TOTW: Failure Modes

The crumbling ruins of anarchism-in-general;
a tower of failures, all those who have fallen, stacked up like stones in a pile...

Borrowing lingo from engineering and using it metaphorically:
What are well-known ways in which anarchists fail according to their own criteria?

Fracture: When cracks appear

Yielding: When a body gives way to pressure

Insufficient Stiffness (Deflection): When flexibility causes failure

Buckling: When a loss of stability creates big damages

Fatigue: When time causes a loss of strength

Creep: When a body deforms over time

Add to that: Failure to launch, failure to detonate, catastrophic failure, derailing, stalling, crashing and burning, and many more.

What are the known stresses and potential failure mechanisms? What have we learned from all typical failure modes? How are they taken, or not, into account? Let’s rank them by how interesting, meaningful or pointless, fun or boring, safe or dangerous, rare or commonplace they are. What types would you like to see more, or less of? Can you propose fail-safes or even new ways of failing? How do you dance in the ruins of anarchism?

There are 45 Comments

I think this is a great metaphor to consider what goes wrong with our plans... but am not entirely sure how to work it...

There have been multiple groups that were... fractured? by people saying that the set up of the group was already broken or fucked up--usually around identity politics lines. Was the fracture in the set up of the group? or in the political jockeying that happened as people tried to negotiate their positions in the group? or both?

This totw is wildly ambitious! I look forward to other people's clarity.

great questions! do you remember the uproar around schulman's book - conflict is not abuse?

just my experience but i found that discussion, the good, bad and ugly parts of it, answers your questions in a compelling way. people always make these shitty, lazy claims about identity being the root cause and it's almost never convincing to me anymore. identity is a construct, it has few, if any intrinsic qualities so it's an absolutely shit explanation for patterns of behaviour.

but the powerful tendency for traumatized people to overstate harm? and constantly make accusations and relive the drama of their past conflicts and abuses they suffered? transference and projection? .... THAT shit does a muuuch better job of explaining things.

Many anarchists lack self-initiative and self-reliance, making them susceptible to being led or manipulated into participating in vain glorious spectacles and State sanctioned protests.It's all wind and gesture, and lacking that deep internal dedicated passion for the anarch originality and creative imagination lurking in the radical independent critical psyche of individual uniqueness.
*Sigh* It's hard finding suitable companions in a world populated by ideological clones, but, oh well, one must press on regardless, , , no comrade types pleeease!

Some claim Anarchy Works time and again and is merely caught off guard by The Shock of Victory, where short and medium-term goals are achieved quickly and long-term goals either are unclear or seem really far away or unreachable and are therefore demoralizing to some

"Presumably any effective road to revolution will involve endless moments of cooptation, endless victorious campaigns, endless little insurrectionary moments or moments of flight and covert autonomy. I hesitate to even speculate what it might really be like. But to start in that direction, the first thing we need to do is to recognize that we do, in fact, win some. Actually, recently, we’ve been winning quite a lot. The question is how to break the cycle of exaltation and despair and come up with some strategic visions (the more the merrier) about these victories build on each other, to create a cumulative movement towards a new society. "

So it could be a problem of scale of how to distribute the subsequent shocks of victories from all the inevitable stacking up of winning in a way that the anarchist foundations don't crumble. Here is the problem of the internal anarchist tension between the poles of anarchism-in-general and schematic anarchy, where excessive rigidity or flexibility would make the anarchist construction buckle. It needs to be flexible enough and have tolerances which accommodate for movements, but rigid and resilient enough so as not to deform or give in to external pressures. The resultant strength which would be measure against external forces is the collective force of the respective unity-collectivities.

The problem of scaleabilty lies in how much success can a unity-collectivity handle, in how it can endure the shocks of victory. Anarchists first have to figure out how to make the trains run on time in a small area for enough time long before aspiring to self-manage supply chains all around the world.

