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wxlfbites · 3 years

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The Church of Satan

I can only imagine the amount of criticism and hate I'm going to get for this, so I just want to preface this post by saying that in 2015 I considered myself a LaVeyan Satanist for a while. I was a teenager and felt like what I was reading was exactly how I felt, it gave me a sense of justification for the views I had. I am not just some random, misinformed individual who only read anti-satanism propaganda. In fact, I've still actually never read anti-satanism propaganda. My opinions have been formed based exclusively on what I've read on the Church of Satan's own website. These are of course, my own opinions and people are allowed to disagree... I just think it might be something to think about if you're considering becoming a satanist.

THIS WILL BE AN EXTREMELY LONG POST

Firstly, I'm addressing the membership the Church of Satan is now implementing. ~ While the Church of Satan says that you do not need to become a member in order to consider yourself a satanist, it is clear that they encourage you to do so. It has registration and payment based memberships that allow you access to confidential information, rituals, and online chat groups you are otherwise not entitled to. Their website claims these memberships have always been in place, but I do not remember any such kind in 2015. ~ It is their policy that affiliated members are discouraged from exchanging member-exclusive information with non-members. They also express that if you are a non-member of the church, you should not expect members to keep up extended exchanges or promotion of your wares. Further, your membership is subject to rejection and retraction at their discretion and they openly state that when you apply for a membership, they gather information on you to ensure you are someone safe and trustworthy to allow in. ~ Whether or not it is intentional, they use guilt tactics in order to persuade people into becoming members. To quote some of these phrases on their own website: "Those who proudly carry our red cards identifying themselves as members have the strength and dedication to implement the tools traditionally associated with Satan". "Look to your other possessions and expenses (most people spend far more than this on general entertainment) and we’re certain you can do this if it means something to you to become a member." "We’ve discovered that most individuals can muster these funds if membership is something they truly desire." ~ They describe your membership card as a key that you must show and scan to other members to prove your affiliation. They make a few references to the underground secrecy that members may or may not choose to maintain, and so to protect their identities as members, these... calling cards if you will.. are used to discretely confirm ones membership in the Church. ~ They do not tell you where the money for your registration fee goes. In fact, they say: "That is up to the administration. It will be applied to whatever is most required at the time it is received. If you feel the need to know in more detail, then don’t join." Implying you don't have the right to know exactly where your money goes? ~ Their membership application includes inappropriate questions that no organization, religious or otherwise, should ever ask. These include: " Are you satisfied with your sex life? Describe your ideal of a physically attractive sex partner." "How many years would you like to live?" "In what organizations do you hold membership?" "Are you a smoker? If so, to what extent." "Do you drink alcoholic beverages? If so, to what extent? State preferences." " Secondly, how does satanism compare themselves to other religions and philosophies? ~ The Church of Satan declares themselves to be "a formidable threat to those who would halt progress in the name of spirituality and theism of any sort." "We are a group of dynamic individuals who stand forth as the ultimate underground alternative, the “Alien Elite.” ~ They state things like "Our members and officials will not serve as teachers nor as entertainers—we have neither the time nor the inclination.", "It is our policy not to spoon-feed information to students who are too lazy to do research." and "Your schedule is of no importance to us." so it's no surprise that the satanic texts they do not provide in full on their website, including the Satanic Bible, - which is there main text and one they highly encourage you to read - cost money. ~ They believe themselves to be the only form of satanism, stating: "People who believe in some Devilish supernatural being and worship him are Devil-worshippers, not Satanists.", "Anton LaVey was the first to define Satanism as a philosophy, and it is an atheist perspective." and “Theistic Satanism” is an oxymoronic term and thus absurd." ~ Statements like: "we stand in opposition to theist religions and their

inherent hypocrisy.", [regarding the word Shemhamforash] - "So, Satanists use it for traditional blasphemy’s sake.", [regarding someones question about their experiences with demons] - "Satanists do not believe in demons or other supernatural beings, nor do we believe in spells. Seek help from local mental health professionals to assist you to get over these delusions.", "We Satanists are all anthropologists to some degree and can find that not upsetting people who think in such simplistic and erroneous terms of “belief equals goodness and truthfulness” might be worthwhile to smooth the proceedings in which one is involved. Trying to teach them that they are mistaken in such a belief may not be worth one’s efforts." are pretty much self explanatory as to the lack of consideration satanism has for other religions as being true for others.

