A Contemptuous Idea: Communique #1

A Contemptuous Idea: Communique #1

A Contemptuous Idea:
Communique #1

What has become of the Beautiful Idea? It is a laughingstock: it is the ideal of the twenty-something in search of adventure with training wheels, a chance to be 'wild and free' but never ever impolitic, a chance to have loveless sex in a tent at a 'Temporary Autonomous Zone' [i.e., telegenic protest] with a stoned stranger (or any paralleling uncritical arrested development of a thirty-something, forty-something, etc.) without endangering one's prospects for getting a Master's Degree in Social Work a few years down the line. The real challenge of the contemporary anarchist is to feel they are totally in rebellion against the existent while simultaneously completely welcome at the next National Public Radio-sponsored wine tasting.

Virtually no one outside of the broadly left- or post-left anarchist subculture takes those same strands of North American anarchists seriously, except insofar as they are concerned these anarchists will, inexplicably, harass and attack ordinary and relatively powerless people depending on what the mainstream news has most recently told them is an important issue and an official enemy. This is a serious problem for the professed goals of anarchists.

We, The Contemptuous, have each been self-expressed and active anarchists for well over a decade for some of us and extending to several decades for others, but when we enter explicitly 'anarchist spaces’ like an occupied zone, a mass protest, a bookfair, a land project, a social center, a group house, etc., we, to greater and lesser extents, depending on the individual and the circumstances, feel less free. We feel we have to watch our words and refrain from joking, we feel many subjects are beyond discussion unless we are willing to risk a screaming argument, we feel we have to assume a fistfight might develop over some minor or imagined slight, we feel calumny and moral blackmail reign supreme. It is for us a very bitter irony that we experience random conversations with normies at a bar, perfunctory exchanges with various people we encounter in daily life, or small talk with whomever in a checkout line or a workplace as more open discursive spaces than the supposedly sober and self-critical anarchist milieu.

In recent decades, the North American anarchist subculture has become at once corpulent with bad ideas yet sclerotic in accepting new ones. Having spoken with numerous anarchists over the years who broadly agree that the North American anarchist milieux is paralyzed in this way but who feel they cannot speak openly, a few of us now adopt the mask of The Contemptuous, so that we may speak as freely, critically and viciously as we desire, as anarchists.

Eight Contemptuous Theses

*We are leagues apart from the anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The saga of anarchism as narrated by the Left pounds the Beautiful Idea into a lusterless, monochromatic surface “average”, with its sights set too low to resemble anything truly deviant or schismatic. Anarchism has become a hobbyist preoccupation of, and dialectically also a pawn and captive of, the professional-managerial class. As such, in their deepest hearts most anarchists hold many of the same values as their ostensibly forsaken peers (establishment journalists, government bureaucrats, college professors, et al.) and end up identifying with many of the goals of the ruling class, albeit in an indirect and obfuscated way.

*In the past few generations, anarchists have become some of the most domesticated people in the whole of the culture, a veritable ferment of ressentiment, hyper-conformity, and normalized mental disorders. The anarchist subculture has become a recreational and social space for disaffected eccentrics who want to avoid working out their psychological issues and instead find acceptance among people who accept the lowest common denominator of interpersonal conduct. The milieu thus collects people who have no real political, metapolitical, or anti-political projects, but instead use such fabricated aspirations as ornaments to obfuscate their personal flaws.

*Anarchists have almost fully internalized the false rebellion of woke-progressivism, criticizing it only insofar as they act as its most bleeding edge (the loyal ‘conscience of the Left’). These humorless NPCs, who have pathological fear of open debate, want to wage a forever-war against an imagined 1950s America that no longer even remotely exists (by sustaining a virtual echo-chamber of official pronouncements and uncontested talking points regarding everything from “privilege” to “white supremacy” to “puberty blockers” to “Roe v. Wade”). Even those who claim to object to (or merely want to question) this tendency do so in a mealy-mouthed manner, signaling their recognition of its chokehold on the mental space of the milieu.

*Contemporary anarchist thought obsesses over ‘the far-right’ while having next to no understanding of what the Left-Right spectrum means and therefore no idea of just what this diffuse enemy that seems to lurk in every dive bar and under every bed is (“We know him when we see him: he is the unvaccinated white male boomer with slightly unkempt facial hair, a ‘dad bod’, a MAGA ball cap, and an extraneous fishing pole in his pickup truck”). This is such a severe error in properly formulating the friend-enemy distinction as to effectively hamstring any realistic prospects for a different reality.

*Many anarchists are media illiterates - the lessons of Debord and Ellul are given lip service but not internalized, probably in part because the majority of them didn't actually do the reading. The latest ProgLeft cause that the corporate media tells them is important is simply given the anarchist gloss: accept the framing as true, and then just give the anarchist spin on it, whether it is immigration, climate alarmism, 'fascism' through Trump, Black Lives Matter, COVID, AI, transgenderism - whatever The New York Times, NPR, and the Bezos Post decided is Very Important this month. All that’s required to be a self-debasing member of this flock is to habitually repeat the academically-formulated credos of the progressive Left’s cultural programmers.

*Anarchists place their political confidence in populist causes and loosely identified masses of Objectively Revolutionary Subjects - ‘the working class' (now largely antiquated as compared to more fashionable subjects because they’re Trump Supporters and Canadian Truckers), ‘the Black Proletariat (still cool, for now, but you know they weren't so good on getting vaccinated), ‘the queer lumpen (the populist wing of the pharmaceutical industry, that latter being -Good, Actually- as of last year, please keep up)’. Rigorous political theory plainly shows politics is driven by tightly organized minorities, not shambling and loosely united populist groups that are largely the hallucinations of left-wing activists.

*Because anarchists have a phobia of anything that smells ‘right-wing’, they are fixated on strictly emergent/structural theories of our enemies and can’t understand (or refuse to consider) any parapolitical/elite theory view. They therefore obsess over perceived ‘horizontal’ enemies (ordinary people with differing political views) rather than ‘vertical’ ones (central banks, the elite NGO complex, intelligence agencies, the permanent bureaucracy). Similarly, they perceive mass social changes like the COVID lockdowns and mandated vaccinations or 9/11 and its consequences as simply the emergent operation of institutions responding to a crisis and regard all critics with an elite theory/parapolitical lens as unhinged eccentrics to be ignored or even aggressed against. We suppose it’s easier to attack ordinary people than it is to face the daunting prospect of real organized power.

Of course, parapolitics is just one of many interpretative “lenses” through which to analyze power and control—all of which can be useful aides to anarchist rebels, but only as situational guides, coarse outlines, working-plans, or evolving tools, not finalities or masters. What we object to is the wholesale, party-line condemnation of parapolitics as “right wing” by the truly binary and closed-boundary system of cultural leftism (with its cast-iron certainties about everything) and the Left’s round-the-clock dedication to quashing the possible contagion of countervailing ideas or approaches. Equally frustrating is the lack of interest ideologically-afflicted anarchists seem to have in mutually-rewarding and conspiratorial interchange with other refractory minds or spirited participation in a broader adversarial discourse that wishes to disrupt and decenter the ubiquitous narratives of Authority, domination and dreamless capitulation.

