TOTW: How Different?

Topic of the Week - I've always seen anarchism as the philosophy and practice that most embraces difference; one that doesn't aim for homogeneity, and on the contrary, fights against all forces that try to impose it.

(A small note here, I'm, of course, not talking about the capitalist variation, usually named as diversity or even difference. Where people still live under the same logic but have a "cool outfit", a different hair color, an "alternative" sexuality, a especial diet, etc. etc. All of these can be present for both between anarchists and liberals, so are not necessarily political (or anti-political) markers anymore.)

All that said, in practice, it's not always easy to deal with those whose cultures, ideas, and practices are different than ours. Even within the different types of anarchism. And when we try, we run the risk of patronizing people, being authoritarian, or something else along those terms.

So how people try to deal with different thoughts, ideas, cultures, etc, without being an asshole?

Listen to the conversation here!

There are 41 Comments

sometimes not being an asshole is patronizing. sometimes being sincere is being an asshole. for example, telling another anarchists "you and i don't mean the same things, we don't want the same things, we don't agree, we are opposed, i don't like you, we won't get along.". embracing difference doesn't mean forced to be together and collaborate. same with dealing with encounters with other cultures. if you don't like a certain behavior, like patriarchy, for example, very pronounced in certain cultures, you can express it and challenge it. this feigned politeness is only convenient to preserving conformity and the status quo.

purism is an insult used by wishy-washy flip-flops who resent those who remain congruent. purist is what fanatics of a different dogma call fanatics of other dogmas, or even free thinkers. "what, you call yourself an anarchist? and you won't even be a little fashy sometimes? what a purist!"

re: 11:47 and 12:27

everyone's a hardass online.

sometimes being nice is ok. sometimes "just being honest" is passive aggressive hostility. sometimes we're open to how other people a) communicate, b) think about things, c) are different from us, regardless of some labels.

fuck you, regardless of labels. is passive aggressive regarded as bad? am i supposed to shoot anarchists i disagree with? no, i don't have to talk to them, and if pressed to say why i avoid them i can express why. i'm not going to your assembly, regardless of labels. and i'm being nice.

Anarchists for the most part are obsessed and delusional puritans who abstain from serious debate , verbally attack non-conformists, sabotage alterity and castigate or even repress unorthodoxy. If you look at anarchist history, you will be hard pressed to find any innovative or creative thinkers movements or groups not first decried as "secret authoritarians"

Quite true, in fact alot of anarchist ideas are rehashed socialist/humanist doctrines. I think the best way to approach an anarchistic lifeform is to accept that if critical thinking were an innate human quality, then everyone would attain a unique and ungovernable conscience.

To elaborate, I mean it is impossible to attain a global anarchistic 8 billion following, because critical thinking is NOT innate, and the best anarchists are anarch individualists living within the masse zombie-clone hegemony.

you're far too optimistic. since language is a game, and meaning is fluid and determined by the people playing, language can change through tame, and changes through context. in the same way that there is an anarcho-capitalist president, we may one day, if not already, have an anarcho-population in an anarcho-planetary anarchist order.

" if not already, have an anarcho-population in an anarcho-planetary anarchist order."
Sort of, a strong individualist tendency which unfortunately, via corporate consumerist values, has created a global Bovarysme.

GeT yoUR bAlls tO thE wAll Anarch, gEt yOur bAlls tO tHe wAll!!

I will agree that some famous anarchist figures are authoritarians of sorts, secret or not. You might be alluding to what the book "Occult Features of Anarchism" touches upon, which talk about aspirational invisible secret societies and vanguards. I haven't read it, but I have read bits of Bakunin, which always strike me as authoritarian. Like siding with Nechayev, another figure who strikes me authoritarian, and in retrospect, Marx and Engels seemed more libertarian on that side of the divide. Funny how the term "barracks communism" was coined by Marx as a satirical slur directed to Bakunin ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barracks_communism ). I think it's witty and fitting. Bakunin is definitely not my kind of anarchist and not "my comrade". But then again, neither are Marxists.

bakunin's secret societies were similar to just a modern-day group of anarchists. the reason why they were "secret" is because anything threatening the order was banned lol. it doesn't sound nearly as scary when you put it this way.

