TOTW: One More Time with Feeling?

In 2020 anarchists across the world initiated, witnessed, and participated in a surprisingly large number of uprisings—some that have grown and continued without interruption into 2021.

The new year also brings with it the notion of an entirely new opportunity for anarchists to... do the exact same things as in previous years and expect different results! Of course this opportunity applies not just to the larger anarchist struggle (whatever that may mean) but also to the smaller scale of everyday life—our interactions, relationships, and our approaches to the world around us.

We believe it is still possible to rebel today ...*

Every day technology is getting increasingly efficient at providing the population a more perfect and constant analog for seemingly meaningful interaction with others—while tightening restrictions on physical gatherings and reducing the ability to have truly private conversations. As this goes on much of our ability to develop and practice creative ways of thinking and living will continue to deteriorate. Many will find themselves stuck reading the same streams of overly simplified fragments of the same dusty ideas from previous generations and emphatically parroting the same failed solutions into mediated social media bubbles and curated quarantine pods. And while there are certainly more people than ever before calling themselves anarchists... are there really more anarchists?

It is still possible to penetrate the monster with a pinprick. But we must move away from the stereotypical images of the great mass struggles, and the concept of the infinite growth of a movement that is to dominate and control everything. We must develop a more precise and detailed way of thinking. We must consider reality for what it is, not what we imagine it to be.*

Is this another year in which we've learned nothing from the mistakes of years previous? How will we avoid the trap of seeing reality not as it is but as we imagine it to be—of doing the same things over and over again expecting different results? How will the rapid advancements in technology and our reliance on its tools help or hinder our ability to develop more precise and detailed ways of thinking?

How will you approach anarchy differently in 2021?


* — Alfredo M. Bonanno. "Anarchists and Action."

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"And while there are certainly more people than ever before calling themselves anarchists... are there really more anarchists?"

A rhetorical question which points to the fact that most anarchists are merely rhetorical. I concur.
The few that are real are not tarnished by that fact, they get a gold star sticker in imaginary anarchy book.

"Is this another year in which we've learned nothing from the mistakes of years previous?"

I think I may have learned less in this year than in all years prior, and I keep on forgetting things that I've learnt and all kinds of skills that I'm not putting into practice are atrophying.

All in all, the only serious mistake is being born, the ensuing punishment has only taught me not to do it again.

"How will we avoid the trap of seeing reality not as it is but as we imagine it to be—of doing the same things over and over again expecting different results?"

Limits of perception and understanding aside, I don't do the same things over and over expecting a different result, the comfort of routine comes in great part from its predictability of outcomes. But life being a sucky ordeal, comfort zone becomes a reduced discomfort zone as you age, since health and mobility deteriorates, and so does the world.

If seeing things as we imagine them to be is a trap, then the unknown loses its luster, killing the urge to explore, since it merely becomes a blind spot and not a screen where one can project ones imagination. When you see reality "as it is" it makes no sense at all. Only perception, sentience, makes sense of things, intelligence is an optical illusion which gives imperfect rudimentary service to survival. Everything is absurd.

"How will the rapid advancements in technology and our reliance on its tools help or hinder our ability to develop more precise and detailed ways of thinking?"

Precision in manufacturing and measurements of all kind, detailed as the largest bandwidth of big data and machine learning can gather and analyze. It will only serve itself, its own survival, in a very imperfect and rudimentary way, just like our own perception and consciousness. Not referring to A.I. becoming self-aware, regardless tech is in service of the society that produces it, its deviations and subversions by minorities does not buck macro trends.

s/anarchists/hackers in first question to get an idea. Black hat hackers? More like Infosec freelancers amirite.

"How will you approach anarchy differently in 2021?"

I've never approached it, I thought at most I may be able to regard it or catch a glimpse. Now in 2021 I realize anarchy is invisible and only those who live it have felt it. The rest is a mirage. So not only will I not hope to see it, I now recognize all the false-positives as false sightings, misapprehension on my part or pareidolia, or hoaxes.

