Another Word for Settle: A Response to ‘Rattachements’ and ‘Inhabit’

from It's Going Down

An anti-colonial critique of two texts, Rattachements and Inhabit.

It was winter 2020 and in the aftermath of the most inspiring anti-colonial uprising of my lifetime, I read Rattachements[1] (Re-attachments in English) and Inhabit[2]. The trains had started up again across the country, and COVID-19 was starting to reorder our lives mere weeks after we had been doing our small part to help shut down Canada. In and around Tio’tia:ke (Montreal) where I live, there were many Indigenous-led initiatives, including solidarity rounddances that blocked traffic downtown, and of course the month-long blockade of the railway tracks that run through Kahnawá:ke. On and around the island, the engagement of settlers in #ShutDownCanada took a number of forms including clandestine sabotage of rail infrastructure, demos and vandalism of RCMP property, and multiple rail blockades, one of which lasted a few days.

Coming down off of these events, it was especially jarring to read the proposals in Inhabit and Rattachements. Both texts are representations of political thought coming out of communities in the US and Quebec that are heavily influenced by the writings of the Invisible Committee in France and European Autonomist movements. This political tendency is sometimes labelled tiqqunist, appelist, or autonomist. It is a political orientation that has a significant amount of sway among a segment of those who were engaged in the settler-initiated[3] portions of the organizing in Montreal last winter, and these two texts seem to be important reference points for these people. Unfortunately, the onset of COVID-19 stifled what could have been an opportunity for deeper analysis of some of the political differences between those of us who organized together that winter. I would like to clarify my disagreement with the anti-colonial strategy, or lack thereof, put forth by Inhabit and Rattachements. I hope that in future broad coalitional moments of solidarity like last winter, we might be able to better understand where our potential for collaboration could break down. I also hope that critical engagement with the analysis proposed by these texts will limit the extent to which it influences the contours of settler-initiated anti-colonial solidarity in years to come.

Rattachements

Taking issue with dominant currents of environmentalist action (on the one hand activists who ask the government to take action to save the environment, and on the other individuals changing their consumption practices to do the same) the writers of Rattachements propose a new approach to dealing with the ecological crisis and colonial capitalism. This new approach is one of building an “ecology of presence” through the construction of communes[4]. The writers see the project of reconnecting to that which “has been torn from them” as both material and spiritual. They wish to truly inhabit land from which to attack the machinery of capitalism while also building new forms of life there. Foundational to their understanding of the problem is an assertion that they did not choose to be thrown into a world bent on its own destruction, a world structured by colonial capitalism[5], wherein their “affects are captured” and their connection to the land has been severed.

The writers forward that “[d]efending the land necessarily means learning to inhabit it, truly inhabiting it necessitates defending it.” In doing so they assert that their reconnection to the land is a precursor and integral part of anti-colonial struggle. An “ecology of presence,” they write, can be found in the connections between Indigenous peoples and their territories, including the Zapatistas’ resistance against the Mexican government and the material and territorial autonomy of the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka. However, the writers, are rejecting an analysis of social position from jump. They appear to not think that the position of subjects within systems of domination is relevant to their analysis or strategies of resistance to those systems. But the writers are nonetheless settlers speaking to (mostly) other settlers. The abstraction they employ is thus dangerous, as they go on to say that “it is when communities affirm that they themselves are part of the territory, of this forest, of this river, of this piece of the neighbourhood, and that they are ready to fight, that the political possibility of ecology appears clearly”. This statement can easily be seen as a call for settlers to understand themselves as belonging to the land in order to defend it, or at the very least, on a level playing field with Indigenous people when it comes to assertions of what the future of land in this place should resemble. Whether or not this is the intention, this opens the door to settler self-indigenization being understood as a decolonial strategy. In a settler colonial society like Quebec or Canada, the state exists in large part to secure settler access to land, and Indigenous people are always threats to that access. This is both the history and present of all settler societies. We need not look far to find examples where settlers relating to the land in a way that resembles Rattachements’ “ecology of presence” has already been put into practice effectively against Indigenous people.

Take, for example, the story of the white hunters in Mi’kma’ki (the Chic Choc Mountains in Gaspésie, specifically) who in 2004 had already grown frustrated about the incursion of logging in the area and who, having hunted on the land for quite some time and feeling rather connected to (even “of”) the territory, were faced with a new threat: the establishment of a “Mi’kmaq-controlled area which would offer outdoor activities for a fee” (a “pourvoirie”). This new project threatened their ability to hunt for free. In response to this, while meeting in a “communal tent” on the territory, the white hunters concocted a plan to identify as Indigenous in order to help add legitimacy to their claims of connection to the land. They founded an organization which would come to be named the Metis Nation of the Rising Sun, and successfully prevented the establishment of the pourvoirie. This story is not an outlier in our area, rather merely one example of a widespread phenomenon wherein settlers, feeling very attached to the land they are living on (and maybe even having some communal inclinations,) feel moved to defend their control of it from threats that include Indigenous people who have their own pre-existing claims and relations to the same land. Often, this involves claiming an Indigenous identity, but it need not necessarily. What continues to be crucial for the advancement of settlement is the ongoing procurement of land by settlers and the entrenchment of the idea that this is our land, whether the possession is property based (I have the deed and so this is mine) or spiritual (I know the land, I feel connected to the land, and so I belong here).

Looking to other settler colonial contexts, we can see more examples of the risks of communal settlement undertaken with radical political aims. The Kibbutz movement in Palestine, for example, is a story of self-organized communes set up from the early 1900s onward, beginning with the second wave of Jewish settlers fleeing pogroms from Eastern Europe. The settlers of the first Kibbutz had anarchist ideals of egalitarianism, rejected the “exploitative socio-economic structure[6]” of the farms established by the first wave of settlement, and hoped to undermine the developing capitalist economy with their communes. They sought to establish “a cooperative community without exploiters or exploited[7]“, and did so in 1910 after gaining access to land “which had recently been bought by the Palestine Land Development Company from the Jewish National Fund.[8]” This first farm was such a success that “before long, kvutzot were being set up wherever land could be bought.[9]” These communes, while viewing themselves as a viable alternative and considerable threat to the capitalist mode of production, were also serving the Zionist settlement of Palestine. Today they are commonly understood as an important part of Israel’s national story, and approximately 270 settlements still exist (despite their internal organization and anarchist character having shifted significantly) in occupied territory. It is clear that while the anarchist and anti-capitalist ideals of such projects may be inspiring, the settler colonial context calls for attention to the impacts of settlement on Indigenous peoples, not merely the ideals or internal politics of communes[10].

Land Back vs. Back to the land

Rattachements emerges from and endorses an understanding that settlers too have been dispossessed – of connection to land, of spirituality and knowledge. It leans hard on this claim to try to get other settlers to feel moved to action. The zine, written within and circulating among social circles dominated by white settlers with varying radical politics, posits that a solution to the ecological crisis lies in these (again, primarily settler) milieus’ ability to create communes. These communes will then be able to establish material and political autonomy by rendering spaces (land, wastelands, buildings, churches, houses and parks) “liveable.”[11] In other words, they propose to settle and squat, communally, the land, whether it has already been built on by other settlers or not, asserting that this is a strategic necessity rather than merely a lifestyle choice.

I too believe that capitalism is a system which alienates us from each other and the living beings we depend upon. And yet I believe that we must be more specific: colonial capitalism has created a country wherein, by and large, settlers own land, and have the resources and relative freedom to build a variety of relationships with it. This comes at the expense of Indigenous peoples, who have been dispossessed of their land, and the languages, cultures, and spiritualities that emerge from and inform their relationships with that land. Rattachements suggests that a crucial part of the anti-capitalist/anti-colonial ecological struggle is shifting settlers’ affective and spiritual relationships with the land in a context where our material relationship with the land – one of ownership of that which has been stolen — remains unchanged and fundamentally colonial. A group of settlers buying a communal house together outside the city as part of a strategy of revolutionary ecology has little to nothing in common with Indigenous peoples reoccupying their traditional territories. The latter is a direct disruption of colonial development projects and environmental destruction and is recognizable as part of a lineage of Indigenous resistance to displacement and genocide.[12] The former misrecognizes itself as somehow sharing something with that lineage, when in fact it is possible because of, and shares much more with, generations of encroachment and expansion by settlers.

Absent from the program of ecological struggle proposed by Rattachements is an explicit call for the return of land to Indigenous communities. Instead, they call implicitly for an increased presence of their (settler) milieus on that land, in part in order to potentially support Indigenous struggles. Despite the acknowledgment that land has been stolen (and the lauding of Indigenous relationships to land as ones to look to as examples for the readers of the zine) what is missing is the proposition that “Land Back” in the literal, material sense, is an important piece of the ecological struggle, and one to prioritize leaps and bounds above settlers going back to the land. In the Land Back Red Paper released in 2019 by the Yellowhead Institute, the writers tell us that “the matter of Land Back is not merely a matter of justice, rights or ‘reconciliation’; Indigenous jurisdiction can indeed help mitigate the loss of biodiversity and climate crisis. […] Long-term stewardship of the land allows for constant reassessment, planning, and adaptation.” This leads to an efficacy of protection of biodiversity and hope against climate change thanks to the culturally specific world views passed intergenerationally through a presence with and in defense of the land.[13]

It must not be seen as a necessary precondition for decolonization that settlers develop relationships (spiritual or affective) with land that we occupy. Settlers deciding to prioritize building these new relationships with the land does not bring us closer to decolonization. Focusing on settlers’ spiritual or affective relationships to the land as an important part of anti-colonial struggles sidetracks and warpsour ability to focus on the much more central problems of settler colonial Canada. The dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ lands is a partial but crucial piece of struggling against settler colonialism and climate change. Regardless of the politics of the settlers, our relationships with land are most often built through a tactic of land ownership, due to the relative ease of access to the financial means or social connections that allow for this. I am thinking, for example, about the many collective land projects that have been initiated by radical settlers in so-called Quebec, which all involve owning the land. To think of building a land-based spirituality on a foundation of land ownership does not make sense, these relationships would be colonial, not revolutionary. In other words, the relationship between settlers and land must change primarily on a material basis, not a spiritual or affective one. Indigenous peoples have articulated that “Land Back” will give them the power to rebuild knowledge, languages, culture, and autonomy. This is the substance of decolonization; it is crucial that Indigenous peoples be free to develop and regain their relationships with the land rather than settlers taking it upon ourselves to do it in their stead.

On Inhabit and Settler Territorial Autonomy

In Inhabit, a text coming out of appelist/tiqqunist/autonomist networks in the so-called US, the desire for territory is expanded.The goal articulated in Inhabit is the extension and multiplication of the isolated communes of Rattachements. Yet unlike Rattachements, whose authors claim to be committed to their own understanding of an anti-colonial politics, Inhabit does not articulate an anti-colonial politic at all. This is not necessarily surprising, as anti-colonial politics seem to be less present in settler radical milieus in the US than in Canada, but it still matters.[14] “Our goal”, they say, “is to establish autonomous territories—expanding ungovernable zones that run from sea to shining sea. Faultlines crossing North America leading us to providence.” Like the westward expansionists of yore, the writers of Inhabit posit a better way to use the land and suggest that pockets not yet taken up in service for their revolution be transformed in their image. In other words, one can read the writers of Inhabit as promoting their vision of Manifest Destiny: the expansion of land use in their vision, faultlines moving unimpeded across a vast and unclaimed North America. Perhaps following the paths of the railroads that came before?

