Against the Liberal Creep: We Keep Us Dangerous

From calling for US imperial intervention in Syria to voting for Bernie, the liberal creep within anarchy in the so-called United States in recent years has been a truly disgraceful phenomenon. The pandemic has exponentially metastasized this cancer with supposed anarchists adopting the talking points of the liberal State wholesale and uncritically, especially with regards to the primacy at all costs of a vague and unspecified "safety."

It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths—change in the sense of renewal.

But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

From calling for US imperial intervention in Syria to voting for Bernie, the liberal creep within anarchy in the so-called United States in recent years has been a truly disgraceful phenomenon. The pandemic has exponentially metastasized this cancer with supposed anarchists adopting the talking points of the liberal State wholesale and uncritically, especially with regards to the primacy at all costs of a vague and unspecified "safety." In this house, however, we believe that science is biopolitical and that there is more to life than the mere fact of biological survival.

Anarchy says that we can have both freedom and solidarity without sacrificing one for the other. Liberalism invokes solidarity to take our freedom and freedom to break our solidarity. The liberal places faith in the social contract, in the transfer of the power over life and death from the monarch to the citizenry, in everyone "playing their part" while abdicating any sense of true agency: the Panoptic policing of each by all, casting one's ballot, staying at home and letting the non-citizens do all the work, flattening the curve. This system is rapidly collapsing, yet all too many cling to its shattered timbers, complaining indignantly that the State isn't doing enough to protect us.

If the betrayal of the Spanish Revolution in 1937 by "anarchist" ministers in the government teaches us anything, it is that anarchists are not immune to the logic of the state of exception. There is always a crisis or emergency (the war, the pandemic, etc.) that can be invoked to "temporarily" suspend our liberatory values "for the greater good." It's increasingly obvious that climate change will be the next crisis to be used in this way by the authoritarians. The only way to avoid this is to be consistent in our ethics. Antifascism without anti-liberalism—that is to say, thorough and principled anti-statism—is a dead end. Fasces flank the podium in the House of Representatives, representing, as they did in the Roman Republic, the power of the Republic's elected officials to punish and kill. Liberalism and fascism quite literally come from the same roots.

It is no wonder that the conspiracist right sees "ANTIFA" as the militant wing of the Democratic Party. At first glance, this seems absurd. Then we take a look at what passes for anarchist discourse and practice these days and, unfortunately, it starts to make more sense. The average anarchist household in the United States has been as self-repressed, moralistic, and law-abiding as a Biden/Harris one. Anarchists write articles about how anarchists in other countries have "questioned mandates that do not make sense," as if not questioning government mandates that supposedly do make sense is in any way a viable anarchist position. We have shamefully ceded the anti-State narrative to the right, without even putting up a fight.

Collectively, anarchists in the United States have taken no meaningfully visible action against the State's inevitably-permanent extension of its emergency powers or the massive transfer of wealth to the techno-capitalist class and its dystopian restructuring of society. In pointing this out, however, voluntary association and autonomy remain our guiding principles: those who would ban masks are as authoritarian as those who would mandate them. But it is the latter who are in power, and anarchy means nothing if not "no rulers."

There was a moment, however, when the crisis was taken advantage of: the George Floyd insurrection exploded through, in spite of, and against the dull and empty time of the lockdowns, the curfews, and the stay-at-home orders. The insurgent proletariat showed the world that there is no vaccine for the contagion called freedom.

In a world where we are faced with a global pandemic and a precarious future, we have to come to grips with the fact that the world is not safe, and there is not a possibility of a perfect "safe place." Security and safety have always been lies sold by the State and ruling class for the expense of freedom and the inevitable creation and oppression of the "other." The logic of staying home to keep a "community" safe, while ordering your groceries online, or shopping on Amazon, quickly begins to mirror the logic of a closed US border to non-vaccinated immigrants and travelers, all in the name of safety and limiting the spread. The banning of non-vaccinated immigrants created a better border wall than Trump could ever have imagined, and was met with silence.

There will not be an end to the crises. There will be another pandemic, or the continuing apocalypse that is climate change, and to each of these moments, the State, technocrats, and ruling class will always claim to offer the path towards a safer and more stable world. And some people will always believe it, choosing their own personal safety and stability over whomever else is excluded from that promise, as long as their place in the global hierarchy is high enough. Anarchy has never promised the delusion of safety, it is the beautiful idea of freedom and self-determination. Let's strive to make this world dangerous as we can for our enemies. We keep us dangerous.

