TOTW: The a-word

A-choo! ?

As I’ve grown older as an anarchist, I’ve felt that one “a” word is more than enough to describe my politics. It engages, provokes, and scares in equal measures, at worst giving people an invitation to attack (with words or more), at best a chance to have meaningful conversations otherwise lost in our drab costumes as banal normies.

Yet it seems a lot of anarchists don’t feel like they’ve had their fill with just one. In addition to anarchist, they pile on the antis - anti-authoritarian, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-, well, you get the idea. There’s also no shortage of projects by anarchists that get swallowed whole by these vague words and concepts, not calling themselves anarchist at all.

One context in which this is happening is one in which Endnotes says “leftism itself has become one identity among others, and one that in itself is of no great importance for the success and evolution” of what they term “non-movements” like the yellow vests in France, the George Floyd protests, etc. Leftism is another margarine word, but replace it with a somewhat less oily anarchism and the point still stands. Far be it from me to lay the course of world events at our feet, but is a reason for our irrelevance perhaps that so many of us are getting swept along in the tide, and failing to say what anarchists must - that is, that we’re anarchists at all?

That said, there’s also an argument that the “a” word can amount to favoring style over substance, and spoiling potential affinities out of the gate due to a label. Anti-fascist or anti-capitalist may feel friendlier or more specific to what you’re doing and leaves the door open for people who may no be anarchists today but could be tomorrow.

But then, could it not be considered a howl in the attentat sense - "social, intended to collect friends; exultant, a response of health & joy, not fear and sickness" and "I howl alone not because I am alone, but because I exult in the joy of... those who are coming." How do we find each other without this howl?

How important is it for you to name yourself an anarchist to others? How important is it that your projects be explicitly anarchist?

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Anarchist is the implication of a certain accumulation of disillusionments, the enduring effect and affect of an exposure to nihilism, the erosion of belief by questioning, doubt. I do not affirm "nihilist" as if I've fallen to the bottom and can go no further, of what is actually bottomless pit and the experience is of living as "free-fall" (a similar position to what's expressed here after "I will start talking about nihilism by saying that I am not a nihilist. I say this because I do not consider nihilism to be a body of ideas, positions, and life-ways that one can be for.", except modified by an iconoclastic aversion to terms, identities and representation in general) . There is a limit to what I will question, I will hold on to the remaining convenient assumptions that serve as bearings, frame of reference, but there is no going back to the discredited illusions. I keep the name "anarchist" to myself (as the demarcation of lies I will not abide by, the dictums I will shun, disobey and forever resent) to avoid being attacked, but the affect definitely colors and guides all my banal interactions with "normies" or otherwise and it's all quite meaningless. I didn't pick out anarchist out of a series of labels because I fancied confrontation with everything and everyone. That's just the predicament you're in once you realize you are not for this bossing/obeying dynamic, hierarchies, oppression, government, civ etc. It doesn't magically imbue you with the power to eliminate any of these. Even understanding is hard to acquire and very limited.

A lot of the words and identities are used by people as social roles to be played in the realization of activism. In my case, the implication of "anarchist" does not imply a disillusioned involvement with the preservation of illusions.

All identity labels, pre-defined concepts or categories, frameworks, paradigms, or preconceived notions could "favor style over substance, and spoiling potential affinities out of the gate due to a label." even "Anti-fascist or anti-capitalist", you can do whatever "may feel friendlier or more specific to what you’re doing and leaves the door open for" anything you want.

The world is sick, I languish in stupor, I do not howl. I am not currently plotting an attentat. Others have, others will, they are the determined few.

"How important is it for you to name yourself an anarchist to others?"

Not at all. If they name themselves anarchist, it catches my interest. It's not a guarantee of anything, but it could point to an affinity or two. Not everything that shines is gold. Best to play cards close to chest.

"How important is it that your projects be explicitly anarchist?"

Not at all. It may not be important, but I desire it. I wish I could live as if the mere fact of seeing the world as an anarchist meant something more than that. Projects need not have a name, or be public. Any other label may be judged by its own merit, most labels are annoying and I wouldn't want them on me. I consider "anarchist" to be an exceedingly appealing label, I consider myself undeserving of it, many projects fall short of it. Many other labels are helpful repellents, telling me to stay away.

The "world" (civ, SOCIETY!) carries on as it is and its worldly project carry us along and away, the disillusionment with it is what implicates me as anarchist and the affect is that I don't like it. There are things to enjoy, like creature comforts, not specifically anarchist, but part of it. Projects, being things that require effort, must pose a considerable attraction to be pursued. Survival, enjoyment, perceived importance, interest, curiosity etc are things that could justify the pursuit of a project, be it anarchist or not.
Anarchy allows for total freedom, anarchists may pursuit these projects or not.

To clarify, my reluctance to use the word is not due to an imprecision, inadequacy, or undesirability of the word, it simply isn't a magic word that necessarily gets you what you want when you use it. There's that stereotype about how annoying devout atheists and vegans can be when they preach to others. But it's one thing to be prudent and avoid claiming the word to show off, and another is to be dishonest with yourself and others by shying away from what you truly desire, compromising your vision for something less or even contrary to the anarchy you hold dear. Worst is doing the latter while claiming and screaming anarchy at the top of your lungs. If you're doing a shitty job of being an anarchist, at least be humble about it. No one can accuse your shit project of not being anarchist if you never claimed it was.

one thing is to fall short of it and another is to renounce it from the start

I stopped using the A-word in reference to myself when I realized how so many liberal zoomer trust fundies were using it all the time, and with putting a lot of "hiss" sound on the "-ist" part like snakes would...

There's a few others reasons, like especially representation politics being a bad idea in general when you're radical and the issue of diluting meaning by over-use in any sauce.

I stopped using the A word when I was orange pilled and experienced community self defense and gardening. Deleuze and Guitarie wrote a little bit about it and you can find more about it at the invisible committee discord but basically the Anarchist identity doesn’t understand Now so we have to find each other and build.

I love the spelling "Guitarie", it sounds like he's a transformer with a guitar alt-mode, or maybe a Moshi monster

im actually reluctant to say Im an anarchist because they are regarded by the majority as losers or else Idpol or communist sympathizers, and I just don' need to attract scorn or disrespect at this time. to the person {priest, boss, family member, person in the street } I just say Im an individual, saves going into a long boring discussion with an NPC which will roll off them like water off a duck's back, let's face it, you keep your politics or ideas to yourself unless you are sleeping with them, and rule 1, you don't sleep with the enemy

we should all be reluctant to give ourselves the label; without a centralized dogma, any idiot can -- and will -- adopt it. too many people follow my own path: using the word to scandalize friends and family long before bothering to learn anything about the philosophy, theory, or history. but that's just the price of admission...

There just really isn't another word my personal project, taken as a whole. But maybe nothing is lost by designating practical projects with some more partial label, since it is rare we get the chance to pursue or advance anarchy all that directly.

I am into calling myself an anarchist, and promoting anarchy to people around me in general. I think know one can know our ideas unless we put a name on them. I think it invites future connection along anarchistic lines.

What are u, a kind of saint? Or probably at Lvl 1 or 2 in anarchism. So there's only one thing you should know before doing anything stupid (and it's likely you will): when you pose around for a position or cause, people will identity that position with their mental image of you and also likely stuff you've been doing.

