a rationalist educational program. While the freethinkers offered public support for these initiatives, they seem to have not put their money behind the efforts.

Wonder why it is that I say what I say about anarchist press today. Can't be things like this or anything.

The center was not much to speak of: a small library and parlor with the works of the leading radical writers from abroad, a large table to gather around, red flags hanging from the walls, and portraits of Kropotkin, Marx, Bakunin, Máximo Gorki, Anselmo Lorenzo, and other “honored men who figured prominently in the libertarian movement that convulsed throughout the European continent.”

Oh, gag.

For instance, on Labor Day 1910, the city’s activists performed the classic del Valle play Fin de fiesta in the Teatro Yagüez. But an event with a cloudy agenda like the one in Mayagüez could create confusion. The FLT in the city was responsible for the Labor Day festivities. While the day’s events culminated with del Valle’s play, the celebration also included a speech by Dr. Gutiérrez Igaravidez, Governor Colton’s representative to the meeting. Thus, the FLT in Mayagüez included broad representation on its bill; however, when representatives of the colonial government were featured speakers alongside the performance of anarchist plays, it was easy for an audience member to get mixed messages. The more anarchist-led stronghold of Caguas seems to have avoided this problem. During Labor Day celebrations there in September 1910, Vilar and others spoke to an estimated crowd of over a thousand. According to Pablo Vega Santos, it was the largest workers’ gathering in the city’s history—with no proworker message diluted by “official” speakers.

Wonder why it is that "left unity" and "working within the state apparatus" won't work. Hmmm~.

Economics undermined efforts in Caguas. By June 1910, the Caguas economy was on the ropes. The FLT newspaper reported that factories which usually employed 200 to 250 workers were only employing 30 to 40 workers due to a shortage of tobacco leaf. While one could say that workers and potential beneficiaries of a CES might have had more time to go to the center because they lacked employment, the equal reality was that few people had disposable income to spend at the CES for newspapers or even to support the CES’s operations. Despite this, the CES did its best to survive and even extend its reach. Anarchists were accustomed to having no money and making the most out of good intentions and a few dollars. In July, the CES set out to print its own newspaper, launching a fund-raising campaign, but to no avail. On another front, the Caguas CES started to offer day classes for working-class children. In addition, as the strongest CESs in the Americas showed, no CES was worth its name without a band. CES member Rafael Ceferino led the one in Caguas that had been launched during the workers congress earlier in the year. Just as a CES needed music, it also needed plays. One of CES member Enrique Plaza’s fondest memories of the Caguas group was the dramatic performances of plays, among them Gori’s anarchist Primero de mayo (May Day).

Also why I think crowdfunding is a problem.

Juan Vilar was the key to the Caguas CES; however, he could rub people the wrong way. Erudite and dedicated, he saw rationalist education as his true calling. But Vilar was sickly, too, and his health began steadily to deteriorate in 1910. In mid-1910, he became increasingly ill. Stomach pains led to high fevers and blurred vision. Eventually, he had to stop working in the Johnson cigar factory in Caguas. With no money coming in, his compañera went to work. But coworkers also took up a collection, raising enough money to buy some medicine. These initial acts of solidarity, though, were short-lived. Soon, his companion—a fellow teacher at the CES Juventud Estudiosa—also fell ill and was unable to work. Worse, upon hearing that Vilar was feeling better but not yet capable of returning to work, his former colleagues in the factory declined to raise more money to help him. As Vilar put it in a letter to Santiago Iglesias, “That was the last straw.”

Huh.

[Ángel] Acosta, [Foster] Brown, and [George] Colton remained convinced that [Ventura] Grillo was not just a random criminal but, in fact, a violent anarchist who was part of a larger dangerous anarchist element in the city. Governor Colton claimed in July that Grillo “was a member of an anarchist society in Caguas, named ‘Centro de Estudios Sociales,’ that had relations with other societies of like nature in Cuba, Spain and South America.” Colton believed that members of the CES were involved in a plot to kill the two victims based on the fact that [Grillo] was an anarchist member of the CES and no evidence had been unearthed that Grillo had any personal motives for the murders. For the governor, this was more than just a murder investigation: “Anarchy and anarchist societies have no room in this territory nor in any other under the American flag.” Colton sought to reassure Puerto Rican workers that he was on their side and that workers deserved justice, rights, and good earnings. However, “I assure you that I absolutely will not tolerate breaking the law or back-stabbing plots from anarchists or anyone else who considers themselves above the law.”

Wow, surprise.

The CES that Colton identified was obviously Juventud Estudiosa, and to any casual observer of the labor press on the island, it would have been obvious that no secret anarchist cell existed. Anarchists were quite open about who they were and what they believed. Unlike the nearly two dozen men detained by Acosta following the murders and then released for lack of evidence, Vilar (like Grillo) had remained a prisoner, jailed initially on suspicion of conspiracy and held in order to keep him from committing another crime. Then a trumped-up morality conviction kept Vilar in legal limbo. By summer, Vilar’s case remained in the media and courts. Fearing the ongoing strike, coupled with the Vilar case, tobacco companies in Caguas began to forbid the lector in their factories from reading political, independent, or workers newspapers—a move protested by organized labor but apparently to no avail.

It's like the state will do anything to, y'know, silence people!

More broadly, the treatment of anarchists, among them Vilar, began to have rippling effects among many leftists whose early faith in American progress and democratic rule continued to slip away. The example of Vilar’s lawyer, Rafael López Landrón is a case in point. An early supporter of Americanization like many progressives associated with the island’s labor movement, López Landrón supported the various strands of “socialism” found on the island in the early 1900s, including at times a belief in stateless socialism, that is, anarchism. Despite this, he used his talent in the U.S. judicial system on the island to defend people ranging from Vilar in 1911 to Santiago Iglesias and Luis Muñoz Rivera over a decade earlier. But after a decade of U.S. rule, López Landrón and many others began to question their early support of Americanization, and by the 1910s would be calling for Puerto Rican independence—another issue that would divide the Puerto Rican Left...

Understandably so.

Chapter 4: Anarchists, Freethinkers, and Spiritists

All quotes from the conclusion to this book:

Poverty in America is not invisible. We see it, and then we look away.

The same is true of everywhere. Poverty tends to go entirely ignored, even when we pretend we're doing something about it.

Our relationship to poverty in the United States has always been characterized by what sociologist Stanley Cohen calls “cultural denial.” Cultural denial is the process that allows us to know about cruelty, discrimination, and repression, but never openly acknowledge it. It is how we come to know what not to know. Cultural denial is not simply a personal or psychological attribute of individuals; it is a social process organized and supported by schooling, government, religion, media, and other institutions.

This relationship has most certainly been acquired from Europe, even as they claim to be "social" democracies. It's absolutely necessary to recognise these views as being tied to the values that the former colonisers brought with them, particularly those who brought the Puritanical bullshit with them.

It's more clear as we watch Europeans, who are going through austerity, pointing at the United States as being "worse than them" with regards to surveillance and bigotry. They hide behind their GDPR, and they pretend they're superior when they sweep their bigotries under the rug.

Denial is exhausting and expensive. It is uncomfortable for individuals who must endure the cognitive dissonance required to both see and not-see reality. It contorts our physical geography, as we build infrastructure—suburbs, highways, private schools, and prisons—that allow the professional middle class to actively avoid sharing the lives of poor and working-class people. It weakens our social bonds as a political community; people who cannot meet each others’ eyes will find it very difficult to collectively govern.

It's so easy to see how these denials continually ruin the world around us. It is exhausting.

For example, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 dramatized not just the suffering of the poor but also their immense political power. Poor and working people’s activism terrified elites and won significant accommodations: a return to a poor-relief system focused on distributing cash and goods and a move away from institutionalization. But almost immediately, scientific charity rose to take its place. The techniques changed—scientific casework focused on investigation and policing rather than containing the poor in quasi-prisons—but the results were the same. Tens of thousands of people were denied access to public resources, families were torn apart, and the lives of the poor were scrutinized, controlled, and imperiled.

So many people ask why things like third-places or other community-oriented centers have disappeared. This is why. If we all had ways to interact and create stronger connections, we'd be organising for better circumstances far more often.

When we talk about the technologies that mediate our interactions with public agencies today, we tend to focus on their innovative qualities, the ways they break with convention. Their biggest fans call them “disruptors,” arguing that they shake up old relations of power, producing government that is more transparent, responsive, efficient, even inherently more democratic.

This myopic focus on what’s new leads us to miss the important ways that digital tools are embedded in old systems of power and privilege. While the automated eligibility system in Indiana, the coordinated entry system in Los Angeles, and the predictive risk model in Allegheny County may be cutting-edge, they are also part of a deep-rooted and disturbing history. The poorhouse preceded the Constitution as an American institution by 125 years. It is mere fantasy to think that a statistical model or a ranking algorithm will magically upend culture, policies, and institutions built over centuries.

Like the brick-and-mortar poorhouse, the digital poorhouse diverts the poor from public resources. Like scientific charity, it investigates, classifies, and criminalizes. Like the tools birthed during the backlash against welfare rights, it uses integrated databases to target, track, and punish.

They are disruptors, but not in the ways that have been marketed to us.

No poverty regulation system in history has concentrated so much effort on trying to guess how its targets might behave. This is because we, collectively, care less about the actual suffering of those living in poverty and more about the potential threat they might pose to others.

I think this is... true and not at the same time? Now we have automated algorithms that enable this guesswork (on things you can't predict) to happen, but people still did it in their own assessments. Schools were notorious for this.

But it was still possible to prove people wrong, when you can't do that to a machine.

While they are close kin, the differences between the poorhouse of yesterday and the digital poorhouse today are significant. Containment in the physical institution of a county poorhouse had the unintentional result of creating class solidarity across race, gender, and national origin. When we sit at a common table, we might see similarities in our experiences, even if we are forced to eat gruel. Surveillance and digital social sorting drive us apart as smaller and smaller microgroups are targeted for different kinds of aggression and control. When we inhabit an invisible poorhouse, we become more and more isolated, cut off from those around us, even if they share our suffering.

And there it is. The digital poorhouse is part of developing a society of disconnected people, whereas accidentally allowing us to organise is bad.

The digital poorhouse is hard to understand. The software, algorithms, and models that power it are complex and often secret. Sometimes they are protected business processes, as in the case of the IBM and ACS software that denied needy Hoosiers access to cash benefits, food, and health care. Sometimes operational details of a high-tech tool are kept secret so its targets can’t game the algorithm. In Los Angeles, for example, a “Do's and Don’ts” document for workers in homeless services suggested: “Don’t give a client a copy of the VI-SPDAT. Don’t mention that people will receive a score. [W]e do not want to alert clients [and] render the tool useless.” Sometimes the results of a model are kept secret to protect its targets. Marc Cherna and Erin Dalton don’t want the AFST risk score to become a metric shared with judges or investigating caseworkers, subtly influencing their decision-making.

And too many of us are willing to follow rules that we know hurt people.

Similarly, once you break caseworkers’ duties into discrete and interchangeable tasks, install a ranking algorithm and a Homeless Management Information System, or integrate all your public service information in a data warehouse, it is nearly impossible to reverse course. New hires encourage new sets of skills, attitudes, and competencies. Multimillion-dollar contracts give corporations interests to protect. A score that promises to predict the abuse of children quickly becomes impossible to ignore. Now that the AFST is launched, fear of the consequences of not using it will cement its central and permanent place in the system.

And there it is. It's easier to reverse course with humans.

We all live in the digital poorhouse. We have all always lived in the world we built for the poor. We create a society that has no use for the disabled or the elderly, and then are cast aside when we are hurt or grow old. We measure human worth based only on the ability to earn a wage, and suffer in a world that undervalues care and community. We base our economy on exploiting the labor of racial and ethnic minorities, and watch lasting inequities snuff out human potential. We see the world as inevitably riven by bloody competition and are left unable to recognize the many ways we cooperate and lift each other up.

But only the poor lived in the common dorms of the county poorhouse. Only the poor were put under the diagnostic microscope of scientific charity. Today, we all live among the digital traps we have laid for the destitute.

If we cared more about the poor, we would actually be better at protecting everyone.

As my colleague, Mariella Saba of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, always reminds me: it’s vital to keep our eyes on the badge. But the culture of policing wears many uniforms.

And the state doesn’t require a cop to kill a person.

Never has.

If someone finds a freely available online copy of the book, please let me know.

Introduction

The fact that "feminism"—or rather "feminine humanism," of which feminism is merely the nineteenth century avatar—is thought today to be outmoded is a means of conjuring away the problems it posited, problems that are still very far from being solved. To confirm this one need only look at the composition of the committees that run political parties, ministerial councils, and meetings of the United Nations. Despite declarations concerning the political and social equality of men and women, this equality more often than not remains illusory. But that the principle has been accepted is already a considerable achievement; a century ago, it would have seemed foolish and outrageous.

This was written in the 1960s, and it could've been written yesterday. There are still far too many problems that arise out of patriarchy that have not been dealt with and are things that people refuse to deal with because they refuse to acknowledge that patriarchy continues and (to some extent) benefits them.

We don't even need to look at the illegitimate power that is the United Nations or any State government; we can look at the way our own organisations, groups, and collectives are structured and the way work gets done within them. How often are cis men granted a pass for their behaviours, giving them excuse after excuse? To do less than others, to receive more. I've seen this in disability groups where disabled women receive less care than similarly disabled men; one of my friends who worked in the sector recently told me that studies in Norway showed that, even in their "welfare state," disabled women received and average of 17 hours less of care than similarly disabled men. That is ludicrous.

These problems haven't been solved, and they most certainly won't be if we continue to look the other way.

The history of women, considered as a branch of social history, is generally held to be insignificant. For "serious" historians, it deserves to be taken no more seriously than any other "lady's work." An historian of the Commune has recently written: "There will inevitably be feminine demonstrations, and they will be enacted by the petty bourgeoisie. They may be the rowdiest of all, but the essential point does not lie in that; it lies in the fact that the working women of the Commune shattered the illusion according to which the emancipation of their sex was to occur as a side effect of the class struggle." Now this emancipation is by no means an illusion. The women who today have access to intellectual professions (university professors, doctors, engineers), in the capitalist countries as well as in the socialist ones; who earn a living without a protector, either lover or husband; who are directly engaged in society—these women are infinitely more "free" than their grandmothers would have dared to dream. The liberation of woman, then, is not necessarily fused with that of the proletariat. The two do not move at the same rate. The fact that Marxist historians and bourgeois historians are in accordance on this issue proves merely that the former are as bogged down in masculine prejudice as their colleagues, although for them it is more a question of political tactics.

There's something to the class reductionism that is often used by reactionaries (those across the spectrum from "left" to right). For generations, we saw that feminism was inherently believed to be part of a bourgeois issue (and in some ways, that's easy to see both in the construction of history as focusing primarily on bourgeois people as a whole and the fact that sometimes movements can prioritise bourgeois people and their views, even if it's not intentional).

However, there's this desire of many to constantly conflate "identity politics" with bourgeois goals and pretend the proletariat would never support it. We see this in so movements, where workers are constantly put at odds against them:

• Feminism and patriarchy
• Gender identity and sexual orientation ("bourgeois queers")
• Immigrant issues
• Disability issues

There is this attempt to segregate workers away from those causes, even when those causes benefit workers. And I think part of that has a lot to do with the workerism of many leftist political movements but also a large chunk of the fact that our organisations are still organised in ways where hegemonic power still attempts to maintain power within them.

It's why organisations can't withstand abuse allegations against their Leading Characters; it's why they crumble because people leave them for something safer or nothing at all (disillusioned with the political movement).

Other people have traditionally believed that the problem no longer exists. Women hold no interest for them except in the amatory relations—that is, they matter only as objects. Bedroom histories will always be best-sellers. Mme de Pompadour and Mme du Barry still draw attention to themselves to the tastes of the day. Mm de Staël is more interesting for her lovers than for the struggle she waged against Napoleon. Flora Tristan and Pauline Roland interest no one.

This is still so true. There is so much interest in the bedroom histories of many women, even if it is as a means to attempt to discredit them or to contradict their virtues.

Chapter 1: Women During the Second Empire

This banding together for solidarity had two goals, political education and propaganda for the International, which were what separated the cooperatives of working class origin from similar efforts established by the charitable segment of the bourgeoisie. The former societies were only stopgaps which were moving toward social revolution; charity was an end in itself.

Things we've known for so long and still refuse to acknowledge, though now I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that charities are also jobs and industry.

It was not just working women who had complaints to make of an order that excluded women from society. A century ago, a woman could scarcely exist socially without a protector, either husband or lover. The education she received was mediocre or nonexistent. The Law of 1850 had indeed ordered the creation of a girls' school for every commune with a concentrated population of more than 800. But the law lay dead on the books. Out of 48,496 public schools, 18,732 schools were for boys, 11,836 schools were for girls, and the others were coeducational. It is true that the private schools re-established the balance to some extent. But, generally, one child in five never went to any school, because he was in rags and was dying of hunger. Those men and women who taught in elementary schools constituted a decently-dressed proletariat. More than 4,000 schoolmistresses earned less than 400 francs annually. Almost 2,000 earned 100 to 200 francs. We have seen that the minimum budget of a Parisian working woman was fixed at about 500 francs.

The 500 francs comes from a calculation earlier in the book, explaining the rough costs of everything else that's needed at the time. This is for a full year.

The liberal professions were virtually closed to girls of the bourgeoisie. When Julie Daubié sat for her baccalaureate, despite the opposition of the rector of Lyon, and passed that examination, the Minister of Public Education refused in his turn to give her her diploma, for fear of "forever holding up his ministry to ridicule." This incident marks the starting-point of a revolution, and one forgets today that this revolution is the outcome of a patient, daily, and colorless struggle.

It's also interesting to me that, even if this is a "bourgeois issue," a lot of people will not see it for what it is. There has been and remains a constant strain of people who insist that women are inferior and refuse to acknowledge that so many women have had to fight for their placement in any form of society.

Chapter 3: The Siege of Paris

After September 4, when the theaters were closed, even more people were attracted to the Clubs. These Clubs, in which all opinions met and clashed, were of various leanings. Women brought their children along; there, at least, they were out of the cold, but they also attended because of political conviction, and did not hesitate to intervene in the proceedings.

Once again, it is more than clear that if we do not make space for families, especially those with children, we will never prefigure shit. Not entirely sure how it is that these movements have focused so excessively on those with grown or no children, but it is exhausting and absurd.

Women also participated in street demonstrations. On September 18 they took the initiative in demonstrating in sympathy with Strasbourg, which had been besieged for more than a month. "The idea came to some among us—the majority—to get weapons and set forth to help Strasbourg defend herself, and to die with her." Louis Michel and André Léo led a little group that set out for the Hôtel de Ville crying "To Strasbourg!" Women—many schoolteachers, young people, and especially students—joined them along the way.

I long for more radical schoolteachers. We've desperately needed them to wake up for as long as they've existed.

Chapter 4: The 18th of March

Any political system which demands the consensus of the masses and at the same time serves as the expression of the masses, must appeal to popular sentiment and organize a following. Religions, like political movements, need collective demonstrations. Women, who are more emotional than men, are doubtless even more susceptible to this communal appeal.

Not fond of this highlighted sentiment here, but it continues:

But the women also had good reasons for backing the new power. To be sure, the goals of the Commune, set forth in a Declaration to the French People, took no account of women's existence. The men of the Commune did not foresee for a single instant that women might have civic rights, any more than did their "great forebearers" of 1789 and 1793, or the 1848 revolutionaries. But certain measures, like the remission of rent payments or the discontinuation of the sale of articles depositied at the Mont-de-Piété, affected women greatly. A 600-franc pension was to be granted to the wife, legal or not, of any member of the National Guard who had been killed defending the people's rights, after an inquiry that would establish her rights and needs. Each of her children, legitimate or not, could collect a 365-franc pension until he was eighteen. At the expense of the Commune, orphans would receive the education necessary "to make their own way in society."