*In the end, anarchists act as a strange vanguard for globalism and transhumanism, which seem to be precisely the major goals of the real powers of our time. Although strenuously insisting to be anti-authoritarians, many anarchists are - when one really examines their premises, motivations, and actions - ultimately useful idiots, pawns being played. In response to these “useful idiots” masquerading as anarchists, and moved by our great contempt for them and their sluggish deference to popular trends or opinions, a few of us have joined forces as The Contemptuous.

As so:

We are at war with Civilization and the civilized herds who take comfort and perceived safety in their self-domestication.

We are at war with Society and its agenda-driven trending, manufactured tensions, enforced values, and the social media-symbiotes who proudly volunteer to live as slaves to their screens.

We are at war with Technology and its faithful cyborg flocks all fingering their smart phones the way monks finger their rosary beads.

We are at war with Politics and the political mobs, those sheep in savior’s clothing ever ready to follow those who bleat the loudest into the next witch hunt.

We are at war with Identity and all of those willing to smother their uniqueness under the masks and disguises of its categories and definitions so that they can find their place in this contemptible world.

We are at war with all authoritarian control.

We are at war with the political, the activists, and the scenesters in anarchist clothing.

We are at war….because we are anarchists!

Because we take this war seriously and because we are fed up with what has transpired in the anarchist space for far too long, as The Contemptuous, we will dispense with politeness, sensitivity, and civilized decorum and instead place special emphasis on derision, mockery, cruelty and transgression to aid and abet the fierce expression of our contempt for this world and its willing slaves. The times we live in and the challenges we face are far too deadly for conversation without content or for aimlessly filling the void of each other’s lives with even more deadening void. We are here to wipe out the hypersensitive and brittle and our first weapon will be words, a weapon each of us has used and honed on her or his own for some time. We will set out to say what has been forbidden to express in this society, most atrociously in its current form. More vitally, for The Contemptuous, we will be willing to say what has been forbidden by those close to us who speak rhetorically of freedom, but seem to know nothing of its power, its consequences, and its essence, perhaps because they have never truly experienced its presence in their own lives, even when it’s slapping them in their idiotic faces. We will be brutally honest with those who call themselves anarchists, but who speak, act, and adopt politics and ideologies as if they know best for others and wish to inflict their own sick plans on the rest of life. Enemies are all around us, they are creeping in closer, and they are uniting with even larger enemies of freedom, whether they understand this or not. What’s needed to break this degrading and belittling cycle of somnambulism (and recover some of our lost sight) is a searing psychic jolt to the anarchist imagination, one unconcerned with offending, the hurting of feelings, or the coddling of the cybernetically-infantilized and intellectually neutered. Enough is ENOUGH! The Contemptuous’ culling must begin.

We are a small band of anarchists who have come together in various ways over shared affinities of the life we wish to live, but in the context of The Contemptuous, we shall focus on what we despise, what we will not let go unchallenged, and what we seek to destroy. This specific project is one focused on the negation of what stands in the way of our unique and free lived anarchy. Under the collective name of The Contemptuous, and at times in individual voices within, we will speak directly and freely of what has been taboo to explore (i.e., the places where there are still clues as to how we arrived in this cultural Prison, and where we might possibly find escape routes) and will attack, with maximum contempt, the pale approximation of anarchism that has, in language, substance and function, become indistinguishable from generic, social justice leftism; we will address the decrease in meaning (and stripping of mutinous potency) caused by an insidious syncretism that has re-situated anarchism within a formless limbo located on some nondescript stretch of the leftist/socialist continuum, and which has deactivated and disabled anarchy’s reality-altering potential; and we will unleash the full savagery of our disgust on the technologically-integrated marionettes, nascent social engineers and moral lawgivers that try to enclose Anarchy within boxed categories and scripted regulations—disciplined, tamed, built for comfort, and superimposed with a docile, straitlaced abstraction that comes packaged in palatable, pretty bows (leaving us with the mirage of sedition and the reality of milquetoast). For one thing, Anarchy (or anarchism) ISN’T a blueprint or rulebook, and any aspiring system that requires adherence to expected behavior, politically correct thought-filters and left/liberal spatial boundaries is already obsolete as a vehicle of liberation, and our enemy. Slaves, morons and masochists follow ideologies, but not willful self-creators, who understand that Anarchy—like all of life—is too complex, chaotic, subjective, free, improvisational and frenetic to be encompassed by any one modelization.

The North American anarchist space today has been rendered effectively bedridden by range-bound, activoid groupings like AK Press and its alleged “splinter faction” PM Press, but even more so by the cognitive and perceptual conformity that the technologies of social media engender. This has resulted in a flavorless, unbelievably feeble, institutionalized anarchism, one which amalgamates the most redundant fables of leftist progressivism and consolidates them into a visionless, plebian faith. To reinforce and eternalize this threadbare worldview the publishing projects in question engage in a unremitting campaign of volume, quantity and oversaturation, through an almost industrial-scale production of absurdly repetitive books—books that are positively anemic in their lack of substance and which have turned Anarchy’s inherently-negating force into commodities that can be safely purchased and displayed (with the original treasonous impulse horribly disfigured before it was evenly properly understood). But for every AK Press hoodie sold to an activist consumer there’s an independent rebel who isn’t satisfied with depleted, ready-made, leftist waste-product, who is sick of all this repetition, and who desires more than wobbly planks made of platitudes that are cushioned with pitifully naïve promissory notes of “good” triumphing over “evil”. Anarchists, as Benjamin DeCasseres once put it, are here “to maraud on the farthest borders of the Conceivable”, to worm our heresy into the world’s pores and into the evolution of phenomena—not to muzzle ourselves with the vocabulary of economics and politics or deliver over-simplistic and opportunistic whimpering lectures on “injustice” and “inequality” in cheapening ploys for herd acceptance. Anarchy is NOT Antifa or ACAB. These are cheap and flimsy substitutes for the simple-minded. Anarchy is NOT a safer space, but one of inherent and embraced risk and danger, and very much superior and more desirable to any other way of being in the world. And, of course, anarchy is NOT a post-modern game to play in the virtual world, hiding behind screens and the mishmash of atrocious ideas and horrible politics. We are here to startle the slavish domesticated mind into perceiving the wealth of unsubdued combinations and potentialities in constant free motion around us, once we tear off the perceptual blinders of authority—not to prop up a social media Panopticon where “anarchists” themselves become both the guards and the snitches, monitoring and judging every utterance of their fellow inmates, and furiously signaling their own piety by way of self-censorship, speech-regulation, and expulsions/cancellations of those indicted as apostates.

And while there certainly are a few other kindred spirits out there who look at this world with open eyes, critical mind, and honest heart, and understand all too well what has gone terribly wrong with anarchists, most of them have understandably given up on the anarchist space and have thrown themselves fully into their own unique anarchist lives, which is more than understandable, its what authentic anarchists do, The Contemptuous have chosen to make one last stand in the anarchist world, from the edge, and spewing into the vacuous space of the anarchist scene. Maybe its our stubbornness, maybe residual remnants of withered romanticism, maybe we just can’t help our joyously deviant selves, maybe its just for shits and giggles, or just maybe in five, ten, twenty, a hundred years from now when the world and its deranged participants play out their sick and deadening game, someone may remember that there actually were a few authentic anarchists out there who fought against it, not just an annoying swarm of leftist drones wearing black and helping it along.

