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.

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.

I've finally reached my limit with all the fucking Marxist seepage over there. All these clowns insisting that Marx was a pivotal figure in... what, exactly? Sociology of capitalism, according to some. Plenty of anarcho-leftists think anarchism without a Marxist analysis of capitalism is unthinkable, even useless. I imagine they measure this by the number of self-described adherents to Marxism as opposed to anarchism. Then why not quit pretending to be anarchists? Most of their organizations and projects eerily resemble Leninist outfits anyway. I'm tired of pointing out the flaws in the LTV, and explaining that you don't need the metaphysics of "value" to understand how exploitation works. I'm tired of pointing out that plenty of famous and influential anarchist theorists borrowed virtually nothing from Marx or Marxists, and their ideas and projects never suffered from such a supposed lack. I'm tired of pointing out the lived history of Marxists going out of their way to attack and murder anarchists. They can keep their fucked up playpen.

i know this is not popular among post leftists, but as a post leftist myself i am NOT anti-civ. i like technology, i like tall buildings, i like my phone. maybe i'm going on wrong definitions, i don't know. please tell me about your definition of civilization and why you support or don't support it.

Holy shit has that placed hollowed out when it comes to posts and posters. This place doesn't seem that much better. Have all the online anarchists fucked off to discord and telegram or is the big @ going through a major drought period right now?

This is my first post here, I’m an anarcho syndicalist in the CNT in France for a while now but I am starting to get tired of the rapprochement of my union with the Marxist or Trotkyst parties in my city. I don't idealize massification, and when I suggest to my comrades that we could work only between anarchists and evolve together... they answer me that there are too few of us here in our city. By dint of campaigning with parties and watching them on the networks or in demonstrations/strike (constantly speaking out, highlighting organizations) my comrades are starting to say to themselves that we are not doing enough like them and that they should we are more serious about our way of fighting. And this mimicry scares me.

I love my friends in CNT, except that I feel less and less in tune and I am afraid of being judged if I reveal what I think. Idk what to do except leaving… Hopefully I have queer and anarchafem friendz and we want to create an affinity group and work together !

Sorry about my bad english

So after reading the 'What Happened to David Graeber' piece on anews and I can't help but notice that what Graeber wanted to do is invert the noble savage into the good civilized historical subject contra to the Western model.

There's all kinds of problems with Rousseau and what he proposed, but what Graeber wants to do is worse. He plays it very loose with the state and what it is for instance. This is juxtaposed to Bob Black's later work that is anthropology focused and far better on the whole.

I have read some of the foundations from the anarcho-individulist movement. I own that anthology ak press published on early 20th century French anarcho Individualist. I am not quite an anarcho or post left anarchist. I am more of an independent radical who draws from Marxism, Anarchism, Psychoanalysis mainly Lacan. I just want material by anarchists or post anarchists with an Individualist praxis. I am also a pessimist philosophically speaking. So I don't believe in revolution frankly I don't believe in morality or at least skeptical of morality as a concept. So I would appreciate any current blogs ,podcasts, books or video dealing with the post left, but with more philosophically Individualist inner revolution. Because I don't believe in revolution outside of the individual seeking to define themselves and their liberty. I am also anti woke and pc seeing those concepts as attacks on the individuals right to self determination and expression. I really believe the left is dead the working class is clueless and revolution will ultimate lead to authoritarianism and the rule of the majority over the individual.

I don't know if civilization is good or bad I am agnostic on that question. Depending on the day I support a voluntary socialism with decentralized local assembles tasked with the more pragmatic economic and social welfare issues. So I would appreciate any recommendations I don't care how fringe or impractical or obscure . Mainstream leftism is just establishment fluff unwilling to admit we may never have a solution to the crisis of capitalism or human living.

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as a post-situationist i find it extremely based.

Really long time ago I read a really good paper on why there should be no heroes. Why the idea of a hero is delusional and incentivises hierarchies and power moves by the so called hero. Remember it being only one article, but maybe I'm misremembering parts of many others, either way if anyone knows the name of an article relating to that topic I'd be grateful.

Hello, we are a group of philosophy enthusiasts. Among other reading groups, we have a small casual non-academic read-together of Blumenfeld's 2018 secondary resource "All Things are Nothing to Me: The Unique Philosophy of Max Stirner" run by a passionate community volunteer with a background in Hegelian philosophy.

We meet every Wednesday at 5pm EST. Our first meeting will be on Wednesday, January 24th.