Mont-de-Piété was a sort of pawn broker.

This was an implicit recognition of the structure of the working-class family, as it really existed, outside the context of religious and bourgeois laws: the recognition of unions libres; of the right of children, legitimate or natural, to subsistence, and the disappearance of the old macula bastardiae of Roman Law, Church, and Civil Code. In this, the Commune, which was handling the Banque de France with kid gloves and did not venture to make any inroads into private property, undoubtedly took one of the most revolutionary steps of its ephemeral reign. That this measure outrated the bourgeoisie, that it was received with jubilation by the members of the Commune—both of these are indications of its significance.

There is one thing here that is infuriating, as there often is a lot of mentions against prostitutes and prostitution. I have a feeling that, even with these movements towards this, a lot of (legally unmarried) women would've still been marked as prostitutes in order to not pay them.

Because this is what happens when you put criteria on something, the people who handle it find ways to not do it. Haven't seen mention of that, but it's worth pointing out that there's a lot of anti-sex work sentiment in the Commune.

Chapter 6: The Clubs

On May 20, citoyenne Valentin urged women to "guard the gates of Paris, while the men go to battle. Then she demanded that the clothing left in the religious communities be sold or distributed "to dress poor children," and that "the flowers upon the altars be given to schoolchildren as prizes, to decorate the garrets of the poor." The proposition was unanimously adopted. Perhaps I am wrong in lingering over this detail, unworthy of a "serious" historian. But I find it admirable that in the midst of fighting, in the midst of poverty, in the feverish atmosphere of the Clubs, a woman should think of giving flowers to children. This seems to me quite indicative of a deep sensibility which which rarely appears in revolutionary movements, which, because the must confront the most urgent situations, have to be schematic.

I also really love these kinds of details. Sometimes everything is written about with such machine precision, as if everything just went as is without... life.

Chapter 7: Opinion and Action

There is no doubt that the women in the Clubs had only very vague ideas concerning socialism. But what they did know, what they did feel in a confused and visceral fashion, was that they had worked all their lives for ridiculous wages, and that, if nothing were to change, their children would be like them: poverty-stricken and exploited. To a young man who was expounding the goals of the Commune, an old working woman in a blue apron, with a square kerchief on her head, got up and answered:

Before I put the quote in that follows, I think it's worth pointing out the weird structure here that women had a "vague idea," but I wonder if this is something that is almost sarcastic in tone about the ways in which women are often talked about? Or perhaps it's a comparison between the "I've read a lot of books" socialist men of the bourgeois and the "I lived the life" socialist women who were fed up. Anyway, the passage quotes one of the ladies of the Commune:

"He tells us that the Commune is going to do something so that the people aren't dying of hunger as they work. Well, that's fine; it's not a bit too soon! Because here I've been a washerwoman for forty years, I've been working every blessed day of the week, without ever having anything to put in my mouth or to pay the rent. Food is so expensive! And so why is it that some can rest from one New Year's Day to the next, while we are always at work? Is that fair? It seems to me that if I were the government, I'd manage things so that working people could be given their turn to rest. If the people had vacations like the rich do, citoyens, they wouldn't complain so much.

Funny how the more things change, the more things seems to stay the same.

At Sainte-Élizabeth-du-Temple, they demanded that women having a specified number of children receive a pension. This proposition seemed grotesque to the reactionary onlooker who reported it; but is it not the origin of family allowances? The Clubs depicted by the adversaries of the Commune as lairs of bandits, drunkards, and prostitutes, were demanding measures whose morality was entirely puritanical. The Vigilance Committee of the republican citoyennes of the 18th arrondissement voted for a motion which would tend to make the prostitution that had been increasing for some time disappear from the streets. The motion was signed by the president, Sophie Poirier, the secretary, Anna Jaclard, and two assistants, Mmes Barois and Tesson. Four hundred signatures followed. The Clube de l'École de Médecine demanded "that all women of suspect morality plying their shameful trade on the public thoroughfares" be immediately arrested, and likewise "the drunkards who have forgotten their self-respect"; that the cafés be closed at 11 o'clock at night; that "stag parties" be forbidden. This document was unanimously approved.

Whew, it's always a good reminder that sometimes we can disagree with history. Or recognise that you understand where certain beliefs come from even if you find them appalling. Particularly, I feel this way about the perspectives about sex workers, which are positively atrocious. Despite the anti-clerical nature of their goals, despite the denunciation of the Church, they still managed to hold onto some of their harsher views.

Also, it's funny to see that it was a "reactionary" sentiment to dislike the family allowance. I can see that as being true (since so many conservatives in places like the US operate under the idea of "taking responsibility for your actions" and punishing already-born children who live in poverty), but it's also a horrifying way to distribute money rather than on a "per person" basis.

Family allowances are most often used to encourage the growth of certain populations, particularly these days. They're also withheld from those of "undesirable" demographics (either in full or in part).

The ideal Commune would have been Savonarola's Florence.

Put this here because holy what the fuck, Savonarola is one of the most confusing people I've ever come across.

What was to become of these prostitutes who could no longer ply their trade? Some of them turned up at the Hôtel de Ville asking to be allowed to care for the injured. They were refused this honor, for, Louise Michel noted, the men of the Commune wanted pure hands tending the Federals. But for Louise Michel, these women, the victims of poverty and of society, had a right to their place in the new world which was being born, and which ought to reject any moral condemnation. "Who, then, would have more of a right than they, the saddest victims of the old world, to give their life for the new one?" Therefore she directed them to a committee of women (the 18th arrondissement Vigilance Committee? the Union des Femmes?) "whose spirits were generous enough to let these women be welcomed." "We shall never bring shame down upon the Commune," these prostitutes said. Many, indeed, died courageously on the barricades during the Bloody Week in May, as did that "Henriette-Tout-le-Monde" whose story has been told by Maurice Dommanget.

Love the highlighting of the irony that the men who likely visited the prostitutes and allowed them to "ply their trade" in health didn't want their "impure" hands touching them in sickness and injury? Forever the ironies persist.

Under the pressure of public opinion and of the Clubs, General Cluseret decided that every man from nineteen to forty years of age be obliged to serve in the National Guard: a useless measure, since it provided only a very weak contingent of men who were really eager to fight (the partisans of the Commune had long ago been at the ramparts and the forts). A clumsy measure, too, since it gave the Commune the appearance of being dictatorial (which it scarcely was), inquisitorial, and intolerable—and all the while ineffective.

Chapter 8: Education

As early as March 26, the Society for New Education named delegates who were to present a project for educational reform to the Commune.

This included three men and three women: Menier, Rama, and Rheims; Henriette Garoste, Louise Laffitte, and Maria Verdure (daughter of schoolteacher Augustin Verdure, also a member of the Commune).

Brought a draft reminiscent of Pauline Roland (1849): Association des Instituteurs et Professeurs Socialistes.

It was necessary for a republic to "make young people ready for self-government through a republican education." This problem took precedence over all others; without its solution, serious and lasting social reforms could never be envisaged. Therefore, all the educational establishments maintained by the Commune, the départemenets, and the State had to be opened to all children, regardless of their faith. In the name of freedom of conscience and of justice, religious or dogmatic instruction had to be abolished in State establishments: "Let neither prayers, nor dogmas, nor anything that is reserved for the individual conscience be either taught or practiced there." Questions that were within the domain of religion, therefore, had to be removed from examinations. Teaching methods should always be "experimental and scientific," based upon "the observation of facts"; therefore, teaching organizations could exist only as private or non-State establishments. In short, schooling had to be considered as a public service; it had to be free, complete (with the exception of competition for professional specialties), and obligatory, whatever the social position of the parent. In response to the delegates of the Society of New Education, the Commune answered that it was in complete agreement with their plan, and that it considered this first step an "incentive to set out on a path that it had decided to take."

So much of this is... a half-half for me, so it's interesting to look back on it. Within the context, I understand why it is that they thought that schools should be the things we kept, reformed, and opened to everyone. When you realise that a lot of the people who were doing these structures were of the "intellectual classes," it's even more clear because they often see the benefit of doing things the way they did them. It's common. It was also that schools in the 1870s, even though they were made compulsory, were very... questionable. Many in rural areas were primarily operated by the Church, they were mostly not secular... and so on. So there was a mixture of seeing the positives of the school and wanting to keep it.

However, while I agree that there needs to be cross-generational learning, this is something that needs to be reconsidered as a one-way direction: adult to child. Also, if children are perpetually placed into one institution... how are they learning? That's still indoctrination, even if the ideas are better. How do they explore their own needs?

Perhaps it's also because the relationship to schools is starting to change, particularly now that we're recognising how they homogenise us rather than support the range of people in them.

For her part, Louise Michel sent the Commune a summary of an educational method that she had been thinking about for a long time. It was necessary to teach as many elementary ideas as possible with "the fewest, simplest, and most comprehensible words possible." She attached great importance to the moral training of her pupils. Their conscience ought to be developed to the point that "no reward or punishment can exist apart from the feeling of having done one's duty, or having acted badly." As for the religious problem, that should be left to the will of the parents. With her friends in the Montmartre Vigilance Committee—Sophie Poirier, Marie Cartier (née Lemonnier), and Mme Dauguet—Louise Michel demanded secular professional schools and orphanages to replace "the schools and orphanages for ignoramuses."

See, here's part of the context for why they'd want to reform what exists over replace.

Anyway, a lot of these reforms took place and were part of France after the fact. Which is interesting, considering the ways in which the ideas were took up to placate many people.

Chapter 9: A Great Journalist

The goals of the Commune, the coherent thought which quickened the best of the Communards, are both expressed by André Léo's excellent articles. And one might wonder through what injustice of History a woman whose novels are above average, and who played an important role in the Commune, has nowhere found her rightful place. Benoît Malon—who, one must admit, became her husband—paid her this tribute: "This woman, whose name is among those of the greatest writers of our time, and whom Rossel, who knew what he was talking about, called citoyen André Léo, was equally devoted to the cause of the people and to serving it with her writings, her speeches, and her total support." Yet literary historians who set third-rate writers up in the eyes of posterity never even mention her name, and the historians of the Commune scarcely notice her. No doubt there are several reasons for this. The first is that André Léo was a woman, and women need much more talent than do men in order to be recognized. Second, André Léo was implicated in the Commune, and literary historians generally tend to be very traditionalistic. Third, however devoted André Léo may have been to the Commune—a devotion that she retained all her life—she did not figure among its extremists, and did not hesitate to criticize the mistakes and violence of the Commune's supporters. Tending toward Bakunin rather than Marx, she thus cannot be ranked among the prophets and saints of the First International. In the eyes of orthodox Marxists, André Léo is an "individual," someone smacking of anarchism, and vaguely disturbing. In the eyes of anarchistic revolutionaries, she is much too reasonable. In the eyes of the bourgeoisie, she is a revolutionary. In short, there is no category for her; she is among those people who could not be annexed by a single cause.

This is so incredibly unsurprising, considering how many people outside of hegemonic demographics get erased from history because people will overlook them for... so many reasons.

In the newspaper La Sociale, André Léo thus became the zealous but lucid promoter of the Commune. As early as the 9th of April, she recorded the isolation of Paris, the mutual lack of understanding between the capital and the provinces. "Both are in the wrong, and for Paris, the more intelligent, the fault is perhaps greater." Thus it was necessary for Paris to enlighten the countryside and the provinces, and explain that they all had the same oppressors. It was right for Paris not to imitate the violence its enemies had done to thought and liberty, not to transgress the principles that were the very bases of its demands. In this, André Léo implicitly poses the eternal question of means and ends. How can just policies be enacted by unjust means, when the end is always contained in the means put forth to achieve it, the means which determine it? "We must support our faith in a worthy manner; we must show in all its brilliance the idea we have the honor of representing; we must not let it be obscured by error or vituperation, must not disturb the conscience of those who see ideas only through men." Therefore, one should not proclaim a Commune and then act as if it were the Constituent Assembly.

This section is quite long, but there is so much here about André Léo and her philosophy. She seems like an interesting person, though I find it interesting that she'd pose Paris (the city) as "the intelligent" when she later (next) will talk about how city and rural people need to understand each other. But it's unsurprising because of how common this is, rather than moving the thoughts between the two and building cohesive philosophies between the two.

As a Commune, Paris should accept the assembly, elected by the provinces. Fighting against the assembly, Paris was no longer the Commune, but the Revolution. Thus it was right to make a frank avowal of the social idea, the revolutionary idea, that one represented. "Now it no longer has anything to contrive. If it does not yield to the lesser, it will not yield to the greater." It was, then a fight to the death between Revolution and Monarchy, between poor and privileged, between worker and parasite, between people and exploiters. The peasant, too, was among the exploited; but his condition was hidden from him by his antiquated ideas. Thus he had to be shown where his interest lay. Granted, it would be preferable to appeal to his intelligence. But whose fault was it? Who had abolished freedom of the press? Who had refused the people education, "without which universal suffrage is nothing but a trap in which democracy is caught, and perishes"? The responsibility devolved upon the men of lies and treason who had wanted merciless, bloody battle. Next came a manifesto, drafted almost entirely by André Léo, addressed to rural workers. It was necessary to end the antagonism between workers and peasants, between the city and the country (a problem against which all the twentieth-century revolutions would stumble).

This is a continuation even until today. Being a former rural person living in the city, the way that people talk about us is... appalling. There is an excessive belief that we're unable to see our own oppressions, and there is a refusal to listen to us as if we know what's best for us. There's also an assumption that we're all the same. And you can see that, to an extent, here.

Continuing the long paragraph:

"Brother, you have been deceived. Our interest are the same. What I am asking for, you want too; the freedom that I demand is your own..." What did it matter whether the oppressor was called landowner or industry? Everywhere, the producers of wealth lacked the necessities of life. Everywhere, they lacked "liberty, leisure, the life of the mind, and the life of the heart." For centuries it had been said that property was the fruit of labor. This was a lie. That house, that land, on which the peasant worked all his life, did not belong to him; or if they did belong to him, they were burdened with debts, and he or his children would have to sell them. "The rich are lazy; the workers are poor and will remain poor." Against this injustice Paris had risen and wanted to change its laws. "Paris wants the peasant's son to be as well educated as the son of the man who is rich, and rich for no reason, for human knowledge is the common good of all men." Paris no longer wanted a king or highly-paid offices. These economies would make it possible to establish homes for the elderly. Paris wanted those responsible for the war to pay the 5 billion francs owed to Prussia. Paris wanted justice to be free, and to be done by judges chosen by the people. Finally, Paris wanted "the peasant to have his land, the worker to have his tool; work to be available for everybody."

It's interesting that so many people are still not recognising how, though the workerist feeling worked here in the context of the Commune (though was still a problem)... That we keep doing it. You'd think we'd have realised that workerism is a problem. I point this out because, while it works here, it should never be the end goal.

Finishing the paragraph:

It was said that the Parisians were socialists, "dividers." But who said that? The thieves who cried "Stop, thief!" to put people on the wrong track. The real "dividers" were "those who do nothing but get fat from the work of others." The cause that Paris was defending and the cause of the worker were thus the same. The generals who that day were attacking Paris were those who had betrayed France: the deputies appointed by the provinces wanted to restore Henri V. "If Paris falls, the yoke of poverty will remain on your neck, and will pass on to your children."

And it did.

Unlike most of the men of the Commune, who so often went astray into vain discussions, devoting themselves to details and neglecting what was essential, André Léo never lost sight of the two objectives that, if the Commune were to triumph, were the most urgent: the indispensable support of the provinces, and the armed struggle against Versailles. In a very fine article, she extolled the soldiers of the Commune, those sixty thousand men who, for more than three weeks, had held their own against a hardened army of old soldiers, policemen, and gendarmes. Who were they, then these dead men whose names and professions were listed every day? A shoemaker, a stonecutter, a carpenter, a blacksmith.

Lmao, this feels like every anarchist collective or labour union meeting I've been at in my life, I swear.

Chapter 10: Ambulance Nurses, Canteen Workers, Soldiers

Insofar as it was a revolutionary power, the Commune would have done better to take over the Banque de France than to carry out measures on a secondary level, which disorganized the hospital services and contributed to futile and inextricable disorder. But the men of the Commune did not discern the hierarchies of urgency. Their debates, like their decisions, were often marked by revolutionary childishness.

Literally still feels relevant in how so many places are organised, I swear.

But, in this struggle to the death, Versailles had no more mercy for nurses than it did prisoners: both were shot. Lieutenant Butin, sent with truce flags to gather up the injured at the Vanves fort, was greeted with rifle fire by the Versailles soldiers despite his white flag and the flag of the Geneva Convention; he had to return in haste to the lines of Federals. An ambulance nurse who was about to lift up a wounded man was raped and killed by five Versailles men. The Commune seized upon the affair, and considered applying the decree concerning hostages which had been voted in on April 5, after the massacre of Flourens, Duval, and prisoners taken by Versailles. This decree aroused the indignation of all right-minded people, but was merely a response to the murders committed by order of Thiers. Moreover, the debate revealed that the men of the Commune were much more respectful of their enemies' lives than were their adversaries.

One of the things I didn't realise was that the Geneva Conventions were much older than I'd thought they were, but it's entirely unsurprising that the State decided to murder people and ignore them. The Geneva Conventions, as we've seen even in my lifetime, appear to never apply to people within your own country... So what is the point of either them or the State?

The decree concerning hostages was not actually applied in reprisal for the murder of the ambulance nurse. It would take the mass murders of Federals by the Versailles army, during the Bloody Week in May, for the exasperated crowds to abandon themselves to violence against the hostages.

Just a reminder.

Everywhere along the outposts, André Léo noticed a dual attitude toward the ambulance nurses. The officers and surgeons were clearly hostile to them; the troops were in favor of them. Similarly, in 1849, Jeanne Deroin, offering her (illegal) candidacy, had encountered only sarcasm in the bourgeois districts, whereas those who heard her in Faubourg Saint-Antoine greeted her sympathetically.

This is also why I get so tired of people talking about how people in the working class are more bigoted. They have their problems, but they are often more sympathetic.

The book quotes the following (from La Sociale, May 6):

Alongside of that bourgeois, authoritarian mentality, so narrow and so petty, which unfortunately exists in so many of our commanders, there blazes in our citoyen soldiers the keen, exalted, profound sentiment of the new life. It is they who believe in the great forces that save the world; they acclaim these, they do not outlaw them. They know what the right of all is contained in their right. Whereas most of the commanders are still only military men, the soldiers are real citizens...

It's so ridiculous how we could update this for today. It's absurd.

Rossel—the student at the École Polytechnique who became the Commune's Minister of War, and who was without doubt one of the strangest and most attractive figures of the Revolution—expressed his regrets at the situation André Léo pointed out to him, and asked her to tell him "through the public press" (a consistent revolutionary, Rossel was a foe of secrecy) how to set it right. "The noble and frank tone of your recent proclamations," answered André Léo, "made me sense a man who was incapable of common bias. You know better than I what you can do to make use of the devotion of republican women, for that is inherent in your power..." Women were running up against masculine prejudices and they surgeons' esprit de corps at a time when, on the contrary, it was necessary to move toward "that responsible brotherhood of men and women, that unity of feelings and ideas, which alone can form, in honor, equality, and peace, the Commune of the future."

Absolutely adore the whole thing about "answer me through the press," but the constant reminder that cis men fail to recognise the power of everyone else? Sigh.

