Research

Everything here comes from this zine:

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My favourite sign off ever.

Anarcha-Feminists Take to the Streets

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

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

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

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

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

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

This and this:

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

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

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

Safety is an Illusion: Reflections on Accountability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And especially this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This.

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

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

Notes on Survivor Autonomy and Violence

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

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

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

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

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

We should not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THIS. This is it.

Dysphoria Means Total Destroy

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

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

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

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

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

I feel this reverberating through my bones.

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

This so much. We need it.

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

Paired with:

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

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

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

Quotes from this zine (which can be found in French here):

• There's a "manifesto" about cholera that le Révolté discusses (7 Dec 1884) but hasn't been turned up.
• People involved in Naples during the cholera outbreak: Felice Cavallotti, Giovanni Bovio, Andrea Costa, and Errico Malatesta
• Also included: Massimiliano Boschi, Francesco (and Antonio) Valdrè, and Rocco Lombardo (who died of cholera)
• English anarchist: Florentine Lombard (in Red Cross
• Galileo Palla (anarchist)
• Ahmed Urabi (insurrection in Egypt)
• socialist newspaper Le Cri du Peuple (“The Cry of the People”)
• paper that Malatesta worked on: La Questione Sociale
• Giovanni Passannante (tried to assassinate King Umberto)
• Gaetano Bresci (succeeded in doing so)
• newspapers: La Rivendicazione, L’Agitazione, le Révolté (Swiss), Proxinzus Taus, Pensiero e Volontà
• names to look into: Gigia Pezzi, Arturo Feroci, Pietro Vinci, Delvecchio
• more names: Nunzio Dell'Erba, Giuseppe Cioci, Luigi Fabbri, Max Nettlau
• Malatesta Court Document: “Verbale d’Udienza,” April 21-28, trial in Ancona in 1898

The right-wing party controlled the government; the left-wing party represented a loyal opposition that simply asked for petty reforms, while the Catholic Church was powerful enough to constitute a third pole in society.

Oh, so much has changed. (read: sarcasm)

In France as well as Italy, anarchists understood that the colonial domination of other peoples benefitted the ruling class of the colonizers while endangering ordinary people on both sides.

Oh, hello, historical parallels.

On the contrary, it seems that the government of the French republic gave it to us. Civilized France goes to conquer barbarian Asia and its ships, more or less victorious, carry the terrible scourge back within them. We, civilized peoples, inflict massacre and desolation upon the barbarians with bayonets and cannons, and the barbarians send back massacre and desolation through cholera. Oh human family! Except that the massacre that we carry out is voluntary, inflicted for the purpose of robbery, whereas the revenge of the barbarians is involuntary and unconscious. So who is more barbaric?

Thank you, sarcastic Malatesta.

isn't it poverty (the daughter of individualized property)

I like this kind of poetic usage to also highlight poverty's relationship to other elements of capitalism.

Bourgeois men, if selfishness has not reduced you completely to foolishness, meditate on this letter; think what would happen to you if on a day of revolution you met these workers who, thanks to your deeds, have retained only one hope: to have to manufacture many coffins, and… but it is useless; you will remain as you are and what is fated will come to pass.

Fucking ouch. But also, I feel this viscerally. This is like that base level of anger that I feel I'm required to carry in this society, and I get this.

In Italy, representatives of the Catholic Church took advantage of the situation to describe the epidemic as the judgment of God on a secular society—specifically as a punishment for the spread of socialism and atheism. They urged people to prostrate themselves in repentance rather than adhering to safety measures.

This isn't purely a religion-only thing, but it's worth asking why this so often happens around churches and Christian organisations. It's not even just Catholics, either.

The state resurrected quarantine procedures from the previous century’s protocol for dealing with bubonic plague, mobilizing the military to form a cordon across the French border. Their policies seemed vacillating and arbitrary; at first, they detained travelers for three days, then for five days, then for seven. Upon release from quarantine, all passengers and their belongings were fumigated with sulphur and chlorine or disinfected with carbolic acid, corrosive sublimate, or bichloride of mercury. This had no medical effect other than to irritate the lungs. Its chief purpose was to create a dramatic spectacle, so that the state would be seen taking action against the epidemic.

The more things change, the more it stays the same.

On August 29, the Società Operaia (“Workers’ Society”), a radical mutual aid organization founded in 1861, announced a new initiative intended to provide assistance to anyone whose family had been struck by cholera. This “sanitary company” involved a handful of trusted doctors accompanied by ordinary laborers serving as nurses. Drawing on the Società Operaia’s scant funds, they offered medication, clean blankets, food, and financial assistance to the ill and the bereaved alike. Wanting nothing to do with the hospitals or the city government, they treated cholera patients in their own homes, only going where they were explicitly invited. Being connected to workers throughout the poor neighborhoods of Naples, they were able to spread the news about their services through word of mouth.

What? Going to where people are helps? (Literally, this is something that every single person on the planet could've figured out. But those in government failed to. Because they don't give a fuck.)

As often happens, the initial efforts by radical grassroots organizers had drawn middle-class activists with more resources who were convinced that they could do a better job at what ordinary people had started themselves. The organization that emerged from this meeting, officially named the Committee for the Assistance of the Victims of Cholera, came to be known colloquially as the White Cross.

As always. The next bit highlights how the White Cross gained credit for everything, despite the fact that a lot of grassroots work did what they couldn't. (And it's because middle-class+ always co-opts movements. They see movements as political stepping stones.)

And this kind of goes back to the structure of charity, even when it's intended to be helpful. Who was doing the majority of the work? And who is getting seen for doing the work? (Who is being left out of the narrative?)

Other ruling class institutions, such as the Bank of Naples, were looking for ways to re-stabilize the economy through philanthropy. If the monarchy, the Church, and the top tier of financial capitalists succeeded in presenting themselves as the ones looking out for the people of Naples, they would legitimize their power, making it more difficult for organizers to mobilize people to resist the various forms of oppression that preserved their privileges.

Hello, historical parallels. Strange to see you here again.

Malatesta was offered an official award in recognition of his efforts. He refused it. The same state that was trying to reward him for what he had done in Naples was also waiting to imprison him for things he had not done in Florence. Besides, he did not wish to be a leader—just a comrade among comrades.

Reminding me of the recent events with Pia Klemp.

The chief solution for cholera, as we now know, is to put a clean water supply at everyone’s disposal. Plumbers, not doctors, are the heroes of that story. But — as repeated cholera outbreaks in Naples and elsewhere throughout the 20th and even 21st centuries demonstrated — kings, capitalists, and presidents alike will all keep some portion of the population languishing in perilous conditions unless collective solidarity and uncompromising rebellion force them to share the resources they try to hoard.

Precisely this. This might not have started with capitalism, but it has certainly been exacerbated by it and the capitalists who benefit.

Quotes from this zine:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes from this zine:

Most anthropologists regard the beginnings of agriculture as the inception of civilization. It was this first act of control over the land that brought human beings to think of themselves as distinct from nature, that forced them to become sedentary and possessive, that led to the eventual development of private property and capitalism. But why would hunter/gatherers, whose environment already provided them with all the food they needed, lock themselves in place and give up the nomadic foraging existence they had practiced since the beginning of time for something they already had? It seems more likely – and here, there are anthropologists who agree – that the first ones to domesticate themselves did so in order to brew beer.

I don't want to be that person, but who? Like, I'm genuinely curious to read more about that kind of idea or development, and you're throwing this shit with no sources. (And I'm not about to say anthropologists are bastions of knowledge or perfection, but I'd really like to see evidence about this when such a claim is made.)