To join, here's the permanent link: https://discord.gg/xDj2WM75Vd

Reading in a group can be incredibly beneficial thanks to various shared insights. So, we look forward to hearing your perspectives!

Materialism was always a dead end worldview from the very beginning imo. I consider myself more of the pan/cosmopsychism continuum. I consider myself more sympathetic to idealism then materialism though ultimately a psychist disposition is my happy medium.

Among many reasons to reject it is the fact that materialism does not really help anarchy as far as I'm concerned.

I’ve been brainstorming what to get tattooed on my knuckles and I think I’m gonna go with “post left”.

This is going to be an addendum in part to my last post, which was a failed post because the link was missing so here is the link first of all, for those who missed it: Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian - Security, Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear

I wrote a post a while back entitled, ‘Patriotism: “Everything is stories”’ where I partially romanticized a Celtic story of seeking autonomy in the USA and a resulting patriotism. The point of the story was to illustrate how stories can define our perspectives.

Just the other day I wrote a demeaning post towards Zionism, in which I based my sentiments on a lifetime of keeping a pulse on the conflict between Israel and Palestine. I think the conflict stuck with me because when I was young people actually believed that the age of war was passed us, that we were in a modern progressive world, and war was antiquated. What Israel was doing to the Palestinians existed as a sort of outlier example of a modern first-world nation violently abusing a powerless people.

A phenomenon I’ve experienced is that after publicly exposing my thoughts, new sentiments arise in me. I often feel the need to edit, or to write an addendum. In this case, I thought about how we tend to live in stories, collectively, racially, communally and individually, and I wanted to sympathize with the Jewish people, especially with a new fear that may arise in them seeing anti-Israeli sentiments globally in light of this recent massacre of Palestinians.

There are many stories which Jewish people live within. I know some of them through Jewish friends, others through osmosis, some through research. But the main one that is relevant here is illustrated in this quote by Ben-Gurian in 1953, actually quoted in the speech by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian,

“Look at these Jews. They come from countries where their blood was free for the taking, where it was permitted to abuse them, to torture them, to beat them, and to treat them cruelly. We have already become accustom to them, being the helpless victims of the Gentile. Here, we must prove to them that our blood is no longer free for the taking, that there is a state, and there is an army for the Jewish people, which will not permit to execute judgment any longer, that there is a price for their lives and properties.”

Whether or not we wish to compare narratives, I can empathize with a people who grow up being taught that this is their collective story. The ultimate us against the world story. When they are attacked, they view it in the lens of a long history of being attacked. We non-Jews may see settler colonialism, they see it as taking back what is theirs.

Of course we all have to come to terms with reality in our individual, and collective experience – and there are also stories which come from cultures and individuals who claim they have been victimized by Judaism. These are important stories as well. Unfortunately, orthodox Judaism sees itself as the “chosen people”, and so they by default do not appeal to Gentile sentiments, nor do they value Gentile stories as equal to their insular stories, which makes them impenetrable by their fellow human.

Jews are not the first to do this, American patriotism has a stubborn attitude which reads like, “If you don’t like it, go to Russia”. The British were also absurd, reading Winston Churchill quotes may require cutting oneself. Actually we could easily make the connection to Anarchists ourselves. Aren’t we a most insular community? And of course we are, we openly challenge the majority opinion and the very system we exist within.

Further I thought about my own journey to Anarchism, how convoluted it is, especially when it comes to Post-Left-Anarchism. I always had trouble explaining to friends,

“Its not an ideology, it is against ‘ism’s” “...but its Post-Left Anarchism, right?” “Yeah but its like Taoism, the Tao is unknowable” “Then whats the point of the ideology” “Its like a subversive think tank, but not an ideology” “So its like a collective, non-ideology, ideology” “You just… you just have to… I don’t know how to explain it.”

Meanwhile I would post things to Leftist Anarchists like, “The road to an anarchist society is non-linear”.

But if the road is non-linear, then why identify with an ism, or a “subversive think tank”? What brought me to Anarchism to begin with? Was it a natural journey, intrinsic to my nature, or was it circumstantial?

I thought about my own story line, the story I carry on an individual level. It occurred to me than it was this very forum where I actually felt I was finally able to tell my personal story and people heard it without judgment, and how healing this experience was for me. How it even helped me step back from the story-line itself, and look at where I might be milking it, or hypocritical, or melodramatic to my own harm. I can’t tell you how much this meant to me, that people were supportive of me here… And I’m afraid I didn’t deserve it at times...