In the meantime, while accumulating small victories we can handle, we can keep our eyes on the horizon by imagining radical futures that may not be so far away, like in An Anarchist Solution to Global Warming

i'm bored of people focusing on past mistakes and would rather doing anything wild and seeing what sticks. deep time is capable of more creativity and innovation through iteration and natural selection than any individual ever could through design. just roll the dice and play the cards you're dealt, amor fati. you can't see how it will come out on the other side. it's unlikely our species will survive the Great Filter, which might be sooner rather than later. so i'd rather a focus on wild off the wall things for novelty's sake to see if we can break out off the rut of path dependent monotony that will likely do us in

failure modes is a terrible analogy since anarchism never passes the drawing board stage. anything people ever do is just people doing normal people things and then someone pointing to it and saying "that's anarchist". there's not a thing that groups it all together in a way that would resemble a structure that could break. like saying different disassembled pieces or even building materials for different projects located in different continents was a something. in a way anarchism never fails because it's a brainstorming session during which there's no such thing as bad ideas as long as they're not authoritarian or oppressive

what, you couldn't make the obvious connection with the economic pressures that make people sell-out? the pressure infiltration and interrogation and torture methods can make people break and snitch? how people get tired with time? how people burnout from activism?

I would say the May 2020 uprising in DC launched fine, hit the target, but failed to detonate. The rocket fuel still did a lot of damage though

Tsk tsk tsk , , , damage in the scale of toasting 1,000,000 mashmallows ! Bravo ;p

DC's first night had Trump driven into his bunker. This was followed by two "nights of fire" combined with big daytime marches. Then came several days of police terror and a bit of a stalemate.

Out of that came the Juneteenth "Fuck the Police" march that pulled down the Albert Pike statue and re-energized things. The next few days saw the back and forrh fighting to hold the Black House Autonomous Zone at BLM Plaza. During this came the failed attempt to pull down the Andrew Jackson statue in Lafayetle Sq right in front of tjr White House.

Mwanwhile the Fuck the Police marches kept going, marching through yuppie outdoor dining areas and condo zones. Chants such as "fire, fire, gentrifier" when their had been actual fires earlier scared the crap out of the condo owners. Soon, there was public discussion of yuppies moving back out of the city. The marches continued until Feb 6, 2021 under increasing police pressure including repeated fake kettles.

Had the marches had more turnout, enabling them to pierce police lines and break out of kettles J20 style, rhey could have kept going longer. At some point talk of yuppies moving out would have become moving trucks and boarded up condos.

Enough boarded up condos and demoralized police in turn opens the door for squatting and taking back territory ourselves.

We hit it, we didn't detonate. Lots of investors no doubt came away with financial burns from the effect of noisy, fireworks shooting, shield-banging night marches on property values though!

Just the din of one of these on final approach to a target block full of yuppies was often incredible, like the approach of an army at the dawn of the gunpowder age. Lots of "fear factor" in that for rich gentrifiers who know nothing of protest and do not realize this appearance may be hollow. Even now "fear of crime' grips the yuppies, and combined w lingering difficulty getting office drones back in the office, DC's yuppie side may not recover anytime soon.

Somehow they manage to keep rents rising through all this, which is part of "failure to detonate"

don’t you think that this level of intensity is unsustainable? it lasted pretty long despite what one would expect. there’s not an infinite wellspring of energy nor of anarchists. that seems like a quick way to burn through your resources in an area. what you’re describing seems like an interesting unfolding of events that i wouldn’t characterize as failures in themselves. was the implicit failure a lack of preparedness or foresight by the few anarchist who have seen similar things unfold before in that same area (maybe just you, do such other people exist and were they prepared and ready to throw down or is it always a surprise and a scramble?)

That Friday night protest where it all began started at almost exactly the same time DC lifted their stay at home order, not sure the exact time that was lifted.

George Floyd had been murdered by police less than a week earliee,so our warning time was just 4 or 5 days. I was not an organizer, only a participant.

We went from full stop to low intensity warfare in less than 24 hours it seemed. Now I am wondering if this SCOTUS situation will touch off another "Summer of Rage" as Women's March predicted.

i think there’s something to be said about anarchists lighting their own fuse instead of simply hoping the wider population will pop off due to pressures since there are many pressure valves

this is the classic 90s era lack-of-strategy black hole imo.

Luke, if I lived on that side of the continent, I would have sucked tear gas with you BUUUT when you say

"Had the marches had more turnout, enabling them to pierce police lines and break out of kettles J20 style"

this is ... wrong on several levels: it's a windmill tilt of the highest order, the recipe for epic tragedy. the point is, you DONT have a serious fighting force and they do. sometimes the crowd gets the advantage for awhile but so what? look at what happened in the ukraine not so long ago, they black bloc-ed their way to a far right populist uprising and got murdered in the streets by sniper rifles from rooftops. in egypt, they took it all the way to burning down police stations en masse and where is that social peace at now? same shit but with an islamic flavour.

