TOTW: "Learning your history"

This 1886 engraving was the most widely reproduced image of the Haymarket massacre. It shows Methodist pastor Samuel Fielden speaking, the bomb exploding, and the riot beginning simultaneously; in reality, Fielden had finished speaking before the explosion.

Every few years, it seems, a chain of events occurs that leads to an uptick in people calling themselves anarchists (surely still outdone by the number of people who stop calling themselves such). The remaining anarcho-curious (the few, the proud) finally take the plunge, hoist the black flag, download Signal, and assume their rightful pseudonym. Within the US context, this has looked like the 2016 Trump moment in America, Graeber addressing the 99% in his wobbly merch before that, or, most recently, those in search of more extreme political solutions for racist, killer cops [1].

New anarchists means new perspectives, sure, but (more often than not) we see a new crop of enthusiastic actors reading from the same, tired old script. Without a convenient manual to follow, this is often the time to “learn your history”[2] – a blunt phrase I don’t love but serves as good shorthand to describe the journey into unfamiliar, yet storied, terrain. The takeaway being to learn from those who came before you (their mistakes, relative successes and failures, etc.) so as to not repeat them endlessly. After all, a diversity of tactics is best when it’s, in fact, diverse.

This includes figuring out who’s-who both on the page and in your local scene—or figuring out you don’t have a local scene :( Anarchist history, rightfully so, can’t be bound within a single book and is often personified in contradictory ways: maybe it’s browsing the anarchist library’s popular texts, or that loud-mouth spewing dogmatic calls to action in a community space, or that quiet girl who you find out, months later, is the one anonymously writing cool zines without the recognition. History, in this way, isn't confined only to past events but to a continued renewal and engagement with life.

I’d argue this journey is unique and, if it were possible to simulate again, it would end differently each time. These contingencies are what make this process so incredibly fascinating and equally frustrating. Such tenuous arrangements also point to the possibility for something new.

Looking back, how did you “learn your history”? What felt like a waste of time or a missed opportunity in hindsight? Are there any lessons you took up initially, then later came to question? To what extent should one “learn history,” or are we better off breaking from traditions that have brought us nothing but failure until now?


[1] This is not to frame anarchists only as a reaction to (or consequence of) major events but to acknowledge the influence of significant culture moments on political identification.

[2] Insert anarchist critique of history here (representation after the fact, separate from lived experience, history = autobiography of the State, etc.).

There are 47 Comments

First!

This topic is too full of double ass. It opens with an assertion and just makes more assertions and assumptions throughout. Then, after so much ass it asks a couple of loaded (based on the previous double assed paragraphs) questions. It all seems disjointed like the author has broken from writing "traditions that have brought us nothing but" legibility with out ideas.

1.) how did you “learn your history”? What felt like a waste of time or a missed opportunity in hindsight? Are there any lessons you took up initially, then later came to question?

Other anarchists. In person and written, oral ;-), etc.
Lots of things in hindsight.
Wut?

2.) To what extent should one “learn history,” or are we better off breaking from traditions that have brought us nothing but failure until now?

- Should.
- We.
Break stuff.
- Failure.

Jeez.

I'm a double ass man, what can I say? ;) it's true, this totw may not be my magnum opus (another double ass!) but was a thought I had knocking around my head the past few days. I'm not out to make sweeping statements or speak for others, just approaching an idea based on my personal experiences, wondering how others relate (and inviting them to share). However much my writing belies this...

Write a better totw, anon! :)

> This includes figuring out who’s-who both on the page and in your local scene

I dunno, maybe just ask the police and FBI? But why doing the same job than theirs?

So it's important to know about the old faces of the milieu, and more important what would be their motives. What's also even more important than that, and is a less coppish matter- is "who left the boat" and why, or what happened to them. As this might give you clues on the actual "failures" of your milieu and how to improve things for the days to come. Perhaps this might even make you restore some broken ties, who knows?

The fact that you equated reading anarchist texts and befriending local anarchist with cop behavior kind of tells me "who's who" in the comments. I agree that learning why people leave can be important, but I don't agree it's "more important" than doing my own thing. People stop calling themselves anarchists/drop out of milieus for infinite reasons. A full accounting of this is a fool's errand, imo

Anyway, I'm talking too much. I'll let others say their piece.