You're being its PR agent.

So if you're honestly about anarchy, then you'd better be representing it well in how you behave & stuff your do, otherwise you'll be making this paradigm a bad name. No, just wearing patches, Red & Black clothing (lol), circle-As or saying "anarchist(m)" at every two sentence won't do anything positive. You'll just cause nausea about it to people around.

And if you're interested in doing it dishonestly on purpose, you're just a teardrop in the rain.

Hm? Sorry, I couldn't hear you over my own yawning at your self-righteous posing about what I should or shouldn't do.

I only got into this whole anarchism game for the cybersex and likes my youtube channel. Once I had a big enough following and sponsors started offering to pay me to promote their wares I knew it was actually a lucrative position to have. So yeah you could say it’s very important to me that others know that I represent anarchism. Anarchism is best when it is shared.

First problem: the Spectacle collects images and signifiers, turns them into empty consumption signals, people start using them as meaningless ways to position themselves. Before you know it, the image or signifier doesn't mean anything any more, or it means about as much as Pepsi vs Coke.

Second problem: the counterinsurgency industry is built on the idea that threats to society are built up from collections of dangerous ideas. They focus a lot of effort on identifying the "red flags" which indicate dangerous people and in persecuting ("network disrupting", quasi-censoring, blacklisting) people who tick the "red flags".

Third problem: media and politicians love to create oversimplified binaries and attach crude or outright false stereotypes to positions they don't like. They also like informally "copyrighting" the meaning of words they like, associating these words with their own exact politics whether they fit or not.

Hence the problems faced by the words "anarchy, anarchist, anarchism". First we have the Spectacle or commodification, anyone can wear a circle-A, anyone can call themselves an "anarchist" in academia or on Facebook, it comes to mean "looking edgy" or "vaguely anti-establishment" or "generically progressive". Second we have the special risk of being profiled, demonised or persecuted which the "Anarchist Bakery" will be running whereas the "Cooperative Mutual Aid Bakery" will not. Third there's the stereotypes that anarchy means Hobbesian chaos, biker gangs, anyone who protests "violently" (New York is an "anarchist jurisdiction", Trump supporters trashing the Capitol are "anarchists"...) and the more subtle stereotypes that "anarchist" means specifically ancom or ancap or primmie or insu.

In most contexts, words should be names, concepts, which designate particular things, in a Korzybskian/general semantics way. If they stop serving this role, they're more harmful than useful. With anarchy/anarchist I'm trying to designate a confluence of politics of desire, refusal of authority and hierarchy, concrete freedoms, anti-systemic struggle, Kropotkin's social principle, ethos not normativity, etc. To the extent that I'm communicating this, it's useful; to the extent that I'm not, the word becomes more occluding than helpful.

I believe in compartmentalising identities and using hidden/public transcript splits to our advantage, if and when this is compatible with an anarchist ethos. Hence the A-word goes some places and not others. It's important when trying to differentiate myself from the radical left more generally; not so important when arguing against generic right-wing bullshit. I tend not to use it when talking to vaguely affinal people.

Wow, you've just defined the newest identity category taking form which begins with a post-Idpol middle-of-the-road neo-liberalism, haha, sorta like getting drunk and screaming "Fuck-off ya bastard" at some dude at a bar, and then latter on buying him a drink and apologizing.

I wish to announce a new minority identity group called "farmers" who are becoming a political force to fight the discrimination and the threats from industrial scale machinery threatening their livelyhood, like the Luddites. Forced into factory process work and transportation off traditional lands into dense urban ghettoes.

"Farmers" is a false identity group, everyone should be growing their own food on free land. Farmers have a monopoly on food production.
The "A" in anarchist should stand for Autonomous Agricultural Activity

Now that I'm old, mostly just use the @ after I've been in a long, usually stupid fight with someone and they're running out of steam and they say something like "WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS!?"

Then I remind them.

this is my favorite response so far :)
"then i remind them" !!

so ominous... lol.

As someone else said, there is no other word really.

On the other hand so many people who call themselves anarchist don't seem to know the meaning of the word, as in things like "Anarchists for Bernie" etc. Although those sorts of misuse, while vicariously embarrassing, are not the main irritation for me.

The main irritation for me is people who call themselves anarchist but then act in their everyday lives as petty authoritarians. I mean, either you really do hold that persons can live as they want, can be responsible for themselves or you think you know better than them and thus they must do as you do. It is easy to read all the things and regurgitate the best @ line in public but how do you act when no one is watching?

And, while I say there is no other word, I'm starting to feel that anarchy is not, or really, anarchy is more than the human. Or, anarchy, as a 19th century political philosophy, is too steeped in Western notions of humanism to be effective at addressing the issues of our time.

"acrat"?

"political nihilist"?

"individualist"?

The first two at least seem like solid replacements to me. They also draw a clearer line in the sand apart from any Sanders bullshit or other political synchretinism.

this one time? at a music festival?

I had to endure a long lecture from this weird nerd about how they'd invented better words and symbols and everyone was stupid and wrong and their symbols and signifiers were better and smart and everyone should get hip to their jive. It was cold and there was a fire and free drinks so I nodded along, found some of what they were saying mildly interesting, I didn't really disagree.

Then the sun came up and the big bad world continued ignoring their little contribution. Too bad. Oh well. I guess radically transforming common usage of language is a bit more complicated than just having an opinion?

It happens quite often, but is rarely a planned process. Think of how many words that are in common use today, didn't exist in (say) 1990, or didn't have anything like their present meaning. There's all the words relating to computers, the internet, smartphones and other tech; most of the idpol buzzwords and those of the alt-right; a bunch of counterinsurgency terms related to network disruption (facilitation, enabling, material support, etc); buzzwords associated with particular moral panics, policy initiatives, etc; language drawn from pop-psychology and trauma studies; stuff popularised by movies, music, TV shows; and of course the regular euphemism treadmill regarding swearing, insults, slurs, etc.

Some quite diverse examples. "People trafficking" didn't exist as a term until the late 90s. "Lockdown" outside prisons, I first heard on 9/11. "Toxic" to describe beliefs, narratives or people, appeared in the mid-2010s and was spun off an earlier COIN use I think. "Precarity" and "gentrification" pop up in the 2000s. "Kettling" came into common usage along with the tactic. "Selfie" became a word roundabout 2016, contractions like "ancom", "ancap", "anfem", "incel", "TERF" a little later. "Numeracy" as a word for math started being used in the 2000s I think.

Sometimes the word is new because the thing is new, or newly revived, or newly widespread; other times a new word is switched for an old one. For example, people have started saying "ethics" instead of "morals" or "morality" because the latter words are discredited by association with the religious right and 50s values. So now a new bunch of moralists can impose a similar regime without it looking the same, because now it's not "morality" but "ethics".

Unfortunately there also seem to be think-tanks, political agencies and lobbies which are trying to deliberately shift uses so as to embed their own perspectives. The model is probably the New Right think-tanks, but the Blairites, the idpols and the COIN lobby all have their own agendas. If they manage to plant a new (usually morally-loaded) word in the media, they're halfway to controlling the narrative. It's an authoritarian process, but it works by "nudging" rather than command. The rest of the time, language just evolves from cumulative use and individual innovation, although I suspect there's a kind of "network effect" involved.