But don't think it's gloom and doom! The big tent non-denominational insurgents will save us, because only we can save us! Save (y)ourselves! We are plenty, organized, strong, brave, intelligent, committed, realistic, determined, loving, caring, the embodiment of all that is good, full of vibrant vital energy and joy! No one can stop us! If we can't do it, no one else can...because there is one inside everyone of us, if you ever felt your taint tingle at the sight of a sunset while you caressed a freshly dug out sweet potato, you might be one of us.

But what is the role of anarchist? Anarchists don't need to be told what they should or shouldn't do, they're free to do whatever, they get all the fun, no restrictions, you can do whatever you want, even whatever you don't want, you can even not be an anarchist, but then you're automatically not an anarchist, so you can't say anarchists contradict themselves in action, because an anarchist is only affirmed or created through action, the rest is the rest of the people, (and maybe even that same people the rest of the time?).

"It is worth remembering the experience of the Paris Commune. Here geography was inseparable from the defeat of the revolution. One of the reasons for its defeat was its isolation from the rest of France. Paris went hungry because the siege of the bourgeoisie effectively blockaded the city from the food producing regions of France. "

haha

So these dogmatic morons still have yet to realize that France was already at war with the German Empire, which troops were also waiting at the outskirts of Paris... The bloodthirsty German command asked Thiers if they could instead storm Paris and do a massacre on their own. i.e. the Communards weren't fighting against one but TWO powerful military powers, Germany being the toughest at the time. There was no armed way out of it, outside of a massacre. Any "revolutionary" calling to arms in the context of a kettled Paris commune was just as bad as any of the reactionary forces.

"Aleppo" was a dogshit jihadist hellhole. The FSA were found to be a bunch of pro-Turkey jihadists who also held a few mutual checkpoints with ISIS, and they fought AGAINST the YPG and SDF....

Can't trust commies, neither in 1871 or 150 years later. Either retarded or insane, these aren't good team mates.

"Can't trust commies, neither in 1871 or 150 years later."

Amen! And awoman!

There's totally no gender etymology behind "amen", tho. ;) It's the Hebrew way of saying "true, so true..."

while it's true that the word "amen" has no gender in it, it's also not related to the concept or deployment of truth. it simply means "i believe it" or "i have faith in it"

it does mean true- it shares its root with emet, truth. It also connotes faith in the sense of fidelity and substantiated trust not merely a personal subjective opinion. True, faithful and trustworthy weren’t disconnected ideas millennia ago, I guess. Hebrew in particular has lots of words that mean too many things to translate directly.

And awoman!

“Awoman” is peak pc.

Interesting how the Commies keep talking about how vital food is, but they aren't talking about connecting with revolutionaries in rural areas, which is where the food actually comes from.

Anti-technology boomer rants are abelist. Millions would die without technology. Real anarchist rebels embrace the cyber reality of the now and hack it to their desires.

Millions are already dying with technology...

Your SOUL is dying on social media everyday...

Hack the cop in your head or have funs with many more months or years of Zoom confinement.

Before Zoom granted us the freedom of real time video communication we were left to sit in our dim rooms typing text into chat applications from the eighties. Now we can read together in the shining light of anarchist appropriated technology all from the safety of our own homes.

Nuthin' wrong with sitting around a campfire singing kumbayah with your partner and a bunch of friends making stimulating conversion during the interludes!

so the preferred things are not dim rooms and legacy chat applications, but televised faces?? Give me a break! You might be a troll but to me are a progressive nit wit who uses anarchist forums to worship civilization.

Anarchists don't need to be told what they should or shouldn't do, they're free to do whatever, they get all the fun, no restrictions, you can do whatever you want, even whatever you don't want,

Excellent proof that what gets called anarchism in today's United States is a 100% wholly owned subsidiary of the psychology of mainstream consumer society. It cannot be anything but this.

What is excellent proof? What are you saying? Forgive my English. Greetings from Athens.

But did your taint tingle tho?

Those are non-consumerist tingles...harvest your tingles organically.

Okaaaaay, I won't tell anarchists to not vote, mmmkay wise man of anarchy moral code of behavior?

"And while there are certainly more people than ever before calling themselves anarchists... are there really more anarchists?"

There are more furries than anarchists.