~ This statement: "Knowing this, if you choose to affiliate with any pseudo-Satanic or anti-Satanic groups, you may well find yourself disaffiliated from the Church of Satan. Forewarned is forearmed." might sound harmless at first glance, but this kind of reminds me of an isolation tactic where cults discourage their followers to read or engage with opposing or differing opinions because it might open their eyes to the truth of things?

Finally, here are some statements that I personally don't find are morally or ethically okay?

~ In terms of kids worrying about their parents approval the Church says: "Satanism teaches that, so long as you live with your parents, you are in “their lair” and must show them respect". Which... is literally the same shit abuse victims hear all the time..... (example "you live in their house, they're your parents and you should love and respect them no matter what")...

~ "There can be no more myth of “equality” for all—it only translates to “mediocrity” and supports the weak at the expense of the strong." is a statement I just .... wish I were making up at this point.

~"The emotional drive to “change the world” is a common stage of early adult development typically beginning around age 16 and lasting until around age 24. Usually, individuals who become aware as to how the world actually functions—rather than being lost in a fantasy wherein they will be some sort of savior figure—come to realize that idealism (such as changing the world) is less important than the principle of getting what you want for yourself.",

Also! Um.. they are fully aware and okay with people who uphold discriminatory political views....

To quote their website regarding politics: "Our members span an amazing political spectrum, which includes but is not limited to: Libertarians, Liberals, Conservatives, Republicans, Democrats, Reform Party members, Independents, Capitalists, Socialists, Communists, Stalinists, Leninists, Trotskyites, Maoists, Zionists, Monarchists, Fascists, Anarchists, and just about anything else you could possibly imagine."

And to justify this, they say: "Members who demand conformity from other members to their particular political fetish are welcomed to depart.”, "For a Satanist to expect, much less demand, consensus on any given issue, beyond basic advocacy of individual liberty within local laws, is an enterprise which is probably as masochistic as it is insane.", "Some naïve idealists seem to think that the Church of Satan as an organization risks irrelevancy if it does not become an advocate of certain political positions—usually their own pet issues which are assumed “must” be shared by other Satanists. This fear is based upon the assumption that the Church of Satan needs to change the world or risk “fading into obscurity.”

Again, all of this information comes directly from the Church of Satan website itself. It it not "propaganda". It comes from their own mouths. You're free to disagree with my interpretation and views of the above. But if you do agree, I'd love to know.

The things above make me uneasy. They give me huge cult vibes and are actually disappointing to read as someone who once considered themselves a satanist. As an omnistic pagan now, I do believe that all religions hold truths within them and can say that there are certain things within satanism I do agree with. But overall, I feel like calling satanism a religion is a stretch and should be joined with caution if it's something you are really interested in. I am only one person, I can't tell anyone what to do. But if you were considering becoming a satanist but hold values and views that the things in this post opposed or were opposite to, then maybe satanism isn't right for you. It's definitely not right for me.

I hope this post was educational at the very least. I hope that it might help people make a decision either way if they were interested in joining the Church.

#the polymorph chronicles #satanism #the church of satan #religion #satan #satanic #spirituality #philosophy #satanist #paganism #pagan #eclectic pagan #omnism #omnist

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antinonymous · 3 years

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The Punk Rock in Marxist-Leninism

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always hated punk rock; the reasons why having changed significantly. I heavily identified as Right-wing throughout my childhood through early adolescence, so punk rock was a piece of culture that I quickly realized was not for me, with its far-left anarchist aesthetic. If you’d shown and explained to me something like Holiday in Cambodia I wouldn’t have cared in the slightest. Anti-fascists often forget about how the far-right rarely considers the vast and vapid categorizations of different leftists and other anti-fascist types. Anarchists are just as anti-American as Stalinists; anarchists just don’t have a plan (besides the occasional riot) so they’re more docile and easier to ignore. They’re just extra annoying and snobby. The sonic elements of punk mixed in with the political atmosphere sealed it for me. I thought this entire genre of music sounded like some twerp in class who says shit about America just to ‘piss off the system’. Childish, really.

In high school, the first punk band I didn’t immediately hate was neo-Nazi band Skrewdriver. I was introduced to them on a bus for school, with only one black kid on the whole bus, having the song White Power being shown explicitly to them. I remember referencing it to him later in conversation and he said he hated that experience. To me though? Finally, I thought, some punk rock where I can very easily say ‘well I like the music, but I don’t like their politics’ and it isn’t SJW crap. If I were to say stuff like that about other punk rock bands that’d be blasphemy, so I avoided the leftists and found more Nazi punk, where the bad politics were more obvious.

