Research

Article comes from here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Article from here:

Names to look into: Luigi Galleani, Amédée Dunois,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a useful phrasing for this issue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes from this essay:

The diverse rainbow of anarchy, henceforth referred to as the Anarchy-Bow, can be a confusing mess. It is comprised of bickering theorists, insurrectionists, primitivists, armchair radicals, and the occasional right-wing jerk all struggling to be correct about the next tactic or developing analysis. There is often disagreement within the Anarchy-Bow. This disagreement is particularly rabid due to a basic consensus. The Anarchy-Bow disagrees with itself with the rabid intensity of people who share similar ethics debating how to change the current world order from a hierarchy based on abuse and exploitation to a system without someone at the top of the oppression pyramid scheme. (And without the entire pyramid scheme). What we want is a system that benefits everyone and eliminates prejudice and racism and the inequalities of capitalism; and then we’ll all have our own unicorn to ride along shining streams. Because you know you want your own unicorn. To ride into battle. Against capitalism.

There are whole systems of indoctrination that teach us to be douchebags to one another from the time we are children. Many people have spent lots and lots of time explaining the ways that people are douchebags and how the structure of society teaches us to be douchebags. The goal of anarchy is to change that, not just a little, but entirely.

Quotes from this essay:

Straightness is not an orientation, or even really an identity, but a system of social relations. In that regard, straightness is very much like capitalism. Straightness is a multifaceted set of social rules that police our bodies, our minds, our desires, and the ways we interact with others. Straightness tells us that people with certain bodies have to be “men” and others have to be “women.” It tells us that men have to act in certain ways, and women have to act in other ways. It tells us that we have to have certain kinds of desires, and not others. It tells us that we have to fuck certain kinds of people, in certain positions, for certain reasons. We can change certain aspects of straightness—for instance, the fight for gay marriage, which seeks to allow privileges for certain monogamous, normative gay couples, without challenging the state institution of marriage altogether—but ultimately we need to destroy this system that polices every aspect of our existence—from the deeply intimate to the highly public.

Like any system of social relations, straightness is both something that is “out there,” in the larger world we call “society,” or “the system,” as well as something that is “inside”—in our heads, our hearts, our minds. It is something that we do to other people as we have had done to ourselves. For people who call themselves straight, it is something that one is constantly proving and reifying. Part of this is because straightness is an impossibility. The ideal man and the ideal woman—these are impossible ideals. Nobody ever quite fits. Part of straightness as a social system is the collective effort of those who subscribe to force themselves and others around them to meet this definition—to kill the inner queer in order to fit oneself into the straight mold. These are the internal contradictions of straightness.

The destruction of straightness would not mean the destruction of heterosexuality. “Women” and “men” would still exist. “Women” and “men” would still fuck each other. The destruction of straightness, however, would mean the destruction of a set of norms, of assumptions, of hierarchical social relations that are forcibly imposed upon all of us. The destruction of straightness would mean we no longer take it as self-evident that being born with a certain kind of body makes someone a “man” or a “woman.” The destruction of straightness would mean we no longer take it as self-evident that people with certain bodies will desire certain types of other bodies. The destruction of straightness would mean the destruction of the “ideal” woman and the “ideal” man. The destruction of straightness would mean a world in which all of our bodies, all of our desires, all of our genders, all of our consensual sexualities, would be honored and viable.

If you have searched within your soul and challenged yourself and come to the conclusion that you feel yourself to be the gender you were assigned at birth, that you are sexually attracted to people of the “opposite” gender, etc., then that is completely different from someone who calls themselves “straight” because they have never challenged the social norms of straightness. Not questioning these norms—within yourself and your relationships with others around you—is to play into the dominant order of straightness. Questioning them—regardless of the conclusions you may reach—is a revolutionary act.

A working-class, heterosexual, cisgender man wants to marry his girlfriend. His girlfriend is a heterosexual, cisgender woman who comes from a middle-class background, but is currently broke. She feels entitled to a very expensive diamond engagement ring. He feels slightly jilted by this—“why should I have to pay for something so expensive for her,” he thinks. She feels hurt by this and feels that he doesn’t love her enough. They get into a fight about it. Finally, he takes out loans and maxes out all his credit cards to buy her the ring. The money that he borrows from the credit card industry—and which will cause him to be enslaved in debt for years to come in order to pay back—goes to support the blood diamond trade in southern, central, and western Africa. There, people have been massacred, societies torn to shreds, to fuel Westerners’ hunger for shiny objects.

