Anarchist propositions

Work - In the Age of Anxiety

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"Today's public secret is that everyone is anxious. Anxiety has spread from its previous localised locations (such as sexuality) to the whole of the social field. All forms of intensity, self-​expression, emotional connection, immediacy, and enjoyment are now laced with anxiety. It has become the linchpin of subordination."

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How do we expose the public secret? We need to actually communicate with each other. "People have to be socially isolated in order for a public secret to work. This is true of the current situation, in which authentic communication is increasingly rare. Communication is more pervasive than ever, but increasingly, communication happens only through paths mediated by the system. Hence, in many ways, people are prevented from actually communicating, even while the system demands that everyone be connected and communicable."  Expose the secret. Get rid of the cop in your head.

Our police order: What can be said, seen, and done

"Jacques Rancière" wrote:

We shouldn't think of the police order only as some institution. I don't think that the police order is the same as the police with their batons. I think it's too easy to say that the media is the police, that it is a big machine. The police order is not only a Big Brother, it is a kind of distribution of what is given to our experience, of what we can do. We don't need a Big Brother like Fox News. I think the same kind of partition between what is possible and impossible for us can be made by more sophisticated channels. It is wrong to focus on a horrible example like Fox News. The sophisticated media are also part of the police order, as a kind of distribution of what you are and are not able to do. In France, we have some sophisticated newspapers, but they are members of the police order in the same way as Fox News.

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From my point of view, Negri's multitude is still in keeping with what I would call the old economist view of political issues, the idea that the real political stage has to be found in the reality of the productive force, living force, of society. I think Negri is still working on this schema, according to which there will come a real movement from below, which will be the movement of work and transformation of work, and new forms of communication. There is this old Marxist idea that there will be a subversion coming from the system itself, the idea that productive forces engendered by the capitalist system itself will break the system. I don't think that capital creates its own gravediggers, according to the Marxist schema.

Yes, it creates other people's gravediggers, but never its own, at least not intentionally.  Whatever Capitalist run societies allows for in the political realm will never amount to an effective oppositional challenge as we in Canada know only too well from experience.  Rancière's point is in relation to Negri and Hardt banking on the affinities of the Capitalist consumer/worker to rise up and transform societies for the sake of their own interests.  If you consider the possible improvement in relations between Cuba and the US, first and foremost it seems that many leftist opinion pieces celebrate the prospect of the consumerist embargo being lifted.  Apparently the Cuban worker may finally come into their own with the vast array of products that might come their way.

iyraste1313 wrote:

...this must come from the grass roots.....

I have been leaning for some time toward the notion that the idea of an empowered working class negating or transforming a system that the working class itself depends on for it's success is defunct, as it likely always was.  The Chinese communist proletariat and it's leadership embraced globalization at the earliest opportunity.  The people's representatives of the Soviet Union became the gangster oligarchs of the 90's and beyond.  The NDP with the support of it's delegates dumped the word 'social' as soon as it had acquired a realistic sniff of power.  If not the proletarian working class, I don't know where exactly the so called 'grass roots' of systemic change will be found.

There is an interesting theory that might be worth a read called 'desiring-production' found in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus.  In part it approached the question of why the masses(body) are susceptible to Fascism(organ) - we don't have to look very far to witness the phenomenon - and in the process of answering the question, it attempted to conceive of a 'body without organs.'

ETA:  The 'body without organs' concept doesn't only take into consideration the historical fascist models, but the everyday political sinkholes we're more familiar with, into which people willingly submit their energies.

Pondering wrote:

Slumberjack wrote:

I have been leaning for some time toward the notion that the idea of an empowered working class negating or transforming a system that the working class itself depends on for it's success is defunct, as it likely always was. 

That seems so defeatist and dismissive of the potential that resides in us all.

What 'potential' are you referring to aside from being imbedded within capitalist production processes, with it's fatal effects on the environment?