This is one of the first things I found, and it only says "to grow carbs." While beer is made out of the same sorts of things, it indicates a shift of diet and not a propensity for alcoholism. Meanwhile, this one outlines drug use in other cultures (though, rather than taking it at its word, it is a jumping off point), but the author does mention that band societies engaged with it on a different level than people settling in towns and cities.

This drastic reorganization for the sake of intoxication must have shaken tribal structure and lifeways to the root. Where these “primitive” peoples had once lived in a relaxed and attentive relationship to the providing earth – a relationship that afforded them both personal autonomy and supportive community as well as a great deal of leisure time to spend in admiration of the enchanted world around them – they now alternated periods of slavish hard labor with periods of drunken incompetence and detachment. It’s not hard to imagine that this situation hastened, if not necessitated, the rise to power of masters, overseers who saw to it that the toilsome tasks of fixed living were carried out by the frequently inebriated and incapable tribespeople. Without these chiefs and the primitive judicial systems they instituted, it must have seemed that life itself would be impossible: and thus, under the foul auspices of alcoholism, the embryonic State was conceived.

While I can see the point being made, something about this feels either too generalised or ahistorical. Ancient societies that had alcohol also saw excessive drinking as a problem. Not all societies immediately started getting drunk out of their minds?

Again, I'd really like to see research behind this or additional sources where I can read more, but there is nothing of the sort in this zine (nor is their an online component to visit for more information).

Another perspective that might actually help out here is that people were domesticated by wheat (though I've never really explored that outside the handful of mentions of Yuval Noah Harari's work). It's an interesting concept to explore.

Either way, evidence would be nice.

... but as every historian knows, the spread of civilization was anything but voluntary. Lacking the manners and gentleness of their former companions in the wild, these savages, in their drunken excesses and infringements, must have provoked a series of wars – wars which, sadly, the lushes were able to win, owing to the military efficiency of their autocratic armies and the steady supply of food their subjugated farmlands provided.

This is really falling on the Noble Savage trope in order to highlight problems, which I think is a poor direction to go when you can make the same point without using it.

The first collection of laws, the Code of Hammurabi of Babylon, decreed a daily beer ration in direct proportion to social status: beer consumption went hand-in-hand with hierarchy. For example, workers received two liters while besotted priests and kings got five. [For an interesting thought experiment, ask yourself how much alcohol – and of what grade – you get now, and what that says about your position in society.]

What do you say if a person... doesn't drink? In this manner, either you're going to be moralising them as superior or you're going to imply they're not getting enough.

Either way, this is an interesting structure, though the point feels hit and miss. While it'd be interesting to explore and understand beer's importance in the hierarchy, there is quite a lot of information left unsaid: What was the importance of beer in this time (beyond the mere conjecture of "some historians")? Which historians are you referring to? It'd be nice to have references to look through because it honestly could be interesting to explore, but it's left unsaid.

Only those human beings that still lived in harmony with wilderness, such as the indigenous peoples of North America and some sectors of Africa, remained alcohol-free – for a time.

Is this strictly true, though? And even if they didn't have alcohol, they did have access to mind-altering plants.

But what's being missed in this discussion is the point that should be said bluntly: colonisers used alcohol as a way to interfere in Indigenous cultures. This is too vague for the point they're claiming they're making, and it's dancing around it too much. It's weird.

I'm also interested in why the author doesn't mention: - Sura (from the Indus Valley), which is a beverage brewed of rice meal, wheat, sugar cane, grapes, and other fruits; - Pulque, balché, or xtabentún (from Mesoamerica); - Chicha (from South America)

And then there's this bit of revival from the Palawa people in Tasmania, which the author couldn't have predicted at the time of writing (though it's obvious it could've happened with the frequent Noble Savage tropes being tossed about).

Another thing: Why the focus on beer as opposed to wine? (And when discussing peoples who were most likely predominantly drinking wine, why is that detail omitted? It's intriguing.)

It’s no exaggeration, then, to say that alcohol has played a key role in the epidemic of fascism, racism, statism, imperialism, colonialism, sexism and patriarchy, class oppression, ungoverned technological development, religious superstition, and other bad stuff that has swept the earth over the past few millennia.

... So has the medical profession. Correlation does not equal causation. Alcohol is not the inherent problem, and I'm saying that as a person who rarely (if ever) has any. Has it been used as a tool for colonisation? Of course. Does that mean that it didn't exist in cultures beforehand? That's false and ahistorical; it's also telling when you're willing to redefine "alcohol" to mean beer (while other forms existed).

It's also telling that the author didn't want to consider how it was used in other non-European cultures. Then again, this comment is meant to be strongly worded and to push you into associating it with fascism: "As for other links between alcohol and far-right/fascist activity – perhaps the reader will recall where Hitler initiated his takeover of Germany."

Yet, the fact of the matter is that Hitler didn't drink much. He didn't abstain, but he drank very little. It doesn't matter, though. People would find ways to make nonsensical connections regardless (as they have with painting and vegetarianism), and this is equally as rubbish.

It’s not widely remembered that strict vegetarianism and abstinence from drink have been common in radical circles for many centuries.

It's also been common among non-radicals and conservatives, you absolute weirdo. What a load of garbage moralising. Does eating meat make you a fascist? No. Does eating a lot of it perpetuate industrial-scale farming of animals, which harms the planet? Yes, especially if everyone's doing it.

Can you make a salient point at all?

On the other side of the coin – can you imagine how much more progress we would have made in this struggle already if anti-authoritarians such as Nestor Makhno, Guy Debord, Janis Joplin, and countless anarcho-punks had focused more energy on the creation and destruct ion they loved so dearly, and less on drinking themselves to death?

Can you imagine what a world would be like if people didn't pathologise everything? Can you imagine what it'd be like to literally fight for everything against multiple armies, knowing that the Bolsheviks had executed the people acting as your subordinate commanders? Which was the case for Makhno (who died of tuberculosis).

And what about people who were known to have depression, as is the case of Debourd? And we are aware that Janis Joplin didn't drink herself to death but overdosed on drugs? Yet, we don't know why, though we know people suspect her overdose wasn't accidental.

Interesting that, rather than compassion, it's moralising again and again; there's a demand that they should've stayed alive to serve us (instead of us taking up their mantel). It's obvious and telling that so many people don't want to engage in elements of actual mental health or chronic illness/disability, which are communities that frequently overlap.

These polemics are more harm than good. They're inaccurate and nonsensical.

All the same, we can learn from this past, as from each other, if we apply our imaginations and a keen eye for pattern.

While patterns are important for learning, not all patterns are meaningful. This assumed pattern is littered with holes; the only pattern that can functionally be followed is that of how settler colonialists used alcohol (and other drugs) to subjugate and control people.

But there are also people among the ancestors of those we claim to be subjugated who state that even this mentality removes agency from their people, which I think is important to consider. (It should not, however, be used as a way to deny the actions of our ancestors.)

Even if you do decide that this history of alcoholism is “the” truth, for heaven’s sake don’t waste time looking back into the past for some long-lost state of primitive sobriety that – for all any of us know – may not even have existed.

Then what was the point of your polemic? To infuriate the readers with gaps and inciting language instead of inform them? To then undermine it all by directly contradicting the usage of your beautiful uses of the frequently referenced Noble Savage tropes? What is the purpose in any of this?

Those drunken despots and beer-bellied bigots may destroy their world and smother beneath their history, but we bear a new future in our hearts – and the power to enact it in our healthy livers.

Again with the moralising. It's always easier to insult and deride people and their vices rather than create spaces where reliance upon them decreases. I genuinely am frustrated by people like this.

Side note to the whole piece: Why use the word "civilisation" at all?