This is one way in which straightness as a system of social relations feeds into and is fed by capitalism—particularly capitalist economic (neo)colonialism and its quest to ravage the people and the lands of the global south. Both members of the couple are oppressed and wounded by a set of social norms—which exists outside the two of them—which has dictated the right and wrong ways for them to express their feelings for each other. She feels entitled to a diamond and feels hurt if he doesn’t provide. He is expected to provide and feels his masculinity called into question if he doesn’t. Finally, he ends up enslaved in debt to the banks and credit card companies that make tremendous profit off the two of them. Their straightness is integral to a capitalist set of social relations that is built off of environmental destruction and genocide against people in the global south, while feeding them into an institution of debt slavery.

A young cisgender boy first learns about anarchism by going to punk shows. He feels naïve but doesn’t want to show it. He hears from his friends about how “real” punks and “real” anarchists do things—it’s all tremendously macho. He feels pressured to perform a certain form of anarchism because he feels his masculinity threatened if he doesn’t. Some older (straight, cis male) anarchists pressure him to take part in an action involving property destruction. He doesn’t totally feel comfortable doing it, but feels the need to prove himself, and prove his straight masculinity. He gets arrested and it turns out that the older anarchists who pressured him were government agents who set him up. They took advantage of his vulnerability—particularly his need to perform a certain type of anarchist straight masculinity—in order to entrap him. He ends up spending a long time in prison. Regardless of the forms of desire this young person may feel, queer liberation for him would have meant having the strength to be vulnerable—the strength to say no, and not be masculinity-baited by the cops. The irony is that this form of straight masculinity is an enormous vulnerability for straight males—and those who associate with them. In other words, straightness is a threat to security culture.

Everyone is, in some way or another, alienated, confined, or oppressed by rigid gender roles and sexual mores. In other words, the moral of this story is not just that straightness must be destroyed but also that queer liberation is for everyone. There are certainly people with a great deal of straight privilege; we can’t forget about that. But what matters the most is, do you act in a way that reinforces straightness as an oppressive social institution? (For example, do you make gender assumptions about people, assume people are heterosexual, make insensitive assumptions about peoples’ pronoun preferences, judge people whom you view as gender nonconforming, etc.?) If you challenge the ways you have internalized straight forms of social relations, and listen to people with less straight privilege than you, then you will become, in a ways, less straight. You will become part of the solution—creating a better world for queer and trans folks and queer experiences of gender and sexuality within the shadows of this world.

There is an old Situationist slogan that calls to “Kill the Cop Inside Your Head.” Killing your inner cop means abolishing capitalist ways of thinking, abolishing the messages the state has fed us and we have internalized. This is a hard, painful process, and it is never fully complete. Part of killing your inner cop and dismantling internalized hierarchies is deconstructing forms of oppression you have internalized: class society, racism/white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, ageism. All of these forms of oppression are part of systematic hierarchies we internalize. Everyone who is an anarchist and wants to work to create better worlds needs to work on all of these struggles within themselves as part of a larger anti-capitalist, anti-statist struggle. Part of killing the cop inside our head means addressing internalized straightness.

Quotes from this essay:

The history of an oppressive medical model for homosexuality and disability and the threat of eugenic extermination (by selective abortion, isolations of genes for specific disabilities or a “gay” gene) offer additional areas of potential common ground between queer activism and disability activism.

An ableist society is one that constructs itself (in infrastructure such as buildings, curricula, media representations) as if disability does not exist, is repugnant, or needs to be modified in order to fit in the existing order. Heteronormative societies, similarly, structure themselves as if heterosexuality is not only preferred, but indeed the only mode of living, desiring, and being with others. It is important to emphasize that ableism and heteronormativity are not just analogous but also intersecting. Not realizing how they work as interlocking oppressions would deny the lived reality of disabled queers who feel marginalized, at times in both communities. One explanation for the exclusion of disability from queer theory and existence, as well as the lack of any effective coalition politics, could be the similar history of medicalization. Queer theory takes back a negative term and articulates gender as a social construction, while understanding the complexity of individual sexual desires. Science and the medical world identified those who are gay or lesbian as disabled and as having a smaller brain, and attempted to prove this through eugenics and other pseudoscientific theories.