like wtf is the end game here? anyway, i'm "that guy". stfu lumpy! *sits down grumbling*

what do you mean strategy and how would anarchists go about doing that?

seems like a smart thing to propose, except all i can think of is platformists, which is a terrible example to follow

"platformist" is an incredibly vague, broad term of derision? if you mean, the modern leftist LARP where people stick a smokescreen of revolutionary politics on like, democratic socialist electoral politics, then fuck that noise, i agree: it has no bearing on the kind of infrastructure that could support the capacity to fight because it's intended to recuperate instead. has the opposite goal.

but fighting does require things tho, lots of things. all of which can be easily incorporated in to a strategy by groups or networks of serious people who want to fight. know how I know? because people whose politics i don't share, are doing this all the time, which is why the world is the way it is

oh, you mean something vaguer and more impossible than platformism, ok

ah, a global conspiracy from below against the powerful, good luck with that

seems like luke is more grounded than you

ah look, a desperate attempt at a strawman even tho I didn't prescribe anything!
i can't help you with your despair, no. that's your personal journey or whatever.

no lumby, a strategy would prescribe a course of action, or else it’s just a vague nothing. this is not a gotcha, you have as many comments as you want to flesh it out, or send me a link to a text. i’m interested to find any strategy that is more than simply wishful thinking

do you even realize what an obvious bad faith move you're making? somebody says

"absence of strategy is a problem"

and instead of accepting this relatively uncontroversial take as obvious, you demand they produce... what exactly?

a summary of an anarchist fighting strategy (for who? under what conditions? why the fuck do I care if you're persuaded? etc) to a seemingly fairly hostile stranger, on an open forum? for all of anarchy, for all time?

being "vague" ... or we haven't even begun a discussion of a huge topic yet? learn the difference

how many questions does it take to press lumpy into drawing the “bad faith” card?

i’m not asking for persuasion, merely pointing to strategies, naming them, linking them. if none have existed before and this is a novel proposal, say so. NBD anarchist strategy. if on the other hand, many strategies have bee attempted and they have failed, what could we learn from them?

it’s okay if you can’t produce this info, it’s not an attack. simply say “i don’t know” instead of pretending you hold the answers but are withholding your wisdom from me because you suspect my faith is bad.

what about this being an objectively terrible space to have that sort of discussion in a serious way?

what about strategy not being the kind of thing you can discuss without context?

"Platformist" may be "an incredibly vague broad term" (I always thought it meant being inspired by the Draft Platform of Makhno, Arshinov, and other Ukrainian anarchist exiles from the Russian Revolution). However, neither "Platformist" nor "new-Platformist" nor "especifista" is known to advocate "electoral politics" of a "democratic socialist" or other type--with or without "a smokescreen of revolutionary politics." Platformism is a brand of revolutionary anarchist-socialism (or anarchist-communism), anti-electoral as part of being anti-state and anti-capital.

yep! that would be a more accurate definition, although if that's the definition we're using, it doesn't exist at all? so it's got that not going on...

but i was trying to ask this anon what they meant by the word? before they made it clear they just wanted me to assert something so they could shit on it lol

all of which is incredibly on topic for "failure modes". bravo @news! keep being your best selves!

There are any number of anarchist objections to (neo) Platformism and especifismo, but promoting electoral politics isn't one of them

Yes, only to end up beseiged like the Ukrainian militants in the iron foundy, no food, no medicine, no ammo. Being beseiged by a larger and better equipped nemy can only result in a lot of unnecessary surrender or death. *Facepalms*

Now that you’ve brought up the war in Ukraine, if anarchists are to learn anything from the the Spanish Civil War or the Russian revolution is that this time time around they should be the ones shooting their non-anarchist comrades in the back instead. Timing this is hard, since they are fighting together. Should the timing be close to when the war is wrapping up? They probably will be buried by state forces by then, so I guess it’s even safer for anarchist to err on the sidepf jumping the gun a bit. See how many of the military higher ups, fash sympathizers and fahs they can frag.

My roles were participation,scouting, bike blockading, and carefully edited video that no prosecutor was able to use against us. I did not create the overall stratrgy, probably nobody did.

The alternative to breaking out of a kettle however is to surrender. On breaking out of a kettle it is usually necessary to disperse for the night in defensible groups. Note that MPD has known issues with internal communications when any opponent breaks into many smaller groups.