I think there's a case for anarchists boycotting particular loaded words or choosing alternatives, or at least putting these words in inverted commas.

is the whole of my comment but, alas, the collective just cannot abide one word comments.

Anyhoo- acrat, don't know what this means but please leave me to my ignorance here, as that is bliss.

Political nihilist- well, I'm already anti-political, and as much as I would like to claim nihilist, I just cannot.

As to individualist; as a corrective to notions of unity based on false premises individualism has done its work. But that work was finished long ago, and now individualism serves the dominant order by keeping us atomized and longing for belonging, if we could only buy the correct set of items to signal our presence to others of our kind.

For now I'd rather remain unnamed.

I am not 11:32, but "ácrata" is another word for anarchist in Spanish, and "acracia", for anarchism. I've never see it used in English as acrat before. It's simply the prefix "a-" added to crat, from the kratos that's also featured in words like democrat and democracy, aristocrat and aristocracy etc.

Ok ok... I know "acrat" sounds awkward and I myself feel weird using it, but the word's been put in a dictionary already. It's pretty much the same meaning as "anarchist":

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/acracy

Also I've read several Greek anarcho texts and posters that use "ακρυξία"... I'm not 100% sure but that might be the @-word they're natively using in the place of our @-word.

"Political nihilism" just refers I guess to negation of politics as a whole, or also political convictions and ideologies. I don't the problem in there.

"But that work was finished long ago, and now individualism serves the dominant order by keeping us atomized and longing for belonging, if we could only buy the correct set of items to signal our presence to others of our kind. "

Nope.

Individualism is not atomization or individuation. The first may be defined as a kind of philosophy or tendency (like anarchism, but anyways), where the latter is a social process. One can isolate themselves but that's not what individualism is about.

To systematically put people into cubicles and packages, or constrain them to do so to themselves and each other, is what a form of COLLECTIVISM does. Such are the curfews happening these days (haven't you heard?). They are certainly NOT individualism, but clearly are some brutal form of individuation.

As for our beloved lumpentroll... I never attempted to hijack our sacred anarchism by forcing "better" definitions. I was only suggesting alternatives where Nettle was claiming to not see any. Well, there are, even if they don't sound perfect. But wait.

Fauvenoir, I wasn't claiming not to see other words to use, rather than anarchist. I was saying I don't like any that were offered in that post, that's all.

In my understanding Individualism is an outlook that assigns primacy to individual human beings such that social groupings are considered not real vis a vis the individual human beings that make them up. My issue with it is that only Human Beings get to be individuals under this philosophy. A bear or a mushroom or a river have no standing in the philosophy of Individualism, not to even mention Black Human Beings, when this was thought up, had no standing in it either.

I like anarchists and what they/we are trying to do, I just want to move away from the European Enlightenment concepts that undergird much of the philosophy we still use.

Collectivism can also be construed as a European (coded as bad) concept if a more limited and specific definition is applied.

Does a bear or a mushroom or a river ground their actions in a philosophy of "the greater good"(Utilitarianism)?

Do "Black Human Beings" TM have a standing in the philosophy of bears, mushrooms or rivers? Are all philosophies that were penned while racism and oppression existed, wholly rebutted and discarded for this reason?

Rhetorical questions aside, I think that there are reasons to slip out of a collectivist undergirding (undercommons?), and all forms of girdles and straitjackets that end in -ist. From your own experience (as multitudinal and dividual as you may be), confer with your gut flora and have a nice little assembly and when you gather all your gut feelings, your hunches, you listen to your heart, that feeling in your stomach, that frisson, the sound of the breeze and all that, talk to the river, to the committee of cumulonimbus clouds, and ask (y)ourselves, tap into the collective unconscious of the now somewhat congealed and chunky primordial soup:

How does it feel to be constrained and made to conform: to a race, a sex, a gender, a class, a role, a standard, a label; society!?
No need to pen a convoluted philosophy to revolt against cages by any other name!

Some might choose a pre-existing an ideology such as an individualism or a collectivism, or create one of their own, to come up with all sorts of fancy schemes to arrange people and bears and mushrooms and rivers and gut flora (and the tinier bacteria on top of the gut flora, the diatoms inside the amoeba, the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell) to their fancy, and some have more success than others. Other skilled manipulators can achieve as much without having to resort to philosophical undergirdings; emotional manipulation, aggression or other forms of coercion might do.

Cows in particular have very interesting digestive systems and gut flora (https://beefskillathon.tamu.edu/cows-digestive-system/). They are very gregarious and social and very easily herded. They are under an awful lot of abuse by people.

On the other hand Herding cats may refer to: An idiom denoting a futile attempt to control or organize a class of entities which are inherently uncontrollable—as in the difficulty of attempting to command individual cats into a group (herd).

We should be more like cats, and less like cows, and not at all like collectivists and individualists.

No, cats ARE individualists by definition, though prides of lions are exceptions, and other species of cats will live in groups, so I think rather than determining an ideal rule or number, why not just permit a flexibility and not obsess about pluralities mmkay?

You're conflating isolation with individualism. You're also doing something strang with animals.

Cats are actually a good, simple reference for individualism. They don't give a fuck about our semantic realities, they aren't racist, politics are a joke to them, they HATE our closed doors (lol), they don't fucking hold back to express they want something and they'll lay down on your face whenever the fuck they want. They gonna band up sometimes, yet easily break apart or quarrel when they don't like others behavior.

I like the way they treat bourgeois mice who don't observe the dynamics of the gift economy and reciprosity.

"From a sheep's point of view, a wolf is evil" - Nietzsche.

African wild cats, the origin species for domestic and feral cats, live in commune-like groups but hunt individually. They do certain random "pro-social" things like bringing back extra prey to the group (the origin of the mouse/bird gifts they bring humans). It also appears they self-domesticated (attached themselves to granaries and suchlike as sources of prey) and they did it much later than humans domesticated dogs, horses etc. Domestic cats are just as trainable as dogs but they don't pick up habits, they will decide on each occasion whether the expected reward is worth the effort or not.

Because I argue against Individualist / Individualism in no way means I am arguing for Collectivism. That's the sort of binary thinking I'm trying to move away from.

There's a term flying around in academia, "dividual"... meaning the individual is not actually in-divisible, it's composed of different parts with their own connections. Most often used to mean cybernetic nodes plugged into a bunch of different systems, but the problem is the same if people have multiple selves or self-states or parts of the psyche (i.e. referring to "individuals" is a technical problem at least since Freud). I'm not sure Stirner's Unique Ones are truly individual either, since they're depicted as a "creative nothing" and a flow-state, and a spook or cog is both other than the self yet inside it.

I'm not going to be dissuaded from using "individualist" in its purest solipsistic sense. Maybe the translation of Stirner missed the opportunity to deflect Freudian connotations by using terms referring to "self-creative imagination" in the context of individual thought?
It comes down to subjective originality devoid of any external cultural dressings.

"My issue with it is that only Human Beings get to be individuals under this philosophy. A bear or a mushroom or a river have no standing in the philosophy of Individualism, not to even mention Black Human Beings, when this was thought up, had no standing in it either."

How did you came up with these gross notions? Like who said that, or at least what is the reasoning behind it?

