Human Iterations

2011-10-18T22:43:00.001-07:00

Hey why are you still here? Seriously, Human Iterations changed locations back in '09.

http://humaniterations.wordpress.com/

The new feed is: http://humaniterations.wordpress.com/feed/

please update your bookmarks, subscriptions and links accordingly

2009-11-24T23:59:00.000-08:00

CHANGE OF ADDRESS

After 6.5 years this blog is changing address. It will now be found here:

http://humaniterations.wordpress.com/

The new feed is: http://humaniterations.wordpress.com/feed/

please update your bookmarks, subscriptions and links accordingly

2009-10-22T10:56:00.000-07:00

(Nutty LTV Partisans & All You Can Eat Buffets)

Consider: I spend a bunch of labor making a giant batch of lemonade. I slap a tap on it and offer to charge people by the hour (or by session) to have at it freely, maybe changing my price weekly. I'm renting the motherfucker.

Yes, it will eventually expire -- but so will a house.

Agorists and most market anarchists who support the freedom to usury ground their notions of property rights in labor-mixing. In other words, an additional value in the structural arrangement of a material -- which is inherently something that can entropy. Simple occupancy uses up a house. Even viewing (shining light on) a painting significantly degrades it over time (this is a major concern of museums). And then there are issues of risk, responsibility and variable use.

But there is no logical reason whatsoever to consider the immediate market value of a good bought in full to represent the full labor cost of that good. Prices change over time. If I expect a good to increase in value over time or simply bring in more than it might from an immediate purchase on the part of someone who only needs it for a relatively short period (even if that single sale is paid in installments), why shouldn't I be able to sell it off incrementally?

Those who insist that the laborers who built a house should only be allowed to be remunerated for their labor at whatever price they can make selling the whole of it at once are depriving those workers of the full product of their labor.

2009-10-15T18:35:00.000-07:00

(One Update Per Month And It's A Whedon)

Yeah, Buffy kicked unholy ass, Zoe was Mal's Terminatrix-like enforcer, Faith begat Echo and Echo is the baddest ass Kung Fu Whore TV has ever seen, and yet, aside from the fact these girls have done some push ups and punched masculinity in its shriveled balls time and again, the idea that Whedon is some sort of hyper-feminist stinks as bad as Eliza Dushku's "acting."

Joss shoots his actresses most lovingly when they're wet and crying and curled up in the fetal position, pressed up against a wall, broken, mascara running, bleeding, and reaching out. And what are they typically reaching out for? Some dude (or vampire or werewolf) and the dick he's attached to.

That's it. That's as complex as it gets. Sound familiar? That's because it's also the image of women we get from every other movie or show written by men. And yet when a lisping nerd who tritely describes himself as "a lesbian in a man's body" does it to a high-school cheerleader, it's "feminist." This is like when Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton "The First Black President." You could only say such a thing if you were THAT willing to settle. His two most artistically successful shows are Angel and Firefly, both centered on men, and written from a male point of view. If I wanted to be glib (and I usually do) Angel and Firefly worked because they're basically "Batman in LA" and "Han Solo, the TV Show," respectively.

(thanks Roman)

Now there's nothing wrong with centering shows on male characters. And Firefly is perfection incarnate with no failings whatsoever. But, for christ sake, it shouldn't be controversial to say that Whedon is not particularly good on gender. It's not like he doesn't know a couple things and it's not like he doesn't, you know, try every once in a while. But the problem is he's insanely cocky about it. He's proud of what he's accomplished. And most of the time? What he's accomplished is pretty shallow. Both in the scope of what he chooses to address and the depth by which he does so. (I dare you to watch Dollhouse without picturing a 13 year old girl going "this isn't really who I am all these identities are just like masks that I wear!!")

The problem with his cheerleaders is that they tend to just accept these premises on face-value. Since Whedon is a 'great feminist' the things he explores must be important and the ways he goes about doing so must be sufficient. And in doing so they absolutely ruin the discourse.

2009-09-15T01:24:00.000-07:00

(From Whence Do Property Titles Arise?)

[I apologize, this skips through certain concepts a bit fast for some people, but it's already a long piece and I'd rather bridge things in broad strokes first before hashing out every particular.]

Many market theorists take property titles as axiomatic and then develop coercive apparatuses to enforce them -- justifying such coercion by appealing to notions like implicit consent and/or the justness of contracts that sell off part of one's agency in the future. This rightfully bugs the crap out of many anarcho-communists. Market theorists in turn tend to write off these apprehensions as a contention over differing ideal systems of property -- ie differences over what constitutes abandonment and the general viability of collective property.

But this, as I've argued time and time again, is a profoundly limited understanding of the criticisms being lobbed against them.

First off, not every system of mediating between different people's desires or uses for objects is describable in terms of property titles. Property titles are claims by discrete agents to absolute veto power over the use of an object; they're a construct used for negotiating between the justness of uses by individuals with competing intentions for an object. Property titles solve the problem by determining whether A or B then gets to personally make the decision between direction 1 or 2 for a given object. But this clearly isn't the only way to approach such situations.

When anarcho-communists talk of societies without the concept of property they often mean a social system where decisions over how to use any specific object or resource are never limited to a discrete body of select individuals but are rather discussions open to anyone and everyone with a stake, desire or idea to contribute. There the critical economic entities are directions rather than veto-titles, concepts rather than individuals. The mediation processes possible can be incredibly complex and dynamic. So on a protozoic level you might have simple discussion or unchallenged focus (I specialize in the use of a single toothbrush and consequently, given that toothbrushes' historical context, not many people are going to have a more useful proposal for its use). While aggregate systems of more advanced mechanisms are visible in the open source development. In short where the most scarce resource is personal time and the weight of one's voice is the nearest thing to currency. At the same time there are often scarcities in space (functionally identical to material) for widely varying projects and in response entire ecosystems of discussion open up. It's worth noting that under many systems of property-titles if the legal experts cannot reach consensus on who is the legitimate owner of an object nothing is done with the object in the meantime. Those involved in contending differing uses for an object in a property-less society are directly capable of far more diverse means of negotiation, but so to, if they can't reach consensus, then nothing is done with the object. Because literally everyone in the world has the capacity to veto.

To some this might appear -- while a philosophically coherent counter-proposal to property, and even briefly workable on a small level -- completely batshit insane. And maybe so. But in practice such external-to-property approaches are often workable enough. The lone immature interjecting troublemaker, or any other conceivable exploit of consensus, simply doesn't exist after a few social iterations. Because everyone is dependent upon everyone else, no matter how distant a community they come from and thus its in their interest to maintain, develop and convey goodwill.

Obviously however, just because such differing economic approaches might make better software for a fraction of the energy Microsoft spends doesn't mean that it can do things like move goods between locations to satisfy demand efficiently or signal all the costs of one consumption versus another. Without the capacity to assign value to spatial/physical relationships (as with the realm of actors and objects) one can't concretely mediate between those relationships. And whatever the dominant dilemmas might be in primitive cultures of plenty or posthuman hives of nanobots, it shouldn't be particularly controversial to assert that the placement of material objects is the central calculational problem in the world today. Some form of property titles seems called for, however sticky, however collectively or individually managed.

The point is that's a debate over fitness. While it may be undesirable, it remains entirely possible to construct a society outside of property altogether.

Following the popular slogan "Everything for Everyone" the stubborn market theorist might still proclaim that such a society would still count as a system with property title expanded to everyone. While practically meaningless this wouldn't necessarily be wrong. But as a theoretical framework in such instance property titles would be missing the point. No one in that society would think in anything approaching such terms.

Which leads us to a second critique of property.

It's not hard to come to the conclusion that the very adoption of property titles in our minds leads toward a worldview of increasing compartmentalization and taxonomy. Indeed this is a popular assumption. By progressively chopping up the world around us, the notion goes, we become inclined to view the world solely as a tally sheet of ownership.

Forgive the digression to my 90s Nickelodeon childhood, but in illustration I am reminded of an episode of Angry Beavers in which the brothers suddenly discover that they each have a musk pouch capable of marking items with a colored personal stench that repels everyone but themselves. This quickly sets off a war of personal claim until the entire world is divvied up with one stench or the other, each brother more and more completely obsessed with the tally until they can think of nothing else.

This is perhaps the most classic criticism of capitalism -- one of simple psychology -- and yet it seems to be a critique market theorists are incapable of parsing. To many an anti-capitalist the problem with the capitalist framework is its inherent bent towards materialism, ultimately to the point of treating human beings as objects. But this is incomprehensible for Libertarians because they see respect for property titles as entirely stemming from a respect for personal agency. In practical, everyday terms respect for another person's agency often comes down to a respect for the inviolability of their body. Do not shoot them, do not rape them, do not torture them. Because humans are tool using creatures like hermit crabs there is often no clear line between our biomass and our possessions (we use clothes instead of fur, retain dead mass excreted as hair follicles, etc.), and so a respect for another's person seems to extend in some ways to a respect for things that they use. Begin to talk of Rights and these associations must be drawn more absolutely. And sure enough we already have a common sense proscription often enforced in absolutist terms that matches this intuition; do not steal.

Yet the anti-capitalists are clearly on to something. Even setting aside the evolutionary cognitive biases of homo sapiens, we as individuals have limited processing. We can't think everything at the same time. If some of the thought processes necessary to succeed and flourish under in a given system run out of control and take up more and more space, others -- like those behind why we adopted that system in the first place -- will get pushed to the periphery.

If a certain metric is set as the alpha and omega of a society, whether it be the acquisition of a specific universal currency or simply aggregate atoms, its status as the requirement or key to any pursuit or desire can end up having an effect upon those pursuits and desires.

Anti-capitalists often disingenuously blur the distinction between wealth and coercive power -- wealth and/or disequilibria in wealth do not inherently have to grant any capacity for social control -- but it's certainly true that direct pursuits of power and wealth share the same form. Singlemindedness is progressively rewarded, until the inertia of this approach crowds out of mind the reason we originally assigned value to wealth or power.

Consequently, rather than focus on accumulating property titles or money as a gateway to opportunity, anarcho-communists argue, we should focus on accumulating goodwill.

I don't disagree.

But once you characterize this focus on goodwill in market terms, a la something similar to Doctorow's reputation markets, the path out of all these tangles becomes apparent. It seems pretty damn clear that property titles are a tool with incredible utility in the world as it exists today and the technical challenges we face. As such it stands to reason that those within a goodwill focused anarcho-communist society stand a comparative advantage to negotiate and adopt a second-order system for developing and recognizing property titles. Regardless of precisely how their market ends up dynamically mediating this, goodwill would remain the primary good capable of being turned into, among other things, selective veto use titles to physical objects. As such we can clear the psychological hurtle: without a state coerced enforcement system underpinning property titles or centralized banks and currency, property titles are not as stable or universally applicable an investment as goodwill. And goodwill, as opposed to property titles, is directly, methodologically tied to appreciating and respecting people as agents.*

This suggests a way to tackle fringe conditions in ownership. Rothbard readily recognized, for instance, that a world in which one man held title to everything would clearly be indiscernible from tyranny. Expand the number of owners and you'd still have an oligarchy. Even granting a token amount of wealth to the rest of the populace wouldn't necessarily jump start the market and allow it to drift back in a more dynamic and egalitarian direction, because said wealth may simply be insufficient as capital.

However, if property is a second-order good derived from market institutions based in reputation/goodwill/credit, then if one class systematically fucked over their credit with all of another class the underclass would no longer have any incentive to respect their title claims because no individual within it would fear even marginal sanction or loss of goodwill for occupying and appropriating their wealth. Simply put, if before anyone else can do anything on a new colony I create robots to till the entire surface of the planet, that doesn't inherently create an incentive among the rest of the colonists to respect a veto-use claim on my part to the entire planet. If others admire and derive value from my mass-tilling project (or from the potential products of it) then my voice is more likely to be respected in discussion over its uses, but if I want to obtain acceptance of a veto-use claim, it would have to derive from the desire of others' desire of social conditions of respect conducive to undertaking their own projects and having their own stuff respected. One gravitates towards adopting property titles because through their exchange one can much further maximize the satiation of one's desires (agreeing to butt the hell out of other people's decisions when it comes to the use of certain objects in exchange for them butting the hell out of your decisions with other objects). Accepting my ownership of literally everything would make that impossible.

Not only does this cope with such boundary conditions, but it also addresses old marxist paranoia about the runaway accumulation of wealth through usury.

Viewed in the light of a reputation market, Jeremy Weiland's old point is even more apt: without the state the more wealth you control the more ridiculously you stand to risk having to pay through the nose to secure against theft and betrayal from those you're paying.

"It's easier to steal a million dollars from the bank, or a vault, than to rob a thousand or so common people. ... It may be that in a free market there will exist a natural, mean personal wealth value, beyond which diminishing returns enter quickly, and below which one is extremely disposed towards profit and enrichment."

It's a distinction between information and objects; ultimately you can't steal good credit. People's trust, goodwill and their whole panorama of intention towards you exists within them internally. It's accessible by anyone anywhere, but they're the only ones capable of changing it. There are no banks it can be kept within, only distributed collective or institutional relay points through which it can be conveyed. And trust critically underlies all material transactions.

Incidentally this renders the entire debate over proposed systematic prohibitions of wages, rent, and interest moot. Obviously all will be, in some contexts, however fringe, desirably or neutrally regarded by all parties. But even if they crop up as large phenomenon, that's not reason to panic, flip the fuck out and organize shit like armed roving 'homesteaders' with ideologically precise definitions of legitimate property. Instead the market will already be ready to grind down or impede any vast swathes of accumulated wealth because it will be the market that negotiates the acceptance of said wealth. Not necessarily through malicious crime, but through higher-level market mechanisms that ultimately give rise the extent and strength of claim.

As a market it might not look much like the idealized American myth of our simplistic contemporary 'market.' But then we knew it wouldn't.

* There is a point to be made here about the problem of manipulation, but I think it's a much broader point that no structural system can address directly, because on such a level we can't dictate intent, we can only recognize and work around biases. So it's no more a fundamental problem than it is for anarcho-communism. That said, I think intent and psychological issues of control are rightfully at the very core of the anarchist project. It just falls outside the purview of this discussion.

2009-09-11T23:38:00.000-07:00

(You Assholes Already Have Your Incense Candles And Your "Internal Combustion Engines")

Sometimes I feel like I must be the only anarchist in the goddamn world who's not looking forward to the day when the government finally repeals marijuana prohibition. Rah rah rah, personal choice, liberty, freedom, etc. Of course. But that shit is going to be Obnoxious.

These days everyone on earth knows that tobacco is a big pile of deadly poison but everyone also knows that marijuana is as harmless to your longterm health as a cuddly puppy wrapped in rainbows. Consequently second hand tobacco smoke has built up sharp connotations of incivility that marijuana smoke doesn't have. Because the government has cracked down on it so hard, marijuana's legal status is the only sanction people stop to think about. These days people will automatically go outside to smoke a cigarette so as to not be rude only to then walk back in and light up a huge blunt beside you without askance or a second thought.

If our culture takes just as long to develop some frail standards of decency as it did on tobacco smoke then you can bet your ass for a long while every fucking bus stop will be Tragedy of the Commons 101.

Look, all I'm saying is that when I feel like momentarily sabotaging my neural net I don't go around spitting the whiskey I'm drinking into other people's mouths. *shake fist*

2009-09-09T07:35:00.000-07:00

(A Brief Defense of Transhumanism & Its Abolition)

Shit is accelerating.

Not just Language to Algebra to Calculus to Transistors. We are more aware of and referential to everything.

There's a certain sector of society of which this is especially true; that understands and embraces this. And pretty much nobody else matters. For the very first time in history the brightest of the brightest are associating more and more, challenging one another and developing free of traditionalist frameworks. They are doing this in direct combat with the premise of social power dynamics. All along various distributions, people are challenging themselves to climb higher and they are finding places to go. The empathic are engaged like never before, entirely new vistas of understanding opening to them. Those focused on autistic explorations of the inert are running wild. We are going somewhere.

And yet everyone is preoccupied with those who haven't caught up or -- even more amusingly -- those who don't want to. No doubt the spasms of their development or suicide will be enormous, and it goes without saying that we should mind their waves. But now is no longer the time to be preoccupied with them.

Of course we're going to plant stuff in our neurocortexes, bypass language and see an explosion in the bandwidth of interrelation between these whirling hurricanes we call minds. Of course we're going to jump the fuck beyond the chains of this deplorable gravity well, chew up regolith, tap ice and mine the strewn bits of metal candy just fucking floating there. Of course we're going to figure out how to replicate or metastasize the constituent material of our hurricanes and share the party outward and outward until we have to bifurcate to deal with relativistic limitations.

Of fucking course.

Transhumanism is not a bunch of white guys sitting in a room watching slides of poorly translated advances in biology. It's not about taking our toys home and waiting for the robots to rescue us from reality.

It's not an ideology -- and insofar as it may drift in that direction it should be abolished. Insofar as it matters though, it is an idealism. Shorter still, an ideal: that of motion. We are not afraid of change. We are change. When we reach out beyond the present context we don't do so in ignorance of it. Just dismissal of its value unto itself. A hundred million years is short term. You put on your shoes every morning, but you don't live for the act of knotting shoelaces. In a matter of decades we have compounded more than a billion years of evolution. Things are only getting faster. And that's still just the short term.

Transhumanism is not an ideology, transhumanism is a space to have discussions about our struggles in the present day without having to defend the very notion of change.

Transhumanism is a safe space for those who recognize that the future exists.

2009-08-18T22:30:00.000-07:00

(What If A Shareholder Blocks? And What Exactly Is Their Process For Standasides?)

Explain to me again why corporations and cooperatives come to decisions through majoritarian democracy? I mean seriously. That doesn't make any fucking sense whatsoever. And I've been struggling to comprehend this for nearly a decade. Seriously. What on earth could be more arbitrary and totally irrelevant to the efficient management or allocation of resources? I mean it really strains credulity. ...For god's sake, there could be hostile takeovers.

~ some brief response and commentary @ no third solution ~

2009-08-17T00:12:00.000-07:00

(Att: Liberal Arts Majors)

"Social reality" is a contradiction in terms. Reality is what an infant can figure out playing and exploring alone on a desert island. The social is all the clutter that gets in the way of that kind of understanding. ...Look, there can be bananas lying about, I'm not cruel. You're missing the point.

2009-08-16T21:08:00.000-07:00

(Holy Shit, Indeed)

"Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right."

-- Thomas Jefferson.

2009-08-15T23:12:00.000-07:00

(Another Instance Of The Technocratic Elite, Hand In Hand With Capital, Fulfilling Science's Only Use And True Goal: The Subjugation Of The Workers And The Commodification Of Everyday Life)

No doubt the high priests of technocracy with their gospel of automation -- their love affair with the architecture of control, and acolythistic faith in unending "progress" -- don't want you to see this video which exposes the inherent character of their religion for what it is: a shibboleth of unspeakable proportions, with no purpose besides our alienation from the natural world.

...

edit: it's called a fucking joke, people. link contradicts body. for context see practically every piece of leftist (and post-leftist) lit in the last twenty years.

2009-08-11T19:32:00.000-07:00

(Silly Brits)

"Whereas race- or gender-based struggles strive for recognition as equals and for coexistence; class struggle aims not at workers and bosses all getting along, but on the contrary aggravating their differences to the point of rupture and social revolution."

I think this quote [pdf] perfectly exemplifies just how out of touch, antiquated and irrelevant Libcom is. The struggles encompassing race and gender are vast and varied. But the native Anarchist stance is not one of equitable segregation or the peaceful maintenance of some status quo -- as Anarchists our campaign is their rupture and complete dissolution. Just what do they think Bash Back is all about? The point is not to reform gender or race relations, but to blow those structural realities to smithereens.

2009-08-11T00:19:00.000-07:00

(Books!)

I really wish that Magpie had included writers that actually matter in the modern world (like Ken Macleod, Iain Banks, Charlie Stross, etc.) as opposed to horribly embarrassing shit like Starhawk and Jensen. Nevertheless, the interviews he's compiled in Mythmakers & Lawbreakers are impressive, hard-won and occasionally rather fun. No longer a hypothetical or perpetual project, the book's cover has just been released on his blog, with AK Press allegedly shipping in September.

If you need something to crack in the meantime you might consider the recently Suffled How it Gush, an engaging anarchist travelogue through the various (A) communities and projects in the Balkans. The new edition is particularly apropos since several of author Shon Meckfessel's friends (working in Northern Iraq) were abducted by the Iranian government last week.

2009-08-07T02:44:00.000-07:00

(Cry Little Girl, Cry)

To much horror and outrage, it appears that WalMart has begun underselling the Girl Scouts. I want to be clear: This is fair and desirable. Of course both sides benefit from monopoly privileges and artificial economies of scale, both through the usual diffuse effects of the state and, more broadly, through our market's general indolence. But while this action may be characterized as unfeeling or rude on the part of WalMart -- violating an implicit social and cultural agreement to uphold the Girl Scouts' cookie monopoly, an act of charity through inaction -- I'm going to take the classic Libertarian position here and say that such disrespectful greed is an unqualified good thing.