Pondering wrote:

Slumberjack wrote:

What 'potential' are you referring...

The arrogance inherent in your words leaves me a bit stunned.

Shouldn't it indicate that in my asking a question based on your statement not to be dismissive of 'potential,' that whatever so called knowledge you think I have, or are trying to position me with as if to place me atop of some arrogant mountain of knowledge, that it is after all less than complete considering that I'm the one seeking an answer, which I would have to assume you're in possession of, and not me?  More specifically though, how does your example of the piano player apply to this discussion, or to the thread in general?  Or is that more arrogance on my part to even ask?

Some news regarding "To Our Friends" by the Invisible Committee, published in 2014

Fuck off Google - (note:  Excerpt - pdf download)

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In Tripoli, Tottenham or Wall Street people have been protesting failed policies and the meager possibilities afforded by the electoral system... They have lost faith in government and other centralized institutions of power... There is no viable justification for a democratic system in which public participation is limited to voting. 

Let's Disappear - (Note:  Chapter 5 Excerpt - pdf download from bloom0101.org

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We would have liked to be brief. To forgo genealogies, etymologies, quotations. That a poem, a song, would suffice.  We wished it would be enough to write "revolution" on a wall for the street to catch fire.  But it was necessary to untangle the skein of the present, and in places to settle accounts with ancient falsehoods. It was necessary to try and digest seven years of historical convulsions. And decipher a world in which confusion has blossomed on a tree of misunderstanding.  We’ve taken the time to write with the hope that others would take the time to read.  Writing is a vanity, unless it’s for the friend. Including the friend one doesn’t know yet.  In the coming years, we’ll be wherever the fires are lit.  During the periods of respite, we’re not that hard to find.  We’ll continue the effort of clarification we’ve begun here.  There will be dates and places where we can mass our forces against logical targets.  There will be dates and places for meeting up and debating.  We don’t know if the insurrection will have the look of a heroic assault, or if it will be a planetary fit of crying, a sudden expression of feeling after decades of anesthesia, misery, and stupidity.  Nothing guarantees that the fascist option won’t be preferred to revolution.  We’ll do what there is to be done.  Thinking, attacking, building—such is our fabulous agenda.

Toscano weighs in:

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After the Insurrection that was to come The Invisible Committee's À nos amis assesses the defeats and 'permanent catastrophe' which never stopped. Alberto Toscano's extended review, ahead of the book's English translation, seeks points of agreement among the peaks and pitfalls of a relentless metaphysical attack on network power.

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A theory of revolution is a balance-sheet of its defeats. That much transpires from the first pages of À nos amis/To Our Friends (English translation forthcoming in April from Semiotext(e)), setting it apart, notwithstanding the continuities of tone and targets, from The Coming Insurrection. Where in the latter, to recall the Eighteenth Brumaire, phrase had prophetically anticipated its content, now the content has outstripped the phrase. The insurrection came and was beaten back. Yet it is still coming. But the order of urgencies has shifted, the poetry of the imminent future largely making way for the prose of the recent past. We have been defeated. But we are everywhere. Stability is dead. Capitalism is disintegrating. And yet it reproduces itself – as a catastrophe in permanence.

Semiotexte(e) Version

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The Invisible Committee's The Coming Insurrection was a phenomenon, celebrated in some quarters and inveighed against in others, publicized in media that ranged from campus bulletin boards to Fox News. Seven years later, The Invisible Committee follows up their premonitory manifesto with a new book, To Our Friends. 

Derrida - IEP

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Jacques Derrida developed a strategy called "deconstruction" in the mid 1960s. Although not purely negative, deconstruction is primarily concerned with something tantamount to a critique of the Western philosophical tradition. Deconstruction is generally presented via an analysis of specific texts. It seeks to expose, and then to subvert, the various binary oppositions that undergird our dominant ways of thinking.

