totw

TOTW: Difference

Some of my least favorite recurring comments on this site are the ones which boil down to “why are you posting this here?” While it may sound innocuous, it’s an attempt to browbeat some kind of consensus about what’s appropriate or not to post on this site. The idea behind the question is “I don’t agree with this and therefore don’t wish to see it.”

TOTW: Anarcho-Humility or Anarcho-Defeat

I am not a man of action. My brief experience with anything resembling activism ended with the whimper of realizing my flame didn’t burn quite as bright as those leading the march or drafting the petition. I didn’t discover a mystic tome of Nihilism and suddenly decide that all was lost and it was time for something new; instead I lost a fight with myself before it even began.

TOTW: Calling the Cops

For cops, please dial extension 1312

Recently I was having a conversation with a non-anarchist friend who is white and female-identifying* she told me about a situation she found herself in where she considered calling the cops. She was alone alone and was threatened by a person of color who came at her in an explicitly threatening way. I responded with some boiler plate questions and anarchist hostility to the idea of calling the cops at all. Though she isn’t an anarchist, she hates the cops as much as I, or most anarchists I know do, maybe more.

TOTW: Just Anarchist

Not to go off on a rant but watching thread after thread on anarchist news treat whatever new piece of information as the foundation of a new hyphenated anarchism demonstrates a central problem to North American Anarchism. As if our desire for a world without coercion, politics (meaning representation), or commodification were not niche enough it seems further refinement is necessary... or not. But a quick trip through anarchist twitter shows a dozen flags and a tumblr-gender number of different anarchist splinters.

TOTW: Anarchists in the Academy

The further away I get from college, the stranger the academy appears to me. My education as an anarchist came after I graduated, and as a result I was spared some of the seriousness anarchist academics seem to ascribe to pluralizing nouns like anarchy, praxis, or whiteness (lest any readers assume there was just one kind).

TOTW: competing identities

It is possible to imagine that identities (as abstractions, at least) don't have to compete with each other, but the default is that they do have to (that is, that some identities are the most down-trodden, or the most crucial to the status quo, and therefore that those identities should be respected more than others and/or that the people most closely resembling those identities get extra cred). Usually this is tacit, but some theories, like some radfeminism and afro-pessimism, are pretty explicit about the foundational role they claim for the oppression of women or black people respectively. And of course to the extent that people treat class as an identity, plenty of folks are all about that as the most foundational, relevant issue.

TOTW: Anarchist Anti-Imperialism

Anti-imperialism is a term used in a wide variety of contexts, usually by nationalist movements who want to secede from a larger body politic (often in the form of an empire, but also in a multi-ethnic sovereign state) or as a specific theory opposed to capitalism in Marxist–Leninist discourse, derived from Vladimir Lenin's work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. People who categorize themselves as anti-imperialists often state that they are opposed to colonialism, colonial empires, hegemony, imperialism and the territorial expansion of countries.

TOTW: How do you use your cyberspace?

It's no surprise that anarchists would reject the internet entirely as being used for liberatory purposes. After, it started out as ARPANET by the military, with the obvious intent of further dominating their territory as well as U.S. controlled locations abroad abroad. This ended up working perfectly as a business model as well in late capitalism, with the internet becoming a giant data collection scheme.

TOTW: Gatherings

A whole lot of years ago I went to the North American Anarchist Gathering in Lawrence, Kansas. While I had been to anarchist assemblies and teach-ins locally, this was the first large and non-regional, but explicitly anarchist event I ever went to. Being from the west coast, it was interesting to encounter anarchists from other parts of the country (this was 2002, before the internet is what it is today).

TOTW: Evidence

In the old days we used to call up citizen tribunals to determine guilt or innocence. Or perhaps that was just in movies. I guess we don't know an awful lot about how truth is determined in this world but the news, and the nightly stories about the news seem to have decided that a lot of conjecture and politicking seems to be involved. It is unclear how much that is true but it sure seems to be true and that is more than half the battle.

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