The slogan "we keep us safe" implies that we share the same professed ends as the State—safety—but disagree on means, that we think that they aren't doing enough or that we can do a better job. There is, however, always an inseparability between ends and means. If the goal is safety, then the safest means are necessarily the best. The logical conclusion is that if a sufficiently socially democratic State proved itself more effective at guaranteeing safety than either autonomous efforts or the current regime, it would deserve "our" support.

By contrast, if our goal is total liberation, then our means must be equally liberatory. We do not share the same goals as the State that we can somehow achieve better. We have fundamentally opposed goals. Nor, to us, does "freedom" mean re-opening the economy, as it does to the petit bourgeoisie. Using our enemies' definitions of victory means that we have already lost. We do not want to manage the economy, safely or otherwise: we want to destroy it utterly. We do not want to solve the crises of capitalism: we want to introduce and participate in its final crisis. We do not want to guarantee safety and security: we want to live free and burn every prison, especially the invisible one in our minds which creates all the others.

The situation within the United States took a particularly American approach to COVID. The State has been able to take a completely hands off approach to dealing with the pandemic while simultaneously outsourcing the biopolitical control it wishes to exert onto its population. The State not only has no desire to actually assist in helping people through this moment, as clearly seen by the pathetic gestures of aid, whether that be a performative stimulus check or a temporary hold on evictions only to come back with a stronger force, but it also knows that it is completely unable to actually enforce any mandates or social control without instigating a mass uprising. But was able to outsource the biopolitical control onto the individual. While the State literally left everyone to die of COVID or die from poverty, it put the entire responsibility of ending the pandemic on the individual. It was up to you to work from home, to volunteer your location and social networks for contact tracing, and to punish and report anyone who strayed from this logic. Because those who didn’t follow this logic were the ones who were fueling the virus. And many leftists and radicals took this to heart, shaming people online for diverging from these rules, even when they blatantly made no "sense" even by epidemiological principles. In many ways, the State is still unable to enforce any sort of mandates in the US, but that does not stop liberals and some leftists from continuing to call for harsher restrictions or demonizing anyone who breaks from this track. All the while, the ruling class and technocrats continue to reap the benefits of the death while having a facade of a moral high ground.

The ability of the State to outsource and individualize policing went hand in hand with its recuperation of forms of proletarian struggle such as the rent strike. Initially caught off guard by the spontaneous wave of tenants across the country refusing to pay their parasitic exploiters, the liberals quickly reacted with temporary rent forgiveness and eviction moratoriums. This was a clever move on their part. They showed themselves to be flexible in the content of their actions, as long as the means and ends took power away from the proletariat and returned it to the guarantor of the social contract...the State. Thus, rent strikes were replaced with rent forgiveness, workplace desertion with mandatory shutdowns, looting and theft with stimulus and unemployment checks (with limited success, as highly sensationalized accounts of organized looting caravans in California have shown). The liberal State showed itself willing to temporarily shut down the economy, as long as it's them doing it and not us. In the struggle to destroy the existent and usher in truly new worlds, how something is done is more important than what is done. Unlike the expansion of authoritarian power through the state of emergency, of course, we all know that these bread crumbs (like the stimulus checks of yesteryear) are truly temporary. We should oppose all government mandates on principle, but also because they are the liberal strategy to get us back to work. Our takeaway from the recuperation of all the innovative and ingenious forms of refusal and desertion that emerged during the pandemic should not be to celebrate that anarchists did "something," it should be to admit to ourselves that we did not aim high enough. Demand nothing, take everything.

On the whole, anarchists in the United States will be wholly unprepared to meaningfully intervene within a phenomenon similar to the Canadian trucker convoy happening here, even though we have had years to anticipate and prepare for such an obvious eventuality. The strategies and tactics used in the antifascist struggles of recent memory will not work as well when the fascists embed themselves within a larger mass movement...just as anarchists have been doing for decades. The trick will be to isolate the fascist elements and offer a truly liberatory alternative, not to indignantly moralize about how the whole movement is fascist.

Conspiracy means to breathe together.

Liberals: do us a favor and shoot yourself.

Long live anarchy!

There are 31 Comments

"We have shamefully ceded the anti-State narrative to the right, without even putting up a fight."