Deconstruction has at least two aspects: literary and philosophical. The literary aspect concerns the textual interpretation, where invention is essential to finding hidden alternative meanings in the text. The philosophical aspect concerns the main target of deconstruction: the “metaphysics of presence,” or simply metaphysics. Starting from an Heideggerian point of view, Derrida argues that metaphysics affects the whole of philosophy from Plato onwards. Metaphysics creates dualistic oppositions and installs a hierarchy that unfortunately privileges one term of each dichotomy (presence before absence, speech before writing, and so on).

The deconstructive strategy is to unmask these too-sedimented ways of thinking, and it operates on them especially through two steps—reversing dichotomies and attempting to corrupt the dichotomies themselves. The strategy also aims to show that there are undecidables, that is, something that cannot conform to either side of a dichotomy or opposition. Undecidability returns in later period of Derrida’s reflection, when it is applied to reveal paradoxes involved in notions such as gift giving or hospitality, whose conditions of possibility are at the same time their conditions of impossibility. Because of this, it is undecidable whether authentic giving or hospitality are either possible or impossible.

In this period, the founder of deconstruction turns his attention to ethical themes. In particular, the theme of responsibility to the other leads Derrida to leave the idea that responsibility is associated with a behavior publicly and rationally justifiable by general principles. Reflecting upon tales of Jewish tradition, he highlights the absolute singularity of responsibility to the other.

Terror and Somatic Control - Biopower and Security

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Biopower is the bastard child of neoliberal societies which have created elaborate systems of surveillance to control the body in pursuit of securitizing culture.

I highly recommend this engaging article.

Judith Butler:  Anarchism in the Israel/Palestine Context

Field Notes - To Our Friends

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As far as insurrection goes, To Our Friends affirms something else we have been suspecting: it’s hopeless to expect it to emerge from the radical left. Those who identify as “radical” tend to suffer a fundamental “disjunction from every situation,” substituting deadening moralism and abstract militancy for careful consideration of the real dynamics of a given moment. The more isolated they are from the actual conditions of struggle, the more convinced they become of the accuracy of their outdated beliefs—which only increases their isolation. In any case, recent uprisings have bypassed the radicals and demonstrated that they are lagging behind history. To Our Friends observes this promising tendency, for instance, in the massive Greek riots of 2008, where even the large contingents of anarchists were outstripped by the wild course of events. Consider also the anti-police demonstrations here in New York, where thousands spontaneously took to the streets and blockaded bridges, tunnels, and highways, stormed shopping malls and social gatherings in continual disruptions of the flows of the city. Stripped of their monopoly on such tactics, the radicals chased after what was happening around them, bewildered by actions they didn’t plan and certainly weren’t leading. Or take the epicenters of conflict in Ferguson and now Baltimore, where a much more interesting amalgamation of forces has appeared. Apparently radicals are becoming redundant. Instead of privileged actions or signifying gestures of the revolutionary, there is the generalized revolt of whoever is present, the unforeseen and wholly explosive force of people acting in concert.

Thought I'd bump a revamped version of the Anarchist Library that had previously been posted here, and include, at least initially because of the title, an eyebrow raising selection from Julius Lester entitled:  The Oppression of Whites

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Perhaps the basic inability of black radicals and whites to communicate lies in the fact that the former know acutely the nature of oppression, while whites still think they’re free. They still find it difficult not to believe the fairy tales about this country taught in school. Blacks know what has been done to them and they are angry. Whites do not and thus can only romantically identify with the anger of blacks.

[graphic links to the homepage]

Theses on the Imaginary Party

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The political and moral significance of thinking only appears in those rare moments in history when “things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” when “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” At these moments thinking ceases to be a marginal affair in political matters. When everyone is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action.”  Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations”

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The Imaginary Party is the particular form taken by Contradiction in the historical period when domination imposes itself as the dictatorship of visibility, and dictatorship in visibility; in a word, as Spectacle.