Blah, blah, blah, before going into the details obviously more dynamism is always a good thing in the long term as it promotes evolutionary fitness among all parties and the most efficient and democratic satiation of desires. Betraying my Austrian dalliances, in any given situation my default allegiances tend to lie with the consumers and $4 for a box of samoas once a year is arguably quite exploitative of those of us laboring under their cruel addiction. But more specifically monopolies corrupt and while Girl Scouts of America may not be rolling tanks under the Arc de Triomphe, the centralized production and sale of said cookies (an incredibly profitable branch of the Kellogg empire, thank you for asking) is pretty much the sole force holding up the GSA's council system and national hierarchy.

And here we get to the root of the problem. Retaining the hierarchical notions of the progressive movement from whence it was born, the Girl Scouts are not the loose free-forming federation of cooperation and mutual aid one would assume. The centralized corporate structure of their cookie business holds the reigns on a centralized empire that brokers almost no alternatives in scouting (the coed Campfire alone serves as the perennially struggling exception) and tightly controls the practices of local clusters of parents and children. While not as profoundly and militantly deist and homophobic as the Boy Scouts of America, the GSA's monopoly status nevertheless forces the suppression of queer girls and the valorization of religious faith in every troop. Without local entrepreneurial deviation and experiment in such basic areas there is simply no way to efficiently deliver the experiences parents and girls desire, much less maintain or develop the scouting tradition.

The current cookie system works well for the Girl Scouts because their centralized national body is able to utilize Kellogg's economies of scale to produce them en masse (Kellogg's in turn sells more thanks to their "charity" branding), then the girls themselves (forbidden by the arbitrary strictures of child labor laws from earning cash through other operations) do the delivery, promotion and general retail footwork. But, as the emotionless market calculating machine of WalMart has figured out, Kellogg's and the GSA aren't the only ones with access to an optionless cheap labor pool or the ability to exploit state-created economies of scale. The only thing they don't have is the brand -- or, less cynically, the public goodwill. The logical response for the Girl Scouts is to re-tailor their business model to fully utilize this advantage. And, if I may be so bold as to offer some Left Libertarian advice, the best way to do that would be to embrace the autonomous nature of the scouting tradition, localizing and personalizing their efforts where WalMart homogenizes. There ain't nothing wrong with a bake sale. The possibilities for work are endless, from native-plantlife restoring landscaping to bike repair. Of course the government actively suppresses such wildcat production and commerce, but imagine how awesome it would be to be greeted at the supermarket doors by scouts selling just-burnt smores from portable gas stoves that they made themselves.

That's why WalMart's greed is a good thing. Not because callous disregard for others is a virtue, but because the vigilant application of self-interested rational thought and direct action -- even among evil constructs of state-capitalism -- allow us to collectively negotiate varying wants and desires towards a conclusion that best satiates everyone: S'mores.

2009-07-26T23:35:00.000-07:00

(Some Particularly Concise Words)

The non-aggression principle is not an axiom. By the term "axiom" I more or less mean something that is self-evident and irreducible, a stand-alone principle that functions as an obvious starting point from which everything else springs. This is not to say that I don't advocate the non-aggression principle or do not think that it is important, but it is to say that I think that its treatment in this way, as an "axiom", is a serious mistake that has had the consequence of oversimplifying libertarianism and providing no basis out of which to stop it from fragmenting into a multitude of contradicting social philosophies.

Brainpolice FTW. Of course, speaking personally, I don't advocate the non-aggression principle, because I don't think it can be strongly derived from any non-arbitrary moral arguments. But it would be nice if more Libertarians were competent or introspective enough to be open to that discussion. All too frequently the NAP is pulled out of a hat to justify some random delineation between realms of acceptable and unacceptable action. And then any critique is countered on the most hazily inducted rule-utilitarian grounds that every possible non-NAP formulation of ethics = Stalinist Death Camps.

2009-07-21T17:47:00.001-07:00

(Another Anarcho-Punk Spanging On The Side Of The Street)

In a ridiculous act of harassment and thuggery, the state of Alabama has just randomly swiped everything in Roderick Long's bank accounts -- and his mother's, just to ice the cake -- leaving him without a cent for food or housing until September. What Caesar giveth and all that. Read the details here. There are few enough anarchist philosopher extraordinaires in the world so if you're the sort of person with walkin' around money, consider this a major karma investment opportunity.

2009-07-12T00:58:00.000-07:00

(Three Thousand Years)

'On a certain day 9200 years ago the manorial houses at the north side of the large square in Çayönü were burnt down, and this happened so fast that the owners were not able to save any of their treasures. The temple was torn down and burnt, and even the floor was ripped open, the stone pillars around the free space were taken down and the taller of them were broken up. The place itself - previously maintained and kept meticulously clean for more than 1000 years - was converted into a municipal waste dump. After a short chaotic transition all houses had been torn down. The slums in the west disappeared for good, but only a few steps away from the spot where the ruins of the manorial houses had burnt the new Çayönü was erected. The new houses were comparable in size to the old manors but there were no more houses or shacks built to an inferior standard. In all houses, work was done and all hints to social differences were erased.'

I've oft quoted some of the archeological explorations of non-hierarchical town and city cultures in Turkey, mostly because they directly refute primitivism at its core. As Ken comments in the above post, there was "no evidence so far of any social division between the sexes, and no evidence of any deaths by violence, over a very long time. That's staggeringly unusual." Something that simply cannot be emphasized enough. But as I was not aware and Ken documents further, not only is there great evidence to suggest that this state of affairs came about through a revolution, this completely game-changing society "spread for thousands of miles and remained free, equal, happy and peaceful for three thousand years." Three thousand years.

2009-06-20T23:37:00.000-07:00

(In Case Kinsella Asks)

I absolutely refuse to condemn the Iranian protesters throwing molotovs or smashing and overturning property in the streets as impediments to the riot cops. Because I am a vandarchist.

2009-06-17T23:46:00.000-07:00

(And Then, Of Course, The Comments Section Just Fails)

I realize I've been a bit lax on the snark and the SF/culture commentary here, most of that jazz has migrated to my Facebook feed -- now with 300% more insularity and arXiv links! But while I'm trying to shift the focus here to hard political texts, if you need a fix of old school Human Iterations you should head over over to this bit by China Mieville that perfectly channels the infinitely meta-ed snark.

2009-05-30T00:22:00.000-07:00

(You Always Bring Me The Very Best Math)

It's an uphill battle to avoid turning this blog into a pile of esoteric links to awesome papers in the physics arXiv. But in this case I'm going to have to make an exception. You're only required to read the extract:

Many mechanisms for the emergence and maintenance of altruistic behavior in social dilemma situations have been proposed. Indirect reciprocity is one such mechanism, where altruistic actions of a player are eventually rewarded by other players with whom the original player has not interacted. The upstream reciprocity (also called generalized indirect reciprocity) is a type of indirect reciprocity and represents the concept that those helped by somebody will help other unspecified players. In spite of the evidence for the enhancement of altruistic behavior by upstream reciprocity in rats and humans, this mechanism has not been really supported in theory. In the present study, we numerically investigate upstream reciprocity in heterogeneous contact networks, in which the players generally have different number of neighbors. We show that heterogeneous networks considerably enhance cooperation in a game of upstream reciprocity. In heterogeneous networks, the most generous strategy, by which a player helps a neighbor on being helped and in addition initiates helping behavior, first occupies hubs in a network and then disseminates to other players.

The key bit, highlighted more prevalently in the paper itself, is that while altruistic strategies can be effective through "what goes around, comes around" mechanisms, they can end up doing so best in jumbled, heterogeneous societies and further, in such cases, do so disproportionately. Those individuals that have the most connections -- or the most relevant connections -- with others will end up benefiting the most.

I know the point here is nothing new to many of us but, given the frequent assumptions and general state of affairs in the activist community, forgive me if it seems worth reiterating:

The upshot is that connectivity is privilege. Not a privilege that should be abolished or rolled back, but one that should nevertheless be constantly recognized, addressed and struggled with in our daily lives. Disequilibria in connectivity leads to compounded relative inequality and implicit power dynamics, but because connectivity is what animates altruism (which provides absolute advances for all) the egalitarian solution in any context is always to expand connectivity for all.

If the benefactors of such expansions have a random component to their selection, then we can retain and advance any advantages of heterogeneous societies while simultaneously avoiding both the martyred suppression of the most connected nodes as well as any perpetuated unequal accumulation of benefits.

This provides an interesting context from which to evaluate evolutionary fitness claims regarding Dunbar's Number. But it also clarifies the very real problem that faces major radical activists and organizers as well as simply folks in communities built on mutual aid wherein the scope of our personal connections both seems to best facilitate collaborative benefits for all, but also places us in -- what should at least damn well be -- an uncomfortable situation vis a vis the advantages that come back to us personally, compounding and further embedding us in such roles. I think it's incumbent upon us as anarchists to respond to these advantages not necessarily by hobbling or martyring ourselves through severing our personal connections but by acting consciously to expand and deepen the connections of others. And, in such rare homogeneous situations where everyone is as connected as they can be and this is less efficient than a more heterogeneous arrangement -- given contextual limitations -- periodically, in different ways, we can make the choice to step back and let others function in a more hub-like capacity. Weirdly enough, such a meta-strategy can even be in our best interest individually.

2009-05-29T11:34:00.000-07:00

(Fractured Rulership)

Is power stronger when it's centralized or when it's decentralized?

It seems quite strange to assert that the psychoses of power are capable of accomplishing far more when centralized as opposed to decentralized, when this is not true for anything else. Empire is not magically apart from the psychological roots that give rise to it. So why should the project of oppressing people be accomplished more efficiently by the centralization of those efforts rather than through diffuse decentralized approaches?

Certainly it's worth noting that, somewhat unique among goals, power has the property of diminishing the strength of the mind its rooted in, but I fail to see how this makes the many-minded pursuit of power different from more single, collective or centralized approaches. It's not like the trivially differing particulars between individual power-goals conflict with one another in any non-trivial way. Introduce yet another prince or warlord to a conflict seeking to personally rule all and you hardly lower the body count or the efficiency of enslavement.

Indeed one is left to wonder why those who are otherwise quite aware of the innate inefficiencies and diseconomies of scale in corporations or communism, nevertheless approach the state's attempts to subjugate us as though they were exempt from the same realities. Surely all of Hitler's meticulous clockwork of genocide was proven fundamentally out-gunned in speed and gumption by poorly armed peasants in Rwanda.

It has always appeared quite clear to me that we should consider ourselves lucky to live in a world defined by global Empire. Obviously our world is still a horrific one, whose innate evil and daily atrocities we, as anarchists, can never begin to accept. But while we work tirelessly to overcome and eradicate power, seizing every opportunity to change the parameters of the game, it does not seem clear to me that we should simply leap upon developments that remove the largest impediment our enemies currently have.

2009-05-21T04:55:00.000-07:00

(Alright, But That Won't Stop Me From Calling Them "Twats")

The thing about writing is that good reasons for avoiding it often promote bad reasons. You will always have a million things to write; emails to follow up on and comment threads to finish. Your time will always be compressed between blocks of weighty Importance. But when you're gifted with a formal and much wider public space like this the trick is not to try and paint it as another responsibility, but as a release valve for yourself. Inspiration can't be caught or relaxed into. It can't be systematically stoked like a fire because you can't separate it from yourself. And trying to does violence to you both.

As an excuse for this post I see that Chris Acheson has put together an easy to use, portable package of Firefox with crypto for the simpletons among us like me. I'll link to it through the @H+ blog so as to spread the much needed props all around.

Returning somewhat to the initial topic, How The Other Half Writes is an enviable defense of Twitter. Of course the specifics of Twitter are inseparable from the internet's current context of centralized services rather than truly networking protocols. If the dominant use of certain technologies appears inane or dehumanizing rather than connective, it's worth remembering that their boundaries are shaped just as much by the luddite pushback against the potentials we so champion.

2009-04-22T02:44:00.000-07:00

(Direct Action)

We had been complaining about how hot it was for years, but management refused to buy a fan or install air conditioning because it was "too expensive." At the same time, our store was pulling in $30,000 a week.

One morning, four of my coworkers walked into the back room of our store and gave the boss an ultimatum: "Will you buy the store a fan? Yes or no?" He stalled....so my four coworkers walked off the job, got in a car and drove to Target, leaving the boss to cover the floor. He was livid.

About 20 minutes later, my coworkers walked back in with a $14 box fan. They plugged it in, wrote "Courtesy of the IWW," drew a small black "Sabotage cat" [the IWW logo] on it, and enjoyed the breeze.

This left management with a choice. They could either remove the fan, in which case they would look like jerks. Or they could leave it there, as a monument to their own negligence.

To their credit, they did the right thing. Two days later, the district manager arrived with a $150 industrial floor fan. Two weeks later, they began installing air conditioning. This is the power of direct action. One week, $40 is too much to spend to bring the temperature in the store to within OSHA standards. The next week, management is spending $10,000 to keep the workers happy.

Every time I hear this story I fall in love all over again.

Congrats on the Bank of America shout-out.

2009-04-08T07:41:00.000-07:00

(The Union Makes Us Weak)

I wrote a pretty lengthy response to Iain McKay's recent bit on post-leftism and was asked to repost it beyond Infoshop.

First, let's ignore the non sequitur anti-science and anti-tech bullshit for now, since perspectives on either have absolutely nothing to do with post-leftism. After all while there are primmies and anti-civs within the post-left, there are also a plethora of transhumanists, cyberpunx and general internet-loving radicals who see invention and exploration as inherently liberatory acts.

Post Left Anarchists are functionally distinct from Left Anarchists in our distaste and suspicion of organization. That is to say our focus on critiquing the drive for organization-as-an-ends-unto-itself. Yes, we recognize that for all the profound changes in social and economic context since the days of yore, there are still workers and bosses and that very real advantages can be wrung out of the system through collective action. But we find the drive for mass and momentum as a primary ends to be constricting and ultimately self-crippling. We see Left Anarchists, and the Left as a whole, as instinctively clinging to the idea of numbers as a solution. Perhaps this is primarily a relic of those ancient days when any social adversary could be squashed by simply throwing enough bodies at it, or perhaps it is a perversion wrought by years of indoctrination in democratic ideals. Modern politics views building mass as the definition of success -- and certainly we will not see anything near true anarchy until every single human being comes to the realization that power relations are always evil -- but getting people to march under a banner is not the same thing as bringing them to a fuller appreciation of the nature of power. (Similarly, discussions on class-relations circa 1917 will not lay the groundwork to the better interpersonal relations that must come before any larger project.) And yet we feel that too often conventional Left Anarchists focus on getting people into the organization (as well as building the solidity of said organization and its brand name) to the detriment of these fundamentals.

Maybe that was pragmatic a century ago, but today mass matters a whole heck of a lot less. The state, the class system, etc, are underpinned less through the application of blunt social force and more through complicated machinations. The ecosystems of power relations we find ourselves embedded within can sustain great pressure, they can handle mass. The key to winning the war today is not mass -- we're not out to win some Revolution as though it were an election by another name -- the key is intelligent proactive exploitation of weak spots. Killing the motherfucker will involve a whole lot less brute grappling and a whole lot more hacking. We will win not as an army of soldiers but an insurrection of generals.

Hence our annoyance with the inclination to build a sense of structure and mass first and apply it -- or figure out how to apply it -- second. We've always seen the world we're building as an ad hoc one of projects and discussions, not organizations and federations. Our take away from this dream is the realization that if a project needs to focus on structure and lines of inclusion and exclusion in order to motivate action then, in the words of a cute kitten, "ur doin' it wrong." The Union hasn't made us strong, the Union's made us weak. It's wasted our time, suppressed our innovation and chained us to groupthink.

That's not to say that we're completely different from Left Anarchists. Certainly they as well have at times expressed a mild realization of the problems with this, just as we have participated in large federations and wasted hours of our life in rooms debating process documents. But even if it's only a matter of degree, in practice this difference of opinion/desire/strategy is still an important distinction.

And, if we are to be allowed to make this distinction, it's worth noting that our perspective is quite at odds with the overwhelming historical nature of the Left. Or, at the very least, the Left outside of Anarchism. So why the hell not define the Left in these terms of mass and structure worship and ourselves as outside it?

"Perhaps it is the American political climate which demonises "socialism" (in all its forms, equating it to Stalinism usually), a climate they are adjusting themselves to?"

And why shouldn't we?!

Putting aside Iain's smug british-chauvinism in this quote, it's worth wondering just why in the hell anyone should want to continue fighting a definitional war over "The Left." The Left-Right polarity in politics has shifted dramatically throughout history and is grounded in an almost meaningless obscurity. There were radical free market folks of worse behavior than the worst ancap today who sat to the left of the president's chair. Even worse the revolutionary distinction between "left and right" was in the popular mind considered one of action vs theory. Seriously none of us want to chain ourselves to one of those at the total expense of the other?

Yes, in America "The Left" is largely synonymous with authoritarian socialism and paternalism... just as it is in the rest of the world. Even if the devastating effects of the Soviet Union's influence could be overcome in the public's mind, that's not a battle most anarchists around the world are fighting. In much of Latin America and Eastern Europe anarchists have completely abandoned self-identification as Leftists. Western Europe is a more complicated matter, but there are plenty of anarcho-syndicalists who refuse to call themselves left. Just as similar although not entirely overlapping numbers of folk have abandoned the term "socialism". Indeed, on a global scale, the British Isles seem to be the only ones making a shrill fuss about this.

Yes there's a history that's important to be aware of. Folks who took exception to the same things we take exception to but worked under the Left nonetheless because it was the only possible game in town back then. But things have changed and the example of the rest of the Left and Socialism, much less their influence, have become serious concrete blocks on our feet. We fight over the definition of the word "anarchy" because we're forced to. Because an-archy has a clear etymological definition that it'll never shed and we have a drastically different evaluation of "without rulership." We're going to have to die on that hill no matter how strategically inopportune. But "social-ism" much less "left" are fluid, entirely fucking arbitrary words. They're defined by what they're associated with. And that's pretty awful company.

2009-04-07T01:05:00.000-07:00

(Space... The Final Revolt)

Sometimes I really wonder why I ever bother thumbing through old leftist texts. And then I find something pretty.

Humanity will enter into space to make the universe the playground of the last revolt: the revolt that will go against the limitations imposed by nature. Once the walls have been smashed that now separate people from science, the conquest of space will no longer be an economic or military “promotional” gimmick, but the blossoming of human freedoms and fulfillments, attained by a race of gods. We will not enter into space as employees of an astronautic administration or as “volunteers” of a state project, but as masters without slaves reviewing their domains: the entire universe pillaged for the workers councils.

--Internationale Situationniste, 1969.

2009-04-03T23:54:00.000-07:00

(Preoccupied)

In the meantime enjoy this quote from someone who is famous. And on TV.

Straw wrote, "If people were angels there would be no need for government . . . But sadly people are not all angels." That rather makes it sound as though he believes politicians aren't mere people. Maybe they're the gods of Olympus. Maybe that's why they're in charge.

--Charlie Brooker, in a column semi-endorsing Class War UK.

2009-03-22T02:12:00.000-07:00

(Best Review Ever)

"and then everybody decides to be freegans and live in dirt huts and make life suck for themselves even worse than on New Caprica, because cities are evil. Sam pilots the entire Fleet into the sun so that just in case anybody starts getting the idea that progress and intellectual development and the human urge to excellence lie anywhere other than somewhere on a scale between inconvenient and vile."

[...]

"Once again, the only emotionally resonant part is Gaius and Caprica, who are back in love and ready to make a go of it as farmers. This is intense because of how Gaius has always defined himself as not-farmer, and so after all the letting go and handing the cult over to Paulla really only has one lie left. It's maybe the biggest emotional step he's taken this whole show, and it's amazing. The angels show up and explain that there wasn't really a point to all of their bullshit except to keep Hera safe long enough to get her to Earth, and then Other Earth. Meanwhile, Helo and Athena teach Hera to surf and grow beans, and the Chief heads off to invent Ireland."

Thanks, tvpity. We wouldn't have been able to make it through this goddamn show without you.

Me? I'm having a hard time writing anything longer than Arrogant Liberals are Arrogant.

2009-03-19T23:59:00.000-07:00

(Brandon Darby Is Our Fault)

Let's talk about Brandon Darby.

Brandon Darby was an activist rockstar who took over one of the most visible projects in the anarchist milieu. Brandon Darby was flipped by the cops. And, as of Monday, it's safe to say that Brandon Darby ended up putting two people behind bars.