True! but hey, that wasn't the first fight that wasn't even put up. A long reaping of what's been sewn for decades imo.
The combativeness of the anarchists has been in decline for some time, for a whole host of reasons that were deeply entrenched before the pandemic: bad theory, bad prefiguration, tons of horizontal hostility, when I first started hanging around @news years ago, i slowly realized that most of the older @s all had cricks in their necks from collectively facepalming since decades before the kids started saying cringe.

the other thing we've been doing awhile is critiquing populism and the culture war so ... i'm not sure what I'm supposed to conclude from the end of this piece? Is it that a more serious assessment of capacity for conflict is needed? if so, fully agree! easier said than done but yeah.

however, the "indignant moralizing" is just what mostly powerless people tend to do when they're sitting around, feeling powerless so i'm not sure why I would isolate the anarchists for that phenomena? literally everybody is doing that right now except the dumbasses in the "freedom convoy", who are also engaging in a largely performative group therapy session, of the nationalist flavour...

Yeah, the proposal seems to be … just be angrier and more radical? The only material suggestion is to embed with right wing anti vaxxers (blech). “A vague and unspecified safety”- I think most leftists have been very specific about the ways in which people are unequally endangered. There is a point to be made along these lines but I think it’s more found in the IGD one which has much more concrete discussion and doesn’t rely on right wing talking points like this one does.

yeah, fair enough. critique is easy, especially the straw manning kind.
tangible doables worth doing tho? that's much more impressive to me.

First off, being skeptical or opposed to the COVID19 vaccine doesn't make someone "anti-vax". This orwellian redefining of the word anti-vax is right out of the neoliberal playbook and you leftiods are lapping it up like hungry stray kittens for milk. Secondly, every single person who is skeptical/opposed to the COVID19 vaccines is not right wing, again this is propaganda put out from the neoliberal state and a clear strawman. Plenty of people with diverging politics are skeptical or don't want the COVID19 vaccines and that doesn't make one right wing for taking that position. Have you taken a look at the covid19 vaccine passport mandates in NYC and investigated the opposition to that? Currently in NYC lots of black residents organized under BLM have stated their opposition to the vax-passports there and have been out protesting because they're actively being barred form many businesses. Are they all "right wing/trump supporters/fascists"?

You leftist are so mired and enslaved by your ideology that you can't dare engage with any information deemed "right-wing" or anything that isn't approve by your leftist vanguard gatekeepers. Keep toeing the party line though.

Thirdly, fuck IGD and their boring collectivist strugglismo bullshit. They're about as informative and interesting as listening to CNN (which is to say completely uninteresting and uninformative). I don't even think this article was all that good at making the critiques of "the left" (you anarcho-liberals) that need to be made but its leagues better than any NPR-lite garbage that's on IGD.

did you know that there are not-white people in the proud boys too? checkmate, leftoids

I really appreciate you speaking out on this and refuting this garbage from these anarcho-democrats LARPing as anarchists! The entire covid-1984 narrative was constructed by the various governments, the bio-medical industrial complex & big pharma, and the various intelligence agencies and few to the masses. The NPC completely ate up every lie the government and mainstream media put out, and the anarcho-democrats did too, and yet for some bizzare reason they think they have the objectively true radical analysis of covid despite everything they believe being the exact same garbage put out by Joe Biden and Fauci.

"We Keep Us Dangerous." That's not a strong start: the only danger in your opening line is to English language syntax.

Way to avoid addressing the content of the article in question. The title is waymore important than that. Of course.

i have no problem with the subtitle, but it is a bit clunky. but for sure fuck your godwinning about people calling out shit grammar. just because some people are interested in keeping communication clear -- which, yes, often means sticking to various stylistic conventions (NOT rules, since there's really no serious consequence for violating them -- except being embarrassed by often smarter people), doesn't make them authoritarians, and it sure as hell doesn't make them "nazis." the over-sensitivity to being called out on one's ignorance (or worse, trying to look more intelligent than you are -- like using "whom" incorrectly, which always makes me roll my eyes... i'll explain it if you're interested) by invoking nazism is weak, and shows how much you embrace American anti-intellectualism.

so for 17:17, pointing out shit grammar is a way of avoiding the content of some essay or rant. but for us "grammar nazis" [sic], the awful and awkward syntax and grammar is just too distracting to bother with trying to understand the point of the essay or rant.

