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“I would like to suggest that, when we come to consider who we are and how we resist today, we should think in terms neither of class - although this is still in other respects important - nor of particularistic identities, nor, worse still, of a People awaiting a Sovereign community - but rather of singularities, of self-creating subjects without fixed identity or calling. These singularities, in their very existence - which is becoming increasingly politicized - constitute a form of autonomous life.”

Saul Newman, Postanarchism (via post-anarqiste)

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But believing in freedom means that we do not regard ourselves as the ultimate judges of another person’s values, that we do not feel entitled to prevent him from pursuing ends which we disapprove so long as he does not infringe the equally protected sphere of others.

F. A. Hayek, Responsibility and Freedom, The Constitution of Liberty (via daseinzige)

For Foucault, power can no longer be confined within the institution of the state, or indeed in any institution. Power is a polyvalent force that runs through multiple sites throughout the social network. It is dispersed, decenter power, diffused throughout society: it may run through the prison or the mental asylum, or through various knowledges and discourses such as psychiatry or sexuality. As Foucault says: 'power is everywhere because it comes from everywhere.' While power can be colonized by the state, it should not be seen as belonging to or deriving from the state as the anarchists believed. Power, for Foucault, is not a function of the institution; rather the institution is a function, or an effect, of power. Power flows through institutions, it does not emanate from them. Indeed, the institution is merely an assemblage of various power relations. It is, moreover, an unstable assemblage because power relations themselves are unstable, and can just as easily turn against the institution which 'controls' them. Flows of power can sometimes be blocked and congealed, and this is when relations of power become relations of domination. These relations of domination form the basis of institutions such as the state.

Saul Newman, Foucault and the Genealogy of Power, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power

#postanarchism #saul newman #foucault #power relations #quotes

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“Stirner thus goes beyond both Marxism and anarchism, creating the possibility for a new way of theorizing politics—a possibility which will be developed by poststructuralism. Stirner occupies a point of rupture in this discussion: the point at which anarchism can no longer deal adequately with the very problematic that it created—the problem of the place of power. He is the catalyst, then, for an epistemological break, or perhaps more accurately, a break with epistemology altogether. Above all, Stirner’s explorations into the nature of power, morality, and subjectivity, have made it impossible to continue to conceptualize an uncontaminated point of departure, the pure place of resistance which anarchism relied so heavily upon. There is no longer any place outside power which confines power which political theory can find sanctuary in."

-Saul Newman, Stirner and the Politics of Ego, From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power

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the state should be thought of not simply as a series of institutions and structures of power, but as a certain authoritarian relationship, a particular way of thinking and structuring our lives–and so the idea of a politics of autonomy from the state involves the development of alternative non-authoritarian relationships, political practices, ways of thinking and modes of living.

Saul Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism (2010: p. 169-170)

forestrebel

People want to see what is “rational,” “suited to the times,” etc., established everywhere. The following definition of liberalism, which is supposed to be pronounced in its honor, characterizes it completely: “Liberalism is nothing else than the knowledge of reason, applied to our existing relations.” Its aim is a “rational order,” a “moral behavior,” a “limited freedom,” not anarchy, lawlessness, selfhood. But, if reason rules, then the person succumbs. … What is wanted is not free movement and realization of the person or of me, but of reason — i.e. a dominion of reason, a dominion. The liberals are zealots, not exactly for the faith, for God, but certainly for reason, their master. They brook no lack of breeding, and therefore no self-development and self- determination; they play the guardian as effectively as the most absolute rulers.

Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own (via forestrebel)

"The Egocrat is initially an individual, like everyone else: mute and powerless in this society without community or communication, victimized by the spectacle, “the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue, the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence.” (Debord) Repelled by the spectacle, he longs for “the liberated human being, a being who is at once a social being and a Gemeinwesen.” (Camatte) If his longing were expressed in practice: at his workplace, in the street, wherever the spectacle robs him of his humanity, he would become a rebel.

The Egocrat does not express his longing for community and communication in practice; he transforms it into a Thought. Armed with this Thought, he is still mute and powerless, but is no longer like everyone else: he is Conscious, he possesses the Idea. To confirm his difference, to make sure he’s not deluding himself, he needs to be seen as different by others —those others who confirm that he is truly a possessor of the Thought.