No sense in dressing it up. Beyond even the jail time, in the realm of perception--both public and internal--this was a great loss for us. For a million reasons we shouldn't be in the condition where we have activist rockstars, and we shouldn't be in the condition where our rank and file are ignorant and shallow enough to crack. But we are.

Brandon Darby's inclusion within the Anarchist milieu was always extremely problematic and indicative of a widespread and longstanding crisis point in the movement. Because:

1. Darby exhibited prominent indications of power psychoses in his day-to-day actions.

2. Darby's political and ethical stances were logically ungrounded.

It's clear that Darby was never an altogether great person, but at the end of the day it is we who are responsible for the clusterfuck that he's become. Blaming or hatemongering Darby is as useless as blaming or hatemongering an inanimate object or a liberal.

Darby was not someone who turned away from the light, Darby was one of the great many within our ranks who have never actually seen it.

I'm not particularly happy about using the revelation of an informant in our ranks to open an internal tirade on the state of the movement, but feel obliged given the sort of language that's been bouncing around the scene since.

Whenever something momentous happens in our little world everyone struggles to use it as proof or justification of their existing opinions. And yes, we should have practiced better security culture, we should have at least addressed -- in some way -- Darby's powergaming. But what's unique about Brandon Darby's case compared to the usual planted informants and undercovers we deal with is that while those approaches would have helped limit the damage, neither of them would have stopped it outright. Brandon Darby was already among our ranks, already embedded in circles of trust when he jumped ship.

Amid all the bellowing about building a threatening gangster-like culture of "stitches for snitches" and more cogent -- if still unfortunate -- calls for retreat behind walls of personal trust, every single voice I've heard has spoken with unison on the futility of addressing the problem itself. "There will always be Brandon Darbys" begin a million forum posts and zine features.

No.

No, there don't have to be. And the very fact that so many people believe this an occasion unpreventable, points to a profound crisis developing in our movement.

Brandon Darby and his still hidden brethren are the consequence of a culture that has abandoned intellectual vigilance and left us poorly inoculated against the sort of laughably shoddy logic that blindsided Darby and motivated him to seek out collaboration with the state.

Remember that we're right. Reason is our home court. We not in any danger of losing an argument on ethics. The very idea is preposterous. We've nothing to fear from deeper examination of any issue; it can only make us quicker and more agile.

There's never any danger in challenging our own ideas because it's our boundless vigilance in our search that differentiates us from the statists. For us there is nothing to be lost and much to be gained in adopting as instinct the habit of questioning our own thoughts and delving deeper.

And yet not only has this become the exception rather than the rule, but we've arguably reached the point where little in our ranks is so despised and frequently spoken against than the practice of thinking things though. We are not a movement of those damnable outdated geeky anarcho-syndicalists, afterall, with their endless prattling on about unsexy things like theory. No, the anarchists of today, we're all about getting things done. Theory insofar only as it directly relates to practice. Obviously it's alright to talk about touchy-feely matters of personal perspective -- that's just a matter of not oppressing one another and tearing ourselves apart in the process of getting shit done -- but constantly exploring our own logic? active philosophical analysis? valuing consistency, coherency and general rootedness? ...talk about your irrelevant circle-jerks.

We've created a situation where vague, nebulous emotional motivations are valorized while vigilant examination is frowned upon. Where a prideful or meritocratic focus on 'getting things done' has trumped actual engagement.

Not only does this create ticking timebombs like Darby, it actively recruits them.

A large swath of the anarchist movement has been set up as an ancillary to liberalism. Folks move from liberal activism, to getting particularly outraged about a given injustice or two (old growth logging, working class exploitation, border enforcement, queer assimilation, thuggish police... etc), which drives them into social circles that sloganistically champion their wider set of preexisting political opinions in a more militant fashion. At one point their grievances against their own government pile up to the point where they stop seeing the state as a tool, ally or arena. There's a little "oh, hey" moment when they realize they no longer support the state, figure they must finally be "anarchists" like everyone around them, and then that's that.

The problem with this transformation is that it's governed by nebulous emotional and social trends. New arguments are seized upon when offered because they seem like an upping of the anti, a deepening of their existing political identity and a strengthening of their resolve. The extremity of the reasoning (and associated action) they encounter is audacious and exhilarating, and to top it all off it makes sense. But the context in which they pick up and adopt these arguments is one of passive integration rather than aggressive engagement.

Folks become entrenched in a social position and engaged in actions that constantly reinforce their emotional commitment, but remain poorly immunized with habits of direct logic and analysis.

Emotional loyalty can deflect the occasional apparent empirical counter-example, and they can shut out particularly successful critiques for a while, but in the long term these at the very least create an unhealthy tension, and at worst prescribe an inevitable break.

Since his proud declaration of proactive complicity in the state's prosecution of certain activists Darby has presented a variety of justifications for his actions. Although excluded from the activist community and demonized by the broader anarchist movement, Darby has nevertheless worked quite diligently to make his reasoning heard. It's an interesting situation because even if his intentions are less than noble, Darby must still assume his arguments are potent.

And that's exactly the problem. Because every justification he's made to in the public press has been laughably stupid:

1. You can get more done by working with the government.

Well yes. But contrary to some myths, 'getting shit done' is not the endall of our activism. We're not anarchists because in today's context an antagonistic position toward political power is particularly effective at getting community centers built or aid distributed or old growth forests protected.

We're called anarchists because we believe the State to be evil. Because we believe power is immoral.

We're anarchists not because we want to reduce the amount of mercury injected into puppies, but because we want to abolish the motherfucking state. We're anarchists because our goal is to abolish all power relations. Everything else is a means to that end. Not vice versa.

Anarchism isn't hardcore-activist-scene trappings. It isn't a "way of doing things"; a tool or commodity on the market that might help you obtain your random political desires. Anarchy IS the desire.

We want something that a centralized power structure by its very nature can't give us: Liberty.

Of course working with the Government will get a homeless shelter built faster than working in open defiance of its zoning restrictions. And sometimes that's needed. But sometimes it's faster to simply occupy an abandoned building.

And sometimes, when you do fight and you help people organize something for themselves outside of the coercive control of the state, it invigorates and inspires them to take the next step in their own lives. Something that working with the government can't do.

2. Disrupting political conventions suppresses the free speech of politicians.

So does punching a censor in the jaw.

As with anything, context matters and means are not exactly the same thing as ends.

Political democracy suppresses free speech by allowing, even encouraging people to vote on what others are allowed to say. Our government has always outlawed the transmission of information that might seriously threaten its continued existence. Simply explaining our ideals is treason punishable with the death penalty -- and would be if they ever thought our plans viable. So if you truly value free speech then it stands to reason that disrupting the political process is its best defense.

Because at the end of the day political conventions are not cafe discussions or roadside protests. The discussion is that of generals and goons meeting to gloat and showcase their plans to suppress all of us.

By their advocates' own admission, completely nonviolent forms of resistance only work in a medium where the information regarding such acts can be transmitted and received. But just how might anyone fight back against those actively using physical force to suppress free speech without disrupting theirs the tiniest bit through our resistance?

Sure, if it was somehow constitutionally, fundamentally impossible for politicians to enact or enforce laws based on say Intellectual Property, Decency, Confidentiality, Libel, Association, Movement, Counterfeiting, Treason, etc... then it might be said that government wasn't inherently suppressing free speech.

Just basing all of its actions off its capacity to murder and imprison us... oh wait.

3. People should openly accept responsibility for their own actions.

Let's examine a case study: Should the French Maquis, after an action against the occupying Germans, reveal their identity and stand out in town square to take the "consequences"?

I mean What. The. Fuck.

The idea that acquiescing to a government's revenge is "taking responsibility for one's actions" is utterly disgusting.

And insulting -- just insulting -- in its flagrant lack of thought.

Yeah, honesty and openness are critical components of any free and just society. But this isn't one. Hiding our faces is a utilitarian decision, and a tricky one to be sure, but we don't live in a free marketplace of ideas and reputations. Again, voicing our beliefs as anarchists is legally classified as Treason. We can be fucking executed for printing a zine.

There are, of course, valid concerns to be had when it comes to unilaterally deciding to up the anti in a situation of collective confrontation. That's an issue of consent, and also of broader strategy. Everyone agrees that bringing a stack of pre-made molotovs to the RNC was sketchy. St. Paul is not Thessaloniki. But obviously there were plenty of ways to stop Crowder and McKay that didn't involve proactively seeking to aid one of the most violent, hierarchical and repressive organizations in the world, the state.

Darby's decision was abhorrent. It was also really fucking stupid. That he hasn't even batted an eyelid, making the above points sincerely, again and again, to anyone who would listen, signals more than anything else that we need to shape up the way that we as a movement, as a culture, approach reason and logic.

Moreover it directly challenges what many people have already taken away as the lesson. We are not going to solve the problem of informants, traitors and cops by drawing lines, falling back on limited circles of trust and clamming up. Being able to shut people and ideas out is not the definition of winning, it's the definition of retreat.

For god's sake, enough of this inane "brute action over inquisitive analysis" fratboy bullshit. We need to grow up. Being able to rattle off a laundry list of invective builds energy but offers no restorative focus in the face of complexities. Depreciating mental explorations that don't immediately lead to actionable proscriptions is suicidal. It's our responsibility to create and maintain a culture of thinking things through. One where discourse on every topic is not only acceptable, but standard fare. Where challenging ourselves intellectually is not derided as masturbation, but as the critical component of our war on power.

Being disinclined to take action is not some passive character trait, but an argument, however cloaked and subconscious, that can and should be openly challenged. Rather than drawing lines and selecting as comrades those that happen to be correctly motivated, we should unceasingly endeavor to create them. And yet our movement is wrapped up in retreat. Progressive insularity and disengagement only broken by mild spurts of semi-inspirational actions. Propaganda through the deed has become an excuse to be 1) incredibly bad at propaganda and 2) incredibly bad at deed.

And you know what? Let me tell you, after a decade's close experience with them, Cops and Informants aren't the ones who don't do anything. They're the ones who can't give you a good reason as to why they're doing it. They revert to emotional appeals and make nebulous statements, but bristle with discomfort and finally hostility when a conversation turns to their rationales. Because emotion is easy to fake while even the most psychopathic of state actors has to justify their own actions to themselves.

That realm of logic is, by necessity, a no-go zone. It must remain their safe space. Something they can depend on, unfettered by serious doubts.

How shallow, how meaningless must have been Brandon Darby's original interpretation of Anarchism that he could carve out a secret mental space in response with ideas as brittle and preposterous as the ones above?

That's our crime. We let that happen. In the culture we created it became inevitable.

But we can build a better one.

I'm not saying that we'll covert every undercover cop at assigned to eat our tofu scramble into double agents (although this has happened). Or that opportunistic psychopathic douchebags will suddenly stop gravitating towards showy activist projects. What I am saying is that if we start holding each other intellectually accountable in our everyday lives we can make their job a hell of a lot harder. And maybe, just maybe, we will no longer have to deal with people ditching the movement and betraying us all for really stupid reasons that they somehow think are profound.

2009-03-18T14:49:00.000-07:00

(Back)

2009-02-04T13:32:00.000-08:00

(Blog Will Return Mid To Late March)

I'm back to taking emails.

2008-12-05T21:50:00.000-08:00

(An Old Quote)

"Technological Development is no more responsible for the suffering of modern world than the Spanish Anarchists were responsible for Franco's atrocities because 'they provoked it.'"

2008-12-02T05:36:00.000-08:00

(Sabbatical Cont.)

With respect to Libcom, while transexual operations may accept or even reinforce gender, they do so by dissolving sex -- and in general I would say that the distinctions of biological identity are far more entrenched in our society. A negation of coerced relational identities is meaningless without a negation of the material conditions those relations are founded upon. Conversely the negation of gender does not mean the complete extinction of mini-skirts and aftershave. The destruction of identity has never meant the abolishment of it; what we oppose is rigidity in relations -- not the medium itself.

Bindel's transphobia is rooted in the same essentialist strand of identity politics that created "just born this way" bourgeois homosexuality. If people aren't free to alter or redesign their own bodies and impulses then under no reasonable definition are they free. While indeed current transexual tendencies seem largely rife with a reification of gender, ask yourself, would a world where neither gender nor sex were reified see transexuals? I think the answer is quite obviously yes. And thus, while some individual cases may be partially rooted in gender programming, the collective existence of transexuals prior to the revolution cannot be counter-revolutionary.

Attacking transfolk as though their gender-sex pairing makes them a fifth column to feminism (or libertarian communism), is exactly like attacking a nurturing girl or rambunctious boy for being a cog in patriarchy. Obviously, being compelled to match conventional sex with conventional gender is atrocious, but the insinuation that the native anarchist stance should be on the reactionary side of body modification itself is fucking horrifying.

No, minority status should not hand the transexual movement a get out of critical analysis free card, but they deserve better than Django's.

2008-11-24T02:33:00.000-08:00

(Dropped Conversations)

As should be obvious by now to everyone but me, I'm on sabbatical. Which is bourgeois for slacking off with friends and allowing my inbox to rewild.

My anarchism has always been less a matter of mathematics or social justice than an outcropping of my romanticism. And this is the first time in four years I've had a breather to catch up and finally deal with something that once happened in that vein. So yeah, I don't really have any projections, don't know what will come of it or when. Just trying to live in the moment again.

No plans or commitments in sight, just total irresponsibility and home-town escapism. Which I swear differs from the norm. May still post random thoughts.

2008-11-16T06:03:00.000-08:00

(Speaking Of Awesome People)

Somebody's uploaded a copy of Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs.

2008-11-11T05:18:00.000-08:00

(In Surprise Election Twist: Americans Like Feeling Good About Being Americans)

The Empire is saved by an overwhelming tsunami of Restored Civic FaithTM, and the Anarchist movement loses all hope at making serious inroads with Black America for a fucking generation.

No word yet on when anarchists are going to learn that nitpicky shit like "real hope is built from below", "one man can't save us all" or "hey, aren't we still killing darkies?" don't carry water because Americans will never, ever, not in a million years rally behind a platform whose first plank implicitly says "we're not that great, let's try to be better."

Americans are the most arrogant people in the world. And we're proud of it.

Right now we're all shitting ourselves delirious over how awesome we are. We elected a black president. And it's not a big deal. And he's all hip and stuff. Woooo! (My heart goes out to all the poor Europeans only now coming to the horrifying realization that their patronizing backhanded anti-bush compliments have ran amuck and turned into popular proof that we're still better than them. I mean, imagine someone with the middle name Hussein being crowned King, Prime Minster and Grand Cheese Poohbah of Britain.)

To turn Americans against their government the very first step is has always been appealing to their patriotism. America: We Kill Kings. America: We Don't Need No Fucking Leaders. America: We're Too Patriotic To Be Nationalistic. America: Freedom In Your Face. America: I Own A Gun To Shoot Cops. America: We Invented The Fucking Revolution. America: We Invited Empire Into Our Living Room For A Reason. America: It's Only A Matter Of Time Before We Do The Fuckers In. America: It Didn't Happen Over Here.

America: The Only Conceivable Ground Zero For The Revolution.

To understand where to go from here, we have to understand that Americans are in no way attached to Obama the individual, Americans are attached to the way Obama makes them feel.

It won't win us any points to stick to our guns and pointing out just how sick and twisted of a psychopath Obama must be to want to rule us all and to actively seek out that position of domination over us. But if we suck up to the sentiment of the moment, pander to localized interests, and accept the image of a noble man while questioning his effectiveness under "the system" we do make three mistakes:

1. We look stupid, shifty and unprincipled.

2. We sound cynical and outdated.

3. We attack the individualist dream.

In short we throw away our strongest points! Anarchism is the most logical and principled position there is. We automatically win every ethical argument vigilantly taken to its conclusion. Anarchism is embedded in every advance and hope for the future. Every modern ethical awakening has struck against hierarchy, every successful component of the information age adopts more and more anarchistic attributes. Anarchism IS the individualist dream. You, you personally, can singlehandedly start the motherfucking revolution. You're going to have to.

Anarchism is not some mechanical proletarian revolt, nor is it some impersonal mathematical reality of laissez-faire economics. And it's certainly not throwing up your hands and saying to hell with it. Anarchism is a simple ethical and philosophical realization: to be a fully living, thinking human being you have to let go of your power over others. They must let go of their power over you.

The thing is, you already know this. (You're awesome.) So why don't you embrace it further. (And be more awesome.)

Things like pesky little election soap operas are just getting in the way. Never mind that Obama cat, he's no where near as awesome as you. So, and I'm just saying this, what have you done today to spread your awesomeness?

2008-11-03T03:07:00.001-08:00

(A World In Which Truly Anyone Can Become Chief Slavemaster)

Written monday night.

I'm not going to vote. This election simply matters too damn much.

Any other year I'd be up for auctioning my vote off for cash or parading photocopies of my original sin in front of anal retentive deontological anarchists. But not this year. This year isn't "nothing changes", this year is us getting punched in the crotch. This year is our nation coming together. This year is 50 million people believing once more that government can be "a positive force in our lives." This is anything we say being stereotyped into the role of the generic cynic: "Obama won't accomplish much. Obama isn't as leftist as everyone thinks." Consequently this is us getting sidelined and horrifically subverted.

It's an inevitable obstacle, but it's an ugly one. We can't afford to take it sitting down, we can't spend a minute cheering with our misty-eyed friends and family members. We have to keep up the offensive. This is not the good president stuck in an intractable and corrupting position. This is a man so psychologically fucked up that he's pursued a vocation entirely based around exerting coercive force on his fellow man. There is nothing a president can do that is not horrifically violent and oppressive. No act possible from that office that is not grounded in state coercion. It's vital we make that clear.

So as much as it pains me to miss out on a chance to piss off my fellow anarchists, I will not be voting in this election.

That said, I will be quietly rooting for Obama.

As much as I can't stand liberals--much less winning liberals--it's simply beyond the pale that I should ever have had to consider the very existence of Evangelical Christians. That we spent eight years considering what young earth creationists have to think as the slightest bit relevant is an affront to common decency. It doesn't matter if we douche our country clean with fucking hydrocloric acid (Obama: The Acid, The Presidency: Our Nation's Sphincter), we need to get rid of them before our nation dies of embarrassment. (This must be what it feels like to be British and wake up every morning knowing no one's yet guillotined the Queen.) Ideally I'd like to see bits of their brains splattered on the street, but I'll settle for electorally bloodied noses. It's just common decency.

...Also, Obama will dramatically raise expectations within the black community. For all the bourgeois cultural damage he'll wreck upon black america, at the end of the day thousands more geeky black kids will survive to adulthood. You can't put a price tag on that.

2008-11-02T23:30:00.000-08:00

(Single Link Onion Post -- Because I Roll Like It's The 90s)

Struggling Lower-Class Still Unsure How Best To Fuck Selves With Vote

2008-10-31T05:33:00.001-07:00

(Heh)

Congratulations where congratulations are due for getting quoted in Slate.

2008-10-26T00:40:00.000-07:00

(The Dustbin Of Absolute Fucking Irrelevancy)

While I'm ruffling feathers,

Marx's theory of the crises of capitalism is little more than a melodramatic description of the business cycle - standard fare in economic analysis. Every original contribution that Marx made to our understanding of capitalism is demonstrably false: the working class does not become increasingly immiserated; the class structure does not become increasingly polarised; no society has evolved from feudalism through capitalism to communism; the iron law of wages is fallacious; the State does not wither away when capitalism is abolished. Marx will continue to be neglected by serious scholars because he was wrong in every important respect. (via)

The question I always have for workerists and everyone else with irrevocably class-war tinted sunglasses is this: What if capitalism is actually leading us to a classless society?

What if a rising tide really does lift all boats (and assorted driftwood) and, as globalization is finalized over the next few centuries, every last human on earth is systematically subsumed into the bourgeoisie? Or what if the upper classes just ship the lower classes off to an incinerator one day? And do you really think that wage labor will have any relevancy to future iterations of capitalism? What happens if the humps on the graph of wealth distribution dissolve into a Gaussian curve? Or a smooth exponential? Or even a flatline of absolute material equality -- do you think that would necessarily have one fucking iota of effect on net oppression?

I'm an anarchist, for god's sake. I do not oppose a specific type of power systems. I oppose power systems.

2008-10-19T21:49:00.001-07:00

(Drama)

Because what the movement needs right now is more blindly anti-intellectual romantic double-speak.

Since organizationalists are annoying idiots... clearly the only alternative is to turn teh anarky into an emotional-support wankfest! Because with enough sexy metaphors and cute turns of phrase we can rewrite any reality to make us feel good about ourselves. We're awesome! Go team chaos!

Step 1: Smash stuff!

Step 2: Magic!

Step 3: Twenty-thousand years of ingrained, complex interlocking social psychoses reinforced by a global material infrastructure dissolves!