You can't think of 2023 in the West the same way Bakoonin thought of his world. The reason why doing secret societies these days has more to do with the soft powers of proactive distributed surveillance as well as avoiding the general assholes. Among other reasons. Western neoliberal shit regimes are mostly about soft power, and there's a cause for creating anarchist thieves guilds and that type of stuff, as legalism and bureaucracies are quite a huge octopus that needs to be avoided in the first place.

sure, that's maybe true in the modern world but it doesn't really have to do with anything i said above. i was trying to make the point that bakunin wasn't more authoritarian than marx & engels because he wanted to do organization outside the side, which was illegal, and therefore had to be secret.

Hello anon,

This is the anon who made the comment from Sun, 11/26/2023 - 14:07 https://anarchistnews.org/comment/62659#comment-62659

I only brought up "secret societies" because I was responding to this comment https://anarchistnews.org/comment/62657#comment-62657 which mentions "secret authoritarians".

But to be clear, the reason I think Bakunin is authoritarian is not secret societies, which I mentioned I knew nothing about, but some of the things he expressed in his writing, including the bits mentioned in the wikipedia article I linked, which is the only reason I mention Marx and Engels. I now paste them here since people might not be clicking through:

"Barracks communism[1] (German: Kasernenkommunismus)[2] is the term coined by Karl Marx[3] to refer to a crude, authoritarian, forced collectivism and communism where all aspects of life are bureaucratically regimented and communal. Marx used the expression to criticise the vision of Sergey Nechayev, outlined in "The Fundamentals of the Future Social System".[3][4][5] The term barracks here does not refer to military barracks, but to the workers' barracks-type primitive dormitories in which industrial workers lived in many places in the Russian Empire of the time.[6]

In the ideology of the Soviet Union the term was applied to theories of "some ideologues in China" of 1950s-1970s.[7] During the Soviet perestroika period, the term was used to apply to the history of the Soviet Union itself.[6]
Primary sources

A relevant section of Sergey Nechayev's "The Fundamentals of the Future Social System" reads as follows:

The ending of the existing social order and the renewal of life with the aid of the new principles can be accomplished only by concentrating all the means of social existence in the hands of our committee, and the proclamation of compulsory physical labour for everyone.

The committee, as soon as the present institutions have been overthrown, proclaims that everything is common property, orders the setting up of workers' societies (artels) and at the same time publishes statistical tables compiled by experts and pointing out what branches of labour are most needed in a certain locality and what branches may run into difficulties there.

For a certain number of days assigned for the revolutionary upheaval and the disorders that are bound to follow, each person must join one or another of these artels according to his own choice... All those who remain isolated and unattached to workers' groups without sufficient reason will have no right of access either to the communal eating places or to the communal dormitories, or to any other buildings assigned to meet the various needs of the brother-workers or that contain the goods and materials, the victuals or tools reserved for all members of the established workers' society; in a word, he who without sufficient reason has not joined an artel, will be left without means of subsistence. All the roads, all the means of communication will be closed to him; he will have no other alternative but work or death.

In their report "The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men's Association", an explanation and justification of the expulsion of Bakunin's faction from the International, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels quote the above text and comment sarcastically as follows:

What a beautiful model of barrack-room communism! Here you have it all: communal eating, communal sleeping, assessors and offices regulating education, production, consumption, in a word, all social activity, and to crown all, ᴏᴜʀ ᴄᴏᴍᴍɪᴛᴛᴇᴇ, anonymous and unknown to anyone, as the supreme director. This is indeed the purest anti-authoritarianism.[5]"

I can agree with that, Nechayev was authoritarian in some regards. Consider the following excerpt from a letter though, from Nechayev's very own Wikipedia page:

Bakunin to Nechayev: "According to your way of thinking, you are nearer to the Jesuits than to us. You are a fanatic. This is your enormous and peculiar strength. But at the same time this is your blindness, and blindness is a great and fatal weakness; blind energy errs and stumbles, and the more powerful it is, the more inevitable and serious are the blunders. You suffer from an enormous lack of the critical sense without which it is impossible to evaluate people and situations, and to reconcile means with ends"