So, for now, to allow The Contemptuous to proceed along its trajectory without interference from petty tyrants and their politics of conformity and illusions of safety, we will launch our attacks anonymously and shoot our poison arrows from undisclosed (and always shifting) locations. We have arrived to disturb the anarchist milieu within its deep slumbers, to thunderbolt its paralytic posture and to disorder its crystallized patterns of thought. We represent a discontinuity in the overriding progressive narrative and will spit our venomous and unyielding critique into your vile and vacuous cyber-spaces and let others pick it to bones, and from there, deeper critique may actually flourish, authentic affinities [read: not solidarity] may develop, lines may be drawn, and perhaps (relevant) actions will follow.


Consider yourselves warned.
 The Contemptuous
contemptuous@riseup.net

Contempt



You think you shall sneak past me

without a barb
...
Ha!

My tongue is sharp and long,

and you shall not escape its sting!

Soon my poison will be

coursing through your veins,

burning heart and brain

in a torment of deep anguish

at your own stupidity!



I see how
you try to put freedom

on a leash,

to train it as a dancing bear

for the entertainment of your masters,

the screen-addicted masses.

How my derisive laughter will flow

when you realize
you have nothing

but the flea circus

of "alternative" obedience,

well-trained parasites,

and you among them.



I see how
y
ou try to cage anarchy,

to tame it

for the social petting zoo,

a safe anarchy
for the children

to pet and grin,

and then grow out of it

to become good,

progressive activists,

signing all the right (left) petitions

through the screens

of their own cages.

But all you've ever had

in that petting zoo cage

is the sad and mangy

rat of socialism

with "Smash the State"

tattooed on its tale.

How my derisive laughter

pours forth!



No, you shall not escape

my venomous barbs,

you who shout out words

you've never understood

to cover up actions

begging for acceptance

and offering your "dissident" obedience.

Humorless in your

superficial seriousness,

you shall never escape

the barbs of my contempt

and my earnest and poetic

playfulness.

There are 130 Comments

All this babble to basically announce you're going to be Twitter trolls? This is so, so stupid. There is certainly a conversation to be had about differentiating anarchists from progressives and challenging mainstream framings, but this reactionary crap is not it.

The best since nonsense will result in is something akin to the '90s anarchist scene - where intellectualized pedophilia ran rampant in issues of Anarchy and where Loompanics Unlimited was seen as some sort of adjacent project. All the talk about risking "danger" is basically an Anarchyist version of white dudes sitting at a bar with Ramones tshirts on screaming some variant of "remember when the punk scene was dangerous?!"

The irony of this is that it is actually really fucking dangerous to be trans, not just stupid-post-on-Anarchistnews dangerous, but actually life and death dangerous. It's also really dangerous to be a committed antifascist. That shit involves actual risk, not just imagined piss-off-the-libs dangerous.

So, you're really mad about accepting mainstream framings, so much so that you want to headfirst at the "work-progressives"? Man, what does that shit even mean? What the fuck are you even talking about.

There's lots to be said about demanding more from anarchists, about what an anti-capitalist and anti-statist politics should look like, about the relation of working class struggles toward those ends. Instead, we get this. Fuck all the way off you dumb dumbs.

"THIS NONSENSE" NOT "SINCE"
"WOKE-PROGRESSIVES" not "WORK-PROGRESSIVES."
MOTHERFUCKER I CANNOT TYPE RIGHT WITH THESE FAT FINGERS.

Including transgenderism in that list is definitely fucked up (the other things that they mention are reified concepts/titles that are icons of struggles rather than struggles themselves), so agree with you there.

But to measure something's relevance by whether it's dangerous or not is also not the best. being a cop is dangerous. doesn't make it something we want to fight for. Anyway.

Most of their points (the 8 pts, i guess) are solid, even if their cultural markers are out of date and their self-righteousness is less charming than they might hope and their blocks of text are too wall-y.

Kinda surprised people are so negative. Besides being old school and out of touch about transgender folks=surely those too go together-=what do you all really disagree with here?

the comment below about "not fighting" seems like just bad reading. They're not saying don't fihg t to my read, they're saying fight better. dont fight within the constraints of whats popular, condoned by the left, and so on. (but the "disciplined minorities" and "make revolution" part is *cringe* . oh well.)

What i think is even more strange/fucked is that the article says "jeff bezos decides", his influence is really messed up but i don't think he is the actual one who decides each week which articles go into the washington post...unless im out of the loop and something has radically changed about roles of how corporate tyrants use the news companies they own.

Some people are just transphobic, the article above appears to be transphobic, conservative and trumpian. Is this a prank?! How many people are still complaining about "woke progressives"? It was understandable during the trump administration since the left reaction was at times cringeworthy and terrible...to the cringeworthy and terrible alt-right uprising that took place. More moderate leftists were complaining about woke politics too, so many political factions were impaling themselves under the orange fuehrer.

Such horrible convergances. I hope i never meet the person who wrote the above article unless they recant their positians. I am dying inside.

so, tell me, how is it “transphobic, conservative and trumpian?” or are you just trying to shut down and “gaslight” (is that how you say it? duh, i’m just a dumb, backwards, and out-dated generation x’er…maybe there’s a way i could abbreviate that to make it more clear so i can go back to playing video games or putting a cool filter on selfies.). calling it “transphobic, conservative and trumpian?” is absurd, but please explain…

just a few comments on this comment, to better understand it:

i couldn't find these in the piece "disciplined minorities" and "make revolution"??? i found sort of this, but not this.

and could you explain "transgenderism in that list is definitely fucked up", not sure exactly what you mean?

and am i missing something? why do so many people use "cringe" so much these days?

Can you make any sense of it on its own?

"The latest ProgLeft cause that the corporate media tells them is important is simply given the anarchist gloss: accept the framing as true, and then just give the anarchist spin on it, whether it is immigration, climate alarmism, 'fascism' through Trump, Black Lives Matter, COVID, AI, transgenderism - whatever The New York Times, NPR, and the Bezos Post decided is Very Important this month. "

it's pretty vague and mostly about the writer(s) haughty tone?

but if there's anything under there, i'd guess it's a lazy gesture towards reactionary fantasies bout spoonfed media narratives that for whatever reason, ignore the rest of the context of the culture wars? ignore that the rest of the corporate media is arguably even worse, the other audiences.. even less critical..

if i was going to stereotype anarchists, it sure af wouldn't be for uncritically accepting what they hear!

"cringe" imo means that someone is not reading the room, metaphorically. someone is, for example, off on their own trip and not paying attention to how to talk to people who are not already just like them. for example.

that comment explained why transgenderism shouldn't have been included in that list. transgenderism is not a fad. one analogy would be that it's like adding "people of color" to that list.

i odn't know where the displined minorities etc thing came from either.

I interpret it. To me it just means paralyzing, baffling disgust. Thats how i use it. Because if i could put my disagreement into different words, then i would. Imagine me sighing and shaking my head if i say it again.

Once i read an article online (it wasn't political or right wing in any way) about how people on twitter just use the word cringe to bully on twitter, and imo i sympathize with that pov because twitter has always has been about being terse and retweeting. I personally dont understand how anyone could believe jack dorsey is an anarchist, he has met with the state department.

Can you imagine someone like Renzo Novatore, who imo was a real anarchist even though i didnt agree with everything he wrote, meeting with state department? I mean personally, i dont know what a "real anarchist" is, but the state department wouldn't want to have a meeting with me so, to me jack dorsey is just some alien authority. He is cringe.

