Month: July 2023

the Anarchist Library is an invaluable online resource, a massive archive of texts related to the struggle for a better world. contained within are full copies of such classics as David Graeber’s Debt, Petr Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, Emma Goldman’s essays, and so on. There are also an embarrassing number of Ted Kaczynski’s writings, though the most bothersome inclusions are the innumerable poorly reasoned personal blog posts, as if the thoughts of some online “theorist” rise to the same standard as, say, the analysis of Silvia Federici.

something I happened upon on the site, which I think is indicative of the thought of a large number online leftists, was a post titled “The White Anti-Racist is an Oxymoron.” This open letter was written in 2003, but the kind of antagonistic rhetoric it espouses has only been further enflamed in the ensuing 20 years by the mechanisms of social media. in the letter, Tamara Nopper, nee Kil Ja Kim, makes many correct and salient points about the problem with white people who try to engage in anti-racist struggles. it is true white activists should primarily follow the lead of those who experience the violence of white supremacy; it is true whites will need to abandon the safety of whiteness if they want to effectively militate against racism. what troubles is that all this is framed as a kind of scolding, a castigation against otherwise well-meaning but confused people hoping to lend their efforts towards a noble cause. not that nonwhites should be merely grateful for whatever help whites are willing to give, but maybe telling whites that

it is impossible for a non-white person to put a white person in her place….to say, or even hint at that as a ‘WHITE’ person someone is being put in one’s place–whoever says this just needs to shut the fuck up because that is some bull

isn’t exactly going to win over converts? I don’t mean to tone police (though I would take issue with Nopper’s lazy rhetoric and poorly-elaborated premises); I hope to merely suggest that an open spirit of dialogue and conviviality might be more conducive to militancy than an attitude that precludes whites/men/heteros/veterans from engaging in genuine struggle.

I don’t want to pick on Nopper, with whom I agree more than not. It’s more that there is a strain of online leftism that seems to conceive of identity-based experience as an unassailable pedestal from which people feel empowered to decree what is the correct way to practice struggle. This is an example of what, in Joyful Militancy, carla bergamanand and Nick Montgomery call “rigid radicalism.”

For this reason, we do not believe rigid radicalism can be countered by inventing a new set of norms for how to behave, or setting out a new ideal of what radicalism should be. There can be no instructions. This would just create a new ideal to measure ourselves against. It would just add to a long list of shoulds, dos, and don’ts that reactivates the problem. We hope to help undo tendencies towards regulation and policing, rather than playing into them.

Joyful Militancy

my aim is not to examine why the online leftist scolds bother me so much. doing so would make this something akin to mark fisher’s “exiting the vampire castle,” and I have little interest in rehashing that argument. plus I’m not exactly a “leftist” or a political thinker or an activist so much as I’m an artist whose sympathies lie with those who suffer power, not those who abuse it. the Lorca platform.

any attempt at formulating an ethics must begin with a lucid appreciation for the problem at hand. ours is an age where all the old methods of resistance have been spent up, or else they are ill-equipped to the task. such is the note on which Deleuze ends his “Postscript on the Societies of Control“:

It’s up to [young people] to discover what they’re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.

In the essay, Deleuze suggests that the present era is defined by “control,” whereas the previous era, which began fading in the first decades of the 20th century, was defined by “discipline.” In a discipline society, the governing logic is one of enclosure; spaces are delineated and policed by physical force; factory floors, prisons, hospitals, schools. Nowadays we are surveilled, manipulated, blackmailed, and seduced.

The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines—levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy and the introduction of viruses. 

This distinction between the machines of discipline and the machines of control provides an important framework for thinking through new methods of resistance. It may no longer be adequate to sabotage the means of production: perhaps it’s necessary to know “how to blow up a pipeline,” but it is not sufficient.

Someone with better technical knowhow can and should elaborate methods for effective hacktivism, but being a writer of fiction and poetry, my interest is primarily in the workings of the human heart, and for developing tactics to protect against the algorithmicization of the soul. A quick glance at any of the number of “feeds” “streaming” “content” into our minds is sufficient to convince anyone with a modicum of yearning for something challenging, affirming, inspiring, anything other than placating, that we’re fucked. Fucked. Absolutely fucked. The whole landscape of culture is dictated by the demands of multinational corporations who have taken every opportunity available to monetize and advertise consumer products, a category that now includes food, experiences, lifestyles: the very basis for shared culture.

That is if you think you can find The Good Shit scrolling Instagram. To be sure, there are many talented artists promoting their work on social media. It is possible to utilize these distribution networks and maintain enough integrity that you don’t just end up another #influencer. But to do so is to succeed athwart the general trends inherent to the structure of social media as it currently functions. I am not someone who does well resisting the colonizing, addictive influence of behaviorist slot machines.

What I need is a method for inviting in a little fresh air, a little verve and panache, the juju to feel it possible to imagine something better, more communal, less stultifying. In a time where the State, in its myriad forms, has such a pervasive grip on everything, Life resembles Death. The masses are hypnotized into zombification, and those with the wherewithal to resist, as Life resists, risk lethal violence coming down on them. So a first step would be to articulate techniques for feeling alive, despite the apparent inescapability of the control forces serving Death.

Firstly, it would do well to not bother oneself with engaging those sad militants, those “rigid radicals,” who would proscribe the terms of legitimate rebellion. If it gets you off to bicker with those types, go right ahead, but beware the quicksand that awaits.