Add new comment

Not sure how seriously to take this, but the center is as totalitarian as the "extremes" nowadays, and getting rid of the Overton window and especially the taboos on "violence" and direct action (including strikes, NVDA, road blocking, etc) would benefit anarchists a lot. Main difficulty: neither the fascists nor the idpols (who are probably the majority on our side now) want to destroy the Overton window, just to shift it to their own advantage. Things get even worse if the far-right especially manage to shift it their way.

The centrist ideology at the moment is "democracy consolidation", which is basically, run the state as a multi-party variant of a one-party state. Elites agree to transition power among different elite fractions, in return for agreeing to never challenge the institutional structure or support extra-institutional direct action of any kind (whether that's armed opposition, riots, NVDA, occupations, strikes, etc). Everyone in the elite must bootlick the police and courts, condemn direct action and "violence", and concede gracefully. The role of this ideology is fourfold: firstly, take all effective power away from social movements and dismantle the previous power-coalitions which gave some rights to unions etc; secondly, depoliticise the police and courts and let them do what they like; thirdly, impose totalitarian social measures under the guise of "defending democracy"; and fourthly, concentrate power in the hands of *only* the elite, even while the non-elite keep the right to vote. The usual discursive trick is to associate any dissent with danger and blame all the risk on protesters, who aren't respecting the utter disempowerment of the population as "for your own safety". It's a totalitarian ideology and a totalitarian regime-type and needs to be fought as such, and this is a much bigger deal today than whether some Trumpies scare some libs in the Capitol.

Also, we do occasionally get situations which cross left/right divides, notably the Arab Spring (Islamists with liberals, leftists, anarchists), the Hong Kong revolt, and the Yellow Vests. Sometimes the left/right cleavage echoes the use of sectarian/ethnic divide-and-rule in places like Lebanon, Nigeria, and Northern Ireland. Convincing as many people as possible that, no, "violence" is not "always wrong" (with the hidden exception of pig and army and capitalist violence of course), and no, NVDA is not "unacceptable" is absolutely vital to get out this current shithole. Even if it only goes as far as: workers have a right to strike, people have a right to stop governments breaking laws, people have a right to exercise basic rights even when banned from doing so, people have a right to self-defense when attacked by pigs - already this is a context far more favorable to building lived autonomy.