Quotes from this zine (which is also part of Gabriel Kuhn's Sober Living for the Revolution):

Drink, like caffeine or sugar in the body, only plays a role in life that life itself can provide for otherwise. The woman who never drinks coffee does not require it in the morning when she awakens: her body produces energy and focus on its own, as thousands of generations of evolution have prepared it to do. If she drinks coffee regularly, soon her body lets the coffee take over that role, and she becomes dependent upon it.

I would love for anyone who thinks like this to spend a minute in the brain of a person with ADHD. I say this because, as a person with unmedicated ADHD (who used to have medicine for it but no longer can because ADHD diagnoses do not cross borders when you move and it is unnecessarily difficult to access medication because adults with ADHD are treated as drug seekers), the best "replacement" (which isn't a replacement) that I have is caffeine.

This is why I will forever say that disability needs to be accounted for when discussing these issues, since they never are. (And by the way, this also includes addiction.)

If some sober people in this society do not seem as reckless and free as their boozer counterparts, that is a mere accident of culture, mere circumstantial evidence.

As a person who doesn't like alcohol, might I say that it's because the culture around drinking is presumed as being "fun" and "lighthearted," while those of us who choose not to drink get hounded for being boring? (Ironically, we also tend to leave people alone for choosing their vices; meanwhile, the amount of times I've been harassed for not drinking because it's seen as "abnormal" should indicate something.)

Alcohol, like Prozac and all the other mind-control medications that are making big bucks for Big Brother these days, substitutes symptomatic treatment for cure. It takes away the pain of a dull, drab existence for a few hours at best, then returns it twofold. It not only replaces positive actions which would address the root causes of our despondency – it prevents them, as more energy becomes focused on achieving and recovering from the drunken state. Like the tourism of the worker, drink is a pressure valve that releases tension while maintaining the system that creates it.

This is appalling. There are ways to discuss the ways that Big Pharma makes money off of these medications and how it manipulates some (certainly not all) people into using them, but it is disgusting to insinuate that someone would not need them. There are a number of people who have said they "finally feel like themselves" while taking anti-depressants, making them realise that elements of depression were part of their brain chemistry. I don't think it's fair to make people endure misery because someone thinks Prozac is a "mind-control" drug. Get the fuck out of here with that shit.

Alcohol, though I don't enjoy it, is not inherently bad. Again, we need to be recognising the way we treat it and how people profit from it.

Also, this is just so fucking ahistorical it hurts. Alcohol has been around for centuries in multiple forms. So let's try talking about how capitalism has co-opted things like alcohol and has thus turned it into something that makes people miserable. Because that does happen.

In this push-button culture, we’ve become used to conceiving of ourselves as simple machines to be operated: add the appropriate chemical to the equation to get the desired result. In our search for health, happiness, meaning in life, we run from one panacea to the next – Viagra, vitamin C, vodka – instead of approaching our lives holistically and addressing our problems at their social and economic roots. This product-oriented mindset is the foundation of our alienated consumer society: without consuming products, we can’t live! We try to buy relaxation, community, self-confidence – now even ecstasy comes in a pill!

Question: If you dealt with erectile dysfunction before medications to help with that existed, what would you do? Should you have existed in Ancient Greece or Rome, you would've worn a talisman with a rooster on it. Had you existed in the 13th century, you would've been told to ingest a wolf's penis.

I hate to break it to you, but we've been medicating such things for a long time. It just so happens that Viagra works (unlike consuming the genitalia of "high libido" animals), and it allows people to... oh, engage with sex. Engage with pleasure.

Y'know, something your first paragraph claims you also support. (It's also far more ethical to consume Viagra than to kill a wolf for its penis.)

Also, what's wrong with Vitamin C? It helps repair body tissues and is useful for bodily functions and immune systems. But I guess have fun dying of scurvy?

“Life sucks – get drunk” is the essence of the argument that enters our ears from our masters’ tongues and then passes out of our own slurring mouths, perpetuating whatever incidental and unnecessary truths it may refer to – but we’re not falling for it any longer!

My issue thus far is that the people writing this particular article have not addressed how alcohol actually makes us miserable or is used in ways to respond to misery. Yes, I have also heard "life sucks, get drunk," but at least I can adequately put forward an example of capitalism pushing people into drinking-to-forget: The Wine Mom.

Why is it that they're handwaving things that are fine but aren't addressing the things that aren't?

Speaking of sex, it’s worth noting the supporting role alcohol has played in patriarchal gender dynamics. For example – in how many nuclear families has alcoholism helped to maintain an unequal distribution of power and pressure? (All the writers of this tract can call to mind more than one such case among their relatives alone.) Th e man’s drunken self-destruction, engendered as it may be by the horrors of surviving under capitalism, imposes even more of a burden on the woman, who must still somehow hold the family together – often in the face of his violence. And on the subject of dynamics …

This is something they could've spent more time on because the interactions between alcohol and sex are worth exploring.

Maybe exploring how disability, queerness, etc interact with alcoholism would've been a good idea. Instead of insulting disabled people or people with mental health needs.

In certain circles, especially the ones in which the word “anarchy” itself is more in fashion than any of its various meanings, freedom is conceived of in negative terms: “don’t tell me what to do!” In practice, this often means nothing more than an assertion of the individual’s right to be lazy, selfish, unaccountable for his actions or lack thereof.

Then perhaps we need to be considering what kind of anarchist circles we're in? And expanding beyond them. If anything, these people sound like the making of right-libertarians and so-called "anarchist"-capitalists. I wouldn't be shocked if that's the direction they went.

Also, because many of the anarchist groups I'm part of do not have a high number of cishet men, they often don't have this issue. Even when people drink, they don't have this problem. Could it possibly be an issue of patriarchy? I think that's likely. (Also, it definitely is an issue of whiteness.)

In such contexts, when a group agrees upon a project it often ends up being a small, responsible minority that has to do all the work to make it happen. These conscientious few often look like the autocratic ones – when, invisibly, it is the apathy and hostility of their comrades that forces them to adopt this role. Being drunk and disorderly all the time is coercive – it compels others to clean up after you, to think clearly when you won’t, to absorb the stress generated by your behavior when you are too fucked up for dialogue. These dynamics go two ways, of course – those who take all responsibility on their shoulders perpetuate a pattern in which everyone else takes none – but everyone is responsible for their own part in such patterns, and for transcending it.

Interestingly, the groups I've been a part of have seen this dynamic from two core demographics: wealthier individuals and white cishet men. That's who is frequently leaving work for everyone else, regardless of amount of alcohol consumed.

But we need to be care about concepts like "to think clearly when you won't," as that can easily lean into ableist structures. It really starts giving way to the ability to deny people autonomy (or to speak over people while claiming they should be autonomous) because of their perceived intelligence. This is a major issue that anarchists struggle with, and it's not helped by how often we still laud a few key figures (who also were eugenicists). Scientism/rationalism is still too rooted in our movement, and that's a problem.

Passing judgment on others for decisions that affect only themselves is absolutely noxious to any anarchist – not to mention it makes them less likely to experiment with the options you offer.

You literally did that through moralising medication while claiming you were talking about it from an "anti-capitalist" perspective. You cannot call something a "mind-control" drug without passing judgement on others for using it. Big Pharma doesn't care if you call it that, but people who need it do.

Especially in the case of those who are struggling to free themselves of unwanted addictions, such solidarity is paramount: Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, is just one more instance of a quasi-religious organization filling a social need that should already be provided for by anarchist community self-organizing.

Agreed. This is why I continually say that the core of what we should be doing is building community, building networks, building spaces that help people meet their needs.

Because that is needed to protect people before anything else.

Besides, most of us who are not substance-addicted can thank our privileges and good fortune for this; this gives us all the more responsibility to be good allies to those who have not had such privileges or luck – on whatever terms they set.

