TOTW: Let's Get Organized!

Someone once told me that I should only begin projects I can complete by myself.

Organizing is the antithesis of such advice. The preferred method of bringing ideas to life for the organizer is a church-like mass.

The focus becomes the abacus. The task itself is secondary, and as a result leaves a vacancy easily filled by fantasy. The greater the fantasy, the more powerless the individual, and the more reliant on the organizer they become.

If you were to organize your thoughts into objectives you alone could achieve your activities may begin to resemble ordinary life under capitalism.

Without the fantasies would you still be doing anarchism? Without the bravado of clandestine plans would you still be an anarchist? Is it necessary for anarchy that we boast ideas of grandeur to a mass of co-conspirators?

How can anarchists celebrate a life built on their individual capabilities alone, even if that means never experiencing insurrection?

There are 103 Comments

Fantasies can be completely disconnected from any practice. Which is the issue I see in a lot of this continental philosophy fixation, and also the fixation on projected imaginary anarchy, such as what they do in anarchist theater projects, anarchist fiction, and simply collective living room discussions about "how would it be after the collapse", or "what would be our dream anarchist world".

But fantasies can also be something something entirely... something that is on the contrary extraordinarily productive and creative. Take Christianity for instance. No matter how you disagree with the Church and the Jesus freaks, they have achieved incredible things since the 5th century. Monasteries have created the public schools, pushed for literacy and have evolved into the first town-factories. Also compare the Virginia colony to Portsmouth, for instance. The first one, while being a lucrative business, was a unstable, disorganized, violent project which relied fundamentally on slavery and mass-murder of natives. The latter -while also having its hands stained with native blood, being run by religious fanatics and having imported witch hunts to NA- was known for having been a frugal community with strong morals and cohesion, and was based on food farming and primitive industry which quickly ended up developing diversified markets that other colonies relied upon. The Christians, when a well-structured community, were undefeatable and could overcome anything. They were ant colonies. In the lower Alps they created stone towns right off mountain slopes, and they built some of the richest architectural wonders just to be filled with void.

That was all due to a kind of fantasy which, instead of discarding or escaping the reality of practices and real-life constraints, transcended and consecrated those towards the spiritual realm. The religious belief system gave almost every act of the daily life a spiritual meaning connected to a greater design. You weren't just gardening for feeding, and you just did't have babies because you felt like it; it a central part of a lifestyle commanded by the Lord himself. You were beating your children to chastize the impure demonic infuences. It was a godly fucking mandate, and it gave you a purpose, that shown you where's the north and south, no matter how it was delusional. A whole society, which I'd call the pre-oil social order, had grown out of this, and it was an unstoppable machine. The British Empire -beyond question the most powerful empire at the times- tried to thwart and control it, and they failed. Protestant fanaticism (a.k.a. puritanism) was just too damn powerful, and it allowed for limitless self-sustained communities.

So the problem ain't with fantasies, but their quality, and how they connect with our lives. Lecturing the "masses" for directing their actions is something that *works*. It did work and nobody here can deny it. Castro's sermons for a while were driving millions of Left-leaning proles worldwide. There was also a time, not long ago, when ancom fantasies were driving a lot of people... yet they lack connection with the daily constraints. You wanna fight the Capitalists? Cool, then what about your landlord? Or how about going to eat with Comrades after a protest at a diner that's capitalizing on gentrification? More importantly... what practices can you sanctify as truly revolutionary in FnBs and picketing and even (more recently) filling potholes?

The closest we've seen coming from the Left is with the green religion, of people being sermoned by local green preachers on how they can wash their asses, wash their clothes, build tiny houses (lol) for the Planet. But the green religion doesn't have welfare programs for all those who work double time for the planet, they only have the politician's promise of a cleaner, greener future with a "stable" climate.

There is a specific purpose in every religious practice, with its set of goals and morals which drive organizing, where organizing is the product of a discipline necessary to reach those ideals. But in the case of liberals and some aspects of radicals, it's just plainly *lacking*. There's either (1) this huge void, opened between you and the perceived ideal (Revolution, or whatever), or it is instead at the outer reaches of a set of practices, where the ideal should be hanging (practices/rituals leading to ???... as seen in Occupy). On one hand there is the blurry goal of "anti-austerity", but where is your plan to bring about social equity, beyond supporting a dumb party that's never gonna be elected?