"Is this another year in which we've learned nothing from the mistakes of years previous?"

Yes. Forever.

"How will we avoid the trap of seeing reality not as it is but as we imagine it to be—of doing the same things over and over again expecting different results? "

It's not up to us. Free will does not exist.

"How will the rapid advancements in technology and our reliance on its tools help or hinder our ability to develop more precise and detailed ways of thinking? "

The advancements in technology will occupy our minds and help ease the passage of the time.

Smash the Like button.

> There are more furries than anarchists.

organise the furries! black rose radical furry caucus

Are we really calling what the U.S did as an uprising? because it was a couple of days of looting and the rest of the year liberal protest and virtue signaling... which is typical American anarchists

Nowhere does it say the U.S. It does say “across the world”... Typical failtroll reading comprehension.

Also it was much more than “a couple of days of looting” in the US but don’t let that stop you from showing your whole ass, m8.

Well, I am in the U.S currently so my comment is about what I see happening here.

through a very distorted and/or counterinsurgency/reactionary lens, it seems!

CrimethInc will analyze the MAGA storming of the Capital for useful strategies that anarchists can use in eventual any day now storming of the capital but only anarchist and produce a 900 page essay.

We will discuss it on social media and in telegram group chats until it is called anti BIPoc and then the strategies will be dismissed outright in favor of a new website.

after a glance at the footage, it's pretty clear the piggies weren't putting up nearly as much of a fight as they usually do against those they perceive to be "on the left" or whatever. so no, this won't be useful information. just confirms what everybody already knows that if you're wearing a MAGA douche cap, you can practically get away with murder in broad daylight while the cops explain that whoever you killed must have been a terrorist.

Caterpiller machinery caps will get you pardoned for random acts of violence against communists, just saying ;)

4 people were killed by police yesterday at the capital, including Ashley Babbit, an unarmed mother... so yeah...

Ideology is one hell of a drug.

they were all bad tho.

society is a hell of a drug.

They're all dead tho!
Life is a hell of a drug.

nothing to do with ideology: even including the shooting deaths, the use of force by the cops was so conspicuously different that you'd have to be very ignorant of the past year's worth of police violence to honestly believe that if BLM was "storming" capitol buildings, the casualties wouldn't have been orders of magnitude higher.

it's apples and oranges and the question is why? the short answer is because of police complicity with this performative far right flexing.

You're sounding just like Biden "Aww gee wiz, if it was a BLM rally they wouldn't have gotten inside and been beaten" duuuh crypto neoliberal

The Congress and White House are just symbols, they're billboard advertisements for power, this is what it looks like. If you blow it up or invade it nothing changes, its a shell, a prop, its just replaced and refilled with political actors following power's script-- In Muhrica its God, Democracy Work. It replaced the previous inhabitants who ran on Nature Spirits, Free land and food, Fun.

A significant part of the cops have been zero violent with the protesters and some even let them storm in the Capitol. National Guard was also put on hold by directorial decision.

Your fallacy here doesn't apply. This was noting else but a dumb fascist riot, enabled by State thugs and commandeered by the Don, as his last throes before being kicked out, and the last throes of 10 years of dogshit 4chan Far Right. Unless Trump pushes the button, they're going down the drain.

But these Trump supporters were mostly harmless, not as dangerous as some football/icehockey or blackblock riots were their intentions are to damage cops. The cops knew it was just a gesture, a facesaving exercise. Some were even protecting some cops from being stampeded or punched. Anyway, the cops knew they were outnumbered 50 to 1 and it was dangerous to go into violent attack mode. They played their retreat and regathering tactic quite well and reduced the chances or things going ultràviolent and against their odds.

what the fuck is this fascist MAGAt apologist doing in every thread on my beloved anarchist news dot org? they get banned from social media and their nazi apps get shit down so they come to shit in our space?

They've been around for a while, didn't you know? And closer to you than you think!

A hint: look around for some well-known internet persona who became famous at the wake of the last J20, pretending to be an anti-Trump protester who got arrested with the others.

https://unicornriot.ninja/2017/criminalizing-dissent-contested-evidence-...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-police-infiltrated-inauguration-... 'member?