I get that you're trying to draw parallels between the "dogmatism" of classical anarchism, so to say, but I don't think his contemporaries liked him all that much either when he started going down this path. AFAIK he was also the basis of Dostoyevsky's drift away from Russian nihilism, and his story where a revolutionary drives some village to "anarchy" aka wanton violence. This later got adapted into some movie about middle-class Maoist kids I believe lol.

i'm just butting in here but of course both of those guys were famously belligerent assholes?

like ... Nechayev famously murdered his own follower for disagreeing with him and trying to leave his group (?!?)

there are many, MANY criticisms of bakunin too, although i don't personally think any of them are as awful as that?

unless i'm forgetting a random murder or two ...

yes, and Marx & Engels are saints compared to Stalin. we can also say that Bakunin is not much different from Blanqui

Maoist kid ----" communal eating, communal sleeping, assessors and offices regulating education, production, consumption, in a word, all social activity, and to crown all, ᴏᴜʀ ᴄᴏᴍᴍɪᴛᴛᴇᴇ, anonymous and unknown to anyone, as the supreme director. "
Anarch kid --- " Yukky yuk yuk !!"

this is a good point. In Russian lit, the intensity of the self-censorship back then is frequently highlighted in relation to the Czar. Dostoevsky lived through a mock execution for association with a salon of basically harmless rich liberals. Anyone, in any social position, could be imprisoned or killed for questioning the authority of the Czar. In that context, an anarchist secret society would make a lot of sense. Also, it sounds like a lot of fun? But totes not tripping on the secret society vibes mid 1800-s lol.

If you think anarchists "abstain from serious debate" why are we talking about this on Anews, where @ist analysis from all over the world is posted?

It's good to critique and have the zingers for how anarchists aren't all that different, but i think we'll see more clearly the next time an uprising comes around if the youth want to carry the torch on this kind of shit. A lot of people are feeling like they're on a knife's edge with regards to Palestine and Israel, and what it means for the direction the world is going. All of it will simmer on the pot, in the USA and elsewhere.

The worst thing anarchists could do is give up what makes them anarchists right now. In an environment of social repression, playing it cool and figuring out how and where to act would be great. But if you try to dictate what *other* people need to do right now, you've already lost the plot. To circle back on the pot simmering-- I see that as an individual experience. Let the pots all boil.

Once I encountered an idea I found to be so strange and foreign to me, so completely unfamiliar, so utterly queer and bizarre, that i had to exclaim: HOW INTERESTING!

Note that this was only the beginning, not the climax, of a very cultured dialogue of the minds…
In the end, we were mutually enriched by our complementing differences.

For me, this is not a rare occurrence. My cosmopolitan lifestyle allows me to partake in the ecumenical and inter-faith dialogue of cultures often.

In my reading about the subject, I came across the following framework:

"“the motivation that encourages followers of different religions to come into contact with each other, four major types of interreligious dialogue are “polemical,” “cognitive,” “peacemaking,” and “partnership”. These types of dialogue are lined up respectively around the following questions: “Who is right?”, “Who are you?”, “How can we live together peacefully?” and “What can we do to improve the world?”"

https://repository.globethics.net/handle/20.500.12424/3981205#:~:text=On...”%20and%20“partnership”.

The answer is distance. You have to have some hegemony the closer ppl are to you. Like if u live in the same room with someone u have to have some hegemony in when u go to sleep and have the lights on. If u live in a house u have to leave to not be loud and wake ppl up when sleeping and dishes and not being transphobic or racist to ppl u live with ect. And the solution to getting along with ppl u disagree with is not be so close to them. It's easier to tolerate ppl I don't like if I don't see them often. And if I just tolerate ppl not doing shit around me all the time that's just me being assimilated. My solution to the issue that I don't like most anarchists is to stay away from em.