There are no "Black Human Beings", btw. They are Human Beings. All of them. We're part of the same genetic family, and there's no evidence of any fork detaching itself from the rest.

Black is not a race, not more than "Asian" (lol) is. There's no such thing as black-skinned order of humans, just as we used to have Homo Fiorensis or Habilis. To compare such a taxonomy to the reality of mushrooms and bears is... problematic, at least? A semantic reality is not a biological or physical reality. Same goes for gender. Trans-women are women as far as women is a social construct. They still won't have two X chromosomes like females have, but that's another story.

Do I negate the entirety of a social construct as individualist? Not really. Not as much as I negate the consensual aspect of semantics. But I assert CRITICISM of a word becoming a consensus reality beyond its implied or former meaning, especially when it is a dishonest twisting of meaning, such as individualism = atomization, isolation, or solipsism.

Negationist,

I'm not sure what it is you think I said. So I'm going to back up a bit in order to go forward.

Race does not exist in the biological sense, I agree. Black, Asian, white are not categories in this sense, all are Homo Sapiens, it is correct to say. I am not stating otherwise.

However, what I am saying is this: notions of who is considered Human, who has standing under the law, who can be counted as an individual, all of these notions were developed by Europeans during the Enlightenment in part to justify European conquest, colonialism and settler colonialism and these ideas are racist at the root. The trans-Atlantic slave trade cannot be a new thing you have just heard of, or 3/5th a human, Jim Crow, eugenics, statistics?

May I suggest reading about Critical Race Theory, (aka everything is racist.)
A pdf of Whiteness as Property by Cheryl I. Harris is available for free on the internet.
Derrick Bell's "Faces at the Bottom of the Well" or anything by James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. du Bois are all widely accessible. Newer books are "In The Wake" by Christina Sharpe, "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments" by Saidiya Hartman and "Afropessimism" by Frank B. Wilderson III.

So, what I am saying is I did not come up with such ideas, old Europeans did. What constitutes "the human" "individual" is all bound up in historical notions that are racist at the root. I am saying the entire Enlightenment project is anti-Black and anti-life at its core.

Sad that you discovered racism and colonialism, and how it affects everything, so late in life that upon learning it you now think it invalidates all previous lessons in anarchy.

I much prefer it the other way around, when after living your whole life living and hearing about the effects and legacy of these problems you can finally feel some freedom from them, by wresting some for yourself, since you can't change the broad strokes of his-story. White guilt and Black pessimism (not equating them, mentioning them as distinct things) are not liberating.
It's another his-tory, this time the myth is the common tragedy of the forcefully dehumanized (via kingdoms, empires, mercantilism, christianity, humanism, etc. = society!) and westernized the BIPOC.

Since you don't engage in binary thought, I hope you won't think I support the opposite, denying the importance of all of the things that have happened ever, specially the highlighting of victimization. Saying "race don't real", like that other anon, in response to "racism exists" is a total non-sequitor, as is saying "racism exists" in response to "I'm an anarchist against society", which some may phrase as being "anti-social" or "individualist". It turns out even if you don't read any racist European authors, if you speak a European language, you will end up using these European words which have a baggage even if a person uses a more colloquial sense of the word loosely based in the meaning that appears on dictionaries, which are racist!

What does it mean to rebel?! How does mass oppression become an argument against individual acts of rebellion? When will the BIPOC organizing committee come up with that synchronized choreography in a syllabus or best-seller that will achieve abolition or decoloniality? Anarchists don't get off the hook either if they think others should wait for them or ask permission to rebel by themselves!

Despite my much-parodied idpol-aversion there is a definite point here, words like "individual" and "human" have a history of being used to mean "white European male" and this is a difficulty in how they're heard. "Individualist" conjures images of rugged-individualist Wild West cowboy who is quite happy shooting Native Americans, owning slaves, "letting" people die by "survival of the fittest", and sexually dominating women. To be fair I don't think even the right-wing "individualists" believe this any more, but it can be a problem with the clarity of communication, if this is the first image that comes into people's heads.

Those terms that you speak of have roots going back to the Greece/Rome and the Middle East. They are bigger then the enlightenment. Also something that has one context in one epoch can have another in another epoch. Humanism-like it or not-has been used as a tool to undo things like slavery. Human and individual are certainly not racist at root. Race was simply a function of a particular form of state and powercraft. It doesn't have much power beyond that context. In a cybernetic power context race will be an antique form of construeled power.

Your reading list is basically crackhead critical theory. Anarchy can't lose that nonsense fast enough. It has played a role in making radical ideas a lot less fun and it was developed primarily by oversocialized(Uncle Ted) psychologically weak leftists with an INCREDIBLY weak sense of self. In particular the non white type who prop up that nonsense tend to come from higher brow puritanical contexts which is the opposite of lower brow black, brown and other fun loving non-white cultures. It's entirely in keeping with the puritanical politics of Euro ideologues like the idiots who came out of Frankfurt.

"Humanism-like it or not-has been used as a tool to undo things like slavery" ... unfinished process? slavery still totally a thing?

also, were that true, why wouldn't we like it? cuz critiques of humanism? that's not how that works either.

Its not like humanism is new, only that its become politicized and written into State constitutions in the last 200 years has it become rhetoric.
Humanism at the individual level is what pure individualism is all about lumphead!

Well it's kinda new. In European thought, the sovereign claims of God were replaced with those of Man, starting about 500 years ago. It's tied-in with political shifts in the French and American Revolutions. But the critique is often overplayed, because to begin with, humanitarian claims have *always* been used as checks on state power, at least as often as they are used as claims to sovereignty; "human rights" was invented at the Salamanca debates precisely to rule out massacring indigenous peoples. Before that, "societies" still had ideas that people shouldn't be treated certain ways, it was just articulated differently. Like, there's Native American cultures where it was prohibited to give people orders or even advice. Ancient Greeks had a bunch of de facto rights, to be buried after death for example, and violating these rights brought dishonour and disrepute on a ruler who violated them. Nayaka hunter-gatherers effectively have a "right" to free stuff since it's considered super rude to not give/lend something that's asked for. Then there's groups like the Adamites and Beghards who thought people should live in an Edenic state, this was divinely ordained. In other words: it's just not true that everyone thought they were externally-determined nodes or entirely reducible to social categories before Europeans invented "Man" 500 years ago.

are often even younger than 500 years.

I was recently talking to my brown african-american friend about how it's kinda refreshing to understand that Roman slaves were almost entirely white and mediterranian. Africans within the roman empire (dark-brown people who emit a black hue) were often just like every other non-imperial citizen. To qualify my first sentence, it was a completely different dynamic from post-anglosaxon hierarchies.

So here we go: the change within a non-human existense has not ended, will not end, will still be around trillions of years after terran humans do-do!

Yeah race/racism is younger than "humanism", and kinda mutates out of a mixture of religious/civilisational othering and class othering (before about 1700 "race", "blood", "breeding" are mainly aristocratic class signifiers). One version of the story of the emergence of racism is that humanism (e.g. Salamanca debates) created conditions where people could no longer say "it's OK to genocide/enslave people because they have a different religion or culture", now the assholes have to either make out the victims aren't human or that the process of domination is a way to humanise them. Another version: well, it's very easy for slaves to "convert" and then free themselves, so the slavers needed some way to prevent that.

within hierarchical power structures spread, that was one of the things i was most curious about after reading stirner, is so clearly we have things like "humanism", but how did it make itself out of the university and into the low-level slave driver's head? Of course, things are now completely different with the internet.

