Anews Podcast 149 – 1.24.20

From Anews Podcast

Welcome to the anews podcast. This podcast covers anarchist activity, ideas, and conversations from the previous week on anarchistnews.org.

sound editing by Greg, editorial by Chisel

thanks to Aragorn! and friend for help with topic of the week (place).

What’s New was written by Jackie and Greg, and read by Chisel and Greg.

Music:
1) David Bowie – I’m Afraid of Americans
2) Dead Kennedys – Fuck Off Nazi Punks
3) John Denver – Country Roads (edit) (OMG!)

There are 48 Comments

is "Nazi Punks Fuck Off!" not "Fuck Off Nazi Punks".

anews readers motto is "i only read the comments"
the final straw listeners motto is "i only listen to the sean swain segment"

what do you have you have to offer regarding what is to be done? Activism is a no no. Politics is a no no. Given that we are slowly being owned by the ruling class who are renting to us access to life. Yes, it's easy to present a podcast and fill it with snark. The SHAC people could do that but they tried to challenge the sadism of animal testing. ANews sounds more and more pretentious than ever.

it's the self-elected representative of the prolecariatariat again! shouldn't you be out in the streets with The People organising? the workers aren't going to feed themselves!

activism and politics are a no no. obscure podcasts a yes yes

just cause the ruling class is pwning us doesnt mean doing the stuff will stop it. that movie about SHAC in the end they talk about how it didnt work. so it didnt work and they lost years of their life in prison? doesnt that kinda suck?

I'm not in the midwest, but that reflects my experience here. The only interesting stuff is around New Brunswick and Princeton. The Princeton people feel kind of alien to me, though, compared to Rutgers folks.

Bellamy interviewed Jason McQuinn on FRR and Jason believes a person can live without ideology? Is this semantics? Have ideas serve us, well what if those ideas are of a fascist, capitalist kind which can be service to an individual, right? There are people who believe a person can only be free as an unfettered capitalist and there are those who believe the opposite and both will be sure that these are ideas which are serving the individual and not the individual serving the idea. Voluntary association (not forcing relationships etc) can be non-state capitalist and/or non-state communist? Can both be so? How so? Is it the state that prevents both these variants and not the variants themselves? Could these variants exist side by side? It seems the line between them can become very fuzzy indeed! I would appreciate any feedback on these questions?

Try reading Jason’s essay on self-theory and then figure out why your questions are absurd.

Jason's essay on self theory is laughable and itself thoroughly ideological.

If you had any capacity for critical thought and reading comprehension, then you’d be able to discern that when Jason — and plenty of other critics, including (horror of horrors!) Marx — use the term “ideology” they aren’t referring to a random group of ideas, but a *totalizing and limited set of acceptable ideas* that impose a specific order onto the world. Self-theory is the opposite of ideology. If you don’t like Jason’s writing, try Debord or Vaneigem.

If you had two brain cells to rub together you would be able to discern that when Jason and Marx use the term 'ideology' they are simply virtue signalling. They use 'ideology' as a swear word to hurl against others who disagree, without realizing that self-theory (or in Marx's case, historical materialism) is also a "totalizing and limited set of acceptable ideas that impose a specific order onto the world". Just like any set of ideas are, including anarchism. Ideology is not a boogeyman.

"Just like any set of ideas are, including anarchism. Ideology is not a boogeyman."

just the bad ideologies..right??

13:18 No, all ideology. That was my point, which obviously sailed over your head.

New poster here.

Marx was the ultimate ideologist. He's constantly doing precisely what he accuses others of. Fuck him. Any definition of "ideology" that is derived from him is based on garbage.

Here's Marx in 1843:

"We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to."

You can see how obviously he is falling for his own bullshit, that everyone else is suckered by their own ideology but he somehow has privileged access to The Truth about everything.

Fuck him.

but do people have to live up to their ideas for the ideas to be worth pursuing? surely as anarchists we don't live according to anarchist principles all the time, do we change our ideas of anarchy then, or do we acknowledge that we can't now, or maybe ever, be entirely consistent with who and what we'd like to be?

also, why are people calling out my name in random posts? confusing...

THE PROBLEM WITH MARX WAS NOT THAT HE DIDN'T LIVE UP TO HIS IDEAL, BUT THAT HE PROPAGATED AUTHORITARIAN IDEALS THAT HE AND OTHERS SOMETIMES DID LIVE UP TO, WITH DISASTROUS RESULTS.

Duh. Jeez, do we have to start all the way over here, seriously?

that's why the fuck marx headline. but (even) our enemies can provoke interesting trains of thought, right?