The Republic could be established only upon such a recognition of equality. André Léo submitted to Rossel an idea of Dr Jaclard, the head of the 17th Legion (as we have seen, his wife Anna played an important role in the organization of the ambulance stations). Doctors without antifeminine prejudices, and the three or four young women who had passed their examinations at the École de Médecine, were to be placed in charge of several ambulance stations. "These women had the courage to force the doors of science; they will certainly not fail to serve Humanity and the Revolution." But, by contrast to Rossel, General Dombrowski displayed an eminently reactionary attitude toward women. André Léo sharply reminded him that without the participation of women, the 18th of March would have ended in failure: "You would never have been General of the Commune, citoyen Dombrowski."

I find it charming to try to knock someone down a few pegs. But it's also something that's necessary to recognise. If you don't support everyone, you support no one; you will always fail.

She asked the general to do a little reasoning. Could the Revolution have been accomplished without women? That had been the mistake of the First Revolution: women had been excluded from freedom and equality; then, returning to Catholicism, they had strengthened the forces of reaction. The republicans were full of inconsistencies: they did not want women to be under priestly thumbs, but they were upset when women were free-thinkers and wanted to act like free, equal human beings. The republicans had dethroned the Emperor and God, but only to put themselves in the place of both. The republicans needed subjects—or, at least, subjected women. They did not want to admit, then as before, that woman was responsible to herself. "She should remain neutral and passive, under the guidance of man. She will have done nothing but change her confessor." But God possessed on enormous advantage over man: he remained unknown, which enabled him to be ideal.

It's an interesting framing that I hadn't actually thought of. Perhaps it's something to keep in mind as I continue looking into this time.

Religion condemned reason and knowledge. The Revolution, on the other hand, postulated that reason and liberty be exercised in the search for Truth and Justice. "The Revolution is the liberty and the responsibility of every human being, limited only by the rights of all, without privilege of race or of sex." Therefore women could not but be concerned; yet people talked about the freeing of man, but not of woman. Women were rejected and discouraged when they wanted to serve the Revolution. It is in this sense that their rejection was a reactionary step. A history of the period since 1789 could be written under the title "A History of the Inconsistencies of the Revolutionary Party." But this attitude of many Commune officers toward women corresponds to an age-old feeling that is too deep and too widespread for it to be easily changed, despite various interventions. Thus the Club de la Révolution Sociale in its turn asked the 17th arrondissement municipal authorities to intervene on behalf of ambulance nurses with the surgeons and battalion commanders.

Written in the 1960s, felt in the 2020s, about the 1870s. For fuck's sake.

Content warning on the next few for war crimes (including sexual assault and murder) against women.

On April 3, at the time of a sortie when Flourens and General Duval were murdered by Versailles soldiers, the geographer Élisée Reclus, taken prisoner, gives us the following account of a canteen worker. "The poor woman was in the row in front of mine, alongside of her husband. She was not at all pretty, nor was she young: rather, a poor, middle-aged proletarian, small, marching with difficulty. Insults rained down upon her, all from officers prancing on horseback along the road." A very young hussar officer said. "You know what we're going to do with her? We're going to screw her with a red-hot iron." A vast, horrified silence fell among the soldiers.

Absolutely disgusting.

Often these women were heroic. Even the most ardent antifeminists have rarely denied that women have courage. At Neuilly, a canteen worker with a head wound had the wound dressed and then returned to combat. Another, chased by a gendarme, suddenly turned around and killed him point-blank. Her comrades and the crowd cheered her when she came back within the Paris walls. On the Châtillon Plain, a canteen worker was the last to retreat, with a group of National Guards, and turned around every minute to fire her gun again. In the 137th Battalion, a young canteen worker—almost a child—never stopped firing the cannon despite the shells, coming from Châtillon, which were falling all around her. When the Federals had succeeded in evacuating the Vanves fort, by means of the catacombs and quarries under the region, the newspapers noted that "it was women who, in this situation, showed the most calmness, presence of mind, and courage. The ambulance nurses wanted to carry off the wounded. The canteen workers were distributing stimulants, and keeping watch over the torches."

I genuinely enjoy seeing these kinds of descriptions, which are so entirely lacking in most histories.

Chapter 11: Bloody Week

A remark is called for here. A large proportion of these women were born in the provinces. As for the men, the proportion was less, but still quite considerable: the Parisian insurrection of 1871 was carried out by provincials. There are doubtless several explanations for this paradox. These men and women who had broken ties with their villages and come to Paris, had given proof in their private lives of a will to renewal, a spirit of adventure, which also were what impelled them to join the ranks of the Social Revolution. Doubtless, too, they were less integrated into traditional urban life. Those who are settled always compose the bulk of conservatives; peasants are adequate proof of this. These hypotheses are certainly worthy of further research.

I feel this so much, though I wonder how many other migrants feel this way.

At this point we definitely must bring up the question of the fires for which eyewitnesses and bourgeois historians have scribed full responsibility to the Communards. These fires actually had several causes: first, the incendiary shells and the kerosene bombs which the Army of Versailles had been using since the beginning of April. Many houses in Paris and the suburbs were burned thus, during the Second Siege of Paris, by the shells of the friends of order and property. These were, no doubt, "good" fires—regrettable, certainly, but normal facts of war. Some of the fires during the last week of May were also attributable to Bonapartist agents, who were trying thus to eliminate any traces that were compromising for the personnel of the Empire. In fact, it is strange to note that the Communards, those "dividers" did not attack the houses of the rich; that the Communards, those anticlericals, did not burn down the churches; but that what disappeared in flames were buildings like the Court of Accounts, the Council of State, or the Ministry of Finance—buildings that contained the archives of the Empire's administration. Perhaps, too, certain people hoped to receive large indemnities.

Some things that often get neglected in the discussion about tactics, particularly when it comes to the State stopping things that will hurt it.

But, having made these reservations, it is certain that the Federals bore a great part of the responsibility for the Paris fires. "Fever of the besieged," "the madness of despair," "revolutionary vandalism"—easily, but a little too hastily, said. Actually, the Versailles troops fired from the shelter of the houses until the insurgents had exhausted their last ammunition; then they advanced on the double and shot down the defenders. It was to counter this tactic that the Federals set fire to the buildings near the barricades; thus they flushed the Versailles soldiers out into the open. Marx vindicated the Commune, which "used fire strictly as a means of defense, to keep the Versailles troops from the avenues which Haussmann had opened out expressly for artillery fire." For the Federals, it was a question of "covering their defeat, just as the Versailles troops opened their advance by shells which destroyed at least as many buildings as did the Commune." Moreover, the Federals resorted to incendiarism only when Versailles began its mass execution of prisoners—which was what invested the struggle with its final and inexpiable character.

Also something else to consider. We often don't give nuance to anyone "destroying their home," but these kinds of events are worth remembering.

Chapter 12: Were There Any Pétroleuses?

But the Paris fires, during the course of an armed struggle, present another problem. They were lit during the fighting, and lit by fighters. There is no reason to think that the women who were helping to build and defend the barricades did not also have a hand in these fires. In the statutes of the Union des Femmes pour la Défense de Paris et les Soins aux Blessés, we read the following brief sentence: "Article 14: The money left over from the administrative costs will be used ... for buying kerosene and weapons for the citoyennes who will fight at the barricades; should the occasion arise, weapons will be distributed according to the drawing of lots." It is difficult to concede, along with certain historians motivated by I know not what sort of hypocritical daintiness, that the word "kerosene" coupled with the word "weapons" has, here, only a domestic meaning—harmless kerosene to light the family lamps. It is more likely that kerosene had already been regarded as the ultimate means of defending the Commune.

Perpetual erasure and obfuscation because people refuse to acknowledge what was directly stated.

As for Anne-Marie Menand, called Jeanne-Marie (could it be Rimbaud's?), she was known in the area around La Madeleine as "the woman with the yellow dog." She was a poor creature, an easy target for Maxime du Camp's persecution: "I have never seen such ugliness. Dark-skinned, with staring eyes, dull and dirty hair, her face pocked and freckled, thin lips and a silly laugh, she had some wild quality about her, which reminded one of the panic of nocturnal birds suddenly put into the daylight..." We know the process: physical defects (including freckles) indicate a corresponding moral ugliness, and become a sign of predestination to evil. In the same way, but conversely, people like Vuillaume and Vallès never saw anything but beautiful, young, joyful, healthy girls among the Commune fighters—which is equally absurd.

Still something that happens, too. Why is so much of this so old but so recent?

Chapter 13: The Execution of Hostages

During the course of this dreadful bloodshed, the Federals executed, for their part, 84 hostages. But the execution of the Archbishop of Paris, the execution of Jesuits, of Dominicans, and of the Comte de Beaufort, who was considered to be a traitor—these weight more heavily in history than the thousands of nameless murders perpetrated by the soldiers of order: bootmakers, stonecutters, masons, day laborers, or seamstresses—small fry, neglected by history. Mme de Lamalle's head on the end of a stick weighed much more in the traditional balance of history than the sacrifice of thousands of unknown people. Right-thinking people were indignant at the former, but considered the latter insignificant. The masses form the vile matter of history. A hundred thousand infantrymen are not worth the death of a general.

Always, and we continue to talk about it in this way. It's so fucking ridiculous how much we pretend the deaths of the wealthy, the powerful... are worth more than anyone else.

Women were mixed up in these executions. Maxime du Camp, once more, accused them of having driven and excited the men, of having sometimes delivered the first blows. One of the men active in the Commune, Da Costa, expressed the same opinion. Thus, by means of a sort of latent antifeminism, the enemies and the supporters of the Commune shifted the responsibility for the summary executions onto women. But in this matter too, the fact seems to be that they had only walk-on roles; they were neither better nor worse than the men around them, neither more pitiable nor more ferocious.

AND AGAIN. Something else that happens, not even just to women. But marginalised people as a whole.

Chapter 14: The Major Trials

Certainly André Léo would not defend the "blindness" and "incompetence" of most of the men of the Commune, whom she never ceased to denounce. But "these mistakes became honorable by comparison with the orgy of infamy that followed them." She explained things and brought them back to focus. The law concerning hostages was administered by the mob only after May 23, when the Commune no longer existed and when Versailles had begun its mass slaughter. The fires had been caused by the Versailles shells, as much as by the need for defense. The Commune had killed sixty-four; the number of murdered Communards mounted to fifteen or twenty thousand (and here André Léo, always scrupulous, estimates far lower than the actual figure). Thus, it was the murderers who were making the accusations. On the one side were all the defenders of privilege; on the other were the democrats. But the latter remained divided, for, as André Léo explained, some preferred liberty, and others equality. Well, "there can be no equality without liberty, nor any liberty without equality." And it was that which separated the socialists from the liberal bourgeoisie. But André Léo noted—and it is even more true today—that the middle- and lower-income bourgeoisie suffered as much as the common people from the capitalist government. "The law of capital is aristocratic by nature," she went on. "It tends increasingly to concentrate power in the hands of a few; it inevitably creates an oligarchy, which is master of the nation's power... It pursues the interest of a few as against the interest of all... It is opposed to the new conception of justice... It holds in servitude, not only the poor, but the great majority of the bourgeoisie who live by their work and their ability"—and wo, perhaps even more than manual laborers, were dependent upon the whim of the capitalists. Therefore it was to the interest of the working class, and also a great portion of the bourgeoisie, to abolish the law of capital; and it was necessary to find a way to do so. The March 18th Revolution had been guided, not by the socialists, but by "bourgeois Jacobinism." André Léo wanted all factions of democracy to unite so as to establish a common program that would include all freedoms (press, assembly, etc), communal liberties, a single and graduated tax, the organization of a citizens' army, and a free, democratic and universal education. "As long as a child is poor... as long as he grows up with no ideal but the tavern, no future but the day-to-day work of a beast of burden, most members of humanity will be deprived of their rights... equality will be only a decoy, and war—the most horrible, the most desperate of all wars, be it unleashed or latent—will desolate the world and dishonor humanity."

She continues:

This explanation, this perspective on civil war, provoked violent interruptions; the president of the Congress for Peace forbade André Léo to go on with her speech. "I had come to this Congress [in Lausanne, Switzerland in September 1871] with one hope, and I left it with profound sadness," she concluded. The bourgeoisie, even the liberal bourgeoisie, could not permit itself to be reminded of the existence of the "class struggle."

Chapter 15: From Auberive to New Caledonia

Finally, and particularly, there were the people. Whereas many of the deported Communards shared the other whites' scorn of the natives, Louise Michel made friends with a Polynesian employee of the penitentiary administration, "who wanted to learn the things the whites know." She gave him lessons; in exchange, he taught her the rudiments of the Polynesian dialects. Then she plunged deep into the jungle to look for tribes still practicing cannibalism; she succeeded in gaining the confidence of one of these, and collected its legends and its music. She did not share Rousseau's theoretical admiration for the "noble savages," but neither did she take part in "civilized" scorn for them. She studied them as an ethnographer, and loved them because they were a part of humanity. When, in 1878, a native revolt broke out, some of the Communards joined the army of repression; but Louise Michel took the part of the Polynesians and secretly aided them. The insurrection was drowned in blood. As for the Arab deportees from Algeria, "they were simple and good, and of great justice," remarked Louise Michel.

So much going on here.

Names to follow up on later:

• Victorine Brochon (butcher co-operative in La Chapelle)
• Nathalie Lemel (book binder who started the food co-op La Marmite and was in the First International)
• Marguerite Tinayre (novelist- pen name: Jules Paty, elementary teacher, consumer co-op Société des équitables de Paris)
• Christine de Pisan
• Juliette Lamber (Mme Edmond Adam)
• Jenny d'Héricourt
• Maria Deraismes
• Paule Minck (Paulina Mekarska - Les Mouches et les Araignées)
• André Léo (Léonide Béra - novelist)
• Olympe Audouard (Le Paillon, La Revue Cosmopolite)
• Noémie Reclus
• Mme Jules Simon (Les Droit des Femmes)
• Adèle Esquiros (married to Alphonse Esquiros)
• Elizabeth Dmitrieff
• Sophie Poirier
• Marquant
• Béatrix Excaffon
• Adélaide Valentin
• Noémie Colleville
• Sophie Graix
• Joséphine Prat
• Céline and Aimée Delvainquier
• Anna Jaclard (Vassilievna Korvina Krukovskaya - bookbinder, married to Victor Jaclard; sister Sophie - Yuri Orbelov, married to Vladimir Kovalesky)
• Fornarina de Fonseca (Eléonora de Fonseca)
• Lodoyska Kawecka
• Mme Brossut
• Joséphine Dulimbert
• Elizabeth Deguy
• Sidonie Herbelin
• Blanche Lefebvre (dressmaker)
• Victorine Gorget (laundress)
• Marie Ségaud (Orlawsky, seamstress)
• Rosalie Bordas

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.

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.

Quotes taken from the introduction to The Utopia of Rules of the same title:

With the collapse of the old welfare states, all this has come to seem decidedly quaint. As the language of antibureaucratic individualism has been adopted, with increasing ferocity, by the Right, which insists on “market solutions” to every social problem, the mainstream Left has increasingly reduced itself to fighting a kind of pathetic rearguard action, trying to salvage remnants of the old welfare state: it has acquiesced with—often even spearheaded—attempts to make government efforts more “efficient” through the partial privatization of services and the incorporation of ever-more “market principles,” “market incentives,” and market-based “accountability processes” into the structure of the bureaucracy itself.

I have mixed feelings on this because I know the 'left' talks plenty about bureaucracy. In a lot of ways, it's also a problem that we maintain the concept of "the left" without actually addressing who is doing what kinds of critiques. This is important to consider, as those "on the left" who are doing the most pro-bureaucracy (generally pro-state) critiques are more aligned with Social Democrats and Marxist-Leninists. Too often, Graeber feels as he's kind of pointing at 'left unity' as a goal... which is an illogical one.

Anarchists in a lot of places have lost some of the fire, but it's mostly those who have not had to deal with a lot of systemic injustice by merely existing: immigrants have long been talking about the harms of bureaucracy, people of colour (especially Black and Latine people) have been frequently discussing it, queer people have also been making a range of critiques on bureaucracy.

If the argument is because of the fact that the word bureaucracy isn't being used, that's either a faulty line of logic or a lazy one that feels as if it is designed to obfuscate (intentionally or not) the work being done by a lot of people who are still frequently overlooked. We all talk about it, but a lot of people aren't listening.

And this feels like it could be a useful place for him to have made the critique that people like him (white, cishet men who work within academia) often neglect it and are upheld for even the most minor criticisms that are built on the backs of others.

Is there any wonder, then, that every time there is a social crisis, it is the Right, rather than the Left, which becomes the venue for the expression of popular anger?

Again, I disagree here because the implied meaning is that the so-called "Left" needs to unify in creating a critique that can stand up to the apparently unified critique "Right." Except that's not a functional idea by any stretch of the imagination because it requires a lot of us to give up our fundamental values, which is the whole basis for so many of these dweebs who now talk about "leftist infighting" as if it's a thing.

Even if that wasn't his intention, he doesn't understand that in order for the "Left" (something he hasn't defined) to have a critique requires the actual existence of the "Left" (which can't possibly exist under any actual recognition of political ideology).

The fact that so many of us with divergent opinions are lumped into a single group makes this impossible and absolutely bizarre as a statement.

The Iron Law of Liberalism states that any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.

Yep, this makes perfect sense and can be easily seen in every single system that we've created. (Though, it's definitely not the only set of reforms that do this.)

Again, even the mainstream Left—or what it is supposed to pass for a Left these days—has come to offer little more than a watered-down version of this right-wing language.

See, here it is again. It's not a clarification at all for who or what "the Left" is, and it continues to obfuscate the point and be used as a means to ignore any real critique that he didn't find.

“Democracy” thus came to mean the market; “bureaucracy,” in turn, government interference with the market; and this is pretty much what the word continues to mean to this day.

This is a useful phrasing for this issue.

In other words, around the turn of the century, rather than anyone complaining that government should be run more like a business, Americans simply assumed that governments and business—or big business, at any rate—were run the same way.

This could be chicken-and-egg, honestly. Is it merely that this is how people assumed governments were operating? Or was it because governments actually operated in this manner (as a result of influences from the businesses both through lobbying and giving power to the businesses)?

Like, how can someone suggest what should be done if it's already being done?

The impression that the word “bureaucrat” should be treated as a synonym for “civil servant” can be traced back to the New Deal in the thirties, which was also the moment when bureaucratic structures and techniques first became dramatically visible in many ordinary people’s lives. But in fact, from the very beginning, Roosevelt’s New Dealers worked in close coordination with the battalions of lawyers, engineers, and corporate bureaucrats employed by firms like Ford, Coca Cola, or Proctor & Gamble, absorbing much of their style and sensibilities, and—as the United States shifted to war footing in the forties—so did the gargantuan bureaucracy of the U.S. military. And, of course, the United States has never really gone off war footing ever since.

And here we are. So again, this feels very much like a chicken-and-egg situation. It's a weird framing, even if correct.

So what are people actually referring to when they talk about “deregulation”?

This is also similar to a question that needs to be asked with regards to "decentralisation." These buzzwords are getting tossed around with multiple definitions being used, as they mean different things to different people and depend upon where they fall in a power structure or hierarchy.

I’m going to make up a name. I’m going to call this the age of “total bureaucratization.” (I was tempted to call this the age of “predatory bureaucratization” but it’s really the all-encompassing nature of the beast I want to highlight here.)

I'm not sure this name is good enough to completely encompass the process that's taking place because he hasn't sufficiently outlined the bureaucratic process. It's truly missing a lot and focusing primarily on the financialisation of everything. It neglects migration patterns, medical paperwork and access, education access, etc. It also fails to recognise the relationships between the financialisation that he points out and their existence. It's a glaring hole, even if he's noting that this bureaucracy exists in places where it should feel awkward (e.g., clubs or memberships, everything having 'legalistic' fine print).