All we ever really needed to do was punch some things and then talk about our feelings in a circle. Maybe it'll be excruciatingly hard, with lots of internal hierarchies and horrible mistakes, but the details will work themselves out! Through The People! Shortcuts are for losers. Remember to say "praxis" a lot and equate thinking things through with inaction and ineffectiveness. And if that doesn't work "Theorist" is a one size fits all slur capable of dismissing any challenging idea and reducing your opponents to anarcho-syndicalist, campus-Marxist caricatures. Why I bet they use the internet. Geeks! Flush their heads down the toilet!

Anarchism: "We're against things that are bad."

What? You want more detail? Go read some pretentious faux-philosophical litcrit build on associative appeals that can be read to mean pretty much anything. It's alright to read a little Kropotkin, as long as you don't get infected with the dread Science. Facts are imperialism! Logic is slavery!

If you're not for throwing bricks at Starbucks then you're for selling newspapers! Viva la cliche!

2008-10-14T00:56:00.000-07:00

(Some Things)

Sorry about my absence.

Blogroll's been updated.

Hack Bloc has a wonderful new site, resplendent in the emerging black & blue color scheme of tech-positive anarchist tendencies. (see also)

Roderick has a pair of brilliantly simple articles up on the Art of the Possible. They are Required Reading, and will be on the final exam:

How An Argument Against the Workability of Authoritarian Socialism Became An Argument Against the Workability of Authoritarian Capitalism

Regulation: The Cause, Not the Cure, of the Financial Crisis

2008-09-29T04:16:00.000-07:00

(No Gods, No Masters, No Gravity Wells)

2008-09-26T03:24:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the delay. Had to get it legally vetted and then sit out the usual hand wringing. Part 2: Organizing focuses at length on the WC, informants and internal dynamics while Part 3: Tactics dissects the week's street battles, response times, etc. ...I've much to say on those topics although they might have to sit on “lost” encrypted drives for a few years. In the end, however, learning and growing is always more important than community and immediate safety. All the usual caveats apply. This is still a working draft.

The Brawl in St. Paul
Part 1: Interests

When asking the question of whether [party ___] was successful in the 2008 RNC protests, it's worth noting that protests are not outright confrontations and cannot be judged by the same standards. Because protesters, no matter how militant, are still on some level inherently self-restrained. The cops fire concussion grenades; we spray silly string. Thus in a conventional sense, protests are always, inevitably, lost battles. What makes protests useful to protesters are the strategic changes they can effect in the process of losing.

Most people forget but Seattle was actually a failure. We got extremely lucky and succeeded somewhat in one tactical goal (impeding delegates), but made no ground whatsoever in the larger struggle. Despite the hiccup, the machinations of the WTO continued exactly as before. While the narrative of N30 inspiring global resistance to the WTO (culminating in its modern irrelevancy) is an oft repeated tale, the reality is that our colorful protests made not a drop of difference. It was the Bush Administration that gutted the WTO; consciously shifting the focus of power from Global Capital to Empire. From hegemonic corporatism to westphalian realism. And it was a Brazilian Neoliberal named Lula whose national self-interest exploited the situation to stall the Doha rounds.

Driving away from Seattle this was quite apparent. For all of our spectacle, we hadn't actually gotten anywhere. But as the weeks passed a curious thing happened: we began to commemorate our stand. We began to feel nostalgic for the sense of confrontation. We made a stand and lost, but in the sheer act of making a stand we discovered a useful offset. It invigorated us and built our numbers.

For a variety of reasons the 2008 RNC was an explicit attempt to recreate the highs of Seattle, and for better or worse it's partly through this lens that most actors and observers will try to measure it. Unlike Seattle, however, the formal goal of impeding delegates was always tacked on just for show. As many people said during the lead-up, while it would be nice to see the cameras pan an empty stadium on the 6 o' clock news, it was also seriously unlikely. If the Republican National Convention itself was nothing more than a media spectacle, the RNC Mobilization was a many-times compounded spectacle, often of self-manipulation. Thus, even more so than Seattle, there's no easy metric by which to analyze St. Paul.

Players and Goals

There were many forces active on the streets of St. Paul, each with very different goals. Before analyzing how they played out, it's worth examining their motivation and intent.

Local City Administration: The municipal authorities wanted money, investment and prestige from the Republicans. But without the government loosing legitimacy with the resident liberal population. Since incumbent politicians would suffer mightily from such fallout, they pushed hard to avoid outrages like protest pens.

Local Police: While local law enforcement also saw the benefit of appearing open and permissive of free speech, more than anything else they were concerned with even the slightest impression of "losing control." Crime prevention was entirely secondary to maintaining the state's image of absolute authority throughout the convention. Thus significant resources in Major Crimes were redirected from mafia and gang concerns to befriending hippies, while, for example, during the convention Sex Crimes alone was cut to just one person and not allowed to file any reports over 24 hours old.

Feds: While Federal participation was extensive -- from the usual Joint Terrorism Task Force stuff to extensive loans and oversight -- their specific intent is harder to ascertain. Obviously, like all the other statist parties, Homeland Security ultimately wanted to protect state power. And we can only presume that their strategy was more informed and nuanced than either local administration or law enforcement. But all that says very little to how this repression fit specifically into their longer campaign against the Anarchist movement.

Maoists: Having spent decades systematically infiltrating the alternative infrastructure and liberal activist projects of the twin cities, the local Maoist cadres saw the RNC as an unparalleled opportunity to further consolidate their control of the liberal activist spectrum in high-profile positions. While always clandestinely hostile to anarchist organizing attempts, they saw far more value in solidifying positions of power among the liberals than in undermining the anarchists who were doing all the heavy lifting organizational work for them.

(A) Home-Team: When the 2008 RNC host town was announced chance had already coalesced in St. Paul what many observers in the Anarchist milieu have since termed an "activist dream team." Folks with a ton of experience and drive -- but relatively little baggage. Notably however, few of these individuals were particularly sympathetic to the summit hopping and mass mobilizations of yesteryear. But, since a mega-protest spectacle seemed inevitably thrust upon them, they decided to chin up and make it the best possible. This Home-Team was particularly concerned with righting the mistakes of Miami ('03) where activists failed to have either substantive local logistical support or a strong framework to plug into and New York ('04) where anarchist organizing efforts were appropriated and eclipsed by liberals, contributing to a total lack of militancy on the ground. And, of course, they were concerned with both the energy that such mobilizations sucked from local and/or long-term projects and the devastation it left on the host community.

While the Home-Team was skeptical of many aspects of Seattle, and in no way saw it as a sustainable long-term model, they still turned explicitly to its successes. Which, in their minds, the slumping Anarchist milieu desperately needed. Collectively they shared three broad goals:

1. Raise Anarchism's profile and spread the word. Seattle was a watershed moment because it inspired thousands of protesters to pick up a book on Anarchism. Not so much the ALF-CIO folks in the stadium, to whom we were hooligans, but rather the students doing lock downs in the streets. Those people, through DAN and face-to-face contact, found personal incentive to investigate anarchism on their own and became a wave of popular reference for Anarchism within activist circles. It was hoped that by taking a leading role in the RNC preparations anarchists would similarly inspire the various liberals and generic "movement" leftists in -- or coming to -- St. Paul.

2. Shake the milieu's malaise and regain self-confidence. Nothing rattles the bones and builds electric buzz like facing off with the cops. The sense of urgency, high-stakes, solidarity and collective strength that mass confrontations bring has a charged effect -- no matter how profoundly brutal the police repression is -- that percolates outward from those who experienced it back to their communities. Nothing gets our priorities in line like a face full of pepper spray from faceless fratboy riot cops and a stranger with a Crass patch pouring malox in your eyes, telling you it'll be alright and helping you to your feet. Miami was a disaster because we fell apart in the face of police repression and in New York we compounded the problem by not doing anything. They pushed us and we lost our nerve -- which, whether or not you think mass mobilizations are sustainable, was a bad thing. It was the hope of many that an organized successful confrontation in St. Paul would help us regrow it.

3. Build capacity. However useless our effort in Seattle might have been on the global stage, in the lead up, planning and execution we built vast networks of friendships and refined skills both tactical (building lockboxes), infrastructural (indymedia was formed), and organizational (learning how to lead folks and come to decisions collectively). Looking at our efforts in Katrina and looking as well to the Jena 7 mobilization, it seemed to many that retaining the capacity to respond nationally to local events was an important if not critical strength. Given the exponential growth (and, alas, relatively constant burnout) of the regional Anarchist activist scene, by 2008 those who still retained the full experiences and skills of the DAN mobilizations were in a distinct minority. To counteract this slide St. Paul offered a useful, but strategically non-critical, training run. (Plus, for those deeds-over-words type activists not drawn by geeky bookfairs and conferences, there'd been few enough excuses for family reunions.)

All these were, on the whole, central issues to the Home-Team and were mirrored by many other Anarchists around the country. But they were not the only force within the Anarchist mobilization around the RNC.

(A) Visitors: To many focused on organizational projects, St. Paul was a no-risk opportunity to prop their flags on the barricades and suck up greater momentum and legitimacy through osmosis (SDS wanted cameras, A3 wanted intra-movement respect, IWW wanted relevance with the younger crowd... etc). But it was also an opportunity, for those radicalized since the end of summit-hopping, to claim for themselves the experiences so romanticized by CrimethInc and co. Balanced in the middle of these tendencies was Unconventional Action, a slapdash facade of the RNC's mandatory national level action network that for a long time was really just two groups in New York and North Carolina. It's no insult, just a fact, that UA was no DAN and much of its base was young and largely inexperienced with this scale of undertaking. This tendency's goal was largely just to be enlivened by the protests. As one fresh-faced out of town organizer said, “to finally get a piece of the Seattle pie.”

So here's what happened. Nobody showed. Not the cops, not the liberals, not the anarchists. Everyone's numbers were way, way lower than they wanted and expected. This was painful for them, but critical for us.

Small town police departments didn't want to be tied up in lawsuits over police brutality. Law enforcement only managed to scrape together a threadbare 3,500 officers by going out of state.

Gustav and local chilling effects from the police raids kept the Liberals at home, but the biggest effects came from Obama and the Maoists. On the eve of presumed electoral victory liberals felt little compulsion to protest the assumed losers. Similarly, because unlike ANSWER or World Can't Wait the Coalition had a limited shelf life, there was little incentive for the local Maoists to invest serious time or energy into making the protests a national-level success. Thus the liberals ended up floating naught but an embarrassing 10,000 out of the 70,000 everyone expected.

While Law Enforcement's low numbers might have otherwise made some level of tactical victory possible, without liberal jelly to fill out the downtown the blockades were doomed from the start.

The Saint Paul Ballot Box

Home team was always in a sticky spot. Having been dealt a project they otherwise would not think of getting involved in, they were faced with the challenge of rallying support from their likewise skeptical peers. Without a good number of experienced, committed blockaders on the ground even a brief tactical victory would be impossible.

Make no mistake, the resources clearly existed within the Anarchist milieu. Traveling the country and interacting with veteran activists it was quite apparent that, had we wanted to, we could have easily shut down 10 St. Pauls.

It's just, as it turned out, we didn't want to.

Anarchist presence at the RNC was maybe 800 people, tops. And while that could have been enough to shut down the main on-ramps and impede delegate buses for up to an hour had those 800 been ultra-skilled blockaders, they weren't. To give some measure of the inexperience on the ground: not a single fucking tripod went up.

Let's take a moment and dwell on that.

Setting aside Sector 5 (Home-Team's native sector, which was systematically dismantled by an informant), there were next to no hard blockades attempted. People parked a van and chained themselves to it. Others used lockboxes across a road in the middle of nowhere, without locking the ends to anything. Most of the "hard blockades" were overturned plastic newspaper boxes. A couple overturned garbage bins. Folks skirmished with the police in a high-risk attempt to place caution tape across an intersection (one officer ripped it down in a single stroke). That's not to undercut or malign the spirit of those involved in these actions; supplementing more intense efforts, these might even have been useful distractions. But there were no chain drops, no bike walls, no drum wall, no serious physical barricades whatsoever. Not a even a single tripod went up.

The fact is plain: the anarchist milieu largely decided to sit this one out.

This should have been obvious in the lead up, but wasn't. Home Team was hardly alone in their initial distaste for Mass Mobilizations. Support for the RNC effort was widespread, but paper thin. Although voiced from time to time, personal distaste and disinterest in resurrecting the Summit Hopping formula was largely cloaked behind generic support for a diversity of tactics and an abstract interest in seeing the community boost its morale. Aside from a few usual suspects, open conflict and debate on tactics was seen as a impediment to be avoided. Thus those who disagreed with the effectiveness of mass protest (compared to more sustainable local projects and ever-popular basic needs organizing) largely kept their mouths shut out of respect for those organizing... and consequently doomed the entire tactical operation.

Right or wrong, the only way to gauge the movement's priorities was in action.

St. Paul saw a lot of of younger bodies hit the street. Enthusiastic at the idea of plugging into a major demo, they largely had no idea that they were the full extent of the demo until about noon on Monday. And then they were crushed.

Rabid Dogs

Before addressing the role Law Enforcement played it's worth first appreciating just how committed the Feds were in concealing their hand. As early as a year before the RNC, FBI agents initiated a quiet campaign of stings and corruption investigations against local police. The inevitable results of these operations gave the Feds substantial leverage over the Ramsey County Sheriff's Department. With local Law Enforcement ready to take the fall, they could instigate pretty much any level of harassment against the Anarchists without fear of substantive public backlash.

But there were trade offs. While the Sheriff made an attractive attack dog, he was not exactly nuanced. In their eagerness to beat hippie ass, Local Law Enforcement adopted a degree of autonomy in their efforts that, on a strategic level, they were simply unqualified for. And once started there was little the Feds could do to reign them in without revealing their hand. While a few of the raids were overseen by inconspicuous FBI and ATF agents, others quickly stemmed from the malformed initiative of local police who thought they were helping out. Thus as early as Saturday we had seen attacks on honey pot targets like uninvolved spaces and anarchist journalists, and by Thursday there were reporters shot in the face, lawyers brutalized and camera-friendly kids tortured in the Ramsey County Jail.

At core, local law enforcement wanted to maintain the impression of unchallenged authority at all costs. While they were always sensitive to the longer game – working hard in the lead-up to try and win over the liberals – the Feds stirred up feelings and gave them pretense to turn it into 'all out war.'

Police forces, as a whole, are blunt armies, slow to raise and harder still to control with any degree of nuance. In provoking the rank-and-file with tales of “barbarians at the gates” the Feds gambled on a stronger, more militant and more skilled anarchist presence. One whose impressiveness would steal the public narrative and take pressure off the cops. Like Home-Team, they had no way of predicting the milieu's decision to stay at home. And Local Law Enforcement—being barely sentient thugs—were simply incapable of re-evaluating the strategic context for themselves. Since the Feds had no way to quickly convey this change, the cops went ahead and more or less followed their initial marching orders to a T, beating hapless kids to a pulp in front of horrified onlookers and generally revealing themselves to be the fratboy fascists they are. This was easily our biggest victory.

Tactically we arrived on the streets with next to no strength whatsoever. Had it not been for the extremity of the police reaction, St. Paul might well have been a complete wash for the Anarchists.

Where any other police force might have have wiped our feeble barricades off the streets without much fanfare, local Law Enforcement had been worked into such a lather that every interaction between protesters and police was a propaganda coup for us. Shocked and outraged liberals will be shouting They Arrested Amy Goodman!!1! for years to come. By upping the ante beyond the conventionally established boundaries of protest, police repression managed to blunt the strategic damage of an inevitable tactical failure.

Cloaking Effects

While Hurricane Gustav stacked more chips against us on a tactical level—reducing the number of delegates required on the first day—its primary effect was in the national media. In conjunction with the nomination of Sarah Palin, Gustav helped keep the RNC protests almost entirely out of the national news.

For organizations like SDS looking to build a public presence this was unfortunate. But for the movement as a whole, the cloaking effect was arguably quite a boon.

Mass Mobilizations work to our advantage when it comes to outreach on a personal level, but media misrepresentation has always been an impossible hurtle for Anarchists. We're quite literally the most misrepresented and systematically slandered group in history. (Stop. Try and think of anyone else so thoroughly and consistently maligned. Seriously. Must be doing something right.) Otherwise intelligent, cogent, respectable journalists turn into deliberately lying hacks the moment anarchism comes up. This is always quite shocking to fresh-faced anarchists who just presumed that our ridiculous public image could be fixed by simply correcting the lies. 'All anarchism needs is a good media effort!' What they fail to take into account was just who exactly invented and spread those lies. Journalists may be committed to the truth in usual circumstances, but then politicians tuck their children in at night too. For such statists, the fleeting decency of their everyday lives is entirely built on a premise so brutal and monstrous it would tear their minds asunder were they ever to look at it directly. Is it any wonder that even the smartest of journalists will consistently revert to sensationalism and blind apologism for tyranny when confronted by the spectre of anarchism? It was journalists, not politicians, who popularized the vulgar and deliberate mis-perception of “anarchy” as equivalent to violent chaos.

On those rare instances when we engage in street battles with the cops it's like dangling dripping bacon in front of a dog. No matter how much integrity they have you can't very well expect them to portray us as anything more than sub-human criminals. While “throwing urine and feces” was a deliciously audacious debasement, the fact that the media lapped up the lies of the cops (even adding their own in a few circumstances) was not particularly surprising. No matter how cautious or adroit our efforts with the media at these sorts of mass mobilizations, good coverage is an outright impossibility.

That leaves no coverage.

Which, magically, we got.

Beyond the blessings of a crowded news day, and aside from a few mandatory “police beat me senseless and shot my camera, but it was clearly justified because some bad, chimpanzee-esque protesters upset the poor things”, every time the media started to turn their attention to the streets of St. Paul, they were quickly vanquished:

“Are those extremist democrats—like the self-proclaimed “anarchists” of the RNC Welcoming Committee—planning to protest the RNC despite Hurricane Gustav deliberately contributing to the partisan divide?”

... “Just as anarchist medics and volunteers were the first to provide aid to survivors of Hurricane Katrina, so too are anarchist organizations like FNB and Common Grounds digging in as we speak to help those in the Gulf abandoned by both parties of our tyrannical, profiteering government. While the state's thugs may have kidnapped those showing us some Minnesota hospitality, we remain undaunted in our solidarity with those survivors of Katrina who were attacked by riot cops last night.”

“Why did some bad protesters—so evil they called themselves “anarchists”—choose to murder several innocent windows along a cheerful Macy's storefront?”

... “I was beaten and tortured, that's right, outright fucking tortured, in the Ramsey County Jail. She was raped. Fuck you.”

Eventually deprived of everything nasty they could think to say, the media by and large opted to say nothing at all.

Respecting a Diversity of Kick-Yo-Ass

All the strategic gains mentioned so far have been at best small variations in degree compared to previous summits and mass mobilizations. But the sharpest accomplishment we had was largely a tactical one, albeit not as sexy or immediate as physical blockades. What marked St. Paul as truly unique and worthy of historical note was the level of explicit coalition building between anarchists and liberals.

While Home Team comprised many different individuals, factions and groups, a significant percentage of its organizing effort was spent preempting the usual Liberal backstabbing. Individuals spent long hours negotiating demands, looking past hierarchical procedures and siting through endless meetings. At the same time Home Team built up a solid organizing presence early on and thus approached the Liberals from a position of unassailable strength and independence. For a good many months the Anarchists were the only game in town.

Local Law Enforcement, in turn, worked tirelessly, in conjunction with Local City Administration, to win over the Liberals and force a standard good-protester / bad protester narrative. They failed utterly.

Home Team countered by humanizing themselves and anarchism on a personal level and then educating their liberal friends on the historic role of police. Left-liberal organizations built around class and race struggles helped validate these concerns. And the anarchists, in turn, were unafraid to play off Liberal qualms: 'Treating the police as allies is a big fuck you to poor people of color.' 'Allowing the police to sow division over mere tactical differences helps silence all of our voices.' The process was long and slow, and aggravating, but before the end NPR-listening grannies had become fierce, articulate proponents of a Diversity of Tactics.

Of course some of this success was due to the fact that the local Maoist puppetmasters, being evil commies, were not exactly zealots of nonviolence. But the Maoists didn't control every Liberal organization. Indeed our greatest and most heartfelt support came from organizations they didn't even have a presence in.

After the Saturday Raids, few among Home Team had the opportunity to fully impress the importance of the St. Paul Principles upon their own ranks. Thus the situation on the streets was more complex. Many black-blockers laid their bodies on the line, famously defending children and disabled folks attacked by the cops, while on the other hand a few fled into one of the liberal marches after militantly confronting the cops—a clear violation of the St. Paul Principles. (The Liberal rank-n-file were not exactly perfect either.)

Nevertheless the coalition held together perfectly. Not only did the cops fail to split ranks, the Liberals went out of their way again and again to stand by us before the media—much to the shock and chagrin of Law Enforcement.