“even if their cultural markers are out of date…..besides being old school and out of touch about transgender folks” …oh yes, its about staying current with social trends and language now….that’s their shit, not ours…and besides, i see what they are saying going on right now in the greater culture and anarchist scene, so it doesn’t seem dated or out of touch, except maybe from the most up-to-date online lingo and catch-phrases.

“blocks of text are too wall-y.” means what, sorry, just asking?

breast creation surgery (he was a trans female, then went back into being a guy with breasts when he was tired of identifying as female), and he hated people constantly harassing him about how weird he was. He seemed like an angry person as a result of all this, but i thought he was friendly to talk to and very frank about what he thinks about everything. I'm honestly just guessing about why he had breasts...maybe he still liked feeling whatever it was he put in the brah? I wouldn't ask somebody about their boobs, even though i would certainly complement them under the "right" circumstances.

The context is the are where i have lived most of my life, it's now not that dangerous to just be gay (in terms of confronting the people who have a problem with what you like in the bedroom), as long as you are careful about what you say to people about it. However, it's clear still terribly dangerous to come out as trans. That's why it's fine for people to just be Drag Queens and Dykes as an alternative, yet when something becomes "fine" and "not fine" often dictates how dangerous or relaxed a situation is. People are just fucking dangerous. There's too much comfort politics about safe spaces, yet it's glaringly obvious why everyone wants some degree of that.

stew
i seriously doubt they are going to be Twitter trolls considering they seem to be clearly anti-tech and anti-social media. they state that they are dropping this and letting us pick it apart… “We represent a discontinuity in the overriding progressive narrative and will spit our venomous and unyielding critique into your vile and vacuous cyber-spaces and let others pick it to bones, and from there, deeper critique may actually flourish, authentic affinities [read: not solidarity] may develop, lines may be drawn, and perhaps (relevant) actions will follow.”

as far a being reactionary, maybe, but it doesn’t seem that the anarchist space wants to take any of these concerns seriously, and hasn't for a while now, so what else is left but something like this. just look at the reactionary responses, most of which do not even begin to address what is actually written about. i almost completely agree with the authors, the anarchist space has been taken over by technophiles, progressives, leftists, activists, and such. anarchy is not a video game to be played from the safety of of a keyboard, nor is it a duty-filled performance to be played out. i wish it was something more anti-social, crass, and edgy. anarchy is not for society, it is for individuals and small groups to live freely, not a solution to the world’s problems.

Get your subcultures correct, at least. "Anarchy" is not punk, you somehow got your words mixed up, which maybe says a lot about what's happening in this post and the comments here. You clearly are talking about punk. Go listen to Aus Rotten and have a ball with your friends, there's no harm in that. Buy just say that's what it is and leave it.

who is talking about punk?

where the fuck does that come from?

you seem confused

You don't genuinely need to obey anyone. The fact that the folks who wrote the essay clearly want to have some clout and protection inside of an anarchist subculture is troubling to me.

"and such. anarchy is not a video game to be played from the safety of of a keyboard."

So then why are you posting online at all? Are you trying to tell me that anarchy is a serious matter? I don't see anything remotely serious about this website, there's lots of prisoner support and victimhood stuff yet i often don't respond to it.

was far better then the identitarian adjacent shitshows that we have today. I fully encourage a return to those anarchymag tendencies(which played a big role in framing my own thinking) and yes that includes a return to being open minded to things like pedophilia.

What makes the right so much more dynamic then the left is that they have that naughty alt space where they talk about nazism and fascism. A very much think the the pedo stuff along with greater sex radicalism is the equivalent to left and post-left discourse.

It's time for a new wave of anarchists/anarchs to adjust to the current media ecology.

Who could have seen SirEinzige's return_to cringe+pedo+fash+nazi+right+reactionary "anarchy" coming? I am SO caught off guard by this position.

*poops pants*
*tweets about it*

Pro tip: narcissistic boasting like "(which played a big role in framing my own thinking)" is only really effective if you have people that don't think you're an entire cringe shitass.

Also, Ziggy, don't you realize that it's entirely what 90s anarchists did that paved the way for the "identitarian adjacent shitshow" of the present anarchist scene you claim to dislike? Every single thing you bitch about regarding today's anarchists can be directly linked to work done by anarchists in the 90s (my own anonymous work included, which you've certainly creamed yourself over (sorry, world)).

Get over yourself you cringe edgelord nobody.

I mean some of them most certainly, some like those who took discourse like social text and its fashionable nonsense(nod to Sokal) seriously. The idiots who paved the way for things like APOC. The post-left Stirnerians that influenced me were not part of that co-factoring of causes. Between people like Black or Kaczynski(who nailed the whole problematic psychology back '95) and the whole AJODA and adjacent tendencies I would say those anarchists hands are mostly clean.

I would say more blame goes to Marxism and the discourse hegemony it has had since at least the post-war period. Anarchists who are either directly or indirectly indentitarian ultimately go back to some type of marxist or post-colon nationalist standpoint either directly or indirectly.

The edgelord stuff at best is closer to the better aspect of the 90s(the snark, nihilism all that stuff)

I'm one of the unique new wave of anarchs, aaAaand I believe that "anarcho-" is a prefix for mYyyy dEsIres ;)

This is the most try hard, edgy shit ive ever heard. The idea that white supremacy, transphobia and stuff like it shouldn't be fought against because that's a mainstream idea is ludicrous to say if You care one whit about freedom. Why even be an anarchist if You don't care about your fellow human beings??

Also that whole "disciplined minorities make revolutions" shit. What are You, a leninist?

first, “disciplined minorities make revolutions”, never says that
also, it never says “white supremacy, transphobia and stuff like it should’t be fought against”, do your reading, don’t project, i know you can. i believe in you.
“Why even be an anarchist if You don't care about your fellow human beings??” where did you learn this brilliant take about anarchy, TicTok?

and this could not be further from leninist.

implication that anarchist should just accept a psychiatric version someone else's misery:

"*In the past few generations, anarchists have become some of the most domesticated people in the whole of the culture, a veritable ferment of ressentiment, hyper-conformity, and normalized mental disorders."

I don't think there's anything true about this quote, except about anarchists being foaming-at-the-mouth resentful people. The comparisons are always a problem, in my experience, the actual Trump supporters basically beat all the other groups in that because they decided to barrow a page from the transgressive politicking playbook.

It's funny to me how Nietzsche still has the best critiques of anarchists, as a group, creating their own values as socialists. It's also ironic in the sense that his whole project was about re-evaluating values. A pretty passionate anti-anti-semite and interpreter of mythologies...

i think what they are saying in that quote is that most self-described anarchists in this time take their cues from the culture, rather than being authentic to themselves, that’s how i take it, and agree. you could take any situation or topic today and pretty much write what a contemporary “anarchist’s” response would be based on all the parameters of progressivism. that is sad.

0_O

he’s a dead alcoholic abuser who got fired from every job he ever had, so there.

OooOooh nOooo, I just realized I'm an anarcho-contemptuist seething in ressentiment who lives outside the Weltanschauung And is void of eschatological longings!