As someone who’s always been into music, my childhood had a specific opinion that I now understand to be just a simple analysis- namely, that politically left-wing music doesn’t do anything to change the system whatsoever. On an open-mic day in my high school the buses had already arrived and then my band got to play Killing in The Name. The school, the ‘system’, allotted us more time because they wanted to hear a cool song. Nobody was inspired by that song that day to think critically about the condition of militarized police in America or how the Klan’s ideology controls the majority of America’s police. I know I didn’t. Frankly, I thought putting politics in music was a waste of time Right or Left. And I found more Rightist music later on, namely in black metal.

Black metal is a mirror image of punk, if that mirror were on two ends of a horseshoe. Both started out as what we today label ‘edgy’, yet generally non-political, and then got somewhat overtaken by the far right and far left. Black metal was firmly cemented in Nazi ideology by the mid-90s with Burzum and the history of the Norwegian second wave, as well as later bands like Germany’s Absurd to solidify National Socialist Black Metal as its own genre. Then there’re wackos like Peste Noire, who, with the help of figures like Anthony Fantano, are somewhat normalized and mainstream while also having deep French nationalist roots. But what makes black metal also similar to punk is the later insurgency movements from either political side into the other genre. Nazi punk distinguishes itself not by its members being skinheads, for skinheads began as a far-left movement, but rather with aesthetics like white and red shoelaces (wrapped straight) and, of course, swastikas. In the mid/late 2010s an anti-fascist black metal scene emerged in response to the atrocities of the Obama administration and Trump’s election victory. This was spearheaded by bands like Gaylord and Neckbeard Death Camp as well as others from Bandcamp and Soundcloud. It didn’t try to distinguish itself at all, in a crypto-anti-fascism directly proselytizing. Nazi punk and anti-fascist black metal are similar in that they, like all music as we’ll be seeing, also don’t achieve anything, but are specifically trying to change the strata of their own genre’s political associations. As my own father put it, there’s only two kinds of Oi – racist and non-racist.

Left-wing black metal was obvious folly that I participated in anyway. But even when I eventually started putting personal politics into my music from 2016 through 2019, I still avoided major bands like Rage and punk rock (besides Bad Religion, which I only liked because I saw a live cover). It was actually Peste Noire who showed me the wonder of sampling in music; yet another far-right appropriation of musical technique, sadly. It was only in late 2019 and 2020 that I listened to bands like Rage and Dead Kennedys, and seeing the amount of effort they put in their messaging left me cynically giggling. Paraphrasing other commentators, music has no effect on political change no matter how radical. Far-left Marxist, Bolshevik, anarchist and Social-Democratic musical compositions have existed since the nineteenth century and were plentiful in the entirety of the 20th century, albeit with significant change after the World Wars. But music is too individualistic to be politically effective as every individual person’s preferences are different. This is how Rage and anarchist punk rock sold so well in America and how I continued to enjoy Peste Noire long after I left the Right.

My music was also inspired by industrial metal band Rammstein, and I’ve since learned that, generally speaking, politically provocative art is an integral part of industrial music generally, which easily puts off someone not paying careful attention to the music. To paraphrase Žižek, artists like Rammstein and Laibach use fascistic language and imagery in a controlled way that lifts various signs from their associations of authoritarianism, leaving them inoffensive enough to gain mainstream credibility. Case in point, Slovenia’s Laibach has caused numerous controversies over their 41-year-career with their overtly militaristic theme, prolific German lyrics, and for having been branded as dissidents by the Yugoslav government, yet they are the only foreign band that has ever performed in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. They were invited to play in 2015 to celebrate the 70-year-anniversary of the fall of imperial Japanese rule on National Liberation Day. The government would clearly know better than to invite a legitimate fascist band; in their minds that would most certainly create an immediate attempt to try to cause some type of western imperialist unrest. One would wonder why they’d invite anyone at all. But nothing malevolent came about from it; the show went fine, and clips of it are on YouTube. I won’t try to make any comment on any individual in the DPRK or anywhere else, but it’s fascinating to think of what happens when Laibach is played through North Korean speakers, interpreted by those who have few else in common with the band other than they both have experience living under a régime inspired by Marx.

It must be a different experience from, say, the experience of Anarchy in the UK by Sex Pistols as sung on North Korean karaoke by VICE journalist Sam Smith. This leads me to my current gripes with punk rock, specifically in the year 2021.

