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Open letter to Rolling Thunder
Lastly, referencing the Really Really Free Markets, that project of acritical affirmation for the “advanced gift economies of North America”, as “not even worth mentioning” is not lost on us. I’ve been critical of this project, just as I would any, including those I contribute to myself. I’ll make this worth mentioning now. There’s little “advanced” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) about the gift economies in North America when those gift economies remain limited in time and space and do not foster the self-organized fulfillment of social needs. Sharing and gift-giving can foster a sense of mutuality, trust, and material solidarity, but what is it we are able to share when we have no land to grow our own food and few capacities for individual and collective self-sufficiency? Indeed, we have things to give to others that we do not need ourselves, but what is it we all need? Gift-giving is a part of our propensity for mutual aid. The Really Really Free Market is a practice of this collective desire. However, mutual aid must contend with enforced social relations of exchange, exploitation, and dispossession. Eventually, revolutionary mutual aid will have to collectivize land and organize social production if it is to grow. Do the Really Really Free Markets contribute towards this autonomy? Which projects expand our revolutionary capacities and which diminish them? Which push the boundaries of mutuality, solidarity, and revolt and which become the formulas for another subculture? I ask these questions not just of the Really Really Free Markets but of all our projects. Do we want insurrection or do we want to pace in the footsteps of the defeated past? I ask myself this question often and refuse to go unchallenged. I understand that you’re trying to represent, and thus reduce, anarchist insurrectionaries in the U.S., complete with distortions that serve a useless premise (“they’re just internet surfers, not real insurrectionists…” and “no matter how many images of Molotov cocktails they screen-print…”). What I don’t understand is why. This issue’s table of contents rests below a flock of winged molotovs. How beautiful. Can I borrow that for a screen print? What point are you trying to make about your projects and your methods versus mine, to whom, and why? Why have you set them up for competition and why –for new converts and believers? Who is this “whole niche milieu of anarchist journalism that considers burning cars more photogenic than race or gender caucuses”? Is it A Murder of Crows or Rolling Thunder? There is a long spread of riot photos in this issue (and a burning car!) that seem to indicate a particular editorial attraction to “photogenic” images! Who cares and why does it matter? The photograph is a powerful tool but one that cannot escape the limits of representation. We keep this in mind but use images as we wish. However we’d do well to use anarchist publications for the insight of their ideas rather than an assessment of their taste for aesthetics. Many people like Rolling Thunder for “looking good” but I’m interested in its content much more than its layout, graphics, and design. Ideas that move me in revolutionary directions are much more exciting than any images of revolt. I want to discover how I can live the revolution rather than just watch others participate in it. Disparaging insurrectionaries by assuming that they simply wear screen prints of molotovs and bask in the glory of mediated revolt is foolish, arrogant, and divisive. Why is this the introduction to an issue that seemingly dedicates itself to “expanding our sense of what is possible”? Possibility begins with the individual but it goes nowhere without forming solidarity and mutuality –that is, revolutionary possibility– amongst those who struggle. Do we want anarchy or programs for anarchy? You provide us no useful criticisms in this introduction, just simplistic categorizations of anarchists who are inclined towards a certain approach, an approach that also cannot be easily categorized despite how many times someone tries to isolate it by doing so. Truth is the first casualty of representation. This article is an excellent example. It may seem unnecessary to react to this small introduction at all. I think it is important and necessary. Some anarchists in the U.S. have been long fond of creating more pathetic lines in the sand between each other, applying the purity of one approach to a broad and generalized movement for anarchy. I would expect this amongst the radical Left, who embrace celebrity and leadership. But I want no followers. I fight for a world without domination with anyone who shares this dream –red, green, pink, brown, and always black. It seems obvious some critiques have rattled the pen of someone enough to construct the “Quincy Insurrectionists”. Please try to at least get your facts straight: “Quincy” was a television show from the good old U.S.A. Whether it was popular in Britain makes little difference to me. Cheap shots make you sound defensive and unimaginative. Assuming anything about anyone is risky. Insult your enemies but talk with your friends. If we want revolution, we’ll need to be capable of open dialogue with each other so we can discover our capacities for revolt. Call us out, but spare us the pathetic insults and self-glorification; it’s a waste of everyone’s time. Rolling Thunder, I don’t need your “help” in laying the groundwork for “real insurrection”. Help me help myself but don’t ever try to lead me anywhere I haven’t chosen for myself. I will determine my own course of action but my project of self-determination is not all that dissimilar to yours. Why would you put up walls between us that we’re trying to break down? Are you a “real” anarchist and me a “Quincy Anarchist”? Aren’t we on the same side of the social war? My projectuality has