You can thank your "privileges and good fortune" for not being substance-addicted (though, I bet some of you are addicted to substances that aren't necessarily seen as a problem), but some of us have avoided addiction to alcohol or drugs through experience. What's wonderful is that you vaguely mention (as pointed out) the impacts of alcoholism on others, but you forget that some of us are victims of abuse by alcoholics.

I don't think my "good fortune" for being in that scenario. It wasn't a "privilege" to be abused by a person who was an alcoholic. This is also why we're going to perpetually come at sobriety in the wrong way; we're not actually thinking about what is happening.

We're moralising instead of understanding.

The social impact of our society’s fixation on alcohol is at least as important as its mental, medical, economic, and emotional effects. Drinking standardizes our social lives, occupying some of the eight waking hours a day that aren’t already colonized by work. It locates us spatially – living rooms, cocktail lounges, railroad tracks – and contextually – in ritualized, predictable behaviors – in ways more explicit systems of control never could. Often when one of us does manage to escape the role of worker/consumer, drinking is there, stubborn holdover from our colonized leisure time, to fill up the promising space that opens. Free from these routines, we could discover other ways to spend time and energy and seek pleasure, ways that could prove dangerous to the system of alienation itself.

Yes but also no. Here are some things: 1. We should deal with how alcohol was used as a tool for colonisation because it definitely was. However, we also need to understand how and when it was not a tool for colonisation and has been part of people's cultures. 2. Social drinking is far older than we realise, and it's not inherently a Bad Thing. I don't have a problem with social spaces such as cocktail lounges and bars/pubs, but I do have a problem that certain activities I love (comedy, writing, music) are always positioned in those spaces (and if not inside them, always has a bar nearby). 3. Union organising has too often been located within bars and pubs, and I suspect this initially started out as a way to exclude people because of who was seen as an "acceptable patron" of those spaces. It's also prohibited a lot of the labour movement because it keeps people, including those in the IWW, from understanding their position in the community and how they need to interact with everyone in order to succeed. (Also, union leadership generally doesn't really care.)

I definitely agree that our social focus on alcohol is a major problem for us, though.

With any luck, you’ve been able to discern – even, perhaps, through that haze of drunken stupor – that this is as much a caricature of polemics in the anarchist tradition as a serious piece. It’s worth pointing out that these polemics have often brought attention to their theses by deliberately taking an extreme position, thereby opening up the ground in between for more “moderate” positions on the subject. Hopefully you can draw useful insights of your own from your interpretations of this text, rather than taking it as gospel or anathema.

Actually, no. If you're trying to satirise a polemic (which is what you're doing when you're making a caricature), it needs to be clear. It's not, and it still isn't.

Why? Because of this moralising statement about people with alcohol addiction.

But you also can't find "moderate" ground when your polemic is maintaining beliefs that harm people (e.g., "mind-controlling" drugs) and advocating for a decrease in health standards (e.g., the point about vitamin C).

Plus, we don't need caricatures that do this because we already have enough conspiracy theorists in the world who harm people through their own medical malpractice, and anarchists should be working to ensure that we don't contribute to that.

Quotes from the introduction:

With the largest navy, the most advanced technology, and unprecedented agricultural productivity, the Ming Dynasty remained the most extensive and powerful political structure in the world. In every way it matched and surpassed Europe, and the question of China’s “failed” transition to capitalism (known as “Needham’s Paradox”) would become a sort of initiatory riddle for future scholars of the region. [Galeote] Pereira had arrived in the midst of the Ming’s deterioration, caused in part by the Portuguese and Spanish silver industries and the new trade networks of which he was himself a product.

“China” was very much a product of the Occidental imagination. The people Pereira asked had trouble even understanding the question of what “country” they were from, as there were no clear indigenous correlates to the concept. Ultimately they explained that there was one ruler, but many countries, which still used their ancient names. The combination of these countries composed the “Great Ming,” but each retained much of its local specificity.

Today, in a crisis-stricken global economy, China is again defined by its exceptions. Its staggering ascent seems to promise an almost messianic escape from decades of declining growth: the mirage of a new America, complete with a “Chinese Dream” and the moral zeal of its Puritanical CCP-Confucianism. For the Western economist, this takes the form of a steady-handed Sino-Keynesianism, as new infrastructure projects are initiated by more charitable global financial institutions such as the China Development Bank, promising the salvation of the world’s final far-flung hinterlands. In the official discourse of the Chinese state, this represents nothing more than the slow transition to communism, with a long layover in the stage of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” wherein capitalist mechanisms are used to develop the productive forces until general wealth is possible.

Instead, the socialist developmental regime designates the breakdown of any mode of production and the disappearance of the abstract mechanisms (whether tributary, filial, or marketized) that govern modes of production as such. Under these conditions, only strong state-led strategies of development were capable of driving development of the productive forces. The bureaucracy grew because the bourgeoisie couldn’t. Given China’s poverty and position relative to the long arc of capitalist expansion, only the “big push” industrialization programs of a strong state, paired with resilient local configurations of power, were capable of successfully constructing an industrial system. But the construction of an industrial system is not the same as the successful transition to a new mode of production.

Even at the height of its diversity, however, this project was ultimately defined by a particular communist horizon that had emerged from the combination of the European workers’ movement and the region’s own history of millenarian peasant revolts. Today, this communist horizon no longer exists. There is no point in “taking sides” on these historical matters, simply because there is no symmetry between then and now—the material conditions (rapid industrial expansion, large non-capitalist periphery, etc.) that structured this earlier communist horizon are absent, even if the fundamental crises of capitalism remain. There is no question of whether communists today will face the same problems—they won’t. Instead, there remains only the question of how communism and communist strategy can be conceived without this horizon.

Beyond this, the geography of Russian influence was uneven. Outside the northeastern industrial heartland, Chinese production was more strongly shaped by other systems of enterprise management, economic planning and state administration. If the Chinese took Russia as one model, they also inherited numerous others—from the imperial era, the Nationalist regime of the Republican period, the Japanese, and the Western enterprises in coastal cities. All of these influences were combined in conscious attempts to create a distinctly “Chinese” nation, complete with a unified national economy. The result was a far more decentralized, uneven system than is visible in the era’s propaganda.

The result, we hope, is a picture of socialist China as it actually was, neither a totalitarian wasteland nor the kingdom of heaven. The nation we illustrate below was not “Mao’s China” in any meaning of the phrase. It was a project constructed by millions of people, and its ultimate (though not historically determined) result is the China we see today—a China that holds the global economy together at its disintegrating roots. A China that, we hope, will also finally be undone by more millions of Chinese people, alongside billions of others destroying their thousand nations and, with them, this monstrous economy that yokes each to all and all to none.

Quotes from Part I: Precedents:

Development in the imperial era does not begin with the stasis of a so-called “traditional China.” The imperial state, often in competition with members of the landowning elite, periodically intervened in rural society, each time reshaping its social character. In one of the last significant interventions (inaugurating the late imperial period), the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) attempted to create an independent peasantry in order to eliminate rivals vying for control over the rural surplus product and to stabilize society. In order to do this, peasants were given land, although not as equitably as originally intended. At this time, as in much of the region’s history, peasants were not just farmers: they farmed but also produced handicraft items, in particular silk or cotton cloth. And the Ming state, as with earlier ruling dynasties, encouraged this dual production by requiring tax payments in grain, cloth and labor.

Earlier in the Ming, most rural households had not produced commodities for sale on markets, but had instead produced a variety of goods for subsistence and then sold a small surplus to the rural gentry, who would then re-sell those products as commodities. But with increased commercialization and specialization, more households began to focus on commodity production without abandoning subsistence production for their family units: a situation of commercialization without development. Over time many began to satisfy their reproductive needs through market purchases as well, with areas that produced higher-end goods buying food through regional markets from more peripheral areas. And it was the rural gentry that controlled those markets.