:poof!:

And I just saw in my soup who you really are! i.e. a confusionist troll. But no I didn't say anything of the sort. Just as if I come across some people that seem a bit too fixated on knowing who's who in a milieu or worse, on a web site, I at least got a good cause to believe they might be the cops.

... you're describing an issue for a therapist, not a "good cause"

Idk I just picked it up from osmosis and doing research when its fun.

I think something I think Abt a lot is the premise of learning ur history has some cons. I often find a lot of the useful lessons for me aren't from anarchists. Sure some history is useful but anarchist history isn't much more useful to me than many others.

Good history to me teaches me lessons, catalyzes me thinking or viewing the world differently and or inspires me by showing me possible things to do. And often this isn't anarchist history. Some is cool but like I said lots of useful history for doing anarchy isn't the history of anarchy.

Black Panthers, che Guevara's "on gurrillas war", MEND and the Niger delta, the host of slave insurrections the Americas, native American revolt in the Americas, taoist fables, swamp fox of the US revolution ect. All have very different values and many things I disagree with. But yet these histories are just as important to me as they impact my life in one of the three ways.

So to this question I think history is very very useful. I have gained lots, it inspires me, opens my mind, lets me imagine new possibilities, shows me bad paths to go down, failures to avoid, teaches me lessons of new ways to engage, and knowing what day dreams are achievable and what ones are not.

I think I could write and talk a lot about the multitude of benefits from the history. So I guess I think history of resistance is incredibly valuable. I don't see anarchist history as particularly valuable but it is useful in that it is a history of resistance. But nothing real special Abt it.

But history of resistance is very beneficial.

Also I don't think anarchist history has brougt nothing but failure. Being able to resist and carve out space to live more autonomous sand enjoyable lives is a win imo. And that has happened.

I'd say the best thing abt history is how it shows me the incredible fears people have done with less resources so it inspires me to push further as if they could be more free with less resources I prob have an even better shot than them . Plus the multitude of don't do that u get killed, fail, go to jail, get all ur friends mad ect is helpful too. Plus history often I hear about X people did Y and I go oh doing Y sounds fun af. And history where I read and go wow these people really thought in a way forgin to me and trying to understand that mindset removes many mental blocks.

And the decline goes back to the 9/11 period. Anarchism and anarchy have never really recovered whatever momentum it had exiting century 20. Much of this is down to the puritanical activist drives that have come to dominate leftist and leftist adjacent discourse. As I've said before it's kind of similar to the inner-wars decline but not as bad for various reasons.

As I've said before 1968 discourse is where 1886 discourse was heading into ww2. It's basically finished as a radical imaginary driver. At this point those interested in anarchism and anarchy need to look for emergent radical currents that are congruent to the coming cybernetic control complexes to come.

I agree, the myths of belief systems within society, all driven by the moralities, values, and aesthetics molded from atheistic and/X-tian humanist ideals has created an anthropocentric nightmare. The leftist wars against materialistic production and wealth missed the most important human facetes of consciousness and pleasure in lifestyles, and wasted the human powers to binary warfare against manufactured enemies. We are all on the one ship earth and food self-suffiency, fun, and a benevolent chameleon existence outside of the crass cybernetic machinecity is the must do/think gaol of the anarch.

do you mean goal or do you mean gaol?

Oops, I meant goal, silly British programmed auto-correct, thanx ;)

great, that's how i read it at first but then i wasn't sure, ha, thanks for clearing that up.

You're way off, dude. By at least 150 years. Look around you and you'll notice that humanism got thrown under the bus in favor of ID pols and on top of this, the Megamachine. Transhumanism, maybe, but humanism is an Enlightement idea and hardly the source of today's cybernetic control society.

That was a response to Anon 23:27, not the Sore Egregore Broken Clock.

23:27 here, we'll yes, you're sorta correct, but I feel that the foundation to Idpol, liberalism, machinological consciousness can be traced back to the Enlightenment. Maybe if I used the term 'neo-humanism' your heckles will not stiffen and raise themselves, hmm?

"Idpol, liberalism, machinological consciousness can be traced back to the Enlightenment."

Nope. ID pols are rather new and a byproduct of neoliberal representation politics.

'Machinological consciousness"... not entirely sure what that means... is likely related to Industrial Revolution-era scienticism/positivism. The worship of a god-machine had its peak through the modernist movement of the first part of the 20th century, but pervades under the form of transhumanism, social media mass-enslavement, car worship and other related trends.

