/r/Postleftanarchism

Photograph via snooOG

Anarchy after Leftism

1) The Left

  • critiquing the Left as nebulous, anachronistic, distracting, a failure & at key points a counterproductive force historically ("the left wing of capital")
  • critiquing Leftist activists for political careerism, celebrity culture, self-righteousness, privileged vanguardism & martyrdom
  • critiquing the tendency of Leftists to insulate themselves in academia, scenes & cliques while also attempting to opportunistically manage struggles

2) Ideology

  • a Stirner-esque critique of dogma & ideological thinking as a distinct phenomenon in favor of "critical self-theory" at individual & communal levels

3) Morality

  • a moral nihilist critique of morality/reified values/moralism

4) Organizationalism

  • critiquing permanent, formal, mass, mediated, rigid, growth-focused modes of organization in favor of temporary, informal, direct, spontaneous, intimate forms of relation
  • critiquing Leftist organizational patterns' tendencies toward managerialism, reductionism, professionalism, substitutionism & ideology
  • critiquing the tendencies of unions & Leftist organizations to mimic political parties, acting as racketeers/mediators, with cadre-based hierarchies of theoretician & militant or intellectual & grunt, defailting toward institutionalization & ritualizing a meeting-voting-recruiting-marching pattern

5) Identity Politics

  • critiquing identity politics insofar as it preserves victimization-enabled identities & social roles (i.e. affirming rather than negating gender, class, etc.) & inflicts guilt-induced paralysis, amongst others
  • critiquing single-issue campaigns or orientations

6) Values

  • moving beyond anarchISM as a static historical praxis into anarchY as a living praxis
  • focusing on daily life & the intersectionality thereof rather than dialectics / totalizing narratives (except anarcho-primitivists tend toward epistemology)
  • emphasizing personal autonomy & a rejection of work (as forced labor, alienated labor, workplace-centricity)
  • critiquing Enlightenment notions of Cartesian dualities, rationalism, humanism, democracy, utopia, etc.
  • critiquing industrial notions of mass society, production, productivity, efficiency, "Progress", technophilia, civilization (esp. in anti-civilization tendencies)

Some useful writings:


Related Subreddits

/r/Postleftanarchism

6,470 Subscribers

5

What are your guys thoughts on Makhno and Makhnovshchina as a whole?

5 Comments
2024/11/26
14:06 UTC

5

Democracy is worse then liberalism

The 20th century was the century where democracy hit peek popularity including from the left. Even though it helped usher in fascism it continues to be given this unquestioned currency.

The left love it more the liberalism even though the latter can at least be said to work even if it is a limited societal conception of freedom. Democracy does not even work in theory and it will always usher in everything from fascism to idiocracy.

Bob Black's Debunking Democracy is of course good required reading particularly for those supposed agents of freedom who cling to that abusive partner.

24 Comments
2024/11/15
18:22 UTC

0

Opinions on Market Anarchists

Heard y'all are anti organisations or do u count market as one?

33 Comments
2024/11/07
04:21 UTC

1

Gilles Duave, Alice in Monsterland

https://mirror.anarhija.net/usa.anarchistlibraries.net/mirror/g/gd/gilles-dauve-alice-in-monsterland.lt.pdf

Another critical essay removed from the (so-called) Anarchist Library about the identity politics moralistic point-of-view. Perhaps expounding on the themes dealt with in Feral Fauns essay “Child Love”.

Is Duavé within any (popularly) notion of post-left?

19 Comments
2024/10/12
20:45 UTC

5

Good intro to postmodernism and poststructuralism?

I'm a total noob. Tip?