If I stay away they have the space to not bug the shit out of me and I get out of their way so they can do cool vandalism or whatever. And when I do see ppl I can chill out with conflict and make come concessions to get along. But fundementally I see being able to get along with most anarchists as fundementally anti anarchists bc to have a herd of people I need ppl to loose their individuality and have concessions on their values.

So I stick in small groups and be choosy with who I like. And stay away from ppl who I will want to have conflict in. Bc I don't want to inpeed other anarchists even if I don't like thier meat breath and promoting putting ppl in prison. So to celebrated diff rwnce and prevent hegemony give people u disagree with lots of space. It's the anarchists who allways wanna hang out at events and mass up into some anarchist horde who are always developed in drama and fighting each other. Because fundementally closeness requires some degree of hegemony. To foster difference u need to have separation.

We are all one. There is no distance between us. Time and space are an illusion. Capitalism and Empire are the upholders of this illusion. Together we can share the joy overcoming it. Away from atomization, becoming whole.

Embrace FULL Communism TM within the Imaginary Party's communal fart bongs, and become a united whole. There's no Ego it's an illusion set up by the Capitalist asuras. It's all written in the Devas n shit since hundreds of thousand years! Namaste.

The idea that freedom is the ability to shed attachments is the cornerstone of liberalism, not anarchy. Freedom is not something that can be abstract

I think freedom of association is a massive part of anarchism. Just bc a belief happens to align with liberalism doesn't make it inherently incompatible with anarchism. Trying to have all the opposite beliefs of liberalism regardless of if it serves you makes one just as indebted to liberalism.

I mean maybe you don't like the freedom to associate for different reasons but I fidn it hard to see how an anarchist would be against it.

one more TOW that rehashes the same tired topics of society’s negotiations. the concepts of anarchy neither embrace difference nor similarity, they strive for authentic relationships, from supportive to indifference to hostility. how it works out from there is a matter of personal priorities, situations, scales, etc. why do these topics always flatten our lives into “how to” manuals? yawn.

Want to tolerate difference, but impose a very rigid type of liberalism/tolerance on others. I was duped into thinking anarchist ideology was maybe a way people could improve their lives by anarchy101.com, but in the end it seemed like some stranger's petty scheme to cyberbully people who disagree with them. The top moderator even told me i was "fragile"...this same moderator who obviously has a need for proxies to cope with the stresses and hardships of life.

...not dot com

It seems like the overarching problem here is the people who don't realize or don't even want autonomy and then the people who want to control those people.

I would bet that the people who value autonomy have far more in common and an ability to be in close proximity than anyone on the other side.

I guarantee the vegan free thinker who values individualism and anarchy has far more in common with a meat eating anarchist who values the same principles than either of them do with some unhinged anarcholiberal nutjob from the other side.

So why do "we" hide away from these people? Would imposing ourselves and deligitamizing them be such a bad thing? Shouldn't we be moving forward in the assumption that our actions inspire people to act and maybe think for themselves. Idk. Just some thoughts.

How different is A-News from It's Going Down? These days, they're indistinguishable...

Nice provocation, "Jeremiah"! I think you're onto something original here by whining about the website. Make sure to circle back in a couple of hours and leave a whole tread of replies to yourself.

~~IT'S GOING DOWN~~
~~AND YOURE INVITED~~
~~TO BE ANON~~
~~OR " JEREMIAH" ~~

The website works surprisingly well considering that anonymous comments are allowed. It's inevitable that a few boneheads are going to slip in sometimes. At least there's no more spam. This is the price you pay for an open forum, thank goodness for moderation.

the moderation was fair. Like for example...someone flames...someone flames back. They both deserve the insults. The insistence that "we erase empty comments" is just a smokescreen. This site would also maybe benefit from some sort of "talk about anything here" type of deal like most forums tend to have, since a lot of the time i just don't understand how these articles and essays are "truly anarchist" and how my "terrible comments" are really any worse. I would like it if I didn't have to insult people by default like i often feel like i do here.

But i digress, there's like no chance whatsoever that strangers will be able to read each other's minds. I'm definitely not a better person than the moderators.

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