Nope, academia-cucks can't comprehend that an ancient Neanderthal as a tribe member is participating in identity politics.

I got into anarchy through punk and crime when i was a teenager in the suburbs. I made friends with other anarchists and countercultural people in my little town. We managed to pull off a handful of exciting things together. 16 year old me thought that we were on the brink of participating in a revolution or at the very least creating some sort of autonomous zone. When neither happened many of us fell into a sense of despair and hopelessness. We lacked the skills to navigate interpersonal issues and the parts of ourselves that were undoubtedly manifestation of the world we were trying to oppose. I, as well as many of my friends became an alcoholic. Others got addicted to harder drugs. Not all of us made it through that alive. Barely any of us are still friends or anarchists.

It really sucks learning things the hard way but I now see the importance of taking care of myself and my friends rather than prioritizing insurrectionary moments or building some kind of momentum toward revolution. I also see the potential danger in substance use. I really saw that shit fuck up a lot of lives. I personally spent so much of my time intoxicated until a few years ago that I wonder how much I would've been able to learn and grow if I was sober that whole time. I wish some older people were around to tell me this stuff when I was 15 getting into all this.

The grass seems greener on the other side. I’ve been sober and away from crime and punk and I didn’t learn shit. You didn’t miss out.

Plus there is something respectable and admirable about the redemption arc of the person that gets sober and overcomes their vices. No cares about the people that never got into them, there’s no story in that. Look at you, crime and punk, sex, drugs and rock n roll, and old sage with plenty of stories to tell from the school of hard knocks.

what are stories when all your friends are dead and your body is fucked before you even hit 30?
I cannot speak for the other anon but would trade in my history for the life of a sxe any day.

i've always smoked and drank just enough rock and roll for it to be sexy and not at all sad!

i lived life on the edge but managed the risks and my expectations for the The Rev that I suspected would never come!

also, all the gay crimes but stayed out of jail!

AND YOU CAN TOO, FELLOW KIDS!

Hey dude, one can reach those heights of highness, intoxication and other-consciousness by applying some moderation and healthy eating and exercise preceding the intake of substances, thus negating many destructive effects. Anyway, congrats for living a full life and surviving dude.

This really resonates, my time as a young anarchist feels like a demented children’s crusade (learn THAT history!). A major cause of lacking historical consciousness among anarchists is that like it or not I think a huge demographic of @‘s at any give time(maybe the majority) are in a phase that will only let a few years. Multigenerational communities are rare, fragile and under equipped to either provide social support in the immediate present or historical memory and collective intelligence in the long run.

I've never been ahistorical in my thinking, but I've become more and more oriented towards history over the years. Around 2018, I came to some conclusions about history that have stuck with me since: https://cyberdandy.org/authored/a-country-that-doesnt-know-itself/

At this point, I do think it is important to learn about anarchist history (especially the history that is closest in time and place to one's own time and place); but, I think history in general is even more important. This year, I gave myself a project of learning the history of every country in chronological order based on their "Date of Last Subordination": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_date_of_format... So far, I have only made it through the first one but I have until next year! Despite what I just said about history in general being more important than anarchist history, I am currently reading Paul Avrich's "The Russian Anarchists": https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/paul-avrich-the-russian-anarchis... One interesting bit from that study has been learning about the anarchist group Black Banner that formed in Bialystok: https://libcom.org/article/history-anarchist-black-banner-movement-bialy...

Anyway, I'll list some of the things that I'm getting out of the above reading:

1) A sense for how large social structures (nation-states) have formed since the end of the world's domination by empires. This includes an examination of the material conditions, demographics, and geopolitics that influenced the formation of those structures. I think that this is good just for understanding the modern world, but even better for understanding what it took to fundamentally change the world from one ruled by empires with mostly religious forms of legal justification to the post-Enlightement world with its global state-system and various market economies. Even with a one-day study of one country, there was something I learned that was worthwhile: Sweden never went through a period of Feudalism.

2) Anarchism was very marginal in Russia until large-scale events like Bloody Sunday and the 1905 revolution radicalized the population. Also, there are many lessons about how anarchist movements are crushed. For example, the Bialystok Pogrom. I think studies like this can inform us about a lot of typical social situations anarchists deal with, even when the context of those studies is over 100 years ago in a place with entirely different material conditions and workforce (among other) demographics.