Not that it's identical (in circumstance), but this seems to be coming back in some (possibly more negative) ways for people in rural places to make money. As described in Blockchain Chicken Farm, rural people are engaging in practices to help keep up with their needs while also producing things deemed commodities (including food) that are then sent to the cities (as sales through Alibaba or other companies).

In some ways, it seems like they're re-using historical structures but adding some technology to them as "progress." (But it reminds me of the shoe-maker in a small village described in the book talking about how the current model is ruining their lives and that it's not possible to keep doing what they're doing.)

Tea producers, for example, suffered from the 1880s onward once the British tea plantations in South Asia were producing in full swing. In the cotton textile industry, spinners of yarn had a hard time competing with foreign, machine-spun yarns. In contrast, the cheap imports of such yarn initially allowed cloth weavers to do well, and only over time did they, too, have increasing trouble on the new market. Foreign-owned industrial weaving facilities along the coast—mostly built since the turn of the century—began to cut into the handicraft market. Sourcing much of its yarn from abroad, the industry led in part to the initial disintegration of the rural-urban continuum.

This bit is interesting when you consider how a lot of European and North American economics texts talk about China today and how their "cheap products" have "cut into" the markets for what's being done. So it's interesting to see that industrial yarn development (often foreign-owned) was cutting into the traditional market here. Perhaps it would do us well to recognise the many ways Europe (and North America) interrupted lives through colonialism and imperialism.

During this new phase, the Nationalist Party (Guomindang, hereafter GMD) that had taken over much of China by the end of the 1920s attempted to complete the capitalist transition and build a national economy by creating a stronger link between industrial facilities in the coastal cities and the raw materials produced in rural China. By the early 1930s, factions of the GMD consciously looked to an Italian Fascist model of economic independence and productivism to reintegrate the rural and urban spheres. This implied strong government control over internal markets and state-private cooperation in industrialization. Yet these policies were sidelined by administrative weakness, GMD leader Chiang Kai-shek’s focus on military development, and the subsequent Japanese invasion of the Chinese coast in 1937 that inaugurated World War Two in Asia.

Note: The GMD mentioned here is the same thing as the KMT (Kuomintang).

Considering their later actions in Taiwan, a lot of this is unsurprising.

By the time of the Japanese invasion, the GMD found its main opposition in the form of a peasant army mobilized by a reinvented Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But the CCP itself had begun decades earlier, born out of the same tumultuous intellectual milieu as the GMD itself, both of which began as largely urban affairs. The CCP’s 1921 founding congress was originally intended to take place in Shanghai. Disrupted by police, the meeting was moved north to Jiaxing, where twelve delegates founded the CCP as a branch of the Communist International. As this early CCP grew, it remained a mostly urban project, staffed by intellectuals and skilled industrial workers. Six years after its founding, it was again in Shanghai that this first incarnation of the CCP came to its violent end. In a Russian-backed alliance with the GMD, revolutionaries seized control over most of China’s key cities in a series of worker-staffed insurrections. After victory was secured with the success of the 1927 Shanghai Insurrection, the GMD turned against the communists, arresting a thousand CCP members and leaders of local trade unions, officially executing some three hundred and disappearing thousands more.

The only surviving fragments of the CCP were its rural bases among the peasantry.

Alongside the gang boss and labor contractor there were also guild masters and secret societies. Though often initially founded under the Qing as rebel organizations of one kind or another, under the Nationalists the guild and secret society took on the character of criminal rackets. Each also helped to shape the forms of labor deployment that would develop in this early period of capitalist integration. Guilds deemphasized the art of the craft in favor of seeking lucrative contracts. They “became fledgling capitalist construction companies whose managers, the guild masters, hired people for wages that were quickly returned to the guild in the form of membership fees […] Brutality in enforcing the guild’s monopoly over hiring and construction was common.”

Secret societies, outlawed under the Qing, had helped staff the 1911 Republican revolution and, in return, were permitted to operate openly for the first time. This fundamentally transformed the function of the secret society and ended the period in which they could be understood as “primitive revolutionaries.” Some “remained faithful to their ‘social bandit’ origins” and joined the Communist Party. But the rest became run-of-the-mill reactionaries...

The influence of such groups grew in the vacuum created by the destruction of the communist labor unions and Party cells after 1927. The result was a city in which labor contractors, the gang boss system, the guilds and the secret societies all formed a complex mesh of labor deployment defined by both the dependence on the wage and the threat of direct violence common in colonial regimes of accumulation.

In this sense, the conditions of CCP politics mirrored that of the GMD, with its focus on national unity, although the CCP was better able to bridge the contradiction between these two politics with the concept of “the people.” A focus on national unity was incomplete and one sided. “The people,” by contrast, was defined neither solely by national citizenship nor by one’s class. Instead, one’s subjective stance towards the revolution placed one within or outside of “the people.” Thus even the national bourgeoisie (Chinese capitalists who did not collaborate directly with foreign powers) and patriotic rich peasants and landlords could become members of “the people,” so long as they threw their weight (and resources) behind the revolution. This focus on subjectivity would remain a strong component of CCP politics from that time on.

Faced with a labor shortage toward the beginning of the 1940s, the Japanese soon turned to more coercive means of recruitment. This included forcing students, prisoners, vagrants and the floating population of unemployed or casual workers into largely unpaid and compulsory labor service, all formalized by the April 1940 National Army Law which sought universal conscription into the military and industrial development projects. Those not pulled into the army itself were sent to the national labor corps “between the ages of twenty and twenty-three [to] work in military construction, essential industries or local production.” The brutality of this labor regime is not to be underestimated, and has been quite fairly compared to the European holocaust in the scale and scope of its devastation.

Throughout this period, then, attempts to rationalize and modernize labor deployment through the implementation of Taylorist methods and the use of hourly wages co-existed with and were ultimately superseded by regimes that relied, in the last instance, on the threat of violence, whether this be at the hand of the gang-boss or through the revival of systems of corveé labor and “tributary” methods of production and trade. This bore degrees of similarity to various forms of pre-capitalist accumulation seen throughout Eurasia, and authors writing on the Manchurian labor system have sloppily referred to it as “feudal.” More importantly, these “feudal” aspects of the labor regime are often portrayed as being in tension with the properly “rational,” Taylorist system of labor deployment through the wage relation.

But this opposition is not so clear. Despite its allegedly “feudal” elements, the Japanese industrialization of the Chinese mainland can well be seen as the initiation of a transition to an explicitly capitalist mode of production dominated by value production. Rather than seeing the build-up of the Japanese wartime complex (or its German, Italian or American counterparts) as driven by simple military madness, we must understand these military expansions as necessities of accumulation posed by states facing limits to their growth and mired in a crisis of value production. The Japanese colonization of the mainland was a response to a crisis of global capitalism. In one sense, this can be understood as a process of “primitive accumulation,” but only if we sever the term from its connotations of an expanding commercial capitalism, circa the European gestation of the capitalist mode of production in its Genoese, Dutch or British sequences.

The Japanese scaling-up of the gang-boss system and the implementation of forced labor were not, then, in any way a form of backsliding into pre-capitalist modes of production. They were instead a capitalist logic of production taken to its extreme—literally a last-ditch effort to preserve the capitalist social relations that ensured the continued accumulation of value on the East Asian mainland. Compounding growth rates, the increasing circulation of commodities across the domestic market and the beginning of the urban demographic transition all followed, alongside the mass proletarianization of ex-peasant migrants. These forms of labor deployment were in fact the ultimate complement to the Taylorist “rationalization” campaigns, because, in the face of labor shortage and military defeats, it was only these forms of labor deployment that worked, or, more accurately: got people working.