I 'member.

heh well which is it? are "these trump supporters mostly harmless" or were the cops shitting themselves because they knew what would happen if they attacked the crowd? I'm inclined to agree with most of your reasoning tho!

Thanks for your understanding and riotknowledge. Its common sense, you don't start a brawl with 50 mob driven morons if you're on your own. Those were the odds, 50 to 1, I rest my case...

comparisons could also be made with the notorious NFAC, which I would argue the cops have behaved with at least some similar reluctance towards.

piggies prefer beating up on soft crowds that can't defend themselves, regardless of ideology, although obviously perceived identity of the targets of police violence matters a lot too.

I'm not sure, a majority of Trump supporters obviously have cardio-vascular issues due to their unhealthy lifestyle eating takeaway, drinking excess beer and smoking whilst sitting on their asses whining. They are physiologically a softer target.

Tho that doesn't overshadow the presence of more dangerous elements among them (like military vets and out-of-town pigs), who're fit for violence against individuals, especially those non-White.

If you're referring to the (fucking brave) individualist Black woman who had the guts to verbally confront a huge crowd of CHUDs in DC then got somewhat beaten and sent to their cop buddies nearby, well, she wasn't starting a brawl. Just going to talk to people ain't starting a brawl, and the only provocation she was lied in asserting their right to exist everywhere on this land without being punched around.

Kudos to this women, and fuck the fascist bootlicking cowards.

She was foolhardy person with a righteous agenda who should be applauded despite her bad judgement of people's intentions.

rebellion, which is what the TOTW is alluding to, is not the kind of thing I want to have anything to do with. Sure, the enemies of anarchists are much more powerful than they were before, they are incredibly impersonal and hidden behind layers of technology, institutions, vested self-interest, and security. They still are vulnerable and have many weak points. However, this does not mean it's good to double down on some hero game.

"Every day technology is getting increasingly efficient at providing the population a more perfect and constant analog for seemingly meaningful interaction with others—while tightening restrictions on physical gatherings and reducing the ability to have truly private conversations."

it is not reducing the capacity to have private conversations...that is just something that people are convincing themselves out of fear, to me it's very upsetting how quickly "the population" (you aren't part of the population??) just gave in to feeling scared and dramatically limiting themselves because of the coronavirus. While saying that fear of the coronavirus is a fiction coming from the authoritarian machine is just another fiction, it is an example of how people can easily be convinced to shelter themselves.

Smartphones are actually more threatening to private conversations than the internet is, anyone can turn their phone in to a recording device. Really if you are afraid of this stuff you need to start speaking your mind more often.

As a devoted Narodnik and having my roots in the Promethean ancient communisms of antiquity, I declare the relevance of nihilo-communism to the present global politic!!
*Lines of our exclusive fashion label of hessian bag creations will be available at a non-profit price at Wayne's Commune Franchises in all branches*
Think of our hard working illiterate and starving Narodnik peasants please !

Hey, standard troll. What are these antique communisms you're referring to? I just hope it's not the phallocrat ruling elite of land-owners, for starters that lived large off slave labor...

The antique communes existed throughout the neolithic epoch when people pooled their resources towards the common goal to survive.

You mean what is known as Prehistory? This is where I got confused... Antiquity is a label for a very different epoch. But no biggie.

I don't observe history to define human nature, only that its either antique, modern, or post-modern. These are the 3 main periods. Yup, no biggie.
Also the Dunbarian number is a main influential ingredient because it prevents the the development of complex chains of command and the organization of the stockpiling and accumulation commodities.
As SE mentions, its outrageous that Wayne Price has never mentioned this crucial factor in commune structure.

To elaborate some more, I prefer using the term antique to describe cultures that did not have a written language, usually small populations where storytelling sufficed to spread the word.

The United States is a lost cause, we just need to cause some disruption while anarchism takes hold in other countries.

of anarchy, and we need to wait and hope for ideals to be realized elsewhere before our lives are worth living.

i am hope anarchists of praxis will break free from the failures patterns from the past. the kaos to come is where we burn brightest.
hurry comrade!!

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