Because it is above all merely the negative party of negativity, and because the sorcery of the Spectacle (since it is unable to liquidate them) consists in rendering invisible all the expressions of negation – and that goes for freedom in acts as well as for suffering or pollution – its most remarkable character is precisely that it is reputed to be non-existent, or - more exactly - to be imaginary.

But people speak incessantly about it, and exclusively about it, since a little more every day it disrupts the proper operation of society. Still, people avoid saying its name – could it be said anyway? – with the same fear as if they were invoking the Devil. And people are quite right to do so: in a world so that has so conspicuously become an attribute of the Mind, pronouncements have the unfortunate tendency to become performative.

Inversely, the nominal evocation of the Imaginary Party, even right here in these pages, may serve as its act of constitution. Up to now, that is, up to its naming, it could be no more than what the classical proletariat was before coming to know itself as the proletariat: a class of civil society that is not a class of civil society, but rather its very dissolution. And, in effect, today it comprises but the negative multitudes of those who have no class, and don’t want to have any; the solitary crowd of those who have reappropriated their fundamental non-belonging to commodity society in the form of their voluntary non-participation in it.

At first, the Imaginary Party presents itself simply as the community of defection, the party of exodus, the fleeting and paradoxical reality of a subjectless subversion. But this is no more the essence of the Imaginary Party than the dawn is the essence of the day. It still remains to be seen how it will come fully into its own, and that can only appear in its living relationship with what produced it and now denies it.

Less Within, More Between

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caveat: Both feminists and anarchists come in wildly divergent flavors (some mutually exclusive), and yet those labels remain useful. I do not continually say “this kind of anarchist” or “my kind of feminist,” so please understand that I’m biased and referring to the anarchist and feminist ideas that are most interesting to me.

We acknowledge that we are all broken by the society that raised us, that we all need to learn how to interact with each other better, and that while some of us are more broken than others, self righteousness is not helpful to us, either as individuals or as groups.

While a bias towards the real is one of the things that maintains feminism’s relevance, that bias also limits us when it comes to articulating what our goals are. I have been to too many conferences, anarchist and otherwise, where the feminist component is dominated by talk about the prevalence of sexist behavior (duh) and how we need to support each other (again duh, or perhaps, unh unh, depending on the definition of support and who “each other” is; questions that are never addressed). The lack of analytic and strategic thinking is in part a valid rejection of abstraction, and in part intellectual laziness and/or intimidation. The feminist tactic of analyzing our individual behavior and needs, too frequently is used to attack people for not abiding by “rules,” when what it is good for is challenging ourselves and our friends to keep our theory and practice fresh and meaningful. This means criticism has to work for something other than making one person feel better than another.

Doug Woodard wrote:

  Anarchists seem to assume that people are pretty much alike, being cooperative and kindly at heart. I don't find that this is so; there are enough people of ill-will ready to exploit others, and even to kill and torture. The feudal system arose out of effective anarchy, and the careers of Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler are examples of the pathology of power.

It seems to me that near-anarchism is a practical proposition in hunter-gatherer societies and some horticutural societies; small- scale societies. One has to expect a certain amount of violence.

It's likely why some anarchist factions have built their ideology around communes and its related workings, figuring that the smaller terrain one controls the better.  I come from a very small town and have worked in several cities, and the same interrelational antagonisms appear to exist no matter how large or small the community is.  Even at the level of families, between two adults in a relationship, or between two kids playing in a sandbox.  Perhaps it is in our nature to ultimately destroy ourselves along with everything else that doesn't survive our passing. Anarchism, despite the bad rap assigned to it collectively by the prevailing 'politics,' represents at best a study in progress that seeks to confront the harmful manifestations of our nature.  Self critique is very much a part of it I find.  Critique of all belief systems, political leanings, religious, societal, etc is essential.  Otherwise one is prone to taking publications like "The Moscow Times," and "RT" a bit too seriously as accurate sources of information.  The enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend.