PURA ACRACIA

from: PURA ACRACIA

What follows is a series of anti-political arguments against the police, politics y más.

Politics itself is the policing of freedom & unfreedom. Freedom, as we are taught in American schools, is not freedom itself.
It is a doctored variation sold to us. It helps maintain the assumption that the perpetuation of American politics is itself tied to perpetuation of freedom. (“Vote or don’t complain!”)

Nothing could be further from the truth.

This is why those of us with an anti-political position say we are for anarchy: freedom is a word with too much American patriotic baggage.

For the purposes of this piece, I will refer to the condition of territorial statelessness (which is akin to freedom) as anarchy.

But then what is anti-politics? Is it the inversion of politics? (Many radicals see radical politics as a grand inversion of bourgeois politics: now the people are in power. A formulation I disagree with, which I’ll get to later.)

Anti-politics is the active negation and consequent abolition of politics.

But what is politics? With the development of ancient Greek democracy, the polis (where the term politics emerges from) denoted a body of citizens who have a direct say in local governance. Politics is that which concerns the polis. And what is citizenship? Adherence to and recognition by the State. A dividing of the population.

But not all citizens under the current racial regime of Capital are equals.

In Black Marxism, Robinson shows this is by historical design. Black people have been held outside the realm of the State’s formal equality since the inception of capitalism and continue to be so even after the supposed end of chattel slavery.

I stand against anti-blackness and the marker of race, which always also means standing against policing. The State is the wing of direct anti-black domination and the police its foot soldiers. Thus I am against the State even in its democratic forms.

Politics is that which is used to mediate between contentious bodies. A perpetuation of antagonistic contradictions, rarely their resolution: to form a social peace to ensure the perpetuation of the current racial regime of Capital. To keep the money flowing.

The perfection of politics can be found in democracy: class-collaboration at its finest. As the writers of Dixie Be Damned put it, “White supremacy’s greatest ally in this country has been democracy, not fascism.” But the anti-blackness of the racial regime of Capital is more than just a formalized White supremacy.

To be an anarchist then is to not only be against the State but also against politics.

Because as @nkoyenkoyenkoye puts it,

“Politics is police.”

The police as protectors of the political order physically embody the law: the bureaucratic wing of the State. The formalization of dominance.


The latest wave of Black revolt and the riots it has sparked have had an explicit target: the police and their power deployed to protect property against Black life. But some bristle at this target.

I recall back in 2014 a white communist asking in a reading group, “when will people rise up against indirect domination and not just direct domination?” Which is Euro-Marxist speech for, “why are Black people fighting the police and not the wage-relation?” As though the two are not linked.

A now common refrain by the radical milieu is that the recent riots worked. That they have produced results that would have not occurred otherwise. This is true. The history of revolt in the so-called United States of America is a testimony to this.

But the instrumentalization of the riot as a thing that ‘works’ misunderstands the riot. This is projected onto the riot after the fact. It is an attempt to make the riot political. To make it legible to State power.

Though the riot, as expressed by racialized proles, is essentially anti-political. The white racist riot is fascism in its extra-legal street mode (see the Tulsa Race Riot & the Zoot Suit Riots).

Rioters are indeed often the disenfranchised, but the riot is not an act for integration into the racial regime but an act against it. Rioters are not trying to communicate a program to be fulfilled by the State as much as acting directly and openly against the present state of things. Otherwise a peaceful march ending with a stage and a list of speakers is in order.

Thus the conclusion of an anti-police (as well as anti-carceral) position is anti-politics.


Some say we need another politics. I say the world of politics has had its day and those against it are the ones who will carry the day to freedom.

For anarchy & communism.

There are 21 Comments

this is like the 15th iteration of the same thing done by the same people. im so confused.

the aesthetics are the same but the content has changed with each iteration

ya this is the cyberbully who just combines communization theory with identity politics and sells it to kids half his age. real "woke" tough guy energy. too bad most people just kind of feel bad for him because of how outdated his politics are.

"In Black Marxism, Robinson shows this is by historical design. Black people have been held outside the realm of the State’s formal equality since the inception of capitalism and continue to be so even after the supposed end of chattel slavery."

I'm gonna beat a dead horse and say NOT ALL BLACK PEOPLE...this is what happens when people fetishize a certain "peoples" as being the most oppressed. This is easy to say, "black people are oppressed", because they are largely kept out of the savory accumulation of wealth that the-grand-monolithic-whites enjoy. We need to stop fetishizing the oppressed by realizing we are not saviors and we shall not end oppression, because we depend on other people, and possibly the evil oppressors, to some degree.