The Egocrat finds “community” and “communication,” not by smashing the elements of the spectacle in his reach, but by surrounding himself with like-minded individuals, other Egos, who reflect the Golden Thought to each other and confirm each other’s validity as possessors of it. Chosen People. At this point the Thought, if it is to remain golden, must evermore remain the same: unsullied and uncompromised; criticism and revision are synonyms of betrayal, “Thus it can only exist as a polemic with reality. It refutes everything. It can survive only by freezing, by becoming increasingly totalitarian.” (Camatte) Therefore, in order to continue to reflect and confirm the Thought, the individual must stop thinking."

-Fredy Perlman

pleistocene-dreams

Beyond Politics, Towards Insurrection: Why Anarchists Need to Outgrow the Left

“The anarchist role is negative, the aim is the destruction of allexploitative and repressive false hopes.” - Monsieur Dupont

At the risk (and pleasure) of sounding overly inflammatory, the Left as we know it is obsolete. The legacy of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao and Hoxha has proven too much of a burden and its suggested praxis of selling newspapers and “building the party” is outdated. You know it, I know it, and even the party bosses – too far down to ever acknowledge it - know it. Even the syndicalist-approved methods of revolutionary unionism is swiftly growing irrelevant in the throes of neoliberalism – in a workforce mostly composed of temporary workers, the ease that a boss can simply swap out any angry workers with new, more compliant ones renders unions impotent. Even the IWW, the greatest example of American revolutionary syndicalism, fails to give its members anything but a social circle and bragging rights (in addition to a virulent and constant covering-up of abusers in its ranks).

The left has failed. The USSR has dissolved. The ISO-SWP-PSL-AFL-CIO-RCP (etc. etc. etc.) has degenerated into opportunism and newspaper sales (if they were ever anything else). So where do we go from here?

It’s not as if we anarchists have ever comfortably been leftists. The association of anarchists with the left (or ultra-left) has always been uneasy. How can we as anti-state and anti-authority revolutionaries agree with or condone the ideologies of Leninism, Soviet nationalism or state socialism or be okay with being relegated to the role of “conscience of the left”? The contradictions show in our history as the darkest moments after the highest-water marks of anarchism. 1921, the Kronstadt rebellion in Russia – Trotsky’s Red Army slaughters the same revolutionaries that helped overthrow the Tsar and executes anarchist civilians for daring to ask for freedom of speech. 1936, the provinces of Aragon and Catalonia in Spain – the CNT, growing more bureaucratic, orders the revolutionary communes to cease expropriation, executes individualist anarchists, and the Stalinist PSUC attacks any commune that refuses to dissolve, sealing the fate of the revolution and civil war.

It’s time to look ahead and, to quote Wolfi Landstreicher, “rid anarchy of the leftist millstone”.

What does this look like? In “From Politics to Life”, the work quoted above, Landstreicher points out that “for the left, social struggle against oppression is essentially a political program to be realized by whatever means are expedient…the leftist conception of social struggle is precisely one of influences, taking over or creating alternative versions of these institutions. In other words, it is a struggle to change, not to destroy institutionalized power relationships.” To paraphrase, the leftist obsession with political answers and reforms makes their goals and tactics completely incompatible with the anarchist idea: complete and total liberation.

Indeed, the left is unable to look beyond mass organizations and their desire for a homogenized rank and file to carry out the desires of the leadership. To gain more activists and misguided theorists, leftist groups create and perpetuate a bevy of canned, formulaic moral outrages in the hopes of appealing to the masses and achieving some semblance of relevance. However, especially today, the failings of this strategy has never been more apparent, only serving to further reduce their legitimacy as revolutionary entities. This is obvious to anybody outside of the party.

Left anarchists, including syndicalists, push the need for working class consciousness and direct-action unionism. However, even this is a reaction to an outdated construct of Capitalism, which makes the entire union structure of struggle anachronistic. After neoliberalism demolished the union model (and indeed, caused the collapse of the old Working Class), trade unions have withered as most workers realize that they have nothing to gain from joining. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing, only a shifting of the playing field. Alfredo Bonanno writes in “The Insurrectional Project” that “The end of the great trades union organizations’ function of resistance and defense – corresponding with the collapse of the working class – has allowed us to see another possibility for the organization of the struggle. This could start from the real capacity of the excluded [(what Marx called the lumpenproletariat)].”

Although parties, federations, unions etc. have lost their relevance in today’s Capitalism, there’s no need for despair. Indeed, the failure of the old forms of leftist reconciliation and cooperation with the bosses has left the road ahead open to us for grand experiments in affinity-based modes of change. The options open to us are endless. Clandestine actions, vandalism, industrial sabotage, community struggle and rioting are all tools to be used to seize time and space to experiment with new and liberatory social relations. But of course, the old Left, convinced of its necessity and hellbent on opportunistically inserting itself wherever it can speak over the rank and file of struggle, will prove – as it has proven numerous times in the past – to be the very first obstacle on the road to freedom, co-opting tragedies in order to further their agendas and forcing obsolete praxis down our throats.