The lengthy campaign to remove homosexuality as a psychiatric illness was finally successful in 1973, with homosexuality being removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Many LGBTQ folks today may want to distance themselves from any community that has been medicalized in similar ways, in order to cut off the historical ties to notions of pathology and abnormality. This process has been well described by Baynton, who demonstrates how, throughout history, disability has been used not only as a justification for excluding disabled people but also to exclude other marginal groups (people of color, immigrants) by attributing disability to them. The marked groups usually do not question the assumption that underpin disability as inferior, but instead try to distance themselves from the disability label, by scientific means if possible.

This resistance to allying queer communities with disabled ones is not only cumbersome to the realization of shared ideals and coalition politics, but it is also detrimental to the lives of disabled queers. Because disabled people are perceived as asexual and/or sexually inferior to nondisabled (except in fetishized communities, like amputee-devotee or dwarf fetish), being queer may seem like a logical step, since being gay is also regarded as an inferior sexual form by heterosexual people and heteronormative cultures.

For instance, heterosexuality is not assumed for disabled/crip folks as they are often perceived as asexual. In the same token, queerness is perceived as a disability from a heteronormative framework. Such an analysis goes beyond understanding the connections between queerness and disability as identities (i.e., the lived experience of queer crips) in a move that both de-essentializes these identities (as “queering” and “cripping” are used as verbs, not mere identities) and tries to grapple with their full existence, materially and imaginarily.

At its very core, disability destabilizes identity and escapes any neat categorizations. Disability is fluid and contextual rather than biological. This does not mean that biology does not play out on our minds and bodies, but that the definition of disability is imposed upon certain kinds of minds and bodies. Those of you who are reading this chapter with your glasses on perhaps do not identify with disability (or crip) culture, but you would be quite disabled without your visual aids. It is also a truism that we will all experience some kind of disability if we live long enough. But more than that, disability, if understood as constructed through historical and cultural processes, should be seen not as a binary but as a continuum. One is always dis/abled in relation to the context in which one is put. A person has a learning disability if put in a scholarly setting; using a wheelchair becomes a disability and a disadvantage when the environment is inaccessible; someone who wears glasses may be disabled without them when attempting to read written language or see far away, but this can change depending on the context that they are seeing and being seen within. The definition of dis/ability shifts depending on what the needs of those at the top of hierarchical structures dictate. The state commonly defines disability loosely when that definition is used to marginalize people, and more rigidly when it is used to determine access to resources.

As a fluid state, disability, much like queerness, should be perceived as a normal state of affairs. Imagining the world through a crip-queer lens then, aids in challenges to forms of hierarchy and domination by challenging the very idea of normalcy. A queer-cripped anarchism would resist the hierarchies that permit the imposition of disabled identities on minds and bodies that are considered deviant as an integral component to resisting domination and achieving autonomy. This differs from Marxist thought, which is centered more on resistance to exploitation and appropriation.

In the nineteenth century the concept of the norm entered European culture, as related to the concept of the average. Normalcy began with the creation of measurements and statistics. Qualities are represented on a bell curve, and the extremes of the curve are abnormal. Statistics were created as state tools (hence their etymology as state-istics) with the advent of modernity, as “political arithmetic.” It is hard to imagine that before 1820, political bodies did not make decisions solely based on crime, poverty, birth, death, and unemployment rates. This new form of governance is what Foucault characterized as biopolitics, the newfound ability to measure performances of individuals and groups that makes them governable.

The key argument Davis makes is that ableism and normalization are not unusual practices that we must denounce but are part of the modernist project by definition (the creation of modern nation-states, democracy, measurement and science, capitalism). There are several paradoxes associated with modernism: representational democracy vs. individual representation, capitalism vs. equality, etc. Normalcy as an ideology seemingly resolves these conflicts. In regards to wealth—on a curve it is clear that not all can be wealthy. Some have to be in the margins of the curve for capitalism to be sustained. Equality under these parameters is not morally or ethically defined, but rather scientifically. So, many people fight for equality, but what we should be fighting for is diversity and respect of differences.