The media ran with the story anyway—even reporting ahead of time on conflicts between “good” and “bad” protesters that hadn't happened, they simply presumed would happen. This much was inevitable. But without the standard nonviolent “good protester” spokesperson angrily denouncing the violent “bad protesters,” their stories have been noticeably weakened.

Tactical Summary

Like all protests, on a tactical level we lost. The actual conflict itself was by nature momentary, fleeting, and largely irrelevant outside its strategic effects. Nevertheless, an overview is easy:

They used superior numbers and infiltration to systematically break and dismantle our street presence.

We managed our coalitions and friendships incredibly well, holding protester ranks together better than ever before.

Strategic Summary

Exactly what the lasting effects of St. Paul will be is hard to measure. Victory and defeat, on a strategic level, is always muddled. But we can at least consider a partial checklist of gains and losses:

They further dehumanized us before rabid fratboy statists around the world.

They built experience and know-how infiltrating our ranks.

They made us appear weak.

We got a couple thousand folks (on the ground and at home) a lot friendlier towards anarchism and more likely to investigate our thoughts on their own.

We returned marginal attention in the broader public to the growing intensity of state power -- rather than, say, hope-a-rific promises of public health care.

We got a ton of face-time between folks within our own ranks who would otherwise never interact, further developing our internal conversations on tactics and theory.

We built sympathy and solidarity with anti-authoritarians outside America and helped re-enthuse them.

The real contest, however, was always over our self-perception. We got our asses kicked. They abducted us in unmarked vans, invaded our homes, stole our stuff, tortured us in jail, and, of course, pepper-sprayed, tear-gased, maced, bear-sprayed, tasered, billy-clubbed, trampled, rubber-bulleted, flash-banged, and concussion-grenaded the crap out of us on the streets.

They did all this, despite the costs incurred, just to break our nerve.

They might succeed.

A Moment of Clarity

It doesn't matter that we were never going to win on the streets. And it doesn't matter that we made particularly tasty lemonade from the lemons dealt us.

Most of those who participated left St. Paul with the immediate pain of a battle lost. We've returned home to half-heartedly raise bail and promote stories on Digg about how batshit insane the cops were. That's not winning, that's whining. And people can tell. We can tell. The go-team! mantra of "Spectacle Crashed!" that survivors were repeating on Tuesday and Wednesday was never going to last. Because it's false. It's hollow. It's a patronizing self-deception and, sure as rain, it will eventually give way to malaise.

Protests are inherently artificial situations. Spectacles of negotiation and appeals to power. No matter how harsh the repression, no matter how feisty the riot, on both sides they're ultimately confrontations for the sake of appearance.

For all the outreach and capacity building we accomplished in this mobilization we ended up looking weak at a moment when we desperately wanted to look strong.

That we kept up "a good nine hours" of street-level confrontations on the first is meaningless. The gut-wrenching horror and exhilaration of street-fighting may have given some newcomers a visceral impression of the magnitude of our struggle. But it's a false sense of scale. Make no mistake, this war that we live is so much larger than pepper spray and black bandannas. Despite the repression we faced the gloves never truly came off.

What we should take away from St. Paul is not a blind mythology, but a fuller appreciation of our strengths.

On the streets and in the lead up, all our successes stemmed from our agility and adaptability. In every contest of outright momentum we lost. Against the State, we simply can't win such. We don't have the strength and, even if we did, it's not our way. We are not a cohesive, undifferentiated mob and there was never going to come a day in which we simply poured over their barricades and on to victory.

Thankfully, many among us appear to be awakening to this.

Attack Attack Attack

While St. Paul resoundingly demonstrated the movement's growing disinterest in mass mobilizations and conventional protest, the alternative is not retreat.

It's not enough to build, to just go home and work on our own communities. Despite the appeal, we cannot afford to simply take shelter behind the feel good, generic movement-ism of projects like free schools, free software and neighborhood gardens.

That's not to say that such things aren't incredibly important. But more important is that we don't lose our nerve.

Because regardless of whether or not they're doing so, anyone can work to build a new world, to help folks secure basic needs for themselves. We represent an ethical realization that power is an absolutely destructive and alienating psychosis. Without that assertion made explicit, those gardens are doomed. Because 1. ultimately The State will never let us get away with such things—even now it is working to devalue and undercut them, and 2. without a clear clarion call to hold ourselves accountable we'll slide back into the same half-measures and compromises that have destroyed every movement in history.

To prevent that we have to keep flying the black flag high.

We cannot afford to lick our wounds. Timidity will not save our tradition. There is no teeter-totter of history. Fascism today will not inevitably give way to permissive liberalism tomorrow. If we've been lucky in the past it was sheer doggedness that pulled us through.

They attacked us, brazenly, openly, arrogantly. They made it clear that they know where their priorities lie. If we had somehow "won" on the streets and, say, turned St. Paul into a giant free state, they would have nuked it.

The only response is to go on the offensive. The only surefire way to retain our nerve is to strike back. Not to negotiate, wheedle or throw ourselves another get-well riot. But to focus on efficiency on an individual level, and to hell with appearances. To hell with the spectacle of our collective momentum. To hit them back again and again with everything we each have. They break our bones? We need to shove the splinters in their fucking eyesockets.

We need to get serious.

"[A]bove all, summits constitute a form of experimentation to see what level of oppression people are willing to put up with."
--Notes on Summits & Counter Summits

2008-09-11T21:49:00.000-07:00

(Not To Be Forgotten About)

Man, we heart you too Poland.

2008-09-09T12:39:00.000-07:00

(The Last Legit Discourse On Morality -- Promoting "Dishonest Or Unethical Behavior" Since 2003)

A friend writes in to tell me that Human Iterations has just been blocked by the filter at his workplace for the below reason:

"Illegal or Questionable Sites that provide instruction in or promote nonviolent crime or unethical or dishonest behavior or the avoidance of prosecution."

Which, as far as bullshit charges go, is pretty tangy-awesome. I'm honored. (And more than a little not worthy, since everything here is about as tame and fluffy as a marshmallow peep.) Anyway, I think this is a first for an anarchist blog within the United States. So go me. This is the big leagues! Boing Boing is totally going to invite me to their parties now.

I've written back and asked for details on the specific filter and will post them when I get them. UPDATE: 'It's Websense.'

2008-09-07T17:34:00.000-07:00

(We'll Rest When The Nightmare Is Over And Not A Moment Sooner)

The duct tape holding my laptop together has finally given way, but I'm still working on that strategy paper in between my other responsibilities. Until then I would point you towards Shawn's far more eloquent words.

"Time to clean up the day's messes, and prepare for tomorrow's battles. I wonder, this time, as we're retooling, as we're raising bail and facing the music and trying to move ahead, if we couldn't - and by "we" I mean more than just the usual suspects, who are probably a little overwhelmed at this moment, one way or another, but some larger force, potentially made a little more possible by the terribly clear, overtly despotic events of the last week or so - at least try to reach further than just getting wounds treated, charges dropped or fought, broken-down doors rehung. We're learning all the time, how to organize and communicate, how to start, at least, to work beyond the sorts of barriers that so often stop our day-to-day projects dead. We have to keep at it.

It's the sort of thing you feel stupid saying out loud, but, once the bail is raised for protestors, we need to figure out how to bail each other out, of stupid jobs we hate, that only prop up a system that feeds off us. Once the pepper spray burns have been treated, we need to figure out how to provide for one another's daily health needs. After we feed the homeless, we have to tackle how we feed one another, globally, without being forced to take part in a food economy that depends of disrupting local agriculture and profiting while people starve. Once we reclaim the stolen pamphlets, we need to finish the work of making sure our written heritage is never "out of print" and beyond the reach of everyone. The things that stand between us and our own institutions would probably not withstand any sort of concerted assault, unlike the riot police lines guarding worthless functionaries and would-be despots, and they'll have to come up with new offenses if they want to beat us up for trading with one another, educating one another, supporting one another."

2008-09-05T11:45:00.000-07:00

(RNC Welcoming Committee Unmasked!)

Click the link for yours truly on caffeine and no sleep before the international news media.

Best moment at the press conference: Al Jazeera and The Uptake bitching about how embarrassing it was that none of the other "self-proclaimed reporters" in the room had even bothered to do five minutes of research on just what the hell Anarchism is, much less what the word "an-archy" really means. It was a brilliant ray of sanity.

Also... when somebody asked the reporters to raise their hands if they thought police and politicians ever lied and only three hands went up in the entire room. That moment of collective recognition was priceless. You could see FOX and ABC seriously squirm in personal embarrassment and guilt with how low they'd sunk as journalists.

I'll have some strategy analysis up later.

2008-09-03T01:26:00.000-07:00

(The World A Pinhole Amid Black Rage)

It's funny how one PDF saying the obvious, the inevitable -- that among the people I hated, loved, patronized, idealized, fought and collaborated with for the last two years were three undercover agents of absolute mindless authority and violence -- can so completely and suddenly crush my self-confidence, leaving me raw and fetal.

My freedom of information ideals chafe every minute against the banalities (and excessivities) of the security culture that their truncheons and jails make necessary. Chances are I've defended each of these people on an individual level. Smoothed over personality conflicts, wasted what little reputation and political capital I had all to challenge the slightest of internal hierarchies that sent so much as a frown in their direction. They. They have behaved with all the brutal, petulant violence of toddlers. Willful followers of an impossible neverland, an escapist fantasy that beats to a bloody pulp all who would challenge it.

Honestly I'm annoyed with the State; how dare it interrupt my infighting! I want worthy enemies, worthy opponents. Scum like these are not worthy to even say the name of those they've put behind bars. They are not one millionth the human being of even the worst of us.

Come and get me motherfuckers.

2008-09-01T15:09:00.000-07:00

(RNC Update From Teh Streets)

Massive police raids. Heavy police violence. Attempt to impede RNC delegates mostly failed. Roving clusters, blocs and affinity groups fighting back against the cops in the streets of St. Paul. Individual activists targeted by snatch squads around town. Am safe. Check TC Indymedia for the best, most comprehensive live updates.

2008-08-29T02:41:00.000-07:00

(Angela Belcher Is An Absolute Badass)

"We haven't ruled out cars." I mean seriously. That's how it's done.

2008-08-28T11:54:00.000-07:00

(On The Right Of Kings To Rule Undisturbed)

There's been a lot of talk on Republican blogs about how activist plans to blockade the Excel Energy Center during the Republican National Convention constitute a deliberate violation of delegates' Free Speech.

But the RNC (like the DNC) isn't a political assembly in the same manner as any protest, rally or town hall meeting. They are assemblies, yes, but certainly not of regular folks petitioning for rights, airing grievances or some such. ...The RNC and DNC are assemblies not of citizens, but of our rulers.

Those who participate in statist politics are not neutral actors, they are the active benefactors of power and privilege founded on force.

On The Right Of Kings To Rule Undisturbed

Murderers are meeting to conspire. Generals are meeting to plan our defeat.

But first they mean to stage a photo-op.

This summer an entire army of politicians and sycophants will descend on two American cities. There they will laugh, boast and parade their troops before the entire world. In one city they will fly a red banner, in the other a blue one. What unites both as a single army is their complicity.

Every member of the political class, from bloggers to politicians, is an active participant in the terror and destruction that is state power. Every urge to vote one way or another is a call for violence. Because every action the government takes ultimately happens at the end of a policeman's baton. Every call for sanction, taxation or military action is an assertion of authority over the lives of millions never met.

To most Americans Freedom of Speech is an end all, an absolute line in the sand. And rightfully so. In a society of dying ideals, our defensive entitlement to such a basic liberty is both refreshing and commendable. But like all ethical ideals, individual instances cannot be examined in a vacuum. Context matters.

In the broader picture an attack upon the generals' planning session is not a violation of their right to freely assemble, but ultimately a defense of those they would subjugate.

In the face of those who--as a matter of course--default on coercion and violence to implement their every wish we cannot be expected to simply stand back and craft persuasive arguments. Their operations must be countered, their social mechanisms directly impeded. We must disrupt their ability to wage war on our freedoms.

The RNC and DNC are not even planning sessions. The planning has long been finished. At best they're press conferences. Twin spectacles announcing the further intent of our politicians to deprive us of liberty. Spectacles paid for by wealth ripped out of our pockets at gun point and attended by those who openly desire to rule us.

The question is not whether throwing a pie at their photo op is a violation of their rights, but whether abstaining from disruptive action would leave us complicit in their violations.

2008-08-24T01:25:00.000-07:00

(Primitivism)

"the question is not can we live without cars, factories, farms and the whole fucked up interwoven array of psychoses we lazily refer to as 'civilization,' but whether an existence without exploration, invention and those orgasmic little eureka moments that constitute science and technology can even be called life."

2008-08-12T21:43:00.000-07:00

(Teh Scannertron)

James J. Martin's Men Against The State is finally fully available on the internet. Go download it off OneBigTorrent.

2008-08-01T05:50:00.000-07:00

(More Reading Ahead & Spoiling Your Dinner)

For me anarchism is entirely dependent upon empathy and the dissolution of personal identity. By which I don't mean the featureless zombification of the masses but the rejection of memes or constructions of self that condition and restrain our creative impulses.

Empathy is the recognition in others of the same driving force that moves our own minds. Would-be philosophers have traditionally started from a taxonomic perspective: this is an object, this is the object's properties. And so Individuals are first recognized and then Free Will or Consciousness is treated as a property of the object. But an individual is not actually a divinely or metaphysically distinct object. Like the construct of "chair" or "bobcat", an "individual" has no objective significance above the sum of its parts and its physical context. (Sure from a heavily abstracted and subjective social/biological standpoint it's an often useful lie but there are inherent bounds to that usefulness.)

Nevertheless, I strongly suspect that Free Will and Consciousness DO have ontological significance. Not as static properties of the fictional object "an individual", but rather as real existing physical tendencies. (And yes, there is direct evidence to support this. If certain neurological experiments implying dual-state time vectors are to be believed, then the brain's function as a computer made out of temporal logic gates would make consciousness substantively distinct.)

The practical upshot being that there is an objective force behind consciousness that distinguishes us from deterministic matter. Further this force implies a vector that can be maximized; the freedom of our thoughts and actions reflect neurological realities, and this can be extended out to social and material aspects. This gives us a strong moral dichotomy in which to base ethics -- one that it already seems at home in -- but most importantly it erases the distinction between personal egoistic motivation and social altruism. (And avoids the cataclysmic faults of Kropotkin's biological essentialism.)

We strive for collective freedom, but -- because the emergence of consciousness is localized -- do so individually, each strategically responding to the subjective context before us. (Mises et al. having convincingly proven the mathematical superiority of dynamic individual interaction as opposed to collective decision making.)

2008-07-30T03:41:00.000-07:00

(You Cannot Buy Creativity. You Cannot Make Creativity. You Can Only Be Creative.)

Ironically, one of the things I love about transhumanism is its limitations. Transhumanism can never be a political movement, it can only ever be a matter of personal action. How do you stage a protest to call for more invention and ingenuity? You can't. As the statist transhumanists are learning, you can't even pass a law to make it happen. The only option you've got is to roll up your sleeves and get to work.

Sure a lot of people talk about the accelerating pace of technological development. But that no more makes them transhumanists than talking about ninjas makes you a ninja. To be a transhumanist you have to do something to further the transhumanist ideal. "Converting" people behind some banner doesn't really count because numbers are irrelevant. You can't vote the Singularity in.

You can only do your part.

On a somewhat tetchy note of self-defense, Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future has posted a list of transhumanists in high ranking academic and corporate positions. The implication is that they're actually applying themselves to open new possibilities for human growth. And that's all very fine and well. Some of those names are quite impressive. But I'm interested in the people that aren't professors or CEOs. Because frankly, those are the people least likely to have the eureka moments that count. The real transhumanists are the wide-eyed girls in the observatory and the stubborn boys splicing genes in the basement. I want to see a list of the hackers whose direct action is keeping the Internet open. Or the backyard engineers in the third world who are inventing monumental improvements to our infrastructure with scrapped bicycle parts. Those are the people bootstrapping us to the future. Not some blowhard in front of a podium or pedantic lab tech cranking through instructions.

2008-07-30T00:18:00.000-07:00

(The Seed)

The State, like all social phenomena, stems from psychological roots. The State is a way of thinking, a conjunction of ideas forming a larger structure (or set of structures) that interacts with the surrounding world so as to secure and perpetuate itself.

The State belongs to a wider family of idea-structures, called Power. Which in turn is one half of an even bigger family. What differentiates these thought structures from all others is that each of them contains a common clause: tis better to ignore than to investigate.

You see, there are two ways that an organism can come into prominence. It can, in a variety of ways, keep reaching out into its environment and changing itself in concordance with what it finds, or it can, through other means, wall itself off and struggle to keep its environment from changing it. The later clause often grows to thoroughly infect entire ecosystems, underlying every aspect of social and personal thought. Naturally the ideas, the interacting states of mind it stabilizes, are temporary at best. They're always falling apart, in a million tiny disasters. Rebuilding and re-securing, until the next collapse. Some of these collapses are truly catastrophic, extending across entire societies. Entire religions and civilizations die. But the seed, it has survived. Because it has gone unaddressed itself. It is the remnant of prehistory. The counter-revolution against thought itself.

It is neurological rigidity.

The State is based in the assumption that stability is more important than contact or touch. And everything it does acts to directly minimize interaction between ideas, individuals and nature. The State is, at its core, nothing more than secrecy and stupidity.

2008-07-29T00:14:00.000-07:00

(A Few Notes On The Culture & Anarchism)

Iain Bank's novels about an anarchist society called The Culture have garnered widespread literary acclaim and single-handedly re-launched Space Opera. They are stunningly popular and influential books (although still somewhat obscure in America).

But. While they've inspired much discussion about anarchy, they've been virtually ignored by the anarchist movement and what outside discussion has taken place has been passive and disconnected. This is not entirely surprising. Among the upper echelons of Science Fiction there are few undertakings considered more rude than tearing apart a piece of fiction to seriously dissect its politics. It is what it is. A constructed what if. If you didn't appreciate the nuances the first time through you're just an idiot. The insinuation that the author might straightforwardly engage in base politics is insulting. Nor is there anything in the anarchist movement less glamorous than utopian hypothesizing. Theory and futurism are considered meaningless pursuits hopelessly disconnected from the real world. Few within the modern milieu think it possible to wrestle anything of immediate substance or tactical value from such meanderings, thus they're largely derided as a waste of time.

Nevertheless there's no denying that Science Fiction and Anarchism have a long and twisted past together, from the more explicit black-flag-waving of Ursula K Le Guin and Ken Macleod to the more subtle explorations by Vernor Vinge, Kim Stanley Robinson, Cory Doctorow, Samuel R Delany and Bruce Sterling (to name but a few). As the cliche goes, the first science fiction author was the daughter of the first anarchist & the first feminist (Shelly, Godwin and Wollstonecraft). Besides being history's most prominent radical, individualist and forward-thinking identities, Science Fiction came into popularity about the same time Anarchism crashed and burned – leeching, one is forced to suspect, off the same idealistic current.

So I hope no one will mind if I turn a critical eye on The Culture and examine their utopia from an explicitly anarchist perspective. (Even if Iain Banks himself seems to hail from a more moderate socialist background, he and Macleod make a lot of noise about being comrades and the dreaded "A-word" has appeared more frequently in-text as his novels have progressed.)

First, a short overview of The Culture:

The Culture is a large, galaxy-spanning society devoid of laws and government, with a deep hostility to authority and coercion. More of a tendency than formal body its members are bound only by free association, often in differingly identified lumps and spread out in constant migration. Its ranks are largely split between three forms of existence: Mind, Human and Drone, (AI, biological & robot) with extensive self-modifications commonly taking place within each category. Its Minds tend to build giant ships or habitats around themselves. Its Humans alter their genetics extensively, often in pursuit of greater pleasure (drug glands, butterfly wings, etc). While its Drones favor using force fields to interact with the world. The Culture's citizens are used to social and material freedom and consequently they exhibit both extreme self-confidence and a subtle guilt complex, that is to say smugness and an overactive conscience. The latter of which leads them to meddle extensively in the name of Liberty & Progress. This often cold-hearted utilitarianism, coupled with their utopian success (and unacknowledged idealism) has left them the most respected and feared force in the Galaxy.

In short The Culture is equal parts an allegory to American Hegemony and an exploration of Anarchist Utopianism. But The Culture isn't just a wish-fulfillment exercise in which the Big Mean Perfect Anarchy goes around beating up Poor Little Evil Empires. The Culture is partially based in fantastical posits, but it also has some real-world grounding.

Things The Culture Gets Right:

1. Hierarchy is impeded by space. Three dimensions facilitates free association on a far qualitatively larger scale. Autonomous lifesystems/ecosystems provide an unprecedented level of self-sufficiency and independence. Relativity and the sheer size of space fundamentally restricts lines of control. Once a civilization moves to space it will very quickly be forced to dissolve all pretenses of centralized authority.