Inhabit’s authors seem unable or unwilling to engage with settler colonialism. With the exception of the mention of incidental interaction between settlers and Indigenous families in contexts where they are already comrades, race and colonialism are invisible in their text. The authors’ unwillingness to engage with the larger collectivities of Indigenous life and their settler colonial context betrays their colonial understanding of the land itself. In proposing territorial expansion without concern for the claims to land that cover this continent already[15], Inhabit calls to its readers with imagery of the settler state national project – from sea to shining sea: “Build the infrastructure necessary to subtract territory from the economy,” they urge. But the land has never been just territory, and settlers occupying it has more often looked like removing Indigenous peoples than subtracting it from the economy. One need only look to the southern US to see how, for example, white people squatting “vacant” land was an intended consequence of the process of allotting Indigenous people land far from their communities. The US banked on the fact that these communities would be unable to prevent squatters from setting in and taking possession. “Rent a space in the neighborhood. Build a structure in the forest. Take over an abandoned building or a vacant piece of land.” Inhabit repurposes thought and strategies from contexts highly unlike their own (squatters movements in europe, for example) and tries to implement supposedly liberatory strategies for “inhabiting” space that merely further entrench settler access to and control of land.

The Flight from Identity

In an October 2020 report-back called Chasse à la chasse[16] (translated as Hunting the Hunt in the English version published by Inhabit’s “Territories” newsletter), the writers (based in Quebec) give an account of their time spent supporting Anishnabe communities fighting for a moratorium on moose hunting in their territory. They conclude their summary of the situation with the following reflection: “It would be an illusion confining one to weakness to think that we cannot be and appear other than as illegitimate settlers, regardless of ‘how’ we intend to inhabit what is left of the world.”[17]

It is surprising to me that one of the most pressing takeaways from organizing in solidarity with an Indigenous community would be the possible escape from settler “identity” it uncovers. It seems to me that the fear of being seen as an “illegitimate settler” is what motivates some of their rejection of social position and in turn undermines their analysis. I don’t intend to say that the authors have nothing to contribute to anti-colonial struggle because they are settlers. Rather, I disagree with the importance being placed on not being perceived as settlers, instead of on evaluating what is the most effective contribution they could make to anti-colonial struggle. Their position as settlers in a settler society is necessarily going to be an important piece of this evaluation. This rejection of social position is visible in Inhabit in so far as race and colonialism are made invisible. In Rattachements, it is only visible as a thing from which the writers flee. “Ecstasy: bliss provoked by an exit, a departure from what has been produced as our ‘self’, our ‘social position,’ our ‘identity.’” In a hurry to reject identity politics, and in conflating “identity” with an attention to social position, the writers remove the lens that would allow them to analyze our context more fully and accurately. In doing so, they doom themselves to a flat and limited approach that says that if it is strategic and possible for Indigenous people to build territorial autonomy, it must be just as strategic, possible, and subversive, for settlers to do the same.

The St. Lambert rail blockade was a multi-day action called by and mostly attended by settlers last winter in the context of #ShutDownCanada. It was an opportunity for a proactive and explicit explanation of why we as settlers thought it important to respond to the call for solidarity actions in the way we did, and an encouragement of other settler radical milieus to do the same. This could have been very valuable in a context where some settler supporters were hesitant to propose or participate in settler-initiated actions[18]. Unfortunately, this proactive communication approach was not taken for a variety of reasons, including lack of political cohesion amongst the people organizing the action. In the end, communication coming out of the camp opted for vague language about who was there and who was being spoken to and missed an opportunity to speak as settlers to other settlers about what we could do to intervene[19]. Obfuscating our position made it easier for the mainstream media to use the fact that we were not Indigenous as a “gotcha” moment which helped them attempt to turn public opinion against us without using overtly racist tropes. Our lack of clear analysis also left space for Premier Francois Legault to separate us from the other blockades because we did not explain how we saw ourselves in relation to them. Of course the cops knew all along the demographics of those in attendance and acted accordingly. There were no tactical advantages to this approach, and we lost the opportunity to put forth clear, decisive analysis as to why other settlers should take the risks we (and many Indigenous communities) were taking at that time to shut down Canada. I worry that an avoidance of addressing head on issues of social position and the role of settlers in anti-colonial struggle may lead us to make similar choices in the future.

Inhabit and Rattachements share a desire to produce affect in their readers which inspire them to see themselves as full of power and possibility. Toward this end, they encourage readers to reject guilt or sacrifice and to understand themselves as central protagonists in struggle. For Rattachements, this looks like encouraging their readers to see themselves as “neither victims” of “nor guilty” for the ecological crisis. This aversion to self-sacrifice, to being ready to give something up, means denying that settler colonialism and some other drivers of the crisis continue to benefit us. This is the preemptive evasion of potential guilt for being a settler – we must not understand ourselves as the subjects for which the genocidal removal of Indigenous people from their land is ongoing. The impulse is tied to a rejection of identity politics, and while I do not suggest to instead embrace a demobilizing guilt in the face of the past and present horrors, I think it is both a strategic and ethical imperative to refuse to ignore the conditions that produce this guilt. When we acknowledge the kinds of lives that settler colonialism continues to produce for settlers and try to find the causes for the clear disparity, we equip ourselves with the knowledge of our context necessary to change it in effective ways. When we flee the feelings produced by this disparity by rejecting a label, we may come to believe we can think or magic our way out of real structures. It is the conditions that need to be fought, not the emotions they produce.

Where do We go from Here?

The authors of Inhabit and Rattachements might think that rejecting, on the basis of demographics, their respective strategies of territorial autonomy or of building material autonomy in communes on the land is essentially a refusal to build power—a concession to the demobilizing effects of ally politics. On the contrary, I think this rejection is both an ethical and a strategic choice, from which we must necessarily develop a stronger and more anti-colonial revolutionary strategy. It does not weaken our movements to turn away from building territorial autonomy for primarily settler communities if what we turn towards is a greater focus on the continued rebuilding of territorial autonomy for Indigenous peoples we seek to be in struggle with. What is required is to not see settlers as the central subject of revolutionary anti-colonial struggle, and to recognize that the positions from which we struggle differ and thus the paths we take must also differ. Any serious analysis of Canadian settler colonialism will see the hundreds of years of Indigenous struggle against capitalism and the state as relevant and in many ways determinant of the chances of these communities’ potential success at building territorial autonomy. This same analysis will note the difference between this history of struggle and that of radical settler movements in so-called Canada.

If we talk about territorial autonomy in a serious sense, we will know it is far more than “a network of hubs” we’ve rented, squatted, or built in the forest, or a constellation of communal houses in the country. Territorial autonomy, if seen as a strategy for the destruction of capitalism and the state, includes the long term work of developing zones where cops cannot go, where the means to sustain and reproduce those who live there can be found, where a large group of committed and connected people of all ages has the means and the need to defend that territory, over generations. We can look to where this work has already been done for hundreds of years to see examples: Wet’suwet’en territory, Elsipogtog, Barriere Lake, Six Nations, Tyendinaga, Kahnawá:ke, and Kanehsatà:ke. This work has by and large not been done for hundreds of years by non-Indigenous communities – we are starting from zero, and thus even if prioritizing our own territorial autonomy seemed ethical, it would not be likely to be strategic because settler communities in a settler society have much less structural conflict with the colonial system. It does not make us weaker to prioritize the fight for the territorial autonomy of communities of which we are not a part. It makes us stronger, if by doing so we build relationships that contribute to revolutionary contexts in which the goals of settler revolutionary networks converge with those of anti-colonial Indigenous groups. Toward a stronger potential for joint struggle against the colonial state.

Our environmental politics must foreground material responses to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ land, for the sake of the planet and as part of a broader commitment to anti-colonial politics. It is dangerous to slip towards a “back to the land” politics, as Rattachements does, because these approaches and projects at best sidetrack us, and at worst set the stage for the development of twisted settler claims to Indigenous land. These kinds of claims will shatter the relationships we should seek with anti-colonial Indigenous allies, and risk strengthening settler reactionary tendencies that we should be fighting. If we see ourselves as aiming to engage in joint struggle with Indigenous communities against the colonial state, we will know that what makes our movements stronger is when our comrades are strong, and our relationships with them are strong.

If we focus on the material realities of settler colonialism and the real ways in which it continues to structure our lives, options, and resources, we can develop more effective strategies by asking what our differing social positions allow and disallow, and how we might put these differences to work for common goals. Mike Gouldhawke explains that “people think of settler as a personal identity but it’s more about a categorical relation between a social subject and settler states.”[20] As La Paperson says, the term settler (and native, and slave) describe “relations of power with respect to land. They sound like identities, but they are not identities per se.”[21] Instead of an attempt to flee these labels, we should put our time to better use and focus on changing the conditions producing those relations of power.

Social position as the sole lens of analysis for developing revolutionary strategy is of course insufficient. It matters deeply how people, no matter what their lives are like now, want the world to look like in the future. However, we need to be able to see and understand the different material realities of those around us in order to have any hope of those realities changing in the world we want to build together. Seeing these realities for what they are, and why they are, shows us that the relationships settlers build with the land are far less important than the ones we dismantle. It is clear that supporting the resurgence of Indigenous territorial autonomy needs to be a greater priority than building a territorial autonomy of our own. The question becomes how to build and sustain formations that can offer long term support and solidarity to Indigenous people struggling against the colonial state, and how best to cultivate a politics that will continue to respond to the shifting contexts, relationships, and terrain of that joint struggle toward self-determination and an end to capitalism, colonialism, and Canada.


[1] Rattachements is available in French here: https://contrepoints.media/fr/posts/rattachements-pour-une-ecologie-de-la-presence , and in English here: https://illwilleditions.com/re-attachments/

[2] Inhabit is available here: https://inhabit.global

[3] To be clear, for myself and many others, we saw ourselves as “initiating” specific actions in response to explicit calls for such activity, in response to changing contexts that we thought demanded it, and in at least the case of the rail blockades, very clearly directly inspired by already ongoing Indigenous initiatives. I use the phrase “settler-initiated” not to take credit for the events of what was very clearly an Indigenous-led movement, but rather to note that there is a real difference between those actions seen by supporters and adversaries as taken by Indigenous communities and those recognized as settler solidarity actions.

[4] It should be noted that the communes they describe are essentially nice places to live where people share meals and daily activities and talk to eachother, and not necessarily communes on a scale where they would produce meaningful reorganizations of the economy or social reproduction. It is reasonable to assume that shift in scale is desired.

[5] Which they call colonial-modernity

[6] Page 17 of A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement by James Horrox

[7] A Living Revolution 18

[8] A Living Revolution 18

[9] A Living Revolution 19

[10] Another example of this kind of communal settlement that I learned about during the writing of this text is the Finnish socialist settlement of Sointula, located on the territory of the ‘Namgis First Nation. The village was established in the early 1900s on so-called Malcolm Island in British Columbia.

[11] The English translation uses the word habitable rather than liveable.

[12] https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/100-years-of-land-struggle

[13] I do not wish here to forward a romanticized view of Indigenous peoples as never exploiting the land, as the Red Paper cautions against doing on page 60. Rather I wish to remind us that without Indigenous peoples’ ability to steward the land, the destruction of capitalism alone would still leave us without the intergenerational knowledge to care for it in effective ways. https://redpaper.yellowheadinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/red-...