The GMD was utterly unable to manage this vast new bureaucracy. Incapable of reining in inflation, the dire economic trends initiated under the Japanese continued under the Nationalists, who were ill-suited to restart the project of imperial expansion begun by their predecessors. The middle class that had started to form prior to the invasion was now all but liquidated. A new bureaucratic warlordism arose alongside and within the collapsing GMD, creating nearly perfect conditions for the growth of the communist armies in the countryside.

As the GMD began to cede territory to the CCP in the Civil War, this Japanese-built state-industrial structure was the most intact component of non-agricultural production that the communists inherited. Manchuria was conquered early on with substantial military assistance from Russia, which gave significant amounts of ammunition, artillery, tanks and aircraft to the communist army while also assisting in the reconstruction of the Manchurian railroad system. But this assistance also came at significant cost, as Stalin ordered Russian troops to partner with the GMD and loot Manchurian factories in order to recuperate the USSR’s own war-strained industry.

The decisions confronted there, more than anywhere else, cut to the root of the communist project. If the Party were to simply seize the industrial infrastructure built by the Japanese, they risked reigniting the brutal expansionary process for which these industries were built and reconstructing the bureaucracy necessary to keep them running. Even if the Party devolved direct control of these industries to the remaining workers trained to run them, this would have done nothing to solve the structural problems inherent in how these large-scale factories functioned, nor the challenge posed by their geographical concentration. The gang-boss hierarchy could be filled with elected representatives, but this would have simply replaced a more Darwinian bureaucracy with a democratic one.

The problem was how, precisely, to utilize the productive capacity of this inherited infrastructure while simultaneously transforming society’s relations of production—a transformation that can only occur at a scale much larger than the individual enterprise, and which is in no way produced by a linear agglomeration of small changes made in individual workers’ relationships to individual workplaces, though these are obviously important and occur at every stage in the process. It was only in confronting this larger problem, then, that the Party’s own theories of industrial organization would become relevant. These top-down theories, meanwhile, were often paired with the bottom-up activity of workers in these industries, whose own opinions on these questions contributed to the overall heterogeneity of the communist project, which was by no means reducible to the CCP. The next three decades would be marked by struggles over the transformation and expansion of this industrial inheritance, with the Party absorbing many of these heterogeneous positions in the securing of its strategic hegemony—a hegemony premised on the potentials of production.

The socialist era was indeed a time of transition, in which a “national economy” was gradually sewn together out of disparate economic sub-regions and various methods of labor deployment. But the most fundamental characteristic of this “national economy”—the one feature that could be said to span city and countryside, determining the relationship between the two—was the implementation of the grain standard and the net funneling of resources from countryside to city. > In other words, the lynchpin of the entire development project was the widening of the urban rural divide, despite the increase of the country’s total social wealth.

In reality, capitalism has not been the only mode of production that saw major processes of urbanization. Nevertheless, it is often simply assumed that the abolition of capitalism entails the abolition of the city and the explosion of industry into a “garden city” of fields, factories and workshops,” in which population itself must be roughly equalized across inhabited territory. Marx and Engels’ own work exacerbates this confusion. The “more equitable distribution of population over town and country” is one of the ten measures advanced in the Communist Manifesto. Though this can be understood as a response to the particular rural-urban inequalities that had arisen in Europe at the time, it is then made ahistorical in The Origin of the Family, where Engels claims the city as a basic “characteristic of civilization,” and thereby an origin-point for all early class structures.

It's actually interesting how frequently this is misunderstood and overlooked; there have been numerous cities that were built without capitalism as their mode of production/economics (such as Cahokia) because the cities were not sufficiently "urbanised" by Eurocentric values. I'm glad this was included.

The situation changed, however, upon the completion of the Civil War. In the later-liberated southern port cities, many owners and managers remained present, leveraging precious technical skills and access to foreign credit in exchange for favorable treatment by the Party. More importantly, victory in the war meant that the communists had seized several of the country’s largest urban areas precisely when the wartime stimulus to these cities’ industries was faltering and the US-backed economic blockade had just begun. The number of workers and wartime refugees skyrocketed, but many of the industries in the coastal cities had been bombed by the Japanese or sabotaged by the retreating GMD. In Guangzhou alone, “it was reported in December 1949 that less than a quarter of the city’s enterprises were operating at full capacity, while nearly a third of the entire workforce was unemployed.”

Nonetheless, attempts at agrarian forms of socialism were not without precedent, as anarchists, republicans and communists alike had advocated and even attempted to build such egalitarian rural projects in the past, particularly in the New Village, Rural Reconstruction and Village Cooperation movements of the early 20th century. Some, such as the Tolstoyan anarchist Liu Shipei, envisioned the end goal of any egalitarian project in China to be anti-modern in character, returning the country to its agrarian heritage. Many of the CCP’s earliest members had emerged from the anarchist movement and retained more than a little fidelity to decentralized models of development that mixed industrial and agricultural activity and thereby encouraged out-migration from urban cores.

Would this be linked to what happened with the labour education movement in Shanghai (which had an anarchist tone)?

Name: Liu Shipei

The restructuring of the economy was coordinated by three main actors. First, there was the military, “which sent representatives (who were also Party members) to individual factories where they claimed the authority of the new government.” But these military representatives were not particularly familiar with industrial production and, therefore, had to rely on the hierarchy of technicians and administrators already in place. Secondly, there was the urban wing of the CCP itself, many members of which were skilled workers. Nonetheless, the Party’s urban wing was small and accustomed to operating within a rigid command hierarchy necessitated by secrecy. Whereas the rural Party’s experience mediating between simultaneous social conflicts and administering large swaths of production had made it a flexible and adaptable organization, the urban Party’s experience had been far more limited.

Finally, there were “the skilled, literate workers who, with the blessings of the Communist Party, were quickly promoted to positions of leadership in the factories by the trade unions.” But these workers were sparse, due to widespread illiteracy among both urban residents and the majority of CCP cadre: “In Shanghai alone […] the illiteracy rate for all employees, including clerks and white-collar workers, was estimated at 46 percent.” Meanwhile, “among blue-collar factory workers, this figure was much higher, probably near the 80 percent figure for industrial personnel in the whole country.” By contrast, “in 1949 almost all of the students in Chinese universities and higher level technical schools were from the urban middle and upper middle classes.” And these students were no longer simply elites educated in the Confucian classics. Instead, “well over half (63 percent) of the members of this group who were university and technical school graduates in 1949 had majored in subjects that were essential for industrialization.”

The Party’s response was to launch a recruitment drive, hoping to bolster its ranks with loyal intellectuals and skilled technicians. The risk of careerism and corruption was clearly noted, but these were considered necessary evils that could later be uprooted. Meanwhile, new unions were formed alongside the new Party organs, intended to simultaneously rationalize production and provide workers with some oversight over the new, less trustworthy Party recruits. At first, the Party had attempted to weed out former gang-bosses, GMD-union thugs and secret society members from its restructured industrial system, but this proved to be nearly impossible and the attempt only further stalled the recuperation of industry. Local cadre were instructed to open recruitment in the new unions, hoping that workers’ own political perceptiveness combined with state-sponsored reform campaigns would be sufficient to prevent these lower-tier elites from regaining power.

Many urban workers had felt disappointed or betrayed by the continuation of capitalism in the port cities, and the early 1950s saw a slow increase in industrial agitation. The new state responded to this dissatisfaction in several ways. First, concessions were given to many workers. Wages increased and most urbanites’ livelihoods were significantly improved—not necessarily a difficult task, since peace alone was an improvement on two decades of war and occupation. Second, new mass organizations were created, including new unions and a national Labor Board, in an attempt to provide less economically disruptive means to solve workplace grievances.[78] Though these new organizations often proved clunky and unresponsive, they were still initially seen as an important tool for the reorganization of industry and for the devolution of more power to workers.