The troubadours and drifting poets spread the "New Message" to the slave- driver's head, even into the slave's head with ballads and social folk rhymes. Just like youtube but without a screan.

Yeah I know, I just said that knowing that someone very perspicacious
would come along and give me a concise and broad history on why humanism is actually a fairly recent phenomena, IN THE WESTERN historical context,
However, the ancient Chinese civilization did however have Confucian humanism whose followers sought and believed in the goodness of human nature, the universal employment of education and self-cultivation to learn skills and crafts to bring out the potentiality of human goodness, a respect for traditional community and family values, the display in art forms of idealist love and affection which the West only achieved 2 thousand years later during the Romanticist era. Other refined tentacles emerged out of Confucianism such as Tao, Buddhism, I guess as they had their Enlightenment 2,000 yrs preceding the European version, well, ìt took about that long for noodles to reach Paris lol.
Thanks again I really appreciate your knowledge ;)

"Other refined tentacles emerged out of Confucianism such as Tao, Buddhism, "

time is a flat circle? how do it work?

Do you think its possible that Confucius was an individualist caught within a feudalist society, and his only escape and emotional outlet was to be a teacher?
Over the centuries, Chinese thought has had a variety of influences, Buddhism, Taoism, and even damn Marxism among them. Yet one tradition above all has run through Chinese thought for more than two millennia – the ideas of the thinker Confucius For a figure who came to symbolise Chinese philosophy, he was not greatly successful in his lifetime. He lived during an era when the country we now know as China was a patchwork of competing small kingdoms.
Confucius developed a political philosophy that reflected his horror at the constant warfare around him. He wandered from kingdom to kingdom, trying to persuade rulers to follow his teachings, So yes, he was a solitary individualist type but never achieved anything more than a low official position, which actually suited his humble DIY personal philosophy. However, he did develop a devoted group of followers, he couldn't help it, he was a happy go lucky type (I assume like MeHappyUsad is ), who transmitted his teachings to later generations. It was not until several hundred years later, during the Han dynasty that “Confucianism”, an ethical system of behaviour and statecraft, became the defining system underpinning Chinese culture for the next two millennia. Its hard to say where informality ends and institutionalization begins, or why his vegetarianism did not attract as many followers as his code of ethics did.
At least it is not a religion as such, and although Confucius didn’t deny the existence of a spirit world, he stated that it was more important to concentrate on this world while one was in it. He liked an orderly community, but didn’t intend that order to be imposed by force. Instead, society should be harmonious and people should be encouraged in “self-development” so that they could make the most of their position. That sounds like individualist humanism to me.
At a time before democracy the heart of Confucianism lay a clan type feudal contract. The ruled owed allegiance to rulers, but rulers who were careless of the welfare of their people would lose the “mandate of heaven” and could be justly overthrown. Nothing can be done about the historical context of the predominant herd morality that is innate within the human species and is the foundation for all humanistic thought through the ages.

Form of taoism, as Lao tzu would tell you, Confucius had an interchange with his feudal world. His wisdom is more reflective of an American self help book than anarchist individualism. There's more about "being" in Confucius than doing. Clearly one of the ancient wise men.

What in the world...

OK let me try:

Zoroaster is recorded as the son of Pourušaspa of the Spitamans or Spitamids (Avestan spit mean "brilliant" or "white"; some argue that Spitama was a remote progenitor) family, and Dugdōw, while his great-grandfather was Haēčataspa. All the names appear appropriate to the nomadic tradition. His father's name means "possessing gray horses" (with the word aspa meaning horse), while his mother's means "milkmaid". According to the tradition, he had four brothers, two older and two younger, whose names are given in much later Pahlavi work.

The training for priesthood probably started very early around seven years of age. He became a priest probably around the age of fifteen, and according to Gathas, he gained knowledge from other teachers and personal experience from traveling when he left his parents at age twenty. By the age of thirty, he experienced a revelation during a spring festival; on the river bank he saw a shining Being, who revealed himself as Vohu Manah (Good Purpose) and taught him about Ahura Mazda (Wise Lord) and five other radiant figures. Zoroaster soon became aware of the existence of two primal Spirits, the second being Angra Mainyu (Destructive Spirit), with opposing concepts of Asha (order) and Druj (deception). Thus he decided to spend his life teaching people to seek Asha. He received further revelations and saw a vision of the seven Amesha Spenta, and his teachings were collected in the Gathas and the Avesta.

Eventually, at the age of about forty-two, he received the patronage of queen Hutaosa and a ruler named Vishtaspa, an early adherent of Zoroastrianism (possibly from Bactria according to the Shahnameh). Zoroaster's teaching about individual judgment, Heaven and Hell, the resurrection of the body, the Last Judgment, and everlasting life for the reunited soul and body, among other things, became borrowings in the Abrahamic religions, but they lost the context of the original teaching.

According to the tradition, he lived for many years after Vishtaspa's conversion, managed to establish a faithful community, and married three times. His first two wives bore him three sons, Isat Vâstra, Urvatat Nara, and Hvare Chithra, and three daughters, Freni, Thriti, and Pouruchista. His third wife, Hvōvi, was childless. Zoroaster died when he was 77 years and 40 days old. The later Pahlavi sources like Shahnameh, instead claim that an obscure conflict with Tuiryas people led to his death, murdered by a karapan (a priest of the old religion) named Brādrēs.

Makes you think,

Thank you please respond

Wow, was a valuable comment 'til you just shit over yourself at the end with this stupid claim at herd morality being "innate".

My advice is you use biological determinism with a lot of cautious and self-moderation. Critical thinking and comparative study helps!

I agree I was meaning a clan morality, or rather the mammalian tendency for offspring to form more intimate relationships within family/clan depencies from suckling age. Or have I now upset a feminist sensitivity within an idpol non-physiological value system?

Confucianism today is mostly reactionary. Very tied-in with cybernetic control, social credit systems, "Asian values" (anti-individual-rights cultural nationalism), rigid etiquette and deference codes, avoidance of social instability at any cost, and the rest of the baggage that would be associated with China, South Korea or Singapore. Whether this is recuperation I don't know. Taoism/Daoism and Buddhism seem more radical but often succumb to a tendency to renounce desire and reject the flesh, and Buddhism also has an influential caste-ist version (hence Myanmar's genocidal monks).

There's close parallels in the Greek tradition: I would say Confucius's thought is structurally very like Aristotle's. They both think there's a natural/divine/cosmic order with a relatively "flat", timeless, yet observable structure and definite types/species of beings which are essentially different and which have an essence/telos. So it's possible to deduce a "human" essence/telos from traits and observed positions of humans within the natural world, and this essence takes on spook-like forms, being obligatory for all humans and trumping all the other "properties" of persons. This quickly turns into rankings of more/less human in relation to the essence, e.g. citizen-men are more human than women or slaves because they reason more, and this is the human telos (the categories but not the structure shift if the essence is changed to work, salvation, etc). Humans aren't necessarily "higher", but have a specific defined role in nature; often there will also be observations that humans are "higher" because the human essence (thought, work, etc) is closer to the divine than the various animal/plant essences (in fact there's sometimes a "three souls" theory where humans have a plant soul, an animal soul, and a distinctly human/divine soul). The mainstreams of medieval Islam and Christianity may well be further elaborated Aristotelian systems, though of course the heresies are rather diverse.