Are we still in 2015 or something? Anyone avoiding to talk about corporate social media ID pols and how they're turning people into fanatics should get kicked in the face for having their brains stuck somewhere 10 years ago.

come on now, stay current, yeah progress! and those shoes you are wearing are so 2022…

there's nothing wrong with using cultural markers that are from the 2010s at the latest, but it just speaks to who the contemptuous are speaking to, and it's not a significant percentage of who reads anews.

the point isnt to stay up to date as some kind of mark of social cred, but to understand that your barbs dont hit a lot of people here (and other places) the way you want them to. doesn't have to be a problem unless you blame your audience instead of accepting tht noone is talking to erryone.

i think that may be a frustration, but how do you reach people who abbreviate everything into nothing, who float in the post-modern soup of meaninglessness instead of living a life in the dirty and dangerous world. i think it has less to do with generational gaps and more to do with situational ones. people seem to rant all day long here about being different than the normies, yet they play the same games, do the same things, use the same things. they are all normies as far as i can tell. the most radical thing any of us can do is to leave all of this behind and live how we want outside it the best we can with those we have deep affinities with. goodbye.

….and the cloud answers back with something far more interesting than the Leftist turds who call themselves anarchists.

you, the contemptuous, the bombastic, i suspect were asked to put on a mask at an indoor gathering in the middle of a deadly global pandemic, and were so upset by this you are still carrying around your frustration tantrum like a prized possession.
and, by the manner in which you use "woke," i also suspect you were called racist once, and that, too, is a badge of honor for you.

this whole screed just reads like you all want to be mean to people without consequences.

why does that tactic sound so familiar? to quote yourselves-

"Enough is ENOUGH! The Contemptuous’ CULLING must begin."

"Anarchy is NOT a safer space, but one of inherent and embraced risk and danger, and very much SUPERIOR and more desirable to any other way of being in the world. "

sigh.

wrong, wrong, and wrong again….sigh back atcha!
go ahead and set up the tribunal to usher out your consequences already….beginning to understand why ITS may have targeted an anarchist space.

they engaged in their "dangerous" warfare, like the mentions of being tired of being one type of black sheep over and over again, insights into the fact that capitalism only gaurantees frustration and pandering, etc. To me eco-extremism was always just a reaction against the verbal abuse of anarchists, and how violence could be an invigorating alternative to writing the pure communist manifesto.

right ... lethal violence as a response to "verbal abuse", nothing problematic about that!

and i say this as somebody who isn't above a little violence, just for the record

Being forced under threat of steep fines and/prosecution, and/or being deprived to see/talk to your close relatives doesn't count as being "asked". Also fuck you. Bye!

why are you, an anarchist, afraid of wearing a mask?

Nice trolling but "consenting" to wear a mask due to the oppression of some hierarchies is the literal contrary of being anarchist, and neither it is *consent*. Keep it up, boi!

so, to recap: i guessed correctly about the masking or else why are you saying this now? lol!

outside the business and institutional world were just some sort of social expectation outside of homes, it could of course be confining and moralistic as hell, but where i live nobody wears masks anymore. There was a point where they all just vanished, and i'm like "finally! I don't have to think about this anymore", but i still have all these N95s laying around, because if you're gonna do it at all, probably best just to go all the way to a reasonable extent. You may think i'm a "weak liberal" or something, yet that's just your opinion.

To be having a reserve of quality N95 masks (those made of tissue, not those medical masks of awful plastic fabric that degrade quickly and make you breathe microplastics AND your own damn carbon monoxide instead of Covid) is a good idea. They can also work against most kinds of "tear gas" so useful in protests.

The rationale for wearing masks during Covid was to keep people from spreading it through mainly coughing/sneezing... not to protect against getting it. Many neolib zoomers didn't get that, due to their mental blocks caused by "dem Qanon anti-maskers/anti-vaxx".

So an N95 wouldn't have protected you much if someone shot Covid droplets at your face, as the eyes and facial skin are sensitive to contaminants. Such mask is meant to block particles, germs and microbes from being inhaled.

The masks really come in to play when there's a lot particles that happen to be floating through the air, and if you are in building that is much more likely to happen.

damn. i think you are the contemptuous’ target audience. can you say progressive-anarchy? i can’t, my mouth won’t let me.

and i bet you were the one who told people they were racist for not getting pumped with a virtually untested vaccine put out by government-pharma (or for having dreadlocks or a mohawk), cheered when nurses, janitors, and cafeteria workers lost their jobs for refusing to get jabbed, who thinks the alt. right lurks around every corner, and that anyone who disagrees with your lame politics is somehow a trumper…

thank you contemptuous for saying what a lot of us want to say….keep it up!

"When someone begins to play a permanent role, a serious role, he either wrecks the game or it wrecks him. Consider the unhappy case of the provocateur. The provocateur is the specialist in collective games. He can grasp their techniques but not their dialectic. Maybe he could succeed in steering the group towards offensive action — for provocateurs always push people to attack here and now — if only he wasn’t so involved in his own role and his own mission that he can never understand their need to defend themselves. Sooner or later this incoherence in his attitude towards offensive and defensive action will betray the provocateur, and lead him to his untimely end. And who makes the best provocateur? The play leader who has become the boss."

what is this homogenous anarchism that seems to be on this account both weak and everywhere? why do you feel like you should be able to say whatever you want in whatever space you step into? if this is truly an intervention of some kind you're proposing, what is it an intervention against? it sounds to me like some kind of amorphous and ubiquitous collectivity that you have hammed up into a leviathan and feel threatened by, yet apparently are also obsessed with attaching yourself to. or perhaps you are simply resentful that there are no spaces you can find that you ARE welcome in, in which case i would think the question would be about making them, not ceremoniously getting yourself thrown out of everybody else's house.

you seem mad that a lot of young people use your precious words and texts to support activity you don't find fulfilling, and intent on punishing them for that. i think what you are looking for is license to be whatever you want, wherever you want, however you want, *without social consequence,* and have decided like many other very boring people to go out and provoke those consequences as a way of at best demonstrating they are kind of shallow but more likely just to annoy people for awhile before you get tired of it and go back to convincing yourself that the secret path to revolution is whatever it is about parapolitics that's being gestured at here (which would be the only interesting thing here to elaborate on). i suggest you disband this group and focus on gardening or something if you really can't get any more imaginative than this--whatever critique needs to be made about some of these tendencies should, i think, have a little more substance than making vague threats and saying the bad words.

The person who wrote it, so much obvious arrogance, with confused/false projections.

However, this is not to see that i don't see myself or "the human" in their effort.

yea i agree with some of the stuff in there and share a distaste for a lot of the kinds of spaces and ideological fixations theyre talking about, but this kind of frothing at the mouth edgy cultural warrior stuff is just the other side of that coin to me, and even more annoying to engage with lol. still, i doubt they'll take my suggestion to retire or reconsider so who knows, maybe it'll have some substance. i doubt it!

every. single. anarchist. scene. ever.

across the centuries, always several of these ranters in the room, often not even noticing that they're paraphrasing each other, always utterly convinced they have unique insights...

i'm trying to remember this old story i found reassuring at the time, at least a hundred years ago: the guy is attending a large anarchist meeting, finds several other anarchist acquaintances at the local bar/eatery, calls them all a bunch of pussies who lack sufficient anarchist zeal. they are weak and soft and bourgeoisie, whereas he is the mighty iconoclastic badass, the truest of scotsmen!

at some point during his tirade, he orders his audience, the subjects of his abuse, to buy him lunch. they laugh and pay for his drinks too!

what did we learn from this story? maybe something about high pressure sales tactics but not much, really. boring story if you ask me...

funny in your usual style, i don't agree with this though:

"across the centuries, always several of these ranters in the room, often not even noticing that they're paraphrasing each other, always utterly convinced they have unique insights..."