The concept of the norm, unlike the ideal, implies that the majority of the population must somehow be around the mean. Everyone has to work hard to conform to norms but people with disabilities, and other marginalized groups, are scapegoated for not being able to fit these standards, while in fact they are needed to create these standards and maintain them. There is a need for people at the margin, but they are punished for being placed there. As an example for such punitive ideology, Davis analyzes the interesting fact that almost all the early statisticians (Galton, Pearson, and others) were also known eugenicists. It is not surprising perhaps since the notion of the norm and the average divided the populace into standard and substandard populations. Difference is thus projected onto stigmatized populations so all others can strive for the illusive normalcy.

The definition of unemployment itself historically excludes disabled people, undocumented immigrants, retired people (who often wish to work), and women (who do unpaid labor).

Mutual aid is a core tenet of anarchism. Much of the anarchist tradition rejects the ideology of individualism and focuses on mutual aid, or, in queer-crip language, interdependence.

If disability studies and activism could offer a corrective to the anarchist practice of mutual reliance, it will be to the concept of DIY, including anarcho-primivitism, which is DIY culture taken to an extreme. There seems to be a growing literature, especially in what has become to be called “green anarchism,” which focuses on self-reliance and a “return to nature.” This politic requires a non-disabled body for its ideal society. Chellis Glendinning writes of “lean hunter-gatherer women” who endure “strenuous demands of walking long distances while carrying equipment, mounds of plant food, and children—physical conditions that are reproduced among today’s female athletes.” Such calls will have devastating effects on the lives of disabled people who truly embody a spirit of mutual aid everyday by relying on personal assistants, friends, and family members to achieve independence and autonomy, which are also core practices of anarchism. Through a queer-crip lens we should perhaps focus more on DIT—do it together. The focus on independence, we would argue, is an adoption of capitalist values. Capitalism asserts an ideology of independence and emphasizes relationships and interactions for which there are economic transactions. This ideology, however, is a lie as all of us are interdependent and rely on each other not only for our food, shelter, and clothing, but also for our emotional, physical, and intellectual needs. Shifting focus from DIY to DIT reasserts our collectivity and interdependence and rejects the focus on rugged individualism, a value that negates many people’s needs for care.

Engaging in prefigurative politics in relation to a queer-crip existence entails (re)thinking inclusivity. The knee-jerk types of anarchist organizing and activism are often quite exclusive spaces and enterprises. For instance, many radical conferences and actions lack attention to basic accessibility such as interpreters, note-takers, and accessible bathrooms and entranceways. For example, one Anarchist Bookfair in Toronto was held up a long narrow flight of stairs. The argument for it being inaccessible was that it had to be in an “anarchist friendly space”; their definition of anarchist friendly excluded people who could not scale a flight of stairs. It is also becoming a kind of ironic truism that whenever there is resistance, there is a march. Although a march or an organized protest may yield some visibility to the cause and create solidarity amongst its participants, it is also a quite exclusionary resistance strategy for many disabled activists. As such it can be as polarizing as it is galvanizing around a particular issue.

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Muñoz suggests, “Concrete utopias...are the hopes of a collective, an emergent group, or even the solitary oddball who is the one who dreams for many. Concrete utopias are the realm of educated hope.”

As mainstream/assimilationist gay and lesbian organizations push for the passage of hate crimes legislation, such as the Matthew Shepard Act, they directly perpetuate the power of the prison industrial complex by relying on its violence while stating that they wish to protect our communities from hateful attacks and murder. Anarchists and abolitionists together have a responsibility to publicly oppose these types of legislation and must offer concrete alternatives that authentically strive to make our communities safer from interpersonal violence as well as systemic violence. Mainstream gay and lesbian organizations have a tendency to exploit our sadness, pain, and suffering after losing people we love and care about to give rise to their campaigns for hate crimes legislation. Organizations such as the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, Communities United Against Violence, Audre Lorde Project, and multiple chapters of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence have all actively supported survivors of violence while also opposing hate crimes legislation, work that must be understood as part of our anarchist and abolitionist struggle.

Kuwasi Balagoon wrote on May 31, 1983, “When a gay group protests lack of police protection, by making an alliance with police to form a gay task force, they ain’t making a stand against the system they are joining it.”