There's also around the same time in each culture a bunch of dualistic or alienated-monist religions/philosophies which appear in Buddhism, Platonism, the Upanishads, gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Manicheanism, etc. In these, there's a higher world of spirit and a lower world of matter, and the former is either more ontologically "real" (the latter is illusion or secondary appearance or transient, the former is true or eternal). Humans exist somewhere between the two worlds, and our ethical calling is to increase the share of the higher and reject/renounce/overcome the lower. This seems non-humanist because the "higher" is defined against human ego and bodily desires, and involves transcendent experiences of oneness. But still, we end up with humans able to access this spiritual field to a privileged degree while animals are trapped in "evil/lower" nature. So this is "humanist" in elevating the higher self but "anti-humanist" in rejecting desire, body, interests, ego, etc. The Lacan, Derrida, Levinas strand of philosophy is pretty much rerunning this ideology and gives us what's usually called "anti-humanism" today.

Modernity and "Man" come from Puritanism which is actually a revival of the dualist structure, and a lot of the early versions contain this exact structure: indigenous people aren't fully "human" for Kant because "humanity" amounts to the spiritual/superego imperative and he thought indigenous people lived immediately from desire; animals for Descartes have no ethical value and can't even feel pain because they operate on a bodily level and supposedly lack the cogito. Hegel is an upgraded Kant and Marx is a fork from the Hegel source-code, as strangely enough is Stirner. Depending how Marx is read, he eliminates the higher/lower dynamic by defining the lower (material) as higher and determinate. However, there's a lot of Marxists for whom Marx is a repeat Aristotle/Confucius with productive work (in a narrow sense) as the telos.

Hence the ways neo-Confucianism, neo-Buddhism, (Althusserian) Marxism, (Derridean/Lacanian) poststructuralism, and cybernetics can produce what are basically neo-Puritanisms (idpol). The idea that the higher determines the lower is also pervasive in current ideologies: the elevation of observable patterns over subjective suffering in medical totalitarianism, the insistence that thoughts are the cause of "extremism" and its affects in counterinsurgency doctrine, the wider insistence that thoughts determine feelings in cognitivism, and the various behaviourist/cybernetic ideologies which ignore/deny the inner life entirely, treating humans (and animals, and plants, and machines) as just outer-oriented, receptive nodes. In these ideologies, the denied non-rational "lower" is often in fact split into two forces; one of these (an id-superego fusion) is alienated and projected, and identified with the will of God, History, Necessity, the "experience of the oppressed", etc., treated as if it has EXTERNAL force, while the other is treated as an overwhelming evil which can't even be named.

I think the dualist and the Aristotelian/Confucian views emerge in critique of an earlier folk-religion which retains shamanic elements but is already alienated from nature to some degree (oracular/Homeric religion in Greece, vedic religion in India; Aztec religion is similar). The earlier religion is articulated by a quasi-ruling class of priests and poets, and their claim to special cosmological status (e.g. making the sun rise each morning) is vital to their power. The newer splitting stuff comes from the military class and is connected to military virtues of austerity, sacrifice, etc (hence similarities between monasticism and military life). Aristotelian and Confucian types of doctrines, and medieval Christianity and Islam, emerge as a later attempt to render aspects of the dualist religions compatible with stable bureaucratic rule. So I'd suspect we have four layers of root shamanism/animism -> poetic religion -> dualist body-denial -> quasi-empiricist observed world order, and these reflect respectively anarchic communities -> priestly ruling caste -> military ruling caste -> bureaucratic ruling caste. Puritanism arises from the lower-middle-class which carries out business in a military-like way, with a lot of self-sacrifice and "moral virtue"; this stratum is often also the origin of fundamentalisms today. The new body-denying ideologies arise from various fractions of the bureaucracy, political class, Spectacular image-management, and professions/academia inflected with bureaucratic/cybernetic logics, and may be tending to move from the Confucian/Aristotelian to the gnostic/Buddhist/Platonist style; given the level of alienation and performance pressure in modern workplaces, I'd expect these are also self-deniers who gain erotic pleasure from renunciation and a sense of superiority over non-renunciators. Note especially the reappearance of unprovable "trust us or we'll all die" claims, variously in medical totalitarianism, counterinsurgency, academic-ecological, and "anti-humanist" discourses, claims which repeat very closely the vedic "trust us or the sun won't rise" and the Aztec "trust us or the next armageddon will be the last".

interesting analysis, couldnt the thread between all of these perspectives be transcendentalism? not sure how animism factors in, wouldnt it be more in the camp of an immanent, body acknowledged, inner-oriented understanding? what are worldviews you know of that counter this line of thinking, that reject transcendent humanism, but acknowledge the embodied human-being experience?

Confucianism came after both taoism and buddhism. None are the humanism of the west that you are equating them with. Look the the ancient Greeks for those roots.

unless your humanism is intended to include non-humans, it is a completely useless, speciest term. if it is meant to apply individually, then maybe "carbon-based individual life form -ism" works better?

Isn't there an obvious theoretical connection between human rights/liberation and animal rights/liberation? I'm not sure the latter is thinkable without the former having been thought, although again, implicit animal rights (e.g. religious-based vegetarianism) and rights of other kinds of entities (nature-spirits etc) is a lot older than the Enlightenment.

Word-root for "acrat" is similar to "anarchy", Greek a-kratos (no power/strength, by extension no ruler) rather than an-archos (no ruler). It's the kind of innovation which is only really worthwhile if you're really determined to separate what you're referring to from the wider use of "anarchy". DIfferent languages use different words for anarchism/anarchy, some of them use analogues of "libertarian", some of the Arabic translations use fawdawiyya which is literally "chaotic, chaos-ist".

Most people will hear "nihilist" as "doesn't care about anything" and "individualist" as ancap/right-libertarian. Sad but true. Stick an "anarcho-" on the start and it sounds a bit different, though anarcho-individualist could still mean ancap.

We can also add other signifiers to clarify anarchism, eg. "post-left", "eco-", "egoist", "green", "immediatist".

Kratos is not kratia. Kratos was the god representing strength, might (which I am for), where "kratia" represents a rule over others (more than self-rule). The non-affixed form of the word "acrat" is used in the same way as democrat or autocrat. Some y Greek root words that are nominal can only be followed by the "-ic" instead of the "-ist", for adjectival purpose, not like nominal "-ist".

"archies" or "archon", differently were a category or rank, not personal names, also equivalent to the gnostic "abraxas", the metaphysical masters. Which is why I think we're using the nomimal "-ist" when referring to someone or some position.

I have no problem calling myself anarchist.

I am generally enjoyed by those who care to know and engage with me, so when I say "I am anarchist" I am layering their perceptions of me onto a concept which many have little concept of. I am happy to accept anything they gift me, whether that be questioning, an embrace, or a punch on the lip. As is the way, I am also privy to gifting and adding a few layers of perception onto a concept.