[14] Conversely, critiques of anti-blackness and slavery are often not well integrated into analysis coming out of settler radical networks here in Canada compared to in the US. This makes it even worse that Inhabit also makes no reference to this kind of critique or analysis either.

[15] By pre-existing claims, I am referring both to Indigenous claims to land as well as longstanding claims by groups such as the Republic of New Afrika.

New Afrikans And Native Nations ( Roots of The New Afrikan Independence Movement ) – Chokwe Lumumba

[16] Available in French here: https://contrepoints.media/posts/chasse-a-la-chasse-recentes-mises-en-acte-de-la-souverainete-anishinabee , and in English here: https://territories.substack.com/p/hunting-the-hunt

[17] It is worth noting that the English and French versions differ somewhat significantly. Whether due to large errors of translation or intentional changes in anticipation of an Anglophone American readership, the closest sentence in the English version reads: “The question of how to inhabit concerns any living being in any given place.” This is a major difference.

[18] #ShutDownCanada was a massive, broad, and heterogeneous Indigenous-led movement. A large catalyst was the militarized RCMP raid on Wet’suwet’en land defenders protecting their home from Coastal Gas Link pipeline construction last winter. In that context, a number of explicit calls for solidarity actions were put out including by Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, and specific camps on the land such as the Gidimt’en checkpoint. Despite these very clear and explicit calls to action, I think that some of the hesitancy of some sympathetic settlers to participate in settler-initiated solidarity actions came from a belief that all actions needed to either be Indigenous-led or explicitly endorsed or approved by an Indigenous person. I believe Indigenous critiques of the ways that settlers participate in anti-colonial organizing are important. I believe that it is crucial to consider how one’s actions might be perceived by or have consequences for Indigenous communities when planning solidarity actions. However, sacrificing basic security principles of “need to know” in order to obtain an Indigenous stamp of approval on a risky settler-initiated action seems like an especially egregious form of tokenism. That our organizing communities in Montreal are often majority or exclusively made up of settlers is something to be examined and addressed on a more foundational level rather than attempting to hide it by seeking an endorsement of our choices after the fact. I could be wrong, but my assumption from this winter was that some settlers sympathetic or supportive of #ShutDownCanada were worried about the risks of participating in solidarity actions and used the fact that some actions were settler initiated to avoid having to take risk and join the blockade. I think this is unfortunate and is something that must be changed in part by clearer anti-colonial analysis coming out of settler networks.

[19] Limited record exists of other speeches to the media, but this is one example. https://contrepoints.media/en/posts/declaration-du-blocage-de-saint-lamb...

[20] https://twitter.com/M_Gouldhawke/status/1345150065103388673

[21] https://manifold.umn.edu/read/a-third-university-is-possible/section/e33...

Thoughts? Email: anotherword@riseup.net

photo: Jonathan Lampel via Unsplash

There are 169 Comments

I'm down for deterritorializing, not for MORE territories, duh. But I'm wondering if that's the only part these elitist Tiqquntard radiculls didn't get from D & G.

To those supportive of Inhabit (as there's at least two well-known visiting this site), I send you another big warm finger up yo ass. Like Tiqqunards didn't fuck up the anarchist milieus enough in France, so they gotta fuck up anything that gets close to this in US/Canada. But I know what kind of White privileged trustfundies they are IRL, coz I hung out with them for a while. If it wouldn't be for their cars/trucks, they'd only be a bunch of bored suburban kids.

re france, talk to friends from nddl zad

in general: consider the disappearance of the individual into the commune. of absorbing everything that is good (and nothing that is bad!) that is already being explored by other radicals and repackage it with delicious branding for all your customers to consume. anarchy is/was never the goal. only more customers and the comfort of thriving on the margins of the present world. or else.

great answer which in fact just makes you sound like a fatneck. imagine being this committed to importing fake political divisions from europe

how are the divisions, or differences let's say, fake?

since we're talking about importations, it seems to me that a source of the problem is the importing of an ideology and strategy from Europe (from French tiqqunists in particular), which are hostile to any understanding of social position and heavily oriented around taking control of territory, into the settler colonial context of Canada or the US and settler-dominated radical networks in those countries.

which is not to say there aren't a number of valid critiques of this tendency proper to its development in France.

one of the reason i love this website are all the beautiful forms of imagery rooted in slang!

As far as the divisions...that's kinda the more historically rooted (think the USA with the federalists/anti-federalists, confederacy, etc.) definition of identity politics, before that phrase really came into usage.

And i'd have to say the fatneck's look at the tiqqunists seems pretty solidly conforming with how i saw them when i was into their writing, some sort of philosophical cabal type thing ("Hello"), but in reality prefers to be this communizing/consumer type of identity. Of course, the mystique did catch my eye, but did clear look like some different version of the-cool-kid store, to borrow one of their translated phrases.

in an episode of abang a! said he was one of the authors. they all took turns writing over what each other wrote. true story.

is fatneck a term used to describe a muscular neck that became that way through the willful resistance against bowing and/or pressured fellatio from charismatic, wealthy communard bros? i don’t speak sooner please clarify.

Not quite. Fatneck is an ableist slur referring to people who developed thyroid problems due to the communard bros confiscating their iodine-rich fruits and vegetables they grew with their own labour "for the commune," while they themselves grew nothing themselves because they were "busy writing" or "giving talks".

"imagine being this committed to importing fake political divisions from europe"

Imagine being okay with importing anything from Europe.

Their earlier paradigm of "being everywhere" literally became a form of memetic, networked imperialism, that is integrative and brutally collectivistic in nature.

They're literally the Invasion of the Body Snatchers for the Left. The CLASSIC stuff of Cold War anti-commie paranoia. Infinite polycules of soulless college White normies who don't think for themselves but follow a hive mind instead. Apparent absence of feelings (love and pleasure, what is that?) yet thinly-veiled spring-loaded resentment just waiting to splode in the face of those evil Individuals through their kangaroo courts. I wonder if they get royalties out of the whole cancel culture, as they may have invented it..

Another funny I got from the former ZAD: when they sing -in choral of course- they sound like a choir of T-800s! But who knows if they're really Humans? Who knows...

I'm surprised this critique comes from a text on IGD. It's welcome, even tho it doesn't addresses all the problems described down here. I'd sure take the old-school anarcho-left any day against those spooky neo-autonomists if they'd be two opposite doors out of a room (but the Stirner in me is whispering that they may constitute the room as a whole!).

Contrepoints is the same internet 2.0 Vanity Fair horseshit started by the infamous Lundi AM, meaning.. I can't even fucking view their site without the Javasnitches (good!). They might have tried to replace Mtl Counter-Info but it didn't seem to have worked too well... Color me surprised.

So as some of you know and also despise, I've been in the ZAD NDDL on two rather long occasions and can confirm that everything's being said about the Appelistas is true. I wasn't around during the last wave of eviction where two thugs from the Appeliste gangs beat up a lonely punk from the "East", one of few remaining greener anarchists in the area dominated by communists, but I was totally not surprised when I've read these news.

There's zero, absolutely nothing good getting sucked into this cult, just like any other cult, and it's just too bad that a few who gravitate around Anews are locked on this Ship of Fools (the Commune). Of course as usual they want boring things like dual power for their gang. Yawn. I know, they aren't the worse cult around, and there may be some nice people whose ego still has yet to flourish beyond the Imaginary Party's territorializations; tho as with cults in general they're really just a tighter more intense archipelago of the greater inland empire.

I'm (spiritually) with the A! clan who are rather into getting lazy, "coping" (lol), doing conversations when possible and enjoying the beauties but also the hardships of life. Nietzsche repruhzent, brotha.

"Only good system is a sound system."
- graf found at the Köpi, East Berlin

and even if we accept that it was a random beating because they're appelistas ... which seems unlikely?!! can somebody explain to me how we're suddenly accepting as anarchists that because they read things, it caused the violence?

is there another claimed reason? like normal beef or a transgression? isn't it strange that those key details are missing from the story?

"we're suddenly accepting as anarchists that because they read things, it caused the violence?" No one has said that.

Tho some theories and ideologies provide with a level of moral legitimation to this kind of violence. Especially those like this one, that rejects the very existence of the individual and views the world as only groupings driven by communal interests to which no moral limits or principles are even addressed. Their goal is conquest, to take territory, always more. To be "everywhere". Ergo, nothing else than neo-colonialism.

Even more problematic when you realize how these groupings consist of privileged White people, who side with land owners and are okay with the cops.

appears you missed the point of the statement: people reference the beating and car trunking and I'm asking why I should accept as a given that reading tiqqun inspired writing is why those people beat that person and put them in a trunk. that seems the least likely reason to beat and trunk somebody ... it's an occam's razor type thing.

turf battle in the ZAD, on the other hand, makes perfect sense. turf battles predate tiqqun by about 7000+ yrs.

setting aside tiqqunists, im beyond tired of the crying and whining over a single assbeating / "kidnapping." the pearl-clutching makes me so embarassed to think i nominally share a tendency with some of ya. none of us are made of glass and the whole thing is so overblown. it barely rises above the level of a prank.

imo those who are so outraged over a little rough stuff should stick to phonebanking

If it was the other way around and, some anarchists roughed up and kidnapped some tiqqunist, no one would care.

I forgive the Appelista cultists for not just this violence on an isolated anarchist who dared being critical. but also:

- being colonialist totalitarian fucktards in the ZAD, importing their ugly prefab houses and chopping off part of the remaining forest land for no reason, in order to build their camps that look just like labor camps;

- siding with the remaining landlords in some covert schemes for years;

- burning thousands in ACIPA funds for their cars (and what else, I don't wanna know);

- partying wild, packed by the dozens in one of their country house just as a hundred other zadistes were fighting the riot cops near the official town center, and laughing at my face like careless rich kids as I was informing them that they might need support,

- slashing the tires of the few bikes in the zone (...but we burned some of their cars anyways, so that's fine)

- being all around deceptive fucks...

Yes. All these sins I forgive, of course! They don't even to have apologize, much less admit their deeds. It's cheap!

No wonder I can't get a good answer on what the criticism is: I wonder how many of these commenters even realize they haven't said any actual information and it's all just wild conjecture and vague anti-commie shit or cult accusations ...

Anyway, the writing makes better points about how it's an inherent problem to talk about building things and territory in the context of colonialism but then I have to ask why we're singling out any one, vaguely defined group for that? Since every settler has this problem staring them in the face? Every day?

Like, how does being an "appelist" even work? Is it if you distro the writing? think I'm becoming more wary of this vague accusation.

THE APPELISTS ARE COMING! THEY USE FRENCH WRITING TO SAY THE SAME SHIT AS EVER! ITS TERRIBLE!

wtf everybody ... seriously

with the bogus division between commies/individualist distinction, but lets not get ahead of ourselves

land ownership is a huge problem for everyone besides the very rich, and the problem is confounded for anarchists, because anarchists take it even a step further...they see that they dont really own anything, because if they dont work to pay the taxes for the land they buy it gets taken away from them. This kinda excludes anarchists from really making an impact on the world besides trash social media accounts, no?

Overall the tiqqunists make things really strange for the alienated people they want to help with their culty jubberish, but beyond that i dont know what to say about it.

yeah, I mean, there's lots of opinions on the writing and some very valid criticisms of how theory from europe has to answer for some shit it probably wasn't designed to grapple with but that all seems like ...normal shit to me? not cause for a weird micro-mccarthyism in the @ space. it's fukin 2021 and we're still drinking communist hysteria koolaid? as if that's our biggest problem?!

but please, someone with more info enlighten me, if I'm missing something

in your head! The conflict between anarchy and communism is a pretty old one, probably around 100 years now...seeing a lot of shit that comes out of commie-structured ways of thinking and debates, i don't have any problem thinking of it [communism] as an authoritarian ideology.

Among MANY other authoritarian ideologies...it's one thing to start genocidal wars and torture people out of anti-communist statecraft, it's another to talk about communism in a derogatory light....

Taking aside the fact that China is a successful totalitarian socio-capitalist regime that is nowhere incompatible, afaik, with the ideas of Tiqqunians, my biggest concern with these Appelistas is that we're dealing with a communalist cult, not with the proxy invasion by a foreign communist power.

I'll keep the claim for an asymmetrical Maoist contamination as just wild speculation, for now... as if Maoists haven't been preying around for a while already!

"This kinda excludes anarchists from really making an impact on the world besides trash social media accounts, no?"

No.

What other impact can you have on the world through private or communal land property that isn't the very same perpetuation of the old problem? Tell me.

lumpentroll, why are you so entitled to being spoonfed drama and also interpretation of texts and ideas you have clearly not read yet rush to the defense of because the magical word 'communism' appeals (appels) to you? okay you aren't satisfied with what people are saying here, but do realize nobody here is writing for your understanding or to change your mind which is clearly already made up.

whatever anon, you can insist this is bad faith if you like but I've been hearing this same vague shit for years now and I'm becoming suspicious of it, simple as that. I'm absolutely entitled to better info than anything I see here (the comments, not the writing which i'm inclined to agree with most of).

So which is it? just drama? or are the appelists some dire threat to the individual? also, strange framing. people make vague assertions and if they're challenged on vague assertions, that's because of entitlement? innnteresting.

you've been hearing about shit concerning a thing for years and haven't looked into it enough to figure it out? totally sounds like "good faith".

let us google that for you...

oh I've tried and mostly, I see the same conjecture currently on display here.

something something "they ruined the ZAD", something something "they're taking over montreal", they're trust fund anarchists, all the usual canards on display. if you aren't just being a complete asshole yourself, surely you could at least see why this pattern of vague accusations becomes suspicious over time, to people viewing this from afar?

also you've assumed I haven't read the stuff and that I'm supportive of it because anything that's vaguely communism I totally throw myself on a sword for?

here's a better theory: anyone who understand history knows to be very creeped out by vague accusations that attempt to create "the other".

Perhaps everything isn't meant to be neatly reported on for your consumption?

the best text in English on the ZAD: https://zad.nadir.org/IMG/pdf/splash3-letter.pdf

One of many passages I could have pulled: "... And here, I come to what I believe was the real target during these events: a certain dynamic of a dominant minority within the occupation movement. One that considers the media allies, that chooses to organize in priority with hierarchical, reformist organizations, that wants control and a beautiful image of the zone, imposing hiking trails and clearing the barricade road, that sells the ZAD in bookstores as the ungovernable “commune,” but that works on a daily basis to allow nothing to escape its control, that is scornful towards the masses of squatters while taking advantage of the strength they produce... basically, they act like shitty politicians."

so vague!

yes, that's definitely just a bunch of assertions but I very much appreciate you digging up the source material.

"that's definitely just a bunch of assertions"

You're a fucking clown.

do you not get that people stating their interpretations of events are assertions, and what makes an accusation not an assertion is examples of actual behavior (even then, could be open to interpretation)?
people get accused of things all the time, including projects that are near and dear to my heart, and people decide to believe those accusations because they like the people making them, not because there is any reality to them.
you might want to start calling people names and consider your critical thinking skills.
it's really hard for anyone not there to know what happened, as is frequently the case. but rather than stomp your foot and say you should believe these things because someone said them, perhaps we can all acknowledge the limitations of long-distance information gathering?

No. Everything is an assertion then. Everything is interpreted then. Troll calling corroborated, lived account a simple assertion is simply petty and false. Why discuss anything at all if we can't ever believe anything? You make no sense.

At night the sun is in the sky and it is green and everybody enjoys it.

You've read the entire thing already and call it "just a bunch of assertions" or your haven't yet read it and are commenting anyway? You say this from North America having never been to NDDL ZAD?

well I meant the quoted portion in the post but you know, there's quite a lot of hostility on display in this thread! all of which is just making me more and more fascinated by how weird everyone is about this topic tbh.

keeping in mind, no amount of smashing on your keyboards affects me in the slightest. i'm a relatively unpleasant person :)

Read the piece. Talk to people who were there. Be less smug.

"what’s at play here on the ZAD is more nuanced than rupture with Tiqqunists or not. For me, they can be objective allies*, we’re stronger together against our common enemies, diversity of tac-tics, all that. But I don’t think it’s possible to work or ally with any group where their end goals are hidden and they work to increase their power through invisibility and conscious manipulation. Nor with any group whose positions range from disdain to active sabotage to mafia tactics in relationship to anti-authoritarian organizing."

Lookie here? the fucking translator is making a very similar point to my own. This isn't about theory at all in their opinion. Shall I keep reading? YES PLS. Shall I ever be less smug? FUCK NO. EAT MY SHIT. VICTORY LAP. ETC

thx again for digging up source material! really appreciate that

You're welcome. Your assertion of the translator's somewhat similar assertion is an assertion and quite clearly false cherry picking that doesn't call for all call caps smugness or shit eating threats. I am the translator. Your interpretation is incorrect. You might want to start working on your reading comprehension and critical thinking skills.

oh interesting! ok, well I'll have to take your word for several things there. anon stuff. lots of trolls here.

it's too bad, I would have more questions for you but I doubt you're interested in discussion.
I also don't have any way of separating which anons contributed to my caustic tone but I really do appreciate the info and the translating work if you are in fact that person.

There are many other texts representing other perspectives on that situation. And not all of them let interpersonal conflict override any discussion a greater strategy. When reading Splash and other texts put out by those camps within the ZAD, try finding positive position or greater strategy. It doesn't exist because it wasn't ever their priority. The only focus was maintaining, in the present, a very particular way of life defined by a hyper specific morality that was actually too fantastical and delicate to exist beyond that very particular time and place.

Anyway here are some other texts that were less focused on maintaining those bubbles. They do not necessarily contradict what the authors of Splash say -- those conflicts were all very real -- but they are concerned with pointing to something greater than the little world the authors of Splash wished they could keep frozen in time:
https://illwilleditions.com/being-in-the-zone/ 
https://crimethinc.com/2018/04/23/one-but-many-movements-two-translation...
https://ill-will-editions.tumblr.com/post/185066678669/the-long-1960s-an...

Hi everyone. Somebody please explain your critiques of Tiqqunists. Act like I don't know anything about anarchist scene drama. Just tell me what's problematic, irritating, frustrating, shitty, and/or ineffective about them.

For how many comments there are here, very little has actually been said.

these comments are attached to an article, for one. “start there”.

I don't know what's problematic, irritating, frustrating or shitty about them, but I can definitely speak to their effectiveness. Ever since they came into existence there has been a marked exponential increase in lived communism and spread anarchy. The insurrection is coming so hard. Anarchists are just jealous that they are not as effective.

Ever since they came into existence there has been a marked exponential increase in lived communism and spread anarchy. The insurrection is coming so hard. Anarchists are just jealous that they are not as effective.

Hahahahaha! This made my day.

But it's true! Because some Tiqqunians STOLE my wife to their polycule and fucked her for several nights and ever since she's been laughing at me for my poor sex skills so I had no choice but to join Antifa and later on Anti-civ when I found out that Antifa was 1000% created by the Tiqqun global conspiracy... Ganggang politics are so hard these days, pfew!

People will have different notions of what is at the base of the divide. These days I think it is simply a difference with regard to means and ends. As an anarchist I believe in a correspondence between means and ends. Tiqqunism takes the position that the ends justify any means ("Only that which impedes the increase of our strength is bad." -- Appel, Proposition V; their obsession everywhere with "usages"). It is possible that our ends/goals are also in contradiction, however we have little to go on to judge their actual end goals, but lots of evidence of the means they find appropriate.

Also, they want to go up to someone about to use a molly during a riot and say "that’s not part of our menu here", before having a "contest of wills" to get them to stop. source : https://illwilleditions.com/rhythm-and-ritual/

ok sure, I'm with you for the means and ends relationship. fully agree. but this "they" as if there's a central office and a party line and all the things. its creepy as shit.

also ... how did you do such a bad job of interpreting that writing you linked? the anecdote is about how some idiot failed on the molly throw, fell short and hit their own people in the demo?! how do you leave out that context?

I read the full article, not just the paragraph before the quote I took, as you seem to have. Before that section, the authors state a "Portland model" of street tactics that concludes with "Not Molotovs". Seems like a reasonable interpretation that they are against molotov use in their context, want to impose that rule within crowds, and are using someone's major fuck-up to justify that (instead of proposing that people practice throwing in a safe environment, for example).

I'm with you on moving away from the abstract use of "they". Tiqqunists literally refer to themselves as a party, though, and my understanding is that at least the scene in France has a hierarchy and what amount to party lines. I think "they" has been used in this thread as a shorthand for "many of the people who identify with tiqqunist ideas", but this set of people can be pretty heterogeneous, with positions that contradict each other, and is made up of unique individuals who should be engaged with as such even if they believe they have put their lives inseparably in common, etc.

fair enough, my bad on the first point.

I don't know shit about france other than the obvious stuff about how a legacy of authoritarian communist entryism might actually be a valid concern.

This side of the pond, I'm far more suspicious of the people who want me to ignore everything I actually see and insist that I should be concerned about phantasmal commie cults in 2021, of all things. I'm not even sure if this shit is a scheme or more of a weird paranoia that springs out of people's anxiety as a naturally occurring phenomena.

There's at least one gibbering loon and/or troll in the comments here who brought up china and that's where the road goes! Always worth noticing when talking points are ... adjacent to reactionary ones...

Tiqqun have been published by MIT's Semiotex(e) for years. In France, it's been sold at the FNAC, an equivalent to Barnes & Noble. They are establishment-friendly, mainstream "commies", yet if their written goal by now is just the same-old totalitarian narrative of power accumulation through hegemony and horizontal integration. I ain't sure they're even communist beneath and beyond how they are structured and organize in real life.

This is no weird paranoia. This is what they are. Just avoid them like the rest of the State, do your own anarchy whatever it means to you, and everyone will be fine.

What else exactly do you need in terms of arguments or explanation? Much has been said already in the comments and a lot more in that essay above...

I feel that you may just be trolling people here (no wait!) to extract more energies/infos from us, or perhaps you're also in denial?

You got a specific question?

bro not to like call your dumb or anything but the French state literally tried to charge the alleged authors of coming insurrection with terrorism based on the book.
actually I guess if you think that’s “establishment friendly” I’m gonna have to call you dumb

- The "French State" is not just a uniform body, but just like in the US or Canada, it's 2 or 3 factions struggling for power.

- I knew already about this trial that lasted a few years. The Appelistes in France already had their people in local (and who knows, maybe national) politics including at the Tarnac city admin.

- Tbey are not anarchist. And neither anti-establishment. The fact they were the target of a witch hunt nowhere changed that.

"Anti-establishment" strikes me as kind of an empty term, I dunno

I agree they're not anarchists, broadly speaking, but it seems to me that at least some of them want to, like, disestablish some kind of an establishment - y'know, the state or whatever. Maybe they wanna establish themselves as a new establishment, but that's a different critique

States seeking to overthrow States are really just States. You want a better State? I don't.

Only the French government and you claim that the large subculture built up around the text “Call” has a formal hierarchy and party lines. The rest of your dogmatic politics notwithstanding, that idea is pure fabrication.

I was one of the people who wrote "Rhythm and Ritual", and was intrigued by your interpretation. (I originally got to these comments because i think the discussion about how settler-based organizing can most effectively damage colonialism and materially support indigenous "land back!" is really important. I hope that conversation continues, but i also want to address what may be a misunderstanding about R&R.)

The "Portland model" was an attempt to report and label something that i think pretty much anyone in the streets last summer would agree was our actual emergent behavior. It certainly is not my (or anyone's) agenda that we want to impose. It was a specific shared result of actions night in, night out, mostly not "organized" by pre-existing "radicals".

It changed on the 100th night due to a handful of people making a choice that almost no one had any input on or ability to influence, but that affected thousands. Not only that night, but over the months since then, as the experience that night was a factor (among others) in the rapid thinning of numbers.

If molotovs had become part of the repertoire in a way that allowed for broader discussion, preparation, and tactical consideration of how they can be effective, i think the whole thing could have had a much more enlivening outcome. (Interestingly, in an earlier draft of the piece we specifically mentioned that more discussion beforehand and contestation in the streets could help ensure that people had practiced throwing mollies thoroughly -- your point!) And i think even the very process of struggling over it, in debates and in the streets, could have helped people build a deeper sense of strength together, even through frictions and conflicts.

At least, that's the core suggestion of the piece: ideological, abstracted "purism" is less useful than a close attention to what's really working in building our capacity to act.

Here's my question to you: i don't want a proto-state in the streets, or anywhere, because i don't want some small elite imposing their will on others. On the other hand, when thousands of people are in the streets with an established culture of what they do together, and then a couple people do something like throw mollies without any warning at the very beginning way before anyone's ready for confrontation, doesn't *that* impose the will of a few on the whole crowd?

The main point in R&R was that we need some other way to navigate this tension between different forms of elitism, while still supporting people in doing their own thing, and also not having mad bureaucracy. We offered some thoughts about how to get there. What do you think?

"when thousands of people are in the streets with an established culture of what they do together, and then a couple people do something like throw mollies without any warning at the very beginning way before anyone's ready for confrontation, doesn't *that* impose the will of a few on the whole crowd?"

just as "a couple people" do not represent the whole of thousands of people in the street, their decisions to throw fire are no more impositions upon others as any other action or choice. just as your writing here does not represent/reflect on or justify consequence to the entirety of portland-based anarchists.

collision and conflict does exist between any two or more anything.

"we need some other way to navigate this tension between different forms of elitism, while still supporting people in doing their own thing"

what do we look like, academics?

maybe worry less about analyzing and controlling the action of other anarchists.

Good point. In the 400 year history of indigenous confrontation no indìgenous person has ever thrown a molotov cocktail. A mollie just is not and does not have a part in indigenous diplomacy

500+ years

"In the 400 year history of indigenous confrontation no indìgenous person has ever thrown a molotov cocktail. A mollie just is not and does not have a part in indigenous diplomacy"

I'm assuming this is sarcasm, because of course mollies have been used by indigenous people.

That does bring up a point that ties to the article this is all about originally: indigenous communities and direct actions generally have pretty strong means by which to make shared decisions about what tactics are appropriate to a situation, and then try to ensure that those involved work with that or go somewhere else. This has been a point of conflict in the past with the more egoist, individualist anarchist approach.

Do those that criticize the Rhythm and Ritual piece for trying to come up with some way of working through streets tactics in a shared way, also see indigenous direct actions (like the massive pipeline actions last year) as dangerous and controlling?

Regardless of race, community leaders are the purveyors of conciliation and pacification.
Even the experience of resistance against pipeline provided examples of this. Don't speak as if you were there.
500 years + of colonization, ongoing genocide, westernizing, modernization, globalization so thorough, that community leaders everywhere speak the same college educated buzzwords, not some ancient wisdom by virtue of blood quotients or skin tone.

Once, I was at an indigenous-initiated road blockade action, where some friends and I (settlers) were asked to remove our masks by someone from the indigenous community we had been invited to for this action, so that we'd appear a little less threatening to the police that were present. Some people removed their masks. Others went and discussed the issue informally with a small group of indigenous participants/"organizers". Our reasons for wearing masks were explained and understood. In this discussion, someone from the indigenous community told us that it was up to us whether to keep our masks on. There was no "shared decision" on this, but many settlers present kept their masks on, and no one was asked to leave.

Elsewhere, on land where indigenous communities are reclaiming their traditional territory and life ways while blocking development projects, different encampments rely on different tactical repertoires (and different levels of individual autonomy), sharing a struggle but not generally making "shared decisions about what tactics are appropriate". This doesn't arise from some master plan of "composition", but from different individual desires and analysis, which are in tension and conflict at times.

In both these examples, it seems to be the absence of unified decision-making that enables people to remain in situations of struggle together, combining their forces against a common enemy. The sharing of strategic and tactical perspectives is constructive, but trying to impose one on a group of people isn't. Neither is considering a certain perspective less legitimate because it is enacted by a relatively small number of people (a logic that appears to underlie R & R and its authors' comments here). I can't speak from direct experience for Portland, but more often than not, in demos at least, it's the initiative of a few individuals who share trust and mutual knowledge that is desperately needed. To break with the passivity of hundreds of people who showed up with no plan, or with the routine of repeating what happened at the last 10 demos, while the cops refine their crowd control plans in response to a predictable set of tactics.

hmmmm, 7:39, seems like your description of people discussing different tactics (masks), raising concerns, addressing them, and different groups making different decisions is kind of a great example of what R&R was suggesting? after all, it goes at quite some length into the idea of a spokescouncil that doesn't focus at all on making decisions that everyone agrees on, but rather as a way to have discussions and for those that agree to connect with each other and take action. how does this fit with the idea of "imposing on a group of people"? see section "difference and decisiveness" in https://illwilleditions.com/rhythm-and-ritual/

They've fired burning arrows at white folk in wooden forts, homesteads and wagons! These arrows have a range almost 10 times that of a molotov! It was the leading weapon until gunpowder was discovered.

Oh yeah dude, they also tied dynamite to arrows and fired them into crowds of white folk in their wagons. They weren't exactly "nice" people!

"At least, that's the core suggestion of the piece: ideological, abstracted "purism" is less useful than a close attention to what's really working in building our capacity to act."

mafaka my capacity to act is already built-in, i can throw shit with my arm. what abstracted purism? throwing rocks at cops is abstracted purism? stfu peace police

rhythm and ritual? this is a rave, not cheer club, stop pushing your choreography on people, you got two left feet.

By rhythm they mean "march in line to the beat of my drum, frontliners to the front line", by ritual they mean "we are the priestly class, we are the oracles, heed our words".

Sure, you can throw a rock. But can you turn over a police car by yourself?

Can you abolish police by yourself?

We have more capacity to act when we act together, and that requires coordination. It doesn't mean we always have to do it that way, and it doesn't mean we need cops or priests or anything else. But it does require something, and R&R is trying to be thoughtful and creative about what that something is.

"But can you turn over a police car by yourself?"

Why the fuck would I wanna do that? Do I look like Hulk to you?
I see you and your buddies larping at the demos with shields, maybe you're playing The Avengers.
Not my style. What's that for? Not trying to get caught. If car is getting flipped, already got neutralized, I'll let others celebrate.
Hope the prisoner support crowdfunding goes well.
Slashing tires, caltrops, molotov, rock, shot, one person can pull off real easy, one-banger. Burn them in car parks at night with simple delayed incendiary devices, not during day at a demo while wearing a shirt you bought at Etsy. Too soon.

"Can you abolish police by yourself?"

Abolishing is what liberals do when they want to change the name of a system of oppression and switch from an obsolete one to a more effective one, like they did with slavery. Abolition will only come by way of giant meteor, until then, there's conflict.
And you're not my friend, buddy, pal. You're a cop, preacher, teacher, school talent show group dance choreographer wannabe politician. Why you so fixated on making me agree? Haven't you got enough followers already? Take the L.

The kind of coordination to do stuff like turning over a cop car can be found in the moment if you know where to find the flame in people around you. You don't need big organizations, upper-caste networks and cults. All you need is to connect with others at the right time and not be an asshole.

This whole "build the Party" paradigm appears to reflect a social insecurity felt in the minds of their members, and encouraged by an insular closed-mindedness. And this is the point I'm trying to assert in a still unpublished forum entry (about Commune Vs Individual). Individualism is partly about overcoming this social insecurity by being able to step out of your tribal relations, so to relate to another as a person, not as a product of some social scheme.

Birth ain't the only time when we come out into the world.

Back and forths all the time.

what these activists should be doing is trying to expand people's tool sets, rather than become of the generals of social change and street chaos. That means promoting a more "everything is permitted" psychology while also counseling people on cause-and-effect scenarios when they ask for that advice.

"The kind of coordination to do stuff like turning over a cop car can be found in the moment if you know where to find the flame in people around you."

seductive! May ALL OF THE FREAKIN' TOOLS be at least objects of consideration...smashing police cars is a lot easier if you got bats and crowbars though! It will be just as immobilized...

That's a remarkably bad-faith reading of the passage you're referring to. They're trying to imagine a more compositional, co-creative, intelligent way to make tactical decisions as a crowd, and including plenty of caveat that they don't have the answers of what this will look like exactly, and you're just accusing them of being cops. I can't tell if you've misread the passage yourself or if you're intentionally misrepresenting it to others - either way it doesn't evoke trust in your other claims.

As an anarchist, I'm not spending my time attacking people who agree with me on basically everything.

"They're trying to imagine a more compositional, co-creative, intelligent way to ..."

>compositional

Drink!

In come the cultists.

lol you cut it off right before “...make tactical decisions as a crowd...”

haha you mean hive mind, mob mentality, herding, flocking, stampede, kettling, organizing, directing, managing? which is it? crowd does not have a “collective brain”, neither does gut flora!

you can keep getting mad at people not agreeing to use your preferred euphemisms, but you’re in an anarchist website, you don’t have to keep up the act for use, keep addressing the general public with your populist mouthpieces and the crowd with your megaphone or hand signals or flags or loud scolds or gestures.

inb4 further “but we’re GOOD leftitst FOR good things, please don’t be mean to us, we can get normies to be real photogenic on a mass demo and conform to our preferred narrative and that can be really effective and liberating!”

"you can keep getting mad at people not agreeing to use your preferred euphemisms"

Who? I keep getting mad? 12:55 was my first comment in this thread.

You seem confused, 13:37. What do you think the comment at 12:55 was saying? Does it support or oppose Appelista tactics?

it was my mistake replying at two different commenters and not addressing them by mentioning time-stamp. i finished your quote but continued to respond to the person you were responding to.

hi five!

"Does it support or oppose Appelista tactics?"

Is this all about just picking sides?

As a writer of R&R, I can say that no one writing the piece was an "Appelista". I've read some of that work, i like some of it, critique other aspects.

The debate within anarchism about organization is very old. The "O" in the circle-A may mean "Organizing", but the tension with egoist anarchists has been there since the beginning. What does it look like to discuss it with more than just insults?