Ritualism has been too long studied outside of its specific purposes for the people who practiced it. Feyerabend has tried to de-compartmentalize it, by presenting ritualism and mythology as a system of production of living conditions, even a form of science of the living.

So all this to say... I think the question is which fantasies that exist, or those we can create, that can show a path to people for organizing themselves. The problem lies partly in the poverty and detachment of our fantasies from the real world, and how they can serve the purpose of free-living.

Fantasies are illusions which when acted upon become fetishes, or reified desires. I'm not going to intellectualize this, but true desires are only emotive and not material physical objects.

So this leads us to the reason for organization, is it to quantify popular material objects of desire or to liberate the expressions of desire and reward emotional investments?

Organization's about the mutual conflation of thoughts-deeds within non-spatial synaptic continuums, obviously!

Fantasies become fetish because they remain within the realm of spectacular "consumption". A fetish is a ritual around a commodity or representation.

intellectualize this, or inn other words think it through

the idea that continental philosophy is something fantastical. that's sort of a common misconception but its still bound, like anything called philosophy with a capital p, to a (hopefully) high standard of rigor, and it does tend relate to the reallyactually real world, actually. it should go without saying that it doesn't always hold to this standard, but the shit worth reading - and the shit people are actually reading - more or less tends to be. I think its an all to common practice though - not especially in anarchist circles, but anywhere people are engaging with this stuff - to sort of treat that whole tradition is if its purpose is not to be explanatory but to just sort of blow the reader's mind, which just sort of perpetuates the sort of bad, incoherent, thinking habits that are associated with it and has people sitting in rooms just repeating the word rhizome back and forth to each other for eternity, never really understanding whether what they're saying means anything.

also, idk if im in love with the idea of instrumentalized fantasies, but that's a story for another day (and whether i'm against it or not may not mean much)

insurrection doesn't really need to be organized or an organized group. I think you are confusing insurrection with something else.

well martin, it does go very poorly for the solitary, disorganized insurrectos tho! Like, face palmy bad. Like, shoulda just stuck with heroin because it was more fulfilling bad.

Insurrection ia another dimension than organizing. They often overlap but don't have to. Disorganized action can be equally interesting for hos unpredictable and random it can be.

I think you don't understand what you're talking about. Insurrections require massive amounts of organization - mostly informal, occasionally formal, all carried along by spontaneity too. Even something that looked wild from a distance - I'll say Athens in 2008, because I can talk about that without much distance - reflected intense, organized bonds, networks, and understandings.

meme

Wow, if only they had Facebook back in the Pleistocene, then we could have skipped the whole Enlightenment and Cold War. The synaptic continuums get warped just pondering upon this!

So what you're saying is that Facebook is the medium for organizing par excellence, and that the present explosion in social media communication is producing one of the most significant transfer of social power to the people in recent history?

Power to the People. Comrades will unite under our Global Community TM with the help of the Algorithm and its loyal ID pol webbots, from the RadLeft to the Alt Right, including NA anarchism in all the flag colors but just one, united, proprietary language. Unilimited planes of immanence... brought to you by the Algorithm's millenial philosophers.

over MySpace with a cleaner more usable interface conducive to political organizing. I remember when my family members started switching over at first I thought it was generic and only for squares but once I switched it was goodbye MySpace! Of course I realize that it's a privacy bugbear but that's the fault of the developers not the interface.

In the future, privacy will only be yours within the bubble of your 10hr sleep and sex, and drugs schedule. Outside of that, your whole being will be transparent. You can escape this by becoming a Stirnerian wildman of the forest.

"Of course I realize that it's a privacy bugbear but that's the fault of the developers not the interface."

uh, no, it is the fault of the users. period.

What anarchists take up the offer of BIG in order to collaborate, organise etc?

Not sure if you're trolling but BIG could theoretically answer an old question: after say, 5 or 10 years of BIG being implemented in the US, would we see a surge of anarchist activity because more poor kids can at least pay for their shitty housing and food without having to work 6 or 7 days a week?

In short, was/is the anarchist movement partly a luxury afforded by the spare time and welfare state of an earlier stage of capitalism? If so, then BIG could dramatically increase the numbers of people able to participate. Food for thought.

Thing is... absurd positions like these could totally be the bottom-line result of years of liberal meddling into "anarchism", to a point that the liberal trustafarians involved, who're after all introduced to anarchism through the usual libleft bookfair formula, i.e. Chomsky, the Bread Book, Graeber and the likes, simply have zero grasp of a radical critique whatsoever, so they see Elon Musk as a potential ally in their struggle for a global social-democracy 2.0.