2. Space-faring societies would almost certainly abandon planets to build their own habitats. Gravity wells are disgustingly cost-inefficient. There's no point in setting up permanent, sedentary settlements on planets -- much less struggling for domination over them -- when far purer resources are scattered about in abundance. Unlike planets, asteroids and comets are decentralized, uninhabited and easily accessible.

3. Post-scarcity societies have no need for private property (as opposed to personal possession). When every individual controls the means to production, individually, occupation and use become the only relevant claims. When I can build anything I want whenever I want it, there's no real point in using force to maintain control over a surplus.

4. When anyone can record anything and transmit it freely, acts of aggression are effectively outlawed. If your every action taken in public is truly public, it's extremely hard to manipulate others or engage in violent coercion. Crime, in the common sense, is largely impossible and restitution quickly obtained. Free association is the most diffuse police system possible and maximizes both choice and personal responsibility.

5. Anarchies are more efficient than other forms of social organization. The more fluid and dynamic a society becomes, the better it's able to process and enact original or ingenuous ideas. Individual autonomy provides intellectual redundancy and best respond to local conditions, whereas hierarchical or collective processes minimize net intellectual capacity. Decentralized, bottom-up tendencies maximize evolutionary iterations. In wartime, anarchies tend to accomplish far more with far less.

6. Any sufficiently rigorous ethical system is indistinguishable from consequentialism. Deontology is just a retarded version of rule-utilitarianism, but the wider one's access to the context of an ethical act, the less such rules help. Granted, any moral good or base desire must take into consideration the present, the marginality of future predictions and the effect upon oneself, but that just makes it a particularly robust consequentialism. Whereas deontological approaches inherently flounder as context widens. All of us ultimately recognize -- whether we judge ourselves capable of making an informed choice -- that sometimes the ends do justify the means.

I don't really care that The Culture blows up stars, meddles with other civilizations, conspires to start wars and accidentally causes the occasional gigadeath. On the whole I'm willing to take them at their word that they do more good than bad (unlike America, whose state-power is based on exploitation and inextricably embedded in a deterministic negative-sum game of westphalian realism).

My concerns are more interpersonal and sociological.

Decidedly Un-Anarchistic Aspects To The Culture:

1. The separation of Minds, Drones and Humans is hierarchical because there's no in-betweens. While Banks makes vague handwavings about the infinite malleability of forms of existence within The Culture and we must cut him some slack as a writer, there's never even passing mention of Humans or drones self-improving to the point where they become Minds. If this is an oversight, it seems a monumental one. The Culture is endlessly cited as the most imminent thought experiment of a posthuman society (and often as proof that anarchism and transhumanism are exactly the same thing). But while The Culture is quite obviously posthuman, it doesn't focus on self-improvement, exploration and expansion the same way that transhumanism does. And, frankly, seems a little unrealistic. There's no way 40 Trillion people could have their hands on near-infinite technology without a significant portion of them setting off to better themselves.

2. The sedentary behavior of most Culture citizens is indicative of widespread self-restriction. Beyond showing no interest in becoming Minds themselves, The Culture's Humans and Drones tend to just dick about in hedonistic pleasure and ineffable arrogance rather than proactively striving to make a difference. Special Circumstances is always portrayed as a very small minority within The Culture, and while everyone tends to take pride in its accomplishments, almost no one set out to change things individually. While SC infiltrates and manipulates thousands of different cultures and civilizations, they don't go everywhere, and it's decidedly weird that more citizens don't strike out for themselves and have a personal go at fucking over teh Prime Directive. Even the Elench (a breakaway, more fervently Anarcho-Transhumanist tendency in The Culture) are practically defined by their conservatism. The Elench trawl the Galaxy for new experiences to help change and improve themselves, but are remarkably blase and limited about the whole thing, pretty much mirroring The Culture's ship + riders archetype. Worst of all, people across The Culture and its various offshoots tend not to seek the capacity to make particularly complicated things for themselves, but instead rely entirely on the Minds.

3. The Culture is repeatedly portrayed as depending entirely on an built-in tendency of Minds to like Humans. Banks offers up a multitude of reasons why the Minds have no interest in altering their core desires re: being nice to humans, but none of them are entirely satisfactory. At the end of the day the Minds' anarchistic benevolence is based on gut-level conservatism and laziness, not any objective morality. In short, The Culture's anarchy works because its most able citizens have yet to kill the cop in their heads. This is excruciatingly annoying and best demonstrates just how afraid Banks is of sounding radical. The only character I found sufficiently anarchistic was the Grey Area -- the most despised and ostracized starship in the history of The Culture thanks to its unapologetic inhibitions when it comes to mind-reading. (Which it uses extensively, without consent, to track down, torture and kill fascists. As well as occasionally to repair relationships and help people overcome trauma and misconceptions.)

4. Such hostility to mind-reading and deeper forms of intimacy/honesty betrays The Culture's broader comfort with subtle forms of manipulation and secrecy. Culture citizens, being sedentary and bored, tend to pass the time with elaborate social and interpersonal games that are based on artificial scarcities of information. People engage in spats, cliques and conspiracies over the most meaningless and arbitrary stuff. And while this is realistic (just look at the present day Anarchist Milieu), their easy-going comfort with such acts of borderline cruelty is disturbing. Granted, there are limits to the degree of casual power-mongering Culture citizens consider acceptable, but even so they display no imperative or desire to reduce such behavior. At best there's a tired exasperation with it. Which is realistic, I suppose, given The Culture's weird preoccupation with more-or-less plain human existence. But it's still decidedly less than anarchist.

Banks portrays The Culture as being unique among galactic civilizations (dating back billions of years) for their suspicion that sudden technological raptures smack of coercion. Given his portrayal of such "Subliming" this certainly appears an admirable reaction. ...But sometimes stagnation smacks of coercion too.

There are, of course, many setting criticisms to be made; FTL and hominids are entirely unnecessary but annoyingly still regarded as a reasonable crutch. (Probably because so many authors are still secretly infected with a lust for skiffy. It'd be nice if the Brits got over the influence of Blake's 7 sometime this millennia, I'm just saying.) Half the high-technology is utterly fantastical while the other half is perfectly reasonable, and the conjunction can be annoying. But most centrally, whenever Banks turns his attention to low-tech worlds they're invariably some cookie-cutter rendition the European Middle Ages (or, to shake things up, early 20th century Europe). Which is beyond lazy. I mean, seriously. Some level of anthropological awareness would be nice. The growth patterns of Western Civilization are hardly a-contextual historical inevitabilities, or even probabilities.

And this pertains just a teensy bit to Anarchism, as I hear tell it's arguably possible to have anarchistic societies without world-shatteringly advanced technology (!). Bank's explicitly mentions home-grown anarchists threatening the rule of their tyrants, but operatives from The Culture seem to default on liberal reformism. Generals replace Kings, and Presidents replace Generals, slowly preparing a society to understand freedom. I'm sorry, but I have a hard time swallowing the conceit that the poor weak-brained peasants need such coddling. And a harder time seeing The Culture as a singular apex of almost marxist development, so far removed from and inaccessible to lower tech societies.

Of course it's hard to look too closely at a fictional setting as vast The Culture's without feeling a little ashamed. Any nitpicking can generate its own excuse and on such decades-old thought experiments you have to cut the Author some slack. Still. SF is intended to thought-provoke and some of those trains of thought are worth hijacking.

2008-07-28T22:38:00.000-07:00

(Glad I'm Not Betting Against Human Ingenuity)

This is -- production costs included -- a significant step forward.

2008-07-26T07:17:00.000-07:00

(Maximizing The [Meaningless])

I'm with Cory: This is a lovely, gorgeous rant against the conceptual meaninglessness of 'maximizing corporate profits.' Further, I suspect there's an Austrian point in there. When individuals divest their agency and buy into a collective bureaucratic structure, they attempt to squash their own time-preference curves into one official collective curve. Times a million.

"if you allow strategic and reputational issues to be given weight in managerial decisions, then it is very hard indeed to think of something that can’t be justified as being in the best interests of maximising shareholder value over the long term."

Corporate responsibility replaces many subjective analyses with one subjective analysis -- trying to judge the overall tendency of those analyses as though they were each cardinal and could thus be objectively crunched. And that's beyond inefficient, it's fucking unstable.

The motivation is simplicity, but the output is arbitrary.

2008-07-21T16:01:00.000-07:00

(Forwarding Announcements In Blog Posts Is Tacky)

Today at 10am, baristas at the Mall of America I Starbucks donned red-and-black union pins and walked off the floor to present their manager with a demand letter. They announced their affiliation with the Starbucks Workers Union, a campaign of the Industrial Workers of the World.

This is the first of many actions that have taken place in Starbucks stores around the city over the past few years of internal organizing, and the first action as a public union campaign. Exiting, yes! and we are asking for your support.

Want to help?

- Join our solidarity committee and be one of the people planning out the support strategy for this campaign in partnership with those who work at Starbucks. Contact tcsbuxunion@gmail.com or call 612-245-4871 to get involved!
- Come to the press conference tomorrow at noon at the Mall of America's Northside Parking Lot and show your support for your fellow workers (press release attached).
- Stay on this email list and help out as you can with upcoming actions, by talking to your friends and co-workers, participating in actions of various kinds, or sending us your advice or support

Now back to the action…

The baristas demanded an option to transfer to other stores and a fair severance package for affected workers. Starbucks reportedly plans to give workers just one month notice before laying them off with a paltry two weeks' pay. The company will insist that some baristas transfer and will revoke severance pay if transfer offers are refused.

The protesting baristas are members of the Starbucks Workers Union, which is a campaign of the Industrial Workers of the World labor union. Starbucks previously backtracked on its refusal to disclose which locations would be shuttered after the union and others condemned the company for leaving workers in a nerve-wracking limbo.

The store action makes the Mall of America location the first Starbucks in Minnesota, and the first store in the Mall of America, to have a public union presence.

Erik Forman, a barista at the store recently fired for union activity, said, "With the skyrocketing cost of living, workers have no other choice than to stand up for improvements on the job. The alternative is a continued decline into poverty and a degraded quality of life for working families. But this doesn't have to happen. Our message is hope- even at Starbucks in the Mall of America, we can organize and fight!"

While portraying itself as a 'socially-responsible' employer, Starbucks pays baristas a poverty wage of $7.60/hr. In addition, all retail hourly workers at Starbucks in the United States are part-time employees with no guaranteed number of work hours per week. According to Starbucks figures released to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 40.9% of its employees (including managers) are covered by the company health care package, a lower percentage than the oft-criticized Wal-Mart, which insures 47% of its workforce.

Since the launch of the IWW campaign at Starbucks on May 17, 2004, the company has been cited multiple times for illegal union-busting by the National Labor Relations Board. The company settled two complaints against it and is awaiting a decision by a judge in New York on more than 30 additional rights' violations. Starbucks' large anti-union operation is operated in conjunction with the Akin Gump law firm and the Edelman public relations firm.

The IWW Starbucks Workers Union is a grassroots organization of over 200 current and former employees at the world's largest coffee chain united for secure work hours and a living wage. The union has members throughout the United States fighting for systemic change at the company and remedying individual grievances with management. The SWU has been especially active in New York City, Chicago, and Grand Rapids.

Union baristas, bussers, and shift supervisors have fought successfully toward improved scheduling and staffing levels, increased wages, and workplace safety. Workers who join the union have immediate access to co-workers and members of the community who will struggle with them for a better life on the job.

Thanks again for your support! We look forward to this and future struggles in the days to come,

Erik Forman, Jake Bell and the Starbucks Workers Organizing Committee (and Brendan Rogers, David Boehnke, and the Twin Cities General Membership Branch of the IWW).
www.StarbucksUnion.org

2008-07-06T04:01:00.000-07:00

(Nothing I'm Going To Tell You Is New)

"Should you speak to a man who understands commerce he will tell you that the everyday business transacted by merchants would be absolutely impossible were it not based on mutual confidence."
--Peter Kropotkin

"Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death."
--Theodor W. Adorno

"Everything that accelerates the flow of information and communication benefits the human race, and every communication jam damages us"
--Robert Anton Wilson

2008-07-03T00:37:00.000-07:00

(Racism Does Not Equal White Supremacy -- A Mild Rant)

I'm really sick and tired of this "racism" is one institutional system defined historically not theoretically bullshit. I understand the desire to be hardheaded and absolutist when grappling with intensely personal and totalizing social issues. And I realize that the word "racism" is one of the very few tools people of color currently have at their disposal. It makes sense to try and hijack it. But seriously. WTF.

1. That's not how we use the word. The Koreans hate the Japanese -- sorry, but we call that racism too. If you're going to try and rewrite the dictionary or attempt some philosophy of language at least try to make a coherent case. Rough historical trends, connections and perceptions do not make a fucking argument. They make a subjective appeal, back it up with shallow populist force and then try to ramrod it into cannon. Excuse me if I don't accept your skin color as a magical get-out-of-logic-free card. Back in the good ol' days when we said crazy shit like "Anarchy is Order" or "Property is Theft" we were obliged to break out some fucking logical analysis to prove them.

2. Whether you believe it or not -- I certainly wouldn't -- there are sane, cogent anarchists out there capable of intelligently examining teh dread theoretical hierarchies of oppression and weighing out judgement of and reaction to expressions of racial antagonism/reactionism in a reasonable manner. We don't need to get beaten into submission with screams that racist acts/structures/attitudes targeting white people should be wiped from our minds as irrelevant in comparison. Surely we are capable of recognizing the ridiculously drastic disproportionality and broader social/historical context. Just as I hold out hope that you too will one day not fear going into deeper utilitarian examinations of the interactions/interrelation of cause and effect, however fringe the specific subject may be. Somehow I think that we're all capable of exploring minute counter-examples without misleading and blinding ourselves to the larger systems of oppression. The desire for a little theoretical consistency never turned anyone into an ineffective douchebag. Please, have a little fucking faith in those of us who like going deeper -- even if we're white. We're not going to stray from the struggle. The party line doesn't need protection. In fact broad, simplistic slogans tend to make us weak, not strong.

3. The appeal to institutionality is particularly embarrassing. I mean for god's sake, we don't need any more help looking like shallow anarchist caricatures. The cops are not the end-all component in society. "Institutionalization" can be far more diffuse and localized to networks and modes of our social existence. Growing up the only white kid in the projects, for example, means taking shit and suffering disproportionate systematic violence on a culturally institutionalized level with -- by the way -- no recourse or contact with the distant beneficiary systems that might provide some access to white privilege. That dynamic is part and parcel of a larger social matrix of racism characterized on the whole by 'white supremacy,' but to call such local realities anything but institutional and systematic would be willful blindness. While the annoyed reaction to class warfare idiots blithely attempting to place the whole 'white working class' in some ridiculous parallel position is reasonable, their idiocy does not negate the tactical -- much less theoretical/personal -- importance of studying and openly addressing such realities.

4. Blunt theoretical force never solved anything. The push to create a simplistic party-line on racism within the anarchist movement or draw up borders between subjective experiences is keeping us in the fucking stone age when we have the tools and the expertise to move the entire world forward. Struggle, resistance, insurrection and revolution are augmented and strengthened -- not diminished or bypassed -- by conceptual coherence, nuance and clarity.

5. I hate to break it to you but yes, even when a bourgeois white kid gets passed over by a college quota system in favor of some black kid, that's racism. It's racism because, of course, its racial discrimination on the part of the state -- and anyway how the hell is that not institutional and subjugation based in force, however minimal? But further any racial discrimination, while not as abhorrent as most of the outright brutal subjugation that characterizes racism, should for god's sake still be unacceptable to any anarchist -- after all we're not goddamn marxists seeking some sort of transitory accomplishment before even considering setting after our underlying idealism. Its absolutely critical that we contextualize that almost negligibly minute act of discrimination within the larger, self-perpetuating system helping uphold racism and white supremacy. As anarchists it should never be our job to cheer when someone gets their ass handed to them in a sling, but to be there to point out to them how such misfortune is part of a larger project of self-perpetuating power structures feeding off the memes and social context that constitute racism.

So anyway, please. The next time you're slapping around some privileged semi-radical douchebag, please. For the fucking love of god. Don't use simplistic reductions of complex phenomena as a verbal battering ram. By all means, don't let them get away with mamby-pamby "things are complicated, there's counter-examples" handwaving and avoidance of engagement, either. Beat them to the punch. By not trying to force idiotic, historically and anthropologically discredited premises into your discourse.

"Racism" = largely universal theoretical descriptor. "White Supremacy" = large component of actually existing historical/social construct. White Supremacy is an embodiment of racism. Racism is not a fucking embodiment of White Supremacy. It's classification as such is really just another annoying case of shallow American Exceptionalism and unwarranted reactionary Eurocentric analysis.

2008-07-02T01:13:00.000-07:00

(My Search Continues)

The Challenge: Can an Autonomist complete just one sentence without obliging me to roll my eyes?

...I keep on wanting to kick them out of the movement. To find some crystal clear point of divergence. So that I can rain fire and brimstone down from the heavens and declare: there can be no alliance -- die and go to hell, you rat-bastard Marxists! Or, conversely, to find this supposed "theory" they're so smug about having. But after a dozen excruciatingly inane texts (and the accompanying optical gymnastics) I must unfortunately conclude that there is no essential division between Anarchism and Autonomism. They're incompetent and hopped up on litcrit, yes. But sadly, being ignorant, obnoxious and useless is not a good enough excuse for me to put them up against the wall.

Hmm... Maybe I can go all Zerzan on them and call them fascists for fetishizing language?

Anyway, all of this is to say I'm finding Holloway surprisingly decent. Ignoring, of course, fact that he has no original ideas, every single one of his sentences is an effete frenchman, and -- like all Marxists -- wouldn't know economic theory or analytical philosophy if it bit him on the ass.

2008-07-01T23:24:00.000-07:00

(Two Definitions Of Power)

Two Definitions of Power

There are two competing definitions of the word "power" in the english language:

1. Power as capacity.

2. Power as control.

With "empowerment," aside from the abstract connotations of self-actualization, what's really being said is: one has the capacity to do something.

But with the strict sociological definition of power, one refers to control over another; coercion perhaps not conveyed in violence or the threat of violence, but nevertheless a situation where one person looses to some degree their own agency to become a deterministic extension of some external will. Or, in the material case, where an object's behavior is determined more fully by one's will.

This makes sense in the most common application. We say that one individual has 'power over another' when they can determine that individual's actions/thoughts.

However that same phrase can be -- and often is -- read as having more power than another. Thus power might be a quantity. A substance, the unequal distribution of which between the two individuals is the source of the determination of the other's thoughts/actions. In the marxist sense this could refer to the distribution of resources. One person "has" more resources and these resources lend them the capacity to take certain actions with a varying degree of force. Between two individuals the one with the most material capacity can win any contention between wills, and thus has control over the other BECAUSE they have more capacity. Capacity, being the root reality, could thus be the subject best deserving the recognition of the term "power."

But is this really so?

If this were the case then the ideal society, most anarchists (and a few statists) would assert, would be the equal distribution of power.

But we can easily conceive of a situation where, despite equal allocations of capacity, both individuals are capable of coercing one another. Even further, occasions where they do.

To pose a very simple situation: One might be intelligent and manipulative while the other might be strong and brutal. Both individual's wills would be constrained by the other's conditions. The brute may intimidate the conman while simultaneously be in turn manipulated by him. The conman's agency is constrained by the ever-present threat of the brute's fury on some areas while the brute may be beguiled into certain forms of behavior.

One might object that this only demonstrates the existence of different kinds of power.

But we can, with a little more thought, replicate the same phenomenon with two conmen or two brutes. While in a contest of wills neither party will triumph in achieving their goal, both parties find themselves constrained.

The contest of wills itself is constraining. And yet neither party would consider the other powerless. In fact both would likely consider the other to be exerting power over them. The conmen in particular may find themselves ever more deeply wrapped in a relationship they are unable to escape, their thoughts ever more dominated by reactive calculations.

In short, both parties capacities are reduced while we do not say the same of their power. Power thus seems to operate as "control."

There are absolutely no situations where one "has power" with high capacity and low control. But there are situations where one "has power" with high control and low capacity. We're reminded of the classic image of a king becomes a slave to his own throne. He has power -- control -- but is controlled himself.

Power then -- despite some sloppy thinking -- is best referenced not as a quantity of capacity but rather a relationship of control. Often to some degree mutual control.

"It seems to me that the truly American Revolution would be to abolish power."
--Karl Hess.

2008-06-29T15:34:00.000-07:00

(Growing Asparagus On Mars)

"About a cubic centimeter of soil mixed with sterile water brought from Earth had a pH of 8 to 9 and contained magnesium, sodium, potassium, and chloride. "Earth-type life would be happy to live in this soil," Phoenix team member Samuel Kounaves of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, said at a media teleconference today. "You could grow asparagus but not [acid-loving] strawberries" in the alkaline dirt."