3) More distant history helps to see the situations we are in now as moments in larger spatio-temporal configurations. When we only look to our recent and near-by history, we might get the impression that everything is hopeless because we see innumerable failures and repeated behaviors that never seem to change. But when we take steps further out from our time and place, we can see that those failures and repeated behaviors are the result of enduring structures that continue to impact us so long as they're at play.

4) Expectations.

“end of the world's domination by empires”
I’m sorry, but I think you might have been studying the history of another planet or an alternate universe instead??

i studied philosophy in school, and separately read a huge amount of journalistic style history of labor agitation and direct action more generally, meaning accounts of what happened rather than analyses. the "data" that sociologists later chew up. i was working my way through college and so focused on the economic stuff, and what i saw was anarchists and other anti-authoritarians again and again at the beginnings of actions, and bureaucratic unions or communists overseeing the end of them. i figured the big answer was illegalist unions and had fancy ideas about agitating towards that end.

i continued working shit jobs after college due to a mixture of my increasing hostility to everything presented as left or progressive, and my complete disgust with any kind of careerism, technology, corporate life, management, etc. every time i tried to find a group, or go to an event that seemed relevant to my political interests, i mostly just left feeling annoyed and disinterested, and often felt despairing about it. this was all a waste of time. my perspective from my philosophical training was already a form of radical subjectivism focused on finding a way to live not so much authentically as wholly and intensely. looking back, i was using that to survive while i flung around in the dark for a political mission or cause or whatever.

in my opinion there is too much remaking of the wheel constantly going on in every political, artistic and theoretical space i've ever encountered. i think it means a hell of lot of human life gets burnt up and in ways that all too often end up perversely serving or reifying hierarchical power or however you prefer to think about your enemies. studying the history of real direct actions got me a lot of the way. studying the history of social movements especially in the 60s-80s got me a lot of the way. studying the history of ancient sumeria, medieval iceland, renaissance england and france etc. got me a lot of the way. but at this point in my life i don't think you can study your way to anywhere, and the distance between "a lot of the way" and "a place you can live" is both infinite and exactly where you run the risk of letting your life become someone else's weapon.

some of the people i argue this to think it sounds corny or pointless but i've noticed that the older i get the less that becomes true. a critical perspective isn't necessarily "more important" whatever that means than any other component of it but it is, i think, at the heart of any sustainable practice. if you're lucky you might not need it for a long time. if you're the luckiest person alive you might not ever need it. but i refuse to be at the mercy of fortune just as much as i refuse to be at the mercy of (anyone else's) virtue, and if i would have done anything differently i would have abandoned vacuous ideas like "purpose" and "efficacy," or their corollaries "pointless" and "failure," the language of which leaves that kind of fortune unexamined, from the jump.

Yes, this is what I’ve been saying since - well I guess since I got old enough to realize I was seeing it in real time. But I’m interested to hear how your study of ancient Sumerian and medieval Iceland applies to modern times. Another major issue I see with anarchist historical consciousness is that it tends to fixate on the rare sources of inspiration while ignoring the vast majority of human history as “bad stuff/not anarchist” and therefore not useful for spreading anarchist ideas, and therefore not useful, period. Rhetoricization of anti authoritarian episodes and disposal of the rest is extreme historical navel gazing.

im interested in the mythologies and poetics of domesticity/social reproduction in both places. i really just pulled them out as examples (so i also agree with you in the sense that a broad ranging approach is generally better than adopting some selective or evaluative principle that tells you in advance whether some time or place is interesting or not) but both are places that serve as lodestones for a lot of big stories that get thrown around today. i like to think through the ways that the fact that people tell their own stories in their own times becomes the fuel that drives this engine of iterative, generational history-making over and on top of them, and what it means to try to demystify that process, whether a spiritless history is an improvement to our understanding etc.

so in a word i guess what i find applicable is the way that folk histories survive what otherwise might be seen as their defeat or absorption into official histories, and become these kinds of haphazard signals that noise up the language or cultural imaginary from then on.