Many anarchists had hoped to strengthen these local forms of resistance into an egalitarian revolutionary movement aimed at expanding the potentials of statelessness already present in Chinese village culture. These attempts, however, were systematic failures. Several of the most prominent anarchists in China, including Li Shizeng, Wu Zhihui, Zhang Ji and Zhang Jingjiang, ultimately joined and had leading roles within the Nationalist Party, sitting on its central committee and forming close relationships with Chiang Kai-Shek and other members of the GMD’s right-wing. Those that retained their belief in an egalitarian and essentially communist revolution, faced with the failures of anarchism, flocked to the newly-founded CCP.

On top of this, the CCP had itself been reformatted by its years in the Chinese countryside. Previously, the leading minds of the Party, such as Chen Duxiu and Wang Ming, had been unambiguously internationalist, and had leveled critiques against rising nationalist trends within the Party itself. Many of the Party’s rank-and-file were, in this period, laborers and trade unionists in the port cities, their everyday lives marked by cosmopolitan contact with workers, technicians and revolutionaries of various leanings from all over the world—but especially Europe and the colonies of Southeast Asia.

Quotes from Part II: Development:

But what scholars often classify as the “Soviet Model” actually covers two alternating tendencies in industrial organization and enterprise management, the first influenced by High Stalinist methods of mass mobilization campaigns alongside “crash production drives and close supervision by Party committees,” and the second more in line with the USSR’s five-year plans of the 1930s, a method of organization “encapsulated in one-man management” which “in effect imposed a strict hierarchical and bureaucratic order over enterprises that was antithetical to the mobilizational impulses of High Stalinism.”

At the same time, the elimination of the handicrafts industry and the market networks that had undergirded relations between city and countryside ensured that most of China’s industrial activity was now urban, and that the population would be more strictly concentrated in urban industries or dispersed across the agricultural collectives being created at this time. Most importantly: the divide between urban and rural was now becoming a clear geographic divide between grain-producing and grain-consuming regions, with the grain-consumers as the primary targets of industrialization.

The easiest solution to this problem, adopted as a local fix by enterprises across the country, was the practice of “replacement (dingti),” in which the enterprise would hire relatives and children of current employees into the same work unit. Because of the constraints on hiring, “the Chinese government inadvertently promoted an intensely localistic practice of work-unit occupational inheritance.” In so doing, the CCP revived the family unit as an integral source of social privilege, fusing it to the danwei and thereby to the state itself. Families that had poor placement or little clout in their enterprises held little bargaining power and therefore saw their family members deported to far-off cities (often in the interior) by the demands of national labor allocation. This created a financial and emotional stress that further prevented such families from ascending the distributional hierarchy.

Again, this reminds me of things that were written about in Blockchain Chicken Farm, where the author discusses how there were still elements and places that utilised the same system of children working in (and taking over) their parents' positions but that this was becoming less common among those who saw new industries.

The collective dining halls and the huge size of communes made it almost impossible for peasants to see how their labor affected their own subsistence. The accounting and workpoints systems had basically broken down. As crop yields dropped in 1959, food began to run out in the dining halls and peasants stayed home to conserve energy. Collective control over labor disintegrated. Most free dining halls only lasted three months, and in the fall of 1958 even commune cadres’ salaries were stopped. Meals in the dining halls that continued to exist in 1959 had to be purchased with meal tickets given out according to work. By the spring of 1959, the Central Committee tried to push the communes back into a system of remuneration according to labor: “The principle of distribution according to labor means calculating payment according to the amount of labor one does. The more work done, the more one will earn.” And summer harvests were to be distributed with 60 to 70% according to labor.

Cadre lost control of the rural population, which took matters into its own hands by stealing from communal stores, scavenging for food, eating the green shoots of plants before grain could ripen and fleeing the countryside. Resistance was punished, in turn, with violence and the withholding of food rations, potentially a death sentence at the time. In the wake of famine, rebuilding state institutions and Party power in the countryside would prove a very difficult task.

The uncontrollable flood of migrants into the cities over the course of the 1950s—first pursuing jobs in the new industries and then fleeing the famine in the countryside—provided the impetus to use hukou records to fix people in their home villages. This was achieved through the apportioning of state benefits according to one’s registration status—effectively preventing rural out-migrants from obtaining jobs in the city. Through the urban danwei system, urban hukou holders would be provided a quota of grain at a state-subsidized price, while rural hukou holders were required to produce grain and would not receive state rations, instead receiving rights to a plot of land, or a direct portion of co-operative, then collective, agricultural output.

Workers in such joint-owned enterprises, then, not only found themselves lacking the privileges of their counterparts in state-owned heavy industry, but also saw the benefits they had wrested from factory owners over the past decade gradually stripped away. Under “joint ownership,” they increasingly lost their opportunities to participate in management, witnessing the evisceration of the democratic institutions that had been built within the enterprise as a counter-power to that of private owners. Many of these private owners, alongside the management personnel they had employed, were simply transferred to positions of authority within the new industrial structure, making the obliteration of workers’ own institutions all the more insulting. Maybe more importantly, the sheer numbers of managers, supervisors and other administrative personnel skyrocketed, composing “more than a third of total employees in Shanghai’s joint enterprises.” This increase in administrative personnel was made necessary by the scale of consolidation and the chaotic character of the port cities’ pre-existing industrial infrastructure. Nonetheless, the practice appeared purely unproductive from the standpoint of most rank-and-file workers, instigating further resentment.

In late 1956 and early 1957, sensing the unrest and frightened by recent revolts against Soviet-backed regimes in Eastern Europe, the CCP sponsored a wide-ranging “policy of (limited) liberalization and democratization and increased scope for criticism of the Party,” in what was known as the “Hundred Flowers” campaign. In standard portrayals of the period, Mao calls for criticism of the Party, and students and intellectuals follow suit. Once the movement gets out of hand, with heavy critiques leveled at the Party and comparisons being made to the rebellion in Hungary, the Party initiates the Anti-Rightist campaign later in 1957 to reign in the movement and punish those who had spoken too harshly of the leadership. There is often an ambiguity in these accounts about whether or not the Hundred Flowers’ movement had been a sort of trick to draw the Party leadership’s potential enemies out into the light. But, whether a trick or an earnest attempt at reform, most of these accounts are consistent in their portrayal of the movement as a largely top-down affair, primarily involving students and intellectuals.

This connects well to what's happening today (in terms of the lessons learned about "liberal democracy." Give people something that masquerades as a "responsive" and "participatory" system, and it helps cool down the issues of repression.

That is, for people who aren't repressed.

In reality, the Hundred Flowers campaign was a response to the extreme social conflicts that had arisen over the course of the First Five-Year Plan. It merely recognized dynamics already reaching a boiling point across Chinese society and concealed them beneath the complaints of students and intellectuals—figures who could easily be dismissed as vestiges of the old society. Directly acknowledging the antagonism that existed among urban workers would have, in effect, raised the question of whether the Party had lost the mandate of the working class. This also entailed that, after the fact, workers had to be “written out of the Hundred Flowers story as protestors, being present only as defenders of the Party during the anti-rightist campaign.” But the reality was quite different.

It's interesting how intellectuals are often used in this manner by authoritarians.