What’s more, since for most of the twentieth century, a job in a large bureaucratic mega-firm meant a lifetime promise of employment, everyone involved in the process—managers and workers alike—tended to see themselves as sharing a certain common interest in this regard, over and against meddling owners and investors. This kind of solidarity across class lines even had a name: it was called “corporatism.” One mustn’t romanticize it. It was among other things the philosophical basis of fascism. Indeed, one could well argue that fascism simply took the idea that workers and managers had common interests, that organizations like corporations or communities formed organic wholes, and that financiers were an alien, parasitical force, and drove them to their ultimate, murderous extreme. Even in its more benign social democratic versions, in Europe or America, the attendant politics often came tinged with chauvinism18—but they also ensured that the investor class was always seen as to some extent outsiders, against whom white-collar and blue-collar workers could be considered, at least to some degree, to be united in a common front.

There are groups who do romanticise this kind of thing, and they're not generally intentional fascists. This is the kind of romanticisation found amongst a lot of union organisers, many of whom I do not think are fascists. But perhaps it should be something these organisers and organisations consider in their structures.

This is particularly true in a lot of union structures that have much deeper connections to the state, be they formal or informal: AFL-CIO in the US, CIGL/CISL in Italy, and the major unions of Slovakia.

It's interesting that these sorts of things go unmentioned when discussing this in any capacity, even as "this is something that members should be vigilant against." Perhaps it's the fear that additional sentiment perceived as anti-union (rather than people perceiving it as actual criticism and caution of structure in a useful organisation).

At the same time, the new credo was that everyone should look at the world through the eyes of an investor—that’s why, in the eighties, newspapers began firing their labor reporters, but ordinary TV news reports came to be accompanied by crawls at the bottom of the screen displaying the latest stock quotes. The common cant was that through participation in personal retirement funds and investment funds of one sort or another, everyone would come to own a piece of capitalism. In reality, the magic circle was only really widened to include the higher paid professionals and the corporate bureaucrats themselves.

This seems like something that could've had some evidence backing it up. Not only to support it and strengthen the argument but also because it feels like something that would be interesting to read more about.

Still, that extension was extremely important. No political revolution can succeed without allies, and bringing along a certain portion of the middle class—and, even more crucially, convincing the bulk of the middle classes that they had some kind of stake in finance-driven capitalism—was critical. Ultimately, the more liberal members of this professional-managerial elite became the social base for what came to pass as “left-wing” political parties, as actual working-class organizations like trade unions were cast into the wilderness.

I don't feel like this is entirely correct. The "working-class organisations like trade unions" were not simply cast into the wilderness. If one reads about, for instance, the AFL-CIO? They learn that the leadership of such organisations often moved into arms of structures that held workers down in order to "get better circumstances for workers" (or so they claimed). This fails to recognise the complicity with which union leadership, predominantly in the most major of unions across the globe, willingly participated in their own decimation.

This also fails to reckon with how more powerful unions (or unions led by people seeking power) harmed those that did not. There's a reason the IWW was constantly harassed by government officials; there's a reason that socialist, communist, and anarchist members were thrust out of unions like the AFL-CIO...

And it's not because these unions were "cast into the wilderness." And by ignoring this, this analysis flounders quite a bit and retains a lot of the romanticisation of unions rather than seeing them as what they should've always been seen as: a strategy. It also means that this is something said in seriousness:

(Hence, the U.S. Democratic Party, or New Labour in Great Britain, whose leaders engage in regular ritual acts of public abjuration of the very unions that have historically formed their strongest base of support.)

This happened under FDR when people who acted as union leadership moved from AFL-CIO to the NLRB, for instance. They started critiquing the ways unions operated because it also harmed their power, even if they once claimed to agree with it. This is also something visible in almost every labour party or group claiming to have been a party of or for workers.

It's like power needs a critique alongside behaviour and action.

From the perspective of sixties radicals, who regularly watched antiwar demonstrations attacked by nationalist teamsters and construction workers, the reactionary implications of corporatism appeared self-evident. The corporate suits and the well-paid, Archie Bunker elements of the industrial proletariat were clearly on the same side. Unsurprising then that the left-wing critique of bureaucracy at the time focused on the ways that social democracy had more in common with fascism than its proponents cared to admit. Unsurprising, too, that this critique seems utterly irrelevant today.

Again, two main issues. First, what happened before the 1960s and how did these 'nationalist teamsters and construction workers' come to be on the side of capital and corporations (fighting against the war effort)? Which ones? Was it all of them? Or was it traditionally a group of white men or white people? Were they upholding patriarchy? White supremacy? Because that's all important as part of this critique.

Second, the argument that "social democracy had more in common with fascism" isn't irrelevant. It's only irrelevant in a place where social democracy doesn't even exist as a concept: the United States. The fact that an anarchist from the United States who had to move to the UK to even continue his career refuses to acknowledge that is absurd, and it shows that he doesn't understand the wider movement. People in places claiming to have "social democratic" principles or programs or policies or whatever, particularly those in places that had "strong" social democracies that have been crumbling from beneath them due to austerity measures, are plagued by thinking they should "go back." And for many of them, that "going back" requires that they play into fascist playbooks.

It's only an irrelevant critique if you're purely talking about the United States, where there hasn't been a social democratic anything in my entire lifetime.

Quotes from this book:

Reminder about who this guy is.

Prologue: Mallory's Dilemma

To Mallory, one of the most important indications of a high-quality, equitable school is that students are successful regardless of their teacher. One teacher’s students shouldn’t learn different material or be less prepared for the next grade than another teacher’s students.

This literally isn't possible, and the fact that the person writing this (hypothetical?) situation doesn't see this is ludicrous. The values that I bring to the classroom are going to impact my students' grades in ways that are much different than those of my colleagues. In our schools, the relationships that we have with students impact our grading, and anyone who says otherwise is lying.

Though I try to make sure my relationships with students don't do this, it's impossible for me to say they don't. Have I given leeway to students who struggled with life issues and trusted me enough to share them? Yes. Have I also tried to give students the benefit of the doubt when they haven't? Also yes. But I probably still gave the students in the former group more leeway than those in the latter. (This is less common now because I've reflected on those practices, but I know it was something I've done in my past because it was something that I learned from my teachers as a student and from the people teaching me to be a teacher in university.)

Mallory put on her detective hat and considered, investigated, and then rejected several explanations: No substantive differences in instruction. Teachers were using the same curriculum with the same tests and even scored those tests as a team to ensure fairness and uniform evaluation. Mallory scoured students’ previous test scores and grades, with no indication of drastically different profiles of the classes as a whole. No substantive difference in the classroom physically—it wasn’t as if one classroom had a broken thermostat or was closer to a noisy playground. What was even odder was that students with identical standardized test scores received different grades depending on their teacher. The teachers were teaching similarly, the students were demonstrating similar achievement, but the grades showed inconsistency. This data seemed unexplainable, impossible, and grossly inequitable.

This is one of the most interesting attempts at writing a scenario and pretending that what's happening isn't happening? Like, it must be difficult to write a story about an administrator who genuinely has zero clue about anything happening in classrooms and doesn't know any reason why students' grades could be so drastically different between teachers.

Also, what is a "substantive difference in instruction?" Oh, well, it's apparently not this:

On a lark, Mallory looked at the syllabus for each class—each teacher of a course had created her own personalized version—and it shocked her. Each teacher’s syllabus began with a similar introduction to the course content and description of important materials for the class, but then it was as if each teacher was in an entirely different school...

Which then goes on to describe late work policies, homework grading, point assignment, and assessment organisation. Clearly there's no "substantive difference in instruction" if these policies are being employed in radically different ways across the board. (If you have strict late policies, you run your class as such; it is literally a substantial difference between two teachers, their practice, and their instruction.)

Teachers’ different grading policies made it possible for two students with the same academic performance to receive different grades. What particularly confused and concerned Mallory was that some teachers were grading students on criteria that seemed to have nothing to do with their academic achievement—such as whether their paper had intact holes or had the proper heading—and others were basing parts of students’ grades entirely on subjective criteria, such as effort, that were susceptible to teachers’ implicit biases. This grade data that couldn’t be possible suddenly was.

Again, it must be fun to write a scenario where the administrator of a school (or even principal) pretends they have no clue how people are "giving wildly different grades" and "doesn't know how such wildly diverse data can be generated." Also must be fun to further pretend that the administrator or principal doesn't engage in this: They are equally (if not more so) guilty of judging students based entirely on irrelevant "academic criteria."

Especially since they're often putting policies in place that encourage that. Oh. Wait, what did that about the author page say?

Joe Feldman has worked in education at the local and national levels for over twenty years in both charter and district school contexts, and as a teacher, principal, and district administrator. He began his career as a high school English and American history teacher in Atlanta Public Schools and was the founding principal of a charter high school in Washington, DC. He has been the Director of Charter Schools for New York City Department of Education, the Director of K–12 Instruction in Union City, California, and was a Fellow to the Chief of Staff for U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley. Joe is currently CEO of Crescendo Education Group (crescendoedgroup.org), a consulting organization that partners with schools and districts to help teachers use improved and more equitable grading and assessment practices. Joe graduated from Stanford, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and NYU Law School.

Not to say this applies to this author, but it's a convenient thing to note about how tied in Harvard is to charter schools and influential people in that movement in the United States. But anyway, the bolded parts are a bit interesting considering he's literally creating a "poor, clueless administrator."

Even though he knows full well that he would've been responsible for many of the policies that enabled harmful grading practices and could've made significant changes to those systems but chose not to. (Like grading, full stop.)

Teachers’ different grading policies made it possible for two students with the same academic performance to receive different grades. What particularly confused and concerned Mallory was that some teachers were grading students on criteria that seemed to have nothing to do with their academic achievement—such as whether their paper had intact holes or had the proper heading—and others were basing parts of students’ grades entirely on subjective criteria, such as effort, that were susceptible to teachers’ implicit biases. This grade data that couldn’t be possible suddenly was.

The practice of grading is literally an exercise in applying subjective criteria to a person's work. This is not difficult to understand, and pretending otherwise is absolutely bizarre.

To Mallory, no longer were her teachers’ inconsistent policies a theoretical dilemma. The school had spent months of planning and coordination to make sure teachers in the math department were using sequenced curriculum and that each teacher was preparing students to be ready for the next year—called “vertical alignment.” Yet teachers’ different approaches to grading was undermining all of it, sending confusing messages about learning and impacting students’ grades and promotion rates, their beliefs about school, and even their self-image.

I'm pretty sure, even if you "fix" the problems of grading to make it "more objective," students will still tie their self-image to that arbitrary number or letter. That's still harmful, even if you're "grading better."

But now came her second shock: When she began a discussion of grades with her teachers, it was like poking a hornet’s nest. Nothing prepared her for the volatility of conversations about teachers’ grading practices. Many of her teachers, previously open to exploring new ideas about nearly every aspect of their work, reacted with defensiveness and adamant justification. Teachers with higher failure rates argued proudly that their grading reflected higher standards, that they were the “real teachers.” A teacher with low failure rates explained that he was the only teacher who cared enough to give students retakes and second chances. One teacher simply refused to discuss the topic, citing her state’s Education Code that protected teachers from administrators’ pressure to change or overwrite grades. One teacher began to cry, confessing that she had never received any training or support on how to grade and feared that she was grading students unfairly. Conversations about grading weren’t like conversations about classroom management or assessment design, which teachers approached with openness and in deference to research. Instead, teachers talked about grading in a language of morals about the “real world” and beliefs about students; grading seemed to tap directly into the deepest sense of who teachers were in their classroom.

Question: Why is a former principal and administrator writing a scenario where teachers are the primary aggressors in the system? Teachers are a problem, yes. However, many of these concerns get wrapped up as either straight up aggressive or absolutely inept.

A person claiming they "received no training or support" on something is highlighting a systemic failure, which is that grading often doesn't have coherent standards. I have never received training in building a coherent set of standards for grading; I have received multiple assignments in teaching programs and further professional development requesting that I "grade something" according to a given set of standards.

Which have never taught me anything useful, but they did teach me that grading is a bullshit exercise and that we really should be focused primarily on feedback and dialogues. (I wonder how students improve... through feedback or seeing a "C" on their paper. Anyway...)

When she talked about these grading problems with principals of other schools, Mallory was surprised and dismayed to learn that grading varied by teacher in every school. This phenomenon was widespread, even the norm. Teachers thoughtfully and intentionally were creating policies that they believed, in their most thoughtful professional judgment, would promote learning. Yet they were doing so independently and often contradicting each other, yielding in each school a patchwork of well-intentioned but ultimately idiosyncratic approaches to evaluating and reporting student performance. Even when a department or a group of teachers made agreements—for example, to have homework count for no more than 40 percent of a grade—teachers’ other unique policies and practices, such as whether homework would be accepted after the due date, made their attempts at consistency seem half-hearted and ineffectual.

This shit happens, but yet this author wants to play as if principals and administrators don't know (and don't encourage) it? Give me a fucking break. This framing is such trash.

On one hand, like a train’s third rail, grades provide power and legitimacy to teaching and learning. Grades are the main criteria in nearly every decision that schools make about students. Here are some examples:

• course assignment (eligibility for advanced, honors, or AP classes)
• graduation (completion of course requirements)
• academic awards (valedictorian, summa cum laude)
• extracurricular activities (athletics, clubs)
• promotion (able to progress to next grade level or sequenced course)
• retention (repeating a course or grade level)
• additional supports (mandatory tutoring or remediation)
• additional opportunities (special field trips)
• scholarships
• college admission

Grades inform decisions outside the educational world as well. Potential employers consider grades when hiring, and GPAs are often required for youth work permits and reductions in car insurance, which means students’ grades can affect family income and expenses. And those are just the decisions made by institutions. Caregivers and families often provide rewards and privileges (including praise) or enforce punishments and restrictions (including shame) based on grades.

Is there a reason why you're not questioning this system? Like, should this system even allow or deny access to courses, extracurricular activities, or additional opportunities (fails to support learning)?

The rest of these assume that learning should only take place within a hierarchical system, and that's abhorrent. But the presumption that grading should impact all these areas is beyond disgusting, especially since there's no questioning of that system (based entirely on arbitrary criteria) in the first place.

And sorry, what employment is based on compulsory school grades? I have never had a potential employer consider my GPA, but I have had potential employers question where I went to high school to gauge my "suitability" for the job (prestige, assumed assimilation into dominant society) and completely fail to because they didn't know my school. The same has been true of my university degrees. Does it matter that I did well in school? Not at all.

It's mattered where I was and how well known they were.

But like a train’s third rail, grades are so powerful and important to classrooms and schools that no one dares touch them. As Mallory experienced, the questioning of grading practices by administrators, caregivers, students, and even teachers can invoke anxiety, insecurity, pride, obstinacy, and conflict. And so most of us avoid the topic altogether.

Have you tried the question "What if we just don't?" because I feel that might actually be beneficial.

... that I began to see that teachers use grading for many different, and contradictory, purposes:

1. To communicate the achievement status of students to parents or guardians and others
2. To provide information that students can use for self-evaluation
3. To select, identify, or group students for certain educational paths or programs
4. To provide incentives for students to learn
5. To inform instructional decisions
6. To provide evidence of students’ lack of effort or inappropriate responsibility

No wonder that grading practices vary so widely. The teacher who grades to sort students into programs will use grading practices incompatible with the teacher who grades to incentivize students to learn.

This is literally how the State tells us to use grades and how we've all been taught to view grades. Are you going to tell me that these "contradictory uses" aren't part of the overarching system? Like... ask questions, mate. You want to claim to be "critical," ask some fucking questions.

Also, stop blaming teachers for this on their own? This is literally a systemic issue that you're avoiding discussing as such.

Reasons for variation in grade (according to the book):

1. ... I found that many grading practices themselves had deep flaws. For example, I learned that the calculations that we commonly use to derive grades—and often embedded in our grading software—are mathematically unsound.

2. ... I learned that many of us evaluate students on criteria that are nonacademic and highly susceptible to bias. For example, a teacher who evaluates a student’s effort as part of a grade likely applies a culturally narrow definition of what effort looks like.

3. ... teachers often use grades for behavior modification, offering the reward or punishment of points and use (or threaten to use) the zero or F to motivate students even though the “motivational F” is largely a myth; research is clear that low grades, or the threat of low grades, do nothing for the student who has low confidence in their academic abilities or limited experience with academic success—the majority of students who receive Fs.

4. ... I also learned that our grading often creates “collateral consequences” that contradict our intentions. For example, we lament our students’ rampant cheating and copying of homework. Yet when we take a no-excuses approach to late work in the name of preparing students for real-world skills and subtract points or even refuse to accept the work, we incentivize students to complete work on time by hook or by crook and disincentivize real learning. Some common grading practices encourage the very behaviors we want to stop.

Funny, I wonder what questions we could be asking here and what assumptions we could throw away to start a different conversation. (I also wonder why it is that this person keeps blaming teachers for the system they work in, especially when that system punishes us for speaking up about how harmful it is and how elements undermine what the system claims it "wants.")

For example, we teachers often assign students a zero in the gradebook if homework isn’t handed in by the deadline. However, we don’t account for all the reasons that a student wouldn’t turn something in on time. One reason, of course, might be laziness or disinterest—certainly not legitimate reasons. Perhaps a student has after-school classes or sports, which could make it harder to turn in work on time, but arguably this is a self-inflicted wound. But what if a student’s circumstances are beyond her control? What if there isn’t a space at home that is quiet enough, or well-lit enough, or not distraction-free enough for a child to complete homework? What if a student’s caregiver is away at a job (or second job, or third job), so that she isn’t around to provide support? What if the parent or caregiver isn’t formally educated enough or doesn’t speak enough English to help the child complete the homework? What if the child has home responsibilities (caring for an older relative or younger siblings) or has her own job in order to contribute to the family income? What if the student who has few supports simply doesn’t know the answers to the homework? What option is there but to submit the work incomplete or late? Clearly, we don’t want to grade students based on their environment or situations beyond their control, but unfortunately, when we use grading practices such as penalizing students for late work, that is often what we do.

Why are "laziness" or disinterest not legitimate reasons? (Also, define "laziness." And then remind me who often gets seen as "lazy" in school. Wait, ableism and racism are checking in with me and telling me that it's a confluence of the two factors that often get labelled as "lazy.")

Also, who is to say that extracurricular activities or after-school classes are "self-inflicted wounds?" A lot of kids are forced into those activities because of external factors: improving their university applications, parental influence, childcare, etc. Like... it's pretty fucking bullshit to assume these things are always choices; that's not how life works. How can you seriously ask "What if a child's caregiver is at a job (or second job)?" and not recognise that extracurricular activities and extra classes have the same function for some people? How oblivious can you be.

The rest of the questions are useful, but why are those more legitimate than other environmental factors?

To my relief, I also learned that grading, if done differently, can be accurate, not infected with bias, and can intrinsically motivate students to learn. Grades can clearly and more objectively describe what students know and can do. Grading practices can encourage students not to cheat but to learn, to persevere when they fail and not lose hope, and to take more ownership and agency for their achievement. And the power of these approaches can be especially transformative for struggling students—the students who have been beaten down year after year by a punishing grading system of negative feedback and unredeemable failure.

A system designed entirely on arbitrarily assigning letters and numbers to criteria and ranking them can never be objective. It can never not be infected with bias. It's inherent in how we assign criteria and ascribe importance to it. It literally is impossible, and thinking otherwise is nonsense.

"More" objective does not mean "better." It means you're obscuring those biases behind something else.