Definitely ditch the "O". Or maybe let's change what it stands for. "Anarchy is Ornery"

I got so many insults! I got a quote for your next essay from Mikhail Ticoomin "in matters of bootlicking, defer to the bootlicker" I don't know, you might like to quote that next time you want to justify your role as writer or armchair or street organizer.

No one insulting you here is an egoist anarchist, nerd. I ain't gotta read Stirner to figure out I can do what I want without the need of the poetic insinuations of a marxist blog post. I meant "anarchist is order" dung pile of wisdom.

" hive mind, mob mentality, herding, flocking, stampede, kettling, organizing, directing, managing? which is it? crowd does not have a “collective brain”, neither does gut flora!"

In Portland (like in many places) this summer, people developed the mechanism of a super-quick "choose with your feet" selection tool for deciding where to go when we were cut off, when we needed a new target, etc. This was a counter-swooping technique, specifically intended to avoid having a manager class. It had down sides, it wasn't perfect, etc. But it was definitely a step in a more anarchist direction, imho.

it's just me i'm sure, but this article seems to be about how can anarchists, who are also settlers, engage in struggle to get free and do it in such a way as to be in accord with First Nations, Indigenous, Original Peoples of this continent. How can we fight to get free but then not just turn around and recreate settler- colonial dynamics?

I don't have any answers, but that's the conversation i'd like to be having.

The difference is that you read the article, while the rest are knee-jerk responding at the title. It happens everywhere all the time.

"How can we fight to get free but then not just turn around and recreate settler- colonial dynamics? "

what scale are you thinking? if your question is imagining an ATR society-scale freedom, I think there is a too wide (if not impossible) gap between here and there . if the scale is you or I getting free (or at least as close as we can), then it becomes a question of living: decision-making guided by whatever anarchist values inform us.

how are you or I living as colonists? what colony, in the interest of what parent nation? is changing where and how you live settling down, settling in? is migration what makes a settler? I would hope that anyone taking anarchist values seriously would be making decisions that run counter to what are being considered "settler- colonial dynamics." but what are those? I assume they differ from simply obtaining food, water, shelter, social interactivity, and creative endeavors (and protecting the ability to do so) like every other human being on the planet? is the difference being in the service of the colony and upholding its norms? if so, doesn't anarchism/anarchy radically differ by it's very nature, at it's foundation?

Yes, good questions.

I use settler–colonialism just to mean the mindset of the non-indigenous mostly, so I guess not technically correct as to colonies.

But on the other hand, this whole thread of replies up til now was about the European influence on the two groups whose articles are critiqued here, and not about the questions of Indigenous lands and how to be on them and not be a settler. So it would appear to me that a lot of anarchists would rather talk about Europeans and not about Indigenous people.

That's what I mean by settler–colonial.

Anarchists aren't at least by default some aliens; I and those I've known come from a womb, then different social milieus. Due to our language and culttural referents we're more likely to connect with Europeans than Natives, even if I do think there's more interesting things to learn from the lattet.

"It must not be seen as a necessary precondition for decolonization that settlers develop relationships (spiritual or affective) with land that we occupy. Settlers deciding to prioritize building these new relationships with the land does not bring us closer to decolonization. Focusing on settlers’ spiritual or affective relationships to the land as an important part of anti-colonial struggles sidetracks and warpsour ability to focus on the much more central problems of settler colonial Canada. The dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ lands is a partial but crucial piece of struggling against settler colonialism and climate change. Regardless of the politics of the settlers, our relationships with land are most often built through a tactic of land ownership, due to the relative ease of access to the financial means or social connections that allow for this. I am thinking, for example, about the many collective land projects that have been initiated by radical settlers in so-called Quebec, which all involve owning the land. To think of building a land-based spirituality on a foundation of land ownership does not make sense, these relationships would be colonial, not revolutionary. In other words, the relationship between settlers and land must change primarily on a material basis, not a spiritual or affective one. Indigenous peoples have articulated that “Land Back” will give them the power to rebuild knowledge, languages, culture, and autonomy. This is the substance of decolonization; it is crucial that Indigenous peoples be free to develop and regain their relationships with the land rather than settlers taking it upon ourselves to do it in their stead."

There's a lot in this. I'm not sure it is so clear that unlearning being-settler is a wrong move. But I also see it centers settlers.

Elsewhere in this, the idea that land-back will mitigate climate change seems like asking Natives to clean up our mess.

and some of the ones posted in response to it, is that there's just a ton of terminology and vagaries, i tend to prefer anarchist writing that's more specific, concrete, and creatively uses figurative speech/poetry.

it's being said that the articles are the cops of @news, and there's a little bit of truth to this because the articles set the precedent for talking about them in the comment section. The one above is talking about settlers, land, de-colonial politics, but doesn't really propose doing anything other than changing our word usages regarding land struggles.

"The zine, written within and circulating among social circles dominated by white settlers with varying radical politics..."

so i mean, could we use some quotes to talk about the actual zine? I don't have enough time to analytically investigate every single thing connected to what gets posted on here. What is a "white settler" in today's context? We're clearly not talking about lewis and clark.

and a final bit of deconstruction:

"Indigenous peoples have articulated that “Land Back” will give them the power to rebuild knowledge, languages, culture, and autonomy. This is the substance of decolonization; it is crucial that Indigenous peoples be free to develop and regain their relationships with the land rather than settlers taking it upon ourselves to do it in their stead."

so are you now a representative of indigenous people? You can't do it, you can only represent yourself from where you stand at any given time. I'm really into doing this whole "erase the greedy colonial past" thing, but i somehow don't think what constitutes a white or indigenous person is so clear anymore, i think leaving all of the white people out of the land struggle will just come to bite you in the ass, because not all white people are positioned in the same way within historically white capitalism. I personally think it would have been fine if native americans were able to kill and defeat the settlers several hundred years ago, slowing down the colonial project, but that didn't happen, and native americans aren't the only ones who've suffered from the aftermath.

the roots of genocide are in making bureaucratic categories of corporeal human beings, it's sad to watch anarchist sympathizers engage in this so deeply.

No one has time to critically engage with all that gets posted here, no, but then also, no one needs to comment on all articles either.

I quoted the passage I did because to me this is an issue, what does it mean to be white? There is much confusion, does white only refer to skin color? And it only gets more muddled the more people you ask. Like Black, white is a designation that has bureaucratic, historical, ontological and epistemological meanings and it is easy to get stuck in one or the other, making communication difficult.

In this article and the zines it is critiquing, my reading is that white is used a signifier of both skin color and a mind-set or a world view. So, in the tale of the white hunters who wanted to stop logging on the land they hunted on, they took umbrage that the Mi'kmaq, who also want to stop logging, were going to offer use of their land for hunting, but for a fee. The whites then engaged in shenanigans, declaring themselves Indigenous in order to stop the fee.

Connection to the land is not enough for one to declare oneself Indigenous, because connection to the land still implies the land and oneself are two, not one. White in the sense of mind-set still has the notion of ownership. The article is making the point that ownership of a piece of land is the least of what gives one connection to that land. Notions of property and ownership are white ideas. Ownership of land does not automatically impart to a person a sense of ancestral belonging to place. I think unlearning this (white) mode of thinking, or really, learning to think/see differently is part of what those of us with this mind-set could be doing.

As you say though, we of white skin and white ideas are here, we also suffer the scourge of capitalism and the aftermath of genocidal and colonial regimes.

I engage with the ideas in this article because I think, okay, what if we overthrow the whole thing tonight? Tomorrow we are free and hungover from a glorious night of celebration. Then what? Do we continue to use the mind frame that got us into this mess? Do we still deal with our conflicts with notions of property and human supremacy? Because you know it is not only the human that is enslaved and genocided by this regime, it is not only the human that needs to get free.

I believe Indigenous and Black people when they say slavery, genocide and colonialism are ongoing, are not over. What that means for me as a descendant of perpetrators is at the very least not forgetting that. And, of course, in the longer view all of us probably have both perpetrator and victim in our ancestral pasts, but I think trying to come to terms with the past 500 years of shit is the bulk of our conundrum.

i 100% agree with what you just posted! Sorry if i was degrading you in the process of critiquing the post above...just remember that in order to free the animals and a more animal existence, then when writing, try to explain what your talking about in a very concise manner, and don't assume that people are in the know because that's how people can easily use your writing against you.I've learned about tiqqunists from other people in the comment section (a little bit...), but did they really have anything to do with the writing of the article? Just curious.

And i think it's great for white people to figure out how not to fall into the same miserable enslaving crap that their not-so-distant anscestor's did, that has been a huge part of my individualist-anarchist praxis...

thanks

my understanding is this; the article was written about 2 zines that were written by people who perhaps are influenced by Tiqqun but are not themselves Tiqqun.

Nettle... Tiqqun is not a group. Nobody is "Tiqqun". It's two pamphlets that got published a long while back by a collective of French commies, followed by several related publications. I/we refer to "Tiqqunians" as commie people inspired by the writings of this collective, and also connected to their pan-Western network.

So in that sense, it's somewhat clear that Inhabit, Rattachements and Contrepoints are "Tiqqun", even if they aren't. They are part of the Imaginary Party, and if you understand the latter notion, this is what matters. Perhaps we'd be better referring to them as the IP or IC, as this is the only name they ever given themselves.

and unfortunately the seeds they spread keeping getting weirder and more poisonous...

for example "preliminary materials for the theory of the young girl", which is short for "the theory of the young girl", or "the young girl as a tool for capitalization"

The Organs of The Imaginary Party

philosophize now!
we excel in mind fucking!
lets keep making spooks!

Personally these earlier writings were their best and more interesting, tho a lot of not too useful minfuck, especially when it comes to their Bloom and Young Girl theory. Colorful but not very useful. Appel and Tiqqun were great imo, as far as you take it as philosophy of insurgency and social commentary, not as a Bible. It's like reading from a Marcuse or Heidegger or Habermas; a lot of what they did was crap, tho there's some crucial ideas to appropriate.

Their latter writings, at least since the Trial, were the most problematic. Pompous, arrogant, sectarian, shallow, exploitative to already-existing struggles... Conveniently this is when they reached global stardom and establishment recognition.

the works i was citing came from "Tiqqun", an enormous big with some huge words...

i find theory of the young girl to be useful if your a guy who has some ressentiment towards them, as a way of orienting oneself away some perverse fantasies, but probably not something very useful for most people...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiqqun

More precisely it's compilations of several texts by French-Italian commie authors, and some of the people behind the Call were behind it, including our famous couple.

What was the one about something something no future for something something? It appealed to me all those years ago?

"I find theory of the young girl to be useful if your a guy who has some ressentiment towards them, as a way of orienting oneself away some perverse fantasies"

The young girl ain't primarily about this pedo shit you seem to refer to. It's about a shadow archetype found everywhere in the Spectacle, that involves older male figures as well. It does involve the appeal to young girls, or at least explains it.

whatever dude, i understood that essay very well, and i was more or less referring to my own sexual attraction to "young hot girls", which has entranced me since around puberty, i wasn't referring to molesting little girls you fucking idiot. As you said, the essay/booklet was about an archetype which the spectacle uses. Are you against people using archetypes they find in essays and seeing how they apply to their actual experiences? You come off as kinda a dogmatic info-control nerd.

but i just see so much anger and hatred on @news it's a little hard for me to not get caught up in it!

i guess most humans are "info control nerds" anyways...