I don't think the classical anarchists were about "being in the room" nearly as much as it is now. A not significant portion of those anarchists took a lot of things to the streets and committed crimes. Maybe this is an illegalist essay that won't accomplish anything criminal or illegal? To me, the rad left and anarchist politics is more about splitting hairs over nothing at all, plenty of that over the whole history and i think there will be a lot more coming. What are they even arguing about?

fascinating assertions!

illegalism that doesn't do the do isn't illegalism to me at all, just noise. i'm a fairly dainty criminal but a basic minimum standard should still be applied, i think? as for your main point, there were still rooms with people performing their politics in a performative way and that's what this essay represents to me. a performance of the edgy iconoclast.

back in the day, before the socials, you could only perform your politics to whoever was in the room or the street, limited by line of sight haha but now the spectacle has devoured the world, so its much worse. in that sense, you're completely right.

but yeah - BUY ME DINNER, YOU FUKIN POSERS! - that shit is likely as old as the written word itself

When Stirner was at any gathering, he sat quietly and didn't rant, yet he was the bigest badass of his era, soo I'd do some more homework before mouthing off (ranting) all the time.

Your idea of a badass teaches at a girls' school and runs a failed dairy shop, only to die at 50?

A loser, but i think its more pathetic that anon above thinks that stirner should be worshipped and idolized. That's not what he wanted, his concerns were practical: he wanted to make money, challenge what oppressed him, get married, etc.

NooOoo, drop the Kanye Kadashian definition of lOser. He married women half his age, he partied, he was a humble winner but preferred anonymity, I don't worship him Or anything, He woUld UnderStand Me!

...i was not criticizing you, but the anon who criticized you. THEN, i criticized you. If you can't read texts, why bother to talk to anons who bully you? I am not related to the kardashian family in any way. The fact that you think i am means your head is full of spooks, i don't wear million dollar rings and then cry about getting robbed by people pretending to be cops.

I have no issue with stirner marrying women half his age, not a problem. Im not the people on here who think every time someone questions moral stigmas on pedophilia, then they are defending child molestation and exploitation. If you're old enough to want to fuck, the fuck. The age thing is a different matter.

If you want people to idolize stirner, then stop praising articles like the one above. Their head is full of spooks: bats in the belfry. In fact, i would say stirner's position would laugh at this style of arrogance...

And if you are upset about what i said, i am sorry. However, the mods typically don't have a problem with insults, so don't blame me for taking out my rage on every single person on here who says something that i find grotesquely inaccurate. The article above basically just alludes to empty romance fictions and insults a large range of people.

OooOooh Alright thEn, I'm sOrry, but I was referring to the Kardasho crass aesthetics. I Like yOu!

Know some crass kardashian quotes, i honestly find humor in celebrities being crass...every once in a while, i get tempted to vote for trump because i see the suffering he causes for friends of his nature...

Yeah, to me now any democratic government is hilariously representing the seething horde who fall for the con and are worthy of satirical ridicule. The Roman poet Juvenal comes to mind.

NooOoo, his Idea was bAdAss, as an iconoclast, smashing all spooks, religions, authorities. Read some books and drop the gang culture definition of bAdAss, mmkay!?

"*We are leagues apart from the anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The saga of anarchism as narrated by the Left pounds the Beautiful Idea into a lusterless, monochromatic surface “average”, with its sights set too low to resemble anything truly deviant or schismatic. Anarchism has become a hobbyist preoccupation of, and dialectically also a pawn and captive of, the professional-managerial class. As such, in their deepest hearts most anarchists hold many of the same values as their ostensibly forsaken peers (establishment journalists, government bureaucrats, college professors, et al.) and end up identifying with many of the goals of the ruling class, albeit in an indirect and obfuscated way."

I feel the article still might be a prank, because they just, with no justification, romanticizing the classical anarchists like the anarchists they critcize do.

But yeah you can't talk about this article without either laughing or getting mad. It's extremely trumpian.

*just romaticize the classical anarchists like the anarchists they criticize do.

"And while there certainly are a few other kindred spirits out there who look at this world with open eyes, critical mind, and honest heart, and understand all too well what has gone terribly wrong with anarchists, most of them have understandably given up on the anarchist space and have thrown themselves fully into their own unique anarchist lives"

Honest hearts? I think honestly this whole article and responses deserve some sort of flowery plaque in the hallways of anarchy.

reading other anons here, it occurs to me, was this supposed to be posted on april 1st?

then we waited a bit to make it less obvious? hmmm?

i think most of the comments here (not all) are reading badly, and/or responding to tone (admittedly off putting) more than content. even the point about transgenderism is in a list of things that are "accepted as given" which is what the text is taking issue with , not the topic(s) itself.

part of the problem of being a boomer is that tone is off on both sides. bob black is an example (aside from his own fucked up politics) of being someone who can be read as even more of an asshole than he is if you take his tone as being completely serious, when he can also be read as somewhat (not entirely) tongue-in-cheek, gleefully provocative, which is a skill that is denigrated these days when everyone's doing it (some much worse than others).

basically i'm saying that you can't read tone in text, and some people don't know how to use emojis, or use them differently from you.
for some value of "you."

presumably that's all part of the point of the contemptuous, and the question of whether they will be able to hear any critical/helpful feedback is an open one for now.

Bob Black at least had the advantage of actually being humorous.

citations, lol.

Bob might be funny from a great distance, kind of like Hunter Thompson (a too generous comparison), if he ever came to your house or picked you up hitch hiking or whatever, you'd probably lose your sense of humour pretty quick!

to put a fine point on it, Bob *can* be humorous in a biting sort of way, in writing.

in person, he is a drunken sot, with all that might entail. use your imagination, if you don't already know from personal experience.

i'm as close to that as I care to be and you're a very generous rabbit

my own "scene" has its versions of the type: grumpy old eccentrics, trailing a lifetime of "eccentric behaviour" behind them, occasionally very insightful but mostly quite toxic to be around, sounds like you already know!

lumpy, not sure about generous... Bob, for all his faults, is not my enemy.

can I convince you to be more sure? may I assure you? you are a very generous rabbit.

also, dig this notion of how everyone who is not your enemy must have some positive qualities worth emphasizing?
truly, your heart must be larger and less black than mine

"Humorless in your

superficial seriousness,

you shall never escape

the barbs of my contempt

and my earnest and poetic

playfulness."
I have lived my whole life as the free thinking anarch individualist poet, and YOU my dear friend aRe AwsOme!

Do not go meakly into the herd,
For one day not to far away,
In the bourgeois clamor we shall be heard,
Calmly ranting out the truths,
That course inside our veins,
Whilst amongst the horde of uncouth,
They seeth inside their ressentimental brains
Our unblemished spirit which we never lose,
Shall shine on in anarch heaven which we choose.

"Do not go meakly into the herd,"
Omg, you are up there with Shakespeare, the immortal bard, I will make this my motto, I will wallow in my contemptuosity, thankyou!