It didn’t work out so well at first. When I discussed these practices with teachers, I was constantly met with the same arguments: Our current grading system prepares students for the real world and if we alter it we’re doing our students a disservice; “smart kids” can handle changes to grading and can be internally motivated but “remedial” or “regular” students need external motivation; these changes just inflate grades; students will just game the system. Conversations were intellectual jousts that didn’t really change what teachers believed or did. Grading was so deeply intertwined with teachers’ belief systems and their daily practices that it wasn’t as simple as just explaining and justifying the practices. I realized that for teachers to become convinced of the effectiveness and the equitable impact of different grading practices, they had to try them out. Through a combination of persuasion, promises, and appeals, I found some teachers willing to test out these new grading practices.

When the system upholds these exact values, when people are taught through their experiences that this is what is expected, you are going to run into those arguments. Grading is not only "intertwined with teachers' belief systems," but they are intertwined in the very lessons that the system teaches us. If you cannot see that, you cannot understand the depth of the problem.

This is so fucking superficial.

Quote from a person named Lucy, who is an 18-year "veteran of teaching" (which is always a weird phrase, as if we're going to war):

“This challenges what I’ve learned to do as a teacher in terms of what I think students need to know, what they need to show back to me, and how to grade them. This feels really important, messy, and really uncomfortable. It is ’Oh my gosh, look what I’ve been doing!’ I don’t blame myself because I didn’t know any better. I did what was done to me. But now I’m in a place that I feel really strongly that I can’t do that anymore. I can’t use grading as a way to discipline kids any more. I look at what I have been doing and I have to do things differently.”

Hey, look. This is the exact thing I've mentioned. This book bends over backwards to blame teachers when a teacher themselves points out that they're perpetuating the system that was done to them. Weird for that to exist after so much "teachers have been doing this thing" without realising that it is a systemic issue. I swear, Feldman. Critically analyse yourself.

Part I: Foundations

Chapter 1: What Makes Grading So Difficult to Talk About (and Even Harder to Change)?

Here's my answer to the chapter's question before engaging in the content: Hierarchies, the State, and indoctrination to believe schooling is at all necessary. Anyway.

And yet, teaching has never been so challenging and so embattled. Our students, who are increasingly diverse, with greater percentages of students whose first language is not English, and whose families live below the poverty line, need us to occupy so many roles beyond teacher: nurse, mentor, social worker, therapist, parent, cheerleader, tutor, and college advisor. We are responsible to adhere to regulations, laws, and directives under layers of bureaucracies. We often feel buffeted by ever-shifting political winds, pawns in complex political games in which people outside our schools argue over competing values and philosophies that affect what we do inside our classrooms: how and whether to teach certain topics (the perspectives of the Civil War, the genocide of Native Americans, evolution, global warming), read certain authors (J. D. Salinger, Toni Morrison), prepare for standardized exams (SBAC. PARCC, state graduation or end-of-course tests), and use certain materials (state-adopted textbooks, iPads and apps, laptops, smart boards). Solidarity and organizing among us seem less possible because of the waning influence and presence of teacher unions and the fragmentation of how we are trained: alternative certification programs, residencies, university programs, and fast-track programs that even threaten the very concept of teaching as a “profession.” Even the idea of a “school system” seems to be shifting beneath our feet into a “system of schools,” where cities agnostically support a portfolio of traditional public schools, charter schools, home schools, distance learning centers, and even private schools via vouchers and “educational savings accounts.” Salaries are rising but are still well below that of other professionals, and often are alone insufficient to support a family. Too many of us work within schools and communities where violence is a fact of life, adding to our own stress as well as our students’. We are guinea pigs in experiments testing how best to evaluate and motivate us, and we are judged by criteria that suggests ignorance—or worse, dismissal—of the challenges of our students and the complexity of our work. It is no surprise that as many as one out of three teachers report experiencing high levels of occupational stress. An obvious result is high turnover, a “revolving door” of teachers, particularly in schools that serve low-income communities, where teachers stay just long enough to hone their skills before leaving and being replaced by brand new teachers.

There are a lot of things here to unpack that are seemingly being swept under the rug in order to discuss how we can reform grading into a "more useful system" to "help students understand themselves," and a huge chunk of that can also be seen in the faux diversity this passage espouses.

If our students are "more diverse than ever" (failing to check some history: segregation of schooling, imperialist wars creating refugees and migrants, and the inherent eugenics of our school system... among others), then why are we relying upon a singular set of standards that are developed entirely within the context of one hegemonic culture?

If our students "need us to embody multiple roles," why are we not considering how schooling is a failure to our society and that the development of silos for children have segregated them from community?

What does it mean to "professionalise" a position that should've been a guide for learning? What does this mean to "professionalise" a position that relies upon culture to understand the role? What hierarchy does this create? (Here's a hint: It creates a hierarchy requiring respect of our students and families because our authority is superior to their own, but learning requires the community to work together. These hierarchies are antithetical to learning as a whole.)

If we're guinea pigs, what does that indicate about the care of the State? If anything, it should highlight that they do not care and that the role of school is not genuine learning, which we keep assuming it is. Don't work from that assumption; work from an assumption that the school is an indoctrination center that maintains the racial capitalist system. Because it is. Ask anyone who does not benefit from it and often finds themselves in direct conflict because of who they are.

Amid all of these pressures and expectations, with administrators and policymakers defining nearly every aspect of a teacher’s practice, we have one remaining “island of autonomy”: our grades. Grades are entirely within our control—the declaration of our professional judgment of student performance and the most concrete symbol of our authority and expertise.

This guy keeps saying "we" as if he is still a teacher and has never been anything other than a teacher; he's been involved in the bureaucratic nonsense involved in schools, including charter schools. If he recognised the position of teachers (most of whom will not move on from the classroom both because of limited upward mobility in the hierarchies that is inherent in any job and also because a lot of people prefer to stay in the classroom because it is where most of the direct change can be implemented), he'd understand that grades are not purely within our control.

The number of times that I've had a head of school, principal, whatever check my grades and change them based on their personal feelings about a student and their family (or, also, how influential that family is) is... astronomical. I watched the head of school for one place that I worked at change the grades of a child of a teacher because that teacher annoyed her. I've watched principals change grades of sports players in the US. I've seen grades get fluffed up because someone's family sent a lot of money or built a space.

We don't have control over those either. This is such a garbage argument. (Nor do I want control, but the point remains that he's just wrong.)

It's not teachers who implement these structures, btw. It's admin. And if admin truly believed that teachers should be "more coherent" across the board, they'd have done something about it long ago. But they didn't. Because they overwhelmingly think that these structures are fine unless it's harming them.

And even when the sanctity of a teacher’s grade is not so formally codified, administrators know that they tread on thin ice when they talk to teachers about their grading, potentially inviting formal complaints, union grievances, and even lawsuits. Grading is arguably the only aspect of schools in which the power dynamic between the teacher and her supervisor is inverted!

Amusingly, I tried looking for lawsuits around grades, and the one thing I found is a Professor who basically did a weird "teachers aren't childcare workers" complaint (we are, btw), some weird "Southerners are stupid" garbage, and supporting a teacher for not accepting late work because a student was "too accomplished" and "should deal with it."

Like... the whole thing is what the fuck.

And despite hunting for cases of teachers being sued over grades, the one thing I found was how two teachers were able to sue their district after being fired because of giving low grades and being targeted for it.

But how many of these cases go overlooked? How many unions don't do anything to support their teachers in these cases (which has happened)? This guy acts like this is commonplace, but it really isn't. (Along with the fact that teachers can be targeted for inappropriate grading but be released for different reasons.)

So guess who still has control, even in the "inverted" space.

Teachers often agonize over what grade to assign, are uncomfortable with how much grades matter, and face constant arguments, bargaining, and pleading by students and caregivers over grades.

Because grading is an arbitrary exercise that no one needs to be engaged in working with and doesn't do anything to help students improve. Start from that assumption because assuming we need grading answers none of the questions being presented.

Maybe we struggle with discussing grading because we have very little experience doing so. Grading and measurement is rarely if ever included in teacher preparation programs or in-school professional development. As a result, the majority of teachers are left on their own to decide how to grade and why and are unaware of the research on effective grading practices.

First, maybe it's because grading is an entirely pointless exercise that could be thrown away tomorrow with no real impact. There's no reason for it.

Second, if it's not discussed in our PD or preparation programs, maybe it's because grading is so fucking arbitrary and something that we assume people learn through experience as a student. It's a system we perpetuate on children because it was done to us.

Like schooling.

Despite this complete lack of training and support with how to grade, teachers’ grading policies and practices aren’t arbitrary. We apply our professional expertise and experiences and carefully deliberate over what assignments and behaviors we include in the grade and what we exclude, the relative weight of those assignments and behaviors, and the magnitude of consequences, rewards, incentives, and disincentives. And yet, each teacher makes very different choices. If we choose to award points to students for being on time, raising their hands to contribute ideas, for working collaboratively, or for turning in work by the deadline, we believe that these skills are important in life and that a grade should reflect performance in these skills. If we instead prioritize that students learn the academic content, perhaps we deemphasize or exclude those “soft skills” from the grade. If we want students to learn responsibility, we allocate a large portion of the grade to students’ homework. If we believe that our grades are an important way to distinguish the top students, we grade on a curve. Teachers can even disagree on what makes a grade “fair.” Most teachers believe that students who try should not fail regardless of whether they actually learn (Brookhart et al., 2016), but other teachers believe the opposite: that fairness is honestly reporting academic performance regardless of effort. Because each teacher’s grading system is virtually unregulated and unconstrained, a teacher’s grading policies and practices reveal how she defines and envisions her relationship to students, what she predicts best prepares them for success, her beliefs about students, and her self-concept as a teacher. That’s why challenges to our grading practices don’t just offend our professional judgment; they can invoke an emotional and psychological threat.

If we're all making different choices, it literally is arbitrary. That is the definition of arbitrary. You literally defined arbitrary. I hate this so much.

As I researched and learned more about the equitable practices in this book, I had the same experience as Jillian: feelings of guilt, shame, and anger. How could I have not seen the faults in our traditional system, the ways many of our current grading and assessment practices harm the most vulnerable students? Throughout my teaching career, I created the best curriculum I could, built the most positive relationships with students possible, but were my efforts compromised, or even undermined, when I graded? That can’t be, can it?

Why are you asking a useful question ("How could I have not seen the faults in our traditional system?") and then running as far as you can get from actually answering it? Reform the traditional system is a shitty answer; it's not even critically engaging with the system. It's just assuming the system is correct (it's not), but we've done it wrong.

With each new piece of evidence and information that contradicts a belief, we have to make more significant changes to our expanded web of belief, each time rejecting the new information or accepting it while limiting its validity so that it impacts our web as little as possible.

Okay, so he'll talk about webs of belief but won't apply this to himself. He does it with regards to "extra credit," but he's still operating under the assumption that "grades are necessary."

Which means he's run into evidence showing that grades are harmful and has discarded it in favour of a system that still unnecessarily ranks and orders students and is still arbitrary (because the criteria, even if "agreed upon" by everyone in a school, will be arbitrarily determined).

In the face of persuasive and nearly incontrovertible evidence that our current grading practices are harmful and ineffective and that other practices are more accurate, equitable, and motivational, you may dismiss or marginalize that evidence.

Joe, why is it that you're focusing on equity when that concept doesn't imply justice or liberation? Also, all grading is still harmful.

Finally, with the stubborn persistence of the achievement gap, we can no longer implement equitable practices in some areas of our schools—responsive classrooms, alternative disciplinary procedures, diverse curriculum—but meanwhile preserve our inequitable grading. Although a handful of authors have addressed grading, there hasn’t been discussion of grading through an equity lens—how grading is a critical element to affirmatively promote equity, to stop rewarding students because of their wealth, privilege, environment, or caregivers’ education and to prevent us from punishing students for their poverty, gaps in education, or environment. Traditional grading practices perpetuate our achievement and opportunity gaps and improved grading practices promote objective assessment of academic mastery, transparent expectations, growth mindsets, a focus on learning instead of points, and student agency—all key ingredients to serve diverse learners and create culturally responsive classrooms.

Losing my mind here. Grading is still going to perpetuate injustice, even if you "make it more equitable" (whatever the fuck that means). The criteria selected are still going to reflect either the hegemonic culture or the openness of the hegemonic culture to "accepted" cultural practices of everyone else. It will still rank skills based on importance; it will still incorporate patriarchy and whiteness in the systems. It'll still be ableist and marginalised disabled people.

Like... there is nothing you can do to retain grading in any way because it is a harmful practice. It will continue to uphold systems but do so under "nice" framing.

Chapter 2: A Brief History of Grading

Grading is part of the “grammar of schools” (Tyack & Cuban, 1995), a concept so embedded in our idea of what a school is that it seems silly to question it. What seems more foundational to everyone’s school experience than getting grades?

Literally should be an indicator to start questioning the entirety of grading rather than reasons for reforming it. But we're not going to be doing that, it seems.

Teachers have always given feedback to students about their learning, all the way back to Socrates and his pupil Plato (as well as God to Abraham). But the introduction of our current grading system is a relatively recent phenomenon, borne out of a particular American political, economic, and social context.

This is a fun way to justify that some form of grading should exist because it is "feedback." Grading isn't feedback. It doesn't provide any avenue for learning and determining how to improve; you also can't sufficiently fight back against grades because they have no real standards or criteria to adhere to.

Because they're arbitrary.

We’ll begin our history at the end of the 1800s. Prior to that, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the family was primarily responsible for educating children, with schools serving a relatively small role. Relatively few children attended any formalized school—around half of white children ages fifteen to nineteen, and far fewer children of color for both legal and nonlegal reasons—and the school year averaged only seventy-eight days (Snyder, 1993).

Which half of the white children? Because what you'll notice is that it was overwhelmingly a space for white boys and no one else. You can't just say "white children" when it's clearly not true.

Overwhelmingly, this guy isn't actually asking questions to any of the assumptions he presents. He's acting as if he is, but it's all just a list with extra details. Anyway, he starts off by listing the five trends of what changed schools (does not highlight any pushback that most certainly took place and does not question the fact that business owners and politicians were lobbying for these changes. The five trends are:

1. The rise of manufacturing
2. Progressive educators (but only mentions John Dewey, the crown prince of teaching programs everywhere, ugh)
3. Migration and immigration (no mention of how this was also associated with eugenics)
4. Intelligence testing and categorization (no mention of this was also associated with eugenics either)
5. Behaviorism (which includes a discussion about Little Albert and only says it "would be prohibited today" and not that the experiment conducted was child abuse)

Now that schools served many more students with a much wider diversity of backgrounds, languages, ethnicities, and incomes, there were two fundamental shifts in the purposes and design of schools. First, whereas schools had always been responsible for acculturating students, the one-room schools had served a relatively homogenous group of students from families deeply rooted in the community. Now, schools were expected to “Americanize” the diverse, unruly mass of immigrants, rural transplants, and the poor by preparing them with the discipline and habits that factories prized in its assembly-line laborers.

Why does he use the phrase "unruly mass of immigrants?" If he's attempting sarcasm, it's inappropriate; if he's not, it makes it sound as if he agrees that migrants "need to be civilised" or "need to be assimilated" instead of actively supporting a genuinely multicultural society.

By the way, schools cannot do that in the ways that we "allow" them to.

Secondly, charged with preparing students to meet the needs of the industrial and commercial world, schools could do so most efficiently if they matched each student with the appropriate curriculum based on the student’s ability—the Progressives’ vision of schools-as-training-ground. Equipping each student with the skills most appropriate to their intellectual ability would create the smoothest and most successful transition into the work world, and this would lead to economic success for the country.

Hey, Progressives? Want to deal with the inherent eugenics structures apparent in your history? No?

If a student did not possess the intellectual capacity to succeed in a more rigorous academic track, then to not match that student with a vocational track would be a waste of school resources and would frustrate the child, perhaps leading to dropping out and depriving the commercial world of the student’s contribution.

This guy just states stuff as fact without commentary. It's really annoying.

It’s also important to keep in mind that schools’ new commitment to evaluating students and sorting them occurred alongside a legal sorting out of many African American students, who were constitutionally mandated to attend separate and unequal schools.

This is true but... If you only saw the segregation of Black and white schools? You missed a lot. Because there were schools for the "feebleminded" (which often targeted poor migrants) and residential schools. They were trying to segregate all of the people that they saw as undesirable.

It’s easy to see how these ideas—schools as sorting and acculturating mechanisms in service to efficient and appropriate preparation for workforce employment—remain pervasive 100 years later. Tracking in our schools persists despite evidence of uneven pedagogical benefit and its discriminatory result. Students of low income, black and brown ethnicity, and those with special education needs are disproportionately placed in vocational and lower track classes, and those classes have been consistently found to have lower academic expectations and more traditional and less engaging pedagogy. In addition, the largest industries (currently, computer technology) constantly exert pressure on schools to provide more appropriately trained employees for entry and lower-skilled positions. Schools continue to serve as assimilating and socializing agents, and though twenty-first century industries often demand more advanced skills than the assembly-line factory owners a century ago, in many classrooms, we continue to place a premium on punctuality, quiet attention, and following directions, the same behaviors desired of students over a century ago.

First, "black and brown ethnicity?" Feels really off because it's conflating ethnicity and race.

Second, all of the state-supported pedagogies have little choice but to be "less engaging." Children in vocational tracks can be engaged in those tracks because they genuinely enjoy something in it; they're not inherently bad, but the fact that they segregate students into vocational or academic is. (This pairs well with my disdain for segregating subjects.)

As we mentioned earlier, prior to the turn of the century, before the large influx of families to urban centers and the rise of large schools to accommodate their children, the one-room school served few students and the teacher was a familiar member of the tight-knit community. It therefore should come as no surprise that communicating student progress looked very different than today. In most cases, the teacher would present oral reports or written narratives to families, perhaps during a visit to a student’s home, to describe how students were performing in certain skills like penmanship, reading, or arithmetic (Guskey & Bailey, 2001). These reports helped to determine areas for the teacher’s further instruction for the student, readiness for apprenticeships, or eligibility for higher education (Craig, 2011).

Is there a reason that we're acting like this is an impossibility? Is there a reason that we're acting like grading was given to us as something "easy to use" and "easy to communicate" complex information? We act as if this is an old technique, but it's something we can still do today and often are still made to do: parent-teacher conferences. I would rather communicate with parents more frequently than be like "Here's a paper and it says your student has an A."

Are you not going to ask the question you should be asking? "Were grades utilised to perpetuate alienation among members in a school, isolating people and breaking down local community connections?" Because that's what I'd be asking based on the history you're presenting.

With compulsory education laws, larger schools, and the emphasis on efficiency, schools had to develop more succinct and simplified descriptions of student progress. No longer could educators use the clumsy “unscientific” narrative reporting—it was time consuming and too unstandardized. Instead, there was pressure to identify a standardized system of communicating student achievement, not only for bureaucratic ease within the school for sorting purposes, but also for external audiences—colleges or employers. Letter grades (A-F) had already been in place in some colleges and universities since the early 1900s to signify a student’s achievement in a course relative to others in the course—called “norm-referenced grading”—and secondary schools began to use the letters well (Cronbach, 1975, cited in Schneider, 2014). Because, as the thinking went, intelligence is distributed across a population with a normal distribution (more familiarly known as a “bell curve”) just like height or weight, then grades are more objective when they reflect that curve within any population. Schools therefore superimposed the normal distribution across a student group and labeled them by letter according to that distribution. By the mid-1900s, a majority of secondary schools used A-F grading and assigned grades according to the normal curve distribution.