Sex Pistols are the origin of punk rock’s association with anarchism due to the song mentioned above, but they are also the origin of punk rock’s association with Nazism due to Sid Vicious’ use of a swastika t-shirt. This is no paradox. Both are a result of Liberal nihilism, of having no true political leaning other than blind offensiveness and ideological motivation without one ever needing sincerity in belief. Either that or punk rock bands are explicitly Liberal/conservative, which is a discourse I remember from my childhood. Post-90s punk was too commercial, liberal, gay, et cetera, with bands such as Green Day having been seen as a perversion of the solidarity of the mostly cisgender heteronormative anarchist community of people who actually listen to punk rock. John Lydon is an open Trump-supporter. After the far-right January 6th attack on the Capitol, Dead Kennedys retweeted many Liberal commentators and politicians, including Republicans Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I see not a problem with individual people and artists but a problem with punk rock as artistic expression; it has terminal hollow conformity. Overall, its association with petit bourgeois ideology leaves punk rock with little to give it credibility. Punk rock has always had an insincere, two-faced nature. ‘Punk’s not dead’ is the anti-fascist equivalent of ‘return to tradition’…or is it anti-fascist? Depends on who’s saying it, where’s being said, and who hears it.

Where to turn? Marxist-Leninists (and sometimes even anarchists) will argue that social bureaucracies such as Cuba, the People’s Republic of China, Vietnam and the DPRK provide an alternative to American global homogeny. Considering the American military spent over $700,000,000,000 on its military last year, and that many bases are specifically placed around those listed countries, their arguments aren’t entirely unconvincing. They also argue that because Marxist-Leninist politicians provided industrialization and progress for their nations without what Marxist-Leninists would personally term “imperialist war”, they should be praised, as well as the fact that many of the problems commonly associated with those countries are explicitly from American intervention to stop ‘the spread of Marxism’ and to keep them subordinated to western authority. However, as Bordiga writes in Characteristic Theses of the Party, the integral realization of socialism within the limits of one country is inconceivable and the socialist transformation cannot be carried out without insuccess and momentary set-backs. The defence of the proletarian regime against the ever-present dangers of degeneration is possible only if the proletarian State is always solidary with the international struggle of the working class of each country against its own bourgeoisie, its State and its army; this struggle permits of no respite even in wartime. This co-ordination can only be secured if the world communist Party controls the politics and programme of the States where the working class has vanquished.

Am I arguing for left unity, left solidarity, the whole “anarchists and Marxist-Leninists are going for the same communist goal” argument? No, I’m not talking about that. This has been said before but, historically speaking, there’s usually only one correct way to pilot a vehicle and thousands of wrong ways. But I’m talking about music. And I bring up Marxist-Leninism for what could be seen as a superficial reason; that the potency of Musikbolschewismus is greater than the potency of traditional anarchist punk rock. If we’re just talking about music to ‘piss people off’, which is what punk rock culturally amounts to, punk rock could be Marxist-Leninist in that that ideology has more of the nihilistic punk rock mentality than any band you could name. Because Marxist-Leninism can indeed be quite nihilistic, with Russian Bolshevik minority rule in foreign countries paralleling the worst aspects of American imperialism and its related apologia. As for industrialization, the USSR demobilized its military to a lesser extent than other European countries, organized more strictly than NATO. Their industrialization in question was related to impersonal and heavily regulated bureaucratic trade, the aforementioned occupation of eastern Europe and elsewhere, and warcraft: firearms, lightweight tanks, and thousands of nuclear weapons. In 2021, the history of Marxist-Leninist music is both far more potent and plentiful than anarchist punk rock; if a bit old-school, boringly classical, and used in the justification of unjust countries.

What I’m trying to say is this: what is the difference between an English band that wears swastika and MAGA t-shirts singing about how anarchy is good and another band that wears sickle and hammer shirts singing about how the USSR and the PRC are good? Both are nonsense but the latter is sincere with what they say… or are they? Considering punk rock’s edgy, yet ultimately cowardly and insincere anti-authority outlook, I can’t help but wonder what would be if Marxist-Leninism were to ever embrace the potentiality of its status and flaws and make annoying, loud guitar music. It wouldn’t be hard since, comparatively, the bad politics are more obvious. And once it gets started, it’d create a new cycle of the entirety of political thought in music; easily being able to be superior to Right-Libertarian punk rock and all the washed-up bands of the 70s-00s.