Strategizing must be both long-term and short-term. Any good strategy is shaped by history. Stories must be told and articles must be read about the Out of Control Lesbian Committee to Support Women Political Prisoners, which was founded in 1986 for the purpose of resisting the Lexington Control Unit for women in Kentucky. Stories must be told about the Pink Panthers, who established themselves in multiple cities around the United States to defend queer and transgender people who were on the streets, living or walking home. Queers need to learn about Men Against Sexism in Walla Walla prison, the George Jackson Brigade, and other 1960s and 1970s revolutionary queer movements and campaigns. As Mumia Abu-Jamal continues to be locked behind the walls, we need to remember the role queers have played in his support campaigns, especially Rainbow Flags for Mumia. The actions of ACT UP, including their creative political confrontations and advocacy for compassionate release for prisoners living with HIV/AIDS, must be shared while picking each other up on the dance floor. We need to hear these stories and tell these stories to our lovers, friends, and anyone who will be our comrades in our growing movements. We need to listen for the explicit anarchist aspects and the implicit anarchist forms of organizing. In our experience of inspiration we have the potential to continue living in the hope for our struggles to succeed. When we tell our history, it is given new life as it breathes new life into us.

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We must include sex work in an anarchist analysis because so often sex work has been treated as an exception to the rule. Every other aspect of labor and social experience has found itself under the anarchist magnifying glass, leaving the issue of sex work to be fought over by feminists, the religious community, and the nongovernmental organization complex. Organizing alongside sex workers cannot simply be an afterthought or a subject too tough to engage. To queer our analysis of sex work, we must move beyond a paternalistic reaction to the thought of sex acts for sale and engage in organizing with sex workers globally. Sex work is a unique intersection between sex and labor, existing entirely neither in the personal nor political realm.

The interconnectedness between economics and society within capitalism is complex. How can we argue that one form of sex is actually outside of capitalism’s control? Are sex workers more subservient to capitalism than house-spouses, or any sexual encounter? It’s a dangerous path to tread to assume some are more influenced by capitalism than others. Sex is not necessarily “freely” had when money is absent. Patriarchy is pervasive; and while some manifestations may be more visible, they are not necessarily more oppressive. Social structures reflect the dominant narrative of the culture within which they exist. The nuclear family, for example, perpetuates capitalism. Sex work is considered by many to be a primary threat to the nuclear family.

A queer analysis allows us to envision the sex industry as something other than a threat to marriage and modern fidelity. The anarchist lens allows us to view sex work as something that does not exist within a vacuum, but another sector of capitalist industry.

The second opposition strain tends to originate on the left, but borrows plenty from conservative perspectives. This objection sees sex work as a threat to the overall freedom of women by explicitly putting a price on sex. This assumption also manifests as seeing poor people incapable of immediate agency, unable to consent to sex work because of their economic context.

Both the right and left objections to sex work focus the argument about its effect explicitly on women, while either willfully or ignorantly ignoring the experiences of queer people and men.

Sex workers must be allowed and supported as individuals to define their own narrative, and not pimped by either the right or the left to further a political agenda.

There are two aspects to this—to perform a sex act for money somehow diminishes the overall value of our sexuality (considering it a nonrenewable resource) and that other forms of labor alienation aren’t really as violent as what is perceived to exist for sex workers. There is a vast difference between a sex act and an individual’s sexuality.

The implication is that certain alienation is essentially worse than other forms of alienation, that there could be a more humane form of alienation and exploitation. A similar mistake is often made to justify small and local businesses as less exploitative or capitalistic, when in fact the volume of a business does not determine if it is capitalistic or not.

Within capitalism, commodities are affected by the concept of scarcity. In this case, human sexuality is subject to the actual and fabricated ebbs and flows of resources and the overall demand for them. Sexuality is not something that is scarce in the world, and trading sex acts does not suddenly make it true. If scarcity of sex were true, the simple act of having more sex would reduce the overall amount available. It wouldn’t matter if sex were sold, simply had for fun, obligation, or pleasure. Scarcity is a myth of capitalism used to manipulate our sense of need toward an object or resource.

The narrative that non-trans women have a nearly identical experience to each other, but incomparable to other sex workers, demonstrates a specific agenda by those that peddle it.

