TOTW: What "Not Anarchists" Influence Your Anarchy?

Anarchists have never existed in a vacuum. We are a part of the world we live in as much as we might want to destroy that world. We interact with the (not anarchist) world in ways that both influence it and are influenced by it. While this is true on every level of day-today life, it is especially true in how we engage with writing and thinking from outside anarchist spheres.

At varying times anarchists have found influence or inspiration in the work of existentialists, situationists, post-modernists, anti-state communists, tiqqunists (so many -ists!), et. al. This is both worthwhile, in that it engages with the world we live in, and the not-anarchist ideas around us, and it is dangerous. Often anarchists who take a deep dive in to non-anarchist thinking end up abandoning anarchy for the more practical, the more formulaic, the more efficient.

What are the non-anarchist writers and thinkers you find influential or inspiring? Why? How do you integrate that into your anarchy?

There are 100 Comments

This is a really excellent TOTW and as soon as I have some spare time I'm going to comment very thoughtfully on it! <3

1. james joyce
2. gabriel garcía márquez
3. jorge luis borges

nothing to say really

If you'd prefer, I can post a well-referenced, 3000-words text wall that says absolutely nothing...

Diogenes of Sinope, was my biggest non (or perhaps pre) anarchist influence. Dr. Bones is my second.

Diogenes counts as proto-anarchist, at the very least. Same with Lao Tzu.

... is the only anarchist I knew who really knew how to anarchy.

If Deleauze wasn't anarchist, you aren't. Throw some Spinoza in there, too, for good measure

But Deleuze was not anarchist, rather an esoteric neo-marxist. A very appropriate man for the late '70s and '80s New Age era, as a bridge between the autonomous movement and the more comfortable academic boomers who were going up the social ladder at the time... clean-cutting their beards, shortening their hair, getting a nice new Citröen and getting laid with Second Wave feminists in-between reading sessions. Now this new millenial revolutionary cadre has been attempting the milestone of reproducing this same era, without the social convulsions and gnarly, dangerous streets in the big cities.

Kevin Keating.

IGTT 10:10

whoever wrote "Kevin Keating" -- you made me laugh out loud so hard that milk squirted out through my nose.

it's probably best that you squirted out that bovine secretion from your nose instead of ingesting it. all those hormones and pus aren't good for you.

Of the top of my head. One can also say Stirner if anarchist/anarchism mean elective anarchy.

Seconded! Most underrated intellectual of the 20th century, but the man was purely anarchist without using the term. He was so repulsed by authoritarianism that he rejected his messianic persona the OTO set him up to be. This guy was for real, and he achieved something in real life, doing the eco-farming thing in the southwest U.S. before the concept even existed.

Yes I was surprised by Krishnamurti, I still have a couple of his books printed 1930s, the era which showed so much promise for lateral social orientation, but alas, the authoritarians manufactured the Depression to counter the growing social shift away from totalitarianism. There is a degree a Stirnerian autonomy which brings to mind a Japanese Stirnerian writer named Tsuji Jun.

i like k too but there's plenty to disagree with regarding his approaches

That he was a guru of sorts in that eco-commune? "Total Freedom" clearly precludes following any specific tradition, ideology or guru/author/master... showing how tradition in itself is alienating towards personal emancipation. The guy is the closest thing you get from Stirner and original taoism in the first half of the 20th century.

He lived and died and everything he detested still goes on. So I see him as a Great Complainer of sorts

"He lived and died and everything he detested still goes on."

umm, you mean like every single individual who has ever despised authoritarianism? you sound more like the great complainer to me.

dear gweilo,
please remove daoism from your mouths.
it mirrors bones and hoodoo. it's not a good look.
let stirner be stirner.
sincerely,
daoists

That tends to be a ruiner of good ideas on its own.

I was talking about Dr. Bones from StarTrek, not commie bones ya twat!

Another poster here. In startrek, the character is referred to as just Bones, not Dr Bones, mmkay!