...then 15 years later you get a neofascist technocracy, through a global superstate. Just like in the '30s, historically backed by a significant number of liberal progressives pushing for eugenics back in the '20s.

… wtf are you talking about? This isn't an ideological position, it's a perhaps slightly counter-intuitive, economic reality.

when the workers were the hoped for revolutionary subject people are more likely to strike if they get paid and if there is some dual power infrastructure to meet their needs. I think capital doesn't want much organization or spare change floating around the lower strata of society for the simple fact that poor, lonely, isolated, desperate people are easier to govern.

Do you really think that billionaire oligarchs like Zuckerberg, Besos and even Musk will give away some of their wealth to provide basic income to the very people that got them rich through exploitation? Will Russian, Indian and Chinese oligarchs be also equally kind enough for this?

If powerful governments like the EU and the US don't have the balls to even make them pay their taxes, then what organization will convince them to pay a Corbyn Tax?

Do you really believe that profiteers of military-industrial complex will accept major cuts to fund it as well? You're talking about, like, DARPA and General Dynamics being cut by the U.S. government, as the governments of other superpowers equally do the same with their militaries R&Ds?

Do you believe that the Christ will come back soon and be recognized as both Jesus, the Mahdi and the Judaic Messiah and give good enough arguments for all of these people to finally be nice and share their wealth with the planet?

Other question... are you dense?

Rather than calling people stupid, perhaps you can direct your attention to the considerable historical precedent for what we're talking about.

The rich are at full drunk power boner right now again, sowing the seeds of angry uprisings as is already happening in France. The pendulum is starting to swing again, some of us are paying more attention than you

"sowing the seeds of angry uprisings as is already happening in France."

Hahahaha! You meant probably "funding" these? One of the things the Mueller investigation has shown is how oligarchs can now pay themselves social movements and uprisings, because they got the resources and money for it. Anton Vaino was hired in early 2016, btw. He's the inventor of the "nooscope". Ever heard of the "nooscope"? It's basically the system that Cambridge Analytica was paid to develop, by Russian oligarchs 'til their games got exposed. Russian oligarchs under Kremlin orders.

So you're saying you have some tinfoil hat theory about a destabilization campaign in France?

Get in line with the rest of the internet hucksters I don't give 2 shits about.

No, obviously. But the fact that its existence was confirmed by U.S. and British authorities makes it real to you, while any further background speculation has to be "conspiracy theories" due to not being backed by the government.

In a nutshell, you're an authoritarian sheep who denigrates anything that doesn't originate from Daddy State. Good night.

Haha I'm just taking Occam's razor to your theory, jackass. Oligarchs can buy AstroTurf campaigns to destabilize countries sometimes, other times, the oligarchs in charge lose touch with reality and push their bullshit too far, France is currently experiencing the latter IMO

but it does seem like a contradiction for the treasury to write checks for nothing unless you look at the economics. A UBI would eliminate the need for the administrative bureaucracy associated with social security and related programs like SNAP since everyone would get a check but it does go against the grain of neo liberal ideology. If someone with clout could do the math, show your work and prove it in theory they might start listening, look how socialism has moved back into the overton window in recent history, the time may be upon us.

is because we're in a state of over production and the lower strata can't afford to buy the commodities. That's why we've been in a state of financialisation for decades because all the money is at the top with nowhere else to invest it. In order to keep the game going they have to either destroy capital or invest it somewhere and yellow socialism might be a way for THEM to reup the social contract and make themselves look good in the process and it might be cheaper than war.

It's cool that you're just hearing about this but ... It's already a thing in several places in the world. It's also coming under attack from the reactionaries, even as the technocrats wring their hands about automation. They've done pilot projects though, look it up.

Basically the suicidally dumb slave masters and the other slavers with half a brain are publicly fighting over this right now, on an international scale.

That's what libertarians and anarchists should be affecting towards. The problem with BIG is that it's a one monopoly to rule them all problem and there is ALWAYS blowback comes form that. The big things that needs to be done is to chip away at the 5 monopolies. Not quite revolution but better then reform in that we are talking about fiat law elimination.