Dude!

2008-06-29T00:32:00.000-07:00

(Giggle)

"...anarchist communists and post-left anarchists, such as Bob Black, reject markets based on the principle that all theories of monetary value are subjective ..."

Seriously.

2008-06-28T03:30:00.000-07:00

(A Manifesto Of Intent)

A Manifesto of Intent

There are three common mathematical arguments for Anarchism that I will tritely state as such:

1. Altruism is pragmatic. cf Kropotkin via Game Theory, Evolution

2. Centralization is inefficient. cf Mises via Price Signals, Economics

3. Collapse is inevitable. cf Zerzan via Systems Dynamics, Anthropology

Each are more or less correct. But even combined they are insufficient at providing a solid inclination, much less moral ought, towards the abolition of rulership. Further all sorts of psychopathy, manipulation and coercion are still possible.

These mathematical realities are supposed to lead individuals to social and political perspectives like so:

1. Collective solidarity is sufficient to meet the individual's desires as well as the course of action with the most certain positive results. There are far fewer individuals on the margins in an anarcho-communist society, thus from a Rawlsian perspective anarcho-communism best balances our desires with the fullest possibility of their achievement. So, to avoid the drastic uncertainties of statist capitalism, abolish the state and abolish capitalism.

2. Diffuse systems will provide for everyone's desires better. The rich will get richer, the poor will get richer. If you want to get richer, abolish the state.

3. Extended rigid structures or limited processes applied perpetually are bound to fail. The tension and eventual crises they generate are undesired. Thus, to avoid as much undesired tension as possible, refuse to participate in the state and capitalism, and when civilization collapses don't rebuild it.

There is a hole in each of these arguments.

1. While the gratification of one's desires in existing society may be uncertain, an individual might place value in the fulfillment of their desires differently. The possibility of being a millionaire, or even simply petite bourgeoisie in the first world, may be desired so extraordinarily that it outweighs the greater likelihood of being or remaining a prole for life. Lastly, of course, none of us are behind a veil of ignorance and society is already constructed. The benefactors of privilege have no personal incentive to downgrade the satisfaction of their desires. Game theory evaluations that favor mutual aid are premised upon largely uniform or linear value systems. Sociology and psychology teach us that the valuations of the human mind are anything but.

Note 1: Kropotkin had an additional element to his argument -- in fact the more significant component -- which appealed to human nature. Being altruistic or, more broadly, participating in a naturally composed social ecology, is one of our innate biological desires. Because our evolution was effected by game theory. This is a good trick and pretty much the central patch keeping Social Anarchism afloat. But there's no reason this natural desire to participate in mutual aid is so strong as to not be individually fulfilled within existing conditions. The giving of charity is a product like any other under capitalism and welfare in the state, maybe even to a sufficient extent to satisfy our biological desire. In short the tendency towards Mutual Aid must compete with every other desire. Humans, like all animals, are born with varying tendencies. Some individuals will barely feel altruistic desires. And as individuals or even just products of our society we have some control over our genetic desires. Most importantly: What's to stop me from writing mutual aid out of my DNA? Self-improvement (once the core of anarchist thought) is utterly irreconcilable with appeals to biological essentialism.

Note 2: Marx claimed that the proles would inevitably one day have the strength to overthrow the upper classes. Thus it would make sense as an individual to side ahead of time with the winning bloc. If this truly was inevitable or even probable within our life times then it might be possible to set off a chain reaction where differently inclined individuals progressively abandon their privilege to adopt anarcho-communism until all the rats have finally jumped ship. But by all accounts the proles are not going to win, they never were. The very idea is preposterous and utterly disconnected from all history, culture, realpolitik and sociology. As should be obvious after all these centuries, the proles are not the strongest class, they're unfortunately the weakest class. They can only win if a significant fraction of the upper classes voluntarily side with them. If there's a state apparatus waiting for them with the promise of more privilege, then such a move would make sense. And historically, in a few cases, did. But it is in no way proven -- or even suggested by history -- that the upper classes can be sufficiently moved by the desire for mutual aid. Insofar as this desire crops up, capitalism and the state, as we've seen, provide them with substantive placebos.

2. While abolishing the state may make me richer, there's far more frequently something to be said for playing its game. Furthermore, should the state dissolve, it's important to note that there's nothing whatsoever dissuading me from taking advantage of others as opportunity avails itself. But even if we take game theory into account and combine with #1 (decentralized market + mutual aid), the same realities apply. We can still find occasion to manipulate and coerce where the counter-incentives are outweighed. Decentralized conspiracy or arbitrary separatism is rewarded. Privilege can be easily re-established in a decentralized, altruistically acting society. Simply keep your knowledge to yourself or closely mind the circles of its transmission. Very quickly power structures can emerge (or simply remain) based solely on information and association. Those who cluster in shared circles create classes, while those who most adeptly manipulate the lines of communication gather self-compounding power. In short relative differences in social strength can reach a point where whatever absolute advances in strength those at the bottom might have made, they can be rolled back.

Note 1: Rothbard makes some ridiculous jumbo about "rights" and "natural law." This is clearly meant to amuse us. The supposed a priori case for property titles, non-aggression, etc. is sufficiently elegant and grounded in common sense to gain internet fanboys, but as a theoretical physicist I find its assumptions (like the distinction between positive and negative action) about as reasonable as golden thrones in the clouds and holy trinities. My market anarchist comrades will have to excuse me for not mincing words. If property titles are to be reconstructed -- or even excused -- they must have a more substantive basis. I believe reputation markets offer this, but that's a treatise unto itself.

3. This is by far the most convincing of arguments, I was a primitivist for a good many years for a reason. Elaborate lies, systems and power structures do tend to eventually fall apart when embedded in dynamic realities. Their collapse is often drastic, unpredictable and of such magnitude as to outweigh any good derived from them. But they do not have to fall within an individual's lifetime. This is the abhorrent truth and the whole reason Civilization (in the bad sense) caught on to begin with. Crooks can, and often do, die happy. Thus, even if Peak Whatever is set to inevitably destroy Civilization within an individual's life time there's no inherent reason to avoid creating separate power structures around oneself. One can detach from doomed existing structures, while still participating in the creation of such structures. Just ones that have a good chance of keeping you in a position of privilege till death.

In short, no matter what in all of these arguments -- even combined -- there is a slim (or not so slim) opening for manipulation, control, exploitation, privilege and power. The rulership Anarchism claims to oppose. All these mathematical realities do is generate awareness of the broader landscape in which one's personal power operates. In fact, as is apparent across the Social Anarchist milieu, such knowledge has in most cases only facilitated the spread of power. We Anarchists, being attuned to all these nuances and experienced in a wide variety of settings/procedures, have become the most adroit Machiavellians in the world. (Thank god by the time we develop these skills most of us are trapped in a dead-end scene!) Although detached from the altruistic placebos of the State, we still manage to find useless wastes of time to keep our genes content while opening entirely new vistas of power games.

I intend to provide, establish and elucidate the personal moral ought that is missing from this discussion.

note: don't expect go expecting a complete work any time soon.

2008-06-27T16:09:00.000-07:00

(Reformism Matters)

The Supreme Court's expansion of the 2nd Amendment is one of the most significant victories ever made in the cause of liberty. When American Empire falls it will be Americans who bring it down. There are 300 million bullets in the belly of this beast, waiting for something to set them off. May the politicians tremble.

2008-06-27T04:10:00.000-07:00

(The Relevance Of Anarchism)

Note: I'm going to start releasing full, standalone articles on this site. They will look like this.

The Relevance of Anarchism

Anarchism is nothing new. Anything we could show you, you've heard already. The touch of Anarchism is in everything around you. A million premises you've already encountered and explored. It's an old idea.

Freedom. Compassion. Ingenuity. Exploration. Things that are good.

We're all on our way to them already. We'll make it or we won't. In every aspect of our lives, before a million separate vistas, we're struggling to make things better.

You're engaged in this struggle. In different ways you've been fighting it your whole life. Perhaps deconstructing gender, challenging faith, inventing new tools...

Why turn aside and get wrapped up in a piece of history? With a dumb name and a bunch of dirty, insipid punk-rockers.

Because anarchism still offers the most basic, radical analysis of society possible, unfettered by clumsy abstractions. And a willingness to take things as far as they need to be taken, a commitment to act rather than retreat.

In short because liberalization isn't enough. The powers of our world may appear to be falling into remission, but they are not going to die without a fight. Sooner or later the hammer will drop. The forces of regression always rear up. It's not enough to obsess over -- to cling to -- some rules only to stand back in shock when those rules are thrown out by the powerful.

To defeat bullies you have to plan, you have to fully understand the underlying realities and you have to be ready.

Power is a social psychosis; a manner of thinking that constricts thought and action for its own sake. So that all who engage in its machinations are left marionettes of their own roles. It stems from a disinterest in active engagement and a longing for a security of mind that might as well be death.

Power is how we control one another and how we are controlled by our very need for control. In building our networks of manipulation and obedience, society has come to resemble bubblewrap. Each of us sealed off from one another by our common bonds.

Resistance, true resistance, is about connecting in new, fluid ways. In solving our problems by thinking about them rather than defaulting on old formulas. But further we must realize that to break down and remake the existent we have to grapple with it.

It's not enough to pay lipservice, to dwell on our occasional flashes of insight, we must be vigilant. In throwing out our idols we must retain our sense of direction. In coming to grasps with the world around us we must not lose our urgency.

Anarchism is not one more chain, but a bellwether.

Our moral urge, clarified and applied.

Because we're not going to get anywhere until we are ready for the full struggle.

2008-06-26T23:10:00.000-07:00

(Why We're Going To Win)

Because they haven't killed the kid in us. Because the culture xkcd is flagshipping is the only revolution that matters.

2008-06-24T22:25:00.000-07:00

(Post-Leftist Core Text Already Lost To History)

I'm desperately looking for a copy of Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs, which, like so many other works, seems to have slipped through the scene into oblivion. For some reason I've always remembered it as Days of War, Nights of Love's far superior, but overlooked, brother. I read bits back in 2003 and really admired the individualist take on organizing, but the last copy I saw was ages ago in the home of a Green Party candidate(!).

If anyone in world still has a copy I would do anything to help scan it for the interwebs and fight off theoretical entropy.

The Curious George Brigade, in case you didn't know, were a lower budget Crimethinc with politics that we could actually be proud of. They're the cavalier superheroes who published Liberate, Not Exterminate -- a wonderful defense of cities against primitivism (I've resurrected a printable PDF version). ...Although for some unfathomable reason when I last found myself defending teh Crimethinc boogieman Marina Sitrin cited them as the evil ones. Go figure.

2008-06-21T23:56:00.000-07:00

(Five Year Anniversary)

There needs to be a framing narrative. Or so I'm told.

Okay. Catharsis.

On a March evening five years ago we invaded Iraq. Five years ago I stormed out of an anarcho-communist meeting. Lived on my own for a month. Applied to an elite college. Scribbled preposterous predictions on the road as the crowd moved over it. Fought with a counter-protester, stumbled and fell on a passage. Started a blog.

Over the intervening years Human Iterations has--quite naturally--been a lot of things, but it was started with specific intent and has steadfastly remained the centerpiece of a broader attempt to bring together left and right. To push as hard as I could to help redefine the spectrum in terms of liberty. I spent several years playing the conventional blog game with progressives and libertarians, constantly juggling readership, before slowly turning my attention entirely on the anarchist movement, the gooey nuggety core of that whole effort.

Today I am hardly alone. There are thousands around the anglosphere and beyond! redefining the political spectrum. Ron Paul, SDS, the Rothbard Caucus, Aliance of the Libertarian Left, Agorist Action Alliance... As Shawn and I gushed together the other day, Brad Spangler works alongside Chuck Munson!

Truly the times, they are a changing.

And I... I am getting bored.

I have other hills to storm.

I'm not throwing away the blog away. But I can't help but feel the battle it was built to fight has effectively been won.

2008-06-19T15:51:00.000-07:00

(Belgian's Plans For Steampunk Internet Ruined By Nazis)

By far the coolest article this year.

2008-06-18T05:40:00.000-07:00

(Shenanigans Throughout The Ages)

Wendy McElroy has an interesting article up all about the stickers that Benjamin Tucker and the Liberty crew apparently sold in bulk. It's an interesting historical tidbit that I wouldn't have expected.

...I've now got this weird image in my head of the 1890s Boston individualists as sort of old-timey Crimethinkers.

2008-06-14T22:18:00.000-07:00

(The Case Against Primitivism In A Nutshell)

"What I hear from a lot of Greens is "We need to protect the earth because it is far more valuable than humankind, and if necessary, the majority or totality of human life can and should die to make sure the rock stays green and blue and spinny."

That's total fucking nonsense.

Besides the impossibility of trying to organize the world's population to self-destruct, I find it offensive to consider humans to be anything but the immensely powerful, rational actors we are. We can build any kind of a world we want. I think it's in our best interest to build a clean, green world, but we should do it because it helps us, not to spite ourselves or out of 'giving up' on our ability to progress. Any political program which seeks to use violence or authority to stop me from using SCIENCE is a pretty fucking horrible political program. Science is LEARNING. It's learning to use what's around you to better your life. Some of what science has achieved has been atrocious, due in part to a misunderstanding of what is in the user's best interest, but you can't be against science itself... or technology itself... do you really think that people will just stop being curious or stop trying to make life easier for themselves?"

Emphasis mine. A surprising nugget of sanity in an otherwise typical bout of Red/Green bullshit.

2008-06-12T17:54:00.000-07:00

(Dresden Codak Reveals Its Serious Affliction With Cerebus Syndrome Slowly... Sensuously)

Transhumanism has a weird relationship to Science Fiction. While the two exist alongside one another in the broader realm of futurism, SF is nothing more than a literary tradition with a mild ethical imperative towards cognitive modeling. Transhumanism on the other hand is an attempt to politicize and radicalize Science.

There are many SF books addressing ideas that fall within the transhumanist discourse, and even a few that directly address Transhumanism itself. SF authors are surprisingly conservative, always addressing transhumanism from afar. While many relate in vague geek-culture terms to the goal of self-improvement, SF is an introspective discipline. You won't find transhumanism as a protagonistic motivation in their writing, because transhumanism is far too political. Its call for action is fundamentally alien to sedentary dreamers.

SF takes great pride in addressing radical political possibilities, but it almost uniformly does this from the perspective of the outsider with largely default personal aspirations. It's hard to write a character fighting for something greater than themselves. It's extremely difficult to portray a character fighting for something unconventional, and it's downright near impossible for a SF author to delve into something so relevant to their own perspective.

Every SF author desires fervently to live in a fancy nanotech utopia. Transhumanism asks: "Why aren't you doing anything about that?" Which is not a fun question.

Anyway, all of this is purely academic because a little "quirky" (isn't that word like dragging your fingernails over chalkboard?) webcomic called Dresden Codak has punched through this longstanding barrier. I didn't actually realize it until today, but Dresden Codak is actually going for broke on a Cerebus Syndrome. It's trying for serious Hard SF explicitly centered on Transhumanism. And it's actually doing pretty well.

Dresden Codak, for those of you put off by my earlier description, is one of the best showcases of gorgeous cutting-edge sequential art. The sort of Copper-style single pieces that take weeks to craft. (If you ever saw one of those old water-colored Calvin and Hobbes sunday strips and thought it should hang in an art gallery, this is the crowd who took it as inspiration.) Dresden Codak's catch was the artists' fascination with geeky intellectual concepts in topics like physics, philosophy and lit crit. Sort of like XKCD with more gumption and less wry self-apologism.

The first pieces published were snapshots of magical realism and intellectual exploration. (And, yes, I followed it since the beginning. I have more indie cred than you. Sometimes I throw myself a little party.) But eventually these one-off pieces were replaced by a narrative. This was very slow process--not because of the eons between updates--but because even when the narrative very explicitly started it maintained the random discreteness of each individual paintings.

Besides. Dresden Codak is a webcomic. It makes jokes. Online.

Gradually, however, it has become a full-fledged graphic novel. Unique in uncountable details of art and presentation, but more unique than I think even its author realizes in its actual material. Dresden Codak Presents: Hob is a hard SF graphic novel about transhumanism, from a transhumanist perspective. Not the edges of transhumanism, the aftereffects or scottish-accented folks off on a distant hill, but the thing itself.

Anyway, it's also really good. So. You know. You should get on that.

2008-06-12T15:50:00.000-07:00

(The Neurology Of Property)

The tests were run in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, tracking certain areas of the brain known to be associated with buying and selling. If the reason for the endowment effect came from the products being overvalued by their owners, Knutson’s team expected to see a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbus change during the test. It didn’t, “whether buying or selling, the activation in the nucleus accumbus looked the same”, says Rick.

But others part of the brain, the insula, which has a role in the experience of pain, and the greater mesial prefrontal cortex became activated when the subjects contemplated selling one of their items. If they had ranked that item as one they particularly liked, the change in the insula was greater.

According to this research, this is because of loss aversion, says Rick. “It is not because people are overplaying the positive [aspects of a possession].” Rather, we just become attached to objects we own — so much so that it takes a lot to convince us to part with them.

-- Nature.

2008-06-06T21:57:00.000-07:00

(Links To Free Printable Agitprop)

A friend of mine in Indiana is starting his own loaning library of anarchist material. And while I had a ton to say about titles, he was more interested in printable zines -- what, with the cheapness and ubiquity. Most anarchist literature in the world remains stuck in the 80s, slinking around the pockets of dirty scenesters on dead tree and generally drowning in our own insularity. But there are PDF copies available. You just have to know where to look. So, in answering him, I thought I'd post this online to provide a resource for others and finally stave off these queries.

Of course I couldn't fail to mention the biggie out of Olympia, Zine Library.net, but it's more of a scattershot archive attempt than a solid resource. It's worth digging around in, but if you're getting started or looking to table propaganda it can be of less use than a specific distro. As chance would have it there's really only five online distros of note, and each toes a pretty distinct party line:

Communist Anarchism @
Prole.info

Anarcho-Syndicalism / Platformism @
Zabalaza

Insurrectionary Anarchism @
Quiver

Post-Left / Lifestylist Anarchism @
CrimethInc

Market Anarchism @
Invisible Molotov

Anarcha-Awesomeness
Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness

Ah, unintentional self-parody...

Maybe later, when I'm feeling more bombastic I'll put up some helpful list of "core texts." Less because I seek to dictate cannon, and more because I realize there really aren't any good lists readily available.

2008-05-29T10:48:00.000-07:00

(Fighting The State's Weather)

"Why is it good for the movement that the LP have radicals in it? Because although electoral politics should never be the primary focus of libertarian education, so long as there is a self-proclaimed libertarian political party, whatever it says or does is going to have an impact on people’s perception of libertarianism, thus making the job of education easier or harder as the case may be. A libertarian party that puts forward relatively radical/leftish candidates like Ruwart thus helps the cause of radical libertarian education more (or, if you prefer, hinders it less) – in that respect, at least – than a libertarian party that puts forward relatively moderate/conservative/statist candidates like Barr. (No, I don’t think the adjectives “moderate,” “conservative,” and “statist” are interchangeable, exactly, but that’s another story. They’re all bad anyway.)

The paradox isn’t a contradiction. There is a respect in which radicals help the cause of agorist education by participating in the LP. There is a different respect in which radicals help the cause of agorist education by repudiating the LP. The question is how to weigh these two respects against each other. Most participants in the dispute seem to think it’s obvious how to weigh them (though their answers differ), but I don’t find it nearly so obvious.

To most people, the word “libertarian” means the Libertarian Party. One might react to this fact by feeling that it is vitally important for radicals to steer the LP in a radical direction so as to project the right image. One might instead react by feeling that it is vitally important for radicals to repudiate the LP loudly and forcefully so as to undermine the mistaken identification. I myself feel the pull of both considerations fairly strongly."

--Roderick Long.

Having never identified with or seriously participated in the whole rigmarole of electoral politics, I find myself occasionally drawn to the bombastic intrigue and grandeur of it. It's fascinating, it's amusing, and it almost fills a certain hole--a nutritional supplement of conventional politics akin to the rush of long-deprived patriotism Social Anarchists feel when we look at clips of Barcelona in '36. The Libertarian Party is the closest I have to a "home team" and such throw-away allegiance is a prerequisite for garnering any entertainment out of spectator sports. You have to root for somebody. Even if you're only pausing on a channel before going outside, it's important to note whether you're yellow or black. Otherwise it's just grown men splashing about in the mud.

I like to pretend that I vote in elections in order to piss off the dogmatic abstentionists, but usually when my ballot shows up in the mail I just have better things to do.