What’s the actual transgressive music we have today? Rap music has been mostly dominated by black Americans since the 80s, with a lot of rappers now being women. It is held to a different esteem than even the antisemitic ‘satanic panic’ of the 80s against heavy metal, since legal cases referring to rap lyrics are not unheard of and can even lead to conviction in modern times. It is much closer to the struggles of the global afro-diasporic community than with European writers from 80+ years ago. Punk rock never had, never could, and never will, have a scene of that calibre.

In conclusion, I hope I have provided a cynical pseudo-rehabilitation of punk rock through the example of Marxist-Leninism in a specific manner related to the overall creation of and interpretation of music, which is an important piece of international culture. I know Marxist-Leninist States to be corrupt and are not socialist, but to the eyes of an American, and to the ears of the average punk rock normie, Marxist-Leninism is just as anti-US government as the anarchists, only scarier, because they actually have a plan! So why can’t it be punk? The PRC’s State-sanctioned abductions are certainly not what Bordiga had in mind in regards to a proletarian government being against its own bourgeoisie. Internationality is the way forward. But it almost sounds like it’s against the system if one has that kind of understanding of ‘the system’. Who’s to say there isn’t an obscure 80s punk demo labelled Kidnapping Billionaires somewhere? Punk rock is nothing more than vapid noise to piss of conservatives. That’s it. It has no heart, spirit nor philosophy. The PRC even saying they would like socialism is too far for American conservative wormpeople, and legitimate reasons to criticize the PRC and other social bureaucracies get overshadowed by imperialist greed and racism. Music is not nearly the kind of tool of radicalism Zack de la Rocha thought it was, but with the internationality of Laibach we see it can do more than one can normally expect. It all depends on whether people can distinguish/separate the instrumentation from the proselytization.

#punks not dead #yes it is thank goodness #writing shit #music shit #nazis #racism #black metal #industrial #LAIBACH #rage against the machine

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grandhotelabyss · 3 years

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An artist who has spent years doing the work on her own terms should not look fashionability in the mouth. But it is odd to find Didion embraced by the world of mainstream sentimental thinking which she charged against for decades. One wonders whether the fans for whom she’s now an Instagram totem, or the many journalists who claim her, realize that she cast her career toward challenging precepts and paragons like theirs.

Nathan Heller, “What We Get Wrong about Joan Didion”

(A good overall exploration of Didion’s career, including a recommendation of what the author calls the least read of her books, Where I Was From, which I also haven’t read. Her anti-credo is that nothing connects to anything else except tenuously and through the individual will, whose works’ only safe repository is tradition. But this conservatism or quiescence, which leads some leftists to suspect intelligence ties, opens in her best work onto a subversive nihilism. Subversive because it counsels not resistance to power—power only feeds on resistance—but rather inner exile, evasion, that great principle of the modernism to which she was heir. We’ve heard it here before: “silence, exile, and cunning.” As I’ve suggested:

Where do Didion’s celebrated style and memorable motifs come from? Read her in the context of modern poetry. Forget the oft-cited Hemingway—the howling desert and the despair are from T. S. Eliot, the floral arrangements and the skepticism from Wallace Stevens; the rattlesnakes have escaped from Marianne Moore’s menagerie, where animals stand for obdurate reality. And Didion’s major (and ideologically heterodox) female precursors and contemporaries share her wariness of or disgust with organized politics and especially identity politics.

Think only of Willa Cather’s and Marianne Moore’s Republicanism, Zora Neale Hurston’s mockery of the “sobbing school of Negrohood,” Flannery O’Connor’s Catholic censure of modernity as such, Elizabeth Bishop’s refusal to be anthologized in female-only collections, Susan Sontag’s reply to Adrienne Rich charging feminism with fascist irrationalism, Doris Lessing’s indictment of what was then called “political correctness” (and is now called “wokeness” or “social justice”) as the dangerous descendant of Stalinist terror, A. S. Byatt’s speculation that feminist victimology has ended women’s two-century streak of writing great novels, or even the Hegelian philosopher Gillian Rose’s brisk dismissal in her harrowing and radiant memoir Love’s Work: “[F]eminism never offered me any help. For it fails to address the power of women as well as their powerlessness…”

Nothing is more futile than a quest for absolute or final subversion, though. It’s no slight on a writer to note that she has become popular, and that in becoming popular only the most affirmative of her attitudes have come uppermost in the public consciousness. The smiley-face placed over the great writer in her popularization is probably a defense against what meaning the private consciousness, with its need to defy public order, gains from reading her.