It’s time for anarchists to move beyond the outdated false binary of left and right. It’s time for us to critique not only industrialization but indeed the foundations of civilization as a whole. Forget the politics of ballot referendums, building the party, studying and quoting the correct theorists - the seeds of a creative, dynamic insurrection have already been sown. It’s time to strike back at everything that destroys us - politicians and recuperators be damned!

Because I care deeply about this topic and would like curious people to know more, I’ll attach a small reading list of essential post-left works.

“The Insurrectional Project”, “Armed Joy” and “The Anarchist Tension” by Alfredo Bonanno.

“From Politics to Life” by Wolfi Landstreicher.

“At Daggers Drawn” by Anonymous.

“Against History! Against Leviathan!” by Fredy Perlman.

All of these works can be found for free online. Happy reading!

- With love, Anonymous

Far too little attention has been paid to the fact that our age, for all its irreligiousness, is hereditarily burdened with the speciﬁc achievement of the Christian epoch: the supremacy of the word, of the Logos, which stands for the central ﬁgure of our Christian faith. The word has literally become our god and so it has remained, even if we know of Christianity only from hearsay. Words like “society” and “State” are so concretized that they are almost personiﬁed.

Carl Jung The Undiscovered Self

This is almost exactly Stirner's critique of humanism

-Chris

That is the logic that takes hold of our practice. We are locked into the account we give of ourselves, and of the world as we perceive it. Despite our small numbers and lack of success we are looped into conviction-politics—too much of what we are is at stake for us. Suddenly, and despite our efforts, the dynamic of the struggle for a better world is narrowed down to us and it—we, it is us, who are against it, the state against the agencies of the state. Our struggle is displaced into a theatre of gestures, meanings, representations. And we forget everything but the minutiae of struggle, this struggle which has become a way of life, and an end in itself. This struggle, which we kid ourselves is about the world, is now no more than the means of legitimising a microcosm, a milieu, a particular way of life that is wholly reliant on its own defeat and the continuation of the world as it is as the condition for its perpetuation. We cease our contemplation of the billions, and their implied veto of our position—all those others, who merely because they do not have our consciousness, become irrelevant to our engagement. These others are no longer even a problem to us, we become indifferent to them. We forget that our actions intensify because they are not here. We never ask, what of the others? We do not ask, why is it exactly that they are not interested in us? Why is it that others feel no interest for us?

Frere Dupont

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The term classism does not explain exploitation, which makes it a flawed concept. We want an end to class society, not a society where classes “respect” each other. It is impossible to eradicate exploitation while class society still exists. To end exploitation we must also end class society (and all other institutionalized hierarchies).

Insurrections at the intersections: feminism, intersectionality and anarchism (via ninjabikeslut)

“The only social body in which it is possible for an individualist to evolve and develop is that which admits a concurrent plurality of experiences and realizations, to which is opposed all groupings founded on an ideological exclusiveness, which, well-meant though they may be, threaten the integrity of the individual from the moment that this exclusiveness aims to extend itself to the non-adherents of the grouping. To call this anti-statist would be doing no more than provoking a mask for an appetite for driving a herd of human sheep.”

Emile Armand

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Some comrades, disgusted at the atrocity and uselessness of certain of these acts [of violence], have declared themselves opposed to all violence whatever, except in cases of personal defence against direct and immediate attack. Which, in my opinion, would mean the renunciation of all revolutionary initiative, and the reserving our blows for the petty, and often involuntary agents of the government, while leaving in peace the organizers of, and those chiefly benefited by, government and capitalist exploitation. … Thus it is that we are revolutionists. In this sense, and within these limits, violence is not a contradiction with anarchist principles, since it is not the result of our free choice, but is imposed upon us by necessity in the defence of unrecognized human rights which are thwarted by brute force.

Errico Malatesta, “Anarchy and Violence,” 1894 (via agenderanarchist)

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It’s true that the increasingly widespread disillusionment with formal organization amongst genuine radicals is often a direct result of two hundred years of counterproductive leftist practice. But leftist organizational practice isn’t just a good strategy corrupted by bad personnel. The same organization-building strategies with more radical theory and values grafted in place would continue to produce the same type of self-defeating practice precisely because the underlying problems are structural and not incidental. The cult of organizationalism — in which the construction and enlargement of formal, mass political and economic organizations take priority over the encouragement and generalization of anarchist self-organization — directly contradicts anarchist principles and goals. Organizationalism encourages and produces authoritarian, hierarchical, and alienating practices because it is based on the idea that people should be organized by politically-conscious militants rather than the anarchist idea that people must organize themselves for their own liberation.