So then I’m thinking about the power of being able to tell our personal stories, and then I’m thinking about how it could be healing for the Jewish people to tell their story without judgment. And after all, I looked back at my attack on Zionism, and how it may do more to antagonize Jewish people in general than to help the Palestinians.

I do think Zionism is only a perverted fictional narrative which grows out of festering insular narratives, and how in my own life, especially previous to being able to tell my own story, I was doing the same thing, always fighting an uphill battle against the labels which I felt were attached to me, and how I even became a villain during my darkest moments in nihilist lack of faith that I could over come it.

One thing that we all know but tend to forget is that heroism and villainy exist in virtually every culture and race on this planet, virtually every community, and even in the growth of the individual, times of villainy, and times of heroism.

In reading Chomsky, he references a (Jewish) philosopher named Walter Lippman, who argues that ruling class needs to “manufacture the consent” of the public, rather than allow them the raw facts. The Rockefellers have made this claim as well in regards to our education system (I also learned this from Chomsky). Well, look at what a propaganda state has done to us all. In the US: Trump Vs. Biden? Pro-Vaccine, Anti-Vaccine? Hard core military culture without self-reflection… The “blue team” vs. “red team” mentality in the USA is insane, and neither side has much to offer. A nation of hypnotized people, parroting shit they heard from angry talking heads. I did read on Wikipedia that Walter Lippman, later in life, basically redacted his earlier sentiments, seeing how this strategy destroys democracy. But the “Dewey vs. Lippman debate” became a popular university debate anyway.

Actually on this note, I’ve noticed that the whole Left still largely pays reverence to Noam Chomsky, but virtually no one I meet has ever read his work. For this reason, Chomsky’s work remains lost on the Left, and the general public, and I find this sad, because it is a poignant, and dare I say post-Left subversive against the higher establishment, the propagandist media, and even our education system.

And now the Palestinians are massacred again, and while the world may show anger, who will stop it? We don’t control our own government which supports Israel monetarily and militarily. The kind of political action which existed during the time of the International Solidarity Movement is dead, and so is the knowledge which our parents generation had. And so the perverted Zionism remains prevalent, just as the American occupation of north America and the crippling of the indigenous way of life remains. Property is still theft! But who will listen to, let alone understand such a statement?

Many of us feel a weight of injustice, but we also have our own lives to live, things that make us happy, friends and family we don’t want to lose. The stories continue to blast through the human population, and we all seem to have opinions - which brings me to my final point:

----Final Point… be patient, its coming---

I will start with a word from the Dagara Tribe of Africa, Yielbongura, which roughly translates into, “The thing which knowledge cannot eat”. If you explore indigenous thought, the conception of the unknown, the mystery, comes up a lot, all over the world whether in China, Africa, or North America, etc. There is a respect for the unknown, and the unknowable. Within civilization, logic operates almost entirely on what is known through mathematics and science.

When we study history, we don’t say, “This probably happened like this, but maybe also happened like that”, we say, “It happened like this, and here is the evidence”. If you’ve studied science history, you also know how hard it has been for established scientific conclusions to be altered by new evidence, new studies. The same is true for history. This is why books like, “The Dawn of Everything” by David Graeber and David Wengrow appear and then disappear, why Eric Hobsbawm’s histories don’t become common knowledge, why “anthropologists” like Steven Pinker can get away with their propagandist narrative in the limelight of media while James C. Scott remains only known to a few of us anarchists. And the public still follows the progressive narrative on the “Agricultural revolution”. On the other hand, Anti-Civ theory makes great points, but to be fair, there are also fair points against it.

But perhaps the problem isn’t even so much in what the truth is, but more that we feel obligated to fight against narratives that are imposed on us – we fight to control the narrative, or at least carve ourselves a place where we don’t feel challenged in how we live.

But collectively, I say we don’t give enough respect to the unknown, spiritually or materially, and actually the indigenous world has accused modern society of this very failure.

There are Native American quotes criticizing “the white man” for fanciful, complex language of contracts and law, which allow them to lie between the lines, whereas the Native Americans aim to speak simple, plain truth, which goes “straight to the heart” in communication.