Welfare while it satiates is a carpet waiting to be pulled from under those who are used to it. In terms of greater strategy anarchists and libertarians might look up the story of Kavadh I and Mazdak in Persia. The equivalent to that would be a US president or other major Leviathan head of state being sympathetic to libertarian anarchist ideas extending the leash and cage of Leviathan and making things more preferable and free.

Another idea would be to put a Mutualist Federational spin on the Medici renaissance model. Instead of a wealth fused family sugaring around wealth you would have a federated territory and org that diffused wealth in a potlachian sort of way. It could fund alternative science and other ways of being. Mutualism as a strategy is still better then anything syndicalism or agorism has to offer.

BIG is something most people could get their heads around and who knows from there, where their heads will wonder to? BIG could be a start, it depends how it is introduced and negotiated, discussed and debated...that's where anarchists could be very informative. Coming out with technical terms and academic waffle is not about creating change;it's more about that person's need. Yes, there are problems with BIG and there could be ways out using BIG too. Regarding monopolies, whoever has the biggest (and most) guns gets to monopolise (if they wish) whether it is BIG or BAG...whatever is 'given' may be taken away! So Aragorn!, how about an episode of Anarchy Bang on Basic Income Guarantee?

It's based on a clear and concrete set of goals that have a core anarchist libertarian economic structure in regards to monopoly abolition or at least elimination. You have an inevitableist take on monopoly which I don't share and which all anarchist structured thought would disagree with. In fact concrete examples of archaic stateless existence suggests that humans actually controlled against fused power growth. Demonopolization via BAG is simply applying that message to a modern state fiat context.

but it's not really an anarchist thing at all, there's not much to say about it. Just a reality that a lot of anarchists used to get their expenses down to almost nothing and limp along welfare, or just be poor as fuck, depending on how you look at it.

There's not that much fertile ground for discussion here, imo. Only interesting part is that anarchist movements in europe and north america might be more closely tied to the "luxury" of the welfare state than we'd like to admit. If true, it certainly fits with the welfare state as a counter-insurgency measure, or an open bribe from the rich not to revolt.

the street etc. "but it's not really an anarchist thing at all..' lots of stuff 'anarchists' do isn't anarchist though, right? If BIG enables people to organise and collaborate by having time to actually think and not to worry all the time about benefit cuts etc, then maybe there will be some energy? So many people on this site just fuckin' moan. Boo hoo..it's not really anarchist...for fuck's sake!

And BAG is better for that then BIG which, again, sets up the carpet under the feet problem particularly when you have a contraction in resources where sacrificed have to be made which was the case in the 1970s with energy depletion and peak oil.

I've already been thru this with the collapse of demand for the skilled end of my trade. Had I finished what I started earlier, I would need VERY little $$, and would not need to live in my truck now for 5 years, renting out my condo/sucking blood. In 6 or 7 years I'll take Social Security (at age 68 or 69) while continuing to work. I can't count on this either - when Great Depression 2.0 really bites, i.e. the $$$-printing stops "working".

"Reverting to savagery" is severely PRACTICAL, as well as providing a higher quality of life. I also may be living longer than I planned. A long-term effect of all the "heavy LSD use" in my 20's - I am reverse-aging: abnormally fast healing from shoulder surgery, abnormally strong immune system for my age, abnormally slow atrophy of my back for my age when not physically working.

Wow, nice to hear that heavy LSD use is the fountain of youth, though, it didn't seem too work for Tim Leary, maybe its the manual labour you also did. What we can learn from this, ---- Meditating all day in the lotus position is just another desk job!

Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD, lived to 102. Stanislav Grof, an illustrious "acidhead" psychiatrist, was giving 2 hour lectures (excessively long in my opinion) at age 102, and lived to 104. Timothy Leary did LSD 370 times. There is such a thing as too many times. Even though God has generously provided psilocybin free of charge in the backwoods.

As an entire spiritual path, IS a desk job. It is also inefficient, and we don't have all the time in the world.
"Savagery" is an entire, integrated way of life.

It doesn't sound like a sold concept to me. There are many things that can mean or be interpreted as "savagery". Just telling some annoying people that I don't care about their bullshit can be savagery...

A term ignorant, enslaved, damaged humans use for hunter-gatherer-permaculturist (i.e. normal) humans.
Neo-"savagery" will be practical, attained in stages, and will not look exactly like the original version.

BadKitty is infamously a bit too stubborn to give up on that unfortunate fixation with that word.