If the kettle attempts are repeated it is time to switch to hit and run tactics with small groups. That can be anything from 10 minute home demos that leave before the cops show up to the heavy stuff. The important thing is to respond to kettled by doing something that cannot be kettled, and which they like LESS than what they tried to kettle. If they don't like marches and throw a tantrum, do something they REALLY don't like!

Yes, we can use Ukraine as an analogy here. Putin may have managed to kettle and cut off the iron works but he is losing the war. Russian troops are being driven back. Ukrainian troops even managed to sink the "Fuck You Russian Warship" Moskva missile ship, the flagship of Putin's Black Seas.fleet, with two locally produced Neptune anti-ship missiles.

We don't have a missile ship to sink, but how about "sinking" a newly opened high end condo building with repeated short protests, too short for thr cops tp show up and at random times the cops cannot predict. Target the new yuppie settlers directly, and watch them stop coming.

"I did not create the overall stratrgy, probably nobody did." <--- problem identified

"we can use the ukrainian analogy here" <--- are you sure?

if we do, that means ... satellite pictures of the hole in the ground, where everyone ended up

Oh yes, of course, satellite pics and co-ordinates of Luke and his comrades in a vacant carpark loading Molotov cocktails into a beaten up pickup truck sent to the captain of an artillery unit 5 kilometres away. Good luck with your modern war! ;)

anarchists are each so unique that no single typology can be constructed to typify any of them nor their failures, which in many cases may not even be considered as such by them since they may live freely without goals nor criteria (or desire) for self-evaluation, and as such defy this cruse mechanistic approach

Yep, its a crude mechanistic reflex connected to primeval instinctual tendencies. Gonna need alot of purging to get that behavioral stereotype erased from humanity, *sigh*

That's so true, like what is there to compete with, and what is the comparison, to what? What is victory, and what does it mean to an individual who is content to be their own master?

what use is anarchism in a world that is tearing itself apart? if you envision anarchy as about how to relate to others (something i tend to align with) then of course there are different ways to be. but i was more thinking of the more revolutionary or insurrectionary conceptions of anarchism: if you cast yourself as a societal antagonist but the society is destroying itself, what is an anarchist to do? see the process to completion, continue to antagonize, do nothing (personal favorite, harder than it seems), scavenge or parasitic behavior (another favorite), ...?

What use is anything when everything is nothing?? Like if things are not things then why even call them anythiny, right? Buildings are made of materials but those materials could be used for other stuff so why are they buildings? Does a crocodile have a thoughts on society? No.

Why do we keep eating when we will just be hungry later? Does humanity just enjoy making poops? Maybe using poops for growing food (my favorite usage) is why we keep being so hungry? Imagine how much extra time for activities we would have without eating.

Anon 13:25, ignore the sarcastic replies to your ideas, I totally agree about your emphasis directed at the relation one has towards society, and how it is futile to invest in the well-being of an imploding disintegrating society which is owned by a capital investors and environmental predators.
I also enjoy your favourite responses to the present existent, and also avoid the confrontational angst-signaling demonstrations and protest of those who believe they can resuscitate the coming societal coma the majority of this planet are anesthetized under. Cheers to you ;)

what use is sarcasm in a world that is tearing itself apart? if you envision sarcasm as about how to relate to others (something i tend to align with) then of course there are different ways to snark. but i was more thinking of the more LULZy or based conceptions of sarcasm: if you cast yourself as a societal snark but the society is destroying itself, what is an sarcast to do? see the process to completion, continue to snark, do nothing (personal favorite, harder than it seems), scavenge or parasitic behavior (another favorite), ...?

Sarcasm can be ok if I use it, because I am a beautiful and rare anarch, but nobody better not (double negative) use it against me or ideas and actions I approve of.

Anon 13 25 asks, "what use is anarchism in a world that is tearing itself apart?" Properly they distinguish between just trying to live a personally less anxious life and trying to change society into one which is not tearing itself apart. I answer that only a popular anarchist revolution and reorganization of society can save us.

Can anarchy be achieved? In time to avoid ecological catastrophe and/or nuclear war? I don't know. I certainly don't believe the Marxist idea that socialism is inevitable. It is not a matter of prediction but of commitment.

I don't know if full anarchy will ever be achieved but I think the best thing to do is let Wayne Price and his Committee of Good Wars totally reorganization society until they think we're ready for full anarchy. At least they will shoot, reprogram, or exile the people they deem unfit for the new anarchist society. Saves us from having to make hard decisions about killing! Huzzah!

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