Yes!! David Bohm & J. Krishnamurti's dialogues are incredible. Krishnamurti negated identity, so labeling him 'anarchist' makes no sense; but their mode-of-life in aggregate would produce anarchy. Both "The Ending of Time" and "Truth, Actuality, and The Limits of Thought" are wonderfully rich conversations about the limits of human understanding.

Amiri Baraka (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ89lZDBDR4) writings, especially his poems and his two essays: Cuba Libre (https://www.walterlippmann.com/docs1124.html) and Heroes are Gang Leaders (which I couldn't find online). What we fight for is not an organizational model (although it can help), and its not a utopian vision, its a powerful feeling of communion and collective power, of understanding our place and understanding that we can make what we want here and now, that our desires are a risk away behind the veil of normality.

Contrapoints.

the youtuber?

yeah ive been incorporating better lighting and outfits into my anarchy

ugh, my eyes are rolling so hard their about to fall out of the sockets...

True that in every existentialist there is an anarchist trying to fight its way out.

Sartre laid the groundwork for my nihilism, which inoculates my anarchism

No … just no. I'm the same anon pointing out sartre was a sexual predator in the first place, great job leaping to conclusions tho!

"Most anarchists haven't bothered to check him out even though he clearly said in later life that his work was in keeping with the anarchist tradition"

You mean like being a secluded drunkard as people were revolting in the streets of Paris? Coz that's how he ended up, and one of the reasons why he's problematic to many radicals. Maybe not shut-in internet commenters, tho, for some obvious reason.

Don't forget admitted sexual predator! He and Simone liked to bring the young students back to the seclusion with them.

But that doesn't make him a sexual predator you puritan fool.

uh … I AM a sartre fan, as I said earlier but he's widely acknowledged to have had "parties" with his young students. Did you even look any of this up before you sprang to the dead frenchman's defense?

ikr?! :D

Why the fuck is he tolerated here, one might ask? I can't always resist provoking him to make his creepy comments, just so we're clear that he's wringing his hands like nosferatu, springing to the defence of sexual predators as a knee-jerk response. Oh, am I moralizing again?! SORRY (not sorry)

That's about the only thing you can do as far as protecting 'the children'.

Yes ziggles, I'm a reluctant moralizer. Only in the most cringe-inducing, extreme cases, such as yours.

It's an INHERENTLY illogical law of a civilization that has a specific bias and disgust against carnality.

“A Disgraceful Affair,” by Bianca Lamblin and "A Dangerous Liaison: A Revelatory New Biography of Simone De Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre" by Carole Seymour-Jones were both written by women who've been abused during their youth by the famous existentialist couple... who at the time were not as militant against the Nazi occupation as they liked to pretend afterwards.

This article also makes a good inquiry on the matter: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/savile-beauvoir-and-the...

That's a critical dead-angle I've seen displayed elsewhere too, in French "radical" literature, consisting of authors not acknowledging how the conventional classroom relation of authority facilitates abuse of teen/child students by problematic teachers.

While there might well have been indiscretions with younger women which would not be unexpected with the interplay of civilized status, there is nothing I see that makes him a fucking PREDATOR. Also, the underlying philosophy that the loli-naba thing represents is actually VERY anarchic. The problems that come from minor-major carnality are not the relations themselves but what is mediated via adult authoritarian status. THAT is what has to go.

You forgot to do that sucking lip noise at the end "fava beans and a nice chianti!"

Age of consent is the same as telling a puppy he/she can't eat meat after weaning off breast milk. Oops, I suppose " weaning off breast milk" is sexualizing gender roles WTF!

Two mascs arguing for no age of consent why am I not suprised. Also there's always this formula: don't be more than like a few years away from each other. Literally 8 billion people I think you can fuck someone who's at least 18-19 ffs

Is basically most of human history. There is the pubescent non pubescent line which I provisionally support which most cultures practice but that is not age of consent. AOC is a modern idea and like most modern ideas it’s a bad idea.