Part II: The Case for Change

Chapter 3: How Traditional Grading Stifles Risk-Taking and Supports the “Commodity of Grades”

And yet, twenty-first century classrooms continue to use the grading systems of the early twentieth century even though, as Marzano (2000) writes, there is “no meaningful research reports to support it.”

Interesting that Feldman fails to acknowledge that grading as a whole has very little support, and it doesn't really matter if you grade "more equitably." It's still an extrinsic motivator that most people do not like and feel stifled by, regardless of if it's "nice" grading or not. (I, personally, have always had loose grading policies! No punishments for late work, a lot of space for mistakes... and still it sets children up for failure and frustration. However, in places where I could drop the grades (like scouts or tutoring), children I worked with were far more likely to engage in deeper learning.

Because they weren't worried about a fucking grade of any sort. Feedback meant a lot more to them.

Chapter 4: Traditional Grading Hides Information, Invites Biases, and Provides Misleading Information

We can see that each category captures a range of information about students. The Tests and Projects category might describe what the student has learned about the academic content of the class—whether she has learned to use the FOIL method to multiply binomials or understands the water cycle or can analyze and critique a rhetorical argument. Evaluating this type of student performance is relatively objective and straightforward: A student either knows the water cycle or she doesn’t. By contrast, categories like Class Activities and Participation are more subjective and undefined. Although some subjectivity may exist in evaluating academic categories like Tests and Projects, it is nothing compared to the significant subjectivity of evaluating these nonacademic categories. What is the right way for students to behave in a class? What does it mean to show sufficient “respect”? How much listening is good enough? Each teacher likely has her own unique definition and criteria of how these categories are evaluated and entered into the grade.

This is a lot all at once, and the part that he takes as being objective isn't. So, let's start:

First, "Tests and Projects" are not entirely objective aspects of grading. In an economics course, there is rarely a "correct" answer (and any economist who says there is really should be questioned highly). There are justifications for answers, but a lot of economics teachers will often grade by the "correct" answers in books rather than considering whether or not the student built a cohesive case.

Which is also somewhat subjective. The same thing can be true of history. When people ask for "causes," what we can give them are often best guesses followed by justifications. Some answers are more correct than others (based on available evidence), but there are also history teachers who will enable Bad Versions of History (e.g., States Rights history instead of a focus on slavery). How does this impact students who actually engage with the topic? They will be marked down.

I've also seen English classes run by teachers using misogynist methods. Grading (assumed) girls down on their work because they view it as inherently inferior. Tests and projects are not sufficient.

Second, while he's correct on the subjective nature on Participation, this doesn't take into consideration any of the reasons why teachers end up tacking it on there. Same goes for "Class Activities." I have literally been given absurd rules on how much I had to grade. Sometimes those categories get tacked on to meet the absurd quotas we're given.

Chapter 5: Traditional Grading Demotivates and Disempowers

Our final perspective on the impact of traditional grading is how those practices harm students not because of a mathematical calculation or variances from teacher to teacher, but because of how students psychologically understand and react to their grades. Like all of us, our students want to accomplish those challenges we put in front of them, to feel confident and competent, and to be motivated for the next academic challenge. How does traditional grading support or erode these traits in our students? How does our inherited approach make those dispositions harder for students to sustain and more difficult for us to support?

These are all good questions and should be the minimum starting point for anyone discussing schooling.

Third, when each teacher has a different system of grading, students don’t know whether any given teacher’s system will benefit them or be fair. Imagine getting a new job and being told that you will be evaluated on every task and expectation, by different supervisors with different approaches, and that evaluation scores will be combined in complex formulae unique to each supervisor. And on top of that, you’ll be responsible to understand and remember each supervisor’s unique approaches, and if you forget or confuse those distinct expectations you’ll be penalized. It’s as if we wanted to create for our students the most stressful, disempowering, and least desirable work environments imaginable!

There's less math involved, but I definitely remember working at a big department store where that was literally what happened. The whole structure of school (in this capacity) is precisely the same shit that managers will do. You can do something brilliantly and someone will still punish you for it. Because work isn't about doing well (and neither is school); it's about following instructions and orders and obeying.

Carol Dweck’s (2006) “growth mindset”

Note to self: Come back to this point on its own.

Chapter 6: A New Vision of Grading

Based on how traditional grading undermines our best hopes, the most obvious conclusion is that we shouldn’t have single-letter grades, and maybe no grades at all. They add uncertainty, hide our expectations, confuse everyone involved, fragment a school’s expectations, add stress, and pull attention away from true learning. But for most of us, the reality is that grades are not going to be eliminated. Our society’s understanding of school and the decisions our institutions need to make mean that we will continue to rely on grades in much the same manner as the institutions of the Industrial Revolution: as efficient ways to describe student performance.

So if we can't do the thing that would be best (no grades!) in the place where it would be best to do it because society understands the system differently... then... What is the point of "reimagining grading?" I really don't understand how you can have a "new vision" while you're basically saying that we shouldn't put the effort into undoing the harmful system we've been using.

It's really bizarre. And considering this book was written by someone who worked in charters... which could actually do far more to 'revolutionise' the grading scene (if they weren't so hellbent on being centers of social disadvantage, redistribution of resources from the poor to the wealthy, and overt corruption, in many cases). Why not be part of that movement?

Probably because it wouldn't sell books and charter programs (and professional development courses!).

Part III: Equitable Grading Practices

Chapter 7: Practices That Are Mathematically Accurate

Pillar I: Accuracy

This is the topic of this chapter, and whew. It's going to be a joy because I hate people who talk about "pillars" in education, which is largely because everyone I've ever met who talked this way and worked in schools? Complete piece of shit who didn't know what they were talking about, so it really makes me hesitant immediately. Anyway.

But behind this quest for finely tuned accuracy, there’s an even deeper assumption, perhaps even a hope: The more math we use to arrive at a grade, the more objective it will be. For many of us, more math = more fair, and so we imbue our grade book with mathematical authority. We believe that the math of our grading software purges our grades of any unfairness, cleanses our grades of the potential stains of subjectivity or bias, and shields them (and us) against criticism from students, caregivers, and administrators. When asked why a student got a certain grade, we can respond simply, “That’s just how the math worked out,” as if the grade was out of our hands. We feel a comfort and a relief knowing that we’re just entering student data; it’s the grading program that awards the grades.

Never have I heard that justification from a teacher. Ever. The justification is always backwards and attributed to student ability and motivation, never math. Did he ever talk to the teachers at the charters he worked at? Or did he enjoy building up all the strawmen to destroy? I'd be curious to hear from them.

There’s no research that finds that failing grades motivate students, and plenty of research that has found the opposite—that a student who receives 0s and Fs becomes less motivated, not more motivated.

True, but is there research on achieving passing grades? And how was that research, if done, framed? Did it look at whether or not the students cared about the A? Or other external factors? Genuinely curious.

Starch, D. (1913). Reliability and distribution of grades. Science, 38(983), 630–636.

Starch, D. (1915). Can the variability of marks be reduced? School and Society, 2(33), 242–243.

These two things get referenced a bit, and I'm curious.

Chapter 8: Practices That Are Mathematically Accurate (Continued)

Most of what I'm getting out of this book is the failure to acknowledge eugenics in schools, an inability to understand what underlies a grading system, and a conflation of "accuracy" with "makes people feel better."

Overall, this whole thing is an argument to stop grading, but he doesn't get that.

--

Quotes from this book:

Chapter 1: Farewell to Humanity's Childhood

This is of little consequence to most people, since most people rarely think about the broad sweep of human history anyway. They don’t have much reason to. Insofar as the question comes up at all, it’s usually when reflecting on why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treat each other badly – the reasons for war, greed, exploitation, systematic indifference to others’ suffering. Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?

It is basically a theological debate. Essentially the question is: are humans innately good or innately evil? But if you think about it, the question, framed in these terms, makes very little sense. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are purely human concepts. It would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.

As the reader can probably detect from our tone, we don’t much like the choice between these two alternatives. Our objections can be classified into three broad categories. As accounts of the general course of human history, they:

1. simply aren’t true;
2. have dire political implications;
3. make the past needlessly dull.

To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is: it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators.

To make that shift means retracing some of the initial steps that led to our modern notion of social evolution: the idea that human societies could be arranged according to stages of development, each with their own characteristic technologies and forms of organization (hunter-gatherers, farmers, urban-industrial society, and so on). As we will see, such notions have their roots in a conservative backlash against critiques of European civilization, which began to gain ground in the early decades of the eighteenth century.

There are, certainly, tendencies in history. Some are powerful; currents so strong that they are very difficult to swim against (though there always seem to be some who manage to do it anyway). But the only ‘laws’ are those we make up ourselves.

After all, imagine we framed the problem differently, the way it might have been fifty or 100 years ago: as the concentration of capital, or oligopoly, or class power. Compared to any of these, a word like ‘inequality’ sounds like it’s practically designed to encourage half-measures and compromise. It’s possible to imagine overthrowing

capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve ‘eliminated inequality’?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.

Debating inequality allows one to tinker with the numbers, argue about Gini coefficients and thresholds of dysfunction, readjust tax regimes or social welfare mechanisms, even shock the public with figures showing just how bad things have become (‘Can you imagine? The richest 1 per cent of the world’s population own 44 per cent of the world’s wealth!’) – but it also allows one to do all this without addressing any of the factors that people actually object to about such ‘unequal’ social arrangements: for instance, that some manage to turn their wealth into power over others; or that other people end up being told their needs are not important, and their lives have no intrinsic worth. The last, we are supposed to believe, is just the inevitable effect of inequality; and inequality, the inevitable result of living in any large, complex, urban, technologically sophisticated society. Presumably it will always be with us. It’s just a matter of degree.

When we first embarked on this book, our intention was to seek new answers to questions about the origins of social inequality. It didn’t take long before we realized this simply wasn’t a very good approach. Framing human history in this way – which necessarily means assuming humanity once existed in an idyllic state, and that a specific point can be identified at which everything started to go wrong – made it almost impossible to ask any of the questions we felt were genuinely interesting. It felt like almost everyone else seemed to be caught in the same trap. Specialists were refusing to generalize.

Ever since Adam Smith, those trying to prove that contemporary forms of competitive market exchange are rooted in human nature have pointed to the existence of what they call ‘primitive trade’. Already tens of thousands of years ago, one can find evidence of objects – very often precious stones, shells or other items of adornment – being moved around over enormous distances. Often these were just the sort of objects that anthropologists would later find being used as ‘primitive currencies’ all over the world. Surely this must prove capitalism in some form or another has always existed?

All such authors are really saying is that they themselves cannot personally imagine any other way that precious objects might move about. But lack of imagination is not itself an argument. It’s almost as if these writers are afraid to suggest anything that seems original, or, if they do, feel obliged to use vaguely scientific-sounding language (‘trans-regional interaction spheres’, ‘multi-scalar networks of exchange’) to avoid having to speculate about what precisely those things might be. In fact, anthropology provides endless illustrations of how valuable objects might travel long distances in the absence of anything that remotely resembles a market economy.

Barter does occur: different groups may take on specialities – one is famous for its feather-work, another provides salt, in a third all women are potters – to acquire things they cannot produce themselves; sometimes one group will specialize in the very business of moving people and things around. But we often find such regional networks developing largely for the sake of creating friendly mutual relations, or having an excuse to visit one another from time to time; and there are plenty of other possibilities that in no way resemble ‘trade’.

When we simply guess as to what humans in other times and places might be up to, we almost invariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky – in a word, far less human than what was likely going on.

Chapter 2: Wicked Liberty: The Indigenous Critique and the Myth of Progress

Intellectual historians have never really abandoned the Great Man theory of history. They often write as if all important ideas in a given age can be traced back to one or other extraordinary individual – whether Plato, Confucius, Adam Smith or Karl Marx – rather than seeing such authors’ writings as particularly brilliant interventions in debates that were already going on in taverns or dinner parties or public gardens (or, for that matter, lecture rooms), but which otherwise might never have been written down. It’s a bit like pretending William Shakespeare had somehow invented the English language. In fact, many of Shakespeare’s most brilliant turns of phrase turn out to have been common expressions of the day, which any Elizabethan Englishman or woman would be likely to have thrown into casual conversation, and whose authors remain as obscure as those of knock-knock jokes – even if, were it not for Shakespeare, they’d probably have passed out of use and been forgotten long ago.

Not only are we taught to think of intellectual history as something largely produced by individuals writing great books or thinking great thoughts, but these ‘great thinkers’ are assumed to perform both these activities almost exclusively with reference to each other. As a result, even in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were getting their ideas from foreign sources (as the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did when he urged his compatriots to adopt Chinese models of statecraft), there’s a tendency for contemporary historians to insist they weren’t really serious; or else that when they said they were embracing Chinese, or Persian, or indigenous American ideas these weren’t really Chinese, Persian or indigenous American ideas at all but ones they themselves had made up and merely attributed to exotic Others.

A certain folk egalitarianism already existed in the Middle Ages, coming to the fore during popular festivals like carnival, May Day or Christmas, when much of society revelled in the idea of a ‘world turned upside down’, where all powers and authorities were knocked to the ground or made a mockery of. Often the celebrations were framed as a return to some primordial ‘age of equality’ – the Age of Cronus, or Saturn, or the land of Cockaygne. Sometimes, too, these ideals were invoked in popular revolts.

True, it’s never entirely clear how far such egalitarian ideals are merely a side effect of hierarchical social arrangements that obtained at ordinary times. Our notion that everyone is equal before the law, for instance, originally traces back to the idea that everyone is equal before the king, or emperor: since if one man is invested with absolute power, then obviously everyone else is equal in comparison. Early Christianity similarly insisted that all believers were (in some ultimate sense) equal in relation to God, whom they referred to as ‘the Lord’. As this illustrates, the overarching power under which ordinary mortals are all de facto equals need not be a real flesh-and-blood human; one of the whole points of creating a ‘carnival king’ or ‘May queen’ is that they exist in order to be dethroned.

After expanding on how scandalous it was that even murderers should get off scot-free, the good father did admit that, when considered as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat system of justice was not ineffective. Actually, it worked surprisingly well. Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control. ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’ If a Huron had killed an Algonquin or another Huron, the whole country assembled to agree the number of gifts due to the grieving relatives, ‘to stay the vengeance that they might take’.

This is something that we've seen a resurgence in as of late, particularly in societies that are trying to separate themselves from the State (or in community-oriented discussions for those that try to operate within the confines of the State but to remove elements of State control from their spaces).

Wendat ‘captains’, as Lallemant then goes on to describe, ‘urge their subjects to provide what is needed; no one is compelled to it, but those who are willing bring publicly what they wish to contribute; it seems as if they vied with one another according to the amount of their wealth, and as the desire of glory and of appearing solicitous for the public welfare urges them to do on like occasions.’ More remarkable still, he concedes: ‘this form of justice restrains all these peoples, and seems more effectually to repress disorders than the personal punishment of criminals does in France,’ despite being ‘a very mild proceeding, which leaves individuals in such a spirit of liberty that they never submit to any Laws and obey no other impulse than that of their own will’.

Jesuits, then, clearly recognized and acknowledged an intrinsic relation between refusal of arbitrary power, open and inclusive political debate and a taste for reasoned argument. It’s true that Native American political leaders, who in most cases had no means to compel anyone to do anything they had not agreed to do, were famous for their rhetorical powers. Even hardened European generals pursuing genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples often reported themselves reduced to tears by their powers of eloquence. Still, persuasiveness need not take the form of logical argumentation; it can just as easily involve appeal to sentiment, whipping up passions, deploying poetic metaphors, appealing to myth or proverbial wisdom, employing irony and indirection, humour, insult, or appeals to prophecy or revelation; and the degree to which one privileges any of these has everything to do with the rhetorical tradition to which the speaker belongs, and the presumed dispositions of their audience.

Do you seriously imagine, he says, that I would be happy to live like one of the inhabitants of Paris, to take two hours every morning just to put on my shirt and make-up, to bow and scrape before every obnoxious galoot I meet on the street who happened to have been born with an inheritance? Do you really imagine I could carry a purse full of coins and not immediately hand them over to people who are hungry; that I would carry a sword but not immediately draw it on the first band of thugs I see rounding up the destitute to press them into naval service?

Delisle de la Drevetière’s comedy L’Arlequin sauvage: the story of a Wendat brought to France by a young sea captain, featuring a long series of indignant monologues in which the hero ‘attributes the ills of [French] society to private property, to money, and in particular to the monstrous inequality which makes the poor the slaves of the rich’.

...

Delisle de la Drevetière’s comedy L’Arlequin sauvage: the story of a Wendat brought to France by a young sea captain, featuring a long series of indignant monologues in which the hero ‘attributes the ills of [French] society to private property, to money, and in particular to the monstrous inequality which makes the poor the slaves of the rich’

Something to go back to because this seems like an interesting line of exploration.

The book is considered a feminist landmark, in that it may well be the first European novel about a woman which does not end with the protagonist either marrying or dying. Graffigny’s Inca heroine, Zilia, is as critical of the vanities and absurdities of European society as she is of patriarchy. By the nineteenth century, the novel was remembered in some quarters as the first work to introduce the notion of state socialism to the general public, Zilia wondering why the French king, despite levying all sorts of heavy taxes, cannot simply redistribute the wealth in the same manner as the Sapa Inca.

In 1751, preparing a second edition of her book, Madame de Graffigny sent letters to a variety of friends asking for suggested changes. One of these correspondents was a twenty-three-year-old seminary student and budding economist, A. R. J. Turgot, and we happen to have a copy of his reply – which was long and highly (if constructively) critical. Turgot’s text could hardly be more important, since it marks a key moment in his own intellectual development: the point where he began to turn his most lasting contribution to human thought – the idea of material economic progress – into a general theory of history.

Yes, Turgot acknowledged, ‘we all love the idea of freedom and equality’ – in principle. But we must consider a larger context. In reality, he ventured, the freedom and equality of savages is not a sign of their superiority; it’s a sign of inferiority, since it is only possible in a society where each household is largely self-sufficient and, therefore, where everyone is equally poor. As societies evolve, Turgot reasoned, technology advances. Natural differences in talents and capacities between individuals (which have always existed) become more significant, and eventually they form the basis for an ever more complex division of labour. We progress from simple societies like those of the Wendat to our own complex ‘commercial civilization’, in which the poverty and dispossession of some – however lamentable it may be – is nonetheless the necessary condition for the prosperity of society as a whole.

There is no avoiding such inequality, concluded Turgot in his reply to Madame de Graffigny. The only alternative, according to him, would be massive, Inca-style state intervention to create a uniformity of social conditions: an enforced equality which could only have the effect of crushing all initiative and, therefore, result in economic and social catastrophe. In light of all this, Turgot suggested Madame de Graffigny rewrite her novel in such a way as to have Zilia realize these terrible implications at the end of the book.

Unsurprisingly, Graffigny ignored his advice.

A few years later, Turgot would elaborate these same ideas in a series of lectures on world history. He had already been arguing – for some years – for the primacy of technological progress as a driver for overall social improvement. In these lectures, he developed this argument into an explicit theory of stages of economic development: social evolution, he reasoned, always begins with hunters, then moves on to a stage of pastoralism, then farming, and only then finally passes to the contemporary stage of urban commercial civilization. Those who still remain hunters, shepherds or simple farmers are best understood as vestiges of our own previous stages of social development.

Observers who had previously considered the modes of subsistence and division of labour in North American societies to be trivial matters, or of at best secondary importance, now began assuming that they were the only thing that really mattered. Everyone was to be sorted along the same grand evolutionary ladder, depending on their primary mode of acquiring food. ‘Egalitarian’ societies were banished to the bottom of this ladder, where at best they could provide some insight on how our distant ancestors might have lived; but certainly could no longer be imagined as equal parties to a dialogue about how the inhabitants of wealthy and powerful societies should conduct themselves in the present.