nothing to do with a media-generated bandwagon. If there are Quincy Insurrectionists, trapped in the mediated world of revolt, then you can bet there are readers of Rolling Thunder who exist in the same capacity. Generalizing activity and ideas to an entire group constructs a false unity that doesn’t exist. To those who love to deride “those Crimethinc.ers” as simply being one thing or another, I point out the arrogant simple-mindedness of this perspective. Would you defend me from the same constrictions, as an individual with my own need for autonomy? Quincy Pundit, it looks like your straw men fray easily. And what do you actually know about being situated in Calcutta? Visiting is not the same as situated. Rolling Thunder, will we share in the project of laying the groundwork for insurrection together or should we await your further instructions? Will we find ourselves on the barricades, immobilized by your terms of division, debating which of us holds the keys to the possible unknown? Will you take any of my criticisms to heart or will you set yourself again to denigrating my perspective instead? Revolution is not about which ideas win the most converts. It is a process in which individuals determine their own theoretical and practical approach on their own terms with whomever they wish. I refuse any debates that seek division instead of solidarity and strength. I refuse any labels and categories that impose themselves upon my ideas and my course of action instead of critically examining them. Against false unities and real divisions, we can find strength in appreciating those differences that contribute to making our revolution mutual, expansive, and uncontrollable. I do not speak for A Murder of Crows; anonymous individuals who share ideas collectively construct it. I do not speak for insurrectionary anarchism either; there exists no unity of thought or action amongst this milieu. I speak for no one but myself, and I refuse to compete with anyone for anything. My solidarity extends to anyone who desires a world of freedom, of anarchy. I want to be very clear that I am giving this response openly because Rolling Thunder decided to print this article openly. Did you think we would bite our tongues? I am not speaking of divisiveness in order to create more useless debates to divide us and waste our time. I persuade no one to agree with me on anything. Rolling Thunder is an influential publication for anarchists in the U.S., and it contributes to the theoretical development of our revolutionary strategies. Our differences of approach need not drive any barriers between the struggles we share or the ones we have yet to. Our lives and relationships under capitalism are divided enough already, while our enemies retain their organized strength in the face of an internally-divisive, and thus weak, opposition. Today they may win. But there is a tomorrow when we will make their game unwinnable. We will need each other’s solidarity if we are to complete this task. Against division, in solidarity, always Dante Sepia --- From Rolling Thunder, issue #5, Spring 2008, page 3. “The Overseas Rioting Issue?” Legend has it that an episode of a popular British television show called “Quincy” once featured actors dressed as punk rockers. Afterwards, the story goes, media-generated “punk rockers” appeared who were not connected to any social continuum, who had become punks under the influence of the mainstream media alone. Other punks dubbed them Quincy Punks. Accordingly, an occasional contributor to Rolling Thunder once quipped that the United States has no insurrectionists, only Quincy Insurrectionists. Anarchists here are moved by exciting photos and translated texts from far away, and style themselves after their on-screen heroes. But they’re just internet surfers, not real insurrectionists: they’re not part of a social continuum; they participate in no actual insurrections. No matter how many images of Molotov cocktails they screen-print, they have to wait years between opportunities to use the—or else save up for plane tickets. This critique hits close to home, for this issue focuses disproportionately on events from overseas. It shares this with a whole niche milieu of anarchist journalism that considers burning cars more photogenic than race and gender caucuses. One disturbing trend n this milieu is that the further from home the events pictured, the more uncritically they are endorsed. Riots in Bangladesh, for example, are assumed to be anti-authoritarian, while popular struggles in Mexico are tragically coopted, and the Really Really Free Markets down the street are not even worth mentioning. It’s not a stretch to guess that if the same pundits were situated in Calcutta, they would dismiss the Bangladeshi workers, look hopefully to Oaxacan rioters, and celebrate the advanced gift economies of North America. We feel the proper role of this magazine is to focus on the struggles closest to those who read and write for it, so as to inform our daily efforts. But as the example of the Quincy Insurrectionists indicates, there is a constant interplay between local struggles and the stories that come in from overseas, shaping our fantasies and expanding our sense of what is possible. As many of us were connected to Ungdomshuset and traveled to Germany to take on the G8 summit, and many more of us were inspired by those events, it’s only natural that they turn up in these pages. If we can provide some of the background behind the exciting photographs and some of the strategic lessons the participants gleaned, perhaps we can help a generation of Quincy Insurrectionists lay the groundwork for real insurrection. |
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so much to say about this
so much to say about this thing!
you rant against divisiveness, but your publication is chock full of divisiveness (in the form of "criticisms" of course), and so is parts of this article.