On a fundamental level, anarchy is how I question the world. Currently, it suits the rural-ness of my environment, and the apparent ontological homogeny of apathy that exists here, to often state and re-state "I am anarchist!"—That is, anarchists are such a seemingly low density population around these parts that I have no problem being the overt proponent and provocateur.

Yeah, I'm anarchist. I have no problems with it at all.

"anarchist", what does it mean to you?

Is this more to you a label for social edge and notoriety, or something more substantial?

Just asking since there's so many cases of posers out these, and your comment does little to address that question that's been also expressed in earlier comments here.

As with every TOTW I've responded to, I didn't read the other comments before commenting as I didn't want to be derivative as a consequence. Perhaps I was too economical in my comment, though I wasn't counting beans and responded how I needed to at the time. Perhaps this comment will be unsatisfactory in a similar way.

But purely for you dear anon. Anarchist, for me, means I attempt to be antagonist, to negate the shit as I encounter it, to find harmony where I am able, to nurture compassion and dignity as I conceive it and garner it with those I care to have a cohesive relationship with. I have seen some awful shit. I feel the constraint. I witness and know of the brutality. I don't fucking like it. I want to see it burn. I have beautiful dreams.

I like to think there's substance, even in my seemingly impoverished response. Perhaps I am the poser, though mostly I am being kind to myself. I can only hope I am the poser because the inference is there are those setting far greater fires and growing far bigger beetroot than me... which is a pleasing thought. I would be happy to accept the pro tip, though I'll only reduce it to a heuristic.

Again it remains I don't see many anarchists in my locality. Social edge or notoriety is for others to decide, yet I am the actuality here.

your paragraph describing your "anarchist" is not bad, except that i think this leaves too much unsaid:

" to be antagonist, to negate the shit as I encounter it"

what is "the shit"? (i probably have an idea, but if your intent is to clarify for those who don't...) a supremacist nazi could say the same words.

if, on the other hand, your intent is to be vague, then ... bingo!

You probably do have a good idea. I'll save the clarification for supremacistnazi.org if I ever come down with something nasty.

So thanks for the somewhat-honest reply I won't be imposing MY view on anarchism to YOU, but but but, like the other anon, it's super vague and nothing here tells me this just ain't about being that old teenager keeps being an antagonist or an ass) to everyone around who dares expressing an opinion or position.

Ever heard about authority... about power relations... governance or government... rulers and despots? So yeaaaaah, take these thigns away from "anarchism" and your anarchism gets pretty shallow (just as I first guessed?). Poser refers to behavior of -literally- posing for positions or character that you are not. Often due to not understanding these characters and really defining what you are, but posing for what you are not. In a nutshell, if in your area or milieu you are know as anarchist due to being the village idiotft or some annoying asshole, that's a thing that I don,t think rules you out from being anarchist... tho that doesn't MAKE YOU anarchist. You're just being oppositional with others, for (???) reasons.

Afaik anarchsist are oppositional with authorities. But eve that is not significant enough. Crime lords and Capitol insurgents can be roughly thrown in that box, too. The anarchist in modern times was the one opposing any rule, the "political nihilist", including his own, upon others. They are the self-ruled.

Part of me wants to say it doesn't matter, but...

I've been to a socialist activist meeting and I've been to an anarchist activist meeting. There was no comparison in terms of vibes -- I felt way more comfortable with the anarchists. I can't really explain it any other way, but the way they spoke, looked at you, greeted you, felt inherently more anarchistic. In comparison, I felt a lot of emotional distance towards the socialists even when I try to bridge the gap by speaking their language, etc.

So, maybe it does matter. I don't think I have enough experience to decide if that was just coincidence.

Yeah, as long as the people with certain ways of interacting carry on clustering as "anarchists" and "socialists" respectively, signifiers are very useful in this way. A group of cats will interact differently from a group of dogs, this suggests there's something "real" beneath the conceptual distinction that isn't just a spook. The problems start when we get people who interact in authoritarian ways calling themselves "anarchists", so we don't know in advance what style the anarchist meeting will be; or the people who are already anarchist shift to authoritarian ways of doing things without changing the label. Lots of groups, online and off, which call themselves anarchist but basically enact an idpol or leftist politics. Hence why I think we need to differentiate the anarchic way of doing things from the full range of the label "anarchism" today.

On the other hand, one sometimes finds groups which work surprisingly anarchically, yet would never dream of identifying as anarchist. Colin Ward talks about this a lot, how self-help groups and the like often function like anarchy. Also a lot of people moving towards anarchist ideas in the 50s-60s, having been communists/socialists before, carried on identifying as communists/socialists and using the jargon of Marxism, but organised like anarchists.

Seems that political abstractions and especially their planning approach are turning meetings into rather awful dehumanizing exercises, Socialists leave no space for free and spontaneous conversation and emotions are repressed. Taking turns, raising hands, facilitating, voting, etc, that sort of crap is for machines not humans.

The best anarchist meetings I attended were either slow-paced free talks with long periods of silent reflection in between every intervention, and the opposite, the more chaotic free talk often with disputes, but in both cases, no given procedural structure.

Structures like the Robert Code do make sense and got some good aspects, but in non-institutional context will ALWAYS be derailed and turned to the benefit of specific people. What was thought for the government works better within the government and extra-governmetal statist orgs. Keep the structures for the structures.

"Bro dude?" lol, I'm queer to the bone.

It's bureaucratic, yes. Not inherently hierarchic but supportive of it, yeeees. But you didn't get my point.

I said WITHIN CONTEXTS OF BUREAUCRACIES with underlaying power dynamics, structures like the Robert code can help provide with more fair and equal proceedings between parties than with the distorted versions you often get in, say, student and nonprofit meetings. I didn't say either are an example to follow for anarchists, so not that relevant.

Being queer (to the bone or not) certainly doesn't exclude the possibility or reality of you being either a bro or a dude or both. And I certainly did get your point, because if you don't see the inherently hierarchical nature of those rules for parliamentary procedures then you're definitely the kind of fake anarchist I do my best to avoid. Saying they introduce more fairness is a hoot; I guess you've never observed or participated in meetings where those rules were used as bludgeons to exclude challenges and enforce conformity.

seriously, the internet has a lot of garbage info. Robert's rules of order seem great for taking down the order of man (pssst, don't buy robert's books or attassa because it all contains some reductionistic reasoning!) and making lists.

I've found writing and making lists to be great for protecting my fragile brain, but it's not good for too much else.

:_-(

Being queer is great, you realize that putting some things in your butt is fun! BUT DON'T GO TO PRISON, THAT PLACE IS DIRTY AND DANGEROUS.

Its ironic, but prisons are about the only places where Robert's Rules may actually prevent hierarchies forming between the inmates and make it safe though dull for queer folk.

I have no problem using the word to describe myself, but I long ago let go of that label/identity as anything but symbolic. I use the word as an adjective mostly, rather than a noun. I am old and secure enough not to worry about fitting in to the boxes that others insist on defining and filling with individuals.

Yet the individuals I have most affinity with all share aspects of my own anarchistic principles, desires and ways of interacting.

I’m not into movement building, I’m into creating my life on my own terms to the extent I am capable in the current context. When I find others I vibe with who have similar desires and priorities, I have interest in getting to know them better.