Further reading: my essays on Play It as It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer, and The Year of Magical Thinking, which latter is really an essay on Slouching Towards Bethlehem in disguise.)

#joan didion #literature #american literature #modernism

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azspot · 4 years

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Right-wing takes on Social Justice and Cancel Culture are everywhere. Frankly, I hear people complaining about the thing far more than I encounter the thing itself. And while you can find examples of oversensitivity and overreaction, I tend to think this is a fairly minor issue that mainly occupies the attention of people who spend too much time on social media. I sometimes see certain condemnatory tendencies among activists that are counterproductive, and I am frustrated by them, but I am much more in sympathy with the activists than with their over-the-top, frothing-at-the-mouth critics, who usually plead for Civil Discourse even as they denounce the left as Stalinists and “Twitter Robespierres.” (I find Taibbi’s term funny: the difference between a Twitter Robespierre and the actual Robespierre is that the latter actually cut people’s heads off while the former just criticize you on the internet. Every time you hear people talk about “online Maoism” or “a digital French Revolution” remember that the “online” aspect eliminates a lot of the force of the comparison.) It’s sad to see a good journalist like Taibbi fully embrace the evidence-free, overwrought, dismissive view of the American left. It’s ironic that someone who decries “hate” and pleads for facts seems to drip with hatred and not care about facts. But this is all too common among the shallow contrarian critics of social justice, who refuse to actually give a fair hearing to the people they call ideologically rigid. The American left is actually better off now than at almost any other point in my life: we are running great candidates for office, many of whom are winning. Radical new possibilities for rethinking criminal punishment are emerging, and the current protest movement is winning public support. A socialist has been a leading contender for the presidential nomination twice in a row. Thoughtful, insightful left media is flourishing. (Subscribe!) It is a shame that a sharp critic like Taibbi should be so dismissive and hostile in such an important political moment. He should consider spending less time on social media, which causes less frustration the less you look at it.

Has The American Left Lost Its Mind?

#journalism

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cathkaesque · 4 years

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British politics in 2020 is a mass of contradictions. The outright legislative terror of the early to mid-2010s has momentarily abated but the landmines planted in that period continue to go off (Grenfell, ‘Windrush’, COVID-19 ‘unpreparedness’). Measures designed to align the working class with capital (right-to-buy) produce renters unions and anti-landlordism. Stalinists lead the rearguard action against civic equality for trans women. A government of ultra-Thatcherites sets about hiking the minimum wage. ‘Momentum’ is a synonym for inertia, austerity is over and only just beginning, the ‘spirit of the blitz’ is the reality of immigration enforcement, and we all live under permanent lock-down but everyone’s at work.

In the middle of all of this, AngryWorkers, ‘a small political collective’ based in West London, have published Class Power On Zero-Hours, an account of their six years of organising in the warehouse and logistics corridor of Greenford and Park Royal. The period that the work deals with coincides roughly with the phase of British history dominated by ‘Brexit’, and Class Power deals with some of the ways in which that (non-)event has been experienced beyond the Twitter Janus Face of gammon nationalists and aggrieved liberal solicitors. It encompasses, also, three major workers’ inquiries, an account of the role of food supply chains in the context of global struggles, a new perspective on the relationship of work and automation, a sketch for revolutionary politics today, and an uplifting middle-finger to boring left-wing scholasticism of all shades and varieties. Along with D. Hunter’s Chav Solidarity and Phil A. Neel’s Hinterland, it’s probably the best book about class to come out of the tiny circles of English-speaking anarchists and communists in the last ten years, and everyone who cares about that stuff even a little bit should definitely read it.

The book’s first paragraph gives a flavour of things to come:

We felt an urgent need to break out of the cosmopolitan bubble and root our politics in working class jobs and lives. We wanted to pay more than just lip service to the classic slogan, ‘the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves’. Over the next six years, comrades joined us and we worked in a dozen different warehouses and factories. We organised slowdowns on shop floors, rocked up on bosses’ and landlords doors with our solidarity network, and banged our heads against brick walls as shop stewards in the bigger unions. We wrote up our successes, as well as the dead-ends, in our publications, WorkersWildWest, which we gave out to 2,000 local workers at warehouse gates at dawn. We tried to rebuild class power and create a small cell of revolutionary organisation. The book documents our experiences. It is material for getting rooted. It is a call for an independent working class organisation. (7)