Thanks Nettle, this is super useful! i really appreciate your work on taking the comments into a more productive direction.

For me, the issue is that becoming part of the land, ceasing to be "white" in the ways you describe, can't be something that someone just decides to do one day. It's a generational process, and it needs a fabric of community, a culture, that supports people living in a profoundly different way.

This is what indigenous people have much more of than "white" people, and one reason why it's so important to prioritize indigenous liberation. For all of us! Because whatever earth cultures "settlers" create, "after the rev" or right here and now, we are going to have to learn a heck of a lot from indigenous folks, and will only be able to grow through strong links of mutual aid.

"For me, the issue is that becoming part of the land, ceasing to be "white" in the ways you describe, can't be something that someone just decides to do one day. It's a generational process, and it needs a fabric of community, a culture, that supports people living in a profoundly different way."

is part of that fabric an explanation of why identity politics is so immobilizing and destructive to all peoples? Having read large portions of the article, i somehow don't think that it is.

You can cease to be white, i know that society considers me to be white, yet I have scottish/irish ancestry, so i got all these freckles that THROUGH A HYPOTHETICAL SOCIETY LENSE, i can also be black. No, I'm not gonna pay all that fucking money to decide who I am.

Maybe another first step for "white people" (as you and I appear to be) is to refuse letting the boxes that other people want to put us in with "identity" effect us? Dude, stop feeling guilty about all this shit you weren't alive for and had no control over, don't depend on some long inter-generational process to be become part of the land! I have some really simple methods so you can become "part of the land" right now:

-throw a snowball at a comrade

-get them nuero-transmitters a-firin' by thinking about how you can live a MORE PLEASURABLE life. Your nuerotransmitters came from the earth, respect them, respect yourself!

-start planning for a garden this winter

-GO OUTSIDE! Look around at the trees, climb the trees.

-listen to the birds

-attack a lumber company...well, here we are getting removed from the land, but this is a possible method for preventing harmful soil erosion in your local area.

you aren't going to get rid of your whiteness and "go back to the land" through writing essays about identity politics, word usages, "settlers", etc., you're just building a giant archive of activist literature that may or may not get read after you die.

You can't get rid of your whiteness, the idea you have that you can with the right ideology is actually very colonialist, but as someone historically separated from your ancestral land base you can have a relationship to the earth

rid of it with ideology". What i was alluding to is that "my whiteness" is a figment of human imagination, nothing to praise or be ashamed of. The same goes for privilege: why should i envy others for the power, "freedom", and popularity they've amassed in this society, or others for that matter? Wouldn't that be a squandering of my privilege rather than annihilation of the concept?

So, what's colonialist about denying my whiteness? Didn't some black liberationists have something to say about eliminating "the white race" as a concept alone? Why are you reverting the conversation back to our different "white" skin colors, isn't that incredibly fucking racist? Why must we FOREVER be enslaved to the RIDICULOUS ASSUMPTIONS of our ancestors? Why the fuck are you now saying that i'm the colonialist? Aren't we using the white man's words, the white man's internet, and the white man's identity confusion/politiks?

you can't eliminate ideologies by writing on @news, but you can use ideologies to help you orient your life around what you want out of living.

I agree, this is going to be an inter-generational project.

The anarchist in me bristles at the idea of prioritizing another's liberation over mine. We get free together or we don't get free, is how I frame it. The nature of the box I am in because of who I am, who my parents were, who my ancestors were, and what they have done to this world (worlds) is not the same as the nature of the box Indigenous people (or Black people) are in, so how we get free may look different. But all these boxes are interconnected or interrelated, they depend on each other for making us all not-free.

Part of my task then is to re-member, to know the history of my people and the atrocities they have perpetrated, not in order to wallow in paralyzing guilt but in order to take responsibility for the mess they made. Someone has to clean it up. This invitation to forget is part of the problem. Indigenous people have to live in the ruins of their world, ruins that my people made. Keeping that in mind is part of the undoing of it.

but further inviting the other person (who i very much thank for coming down in the comment section to work out disagreements) to not get so hung up in identity politics, and the semi-imaginary boxes.

I really don't understand how i can really clean up the mess when my lifestyle produces trash...i have that goal in mind, to produce more and more food of what i eat...for a "white person", one mess that CAN be cleaned up are the GUILT-LADEN POLITICS.

BECAUSE IF YOU ARE WHITE, WHEN YOU GET INVOLVED IN ACTIVISM, WRITING, STREET DEMOS, ANY SORT OF WORK, THE WHITE SHAME WILL FALLOW YOU UNLESS YOU FIND PEOPLE WHO ARE LITTLE MORE COMPASSIONATE AND SENSIBLE, AND THE MORE PEOPLE WE HAVE TRYING TO PLAY ID-POL (I'M ALSO LOOKING AT YOU, PROUD BOYS), THERE WILL BE MORE BAGGAGE AND TRASH ACCUMULATED ABOUT BEING A SO CALLED "PRIVILEGED WHITE PERSON".

And as far as forgetting: it has been said that it's a sign of good health to be forgetful.

Can't spell Rattachements without rat and ache. Authoritarian fucks. Appelistas can inhabit deez.

So since politely asking isn't how we do things on @news, I antagonized some generous soul in to this answer. What a lovely moral to that story everybody!

Appelista is a broad characterization of the allegedly shady leftist political activist with connections and middle class roots. A slightly more complicated version of the trust fund anarchist trope. Depending on who you ask, they ARE the state, as well as terrorists according to the state but no matter what, the group think says the cool kids should hate them because DUH, DO YOU EVEN ZAD BRO? FUKIN CLOWN! LEARN WHICH ASSERTIONS TO CHALLENGE, BEECH!

Compared and contrasted with the hobo squatter kids, more lumpen, etc. "Autonomists". All of which is a bunch of boring, ossified european crap about class that I'll go back to not giving 2 shits about, now that I have an answer.

Then we take the two gordian knots of european class antagonism and trying to live as anarchists within settler colonialism ... and tie those two fuckers together because fuck it, why not?! Always new and exciting ways to make ourselves miserable, right?!

cool, cool, I can feel the dread of the next decade or so stretching out before me! good times

I certainly hope we as anarchists are NOT trying to live WITHIN settler-colonialism.

My point was not that this convo about Tiqqun, et al, should not happen, but that it is not related to (or only tangentially related to) the article under which it did happen.

oh, didn't think you were saying that. my thing is I'm pretty well acquainted with all the who-counts-as-a-settler discussions and didn't know shit about all this french crap that's slowly filtering to far away places where more than a few of us are confused by it.

as for being within or outside the state, just meant we're all being subjected to varying degrees. or I would have to scoff at anyone who claims to have completely escaped! more power to'em if they're flying below the radar or carving out some little bubble of autonomy but it's no small thing.

A new word invention to consider Post-IdPol or CulturePolitics, CulPol for short.

I agree that the progress of a more unified world view needs a term which transcends identìty politics, but I'm not sure how that fits with the individualists and also how it avoids the label of totalitarian populism.
And culture politics is nothing new, it goes back to antiquity when borders and walls were first constructed, so I suggest you look deeper into MY new term, its Individual Associates, or InAss for short.

" a more unified world view needs a term which transcends identìty politics, but I'm not sure how that fits with the individualists and also how it avoids the label of totalitarian populism."

Just quit dissing humanism (at least the non-speciesist version), and accept the scientific reality that we're all part of the same family? This is both compatible with individualism, to some extent, while not being populist by default.

or dismiss the transcendent idealism of humanism along with the reductive materialism of "scientific reality..."

What do you mean by the "non-speciesist version" of humanism?

"the progress of a more unified world view"

is that actually what you desire? progress and a unified world view?

(are you one anon or more than one? can't tell, kinda don't care.)

My part of this conversation was not about guilt or identity politics. You, anon, are the one (er, several?) who brought it up and keeps bringing it up.

so are you about to ignore the long chains of the longs slews of guilt-enforced ideas in the essay posted? As i revealed, they all lead back to a semi-fictitious white settler, and it sounds like more statues were torn down which is nice.

come on now...i may be a "white male", but the world doesn't revolve around me. It doesn't revolve around you either. You also shouldn't blame your fellow anarchists for a shared and alienated condition until they give you a good reason for it.

Here's another comment on the essay: nobody can go back to the land when we haven't left it yet.

I would say no one can go back to land they were never on in the first place.

Well said, the concept of "land-ownership" is obsolete. Now the new occupation requires the discovery of the psyche's untapped terrain.

but that's okay. No one here is on-the-spot about everything.

The whole paradigm of Back to the Land, that was somehow abandoned back in the '80s but might be undergoing a much-needed renewal, was never about country people literally going back where they came from after a shitty urban experience. It is an UTOPIA that rejects a level of urbanization and tech development (dependence on mass-produced technology and consumerism) and often driven by a different spiritual mindset, from hippies to fundamentalist Christians or Jews, so some socialist or anarchistic communes. The utopia understated a level of return to a better state, before urbanization took over, but in the case of hippies this led to a plethora of experiments, more than traditionalism.

So now what's the possibly-developing new movement imo migrates from "Back to the Land" to "Land Back". It can mean different things in the real world given the context, but involves negation of colonial patterns like domination, domestication and APPROPRIATION. That's the place where many hippie communes didn't venture.

that's my goal with rural life, is a slowing down of or separation from civilization at least. However, the reason the hippies failed in their experiments is what they did often took the structure of religious cults. The un-doing of hierarchy in real world situations is a very complicated process in terms of the clashing of wills.

Let's avoid further misundertanding a religion as a hierarchy or even a cult. The fundamental definition of religion is very vague and open to diverse arrangements. it's really just a bunch of people communing around shared beliefs and/or values.

There's a very clear reason, at least in some regions, why hippies often took the structure of religious cults. Beyond the fact some of them were actual fucked up cults, there are legal benefits in the official status as religion, like a quicker way to start a land trust, tax avoidance on the communal property, and the nonprofit requirement that makes capitalist schemes harder. That's, at least, the situation in my area, where many hippie communes turned into religions due to that loophole.

So anarchism as religion? Why the fuck not!? I'm afraid that already is one... ;-)

But that is only the legalist approach... which in itself isn't as favorable as easy as it looks. I'd personally be rather favoring squatting some abandoned place that's not looked-after by any sort of speculation.

have a religious component to them, anarchism is big enough that one could safely call it a religion!

your laying out a foundation for using the things that we wouldn't like as anarchists, but the issue is always you have to really know what your doing in order to keeping those things from draining you.

I guess we could start the Official Anarchist Cult, and we could buy a house with a bunch of land (10+ acres) and collect donations from people online, and then do these joking/ironic religious rituals where we take a dollar from the donation pot, burn it, and recite some chants to end capitalism!

Believe it or not I'm not trying to be spot on about everything, just trying to have a decent conversation about how to live and die at the end of a world. (I do have my opinions, tho!)

I am aware of the Back-to-the-land movements of the 60's, I've read Peter Coyote's books and I have some friends who bought land in ~1970 for a farm and it is still a working farm. Living where you can grow your own food is certainly not a bad idea, it is also made complicated by a history of extermination of Indigenous peoples.
My quip was more about the idea urban hippies in the 60's went *back* to the land, because a lot of them were never on it. But it also works as a jab at that Utopian thinking.

Land Back, as you know, is an Indigenous campaign to get land back into Indigenous hands. Other than the play on the words Back to the Land I'm not sure there is a positive connection. but I don't know for sure.