And that's the real critique. Electoral politics is a time sink, an amazingly ineffective waste of time even when compared to the amazingly ineffective wastes of time conventional anarchist activism is already prone to. Arguing about one candidate versus another is pretty much like wolfing chilidogs and yelling at the TV with your friends.

But--and this is where I side with Jeremy and Roderick--it's worth noting that people bond over chilidogs. It's easier to start a conversation over mindless fluff than ask your neighbor to pull a shift in the community garden. "I don't get the point of Football" is a pretty solid position. It's a pretty easily defendable position. But that's all it is. It leaves an uncomfortable silence in the room. And nobody gets to eat any chilidogs.

As Anarchists we're pretty hardcore idealists, but that's no reason to not be hardcore realists as well. Ron Paul, despite being an outright sith lord on borders and sexual liberty, managed to radicalize a whole fucking slew of people. I personally know at least three market anarchists now active as community activists who got started with fucking Ron Paul meetups. So while he may suck as an agent for liberty, as an effect, the campaign was positive weather. Even Obama's campaign has its positive aspects. Just as certainly a Hillary nomination or a McCain victory would be delicious cheesecake mana from the heavens.

While electoral politics rarely adds up to a hill of beans it shapes the tone of conversation in a country, and that's something to pay attention to even if only rarely are we offered the barest, unsubstantial effect on it. A Ruwart victory in the LP would have been a boon to the party's radical caucus. But who knows what the long term effects would have been. And that's the whole point. Participation in conventional politics abstracts us away from the concrete. We lose agency over our actions in the larger machine. And then we grow used to it.

2008-05-28T10:22:00.000-07:00

(Green Gap)

I'm just really looking forward to the day when some Prius driving yuppie makes up his mind about a war based on the environmental ratings of each side's bombs.

2008-05-27T13:08:00.000-07:00

(We're Not Fucked Enough, Throw In Some Triffids)

While I fully and enthusiastically support Genetic Engineering (caveat: once we actually know what we're doing) I respectfully disagree with Freeman Dyson. As much as I salivate at any opportunity to outrage the goddamn primmies, the solution to global climate change is not blindly fucking with the biosphere a little more. The solution is throwing away our cars and smashing the artificial market distortions that make globe-trotting production cheap.

There are wonderful pro-technology solutions to global warming. But--and I'm sorry to smash your bourgeois dreams Mr Dyson--"technology" does not equal cars.

SUVs, suburbs and industrial behemoths are not some pinnacle of technological development, but rather a horrible misstep that's getting in the way of true progress.

2008-05-24T15:22:00.000-07:00

(Utah Phillips Is Dead)

That is all.

2008-05-22T21:17:00.000-07:00

(Open Capitalist Network)

Thanks to Kevin Carson for highlighting a positive development.

2008-05-22T16:33:00.000-07:00

(Mass Graves)

"The commission estimates at least 100,000 people were executed, in a South Korean population of 20 million. That estimate is based on projections from local surveys and is "very conservative," said Kim. The true toll may be twice that or more, he told The Associated Press."

In 1945, as the Japanese Empire finally went into retreat, the Korean people were left without an occupational authority for the first time in decades. In that brief moment something amazing happened. The Korean Anarchists, long the champions of the resistance struggle, came out of the woodwork and formed a nationwide federation of village and workers councils to oversee a massive project of land reform. Korea graduated from feudalism overnight. Aside from some struggles with the Socialists and Nationalists, the peninsula was at peace.

When WWII concluded, however, the "responsibility" of securing peace and order in Korea was assigned to the Americans and Soviets. By all accounts in this instance the US actually had no imperialist intentions. While the Soviets moved quickly to deploy their forces and occupy the North, the Americans took their time showing up, and were largely content to let the South Koreans manage themselves.

The Koreans, culturally steeped with anti-authoritarian values, were fond of America and openly despised the Soviets. While a few socialists fled North hoping that the Soviets would give them a hand against the Anarchists, they were overwhelmed in numbers by a mass migration south. Everyone assumed the Americans would assist or at least respect their autonomy.

This did not last.

The Americans Military commanders who eventually arrived had trouble understanding or dealing with the anarchy they found. They had no protocol for dealing with regional federations and autonomous communes. So they helped the dispossessed aristocracy form a military government. In order to make the map "simple." In order to "get things under hand."

Most importantly they did not understand that the Korean Anarchists and Anti-Authoritarian activists that saturated the countryside were different than--and in fact vehemently opposed to--the Communists, going so far as to organized and launch insurrectionary attacks on the Soviet Occupation before the Americans arrived.

The Americans couldn't understand "anarchists". But "leftists", they knew, meant Soviets. And they had the gall to ignore or resist their puppet military government. So they started killing them.

By the start of the Korean War, the slaughter was in full swing. Having arrested every anarchist organizer or sympathetic peasant they could get their hands on, they started executing them en masse.

The Korean Anarchist movement was, historically, one of the strongest in the world. It survived half a century of brutal occupation and economic exploitation. It survived a three way assault by the Chinese, Japanese and Soviets. It has survived many, many massacres and exterminations. It is even still around today. So strong that in the last few years they've been known to evict the police from the streets. But the worst injury it ever suffered was initiated and orchestrated by the United States military. In a single campaign so horrific it borders on genocide.

This was truly, objectively, one of the worst things the US has ever done. And there are some big fucking contenders.

Most north american papers ran front-page stories this Monday about the latest mass graves being uncovered while I was riding the "Empire Builder" from St. Paul to Portland. I found a copy wedged between Amtrak seat cushions. And there was an ancient photo of piled corpses as far as the eye could see. The papers euphemistically used the term "leftists." But I know the history, I did the research.

They were almost all anarchists.

However lovely America may be. Remember, the US government is not our friend. It will never be. It can never be.

2008-05-15T20:35:00.000-07:00

i hate my flower, he said, so he punched it and it blossomed

But this is not the beginning. When we hacked into the blog account we had no idea.

They sit in sleeping bags, talking. But they're so close, he said, I can feel it brimming on the edge of every word. Birds who clip their own wings in protest of airline food. Hidden there, an entire passage rhapsodizing on the development of flight, while they grunt shallow slogans against it.

You better watch out, she said, they'll hobble you too.

I'm not afraid of the bourgeois, their penny souls are worth too much to sacrifice.

Days earlier. he's becoming one of them, did you see. All pretty pictures, smudged toner and anthemic quips.

I'm already corrupted, as he buried deeper into his cocoon.

cocoon! cried the English majors. for shame! they drank the drying ink. Art projects spread out like the broken bones of assault rifles that will never be fired.

But if I made millions on a graphic design project I know I'd start a scenester publishing house. And I, too, would fuel your pretensions of conspiracy with my own silence. But we are not these clones of ourselves. and who will do the dirty work of hating them?

How can you tell a ninja that his secrecy is a sword pressed against your neck?

Yo. Somebody put CrimethInc's latest book online.

2008-05-12T20:09:00.000-07:00

(Finally)

While on the one hand I'm not convinced that any interaction between NASA's bureaucracy and the market can have positive effects, on the other I spent most of high school secretly justifying the state in the short term on the grounds that the brutal enslavement of humanity was clearly a lesser evil than failing to get our asses moving.

Either way, this decision--like the fall of the Berlin Wall--is indicative of broader, underlying momentum. After four decades we are finally getting somewhere.

2008-05-06T08:35:00.000-07:00

(A Desperately Needed Note To Anarcho-Capitalists From The Poor)

Guys, the more y'all make taxes the center and end-all of your critique the less we give a damn. Some of us don't make enough to pay them. And some of us have never bothered paying them anyway, especially in states without sales tax. What are they going to do, audit us?

Taxation is simply not on our radar.

The more it matters to you, the less you matter to us.

2008-04-27T13:40:00.000-07:00

(Turing GPA)

Is anyone else starting to find themselves failing captcha tests? It's really obnoxious. And embarrassing to my ego as a sentient being.

2008-04-25T23:11:00.000-07:00

(Elegance)

As an anarchist I often find beauty in the composition of evil systems the same way as a physicist I find beauty in the composition of material systems. I want to frame this one and put it on my wall.

"Qom may have become a prostitution hot spot due to the abundance of shrines. Young female runaways with no shelter come to the city knowing they can take refuge at holy sites by sleeping in rooms intended for pilgrims. They have no way of making a living, so after awhile they get involved with the sex trade. The city's young theological students and transient tourists form the main clientele."

2008-04-21T10:30:00.000-07:00

(And We're Back)

"Because we have derived so much benefit from our associating with one another, most of us have no doubt expected that bringing people together into institutional collectives will foster greater social unity. But this has not been the case. Our expectations have failed to materialize because we have failed to distinguish between those spontaneous, unstructured organizations in which people come together for their mutual interests, and the structured institutional systems that mobilize people, inducing them - through intimidative or coercive means - to sacrifice their individual interests in favor of the alleged collective good. But on close examination, what is purported to be the collective good ends up being on the narrow good of the institution itself. One of the consequences of our being pushed together by institutional pressures has been an increased social isolation, a pulling away from one another."

Butler Shaffer, via Jeremy. This is quite possibly the most elegant and concise anarchist passage I've ever read.

2008-03-31T23:14:00.000-07:00

(It's Like A House Warming Party)

And you're invited.

2008-03-30T20:31:00.000-07:00

(Frankly, I Love It When The Upper Class Devours Their Own)

"The other day, when I accidentally saw ten minutes of CNN, they were running a profile of a two-earner couple who are now living at a public campsite after losing their big cushy house, featuring the wife wistfully talking about the granite countertops, and whining about how the bank hustled her and her husband into signing onto the ARM and how they were "lied to" by the bank."

From Stop Me Before I Vote Again, which sums up the mild bemusement of everyone I know regarding the AMR bubble and the frantic arm-waving horror of bourgeoisie pundits. Recession? If you say so. Things are exactly the same down here. By the way, those are some plush campsites. (via Commie Curmudgeon)

2008-03-30T02:28:00.000-07:00

(Titter)

Hee!

2008-03-22T01:49:00.000-07:00

(Damn, But Nickelodeon Knew How To Craft And Market Mary Sues)

By chance I've happened to catch myself simultaneously watching old episodes of The Wire and Space Cases. That mash-up is pretty much the purified essence of nine-year-old me. I wanted to shoot me some punk-ass bitches and live happily ever after with Jewel Staite on a starship.

...Actually, come to think of it. Not much has changed.

2008-03-21T23:50:00.000-07:00

(I'm An Old Man)

I'm running into members of the ALL in real life and social anarchists I've never met before are referring to agorism with some semblance of respect. Random market anarchists are citing me as the person who opened their mind to social anarchism. I've actually reached the point where I know of more social anarchists who've converted to market anarchism than I can count on one hand.

This is profoundly weird.

It's like I've won--or am in the process of winning--a meaningful political battle. ...What... What's... What's that like?

And more importantly, what's next? Where should we go from here?

2008-03-20T06:49:00.000-07:00

(Testing Out Kindergartens And Tying Its Own Shoes)

I stopped caring about the Iraq war five years ago today.

I organized high profile mass referendums against the war. I helped organize mass demonstrations. I staged effective guerrilla education and awareness raising. I composed complex realist critiques of the neocon strategy and mailed them to washington think tanks. I worked to cost the US military relatively massive amounts of money in unspecified ways that I've now suddenly forgotten. Through a host of unspecified actions I made the threat of widespread violent and non-violent resistance at home prominent.

The night before the bombs fell I stayed the entire night awake alone composing/photocopying multipronged propaganda and gathering tools. And when the following evening came, Portland along with a few other US cities ceased to move. And then I caught the bus home.

I did not give it my all. I could have tried to assassinate figures within the Bush Administration. (And almost certainly would have accomplished it.) I could have held a television station hostage or any number of alternative public spectacles. My youth held unique privileges. And now I will forever be indebted to prove my choice was worth it.

That March night, while still locked arm and arm on the Burnside Bridge, I had a lengthy debate with Libertarian counter-protester. And a week later I stormed out of an anarchist meeting when it was suggested that, since the war was a moot point we should turn all our focus to putting on a "free art" fest. ...But that's a different story.

The following are a series of posts on the Iraq war reflecting on our point today, half a fucking decade into the occupation.

Why was the invasion of Iraq objectionable?

Why is the continued occupation objectionable?

Can we still derail the US occupation?

Can we still change the world?

Why did they get it wrong?

How did my predictions fare?

2008-03-20T06:46:00.000-07:00

(Why Was The Invasion Of Iraq Objectionable?)

The demolition of the Soviet Union in 1991 was an almost unprecedented triumph in the cause of liberty. It was also the most abrupt and drastic instant in geopolitics. Ever.

It took the United States--the most energetic and dynamic political body in history--11 years to respond. To a small circle of Americans those eleven years were agony. As a geopolitical apparatus the United States is quintessentially proactive. When it stops moving it begins to die. Due to its unique historical position and composition, the United States is privileged with unparalleled speed, agility and strength, but once committed it turns like a fucking cow.

For eleven years the United States barely budged. The mighty beast's brain spun with adrenaline, progressively more and more frantic and terrified as its limbs refused to move.

Finally, frantically, something connected.

On the day that this occurred there was a plan already in place. A scheme both as desperate and satiating as the bolting of a deer. One could no more call it intelligent than one might call the deer's first leap a brilliant strategic salvo. It does not take genius to see danger and respond. Forcing military conflict in the gulf was the ONLY first step in a game China and Russia had already started. Simply put it was, by all reason, necessary. It was also, paradoxically, the stupidest move possible.

If the United States does not bomb foreign countries regularly every decade it will die. This is as true today as it was two hundred years ago--though the instruments superficially differ--and it will not change. There is no magical scandinavian socialist paradise we might transform into. Those are not self-sufficient geopolitical systems. They exist in an ecology propped up by the United States. Neither isolationism nor pacifistic neoliberalism have a hope at navigating or surviving the complex global power structures we are irrevocably embedded in.

Those power global power structures must be completely and absolutely annihilated before anyone on this planet will ever know peace. But, for the most part, they cannot be abolished by the United States. The United States is an interdependent component of the greater system. Its appetites are taken into account. Although the balance of power might shift, power itself remains constant. The collective psychosis that grips our world cannot destroy itself, and undulations within it can only deepen the infection.

The neoconservatives, a small group of trotskyist geopolitical realists spiked with a dose of american exceptionalism, did not realize this. They were trots and wonks, and as such, fools. Blinded by the simple brilliance they dealt in. Though they justified the morality of their enterprise through the tangential connection of America with positive adjectives. Power was the landscape on which their reality entirely operated. They could no more see the evil of the state than a fish water.

That their schemes for preeminent American might could only come about through a fascist metamorphosis was inconceivable. But had they fully understood, in broad terms, what success in the game of international politics will entail, it's questionable whether they would have shirked away.

Even if they had grasped the specific propellant, that human nature and memetic composition guaranteed that the road to hegemony would be paved with the resistance of every last corpse on Earth. That strengthening some lines of identity would only reinforce others. I suspect they still would have followed through. A little attrition and a few million dead were still swallowable pills. A little sanguine stickiness in Babylon would not significantly alter the board's conditions. When Dick Cheney painted our prospects as a cakewalk, he was not suffering from sudden amnesia. He didn't care that it wasn't true.

And yes, had Iraq simply been a quagmire of insurrection, that wouldn't have necessarily impeded or even slowed the neoconservative plan. Handled correctly, the plan could have *conceivably* continued. And, after all, there was, at the end of the day, nowhere better to dart. It was obvious.

So why was this move the stupidest of all possible?

Because it was colossally unresponsive. The United States' strength is its speed and agility. By committing itself so resolutely to one undertaking the neoconservatives threw away their greatest weapon. They spent a decade struggling to get the country turned around but failed to learn the lesson. Momentum sucks.

We leaped and Russia pounced. Putin broke apart the international coalition (though Germany's abstention was an astonishingly rare case of honest democracy), systematically violated our narrative and actively energized Iraq & Iran. At which point insurgency was foreordained. But--more importantly--it was obvious at this point that the United States was unprepared to handle such a strike with the necessary nuance. (Although I still thought they'd do better than they ended up doing.)

The United States has never in its history learned how to plan and defend a position of momentum from agile attacks.

Whenever military conflict gets down to a pure contest of momentum (the world wars, the last phase of Korea, the arms race) the US can usually numerically overwhelm its combatants. China is the big exception, in order to beat the PRC, the only option left the US is a flurry of systematic strikes. In its broadest conception the neoconservative plan recognized this, but in its first step their greed and impatience proscribed a sudden bolt. Something that flies in the face of their [correct] larger strategy and has never, ever, ever worked for this nation.

The broader neoconservative plan was incapable of securing liberty and would ultimately only accelerate the global power psychosis.

The specific step of invasion would almost certainly guaranteed vast bloodshed abroad and subjugation at home. Made all the more intense and assured by US failure to steal the auspices of the UN.

Finally, any possible long-term offsets to such horrors were outlawed by the way the US prepared for war. In chaining itself to the momentum of the war effort the US sacrificed its greatest asset and any hope of gaining significant ground against the PRC. (Russia's nobody-wins response of unleashing Iran may end up somehow stymieing the PRC decades from now, but that's very much up in the air.)

2008-03-20T06:44:00.000-07:00

(Why Is The Continued Occupation So Objectionable?)

In the early lead up to the war I objected on the grounds that the neoconservative plan would either further US power in a run-away imperialistic sense on the road to global fascism, or dramatically declaw the United States against far worse and more inevitable imperial powers.

We've been so lucky as to receive the benefits of both.

The iraq war inspired "resistance" to US imperialism, but it did so on strictly identity-based grounds, which can never ferment or foster truly effective insurrection. The iraq resistance is a purely mechanistic phenomena of power structures, it is entirely resultant and defined by a narrative of competing power structures. As such it can never do anything but deepen those power structures.

I am opposed to the Iraq war not just for form's sake. (As I might be obliged to oppose an imperialistic action on the global chessboard that actually restrains the net rate of increasing power, by say, effectively countering the PRC or Russia, or a move that would superficially attack the anarchist movement only to really make it stronger).

I am opposed to the iraq war on every conceivable level. Every day that we stay there means

1. More dead bodies.

2. More oppression at home.

3. More deeply entrenched iraqi power structures.

4. More strength in the hands of those imperialist powers that, unlike the US government, the anarchist movement has no hope of one day killing.

(Note: I am not opposed to continued infrastructural donations and I emphatically support unqualified military aid to Kurdistan, which would actually be a good both for the Kurdish people AND the regional interests of the United States. Fuck Turkey, they're irrevocably in the West's pocket anyhow and we don't need 'em.)

2008-03-20T06:43:00.001-07:00

(Can We Still Derail The US Occupation?)

For the most part, no. And for the rest, we shouldn't.

The moment US boots hit sand the occupation moved entirely out of the domestic realm.

Most radical action these days is strategically composed as a vanguard to reformist struggles. We act as an extremist threat to shift the spectrum and make less demanding positions more acceptable.

But if 100 million people marched on DC it wouldn't change the state's geopolitical context. Similarly while politicians *can* have an effect on the geopolitical behavior of the United States, only with regard to agility. They cannot change the context and basic premises of its existence from within anymore than a shark could become a vegan.

Of course if those 100 million people--or even just one--broke the democratic narrative and seriously set out to smash the motherfucking state, I can guarantee that american soldiers would leave iraq immediately.

Without, however, a simultaneous attack on every other global institution of power the end effects would be devastating to the cause of liberty. By virtue of it's current shameful anemia the anarchist movement NEEDS the United States government. To our eternal discredit we have not yet accumulated the resources or capacity to ultimately win in an open fight with the governments of china and russia, much less every other would be tyrant, gangbanger and social-democrat in the world.

May the day come when we can finally kill it. But we can't just go around attempting to smash random governments willy-nilly just because they're doing immeasurably evil things. Some bare modicum of strategy, please.

2008-03-20T06:41:00.000-07:00

(Can We Still Change The World?)

Of course. But the future of interventionist anti-authoritarian action lies in decentralized insurrectionary struggle, in selfless commitment and individual responsibility.

Americans seeking to change the world must learn to accept this and stop trying to rehash the unique conditions of the Second World War.

The only shame about Saddam's death was that it didn't come through some old-fashioned propaganda-through-the-deed to inspire and embolden those who he ruled over. There were a million different ways you or I could have contributed to his disposal. Cheerleading an invasion effort by the United States must certainly rank near last when it comes to end results, somewhere around blowing up the entire planet to get at the bastard.

It's only because we buy into the premise of state authority as the alpha and omega of all social change that we would even consider this whole charade.

We need to learn that grunting our consent from the recliner is no way to solve the world's problems. Such democracy is, in effect, an incredibly unhealthy fixation; a narcotic, collective abrogation of personal responsibility and initiative. Whenever discussion starts to center around what some nebulous collective "we" should do, rather than what you and I might specifically accomplish together, it's time to step back. And maybe get your gun.