These are the methods; what about the conclusions? What do the General Rules of the International Workingmen’s Association of 1864 mean to the working people of Ealing in 2014? How does a working class that is increasingly Eastern European experience UK politics in a period in which the main focus of the ‘national conversation’ is about how to stop them from ‘coming over here’? AngryWorkers acknowledge that ‘the years from 2014 to 2020 in London were a thorny desert’ (35) in terms of workplace struggles. Workers ‘are in a state of permanent suspension: what will happen with Brexit? Will my wife and family get a visa? Will the bank grant me a mortgage if my wife gets her overtime? Will the situation “back home” get better?’ (38) Unsurprisingly, ‘times are getting harder’ for the working classes even as the mood darkens back in the cosmopolitan bubble. There, it’s climate change and ‘global fascism’; here, it’s sciatica and the £4,000 charge to get your baby delivered in the NHS hospital (99). The prospects for ‘Revolutionary transition and its conditions in the UK’ (the title of Chapter 14 of the book) don’t look rosy from either perspective; but AngryWorkers at least have some ideas about how the obstacles might be cleared away.

For this reason, Class Power on Zero-Hours isn’t a defeatist book. The authors love their area. They’ve spent years getting to know it. They want it to be at the centre of a working class movement. The desire is at the root of their impatience with parliamentary reformism, but it’s also what compels them to overcome their revolutionary scruples and to try things that they normally wouldn’t, such as joining big conservative trade unions and throwing themselves into the miasma of their internal politics. The text gives a meticulous overview of what the neighbourhood offers: control over 60 percent of London’s food imports, hundreds of unorganised small and large businesses operating on a low-wage model, and widespread disgust for official workers’ organisations that have sunk into the status quo like an old trolley into a canal. Right to the finish AW remain convinced that Greenford and Park Royal have the potential to exist at the centre of a new culture of class initiative and autonomy, and the dozens of pictures in Class Power on Zero-Hours of pay protests by women workers, occupations of Labour Party offices, IWW organising drives, and scores of workplace newsletters are a beautiful, moving anticipation of how things could be.

Organised around this six-year history are a series of more general claims, dealing with ‘the political’ (prospects for ‘democratic socialism’) and ‘the economic’ (unevenness of automation under capital), and trying to bridge the gaps in-between. If we take the book’s absolute ground level conviction to be that ‘the working class has become invisible’, (30) and has been subordinated to the concerns of an educated inner-city ‘left’ (an argument AngryWorkers share with the other two books I mentioned above), then its other main arguments can be arranged in something like the following sequence:

1) ‘the left’ has responded to the transformation in its class base, not by altering its practices, but instead by changing its theories;

2) the most common theoretical claim on the left is that we have moved from an ‘industrial’ to a ‘service’ economy. The second most common is that ‘unskilled’ and ‘semi-skilled’ manual jobs are being progressively automated away. Both of these claims are untrue (they are psychological projections);

3) a political theory that accepts both claims is likely to conceive of power in terms of trade unions and the state. It will be broadly oblivious to the ways in which both serve to oppress workers and stifle their initiative (this is what ‘democratic socialism’ is);

4) the recent emergence of complex global supply chains servicing the ‘consumer economy’ has required the concentration of large groups of industrial workers in massive central logistics hubs;

5) the workers in and around these extra- and peri-urban hubs are organisationally weak, but have significant ‘structural’ power;

6) a left that wields economic power in the form of independent working class control over productive resources is still the main prerequisite for a revolutionary change in the way we live.

This looks like an excellent read - the kind of class struggle politics the British left has lacked for some time!

#socialism #trade unions #Class Power on Zero Hours

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fieldofpain · 4 years

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On the White Rev Left

Developing Militants: the Left’s Minstrel Show and How College Educated Revolutionaries of all Colors Keep the Working Class Shucking and Jiving

[This piece was originally published by a small collective known as Fire Next Time in early 2013, though to my knowledge they no longer exist as an organization. Their website has disappeared into the digital ether and their writings along with it, so I’ve decided to re-up this article onto tumblr, even if I doubt many will find it on my lil’ old blog. If this does happen to stumble across your dash please take the time to read it, particularly if you currently consider yourself a “radical” in college. It had a tremendous impact on my friends and I when it first came out and dramatically changed the direction of the political work we accomplished that year.]