What’s the difference between “haphazard signals” and noise, especially after hundreds of generations of iterations? I’m interested in this idea too but it seems murky

speaking very loosely here im thinking of "noise" in this sense as the phenomenology of the ongoing life of these signals, wherever they are continuing in some kind of subaltern circulation vs being captured or fixed into some specific cultural or academic or statecraft display. a folklorist in 17th century iceland who basically writes spooky stories to tell in the dark for 17th century icelandic kids refers to a 12th centurt saga that either existed and was destroyed, or that he invented (but from what material?) to authorize or lend weight to his storytelling; this non-saga then starts moving through the way people speak about these things, as part of their own stories, etc. my sense is that there is a *character* to this kind of thing which looks more like creation, re-creation at any given point of departure rather than reification of any particular historical understanding. even when some wagner or any of his many acolytes comes along to try to fix all of that to a point, and a project, the thing that escaped in the first place i think continues to circulate, maybe because it's less about the contents of the signal than that it exists at all. these are just my off the cuff reflections on your question though i don't claim to have some specific theory here to advance

in my experience, coming to anarchy was more like an epiphany than like a conclusion after some period of study. filling in the back story or the history of this word / concept / mode-of-being, for me now, has been a life-long, never quite completed, task.

so, the history of anarchy is Proudhon, Goldman, Freedom & ajoda, as just a few examples of a European anarchism, and all worth having at least a passing familiarity with. but it is also about how to live non-hierarchically with all beings in your area. by which i mean the latent humanism of anarchism is a blockage toward a more whole anarchy. by which i mean, the history of anarchists and anarchy is way more than the merely human telling of events on the way to liberation.

Yes, succinctly I refer to it as the
1)' clean slate of ontological exploration ' and
2) ' sweeping away the cobwebs of cultural stagnation '.

A Thousand Plateaus by D&G and the Archaeology of Knowledge by Foucault.

D&G were Socialist/Communists and Foucault was a Maoist. Just sayin'

Cool, I’m going to add them to the list of banned books at our infoshop for the next anarchist book burning!

Live out your troll fantasy!

Not sure what you meant but a good critique should be worth a think wherever it came from, those guys weren’t really known for writing tomes of prescriptive theories. Who needs to be told Foucault wasn’t an anarchist? Who cares?

regardless of what the authors believed, those books helped me develop anarchist ideas that I'd hadn't previously arrived at.

And so was the author of 'Death of the Author'! SooOoo whAt?!

LaBoétie was not anarchist, and a state official. His critical analysis of how the state works, tho, is invaluable to ANY anarchist out there.

Heidegger also wasn't an anarchist, but his ideas prompted me to consider the ontological roots of the anarch consciousness.

Foucault was not a fucking Maoist. He was vaguely associated with Maoists who participated in the Groupe d’information sur les prisons.

Anyone "vaguely associated with Maoists" after the so-called Cultural Revolution (and there were plenty of French intellectuals who white-washed that bloody enterprise) deserves scorn. Sorry if that is inconvenient for you.

Our social center (now evicted) used to open to the public every Thursday evening. Most nights it was just us, no one outside our little group of misfit rebels would join us, so we would sit around the table, drink cheap wine, and share stories. That was how i learned about the city, my comrades, and their adventures, Listening to the story of your group is a very important ritual as it communicates shared beliefs and values. I have very found memories from those nights.

A side question: What’s the point of “learning one’s history” if nothing like cumulative intelligence seems to develop out of it? Or put more hospitably, where have we seen this intelligence emerge- or is that the wrong thing to look for? On this site for instance I feel like I’m still seeing the same kinds of questions subjected to tedious and unproductive debate that I was reading here a decade and more ago. I’m not looking for novelty but maybe just history itself, that we’re supposed to learn from in the first place; seriously, are we learning anything? I feel like this crisis stricken era is a time in which anarchism arguably ought to be coming into its own and really having a moment, compared to which, it really barely still is. It’s arguably less visible and significant currently than during the height of occupy, except for the classic “get together and smash stuff” events which have been a main touchstone of anarchism in the wider world since 1999. Is there a reason for being stuck in this internet era; a reason beyond lack of imagination or ideological cohesion - a lack of right ideas - that explains this historical impotence and incomprehension?

Today I’m a little triggered specifically by the atl debate but another place I notice a real lack of historical intelligence is the way some are debating the Ukraine war with poorly thought out parallels drawn almost at random from widely varying times and places, as if to suit personal ideological preferences, and as if - even by the most rigorously self assessed radicals - we are just trying to keep up with what passes for an evolving historical intelligence in the eyes of the capitalist spectacle (but which is really just its headlong race into destruction and misery). Now apply this closer to home…

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