Much of this piece is on target: the U.S. anarchist subculture is a self-licking ice cream cone. It doesn't mean anything to anybody who doesn't have an intense personal state in calling themselves an anarchist.

ok, thanks for expanding on that, but i don’t like pop culture slang and abbreviated meanings, why can’t people just explain their perspectives rather than relying on place-holding trending phrases.

because those people are weak, my fellow trend-destroyer. they cannot help but opt for descriptors such as "cringe" or "based" in their memeified stupor, instead of the intellectually superior "vacuous" or "schismatic". with contemptible laughter, we shall watch watch the herd suffer the ills of the internet culture they have been sucking from the teet of the Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg elite.

thank you!

fuck trends
fuck social media'fuck it all
live your life in real-time

im only here 'cause a friend said i should check out some anarchists who posted a dope article.

it was!

But commenting is liiiife!

Sorry but this can't be avoided, even if this ain't an acceptable, healthy form of communication. I'm posting this shit and it is now part of your LIFE and you can't unread it, MUUUUUHHAHAAHAHAHA!

...hey! my life is already sad enough with your flexing on me like this!

*runs out of the room crying and waving noodle arms*

yes, agreed, thank you, not political or right wing in anyway! but most of the responses before this one were definitely political and left-wing. who’s jack dorsey?

retire? no way, keep going, you are sorely needed, and hilariously honest.

i don’t think they are “romanticizing the classical anarchists”, just their beautiful idea. and i don’t think its a prank. if so, that’s elaborate. how is it “trumpian”? what a lame way to describe something.

Just refer to everything we don't like as "moralistic and wrong", basically? Thats all im getting out of all the substance-free endorsements of the article.

"Whose jack dorsey?"

Wow, im not gonna do your work for, even if you aren't just being silly. No thank you.

oh, i did the work, twitter starter? never been there, its not real. we all don’t follow this culture like you. soooooooooo soooooo soooooory. some of us are in the bush most of our lives…living, loving, and laughing (for real, not just on a walled-sign or online) and pop in occasionally to check on “the anarchist space”. maybe i should try to glue myself to the fucked up reality a little more to please you. let me guess, you play video games? fuck off. if things are moralistic, they should be called out as such. i’m tired of these silly games with half-wits who want most of this world, just tweeked a little bit to make it more equitable and just.

to quote my dear 2pac
“fuck all y’all!”

it is obvious that most people here do not engage with the text, which has a lot to say and is challenging, but instead, chose to react to its existence and perform their politics and identities. i understand the contemptuous’ issues with the anarchist space in north america, and while it is harshly presented, find it mostly spot on. anarchists have become the militants of the left, and no longer agents of chaos, freedom, life, and anarchy…that is sad, pathetic, and dangerous.

that the essay is probably better than 90% of the content on here: time for me to engage in "loving praise": the good points of the article are summed up here:

"What has become of the Beautiful Idea? It is a laughingstock: it is the ideal of the twenty-something in search of adventure with training wheels, a chance to be 'wild and free' but never ever impolitic, a chance to have loveless sex in a tent at a 'Temporary Autonomous Zone' [i.e., telegenic protest] with a stoned stranger (or any paralleling uncritical arrested development of a thirty-something, forty-something, etc.) without endangering one's prospects for getting a Master's Degree in Social Work a few years down the line. The real challenge of the contemporary anarchist is to feel they are totally in rebellion against the existent while simultaneously completely welcome at the next National Public Radio-sponsored wine tasting."

N.P.R. is garbage. Listening to it sounds like you going to the dentist, recycled ideas are referred to as nuanced insights...but you know the anarchists they are referring to (getting the master's degree in social work) are listening to it while they wake up in the morning and make breakfast. Is there anything wrong with that? No, but U.S. anarchism is basically just the more serious and hardline version of those progressive politics.

The more the news talks about transgenderism, the less interesting it becomes, and then cannot be distinguished from trans-humanism, which I'm convinced has been going on since the 1950's. Only if trans-humanism were steam punk, solar punk, PKD novels, and strange identitarian adventures like afro-futurism....However, that's not what transhumanism is: it's more of the delusional scientist's Star Trek fantasies: "Maybe one day there will be no disease, and the under privileged people will all get their rabies shots because they will know i'm right!" Right. Outside of science fiction, trans-humanism will continue to irritate, scold, and harrass me wherever i go.

However, the humorless tone of the essay (about how serious this cultural warfare actually is) reveals that they are just becoming the left of the left of the left (anarchism being the left of the left).

The implication that we should not want to risk the screaming match, totalitarian group think, and the weak nod to left and progressive ideas that we do agree with, means that we only have recourse to ignoring things we hate passoinately, and continuing to feel like "we don't want to speak out of turn". A lot of anarchists, including me, got bullied online for speaking out against the anti-COVID measures of the state, and also for not wanting to take it seriously. Luckily for me though, I have seen lots of critique of the way that the anarchist majority responded to The Pandemic™

Obviously north american anarchist politics, the kind that bows its head to general assumptions among the left and universities, continues to oblige itself to respect the anti-fa street politics, framing racism as if it were the same in the 1950s and earlier. Unfortunately, edgier publishers like LBC and Warzone Distro continue to feel like they need to have respect amongst their peers. Saying that anarchism is a failure exclusively because of the left or "acceptance of fascist ideas in anarchist culture" (the latter one is just a delusion because far-right politics are NOT socially acceptable in anarchist spaces) glosses over a lot of the information you have available to you. If you want to play this game, there is a lot of blame to go around! As for me, i would to see more criticisms of the boilerplate gated community anarchism of Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and other platforms. We'll see how long it takes for more anarchists to start deleting accounts and engage in activities like gardening, carpentry, auto-repairs, just chilling the FUCK out, and even electronic hobbies like music and programming.

You aren’t there yet though and you have forgotten the constructive use of a hammer as well. There are some really well taken points here. I wish you had spent more time and effort expounding them thoroughly. The obsession with combating other anarchists seems to have become all-consuming even though your own text includes plenty of materials for explaining why that’s a waste of time. I seriously think there are promising lines of criticism here but it reads like an 00s insurrectionist zine with a dash of internet-poisoned “trutherism”, more than you’d like to admit cribbing from the dirtbag left, and a whiff of ITS.

I’m interested not just that you mentioned COVID and “transgenderism” but that you didn’t mention Ukraine or Epstein in that list

Jeez how many sockpuppets pseudonyms can one extroverted egoist use in one comment section. It's sOoooooo cringe. Daddy Stirner would be ashamed.

I agree with the sentiment completely:
“And while there certainly are a few other kindred spirits out there who look at this world with open eyes, critical mind, and honest heart, and understand all too well what has gone terribly wrong with anarchists, most of them have understandably given up on the anarchist space and have thrown themselves fully into their own unique anarchist lives, which is more than understandable, its what authentic anarchists do, The Contemptuous have chosen to make one last stand in the anarchist world, from the edge, and spewing into the vacuous space of the anarchist scene. Maybe its our stubbornness, maybe residual remnants of withered romanticism, maybe we just can’t help our joyously deviant selves, maybe its just for shits and giggles, or just maybe in five, ten, twenty, a hundred years from now when the world and its deranged participants play out their sick and deadening game, someone may remember that there actually were a few authentic anarchists out there who fought against it, not just an annoying swarm of leftist drones wearing black and helping it along.”

And it is why I want more from The Contemptuous.

please.

"The Contemptuous" only exist on the internet, brah. They never do anything in the anarchist space, or outside of the anarchist space for that matter.