The idea that women globally cannot choose to work in the sex industry, but they can choose some other industry within capitalism, is offensive and condescending. It is as if their engagement in the sex industry illustrates some flaw or weakness.

I have been asked countless times why I chose the sex industry. I answer that I no more chose sex work than I chose retail, tourism or food service. We all have a spectrum of limited options to choose from; why does the sex industry imply a personal identity to its workers? The implication is that some labor choices are more political than others.

Another common questions is, “how could someone choose sex work if there were ample options of meaningful work?” The reality is that for the working class there are not ample options of meaningful work. Seemingly meaningful work may very well be code for non-alienated labor. With a solid analysis of capitalism the term “meaningful work” has no basis within the current capitalism economy. Choice within capitalism is an illusion. These choices are only substantive in that one may be able to choose what brand of labor exploitation they prefer. For the vast majority of the working class even that “choice” is nonexistent. It is never an option to choose not to be exploited.

Sex work illustrates how a capitalist economy values labor and determines the value of the laborers themselves. Workers are only worth the amount that they produce within capitalism. It is this visibility that strips the mysticism of capitalism away.

As anarchists we should certainly be able to reject the idea of this “human universal” and clearly see who benefits from the nuclear family. The nuclear family is not the accidental result of urbanization and industrialization, but rather the most efficient way to reproduce labor(ers) and profit.

What does the state have to gain from the regulation and criminalization of sex work? Regulation justifies further surveillance of poor people, people of color, and queer people (of course these are not mutually exclusive), who are the majority of sex workers globally. The criminalization of the sex industry continues to rationalize incredible violations of human rights around the world, all in the name of protecting sex workers. Many sex workers are placed in rehabilitation camps where they are subjected to sexual assault and beatings by guards and staff. Incarceration seems to be the global universal in the “rehabilitation” of sex workers, for those classified as “voluntary” or “forced” sex workers.

The dichotomy of “forced” vs. “voluntary” sex work is highlighted in most regulation. Providing social and health services for those that are regarded as forced is given tantamount funding and support. However, it is almost impossible to find funding and support for “voluntary” sex workers. In particular the US will not fund any program that they consider to condone prostitution. There is no evidence that regulation is for sex workers’ best interests. Regulation serves the purpose of furthering the divide between sex workers and ultimately impedes self-organizing.

It has been argued that sex work sets a social precedent that the sexuality of women is always available if the price is right. However, sex work actually undermines the idea women are available for free, or that the purpose of women is labor reproduction. This is dangerous to the state apparatus because it shows the direct benefit to be reaped from free reproductive labor. Having children, reproducing the primary wage earner, and even sex may be done naturally, but these things are work. When the left gets into bed with abolitionists, these are the unintended consequences—the furthering of patriarchy through upholding the nuclear family.

A queer analysis of sex work frees us from the constraints of viewing it as a threat to marriage and workforce reproduction. This is certainly not meant to imply that fidelity is not important within a queer analysis, but sex work does not threaten an institution of fidelity. A queer analysis of sex work allows us to view sex in an unconventional way, where sex is not essentially degrading, private, or for love.

The gender and sexual identity of sex workers is not necessarily reflected by the clients they have.

It has been said that there is no room within anarchism for sex work, that to fight for improvement in the industry will only extend its life. There is no room in post-revolutionary society for any alienated labor. That does not mean that we can simply discount the industries we find problematic now. It’s all of us or none of us.

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Hegemony is maintained in large part through institutions (marriage, workplace, schools, military, etc) that educate people to accept and identify with the dominant assumptions, values, roles, and consciousness of their society and oppressors. The success of hegemony can often be measured by the inability of the oppressed to envision new alternatives—that somehow our misery is natural or even justified. Luckily, the hegemonic power of privileged groups has its limits. Despite our intense socialization, we still have the ability as human beings to question our circumstances and build alternatives.

Living in a gentrified apartment, buying $495 shoes, getting married, and hiring an immigrant nanny are all presented as the embodiment of feminist liberation.

Informed by liberal feminism, the show celebrates women who assume powerful positions within dominant institutions. The individual women who enter these elite spaces are presented as the natural champions of women’s rights.