3 Comments
2024/09/11
10:13 UTC

8

comment posted on another sub about Graeber

as an anthropologist: Graeber claimed (in his "Fragments") that he was pretty much the first actual anarchist anthropologist, despite the work of Harold Barclay and James C Scott, and the radical anti-tankie marxists Stanley Diamond and Pierre Clastres. so, arrogant and ignorant at the same time.

for his sweeping (and totally unreadable vanity project "Direct Action"), he reports as a participant-observer on the strategies and tactics of various anarchist and anarchist-influenced activist groups; many of the people he participated with and observed were not informed that their conversations and activities would be documented in a book. so, questionable ethics.

as a revolutionary tourist: like that other fool Milstein (and plenty of others, including a good personal friend of mine), Graeber was completely taken in by the PR handlers of the YPG when visiting Rojava. his paeans to the "Rojava Revolution" with their empty comparisons are painful to read for anyone who actually knows about the revolutionary projects of anarchists throughout the 20th century, like the Makhnovshchina, the various communes in pre-Mao China, the original Zapatistas, and the collectives in the Spanish Revolution. totally unlike the aforementioned examples, Rojava has no agricultural or industrial base to collectivize into economic self-management. the only aspects of life in Rojava that appear to be horizontal are the militias; while crucial for the defense of revolutionary experiments, the independent existence of militias is never sufficient for the flowering of such experiments. in most cases of anarchist and anarchist-influenced social revolution, militias arose AFTER the collectivization and self-management of agricultural and/or industrial areas. so, upside-down historian.

his campaigning for Corbyn was a colossal embarrassment for anyone familiar with the long-standing anarchist position on electoral politics (hint: anarchists are not in favor of parliamentarism). he should have known this already after writing a book called "Direct Action" -- which is the exact opposite of electoral action. plus, the fact that Corbyn did exhibit some soft antisemitism could never be admitted by Graeber or most other Jewish pro-Corbyn people. compounding the embarrassment is the fact that as a non-UK citizen, he wasn't even able to do what he encouraged others to do. so, shallow understanding of antisemitism, and shallow understanding of the role of parliamentarianism in propping up industrial capitalism.

as an anarchist: he didn't understand why anarchists are opposed to electoral politics; he didn't understand how he wasn't the first anarchist anthropologist; he didn't understand that the slogan he helped popularize ("We Are the 99%") is a majoritarian deception perpetrated by pro-capitalist populists who instinctively accept that landlords and cops are or can be our comrades in the struggle against a handful of "bad" capitalists. he didn't understand that going against the mainstream (in the case of his co-authored ode to urbanism, "The Dawn of Everything") often just makes you look foolish rather than radical. so, bad anarchist.

eagerly anticipating the flurry of downvotes from the anti-intellectual mob.

15 Comments
2024/09/04
22:48 UTC

6

Organizing

Sup im pretty new to anarchism come from an ML background if i did understand that right postleft Anarchist reject organizations and ancom/sydicalist build horizontal orgs my question is how do postleft anarchist do organization?

32 Comments
2024/09/01
16:21 UTC

8

What are some good resources for someone who doesn't like to read?

10 Comments
2024/08/27
14:49 UTC

10

Questions about post left anarchism

Hello! I'm an anarchist who's curious about post left anarchy. I really like the concept but at the same time I'm having a bit of trouble really pinning it down. For starters, what's the exact difference between post left anarchy and other forms of anarchy (i.e. anarcho-communism or anarcho-egoism)? Second, I understand anti-work is also a part of it and I find the concept intruiging. Could you explain it in more detail? Thank you sm!!

11 Comments
2024/08/23
21:06 UTC

2

Is there an alternative or similar piece to the "Under no Pretext" quote?

I know, slogans are spooky symbols of virtue, but it just sounds annoying when i say anything about Marx.

inb4 second amendment

9 Comments
2024/08/14
16:08 UTC

6

The Reign of Narrative, in the Era of Abstraction

/insert essay here

2 Comments
2024/08/10
23:17 UTC

4

Feral Faun

Is he still active? How is he viewed within the community?

19 Comments
2024/08/10
17:24 UTC

21

Anarchism in an age after musical youth cultures

This is an analysis that seems to be original coming from me but an undeniable thing I notice is that the decline of anarchism over the 1st quarter of century 21 correlates with the end of musical youth cultures and the rise of memetic online internet youth culture.

It seems the circle @ just hasn't been able to adjust to this change. One of the characteristics of this age is ubiquitous consumerism, something that runs counter to what anarchism and the greater radicalism that it was a part of was for which was anti-consumerism or consumer agnosticism. I think that modern music better played into a not-so consumerist mentality given that music is something produced and has a general creator basin. This is not the case with video games, high speed internet and the current digital nexus.