Nice sock, btw. Good PR! ;-)

"We represent a discontinuity in the overriding progressive narrative and will spit our venomous and unyielding critique into your vile and vacuous cyber-spaces and let others pick it to bones, and from there, deeper critique may actually flourish, authentic affinities [read: not solidarity] may develop, lines may be drawn, and perhaps (relevant) actions will follow."

We are going to snark in "cyber-spaces" to maybe nudge "deeper critique" and maybe people who leave the house (not us) will do some stuff!
YOu hAVe bEen wArnED!!!
OooOooooo yeEeah!

Article was a possible prank, what a bunch of fucking hot air. I see that a lot of posters (probably just 1, 2, or 3 in reality) have turned this into a matter of "the free" vs. "the left" like the article intended, but that is not the reality of scenester politics. The article isn't all bad, but it is a trumpian train wreck that reads like internet trolling.

And yes, the cyber spaces of anarchism are pretty contemptible and terrible, but just because their mixing their ranting with some truth doesn't make their position any better than your average congress person's position. Policians mix truth with lies, i dont need to respect any of the people who are behind this project: they are the contemptible and the contemptuous.

I guess anarchists didn't get enough of Trump over the last decade that they need to popularize and circulate the term "trumpian".

hmmmm, still no real discussion of the actual critiques in the piece.....imagine that...

maybe becasue most people here agree with them. the parts that are controversial have been spoken to, so... maybe you need to go back and read them again

it seems like most of the posts here have made the contemptuous’s point for them, anarchism has become leftism. anarchy is NOT leftism, activism, social work, being inclusive, etc. it is about being free, on one’s own terms in relationship with those they care about, something most self-described anarchists forgot a long time ago.

"unh unh"/"yeah hunh" back and forths are boring af. if you disagree with how someone is characterizing the original post or a comment, then say why. there are sufficient posts saying "the contemptuous sound old," and there are sufficient ones saying "you're proving the contemptuous are right."

assertions are empty. make an argument. be specific. everyone knows how to repeat themselves to death, few are convinced by that.

I doubt you're going to ... have much of an answer but aside from just saying "anarchism isn't leftism" (cuz like, historically, that's uhm... 80 to 90% wrong?) i was wondering if you care to support that statement in any way?

this website is famously home to the folks who make these kinds of arguments about like, an ancient anarchy that always existed everywhere in a general anti-authoritarian sense, or an anarchy that is post left? you know, like a real argument? you got one of those?

cuz i'm sympathetic! i find most of the contemporary left to be useless and irritating too!

this is what i don't get - if anarchy

" is about being free, on one’s own terms in relationship with those they care about,"

why does it seem to matter so much to you what others do if they think they are doing exactly this?

maybe you think they suffer delusions, are subject to false consciousness, or the like. (i have a hard time being so presumptuous about the interior states of others.)

maybe you are in direct conflict with these others, in which case, it would be what you are in conflict about/over, not their self conception, that is at issue.

I think the problem with anarchists being part of the Left (and i didn't write the piece so i have no reason or responsibility to do anything but comment on what was written and comments that follow, not give some long argument in this particular context, sorry if that is "boring af"), is that they are constantly lending support to the Left and its obviously authoritarian goals. I would say the same to the small number of national anarchists and anarcho-capitalists in relation to the Right, but there are far less of them, and so many anarcho-leftists. Why do so many anarchists continue to follow the Left's agenda? Every time there is a headlining cause on the Left, anarchists soon follow with virtually the same rhetoric, just more aggressively. This is outrageous. Or, every time there is a headlining cause on the Right, anarchist push back against it. This is politics! Stay out of their political paradigm and their cultural wars. Fight it all in its totality, and the specifics from that perspective, or not at all, otherwise you are endorsing a side, either progress or regress, which are both problematic as anarchists. But that won't happen, because most anarchists are forever tethered to the Left and marxism, whether they understand this or not. I suspect this is what frustrates the Contemptuous, as it should all anarchists. This is "why i matters so much what others do", because they are continually contributing to the politic, agendas, and social manipulation of this cultural conflict, rather than having an anarchistic conflictual relationship with the totality in an apolitical way. The Contemptuous provide many examples of this unfortunate dynamic, and many people's comments here reflect their situation within it.

Nothing wrong with many (or most) of the critical positions of leftists, but they always faltet when they believe they are morally obligated to fix those problems. The left over the course of its whole history has remained anarchronistic and overly verbose in terms of its dialectic with "the right". Sometimes its also really nice when people aren't talking, people can often come to their own conclusions about what they screwed up in their thought process.

add "post-" to "leftists" here and you've got as much as i really have to say about this piece

"Nothing wrong with many (or most) of the critical positions of [post]leftists, but they always falte[r] when they believe they are morally obligated to fix those problems. The [post]left over the course of its whole history has remained anarchronistic and overly verbose in terms of its dialectic with 'the [left.]' Sometimes [I]t[']s also really nice when people aren't talking, people can often come to their own conclusions about what they screwed up in their thought process[¿es?]."

The trick is brah not to take things toOo seriously, lighten up, like the mods should do, sigh

"I think the problem with anarchists being part of the Left"

firstly, i said nothing about anarchists being or not being part of the left. my point was this: if one's definition of anarchy is "it is about being free, on one’s own terms in relationship with those they care about," then if someone thinks they are free on their own terms and in relationship with those they care about, nothing at all is being said about the left, the state, hierarchy, mutual aid etc.

secondly, getting caught up in electoral politics is detrimental to anarchists, for sure. on the other hand, if the state passes legislation to make my existence difficult or impossible i, at the very least, want to know about that and also, most likely, will want to do something about that. the idea that we need never pay any attention to the world around us is shortsighted at best, suicidal at worst.

i was responding to why this article seems important as a critique of what anarchists are typically engaged in, and yes, pay attention, even intervene, but not as political tools, as many anarchists have. never said don't pay attention, in fact, we need to critically. for instance, the technological all-consuming nightmare is essential to examine, critique, and fight against, yet most anarchists avoid this, and instead focus on political problems (and i'm not referring to electoral politics).

" the idea that we need never pay any attention to the world around us is shortsighted at best, suicidal at worst."

We are "the world", what we have no control over still comes into play as a factor when we least expect it.

No u

I’m the only real anarchist. Everyone who is not me is a poser. If you’re reading this you’re a poser. Oops I accidentally read this as I was typing it, I guess I’m a poser too.

Agh!

"In the end, anarchists act as a strange vanguard for (((globalism and transhumanism,))) which seem to be precisely the major goals of the (((real powers))) of our time. "

Like maybe there's a reason a lot of us prefer structuralist critiques of power rather than easy stories about the shadowy cabals of elite globalist bankers, ya know?

Anyway, apart from this being mostly reactionary drivel, a big section of it is also rendered almost unreadable by your eternal war on paragraph breaks.

Wondering why the comment sections have been closed for The Contemptuous Communiques #2 and #4?

sections when they thing "it has been discussed enough", which is inherently authoritarian...or at least that's my guess of what has been going on.

LOL, and it's really funny that somebody so homophobic and sexually repressed (not you, but that person who keeps calling people faggots) is still here...maybe they're a dom, and need to start out with the degradation to a boner...

Boner.

I heard someone reference this recently, so I checked it out.

WOW! LOVE IT!

How can I get the rest of them?

Is there a website?

It's been a while. When are they coming back?

Each day that goes buy, the anarchist scene needs their kind of medicine more and more.

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