TOTW: Renewing the anarchist idea

creating an anarchist movement with teeth!

Topic of the week – This week we’re taking some time to reflect and digest some statements and questions posed in a recent article titled “2022 in Review: A Year to Endure” by CrimethInc.

Towards the end of the text, it states:

“We are once again at the beginning of a new era that will pose new challenges. This is the time to propose new tactics, new strategies, new horizons for experimentation.”

It goes on to ask the readers:

“As you undertake projects of your own this coming year, imagine that these are not just ways to address immediate needs or respond to emergencies, but also opportunities to shape the imaginations of thousands of others like you. Imagine what it would look like to develop new models for revolt in an era of scarcity and ecological crisis, when people desperately need new ways to access and share space and resources. Imagine that your efforts could give rise to new experiments that will be infectious and that these will evolve in unpredictable ways. How can you contribute to this process? How can you accelerate it? How can you approach your own humble efforts as a step towards the movements of the future?”

What do you think about the statements and questions?

***

Anarchist News has open submissions for guest Topic of the Week posts. If you’re interested please email:
thecollective [at] anarchistnews [dot] org

This TOTW comes in large part from a CrimethInc. text whose statements and questions have been taken by a member of thecollective and presented as a weekly topic to delve into further. It is not a guest CrimethInc. TOTW, but an attempt to spend some more time and space on this topic.

There are 24 Comments

"revolt in an era of scarcity and ecological crisis" Let me see, how about just the singular act of ceasing to be a consumerist pawn in the corporatist game of endless growth, production and profit.

"How else the proles gunna feed their famulies!?" n such n such... You know the drill.

I ignore "drills", I have my imagination and feed my family by delving into the bountiful creative realm of frugile diy subsistence far removed from the corporatist arena n such n such.

DUDE, I was just paraphrasing the usual normie libcom moralism with that whole family-feeding imperative. I am not defending this. Calm the duck down and quit being such a snowflake, sheesh!

I disagree that “We are once again at the beginning of a new era”. This is just a lazy and cheap rhetorical framing. This paragraph goes on with “new, new, new”, there’s nothing new. I don’t propose anything, I reject collective framings, and framings in terms of crisis and emergencies, of tactics and strategies for movements. The turning of another calendar year does not mark anything significant for me.

agreed that it's a rhetorical device, and that the start of the year doesn't have to mean anything. otoh, every day can be a day to (re) consider the decisions we are making, the direction we want to be going in. new year's being a day that is socially set for that consideration doesn't have to mean anything, but we also don't have to reject it out of hand.

so the question doesn't have to be contingent on the timing., and definitely not on some false newness.

I (first person singular) (re) reject it out of hand. who the fuck is “we”?

sad that crimethinc’s secret stash of new ideas for the movement burned in the warehouse fire.

is that they are framing people,

and always end up literally "framing" them!

The universe isn't made with frames, afaik. Framing the mind does, on the other hand installs blocks, conducts, wires and hindrances in our cognitive processes. Intelligence grows out from the breaking of frames, not their building...

"What do you think about the statements and questions?"

I think it's good. If asnooze was half as based as CrimethInc this would be a worthwhile website but instead we got butthurt moderators on powertrips. I hope the new 2023 era has thecollective giving the website to real anarchists that aren't so authoritarian. This would be the best

Sadly the Crimethinc. website doesn't allow anonymous user comments, or comments at all - maybe this is something Anews should take into consideration, though I'm not the trolls on this site would enjoy that

a new tactic anarchists could use could be to find a way to hack toll passes. like maybe it deposits the amount it’s supposed to charge, instead of charging it, the payoff is automatically anonymized, redistributed, and laundered widely, the key would be to get your bloc of people to pass the tolls the moment the hack would be active.

I would much rather prefer to see some cohesion but this is a comment section , not a council room so I can live with that . What worries me is the apparent lack of a solidified front . We must push away elements that have nothing to do with our cause and form stronger bonds .
I hope I'm wrong and this initial perception is just the result of some scum that attempt to sow distrust and chaos without achieving much if anything .

If you want a cause that expects people to conform to I recommend whatever church is most likely around where you live. They'll take you in.

In all actuality those governed under the current techno-industrial phase of capitalism have no thoughts that matter. Predictable behavioral patterns for ensuring revenue streams does. From there, power guards key infrastructural nodes for the continued flow of goods.

Notice how economic press is merely concerned with "supply chain disruptions" at the moment. A railroad strike had to be blocked...