Radical social movements must challenge one of the most unquestioned assumptions of liberal movements: that inclusion into dominant institutions is in and of itself social liberation. Amidst military and prison scandals of systemic rape and torture, not to mention multiple US wars overseas, the inclusion of women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, and undocumented youth into extremely misogynistic, racist, and capitalist institutions, such as corporations, the military, and police, has life and death consequences.

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my knowledge and my perspective will of course have their limits. at the same time, i did not want to theorize these experiences, putting a kind of intellectual distance between myself and the ideas because that is not how i encountered them. nonetheless i will be engaging many concepts, ideas and theories. our education system teaches us to understand stories one way and ideas another (for example, we study literature or stories differently than we study philosophy or ideas). it is my hope that these narratives will be understood not as cute little stories about my life, but rather as a source of important ideas about sexualities that might be useful to straight people in becoming anti-heterosexist straight allies. and one last hope i have is that many more people will tell their own stories, which will be taken seriously by anarchist and other readers in our struggles toward radical social and political transformation.

challenging standard orthography (writing systems) by not using capital letters, by using “improper” grammar such as sentence fragments and the like, has a long history and a complex set of motivations. most importantly, it challenges the phallogocentric domination of textual representation, i.e., the presumed superiority of phallic (masculine) logos (use of words, acts of speech) that underlies western traditions of philosophy, theory, literary studies and other logocentric disciplines, and that can lead to semiotic subjugation (Félix Guattari, Soft Subversions New York: Semiotext(e), 1996.)—the feeling that we are subjugated to language rather than subjects that can speak through language. second, it challenges the privileging of the written word over oral traditions. third, it challenges pedagogical norms that are imposed upon schoolchildren from a young age, norms called into question by anarchist educational approaches such as free skools. fourth, it disrupts the presumed relationship of the author being dominant over the reader, a binary “other,” and instead allows the reader to intervene in the text she reads, to be an equal with the writer. fifth, through this deconstruction of the binary relationships between masculine/feminine, written/oral, correct/incorrect, writer/reader, etc., non-subjugated orthographies that refuse the use of capital letters and traditional grammar make space for the privileging of the collective, and cooperation in the construction of meaning, decentering the primacy of the individual writer, the supposed (rich, straight, white male) sublime genius who produces texts. this is therefore a radical, feminist, queer, and anarchist strategy that disrupts the way texts are produced, valued, legitimated and circulated. bell hooks drew attention to these debates, for example, by changing her name, disavowing her “slave name,” and writing her name without capital letters.

anarchaqueer theories and practices start with the basics. how do we relate to people emotionally and sexually? how have these types of relationships largely been determined by oppressive systems such as patriarchy, heteronormativity, capitalism, families, culture, and the state, systems that we do not believe in, and which we are constantly rethinking and struggling to dismantle?

we started to think about how the word “non-monogamy” was a reification of the centrality or supposed “normalcy” of monogamy, and we wanted to have a different starting place, a multiplicity of amorous possibilities, so we started to use the word polyamory instead. poly for short.

regardless of what the rules were, what was interesting to me was that any two people could make their own rules. you could say what you wanted, and listen to what the other person wanted, and then try it out, and check in with each other afterward and see how they felt about how it went. this for me was super different than heterosexual monogamy which had a bunch of rules, none of which made any sense to me, like the rule about how if you show how jealous you are, it means you really care about the other person. or if you hook up with one person, and then a second person, it means you don’t like the first person anymore, whereas in my experience, feelings for one person tended to have little bearing on, or perhaps even augmented, my feelings for another person. being able to incorporate this emotional experience into openly negotiated multiple relationships was awesome.

another thing that concerns me is that maybe in being attracted to younger people, i am somehow replicating ageism—both the ageism in the anarchist scene which is really a youth-oriented scene, and a kind of internalized ageism that mainstream society offers where youth is valued and age is something we are supposed to fight or disavow, rather than accept or even respect (as some cultures do). sometimes i think it is unfortunate that there is not a lot of age diversity in the anarchist “scene.”

for example, when ulrike meinhof, who was part of the red army faction in germany, decided to leave her children behind and become an active urban guerrilla, living underground and working to overthrow the german state, there were many newspaper reports that demonized her for this (not for her political actions in and of themselves), and said she was not just a bad mother but somehow actually insane for leaving her children with their father.

but it seems more like a failure to be responsible to those people with whom we are engaged in intimate relationships.