I don't see any more essential way to take back the land in an indigenous perspective than to- completely negate the abstract bullshit property schemes imposed on the land for centuries.

This is where I did not agree with Aragorn! in a podcast, as he was presenting or understanding the idea of avoiding to buy land to be a kind of guilt thing. It's not about guilt... but about not reproducing the very same patterns colonialism, here, is made of. It's also about free-dom, plain and simple.

Property is the opposite to freedom; it's territorializing and assigning this or that place to contractual landlords. This is by far the biggest insult to American indigenous people, that some Euro despots went on imposing these shitty old notions around here. This is shitting on the land.

My dream for this land is very straightforward, and 100% compatible with the indigenous perspective. It's a place where the abstraction of property, as well as all its contracts, its lots, its laws, are just a faint memory of a stupider world. Will it ever happen on a large scale? I dunno, and I don't care coz I likely won't be around to see this. But it can be done at a local small-scale level.

...and this may appear to be a very harsh insult to those organizing the whole thing, nevertheless i would might say it to them depending on my mood...

that by trying to get the "land back" within the modern framework, then the indigenous are more strongly buying into the illusion that they bought into when signing those bogus contracts. From my understanding, native americans originally saw it as a written agreement that "they could have __________" instead of a distraction so the english could pillage them and ruin their lives.

To take on the legal ownership of land is at least a pain in the ass. Someone on the rez or the privately owned land is going to have to pay the taxes for it, and who knows what kinds of other long term effects are going to become part of being the "contractual owners"?

I don't know though, i would be interested in talking to them and figuring out the details of how it could benefit their communities instead of making conjectures about the effects of their activism. With work and money, of course the best thing to do is find something either the most enjoyable or most tolerable.

But transcend society's work/burden/die model for existing? That's a fucking tough one, would probably have to come about through either some inter-generational culture building, or more likely apocalyptic disasters.

Nice tree you're looking at there. May I introduce you to the entire rest of the forest....

"that by trying to get the "land back" within the modern framework, then the indigenous are more strongly buying into the illusion that they bought into when signing those bogus contracts. "

Also, acquaint yourself with some different stories about this.

gotcha moment, but yeah i am saying that i would like to know about what the native indigenous intend to do with their land before making any conclusions about the "land back" project, i dont assume by default that indigenous people are inherently wonderful or innocent, i find land ownership in general to be suspicious because the possessive nature of people is why the world we live in is so miserable...this is not to say im flat out opposed to buying or possessing land, but it has its drawbacks.

wierd, someone telling me i need to learn more stories when the article im reacting too gives such little information of whats going on in the world. Burdens upon burdens...thats what it often feels like to be a human.

... if I mug you and take your wallet and then I'm standing there, holding the wallet and you say "give that back!"

and I say "maybe but first, what do you intend to do with it?" ... is that a reasonable question?

lol, nice trolling.

if you want me to feel guilty about things, your gonna have to start making more sense! Oh i get it, you are all about obedience and not asking questions!

in your lumpheaded parable, the answer is YES, that is a rational question if im dumb enough to believe in rationality.

this isn't about guilt, it's about which questions make sense in what context.

I don't experience "settler guilt" because I'm not a liberal but if I robbed you and then acted like you owed me an explanation too, that's either a flex or a completely-oblivious-to-context move. pick one.

Another poster here, NO YOU ARE LIBERAL in ignoring the term custodian in favor of owner. Indigenosity did not come with a landrights charter, they themselves moved/migrated into the land assimilating or driving out the previous occupants. Global inhabitation requires the acceptance of immigrational transference of occupation and space!

i have nothing against abstractions, but the more people remove speech from concrete, tangible, reality, the less its possible to:

-get your fucking head out of your ass

-establish any sort of trust or non-cyber type of relationship (THIS LATTER ONE IS ViTAL FOR ENDING WHITE LAND OWNERSHIP BECAUSE THE INTERNET IS HOW WHITE PEOPLE GET FUCKING WEALTHY)

-to hunt, gather, or grow any sort of food.

think of the word "indigenous", its so broad, so non-specific, it doesnt really say anything.

I have not stolen anything that wasnt out of some store, i have not pushed anyone off of their land. And i do think you are a liberal, whether you are or not is not really your call to make since its such a broad category. But thats great that you dont feel settler guilt.

I deliberately made this as not-abstract as possible for you jibbering jackasses. spelling it out, real simple words.

I already robbed you, now I'm doing an endzone dance and spiking the ball, flying double birds in your face, etc. long story short, I'm NOT the sympathetic character in this little thought experiment or story or whatever it is. you would want your shit back, you wouldn't owe me a damned thing and you'd hate me to the end of your days at the very, very least. you'd be 100% right to.

figure this shit out, use your brains ... you gotta be only pretending to be this stupid, right? trololol

So, let me get this straight: you've been lecturing people on the evil whites and individualists, whining about how you are entitled to better comments/commenters, and you still distance yourself from liberals?? That's exactly the kind of behavior i imagine a WHITE AMERICAN LIBERAL to engage in. With this kind of logic, It's clearly a lot better that I'm stupid in your eyes.

I also don't understand why a liberal, narcissistic, braggadocios, cyberbully is doing on an anarchist news site. You must be one of those four-chan fascists as well! Four-chan fascists LOVE to belittle people!

this is funny ... did you even realize that you framed your own lack of understanding as somehow my problem?

but you're almost right about one thing, people who really like transgressing boundaries for bad reasons often describe me as a bully haha

and cyberbullies:

-the cyberbully takes narcissistic pride in transgressing boundaries

-the cyberbully likes to corner and harass

-the cyberbully either sees themselves as being superior to other internet users, and/or pretends to be superior just for some momentary shits and giggles

i don't really appreciate this degradation of people who transgress boundaries, that invalidates any sort of anti-authoritarian/anarchist/happy type of existence. Let's see how you do trying to obey every law, be polite, and stay on your side of the fence!

How much land do you own?

actually anti-authoritarians need ways to deal with transgression too. have you seriously not encountered this problem yet???

That's really weird that you took what I wrote and translated: "he love all transgression! Ugh! Belch"

Lumpentroll, talks in the style of a misogynist! Oh no, all the assumptions, not again!

such weak trolling at this point ... gonna keep embarrassing yourself? keep digging?

THAT ^^ is soooo considerate and graceful of you to ask the mugger to explain his money spending, beautiful anarch person understands its all about relationships not criminality, thanx ;)

Yes anon 12:09 I agree, I do not want to see a casino built where bison once roamed!

"Will it ever happen on a large scale? I dunno, and I don't care coz I likely won't be around to see this. But it can be done at a local small-scale level."

^^^love how this just collapses and dismisses centuries of class warfare and colonialism. ahhh the word "negate" is truly the instant oatmeal solution to all problems in your mind! SO EASY?!?!

just to make things clear, at the crux of all this understanding of the land, is in a modern context, "land ownership" also amounts to a somewhat totalitarian/capitalist relationship, where in the end you gotta make money of your plot or else it's just going to get taken away by somebody.

I'm down with ownership is a collective knowledge that something is shared, but the current system gets in the way of preventing this.

It’s a joke without a punchline. It was always unspecific collective force lacking any elective affinity and right making might. Secular messianic struggle brought on by intellectual imbeciles such as Marx.

As for the land question, just study the Métis and the Masterless Men of Atlantic Canada. The blueprint is there. It’s just a matter of doing it and having the right desires and surrogate activities at hand. IDpols and other loser leftists can fuck off.

as always ... your takes are incredibly stupid and it's fun to try and pick the weakest point to attack but even you understand war works in at least two directions, right ziggy?

lol, here we go again, SOT fighting SE....

anyways, i do agree with SE about "class warfare", but the punchline to the joke is acknowledging that class-ware is pretty much the same thing as careerism, id-pol shouting matches, communist/trumpee insurrections, putting strychnine in the boss's punch bowl...how can one really fuck with class-capitalism without doing away with the framework or just doing your own thing out of view of the shifty-eyes? Stealing, riots...to be corny af on an anarchist website...at least allow someone to something they need in a given moment.

But as far as the left and the right? To me they're part of the same issue, this idea that policy reforms and cops can actually make this world more tolerable to live in for everyone. I had the pleasure once of talking to some lady from belaruse, who came to the US in part because she didn't like the communist dictatorship, and i asked her what the difference is between nazism and communism, since i don't have much experience with the latter. She answered that nazis have have more of a proclivity towards racism and violence, whereas communists want to sensor everything and air the ruling party on television. So either way, the right and the left have these nasty diabolical schemes. We can compare the schemes all day but I'm just sick of seeing this same issue where lumpentroll is a detective of the left looking to expose the individualists and their evil gaslighting concerning the colonial efforts of the west. Dude, it's an anarchist forum! How many times have we heard those stories?

blah blah blah ... neither of you clocking the pretty important fact that class warfare is being done TO all of us, all the time. Why is your analysis so bad? I don't know, it might be the myopia caused by egoist/individualist stuff but I know plenty of smart egoists so that's probably not it.

maybe it's the america koolaid where you actively avoid trying to understand class antagonism ... maybe you're just dumb as shit and it's nothing to do with ideology at all? who knows? who cares? also I don't care about your whining ...

don't like my shit? awww NOOO! so sorry to hear you're having a bad time sweetheart! goodness gracious me, let me get my notepad so I can write down all your super important insights regarding how I do my shit because YOU DONT LIKE IT!

you sure as hell make a lot of ACCUSATIONS! Class warfare, what is that? Looking at the words alone, it implies wars between classes. That's another example that can be added to my original list, the exploitation of the have-nots by the haves.

Whatever, go back to getting trolled by SE, you both deserve it. You with your narcissistic psychological hang-ups, and him with his dumb middle school bully language.

assertions are a neutral value, not good or bad: trouble is when people can't tell whether there's any basis to a claim

This is what lumpy's discourse amounts to. Class war/antagonism is a pseudo phenomena that masks the fact that this is all elective positioning and proposed solutioning within the context of a zero sum game around planetary resources. There is nothing radically transcendent about class war. It retains the messianic structure that birthed it and can never be anything other then this.

Anarchy is bigger and more profound then class war politics and its power seeking end game. Anarchy is a collective and individual force in the direction of freedom without being drawn into an elective ideological game. Class war by its nature can never be individualist and collectively specific and projectual. It will always be prone to Jacobins and other game A power seekers who want to turn history into more history.

sigh! again ... it's being done TO YOU right now. to everyone. who isn't a billionaire.

doesn't matter in the slightest if you blather on and on about how the boot stamping on your face isn't real. but by all means, blather on!

"just study the Métis and the Masterless Men of Atlantic Canada. "
Some good advice here^^ from SE. Also a combination of bohemian aesthetics, DIY ethic, and an individualist's " up and at 'em " self-initiate and self-pride and self-esteem attitude that can conquer all.

Damn hippies, got stoned and levitated into a pseudo-religious hierarchical humanism!

Holy landrace, Batman!

When someone is born in a place, and spends their entire life there, are they indigenous to that place? If not, how many generations are required before the apparent authorities bless them as such?

WTF is meant by “back to the land”?

Egads this is some pathetic shit.

some people bother to learn about the ongoing discussions around a topic instead of just trolling

anyway, like someone else said, I also blame nettle for some of this discussion being not-so-terrible.

you're doing the internet wrong! I learned stuff! wtf

I haven't read it but when i clicked the link it was in English.

But auto translate sucks...

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