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.