I also think this explains why the right wing stuff(authoritarian and non-authoritarian) took off. The ancaps were the original edgelords and they easily fit in with the emerging high speed internet video game cultures of web 2.0. So did the fascists and other rightist authoritarians sadly. They never got going back in the old zine scene niche musical youth culture days but they and the anarchists have essentially switched places now. It very much plays to on the nose propaganda this is reminiscent of radio propaganda(which also tracks with more right wing mentality)

I don't see a late development happening where @ s and their adjacents get going. What will have to happen, likely, is a new media ecological context that is friendly to anarchists and their friends.

11 Comments
2024/07/23
20:23 UTC

17

What do you guys think of Direct Democracy? and What do you offer in return?

I heard that Bob Black and other post-leftists hate Democracy as they think it is another system of leviathan and control, and this is fine; but what do you contrarians offer in return? What other system?

21 Comments
2024/07/02
18:42 UTC

25

Why do post-leftists hate Marx so much?

Title really

49 Comments
2024/06/10
12:11 UTC

8

What do the post-left anarchists think of Council-Communism?

6 Comments
2024/06/09
21:21 UTC

3

What do you think of transhumanism? Do you consider yourself transhumanist?

Some little background of me: I live in Russia (hence I am not really integrated in modern western political discussion, despite trying to understand what's happening both in the U.S. and Europe politics). I was always impressed by left anarchism ideas, I read Kropotkin, however I think that the way old and new left movements organize themselves is inefficient and seems to always end in some sort of authoritarian way or cooperating with the state. I disagree with some ideas of modern western popular left-wing movements, i.e. gender problem, while I support LGBTQ+ movement, I think the concept of gender itself should be eliminated long term, as well as a concepts of race and nation. I like core concepts of Anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism such as elimination of central goverment, elimination of market economy and money in general, federalized horizontal society structure without hierarchy, however being a 19th century ideas their proposed real life implementation seems underdeveloped and outdated to me, that's where transhumanism and technology development comes in. I believe that the further technology goes the more there are possibilities both for extremely totalitarian states and anarchist societies. I don't believe that humanity with their current technological progress nor humans with their current biological capabilities are able to establish any form decentralized horizontal society, however it doesn't mean we can't change human body and brain to fulfill our needs. I believe that capitalism at some point of its technological progress will destroy itself and hence establish a more effective federalized horizontal society without hierarchy. And in all of that being said, while not considering myself right wing, but both disagreeing with most popular left wing ideologies I began looking towards post left anarchism and whether these ideas are adjacent to my worldview or not. Any help in figuring my views out is appreciated.

18 Comments
2024/04/12
17:28 UTC

11

Was anarchism/anarchy effected by the antifa bubble?

I can remember various antifa critics talking about antifa being a bubble and that so many anarchists membraning themselves with it was going to have negative downstream effects.

It seems like this is exactly what has happened to @ discourse now that the bubble has burst.

10 Comments
2024/03/31
16:58 UTC

8

Radical imaginations of the future

So I watched the bulk of Cuck Philosophy's video on urban guerrillas that he just put out that was a pretty good synopsis of the last 2 major post-18th century radical ages and it got my neuro noodles noodling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-pdWG8YkZ8&t=26s

I very much think that revolution as a prime moving idea is something to be jettisoned by future @ s. I see it as an outgrowth of mechanical solidarity more-so then organic(I'm reversing Durkheim's idea of organic vs mechanical solidarity as he gets scale wrong and had no idea about Dunbar's number). For me I think that anarchists/anarchs should look at things like emergent imaginaries and egregores as sources for anarchy and not revolution, the latter which arises more from inflamed contexts that quite often do not transform into anarchic contexts. I'm not saying there should not be a tertiary place for revolution(social only) but insurrection and imagination is better.

Essentially circle@s should look more into mythology then revolution. Revolution will always be a process of society revolving into yet another society.

0 Comments
2024/03/25
03:16 UTC

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