Amongst people outside the radical subculture, I'm not gonna avoid the word but I've definitely had better conversations saying what I believe than just touting team colors.
Among radicals though, damn skippy. Identifying stubbornly as an uncompromising anarchist can have a pretty cathartic effect in circles where rooting more liberal Democrats or dressing up as cops for countries that no longer exist is the norm. Those just beginning to rebel in this moment deserve the chance to encounter unrepentant anarchists as much as anyone else.

So, words only have the meanings we give them.

But everytime we cut them to pieces, we create even MORE of them, to an exponent.

The only way to fix this problem is to put communications systems out of our mind.

Since we clearly can't talk about anarchism, we need to remove all the hindrances to getting offline.

As long as anarchists do not inform ourselves about the myriad of forces that seek to intentionally confuse their project for an anarchist one, we will continue to be fooled by them. More problematically, and over a long enough timeline, this confusion becomes reality. “Anti-authoritarian” becomes a soft way to obscure that you are a Maoist whose “revolutionary program” is what makes you a true anti-antiauthoritarian. “Anti-Imperialist” becomes a way to describe hostility to American foreign policy and not an adherent of the three worlds theory of Maoism. “Decolonization” becomes code for an urban aspiration for an impossible culture instead of a problematic term relating to everything from native resistance to resource extraction, the dismantling of older Empires, or a project of the United Nations.

Perhaps it is too late, at least in the US, at least for my lifetime. We are a culture that has abandoned not just reading but critical thinking on the whole. Watching language morph into its opposite used to be something associated with the totalitarianism of the USSR or Newspeak of Orwell’s fictional universe. Debord’s spectacle updated this dialectical perversion by demonstrating how capitalism has buttressed the monopoly of violence that used to be a prerequisite for this violence to language. Our meme-tastic, utterly superficial engagement with even political questions like how to live, how to do it together, and who am I in relationship to others, seems to show that pointing to Maoists as a political problem is about as useful as talking about aliens and pyramid power. Anarchy as conflict with the existing order, both state and capital and also the its conceptual framework, is an infinite endeavor.

that's a very deep post. However, I disagree with you strongly here:

"We are a culture that has abandoned not just reading but critical thinking on the whole. "

people in the US (the culture i was bathed in, the water is very cold and the fumes are toxic), and distilled global capitalist culture (deemed "neo-liberalism"), often contain extreme hypercritical-thinkers, and more and more people read a lot of stuff on the internet. Book sales have gone up during the COVID crisis, at least for corporate books stores. A lot of those books just collect dusk.

Really what ruins critical thinking is the fact that all people are competing for resources in an overly industrialized and robotized worldview.

Not sure the kind of numbers you're thinking. But a lot of people seem to lack the most basic crap detector. There's one set of people in the US who believe in all seriousness that Trump is the messiah who was cleaning out the swamp of corrupt elites and has now been deposed through election-rigging. Pretty easily falsified (whoever heard of a gropey messiah? what about the corrupt politicians he pardoned in return for payments?) but people don't even go so far as to ask the questions. Another set of people jumped on the covid lockdown bandwagon and simply refuse to engage with questions about the harm caused by lockdowns, the destruction of civil rights, or whether they even "work". Because muh science, but they obviously don't understand how scientific claims are formed and tested. Some of these people also jump on the idpol bandwagon and are quite happy to give other people the right to ban them from just about anything just by calling it "racist". No critical capacity to assess whether it's really racist or not. And that's the politically engaged people. There's a whole load of others who don't get much past selfies, TV shows and fashion trends.

There's a few hyper-critical and hyper-educated geeks but they're pretty few and far between and very isolated AFAIK.

I mean there are critical nerds all over the place in the US, they're just scattered. The dogmatic ones are both servile and critical at the same time (the ignorant medical nerds you mention). And the trump bandwagon clearly sees trump as some sort of messiah. Some of the conspiracy theorists have fallen off the wagon though, yet the core does remain very servile and protective of their spectacular leader. There are the trumpees who are more to the center and just like to nod with other people because they're shy. My former next door neighbor is one of those people, he's a little retarded, probably voted for trump both times, and actually somewhat brilliant in his own manner.

Actually now you explain this, you may well be right. Your neighbour sounds fairly typical of the kind of people who hang round the chans. And I know smart people who jumped on the idpol bandwagon and the covid bandwagon who should know better but don't. What's weird to me is how this herd shit can draw people in on another level and kinda override their critical intelligence and independence, almost like it's switched-off or short-circuited.

If we'd been alive in Britain in 1640, and held similar views to those we hold today, we'd have been called "liberals", "republicans", "democrats", "Levellers" or "radicals". Socialism, communism and anarchism weren't around yet as signifiers; some of the other terms didn't yet have their later associations and questions like "are you in favour of market competition, state welfare, or neither" hadn't yet come up.

If we were around in 1848 we'd probably be called "socialists", which at the time encompassed any radical critique of the ancien regime which was more radical than liberalism. Later "socialist" came to mainly mean the social-democrat parties and "communist" and "anarchist" became distinct (the splits in the First International started early, but a lot of the original members were Proudhonians).

If we were around in (say) 1920s Europe then we might well have called ourselves "communists" of some description (anarcho-, libertarian, etc) even if we held what are today post-left views.

I think what happens is, initially a new label is invented or an existing one generalised for people who are more radical than the official opposition, but then over time, a part of this new camp becomes the official opposition and gets identified with a more precise, and more statist, doctrine. As the new power-grabbers spin out their new ideology, it becomes more and more unlike (or specific to one corner of) the former big-tent label, and more and more identified with *them* and their project. At this point, a new label is invented or adopted which specifies how the continuing rebels are different.

This has never been a problem for anarchism before, because few people identified as anarchist and the label was attached to other movements which got recuperated, without anarchist signifiers being included in this. But anarchism started to become the main name for radical opposition to the system roundabout 1999 (Seattle) and carrying on through Greece 2008 and Occupy 2011. At this stage some of the people getting recuperated from 2000 onwards carried on identifying as anarchist and retaining aspects of anarchist ideology while dropping or altering others (mostly idpol-"anarchists" and radical liberals). I suspect we'll have to invent a new signifier and that in 50 years people like us will no longer call themselves "anarchists", and if they read anything we wrote they will be going "why the fuck did they still identify as anarchists and keep using these terms/ideas that in retrospect are completely recuperable" (same as I'm guessing we think if we read Pannekoek or Winstanley). Main faultline I think: anarchy is not groupthink hivemind cybernetic collectivist "self-organising systems" plugged into social control, it involves an entirely different source of radical agency from passion/desire/will.

Anarchist has a certain descriptive value. Many non-anarchists will think of "libertarian" capitalism first, which is why I tend to add the signifier "anti-capitalist" to my anarchisms. Identifying with the term anarchist means many things to me, but to the non-anarchists out there there tend to exist only tropes and phantasms. Some media was calling the capitol rioters "anarchists" for god sakes. I think it would be a great thing for anarchy if anarchists started owning the word; to combat the misinformation that has been peddled by the powers that be as well as the ignorance of the common person.

The Zapatistas come to mind. They explicitly reject the label of "anarchist" but are one of the most anarchistic areas on earth. I'm not sure if owning the label would do them very much good, but I don't think rejecting it does very much good either.

Words start to lose their meaning when you use them too much. I can't hardly say it anymore. Libertarian socialist sounds better.

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