I can attain those highs naturally without any chemical catalyst, so it looks like I'll be around for a while, unless I walk infront of a bus, wait, I'll leap over it right?

i have done acid probably 300-350 times in my life. guess i can plan to live forever, eh?

jeez, i hope panther is joking with that shit. the road to death is paved with the miracle cures of the gullible.

not that i think anything is impossible. after all, i know at least a dozen people over the age of 90 that have smoked tobacco most of their lives; so clearly tobacco is the magic elixir of longevity.

300 times, it is unlikely you were using it appropriately. Which may be why you compare it with a lifetime of smoking cigarettes.

I found 50 trips a nice rounded off average, the last few 6 months apart, now, I have found emotional equilibrium.

What's your real trick, Repanther... drinking young people's blood? I'd very much like to look at blood samples of yours just to potentially see what's going on at cellular level,especially with the mitochondria, since reverse-aging is scientifically impossible, and still one of the areas of medical research that's the most looked after by billionaires.

I suppose it's something you're consuming on a regular basis? Let us know and don't be an old bitch... humanity can benefit from it!

Of "physical vs. Metaphysical" is a delusion. "Metaphysical" is just living physical reality at a level that science doesn't understand (tho quantum physics seems to be getting a clue).

Is that all life emanates from God.
Billionaires are inherently WAY too spiritually blind to receive what I have been given. And all their $$$$$ can't buy it.

Well I guess that hippie con man Aubrey DeGrey has found a way to profit off billionaires spiritual poverty...

Easy now, I agree with everything you're saying, my point was I don't think it's a big enough topic to full an hours worth of podcast about.

You and I just summarized it in a few paragraphs and it's all classic class war stuff. Barrels of ink have already been spilled.

^reply to 10:21

Not ziggy. Nobody gives a shit about your little pet theories ziggles and convincing us about them wouldn't change anything.

You mean like mainline 19th century anarchist proposals that do not involve the construction of a welfare state which comes at the expense of anarchism when it is in decline as was the case in the 20th century.

Sure, it's my pet theory to remind anarchists what their preferential interests are relative to political economy.

Damn y'all bogus, callin' this individual "ziggles" and "ziggy" lol wtf.

Spend some time observing Ziggles McGee and see if you want to honour him with his honourific. He's worked hard to earn his fanbase.

Are you like, expecting capitalists to grow an heart and saved the homeless, or just blaming anarchists for the BIG program for not coming to reality? Just go ahead and support Corbyn if you'd like... no anarchist is holding you from it. But we already, even form a mainstream politics perspective, how supporting Labor has paid off in the past, no?

you're so dumb or first level it's laughable...

You seem to be wanting anarchists to support your BIG political reform.. which ain't even on the table of any predominant party afaik, but are blaming anarchists for their lack of electoral support? Christ.

Anarchists have been opening and maintaining squats, providing aid in ecological disasters, serving free vegan food, etc. Many anarchists are very able people with decent-to-awesome social skills (that doesn't include me!) and got the wits to beat any political opponent. But instead of trying to run for office they do this kinda stuff why? Why?

Because they're fucking anarchists, fuckface!

That means they don't deal with State politics in the first place, and even less rely on State politics for improving other people's conditions. If you think they're wrong, well all ya got left to do is pretty easy... here's a more appropriate site for ya, that's got absolutely nothing to do with anarchy or anarchists:

https://www.dsausa.org/

For real tho, fuck the state. Why the fuck is this even still a debate?

Nick Land's the biggest dark luminary of the Alt-Right and other neonazis, you fool. Or will it be "LeFool"?

I know you reactionary Rightards are related to WZ distro... trying to recycle the "insurrecto" identity to the max with those wordpress.com sites, and also have been parasiting this site just like your crowd of stinky basement dwellers parasite any fucking site that attracts even a minimum of visitors. Good luck on your war on the Left, and your new bogeyman the appelistas... chasing ghosts and then stalking individual people as you've been always doing. You are useful idiots of the regime.

A lot of figures that I respect(like Fendersen and DuPont for example) would quote and name drop him here and there. To say that Land represents the Alt-Right seems a fairly crude reading and analysis of him. Some of the reading in that blog site does look interesting at least from a post-left perspective.

Don't be an intellectually incontinent leftist.

Dude, Land is a self-problaimed neo-reactionary and dark enlightment ideologue, and Alt Right support of him is all over the net. There's also some very good evidence in his writings that he's connected to the O9A.