So then I thought about my own discussions of history, and my own story, and how I often give my narrative as fact, as if it is the truth beyond the lies. This is a failure of my own. And I look at the Jews and their story, and how at least mainstream Jewish narratives call all accusations against them “conspiracy theories”, or “anti-Semitic” (Here in the States we hear, “Anti-American”). And frankly, we’re all guilty. Even us anarchists, in our media we tend to disrespect the possibility that we might be mistaken. Why do I have such a need to edit my posts and add addendums? Partially because of this very reason, but also another reason:

In our culture we do not allow each other to be wrong. In fact its institutionalized in our schooling. To make a claim, we need to back it up rigorously, sometimes absurdly scientific, and if we are wrong, then we are cast aside and not taken seriously again.

But we all still have stories to tell, and our story lines aren’t perfect. Sometimes we need to tell our stories even if they are wrong, and to be listened to without judgment. Let the story simmer, and hear other peoples stories, and how those stories might change our own narratives.

Of course there is such things as outright lies, something we all have to be wary of, but by my estimation a liar should not get away with it too long in a healthy dialogue within society, and that very liar may soon learn the value of honesty before they are even discovered as liars. But we are a long way from a healthy society.

Here I want to refer to a book chapter from the story, “The Little Prince”, where the little prince meets a fox. In this chapter, the fox asks the boy to “tame” him, and the boy asks what “tame” means, and the fox explains that it has a lost meaning, that the root of the word actually means, “to form ties”, and that humanity has forgotten how to make real friends because there are no stores where people can buy them. We were brought up with the word “tame” as, to tame a wild animal, as to domesticate, but apparently this is not the root word. And actually this example alone represents so much of what I feel is foundational wrong about how we form relationships on earth, not just to each other, but to our animal neighbors.

I said I was going to make the final point but I’m only getting to it now: that the stories we tell, are only so good for the people who tell them. What about the beings of this planet who cannot tell their story? Or are too honest to conceive of a narrative to begin with? Indigenous who spoke a different language, outlaws who never realized they were breaking a law, animals in laboratories who only communicate with their expression of fear and pain, and Palestinians who have no media outlets or global tycoon friends. Their stories are those which escape history, exist apart from the modern human paradigm, and in the present we may watch them die in real time, helpless in the abstract, as we attempt to navigate the narratives which cause the suffering, as if fixing the story will save the dead and dying.

There is a point where the story no longer reaches human trust, and that is a sad day for humanity. Will obedience finally replace trust?

The corporations like to say, “We’re all in this together”, they’ve been saying that for decades, while they fuck everyone over, but there is truth to the statement. I don’t believe evil grows out of nothing.

I once had dream that I met my pet archetype of evil, David Rockefeller - we were both Scottish, I was an established adult, and he was a young boy, and he came up to a group of adults, and attempted to make a humorous comment which flopped… I had an opportunity to save him from awkwardness or embarrassment, but mocked him along with the others instead, and then saw the utter dispossession of his feeling of belonging in his tribe, and I felt horrible for him, and could then see how he may have come to be what I now perceive to be a monster. When someone makes themselves vulnerable, it is a bad time to shut them down.

Just for good measure, I might even now argue that a lot of the modern issues we face may come out of our quickness to judge children, put them into categories, punish their families, ostracize. If not only a problem for those victims, the fear of that fate creates a competitive other, which then comes to believe they earned their dominance. When competition is institutionalized, what might one expect? But I doubt our problems began with institutions.

This post I made at least three drafts, and am happy with it. Also I will try to make it back to the library for comments, when I can.

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian - Security, Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear

Summary:

This examination of Palestinian experiences of life and death within the context of Israeli settler colonialism broadens the analytical horizon to include those who 'keep on existing' and explores how Israeli theologies and ideologies of security, surveillance and fear can obscure violence and power dynamics while perpetuating existing power structures. Drawing from everyday aspects of Palestinian victimization, survival, life and death, and moving between the local and the global, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian introduces and defines her notion of 'Israeli security theology' and the politics of fear within Palestine/Israel. She relies on a feminist analysis, invoking the intimate politics of the everyday and centering the Palestinian body, family life, memory and memorialization, birth and death as critical sites from which to examine the settler colonial state's machineries of surveillance which produce and maintain a political economy of fear that justifies colonial violence.

EDIT: I deleted everything I originally wrote. I think it's better just to have a summary I got online. The summary is of her book, but the link to to a presentation she gave on her book.

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I'd be curious to the general vibe on these issues in that community. Anarchism seems somewhat divided though mainly on the conspiracy side of the fence.