Ultimately this this something that bothers me to a great end...i think in the US "the native americans" have won the oppression Olympics for sure!! Talking about any "people's" is always grand and monolithic, so caution, even if you can't stfu about race.

This is another reflection of also of the narrative that the whites are supreme, which is another illusion that has been spread by left wing politics. "Supremacy" it's is an illusion, because i do not see masters, i see only slaves

They did hit on something very deep in the last part:

"But the instrumentalization of the riot as a thing that ‘works’ misunderstands the riot. This is projected onto the riot after the fact. It is an attempt to make the riot political. To make it legible to State power.

Though the riot, as expressed by racialized proles, is essentially anti-political. The white racist riot is fascism in its extra-legal street mode (see the Tulsa Race Riot & the Zoot Suit Riots)."

What works doesn't really matter, it's ultimately what benefits you in both the short and long term. Us sadists have also figured out that you have include all of the other living beings, which is difficult, something i will never perfect.

As anticiv, I kinda connect with this, in how I have a hard time seeing a line of struggle within humans that is worthy risking myself for, as humans tend to be fucked, treacherous, hypocrite beings. And this totally applies to whatever politics you might have around, including the so-called "radical" or "revolutionary" shit.

Who really deserves to be fought for? Those that don't have the means to defend themselves against this oppression. The children, some of the disabled, and of course the non-human animals.

Adult humans tend to be the bottom end product of this alienating system, where they find themselves turned against another, even if on the surface it looks otherwise... Humans by attempting to improve society have created a system where anyone can become a despot and profiteer. Today's Leftists aside of the same school of thought than Camatte, have lost sight of what capitalism really means, in the real world. Some authentic socialists might succeed at changing a few things in the structures they're in, but systemic change is still one big riddle I doubt they've solved.

You're making a lot of assumptions here. Also, your racism is showing. Also, stop telling us what "we need to" stop, do, think. We get it, you are white and you don't think you are bad. This is fine. Projection of your shortcomings are not.

17:35 comment was in response to anti-politics (not verified) on Mon, 08/24/2020 - 16:59

These reply mistakes would never happen on Facebook.

Being about "those who need to be helped", because that's much broader than one "race of eternally left behinds". Im one of those people who also cant stand their lack of competence within a system that is bent on destroying all things including me. But since im not an asshole, i dont really want other people to feel sorry for me. Ive grown up with a lot of guilt about my privilege and i tend to find over and over again that that miserable guilt gets me no where. I have to just relax. Over my adult years i have actually pretty hard surrendering my privledge in ways i can still remain a little comfortable.

Ultimately getting on the internet and telling people they're racist without actually pointing out the more nuts and bolts flaws with what theyre saying is just foolish, and resembles hateful trolling. I can see how my post also remembles naz-trolling, but i feel thats ultimately inevitable when expressing opinions about race, the genocide in talking about race are always in the generalities, so how are we going to help people in the hellish situations? I dont know, you tell me.

Just to let you know, just so we can stop beating a dead horse, black people definetly deserve reparations, they are victims of terrible poverty, overall, but i think the choice of how those reparations are administered is a very important one. For example, theres a lot of talk about easy access to universities for black people, but to me universities are the most comically white institutions imaginable. They do not create more skilled skilled people overall, and often play a similar role in perpetuating poverty as the prison system does. It seemed to me universities thought i was a ------ and im totally done with them....

I'm so privileged that I live in a truck. And I am very comfortable doing so.

Really, I MUST put a bed of nails to sleep on in my camper shell.

"These reply mistakes would never happen on Facebook."

that may be the dumbest comment i've seen in ages. and on @news, that is really saying something.

yet, there is a little truth to this comment, i've repeatedly talked about the flaws in @news comment styles (that's actually the worst element of this site, the adolescent entertainment style) and insistence on not actually fixing the cyber-bullying problem here that i have done a great job at contributing because that's what it seems to be structurally designed for. The "real conversations of the streets", more romanticize of foolish absurdist (my favorite part...honestly!) trolling. Facebook is a gigantic right-wing hate machine, but is it really that different from anarchist news except that it has gestapo-esque cancel culture as well?

I'm going to have press the left hate button one more time: i just read this yahoo news article that left a vignette about how trump supporters basically only like him because he's racist lying antagonist:

https://news.yahoo.com/trumps-fights-fights-back-unapologetically-121320...