Ah, yes... I know about the O9A too. If you think that all dem "antifa" are that retarded as to *not* know about those creeps, then you're the retard.

So if it ventured into the "red danger zone", this means it ain't paranoid hysteria, amirite?

By the time you're LARPing as a devil-worshipping nazi cartoon from a bad horror movie, you're officially irrelevant.

I AM NOONS, QUEEN OF THE NORSE FATES, BEWARE THE HOMELESS TOOTHLESS HAG YOU ENCOUNTER OUTSIDE THE SUPERMARKET WHERE YOU PURCHASE YOUR INSTANT LATTE POUCHES, TONIGHT EEEHEEEHEEEHEEEHEEEEEEE!!

This is such a weird argument. It's more and more common to attack someone based on their perceived political alignment or some labyrinthine map of associations rather than their words or ideas. Maybe you could convince me - I don't know who the fuck this dude is - but 7 degrees of Mussolini is not an argument. I have noticed that both fascists and antifa give a lot of undue attention to impenetrable and inconsequential academics so I'm betting that's basically what's happening here.

O9A is so, SO much worse than just "obscure academic". You're deep in to occult nonsense with this shit unfortunately, it stands for "order of the nine angles" and if you want to fall down a stupid goth woo rabbithole for a few hours, FILL YER BOOTS!

finally, someone that sees past the pathetic posturing of ideologues. great comment.

" 7 degrees of Mussolini is not an argument" -- fucking right on!!!

Yes GO3, Nickie baby has some interesting things to say about the way X-tian eschatological belief has stagnated cultural refinement and narrowed diverse paths of inquiry.

until last night but it does seem that Nick Land is a dark enlightenment neo reactionary type. The blog I read is by S.C. Hickman and I think he is an old disillusioned leftist who writes about a lot of people like Zizek but I don't think he is a devil man like Nick Land. So I abhor reactionary politics but some of NLs sci fi and speculative realism is pretty good.

I'm not Le Way I'm the artist formerly known as gel-oberon 3 under a new moniker.

Definitely not, you still carry a heavy libertarian ethos, maybe its an epigenetic trait which lingers despite your efforts to become a hardcore nihilist like Le Way, which you have failed at miserably!

This TOTW setup sets up a simplistic binary between "realistic" individual projects and "fantastical" collective/organizing ideals. It is a caricature of 'organizing' with little resemblance to what 'organizers' do or say. I don't think of myself as an organizer, and I think ideas about organizing tend towards simplistic ideas and action, but a retreat into individual projects is just as silly, and based in other fantasies: that each of us is a self-enclosed individual with its own desires and linear plans, and that these individual objectives and capacities could be separated from all our human and non-human relationships and dependencies.

If the mass-movement-organizer fantasy is an inheritance from Christianity and the Left, the individual-planner-achiever is a fantasy derived from liberalism and capitalism. The most lucid part of the TOTW intro is that individual projects might "resemble ordinary life under capitalism" -- yeah, because we are being 'organized' all the time, whether we like it or not, by the state and capitalism, and “the individual” is one of its most basic building blocks. A "life built on individual capacities alone" is not worth celebrating; you sound like Elon Musk.

I think it's worth thinking about how to organize or be organized differently, in ways where we aren't rendered passive or massified. Part of why I like collective projects is that I find it easier to hold together projects with others, compared to holding together my precarious 'individual self'. I want concepts and ways of coming together that avoid the stupid traps of treating either 'the group' or 'the individual' as something natural or fixed. The individual and the mass are both spooks, and they become dismal fantasies when we can't mess them up and reconfigure them. I will be interested in collaborating with other people for the rest of my life. I will be an anarchist for as long as that label helps me find others and do interesting things with them.

Individualism is a spook when it is accepted as the offspring of the collective meritocratic goal. That type of individuality is still a cloned reproduction of the mass nuclear family ethos, its not the individuated consciousness which Stirner strives for, which breaks with the whole integration of social morality and belief structures.

I think today's problems are different from Stirner's 175 years ago. Contemporary capitalism is great at breaking from "the integration of social morality and belief structures." I'm sure egoists have another reason why the nihilistic consumer also isn't what Stirner *really* meant by individualism. I'd rather dispense with the individual altogether. Luckily, radical European theories of the subject continued after 1844!