Meanwhile, all those nodes really represent is an ongoing ability for powerful institutions to veil systemic looting and off-shoring of the economy into fronts and shells.

We can think the Purest Thoughts but it isn't going to get that money back or alter the feedback loops or alter the engineering language that gave rise to them.

Root for the weather to alter predictability.

"...but also opportunities to shape the imaginations of thousands of others like you."

New year, same obsession with winning hearts and minds. Why are some anarchists so focused on spreading more ideology?

The internet is a powerful distorting lense that distorts collective imaginations (because companies are using it to work people for free in privatizing their inner lives). It's been too easy to appeal to emotions and gamify polarization for profit.

In my 36 years I've never seen so many people care about electoral politics in amerikkka. Yet, no one on charge has any idea what to do. That's the fun transparent secret about it all. It means anything is possible. Although I realize probably nothing is going to happen but the usual further consolidation of power. Perhaps billionaires will decide the answer to climate change is seeing to it that we all have to go. They have nowhere left to put their money but in empty luxury developments as fancy file cabinets. Juke the stats. Shuffle the books. The same 10% of investors own 87% of the stocks. (Are recessions just boardroom meetings agreeing to induce Shock Therapy on the public when quarterly earnings reports don't satisfy shareholders?)

At this point I root for the demise of the species. Perhaps it'd be fun to lie, to poke fun, to provoke the infighting of powerful people so that nothing gets done. Maybe one will give up and throw their money into the wind like those that gave financing during the time of Bakunin and Kropotkin.

While I can blend in to normie world, I don't have kids. This has isolated me. So has leaving social media 98% of the time since 2013. It's too hard to pick up a phone and text for people. I've been basically socially dead since then. Would not know how to sustain a community, friendships, so can't even imagine starting anarchist projects.

This world is shit, and there is an untameable imagination inside my head. I see a lot of people my age or older losing interests, passions, hobbies, getting mentally soft and slower. Even the people I do sometimes visit, they don't work out. They don't seem curious. Media induced social fears reign. Having someone tag along for a 10-25 mile bike ride (and not even on a hundred degree day) is basically unheard of.

Unlike a lot of other males, I couldn't give a shit about sports. Music was always cooler. I never will understand being a spectator in things you care about. I don't just listen to music. I also play it and write my own shit.

Egoist by circumstance. Learning to be my own best friend. Learning patience. And flow states.

All I can do socially is remember. Remember contexts, sources, and stories to try and share laughter over. My head is a library. The constant feed/scroll of the internet preys upon social amnesia. Perhaps social ammesia could be combatted so each generation (except for places with intact anarchist continuity) doesn't have to start from scratch would be better than winning hearts and minds over to something that has largely stayed in the imagination since 1936?

This is why I always yawn at the Spanish Civil war meme, as it seems like that's all the kids know about, coz that's the last historical moment taught online to would-be anarchists... not even '68, and this happen in a very different context that even in today's Catalunya has no bearing, outside of that very same crowd of R&B LARPers you got in every single developed cuntry.

But yea, you're right about the collective and personal memory thing... Social amnesia is flattening people and making us forget our unique-ness or difference, our personal experience of the world, our spiritual insight into reality. It's hard to remain a musician and artist when gazillion of "professional" artists keep generating the same generic crap and demean you coz you don't have the same recognition. Doing things for ourselves is the best we can do?

Yes, and the thing is that mindful diy indepence develops self-awareness and initiative to evolve and grow to our unique level of creative autonomy devoid of authoritarian coercive pressures.

-- independence --

the most awkward schtick. what’s the point of doing a parody if it’s not even funny. i guess some narcissists can settle for self-amusement, such a low bar.

Yes, and at that time , 1936, Mussolini was fine tuning a social corporatist model called fascism which still exists today, camouflaged and decorated by the spectacle of shallow sensations as propaganda and mindnumbing sensory overload, far removed from the earthy sensuality of human empathy and sexual freedoms.

Does the renewal or recuperation of an idea which so far has failed to take hold and sway the majority of folk on this toxic mud planet have any chance of somehow finally succeeding, especially when the 'idea' was born out of an ideology which assumed everyone wanted to be the same?
Just imagine 8 billion unique individualists doing their own thing, 8 billion ideas bouncing off eachother in a creative empathic wildness of free food and everything else.

Can Thecollective explain us why this idiot troll, who's been trolling almost every fucking day for the past 5-6 years, has a registered account on this site? Thanks.

Add new comment