The Discourse on the Origins of Social Inequality has been taught, debated and picked apart in a thousand classrooms – which is odd, because in many ways it is very much an eccentric outlier, even by the standards of its time.

...

Almost all the examples in this Discourse on the Arts and Sciences are taken from classical Greek and Roman sources – but in his footnotes, Rousseau hints at other sources of inspiration...

...

As for Rousseau, he spent much of the next several years writing well-publicized responses to criticisms of the piece (as well as using his new fame to produce a comic opera, The Village Soothsayer, which became popular at the French court).

Also an interesting line of inquiry to explore.

What needs to be investigated, instead, might better be called the ‘myth of the myth of the noble savage’: why is it that certain Europeans began attributing such a naive position to others? The answer isn’t pretty. The phrase ‘noble savage’ was in fact popularized a century or so after Rousseau, as a term of ridicule and abuse. It was deployed by a clique of outright racists, who in 1859 – as the British Empire reached its height of power – took over the British Ethnological Society and called for the extermination of inferior peoples.

Chapter 3: Unfreezing the Ice Age

The problem is that prehistory turns out to be an extremely long period of time: more than 3 million years, during which we know our ancestors were, at least sometimes, using stone tools. For most of this period, evidence is extremely limited. There are phases of literally thousands of years for which the only evidence of hominin activity we possess is a single tooth, and perhaps a handful of pieces of shaped flint. While the technology we are capable of bringing to bear on such remote periods improves dramatically each decade, there’s only so much you can do with sparse material. As a result, it’s difficult to resist the temptation to fill in the gaps, to claim we know more than we really do. When scientists do this the results often bear a suspicious resemblance to those very biblical narratives modern science is supposed to have cast aside.

Perhaps the only thing we can say with real certainty is that, in terms of ancestry, we are all Africans.

I hate this phrase. I know it's harkening back to Richard Dawkins and his bullshit, but it usually just rubs me the wrong way.

In the 1980s and 1990s it was widely assumed that something profound happened, some kind of sudden creative efflorescence, around 45,000 years ago, variously referred to in the literature as the ‘Upper Palaeolithic Revolution’ or even the ‘Human Revolution’. But in the last two decades it has become increasingly clear to researchers that this is most likely an illusion, created by biases in our evidence.

Here’s why. Much of the evidence for this ‘revolution’ is restricted to a single part of the world: Europe, where it is associated with replacement of Neanderthals by Homo sapiens around 40,000 BC. It includes more advanced toolkits for hunting and handicrafts, the first clear evidence for the making of images in bone, ivory and clay – including the famous sculpted ‘female figurines’, dense clusters of carved and painted animal figures in caves, often observed with breathtaking accuracy; more elaborate ways of clothing and decorating the human body; the first attested use of musical instruments like bone flutes; regular exchange of raw materials over great distances, and also what are usually taken as the earliest proofs of social inequality, in the form of grand burials.

All this is impressive, and gives the impression of a lack of synchrony between the ticking of our genetic and cultural clocks. It seems to ask the question: why do so many tens of thousands of years stand between the biological origins of humanity and the widespread appearance of typically human forms of behaviour; between when we became capable of creating culture and when we finally got round to doing it? What were we actually doing in the interim? Many researchers have puzzled over this and have even coined a phrase for it: ‘the sapient paradox’. A few go so far as to postulate some late mutation in the human brain to explain the apparently superior cultural capacities of Upper Palaeolithic Europeans, but such views can no longer be taken seriously.

In fact, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the whole problem is a mirage. The reason archaeological evidence from Europe is so rich is that European governments tend to be rich; and that European professional institutions, learned societies and university departments have been pursuing prehistory far longer on their own doorstep than in other parts of the world. With each year that passes, new evidence accumulates for early behavioural complexity elsewhere: not just Africa, but also the Arabian Peninsula, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Even as we write, a cave site on the coast of Kenya called Panga ya Saidi is yielding evidence of shell beads and worked pigments stretching back 60,000 years; and research on the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi is opening vistas on to an unsuspected world of cave art, many thousands of years older than the famous images of Lascaux and Altamira, on the other side of Eurasia. No doubt still earlier examples of complex pictorial art will one day be found somewhere on the continent of Africa.

This, he concludes, is the essence of politics: the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one’s society could take, and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another. In this sense, one could say Aristotle was right when he described human beings as ‘political animals’ – since this is precisely what other primates never do, at least not to our knowledge.

So, according to Boehm, for about 200,000 years political animals all chose to live just one way; then, of course, they began to rush headlong into their chains, and ape-like dominance patterns re-emerged. The solution to the battle between ‘Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves’ turns out to be: our genetic nature is Hobbesian, but our political history is pretty much exactly as described by Rousseau. The result? An odd insistence that for many tens of thousands of years, nothing happened. This is an unsettling conclusion, especially when we consider some of the actual archaeological evidence for the existence of ‘Palaeolithic politics’.

Quotes come from this book:

Chapter 1

If to the normal effects of habit is then added the kind of education offered by the master, the priest, the teacher, etc., who have a vested interest in preaching that the masters and the government are necessary; if one were to add the judge and the policeman who are at pains to reduce to silence those who might think differently and be tempted to propagate their ideas, then it will not be difficult to understand how the prejudiced view of the usefulness of, and the necessity for, the master and the government took root in the unsophisticated minds of the labouring masses.

So, since it was thought that government was necessary and that without government there could only be disorder and confusion, it was natural and logical that anarchy, which means absence of government, should sound like absence of order.

Change opinion, convince the public that government is not only unnecessary, but extremely harmful, and then the word anarchy, just because it means absence of government, will come to mean for everybody: natural order, unity of human needs and the interests of all, complete freedom within complete solidarity.

Chapter 2

What is government? The metaphysical tendency which in spite of the blows it has suffered at the hands of positive science still has a strong hold on the minds of people today, so much so that many look upon government as a moral institution with a number of given qualities of reason, justice, equity which are independent of the people who are in office. For them government, and in a more vague way, the State, is the abstract social power; it is the ever abstract representative of the general interest; it is the expression of the rights of all considered as the limits of the rights of each individual. And this way of conceiving of government is encouraged by the interested parties who are concerned that the principle of authority should be safeguarded and that it should always survive the shortcomings and the mistakes committed by those who follow one another in the exercise of power.

Call us out, why don't you. But seriously, this feels so... relevant more than a hundred years later, and it feels even more timely and prescient because this has been something that we've been fighting for far too long. The government cannot and will never care about us; that's not its purpose, and we should see that now if we didn't before.

But what reason is there for the existence of government? Why give up one’s personal liberty and initiative to a few individuals? Why give them this power to take over willy nilly the collective strength to use as they wish? Are they so exceptionally gifted as to be able to demonstrate with some show of reason their ability to replace the mass of the people and to safeguard the interests, all the interests, of everybody better than the interested parties themselves? Are they infallible and incorruptible to the point that one could, with some semblance of prudence, entrust the fate of each and all to their knowledge and to their goodness?

And even if men of infinite goodness and knowledge existed, and even supposing, what has never been observed in history, that governmental power were to rest in the hands of the most able and kindest among us, would government office add anything to their beneficial potential? Or would it instead paralyse and destroy it by reason of the necessity men in government have of dealing with so many matters which they do not understand, and above all of wasting their energy keeping themselves in power, their friends happy, and holding in check the malcontents as well as subduing the rebels?

Furthermore, however good or bad, knowledgeable or stupid the governors may be, who will appoint them to their exalted office? Do they impose themselves by right of conquest, war or revolution? But in that case what guarantee has the public that they will be inspired by the general good? Then it is a clear question of a coup d’état and if the victims are dissatisfied the only recourse open to them is that of force to shake off the yoke. Are they selected from one particular class or party? In which case the interests and ideas of that class or party will certainly triumph, and the will and the interests of the others will be sacrificed. Are they elected by universal suffrage? But in that case the only criterion is in numbers, which certainly are proof neither of reason, justice nor ability. Those elected would be those most able to deceive the public; and the minority, which can well be the other half minus one, would be sacrificed. And all this without taking into account that experience has demonstrated the impossibility of devising an electoral machine where the successful candidates are at least the real representatives of the majority.

I love the framing of all of this as questions. Questions are a great way to push people into thinking about the situation they're in. Hell, this is a great way to even make anarchists think about their own beliefs.

Also, I just think this is a beautifully written piece.

Chapter 3

This is the theory; but if theories are to be valid they must be based on facts and explain them — and one knows only too well that in social economy too often are theories invented to justify the facts, that is to defend privilege and make it palatable to those who are its victims. Let us instead look at the facts.

The basic function of government everywhere in all times, whatever title it adopts and whatever its origin and organisation may be, is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses, of defending the oppressors and the exploiters: and its principal, characteristic and indispensable, instruments are the police agent and the tax-collector, the soldier and the gaoler — to whom must be invariably added the trader in lies, be he priest or schoolmaster, remunerated or protected by the government to enslave minds and make them docilely accept the yoke.

A government cannot maintain itself for long without hiding its true nature behind a pretence of general usefulness; it cannot impose respect for the lives of privileged people if it does not appear to demand respect for all human life, it cannot impose acceptance of the privileges of the few if it does not pretend to be the guardian of the rights of all.

A government cannot want society to break up, for it would mean that it and the dominant class would be deprived of the sources of exploitation; nor can it leave society to maintain itself without official intervention, for then the people would soon realise that government serves only to defend the property owners who keep them in conditions of starvation, and they would hasten to rid themselves of both the government and the property owners.

Despite all this, the nature of government does not change. If it assumes the role of controller and guarantor of the rights and duties of everyone, it perverts the sentiment of justice; it qualifies as a crime and punishes every action which violates or threatens the privileges of the rulers and the property owners, and declares as just and legal the most outrageous exploitation of the poor, the slow and sustained material and moral assassination perpetrated by those who have, at the expense of those who have not. If it appoints itself as the administrator of public services, again, as always, it looks after the interests of the rulers and the property owners and does not attend to those of the working people except where it has to because the people agree to pay. If it assumes the role of teacher, it hampers the propagation of truth and tends to prepare the minds and the hearts of the young to become either ruthless tyrants or docile slaves, according to the class to which they belong. In the hands of government everything becomes a means for exploitation, everything becomes a policing institution, useful only for keeping the people in check.

Reminds me of this AJ Muste quote about labour education.

Chapter 4

The principle of each for himself, which is the war of all against all, arose in the course of history to complicate, to sidetrack and paralyse the war of all against nature for the greatest wellbeing of mankind which can be completely successful only by being based on the principle of all for one and one for all.

So therefore if the oppressed masses were to refuse to work for others, and were to take over the land and the instruments of work from the landowners, or were to want to use them on their own account or for their own benefit, that is the benefit of all, if they were to decide never again to put up with domination and brute force, nor with economic privilege, and if the sentiment of human solidarity, strengthened by a community of interests, were to have put an end to wars and colonialism — what justification would there be for the continued existence of government?

Once private property has been abolished, government which is its defender must disappear. If it were to survive it would tend always to re-establish a privileged and oppressing class in one guise or another.

Chapter 5

The list of proposed questions never seems to change. Anarchists are often met with the same list. I know I've been asked all of these a dozen times:

• Who would organise and guarantee, if there were no government, food supplies, distribution, health services, the post and telegraph services and the railways, etc.?
• Who would look after public education?
• Who would undertake those vast exploratory projects, land drainage schemes, scientific research, which transform the face of the earth and increase Man’s power a hundredfold?
• Who would watch over the conservation and development of social wealth to pass it on enriched and improved for future generations?
• Who would have a mandate to prevent and punish crime, that is anti-social actions?
• And what of those who fall short of the law of solidarity and don’t want to work? And those who were to spread disease in a country and refused to take the kinds of hygienic precautions recognised as useful by science?
• And supposing there were some people, sane or insane, who wanted to set fire to the harvest, sexually assault children, or take advantage of their strength to assault the weak?

And it's just... I get why people ask these questions, but they are questions to which there are no good answers. No one has good answers, and the State most certainly has no good answers. But to be able to say that you don't know? Is a strength.

"Who would organise the distribution of necessary resources?" I don't know, but I'm certain we have pre-capitalism (and even pre-feudalism) models that we could look towards for inspiration. We could look at how many small villages have organised distribution of necessary resources, we could look at how the BPP tried to organise resources... there are models. We have some templates to adapt. They exist. But those models cannot look the same for everyone (unless they just so happen to work for everyone, which is unlikely).

"Who would look after public education?" Why would we leave education as it is? Schools are not for genuine education; they are not for genuine learning... And there are people who care about learning (adults and kids alike) who will and can work together to build those spaces. Again, they do not need to look the same as everywhere else! We have templates, we have models, we have ideas... we need space.

And when people ask "who will protect you if there are no cops" have never been left unprotected by the cops. They do not know what it's like to go to the cops because you're terrified that you'll be murdered by someone in your own family, with evidence of them saying they will do so, and to be told by them that they can't help unless you're dead. They do not know what it's like to go to the police after you've been raped (knowing in your heart that it'll be useless but going to placate your friend who believes it'll work) only to have the singular woman cop in the office accuse you of "changing your mind" and "being dressed inappropriately," telling you that the whole thing was "your own fault."

Such are the objections the authoritarians face us with, even when they are socialists, that is when they want to abolish private property and the class government which it gives rise to.

We can answer that in the first place it is not true that once the social conditions are changed the nature and the role of government would change. Organ and function are inseparable terms. Take away from an organ its function and either the organ dies or the function is re-established. Put an army in a country in which there are neither reasons for, nor fear of, war, civil or external, and it will provoke war or, if it does not succeed in its intentions, it will collapse. A police force where there are no crimes to solve or criminals to apprehend, will invent both, or cease to exist.

Refers to the above, and it's fucking correct.

Chapter 6

But let us even suppose that the government were not in any case a privileged class, and could survive without creating around itself a new privileged class, and remain the representative, the servant as it were, of the whole of society. And what useful purpose could this possibly serve? How and in what way would this increase the strength, the intelligence, the spirit of solidarity, the concern for the wellbeing of all and of future generations, which at any given time happen to exist in a given society?

This is the kind of question we need to be proposing in response more often. Too often, people are on the defensive and trying to answer those same lists of questions century (after century). People keep saying we need a government, but there isn't a good reason for it (and I haven't seen one yet).

We are used to living under a government which takes over all that energy, intelligence and will which it can direct for its own ends; and it hinders, paralyses and suppresses those who do not serve its purpose or are hostile — and we think that everything that is done in society is carried out thanks to the government, and that without the government there would no longer be any energy, intelligence or goodwill left in society.

What can government itself add to the moral and material forces that exist in society? Would it be a similar case to that of the God of the Bible who creates from nothing?

Even if we pursue our hypothesis of the ideal government of the authoritarian socialists, it follows from what we have said that far from resulting in an increase in the productive, organising and protective forces in society, it would greatly reduce them, limiting initiative to a few, and giving them the right to do everything without, of course, being able to provide them with the gift of being all-knowing.

Anyway, in order to understand how a society can live without government, one has only to observe in depth existing society, and one will see how in fact the greater part, the important part, of social life is discharged even today outside government intervention, and that government only interferes in order to exploit the masses, to defend the privileged minority, and moreover it finds itself sanctioning, quite ineffectually, all that has been done without its intervention, and often in spite of and even against it. Men work, barter, study, travel and follow to the best of their knowledge moral rules and those of wellbeing; they benefit from the advances made in science and the arts, have widespread relations among themselves — all without feeling the need for somebody to tell them how to behave. Indeed it is just those matters over which government has no control that work best, that give rise to less controversy and are resolved by general consent so that everybody feels happy as well as being useful.

Literally just reminds me of how there were reports of the Mayor Bowser in Washington, DC giving out the hotline info for mutual aid and then the State trying to co-opt that organising as if they were the ones doing it.

For instance, the government takes over the responsibilities of the postal services, the railways and so on. But in what way does it help these services?

The fact that this critique is still relevant in 2021 is absolutely nonsense. (And the answer is that it doesn't help them. It constantly harms them.)

Of course in every large collective undertaking, a division of labour, technical management, administration, etc., is necessary. But authoritarians clumsily play on words to produce a raison d’être for government out of the very real need for the organisation of work. Government, it is well to repeat it, is the concourse of individuals who have had, or have seized, the right and the means to make laws and to oblige people to obey; the administrator, the engineer, etc., instead are people who are appointed or assume the responsibility to carry out a particular job and do so. Government means the delegation of power, that is the abdication of initiative and sovereignty of all into the hands of a few; administration means the delegation of work, that is tasks given and received, free exchange of services based on free agreement.

But to do so, what purpose is served by people whose profession is the making of laws; while other people spend their lives seeking out and inventing law-breakers? When the people really disapprove of something and consider it harmful, they always manage to prevent it more successfully than do the professional legislators, police and judges. When in the course of insurrections the people have, however mistakenly, wanted private property to be respected, they did so in a way that an army of policemen could not.

Customs always follow the needs and feelings of the majority: and the less they are subject to the sanctions of law the more are they respected, for everyone can see and understand their use, and because the interested parties, having no illusions as to the protection offered by government, themselves see to it that they are respected. For a caravan travelling across the deserts of Africa the good management of water stocks is a matter of life and death for all; and in those circumstances water becomes a sacred thing and no one would think of wasting it. Conspirators depend on secrecy, and the secret is kept or abomination strikes whoever violates it. Gambling debts are not secured by law, and among gamblers whoever does not pay up is considered and considers himself dishonoured.

Chapter 7

That’s all very well, some say, and anarchy may be a perfect form of human society, but we don’t want to take a leap in the dark. Tell us therefore in detail how your society will be organised. And there follows a whole series of questions, which are very interesting if we were involved in studying the problems that will impose themselves on the liberated society, but which are useless, or absurd, even ridiculous, if we are expected to provide definitive solutions. What methods will be used to teach children? How will production be organised? Will there still be large cities, or will the population be evenly distributed over the whole surface of the earth? And supposing all the inhabitants of Siberia should want to spend the winter in Nice? And if everyone were to want to eat partridge and drink wine from the Chianti district? And who will do a miner’s job or be a seaman? And who will empty the privies? And will sick people be treated at home or in hospital? And who will establish the railway timetable? And what will be done if an engine-driver has a stomach-ache while the train is moving? ... And so on to the point of assuming that we have all the knowledge and experience of the unknown future, and that in the name of anarchy, we should prescribe for future generations at what time they must go to bed, and on what days they must pare their corns.

Again, things that just won't stop. I feel like one of the worst parts of society is that people feel like we need to have answers rather than possible options. How will society be organised? I don't know, and I shouldn't have to know in order to say that the organisation we have now doesn't work and never has. Certainly, we should be able to envision better and healthier structures? And we should understand that these structures should be flexible? That we won't get them right the first time through and so we should be able to feel as if we can change them when we understand that they're not working or are harmful?

"How will we teach children?" How have we been teaching children? Compulsory schooling for everyone is so brand new, and it was even more new for Malatesta, that we should be able to recognise that the overwhelming majority of children have never learned like that before. We have options, and kids need them...

It's so exhausting, and it's like it never ends. The same questions, the same refusal to recognise that we shouldn't have all the answers because the answers need to be discovered in the course of understanding what we need.

But the fact that because today, with the evidence we have, we think in a certain way on a given problem does not mean that this is how it must be dealt with in the future. Who can foresee the activities which will grow when mankind is freed from poverty and oppression, when there will no longer be either slaves or masters, and when the struggle between peoples, and the hatred and bitterness that are engendered as a result, will no longer be an essential part of existence? Who can predict the progress in science and in the means of production, of communication and so on?