Jason McQuinn, “Against Organizationalism: Anarchism as both Theory and Critique of Organization” (via agenderanarchist)

Strikes are a regular part of the management of Capital. They have been recuperated into the planetary work machine like the unions that organize them. Today, strikes can only be effective when they are unexpected and unplanned manifestations of the rage of the workers. In other words, strikes can only be effective today if they are Wildcats, if they lack corporate (union) sponsorship. Most strikes are used by unions to ensure that the unions maintain their privileged role as the mediators of working-class struggle, removing the direct, unabstracted human element from the conflict between employee and employer. We can no longer allow strikes to be used as a catharsis to alleviate tensions and get everyone back to work. The only goal of a strike should be this: more strikes.

Alaric Malgraith, Autonomous Workers’ Nuclei: A New Vision for the Post-Industrial* Labour Movement, Strikes and mediations

#unions #class struggle #strikes #wildcat strikes #autonomism #labor struggle

Because anarchists understand that only people freely organizing themselves can create free communities, they refuse to sacrifice individuals or communities in pursuit of the kinds of power that would inevitably prevent the emergence of a free society. But given the almost mutual origins of the anarchist movement and the socialist left, as well as their historical battles to seduce or capture the support of the international workers movement by various means, it isn’t surprising that over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries socialists have often adopted aspects of anarchist theory or practice as their own, while even more anarchists have adopted aspects of leftist theory and practice into various left-anarchist syntheses. This is despite the fact that in the worldwide struggles for individual and social freedom the political left has everywhere proven itself either a fraud or a failure in practice. Wherever the socialist left has been successful in organizing and taking power it has at best reformed (and rehabilitated) capitalism or at worst instituted new tyrannies, many with murderous policies — some of genocidal proportions. Thus, with the stunning international disintegration of the political left following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the time is now past due for all anarchists to reevaluate every compromise that has been or continues to be made with the fading remnants of leftism. Whatever usefulness there might have been in the past for anarchists to make compromises with leftism is evaporating with the progressive disappearance of the left from even token opposition to the fundamental institutions of capitalism: wage labor, market production, and the rule of value.

Jason McQuinn, Post-Left Anarchy: Leaving the Left Behind

#post-left #post-left anarchism #post left anarchy #jason mcquinn #anarchism #leftism #socialism

Part of the problem is that many former leftists tend to misunderstand anarchism only as a form of anti-statist leftism, ignoring or downplaying its indelibly individualist foundation as irrelevant to social struggles. Many simply don’t understand the huge divide between a self-organizing movement seeking to abolish every form of social alienation and a merely political movement seeking to reorganize production in a more egalitarian form. While others do understand the divide quite well, but seek to reform the anarchist milieu into a political movement anyway, for various reasons. Some former leftists do this because they consider the abolition of social alienation unlikely or impossible; some because they remain fundamentally opposed to any individualist (or sexual, or cultural, etc.) component of social theory and practice. Some cynically realize that they will never achieve any position of power in a genuinely anarchist movement and opt for building more narrowly political organizations with more room for manipulation. Still others, unused to autonomous thinking and practice, simply feel anxious and uncomfortable with many aspects of the anarchist tradition and wish to push those aspects of leftism within the anarchist milieu that help them feel less threatened and more secure — so that they can continue to play their former roles of cadre or militant, just without an explicitly authoritarian ideology to guide them. In order to understand current controversies within the anarchist milieu, anarchists need to remain constantly aware — and carefully critical — of all this. Ad hominem attacks within the anarchist milieu are nothing new, and most often a waste of time, because they substitute for rational criticism of people’s actual positions. (Too often rational criticism of positions is simply ignored by those unable to argue for their own positions, whose only recourse is to wild or irrelevant accusations or attempted smears.) But there remains an important place for ad hominem criticism addressed to people’s chosen identities, especially when these identities are so strong that they include sedimented, often unconscious, layers of habits, prejudices and dependencies. These habits, prejudices and dependencies — leftist or otherwise — all constitute highly appropriate targets for anarchist criticism.

Jason McQuinn, Post-Left Anarchy: Leaving the Left Behind

#post-left #leftism #anarchism #jason mcquinn #post left anarchism #post left anarchy

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