also, you see being critical of everything you do as healthy. it's NOT. remember 1960s/70s SDS and their self-criticism sessions? no. look it up. they all went fucking bonkers, became self-centered narcissists, and destroyed their individuality by trying to criticize each other into perfect little revolutionary machines without defects or differences (aka character/personhood). focusing inward and criticizing everything we do as radicals is not healthy, it leads to more and more of an inward focus in which one day you turn around and realize there is only 10 of you all focused on yourselves and their is no one else. instead of criticizing each other or ourselves, lets criticize the capitalist and state institutions that keep us slaves. let's have our focus remain outward, outside the world of anarchy, otherwise we our revolt will never expand, though it may become "perfected" by insurrectionary standards. its much more useful to have a revolt of millions that is far from perfect than a revolt of 12 than is an ideal of insurrectionary self-actualization. are you trying to reach the expansive ends, or the perfected ends? from most of what Murder of Crows writes, it seems to be the latter. perhaps rolling thunder has gone there just a little bit by even printing this letter about AMOC, as well, but we all need to keep our eyes on the prize: revolution. NOT ideologicallly perfected revolutionary perspectives/revolutionaries.
i look forward to AMOC #3 having less searing criticism of anarchists or radical movements and more searing criticism of the system, as well as expansive projects than can be undertaken to expand the struggle against the state. the point about needing land not just RRFMs is a good one. where's the AMOC squatted commune?
I'm sick and tired of
I'm sick and tired of sds/weatherman criticism. It's not the fucking sixties, no one should give a fuck about a democratic society turning into a moaist society, because both suck. If thats a paradigm to understand our struggle then we are fucking in the clouds (with Stalin). Secondly, inward focus is needed, because most of the "anarchist" milieu are stuck in subcultural traps. If the active minority doesnt refine ways to engage in class struggle then we will be stuck doing free markets forever. Fuck that lame hippy shit...
i'm not worried about a
i'm not worried about a democratic society turning into a maoist society, i am worried about going down the same road trodden by those 60s groups of increasing inward focus and increasing militancy while the actual larger movement loses steam/withers away because all the folks who used to be organizing people start just talking to each other.
radicals are steered towards certain paths because of the social/cultural environment of the US, regardless of whether they see themselves as maoists or insurrectionary nihilists. avoiding those pitfalls that others in the past have run into is how to break out of becoming irrelevant and create a revolution.
Fucking Rolling Blunder, a
Fucking Rolling Blunder, a bunch of crimethinc wankers!
You sure have an intelligent
You sure have an intelligent perspective to contribute!
CrimethInc. seems to attract this kind of criticism, even when it takes more paragraphs to express.
Honestly, the Rolling
Honestly, the Rolling Thunder article seemed to be pretty self-critical, not to mention clear, to the point, and not particularly divisive. What I don't understand is how this response is really responding, in any meaningful way, to it. In terms of drawing lines, I think long masturbatory rants about nothing in particular are far more damaging than "Hey, let's be careful not to turn int brutal caricatures of what we want to see in our struggle." Maybe I'm misinterpreting both articles?
Hrm. Sorry, I guess that comes off as a bit of an attack on Dante Sepia - it's not meant to be. I just feel like I'm in a meeting where someone has decided to go off on a half-hour tangent instead of talking abut the issue at hand.
Peace, Love, and Class War,
Brad Religion
Quincy was an American show.
Quincy was an American show. The episode in question was about LA. The "band" on the show was supposed to be Fear.
Cecil
Rolling Thunder contributor
Rolling Thunder contributor responds:
Thanks very much for posting the selection from our most recent issue--and also for the useful information that Quincy was actually a show from the US (hence "legend has it"--sometimes those legends are misleading!). We'll include that error in the errata section in a future issue.
Don't let's get carried away here. The text cited from Rolling Thunder was intended to be self-critical more than critical of anyone else. A Murder of Crows is not even mentioned; various contributors to our journal have various opinions about that publication, but we would have published a review of it if any of us really wanted to say something about it. It is never our intention to provoke needless infighting; those who have worked with us in actual organizing and struggle know that we value solidarity over division--that it is important to us to always keep our guns trained on the real enemies.
If we touched a nerve here, please accept this as an apology. However we differ from publications like AMOC--and whatever we think of them--we are part of the same milieu; we can hardly critique our own efforts without it reflecting on others, and vice versa. Personally, I think a great deal of what is written above about us seeking to draw lines in the sand and attempting to "lead" people is inaccurate and unfair--and if the center of gravity for the author really is promoting critical analysis rather than drama, then it would have made more sense to engage with the content of the passage cited, which addresses the way some radicals in the US are prone to glorifying oversea activity. But the point is, we all have better things to do than bicker back and forth in comments sections.
Suffice it to say: we aspire to be reliable comrades for all who revolt and struggle, and seek to promote the same solidarity spoken of in this letter.
Sincerely
one of the editors of Rolling Thunder