Firstly, for literature regarding my comment, Wilhelm Reich is a good start for someone struggling with understanding the relationship between sexuality and the totalitarian regime.
There has developed an intersection of IdPol policy with puritan morality. Their similarities stem from an identical structure of authoritarian legislature, but their characteristics differ in that IdPol is generated by the politicization of a codification of a gender/race taxonomy whilst Puritanism is plain old enforced religious moral dogma.
Age of consent is the perfect example of the confused and uninformed social stigmas attached to organic natural tendencies and liberties, and how these rules inhibit the growth and developement of positive emotional wellbeing. Many youth suicides are related to the prohibition placed upon youthful sexual experience.

one thing that bothers me overall with such typical, puritanical ways of thinking is that if teenagers shouldn't be having sex, then why do they have sexual urges? Your shameful glare doesn't do anything about the child rapists and predatory men that you want to kill lol

Yeah he and Simone liked sex, so what they should be burred at the stakes? Get out of here with that puritan shit you fucking christian!

No fuck UUUU!

Its a really cheap shot to be accusing of "Christianism" whoever points out at the fucking hypocrite and abusive sexist gimmicks of this pretend philosopher who just revealed himself to be yet another macho rapist creep. Guess what... he also looked the part.

Shouldn't you be using a little bit more apt slur, like "feminist SJW" or something? Oh wait... how could Simone The Beaver... that's so confusing, wtf went inside her head!? She went for that Madonna bourgie libertine crap?

Like carceral feminist IDPol to describe the likes of you. It's one thing to point out indiscretions and imbalanced power dynamics, it's another thing to throw about the word rape and rapist left and right to people who don't fit the definition. This is the reason why Catherine Deneuve and others like her are needed as a counter weight to the puritanical excesses of #metoo which on the whole I think has been a good thing sans IDPol feminazi filth.

...and a 100$ high-profile purely academic essay that supposedly demonstrates Sartre's "anarchism". Interesting. I think the notion of "an-cap" is due for a revision.

Sartre, wow- be more basic? Should have finished growing up and left him behind with Kerouac et al.

I could make sense out of that comment if it had meaningful-enough signifiers and referents for it. But it's just noise to me. What are you saying here? How come Kerouac ha anything to do with it?

Cocteau was the real creative genius within the Dada social manifestation, in fact, the whole experimental "club" which included Dali, Sartre, Gide, Breton, Camus all congregated at Cocteau's "Theatre of the Absurd" to create and express iconiclastic broadsides at the established morals and politics of the Western social anomaly.

I suggest that nobody corrects this absolutely comical error and just let it stand as a testament to the monumental ignorance of Le Fool. OK? Who's with me?

Cocteau wasn't the sole creator of the theatre, but he was the pioneering choreographer for some of the plays, which were only short-lived, and the Theatre itself was a surreal spontaneous event anyway, and not the solid construct that a philistine such as you falsly assume the avante-gard performance to be.
I do not go pouring over the pages of wikipedia as you do before writing a comment, but from memory.

Yes and that is precisely why your posts are filled with laughable bullshit and nonsense. If you are poorly informed to begin with, and then you rely on your memories of what you were poorly informed about -- well, then, that's a sure fire way of being Le Wank!

It was primarily Ionesco and Camus who brought forth the Theatre of the Absurd, which is a post-WW2 movement. Artaud was a kind of precursor with his erratic, eschatological prose. Cocteau's major influence was during first half of the century, but even at that, he wasn't the biggest name behind Dada. Absurdism is also at best rooted in a late 19th century French author that nobody here has likely read, and is the earliest influence for surrealism and dadaism. I will not say his name.

LeWank's pretentiousness is unsurprisingly as sky-high as his ignorance and idiocy. And yes, I'll keep that brain fart of his for this site's Hall of Famously Stupid Trolling. This is an historical record.