I'm just going to say i flirt with the idea that "biden is worse" sometimes only ironically, because i have no idea which one is going to continue this nightmare, all the evidence once again points to trump. You can vote for biden if it makes you feel better, but don't you dare lecture me about since i'm good anarchist i need to hold your hand and go to the voting booth with you. I'm tired of always identifying with what i vote for, because that's the trick.

the fact that @news has kept LBC, the greens, critiques of identity politics, some of the interesting aspects of left anarchists (remember the CHAZ???).

Yet, all "politics" seems to lead to rome, with it's many schisms and wars.

the fact @news has kept around these diverse flawed characters means they see the issue with fascism, and have done all they can to keep it out of people with genuine fervor...

remember when anti-fa were basically hunters of american neo-nazis? Don't know if that was ever a thing beyond 80's punk shows, but it is a refreshing polemic...trying their best to get rid of the violent communities of abuse and misogyny.

The whole of politics is flawed by the premise of democratic collectivism. As if any people are going to evolve from tribal/feudal, marxist/capitalist, neo-liberal/consumerism whilst our glorious natural organic individualist sovereignty is brushed under the carpet.
Finally the covid19 has jolted the collective herd mind out of its fantasy of unlimited reproduction and hedonistic consumerism and made politics change from pouring the wealth and resources of the Earth into ficticious wars against drugs and wars against terrorism. Now the spree is over and a Darwinian sense of survival has sobered the extravagant excesses of the flacid aged conquerers and rapists of Mother Nature.

You may have no interest in politics, but politics is very interested in you.

The United States is the main problem country of the world.  The U.S. is now well on its way to collapse. There are no tendencies at work in this social order that can avert this. There is exactly one path forward in liberatory terms -- an aggressive class against class, public, widespread, consciously anti-wage-labor mass social movement of the wage-earning class, including enlisted people in the Armed Forces, with an openly stated goal of replacing this historically bankrupt social order with a society worthy of the human beings who live in in -- a free, egalitarian, ecological sane, post-market society, where we will immediately abolish wage labor and all forms of unnecessary toil.  The current unrest has been channeled into a cul-de-sac that conceptualizes our underlying problems in skin color terms. This effectively unites vast numbers of decent people and conventional bourgeois political grifters. 

The demands expressed in the rebellion -- abolition of the cops and prisons, the need to fight against white racism and against white racists, hatred of the comically egregious Donald Trump -- are wholly righteous, and, in a very typically United States of America way they are also completely severed from the underlying historical context that generates the problems. 

The specific kind of racism that prevails in the U.S. was first cooked up in 17th century Virginia by pre-capitalist exploiters and social parasites as a psychological scam for keeping chattel slaves and indentured servants atomized and divided -- and it worked.  It still works now in the context of the laudable unrest we see in the streets today. 'Black Lives Matter' is a brilliant phrase.  It is transparently true -- no one other than the most primordial racist scum can deny this.  It also defines the larger social problem on terms that the reigning social order itself could presumably resolve on the reigning social order's terms and channels energetic discontent away from the class against class action that offers the only potential permanent resolution of the problem.

Anti-black racism is something like a beta strand in the DNA of the United States.  As many people can see the only way to cure this is to abolish the United States -- but this can't be done without toppling and abolishing capitalist social relations in a mass, conscious social movement linked to similar mass proletarian movements everywhere else in the world.  A revolutionary movement that jumps off from the most degraded industrialized society on earth could be much more effective at abolishing capitalism on a global scale than a revolutionary movement in a backwater like Russia was one hundred years ago.

I want authentic communism, too, but your clarion call against the very concept of politics has no practical component -- none that I see here at least.  I see no evidence of a practical, real world pattern of action behind this repudiation of politics.  Now, it's possible that I'm wrong on this, but if that's the case you need to do a better job of calling attention to what this is.  In the glorious words of Comrades Strunk and White (sic!?), prefer the specific to the general.  Proclamations of this sort abound in the U.S. anarchist subculture and are a measure of the fact that what's called anarchism in today's United States exists solely to provide entertainment to its authors and cannot be taken seriously in the larger world around us. I like some of what I read by you -- if I didn't I wouldn't respond at such length -- so hopefully this isn't the case with the rest of what you are about.

'you may have no interest in politics, but politics is very interested in you' is much like 'if you don't vote, you can't complain': a slogan used to shut down conversation. strunk and white wouldn't be pleased with how general it is either.

still, i appreciate the length of your comment. so thanks for that.

by scared people who want others to be afraid...which is precisely why i hate politics, not sure what people mean when they say "they want communism", but clearly those who say it will put up with a broad amalgamation of power, which is honestly just as scary to me as neo-nazis.

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