Thank you for proving my point. I appreciate it, saved me time and effort better spent elsewhere.

anyway, aside from the incorrect use of "whomever," the deployment of marxist jargon completely undercuts the alleged anarchist origin of this rant. targeting anarchists for being stupid is picking at the low-hanging fruit of political actors; for decades the vast majority of american anarchists have been liberals and social democrats in practice, with brief explosions of visible and principled contestation with the status quo of (allegedly) ameliorative incrementalism. this rant could have been three sentences long and had more impact.

... what "marxist jargon"? wtf are you talking about? where?

i suspect i'll regret asking tho...

dear lumpy, here you go:
"the state of exception"
"proletariat" ("insurgent" and unadorned)
"petit [sic] bourgeoisie"
"proletarian struggle"

why would you lead with your weakest argument of all?

anyways, I see you place your bar on the floor for criteria.
marx used all the nouns and verbs! guess everything is marxist!

How bout coming to terms with the fact that that’s been a millstone on anarchy and antistate propaganda.

Fascism is a major phenomenon did not survive the 40s. Stop believing in that duppy under your bed.

Dear mods,

Is there an ignore feature planned?

This SirEinzige turd is ruining our anews experience and instead of asking moderators to moderate our anews anon alliance would prefer to be able to flush him ourselves even when you mods are away from keyboards in your polyamorist cuddle puddles.

Sincerely,

anews anon alliance

Much like the pandemic, trolls are a symptom of systemic issues. This site (afaik) was started as a freeze-peachier alternative to the heavily moderated and heavily left leaning news.infoshop.org. The biggest issue used to be someone who posted lengthy, repetitive philosophical rants, but they were curious and interesting, not an obsessive, slur-spewing narcissist. I have no idea how moderation works here(?), and I’ve missed a lot of the online @ discourse over the past decade, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person who doesn’t visit as much or take the site as seriously because of the shtty vibe that certain people (I’m sure not just z , but dang does he go hard) feel free to bring. It seems like on the whole there are less comments and less interesting ones.

Are you referring to Emile? What happen to him? He was one of the most entertaining and interesting aspects of anews.

"We have shamefully ceded the anti-State narrative to the right, without even putting up a fight."

The right are not anti-state. Not sure where you got that idea from. They only hate the state when it interferes with what they want (e.g. unfettered economic power) but love the state when it helps them achieve it (i.e. police, military, draconian laws, and law n order).

there's some interesting distinctions there primal, authoritarianism isn't very rational and doesn't worry much about hypocrisy obviously but to say that reactionaries are never anti-state is simply not true.

you just need to put them in a historical context where their beloved power has been sufficiently captured by what they perceive to be their enemies. it's mostly the desire to seize it, rather than abolish it but the quote you're referencing is only about rhetoric anyway and the far right has definitely been using anti-state rhetoric to great effect, however disingenuous most of them are.

Just as the liberals/democrats do, and as we're seeing anarcho-liberals do as well. Who are out protesting for more state mandates, lockdowns, a biomedical-technocratic security state and a continuation of whats been going on for the past 2 years. They"re other side of the same state owned coin...

glad the author is critiquing their own bad-faith reading of rhetoric from the beginning of the pandemic about anarchists trying out how to do stuff together without getting sick from a disease we understood even less then than now and then hooking in some populist/red rhetoric about proletarians and the clown car blockade going on in canada.

kind of funny that this was published on IGD, but then, they also employ some of the misplaced idealism (that the stimulus checks issued months before George Floyd was murdered were somehow a response to looting, for example) that thrives in spaces like that.

The general direction of this article is a good one. But, as can be seen with the typically United States of America juvenile petulance in several of the response here, the author is addressing this to the wrong audience. Anarchism in the United States exists to satisfy the emotional needs of people who like to call themselves anarchists. It isn't a credible, collective, public, working class based opposition to the general state of things in this society. It isn't going to become that or spawn anything like that.

The understandably much feared potential near-future right-wing dictatorship -- a difference of degree and not of kind from what much of the populace already endures -- is coming. It will not last long. It will be inefficient and explosively unstable. The demographic who will be its most die-hard supporters -- rural, white, older, untravelled, poorly read, credulous, unintelligent, mentally ill, or both unintelligent and floridly mentally ill -- will be vastly outnumbered by predominantly urban multi-ethnic low income wage-earners and desperate poor people, people who, unlike the Chuds, can put two and two together. And the converging catastrophic structural emergencies that are coming to a head now cannot be competently managed, avoided or defanged by plutocrats hobbled by market ideology. 