In some cases, this intra-enterprise division took on extreme forms and strikes were crushed by more privileged workers themselves, with no need for directives from the central government. During a dispute at the Shanghai Fertilizer Company in May 1957, 41 temporary workers who had been promised regular status but had then been abruptly laid off attacked union officials, demanding to be re-instated as regular workers. After nearly beating the union director and vice-director to death, the union, youth league and permanent workers vowed to solve the conflict themselves, and the permanent workers “even stockpiled weapons in preparation for killing the temporary workers.” Before this could happen, however, the municipal authorities stepped in and arrested the temporary worker leaders.

Given the dangers posed by open worker revolt, the Party not only sided with the more privileged members of the industrial workforce—i.e., older permanent workers with urban-based families employed in heavy industries—but also sought, initially, to reform systems of industrial and political management. As early as the fall of 1956, the upper echelons of the Party had realized that the strike wave, still in its infancy, was rooted in deeper conflicts that were themselves engendered by national industrial policy. Events in Eastern Europe further verified these fears. At the Eight Party Congress the Soviet Model influenced by the five-year plans of the 1930s, with “one-man management” at its core, was rejected in favor of the alternate Soviet Model, based on High Stalinist principles, which favored mass mobilization, workers’ participation, and direct supervision and management by Party committees instead of technocratic leadership by factory directors and engineers.

Though endorsed at high levels and rendered into socialist mythology via historical comparisons with the USSR, the mobilizational policies that resulted were often more the product of local, practical solutions to factory and city-scale conflicts and, in many instances, would ultimately exceed what central authorities considered acceptable concessions to the workers. In many factories, workers’ congresses were founded, “consisting of directly elected representatives who could be recalled by workers at any time,” a form of organization that was pushed for by then-chairman of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), Lai Ruoyu, who “identified democratization of management as the feature which distinguished socialist enterprises from capitalist ones.”

In terms of repression, workers suffered far more than students or intellectuals. Though the crackdown on strikes was concurrent with the Anti-Rightist campaign, workers were denied the political status of “rightists.” Instead, they were given the classification of “bad elements,” implying a simple criminality rather than any sort of principled political opposition. This was no difference of semantics: “workers, and some union officials, were in fact imprisoned and sent to labour camps in the aftermath of the Hundred Flowers movement, and some were executed.” When high-ranking ACFTU officials such as Lai Ruoyu, Li Xiuren and Gao Yuan stood behind the workers, even going so far as to advocate for independent unions, the result was vilification, dismissal, and a general purge of the ACFTU.

It is untenable, then, to simply attribute the failure of the strike wave to the state’s repressive measures. For the most part, the state simply did not have to intervene. Divisions within the workforce—particularly along lines of seniority and regular versus temporary status—were often sufficient to prevent the strikers’ demands from galvanizing wider support. The striking workers were often the minority in their own enterprises, and their demands were just as often violently opposed by other workers, as in the example of the Shanghai Fertilizer company.

The Party would soon leverage this fact, portraying strikers as “bad elements” with non-proletarian family backgrounds attempting to trick other workers into participation in an anti-communist conspiracy. Despite the exaggeration of this propaganda, the kernel of truth here was simply that a significant bulk of the national industrial workforce was sufficiently satisfied with their positions to be wary of losing them. This was especially true among the older workers, who not only held higher wages and received more benefits, but also remembered the abysmal conditions of work prior to the revolution.

The result was that no mode of production fully cohered during the socialist developmental regime—and it is precisely because of this that the state itself, increasingly fused with the Party (and, ultimately, the military) played the mechanical role of ordering production, distribution and growth. In some cases this entailed mimicking patterns seen in the transition to capitalism, in other cases importing practices, technicians and entire factories from the USSR, and in still others replicating or reinventing forms of labor deployment, infrastructural development and cultural mobilization that bore significant resemblance to practices found in the region’s history.

At the same time, because these methods of accumulation were mechanical, the state tended to ossify into a stiff bureaucracy if any one policy or method was in place for too long. At each point, new practices were adopted not out of ideological attachment or as neutral tools in factional battles, but most often as a bricolage of makeshift responses to an accumulation of myriad local crises. Throughout the socialist era, each policy shift was also a method of re-oiling ossified state mechanisms through modification and reinvention. In extreme cases, these shifts were accompanied by large-scale purges and re-staffing.

But this decentralization also caused new forms of competitive chaos, as different segments of local hierarchies competed for control over the new powers devolved to cities and provinces. In some cities, such as Guangzhou and Shanghai, the municipal Party committees effectively took direct control over much of the cities’ heavy industry, despite Party directives dictating that these industries be administered by the central planning authorities. Meanwhile, the decentralized enterprises (accounting for more than 85% of all employment in Shanghai) were effectively given over to “direct control by municipal Party committees,” which meant that “enjoying as they did ties with local Party officials, enterprise Party committees gained control over production tasks.” Down to the most basic units of urban life, the policy was to “guarantee the absolute leadership of the Party in industrial production.” Decentralization, then, actually represented a stronger fusion of Party and state, as the tasks of everyday production as well as setting output targets and reporting final production numbers were all roundly handed over to Party committees rather than technicians and managers.

An extreme example of this can be seen in the practice of several factories in Guangzhou, which adopted “an anarchical policy of ‘non-management’ (wuren guanli).” This policy entailed that enterprises “practiced the ‘Eight Selfs’ (ba zi), in which workers arranged their own plans, output quotas, technology, blueprints, operations, inputs of semiprocessed goods, quality inspection, and accounting.” The practice became so extreme that banks “distributed cash to any worker who came in with purchase orders. Employees who knew the enterprise’s bank account number could withdraw funds to procure whatever items they needed for their factories.” Yet, even with the near-complete abolition of enterprise-level management and with workers collectively agreeing upon their own production quotas, all evidence suggests that these quasi-syndicalist factories suffered the same output speculation as factories that retained more traditional management structures. The ultimate effect of the production crisis was not blunted in Guangzhou.

Quotes from Part III: Ossification:

Quotes from this article:

Travelling only at night, the corpse drivers would ring bells to warn off the living, since the sight of the dead migrants was thought to bring bad luck. Though itself somewhat apocryphal, new myths grew out of the practice, as the hopping corpses were transformed into jiangshi, vampire-like creatures driven to feed on the life force of others. Their own blood siphoned out of them by the docks and factories, these migrant workers were transformed into monsters befitting a new reality—one of crumbling empires, civil wars and the insatiable expansion of commodities.

Transporting corpses over a thousand li was not remembrance, then, but a strange sort of survival. The stiff-limbed dead walked from their factories, traversed countries torn by war, famine and other unnamable sufferings to finally settle amongst their kin in the dust of their homeland, a rural world that had only just caught sight of its approaching oblivion.

Today, China itself has become such a wandering specter. The rural world is dying, yet hundreds of millions of workers still seem stuck between their peasant past and a future that fails to arrive. Two decades of staggering economic growth built on a series of credit bubbles have left a legacy of “development” defined by wastelands of apartment complexes sitting next to half-empty factory cities, each year filled with fewer workers and more unmanned machines. While the elite children of the country’s financial and administrative centers collect sports cars and foreign degrees, the children of today’s migrants are guaranteed little more than the fleeting chance to become yet another corpse crushed to pulp in the factory.

A lot of this is reminding me of Blockchain Chicken Farm and the depictions of rural life among the techno-optimist framework.

As growth rates dwindle, the country seems nonetheless driven ahead by an undead, mechanical momentum. Workers are laid off with nowhere to return. Ruralites give up their land in exchange for a fraction of the condos built on them, soon losing their value to an inflating currency. Entire landscapes are poisoned by decades of rapid industrial expansion, while urban centers succumb to man-made landslides, earthquakes and chemical explosions. Riots and strikes proliferate, but fail to cohere into anything larger. The working class has been dismantled. Nothing is left today but dead generations united in their separation, shambling through the fire and the dust.