I guess I'm more focussed on the innate synaptic processes of braincells which hasn't changed much in 100,000 yrs, and gives the infant some benchmark of freedom to aspire to. Oh well,,,,

Science doesn't provide a leg for the individual to stand on. Scientific fields that were once the foundation for the individual (cognitive science, biology, chemistry, etc) are increasingly grappling with the fact that humans are far more interdependent and connected than was previously thought. We act and desire differently based on the networks we're enmeshed in. Our 'innate synaptic processes' are guided by the ecosystems of gut bacteria that are not our own. Socialization and trauma are transmitted epigenetically through generations. Algorithmic computing is refining techniques to stimulate predictable, embodied responses before consciousness ever plays a role. We are all cooperating (and organizing, and being organized) whether we like it or not.

True, but my desire is to transcend the epigenetic tendencies, to back-track the synaptic process, to cleanse historical ghosts from my will.

nerds

You both sound like two science books leaning on one another in the pearly halls of academia.

It is wack to let the concept of "Individualism" be monopolized by fixed systems of any type. Individual anarchy, in my opinion, can be summarized as an empowered, armed, self-emancipated person who rejects the group-think of societies, identity politics and formalized membership.

This whole "individualism looks like capitalism" is such a lazy analysis which takes the easy way out of individual development and instead, prescribes more collectivism as the solution. Communism and capitalism both want to subjugate the individual. One insists the brainwashed individual is free, the other insists on a moral imperative to surrender individuality for the "collective good". Set em both on fire.

Are you talking about me or about the two materialistic empiricalistic anon morons dropping Platonic lattice structured consciousnessness models into my delicate ephemeral psychic cosmos?

both subjugation systems is bang on. I am more and more for individualism. humans tend to want to dominate and a healthy awareness of this is vital. Indeed, there would be no need for all the identity politicking that goes on if each of us was 'allowed' to be an individual among individuals.

Oh sure Flour Bomb, your individualism is a fixed system of vegan diet and banning meat consumption!

You have clearly misunderstood Stirnerian individuation as his approach is VERY compatible with interdependence. He actually outright says that the individual is born social. The individuation that he proscribes is post-facto as opposed to the Western born island mind. Why do you think he emphasizes the importance of intercourse.

Yeah, as in a symbiotic relationship, either mutualism or commensalism in its effects, between people, and developing its own unique language and experiences.

"We act and desire differently based on the networks we're enmeshed in."

really? holy shit, that is a seriously deep and complex observation!

ever hear of nature vs nurture? they both play a role, and nobody will ever know precisely how it breaks down. oh yeah, Science and its religiously fanatic supporters will constantly make claims to the contrary; algorithmic computing will come up with just the right formula, no doubt.

"How can anarchists celebrate a life built on their individual capabilities alone, even if that means never experiencing insurrection?"

I cannot celebrate in a vacuum of self. Even if I celebrate alone, the celebration is a connection to some outside force - human or not. Practically, my advice is to question what makes you proud of yourself as an anarchist. I believe the bar should be set incredibly low. But I have a taste for pleasure and aspire to understand kinship. I would like to move on from the guilt of not being a warrior and the shame of being/not being an insurrectionist. I would like to move on from the guilt of no study and the shame of not publishing. I would like to move on from the guilt of potential and the shame of mediocrity. I would like to move on from the guilt of loneliness and the shame of isolation. Does this make sense? If so, please reflect. I am in the weeds myself ... or perhaps I am just trying to celebrate in isolation?

Also, good for everyone!

It can be lonely and sad being an anarchist trying to fight the dominant hegemony, with the rampant consumerism and status industry all around, neighbours, family, even old friends, it can be painful being around them cos they just bring you down.
But chin up, chest out, whatever small your contribution may be, make it beautiful.don't

do they collaborate or pontificate? What is post-left anarchy...what does it look like?

Just as you participate in illegal activity with only people you trust and are close with, same goes for post-left anarchist generally speaking. None of this masses, were in the streets bloced up therefore I trust you shit. Mass demos or street actions ALWAYS have undercover cops in them collecting intel. Look at J20 and like every other mass protest. Keep it small, close friends, make em fear the night!

Not the other anti-post-left commenter but... What about when you don't have any "close friends" who got your back when it comes to illegal actions? Beyond that I totally agree that the "masses" or "proles" or "the people" or even "some people" are broken spooks. Where do we go from there?

Add new comment