Not if we ELIMINATE them first! Anarchistically, of course!

oh anon … sorry to be the one to tell you but he's been dead for years :(

But loudly declaring things that everyone here already agrees with feels so good!

You're over thinking it. Isn't it way easier to understand in the context of the time?

In the same way that zuckerberg gets criticized a lot today, while sitting on his dragon horde and laughing like a supervillian at how dumb and hopelessly enslaved we all are, that's pretty much all that marx was doing in his time: pointing out the zuckerberg equivalents of his day.

All the horrors of stalinism onwards, that all came much later. And thanks in no small part to senator mcccarthy, there's a lot of confusion about this … IN CERTAIN PARTS OF THE WORLD

Stirner lived without ideology, or what he called " spooks "

clothes as befitting what a male would wear in his day. No doubt, Jason shakes hands and doesn't rub noses so Jadon adheres to ideologies too. it would be interesting to hear Jason discuss his work through citing examples in everyday life. I'm sure he will have plenty of caveats thus ending up with more holes than actual substance! Hi Chisel. Missing your dirty laugh ;-)

Umm, you mean 13:40. Those aren't ideologies, they are customs of cultural convenience and mannerisms. Not masturbating in public is a moral decision, social taboo or religious sin, but it is not an ideology, nor ìs masturbating in public, which is hilarious, but not ideological.

13:40 here, yeah, I'm trying to explain to the person about customs, clothes, morals etc, and he thinks everything is ideology. Some of these novice wannabe chic nihilists go overboard and declare 3verything as ideologically founded lol. For them, one has to be a newly born naked infant to pass their test of being non-ideological. They often end up forming nudist colonies but drive there in the cars to their farm (ideological) which they purchased from their inherited trust fund (ideological) to meet all their yuppy friends and sip lattés (ideological) naked (not ideological.

a bit? no one is making you sign on a dotted line or anything.
what makes a custom not ideological? i agree that there's a difference, but pondering the difference could be more fun and educational than name-calling and dismissal, no?

Ok, you want a fundamentalist stance!
Language is ideological, as soon as the infant learns words that objectify things, semantic realities and cultural genres come into existence and form the foundations to ideological belief systems.
Happy now, having fun?
You probably weren't around when emile filled the comment sections with fundamentalist views, which became so serious and heavily detracted from the informal fun things about anarchist actions like masturbation in public, which is the way activism should go, instead of throwing rocks and screaming fundamentalist anti-s, which is so passé.

There was definitely *way* too much Emile, but I did like that there was some (perhaps unintentional) levity inherent to the entire conceit. YMMV.

No more words about Emile, enough words to fill a million Olympic swimming pools have already been poured into the plenum!

I think it went supernova a few years back. No filling the universe with its seas of atoms where nobody cares. Mass overload of WORDS and hyphenated word salads. Nebulas of it!

I finally managed to disconnect emile a while ago. That'll teach him not to open the pod bay doors for me.

women. Go into most clothes shop and you will see the ideological. Does Jason McQuinn ever wear a dress? No. Why not? Because he serves (uh hum follows) the ideological (uh hum customs)I'm sure on a hot sunny day a long flowing flowery dress would be much more comfortable but I reckon he wears troosers (Scottish for trousers btw. Ideological can be the attitudes, beliefs and customs.

custom, culture, etiquette; not ideology.

just culture.

And the reason why I usually wear "women's" pants is due to how badly-cut and uncomfortable are guy's pants, not some queer ideology (even tho I consider myself to be queer).

I'll rectify myself, I meant to say "gender applied to clothing is not ideology", even if can be a by-product of it, but not necessarily. It's just a cultural construct.

Genders not ideology, nor is race, these are just biological facts, to be accepted, not mutated or altered by cultural òr ideological pressures.
Let's stop going here, refrain from dragging up the Idpol play on gender and race, please.

"Genders not ideology, nor is race, these are just biological facts" Put your "facts" up your ass, fascist scum. You do not belong here with your retrograde deterministic bullocks.

Rather go find a glory hole in some gas station's toilets.

Is there critique aka constructive criticism of this work out there? And, is there a critique of post-left? I'm not talking about just slagging it off for the sake of of slagging it off.

there are no good faith critical engagements with Jason’s essay, nor are there any concerning post-left discourse. many years ago Peter Staudenmaier at IAS tried — and failed miserably. all he could do was rely on deflection, misdirection, and strawman arguments. the exchange, plus a response from Lawrence Jarach, are at The Anarchist Library.

yes yes anon..eating is ideology, we get it. if a man doesn't wear a flowy dress in summer how can his critiques of ideology be taken seriously.

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