Being a nihilist dadaist I regard accurate historical data as the trivial baggage of dull philistines with no consequence or significance. Automatist absurdism, Breton's manifesto and Camus's irreverence give me spontaneous bioluminescence. Thankyou!

1. Graeber
2. Chomsky
3. Bookchin

It's 2019 and you're still waving these libcom dinosaurs over here? Wow.

This list is supposed to designate what exactly? A hierarchy of publicly known academics of dubious morality?

Adding the quintessential critic Roland Barthe to the list,

He ain't so bad.

All the way. And maybe a little bit of Parliament Funkadelic. Free your mind and your ass will follow.

OK in late with the homework (naughty), first off yes it's mostly Euro-deriratives (I'd really like tips on more indigenous and non-'western' writers tho!) and sorry I only read English... Also, can't claim to be a total authority (ha) on any of these authors extensively, but I think that they're relevant...

- Russell Means
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/russell-means-for-america-to-liv...

- 'We Are All Very Anxious' by Institute for Precarious Consciousness
https://resonanceaudiodistro.org/2015/11/18/we-are-all-very-anxious-audi...
(reminded me a lot of the Brilliant 89 with Andy Robinson, though I don't think he's involved with this crew and IS an anarchist)

- Os Cangaceiros
https://resonanceaudiodistro.org/2016/10/06/a-crime-called-freedom-audio...
https://resonanceaudiodistro.wordpress.com/2015/10/05/ndrea-audiozine/

- Peter Linebaugh
https://libcom.org/files/Linebaugh%20and%20Rediker%20-%20The%20Many-Head...
https://resonanceaudiodistro.org/2017/04/24/history-of-may-day-audiozine/

- Silvia Federici
http://anarchalibrary.blogspot.com/2012/05/caliban-and-witch-2004-pdf.html

- David Abram
http://libgen.io/book/index.php?md5=D96F256F8D2D605CCF35C1D68C735199

- Margaret Atwood (fiction)

- occasional John Gray (NOT the one who wrote 'Men Are From Mars...'!)

- Fredy Perlman (never called himself anarchist, did he?!)
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/fredy-perlman

- Anna Tsing
http://libgen.io/search.php?req=anna+tsing&open=0&res=25&view=simple&phr...

- Walter Benjamin

- Guy Debord
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/guy-debord-the-society-of-the-sp...

- Annie Le Brun

- Ivan Illich

- Sian Sullivan
https://siansullivan.net/publications/

- Tim Ingold

- James C. Scott (many people think he's an anarchist but he's on record in interviews saying he's not quite there, and that's why his book was 'Two Cheers for Anarchism' and not three!)

- Isabelle Eberhardt (we'd love to call her one of ours but she's much too loner-cool, despite having a more ambiguous relation to French colonialism than in often recognized)

- Paul Shepard (you don't have to be a primmie, honest!)

- Gilles Dauvé
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gilles-dauve-when-insurrections-die

- Hannah Arendt

- George Orwell (gotta take the rough with the smooth, but still)

- Jean Genet
https://resonanceaudiodistro.wordpress.com/2016/06/29/the-criminal-child...

- Nicholas Carr

“Spell of the sensuous” and “caliban and the witch” used to be two of my favorite books as a baby green @...

Do you mean that you have a specific critique looking back now on these two books, and if so can we hear it? (apols if I'm taking this too seriously and it was just a remininscence free from any snark ; ) but more importantly, what non-anarchists or even anarchists address these subjects better in your opinion? for the record, the new intro to 'Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture' more or less encapsulates my problems with 'Caliban', without preventing me enjoying it)

Joel Salatin - The Sheer Ecstasy of being a Lunatic Farmer
Masanobu Fukuoka -The Do-Nothing Method, "Natural Farming"
Clive Barker,Ursula Leguin, ...

Winona Laduke

No no, it seems to be white dudes only on this thread. Try again

Tobrianda islanders aren't white, infact, they are so non-white Western that they don't even bother writing books!

charles eisenstein
alan watts
daniel quinn

Add new comment