How will children be educated? We don’t know. So what will happen? Parents, pedagogues and all who are concerned with the future of the young generation will come together, will discuss, will agree or divide according to the views they hold, and will put into practice the methods which they think are the best. And with practice that method which in fact is the best, will in the end be adopted.

He really should've included children in this mix and done so explicitly. Children have every right to have a say in how they learn and what they learn, and it is up to us to also listen to them.

Chapter 8

This society without government, which maintains itself by means of free and voluntary cooperation; this society which relies in everything on the spontaneous action of interests and which is entirely based on solidarity and love, is certainly a wonderful ideal, they say; but like all ideals it lives in the clouds. We find ourselves in a world which has always been divided into oppressors and oppressed; and if the former are full of the spirit of domination and have all the vices of tyrants, the latter are broken by servility and have the even worse vices that result from slavery.

It's interesting that the argument about "human nature" has constantly been trotted out against anarchism (though the wording has changed). It'd be nice, one day, if people realised that what they consider human nature is not, in fact, our nature. At all.

It's also frustrating because it ties into the refusal of people to deal with bigotries. It's like a way of saying "boys will be boys" and what not when the point is that these are things we can (and should) work to unlearn. When people tie things into "human nature," they're giving an excuse for why the world works the way it does... And that excuse doesn't make sense.

How will these men, brought up in a society based on class and individual conflict, ever be able to change themselves suddenly and become capable of living in a society in which everyone will do as he wishes and must do, and without outside coercion and through the force of his own will, seek the welfare of others? With what single-mindedness, with what common sense would you entrust the fate of the revolution and of mankind to an ignorant mob, weakened by poverty, brainwashed by the priest, and which today will be blindly bloodthirsty, while tomorrow it will allow itself to be clumsily deceived by a rogue, or bow its head servilely under the heel of the first military dictator who dares to make himself master? Would it not be more prudent to advance towards the anarchist ideal by first passing through a democratic or socialist republic? Will there not be a need for a government of the best people to educate and to prepare the generations for things to come?

We are always faced with the prejudice that government is a new force that has emerged from no one knows where which in itself adds something to the total forces and capacities of those individuals who constitute it and of those who obey it. Instead all that happens in the world is done by people; and government qua government, contributes nothing of its own apart from the tendency to convert everything into a monopoly for the benefit of a particular party or class, as well as offering resistance to every initiative which comes from outside its own clique.

Chapter 9

Once this negative power that is government is abolished, society will be what it can be, but all that it can be given the forces and abilities available at the time. If there are educated people who wish to spread knowledge they will organise the schools and make a special effort to persuade everybody of the usefulness and pleasure to be got from an education. And if there were no such people, or only a few, a government could not create them; all it could do would be what happens now, take the few that there are away from their rewarding work, and set them to drafting regulations which have to be imposed with policemen, and make intelligent and devoted teachers into political beings, that is useless parasites, all concerned with imposing their whims and with maintaining themselves in power.

Of course there will be difficulties and drawbacks; but they will be resolved, and they will only be resolved in an anarchist way, by means, that is, of the direct intervention of the interested parties and by free agreements.

In any case we will have on events the kind of influence which will reflect our numerical strength, our energy, our intelligence and our intransigence. Even if we are defeated, our work will not have been useless, for the greater our resolve to achieve the implementation of our programme in full, the less property, and less government will there be in the new society. And we will have performed a worthy task for, after all, human progress is measured by the extent government power and private property are reduced.

Quotes from this book:

Introduction: A Point of Clarification

The newspapers conscientiously draw up the list of causes for the sudden disquiet. There is the financial crisis, of course, with its booming unemployment, its share of hopelessness and of social plans, its Kerviel and Madoff scandals. There is the failure of the educational system, its windling production of workers and citizens, even with the children of the middle class as its raw material. There is the existence of a youth to which no political representation corresponds, a youth good for nothing but destroying the free bicycles that society so conscientiously put at their disposal.

None of these worrisome subjects should appear insurmountable in an era whose predominant mode of government is precisely the management of crises. Unless we consider that what power is confronting is neither just another crisis, nor just a succession of chronic problems, of more or less anticipated disturbances, but a singular peril: that a form of conflict has emerged, and positions have been taken up, that are no longer manageable.

Yet classical politics is equipped with variants that know very well how to accommodate these practices and to extend their ideological rubbish to the very heart of the riot. If the Greek battle wasn’t decided, and put down, in the streets — the police being visibly outflanked there — it’s because its neutralization was played out elsewhere. There is nothing more draining, nothing more fatal, than this classical politics, with its dried up rituals, its thinking without thought, its little closed world.

Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance. Something that is constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something constituted over there. A body that resonates does so according to its own mode. An insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire — a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythm of their own vibrations, always taking on more density. To the point that any return to normal is no longer desirable or even imaginable.

It is now publicly understood that crisis situations are so many opportunities for the restructuring of domination. This is why Sarkozy can announce, without seeming to lie too much, that the financial crisis is “the end of a world,” and that 2009 will see France enter a new era. This charade of an economic crisis is supposed to be a novelty: we are supposed to be in the dawn of a new epoch where we will all join together in fighting inequality and global warming. But for our generation — which was born in the crisis and has known nothing but economic, financial, social and ecological crisis — this is rather difficult to accept. They won’t fool us again, with another round of “Now we start all over again” and “It’s just a question of tightening our belts for a little while.” To tell the truth, the disastrous unemployment figures no longer arouse any feeling in us. Crisis is a means of governing. In a world that seems to hold together only through the infinite management of its own collapse.

I feel this in my bones.

Organizations are obstacles to organizing ourselves.

The Coming Insurrection:

The sphere of political representation has come to a close. From left to right, it’s the same nothingness striking the pose of an emperor or a savior, the same sales assistants adjusting their discourse according to the findings of the latest surveys. Those who still vote seem to have no other intention than to desecrate the ballot box by voting as a pure act of protest. We’re beginning to suspect that it’s only against voting itself that people continue to vote. Nothing we’re being shown is adequate to the situation, not by far. In its very silence, the populace seems infinitely more mature than all these puppets bickering amongst themselves about how to govern it.

That they were careful to assure us that the drone was unarmed gives us a clear indication of the road we’re headed down. The territory will be partitioned into ever more restricted zones. Highways built around the borders of “problem neighborhoods” already form invisible walls closing off those areas off from the middle-class subdivisions.

This book is signed in the name of an imaginary collective. Its editors are not its authors. They were content merely to introduce a little order into the common-places of our time, collecting some of the murmurings around barroom tables and behind closed bedroom doors. They’ve done nothing more than lay down a few necessary truths, whose universal repression fills psychiatric hospitals with patients, and eyes with pain. They’ve made themselves scribes of the situation. It’s the privileged feature of radical circumstances that a rigorous application of logic leads to revolution. It’s enough just to say what is before our eyes and not to shrink from the conclusions.

And... this is what fills my brain when I think of the values I want for groups I work in. At least partially, especially to de-center people who have often been centered and still try to retain that space, regardless of what they claim to believe.

First Circle: "I AM WHAT I AM":

“I AM WHAT I AM.” Never has domination found such an innocent-sounding slogan. The maintenance of the self in a permanent state of deterioration, in a chronic state of near-collapse, is the best-kept secret of the present order of things.

“WHAT AM I,” then? Since childhood, I’ve passed through a flow of milk, smells, stories, sounds, emotions, nursery rhymes, substances, gestures, ideas, impressions, gazes, songs, and foods. What am I? Tied in every way to places, sufferings, ancestors, friends, loves, events, languages, memories, to all kinds of things that obviously are not me. Everything that attaches me to the world, all the links that constitute me, all the forces that compose me don’t form an identity, a thing displayable on cue, but a singular, shared, living existence, from which emerges — at certain times and places — that being which says “I.” Our feeling of inconsistency is simply the consequence of this foolish belief in the permanence of the self and of the little care we give to what makes us what we are.

Freedom isn’t the act of shedding our attachments, but the practical capacity to work on them, to move around in their space, to form or dissolve them. The family only exists as a family, that is, as a hell, for those who’ve quit trying to alter its debilitating mechanisms, or don’t know how to. The freedom to uproot oneself has always been a phantasmic freedom. We can’t rid ourselves of what binds us without at the same time losing the very thing to which our forces would be applied.

But taken as facts, my failings can also lead to the dismantling of the hypothesis of the self. They then become acts of resistance in the current war. They become a rebellion and a force against everything that conspires to normalize us, to amputate us. The self is not some thing within us that is in a state of crisis; it is the form they mean to stamp upon us. They want to make our self something sharply defined, separate, assessable in terms of qualities, controllable, when in fact we are creatures among creatures, singularities among similars, living flesh weaving the flesh of the world.

This whole section has a few... issues. While I do recognise that there are disorders mental health issues that may not exist under capitalism, it's unfair to make claims (even in a provocative book) that they only exist under the state. We can't entirely know this, and it's absurd to state it in this fashion because it undermines the struggles that those of us with these disorders and mental health issues have.

Would I no longer have ADHD if all states ceased to exist? Would all of my depression or anxiety evaporate as soon as the state fell? No, as my brain would still be the same as it ever was. But what should be noted is that it would present differently; it would be recognised and understood differently. Perhaps my depression would lessen, perhaps fewer things would make me anxious, and maybe my ADHD would cause fewer problems because of the removal of the state's stigma of disorders and mental health issues.

But what's being said in these assumptions that so many people (including anarchists) fail to recognise is that the dismantling of the state does not guarantee the dismantling of the stigma or the social conditions and structures that impact us. All of these need to be dismantled together, and the more we continue to state otherwise? Wrongly placing blame on the use of medications (without making a distinction between willingness to take them and the coercion or mandatory requirements many people have) does nothing to help those of us with those conditions who are impacted by them under the state and would continue to be impacted by them as a result of people failing to adequately create liberatory spaces.

Second Circle: "Entertainment is a vital need":

To take the most banal: there is no “immigration question.” Who still grows up where they were born? Who lives where they grew up? Who works where they live? Who lives where their ancestors did? And to whom do the children of this era belong, to television or their parents? The truth is that we have been completely torn from any belonging, we are no longer from anywhere, and the result, in addition to a new disposition to tourism, is an undeniable suffering. Our history is one of colonizations, of migrations, of wars, of exiles, of the destruction of all roots. It’s the story of everything that has made us foreigners in this world, guests in our own family.

France is a product of its schools, and not the inverse. We live in an excessively scholastic country, where one remembers passing an exam as a sort of life passage. Where retired people still tell you about their failure, forty years earlier, in such and such an exam, and how it screwed up their whole career, their whole life. For a century and a half, the national school system has been producing a type of state subjectivity that stands out amongst all others. People who accept competition on the condition that the playing field is level. Who expect in life that each person be rewarded as in a contest, according to their merit. Who always ask permission before taking. Who silently respect culture, the rules, and those with the best grades. Even their attachment to their great, critical intellectuals and their rejection of capitalism are branded by this love of school. It’s this construction of subjectivities by the state that is breaking down, every day a little more, with the decline of the scholarly institutions. The reappearance, over the past twenty years, of a school and a culture of the street, in competition with the school of the republic and its cardboard culture, is the most profound trauma that French universalism is presently undergoing. On this point, the extreme right is already reconciled with the most virulent left. However, the name Jules Ferry — Minister of Thiers during the crushing of the Commune and theoretician of colonization — should itself be enough to render this institution suspect.

It would be a waste of time to detail all that which is agonizing in existing social relations. They say the family is coming back, that the couple is coming back. But the family that’s coming back is not the same one that went away. Its return is nothing but a deepening of the reigning separation that it serves to mask, becoming what it is through this masquerade. Everyone can testify to the rations of sadness condensed from year to year in family gatherings, the forced smiles, the awkwardness of seeing everyone pretending in vain, the feeling that a corpse is lying there on the table, and everyone acting as though it were nothing. From flirtation to divorce, from cohabitation to stepfamilies, everyone feels the inanity of the sad family nucleus, but most seem to believe that it would be sadder still to renounce it. The family is no longer so much the suffocation of maternal control or the patriarchy of beatings as it is this infantile abandon to a fuzzy dependency, where everything is familiar, this carefree moment in the face of a world that nobody can deny is breaking down, a world where “becoming self-sufficient” is a euphemism for “having found a boss.” They want to use the “familiarity” of the biological family as an excuse to eat away at anything that burns passionately within us and, under the pretext that they raised us, make us renounce the possibility of growing up, as well as everything that is serious in childhood. It is necessary to preserve oneself from such corrosion.

Third Circle: "Life, health and love are precarious — why should work be an exception?":

We belong to a generation that lives very well in this fiction. That has never counted on either a pension or the right to work, let alone rights at work. That isn’t even “precarious,” as the most advanced factions of the militant left like to theorize, because to be precarious is still to define oneself in relation to the sphere of work, that is, to its decomposition. We accept the necessity of finding money, by whatever means, because it is currently impossible to do without it, but we reject the necessity of working. Besides, we don’t work anymore: we do our time. Business is not a place where we exist, it’s a place we pass through. We aren’t cynical, we are just reluctant to be deceived. All these discourses on motivation, quality and personal investment pass us by, to the great dismay of human resources managers. They say we are disappointed by business, that it failed to honor our parents’ loyalty, that it let them go too quickly. They are lying. To be disappointed, one must have hoped for something. And we have never hoped for anything from business: we see it for what it is and for what it has always been, a fool’s game of varying degrees of comfort. On behalf of our parents, our only regret is that they fell into the trap, at least the ones who believed.

Here lies the present paradox: work has totally triumphed over all other ways of existing, at the very moment when workers have become superfluous. Gains in productivity, outsourcing, mechanization, automated and digital production have so progressed that they have almost reduced to zero the quantity of living labor necessary in the manufacture of any product. We are living the paradox of a society of workers without work, where entertainment, consumption and leisure only underscore the lack from which they are supposed to distract us. The mine in Carmaux, famous for a century of violent strikes, has now been reconverted into Cape Discovery. It’s an entertainment “multiplex” for skateboarding and biking, distinguished by a “Mining Museum” in which methane blasts are simulated for vacationers.

Bullshit Jobs vibes, anyone?

Today work is tied less to the economic necessity of producing goods than to the political necessity of producing producers and consumers, and of preserving by any means necessary the order of work. Producing oneself is becoming the dominant occupation of a society where production no longer has an object: like a carpenter who’s been evicted from his shop and in desperation sets about hammering and sawing himself.

The present production apparatus is therefore, on the one hand, a gigantic machine for psychic and physical mobilization, for sucking the energy of humans that have become superfluous, and, on the other hand, it is a sorting machine that allocates survival to conformed subjectivities and rejects all “problem individuals,” all those who embody another use of life and, in this way, resist it. On the one hand, ghosts are brought to life, and on the other, the living are left to die. This is the properly political function of the contemporary production apparatus.

Fourth Circle: "More simple, more fun, more mobile, more secure!":

From up close or from afar, what surrounds us looks nothing like that:

it is one single urban cloth, without form or order, a bleak zone, endless and undefined, a global continuum of museum-like city centers and natural parks, of enormous suburban housing developments and massive agricultural projects, industrial zones and subdivisions, country inns and trendy bars: the metropolis. Certainly the ancient city existed, as did the cities of medieval and modern times. But there is no such thing as a metropolitan city. All territory is synthesized within the metropolis. Everything occupies the same space, if not geographically then through the intermeshing of its networks.

It’s because the city has finally disappeared that it has now become fetishized, as history. The factory buildings of Lille become concert halls. The rebuilt concrete core of Le Havre is now a UNESCO World Heritage sire. In Beijing, the hutongs surrounding the Forbidden City were demolished, replaced by fake versions, placed a little farther out, on display for sightseers. In Troyes they paste half-timber facades onto cinderblock buildings, a type of pastiche that resembles the Victorian shops at Disneyland Paris more than anything else. The old historic centers, once hotbeds of revolutionary sedition, are now wisely integrated into the organizational diagram of the metropolis. They’ve been given over to tourism and conspicuous consumption. They are the fairy-tale commodity islands, propped up by their expos and decorations, and by force if necessary. The oppressive sentimentality of every “Christmas Village” is offset by ever more security guards and city patrols. Control has a wonderful way of integrating itself into the commodity landscape, showing its authoritarian face to anyone who wants to see it. It’s an age of fusions, of muzak, telescoping police batons and cotton candy. Equal parts police surveillance and enchantment!

This taste for the “authentic,” and for the control that goes with it, is carried by the petty bourgeoisie through their colonizing drives into working class neighborhoods. Pushed out of the city centers, they find on the frontiers the kind of “neighborhood feeling” they missed in the prefab houses of suburbia. In chasing out the poor people, the cars, and the immigrants, in making it tidy, in getting rid of all the germs, the petty bourgeoisie pulverizes the very thing it came looking for. A police officer and a garbage man shake hands in a picture on a town billboard, and the slogan reads: “Montauban — Clean City.”

The uprooted and stressed-out masses are instead shown a countryside, a vision of the past that’s easy to stage now that the country folk have been so depleted. It is a marketing campaign deployed on a “territory” in which everything must be valorized or reconstituted as national heritage. Everywhere it’s the same chilling void, reaching into even the most remote and rustic corners.

The metropolis is this simultaneous death of city and country. It is the crossroads where all the petty bourgeois come together, in the middle of this middle class that stretches out indefinitely, as much a result of rural flight as of urban sprawl. To cover the planet with glass would fit perfectly the cynicism of contemporary architecture. A school, a hospital, or a media center are all variations on the same theme: transparency, neutrality, uniformity. These massive, fluid buildings are conceived without any need to know what they will house. They could be here as much as anywhere else.

No longer undertaken in view of victory or peace, or even the re-establishment of order, such “interventions” continue a security operation that is always already at work. War is no longer a distinct event in time, but instead diffracts into a series of micro-operations, by both military and police, to ensure security.

The armed forces don’t simply adapt themselves to the metropolis, they produce it. Thus, since the battle of Nablus, Israeli soldiers have become interior designers.

The metropolis is not just this urban pile-up, this final collision between city and country. It is also a flow of beings and things, a current that runs through fiber-optic networks, through high-speed train lines, satellites, and video surveillance cameras, making sure that this world never stops running straight to its ruin. It is a current that would like to drag everything along in its hopeless mobility, to mobilize each and every one of us. Where information pummels us like some kind of hostile force. Where the only thing left to do is run. Where it becomes hard to wait, even for the umpteenth subway train.

With the proliferation of means of movement and communication, and with the lure of always being elsewhere, we are continuously torn from the here and now. Hop on an intercity or commuter train, pick up a telephone — in order to be already gone. Such mobility only ever means uprootedness, isolation, exile. It would be insufferable if it weren’t always the mobility of a private space, of a portable interior. The private bubble doesn’t burst, it floats around. The process of cocooning is not going away, it is merely being put into motion. From a train station, to an office park, to a commercial bank, from one hotel to another, there is everywhere a foreignness, a feeling so banal and so habitual it becomes the last form of familiarity. Metropolitan excess is this capricious mixing of definite moods, indefinitely recombined. The city centers of the metropolis are not clones of themselves, but offer instead their own auras; we glide from one to the next, selecting this one and rejecting that one, to the tune of a kind of existential shopping trip among different styles of bars, people, designs, or playlists. “With my mp3 player, I’m the master of my world.” To cope with the uniformity that surrounds us, our only option is to constantly renovate our own interior world, like a child who constructs the same little house over and over again, or like Robinson Crusoe reproducing his shopkeeper’s universe on a desert island — yet our desert island is civilization itself, and there are billions of us continually washing up on it.