The United States is speeding towards collapse. No tendencies within the capitalist system can stop this; the debt of history has now come due -- with interest. But at this point in time no anti-capitalist fighting tendency tangling with this has emerged, one that speaks in transparently clear language and disdains to conceal its goals. And you aren't going to find it here -- it has to constitute itself on wholly different terms and using different language than what's found in the US anarchist scene.

He completely tops out at not even the best of euro ultraleftism. He still believes in class war and thinks class agency is a thing. He’s not entirely wrong about contemporary anarchism though.

Essentially there problem boils down to failed communicative propaganda and much of this can be explained by how much of the Marxist dominant new left they ended up soaking up including all that activism which amounts something similar to militancy.

Anarchists simply need to refind their 19th century grove and be thoroughly divorced from the structure of Marx.

Nah, mate. YOU are the retarded version of you. However, the other version of you is also retarded.

Marx realized proles were idiots and he would have to compose an essay which was severely dumbed down and resemble something equivalent to a Punch and Judy street puppet show which all workers of the period regarded as the highest form of theatre and wisdom, and so he wrote The Communist Manifesto, a street puppet theatre show.

The general direction of this article is a good one. But, as can be seen with the typically United States of America juvenile petulance in several of the response here, the author is addressing this to the wrong audience. Kevin Keating in the United States exists to satisfy the emotional needs of people who like to call themselves Kevin Keating. It isn't a credible, collective, public, working class based opposition to the general state of things in this society. It isn't going to become that or spawn anything like that.
The understandably much feared potential near-future right-wing dictatorship -- a difference of degree and not of kind from what much of the populace already endures -- is coming. It will not last long. It will be inefficient and explosively unstable. The demographic who will be its most die-hard supporters -- rural, white, older, untravelled, poorly read, credulous, unintelligent, mentally ill, or both unintelligent and floridly mentally ill -- will be vastly outnumbered by predominantly urban multi-ethnic low income wage-earners and desperate poor people, people who, unlike the Chuds, can put two and two together. And the converging catastrophic structural emergencies that are coming to a head now cannot be competently managed, avoided or defanged by plutocrats hobbled by market ideology.

The United States is speeding towards collapse. No tendencies within the capitalist system can stop this; the debt of history has now come due -- with interest. But at this point in time no anti-capitalist fighting tendency tangling with this has emerged, one that speaks in transparently clear language and disdains to conceal its goals. And you aren't going to find it here -- it has to constitute itself on wholly different terms and using different language than what's found in the US Kevin Keating comments.

Could be a EMILE 9000-style super computer that has absorbed everything KK has ever said or written and now "imitates" the model with ever increasing accuracy. Call it the KEV 9000.

...rent strikes, George Floyd insurrection, conservatives with trucks, all seem to be a sectionalized rebellion against one aspect of state control...in a lot of ways, there just seems to be no escape from neoliberal capitalism and the moralities/ideologies that underpin them...i'm not against any rebellion persay, i just think there's some reason to the logic that we have to get rid of the whole thing instead of symptomatic rejection of things that will continue because we continue with our obedience: working, paying taxes, reporting everything we do to the internet. Now if those three movements were combined with a general attack on the internet, then THAT could have meant a more established chaos, not that that's a good thing. If anarchy ever comes, then it may favor me, or not, it's not in my power to control. There's a lot to be said about a more thorough rejection of morality which got supressed because of "the greater good" and crap like that. I guess it's all just a cosmic joke in a way, "you can't have one without the other", "every action creates an equal and opposite reaction". The more disruption there is, the greater calls for order.

"The general direction of this article is a good one. But, as can be seen with the typically United States of America juvenile petulance in several of the response here, the author is addressing this to the wrong audience. Anarchism in the United States exists to satisfy the emotional needs of people who like to call themselves anarchists. It isn't a credible, collective, public, working class based opposition to the general state of things in this society. It isn't going to become that or spawn anything like that."

Uh, yeah, it's here to basically cater to emotional needs of people who feel angry at a larger number of things than either the left or right permits. However, anarchism can not, and SHOULD not, reject "juvenile petulence", because anarchy/chaos without the needs of children just looks like a university or something like that. Burn down the schools, unleash the hounds...

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