Introduction

The White revolutionary left is largely college educated young people. Whether they work at a cafe, wash dishes, teach in public schools, or drive trains, they share the common experience of a college education. Their experiences in college have profoundly shaped their politics in a variety of ways. Two particular sets of politics are race relations and relationship to revolutionary theory. These White College Educated Revolutionaries (WCER) have never broken from the experiences in college. Worst of all they unknowingly impose their particular college experiences on the revolutionary movement and particularly the working class whites and working class People of Color (POC)[1]. Lastly, People of Color College Educated Revolutionaries (POCCER) have played a crucial role in working with WCER in unknowingly preventing any working class leadership from developing.

This has resulted in a devastating consequence for potential POC working class revolutionaries. They are denied the very intellectual benefits which WCER have received. While WCER have all the best intentions, this is objectively white supremacy in motion. This results in the control of most organizations by WCER. The POCCER in particular are rarely in genuine leadership because of this dynamic and their own contradictory relationship to education and revolutionary theory. This results in a minstrel show where authenticity is defined by lack of knowledge of the past and the romanticization of someone’s experience. Fundamentally it says that theory, writing, and education is not for POC. White college educated revolutionaries control the movement and usually forefront only their experiences and expect POC and white working class people to conform to them.

I will expand on these points in this essay. This is one of the many crises of the revolutionary left today. Sadly, much of what I describe is done under the best of intentions. While it might sound like it at times, I do not believe there is a coordinated and evil plot to keep down working class people in the revolutionary left. I do not believe any of these WCER are white supremacists. They are serious revolutionaries. But they are revolutionaries who are the product of the general historical moment and their particular life experiences. Regardless of what they say and think, I am most interested in the objective results and process of their actions.

The White College Educated Revolutionary (WCER) The category of WCER is very broad and needs some political refinement. While I cannot draw extremely sharp demarcations, some minimal ones will be helpful. I have noticed that WCER in Trotskyist and Maoist organizations do not display this problem. If anything the Maoists are the most serious about developing well rounded revolutionaries as far as their tradition understands it. WCER Trotskysts also display a fair amount of seriousness and fall outside the critiques I am making.

I have noticed Anarchists are some of the poorest in this sense. While there are exceptions, those who I can point out are exactly that, exceptions. Then there are those coming out of the Johnson-Forest tradition which have most in common with the problems of the white Anarchists and WCER. Lastly, there are the independent activists who are radicals or revolutionaries, but most importantly have not joined any revolutionary organizational form. The core of my critique is centered around independent activists, those influenced by the Johnson-Forest tradition, and Anarchists, with all of them having in common their college education. When using WCER, I will tend to refer to this layer as a general rule.

Most of the WCER left has had minimal contact with POC working class and unemployed. They come out of the suburbs or small towns and go to fairly elite private or public university. They rightly developed a moral anger against the white supremacy geared towards many communities in the USA and around the world. They learned about Marxism in the university and often it was discussed as Stalinism. Marxism was paraded around as completely male, Euro-centric etc. What was missing was any mention of Walter Rodney, Rosa Luxemburg, Grace Lee Boggs etc. Or how many movements in Asia, Latin America, and Africa were marxist/ communist, although of highly Stalinist-Maoist varieties. Nor do they study in college the Grundrisse, Johnson-Forest Tendency, Socialism or Barbarism, etc.

What first developed for these WCER as a critique of Marxism, led to a criticism of theory and universal ideas as destroying oppressed groups’ particular experiences. Theory and universalism became a stand-in for the white straight man. While there is a strain of truth to it, it does not explain any of the women and POC militants and movements I have mentioned so far. What stood in its place was the romanticism of the individual experience of Queers, women of color, Trans-people, men of color, etc. The class dimensions of these identities were usually hallowed out because class also became the bogey man for Marxism. Sociological academic words like intersectionality, privilege, and positionality came to fill in for the revolutionary past. Bourgeois thought had once again defanged revolutionary theory.

If revolutionary theory was not totally hollowed out, what was learned at best was an incomprehensible academic Marxism. Giving certain insights to many WCERs, it also left them unable to speak plainly to anyone outside of academia. As soon as WCERs stepped out of school, they discovered no one understood a word they spoke unless they spoke plain. This further deepened the idea that revolutionary theory was not for the working classes. This created a private versus public distinction of where revolutionary ideas are discussed. Back on the college campuses, the WCER did some organizing where the only POC they encountered were their class counterparts. The political experiences and relationship developed on college campuses had a definitive impact on how both of these groups imagine politics, organizing and race relations to be. And these POC had been waiting their entire life to give it to the man and they found a group of WCER who were only too happy to oblige their POC counterparts. Both the WCER and the POC revolutionaries had a sickness of revenge, guilt and an inner cowardice.

Authenticity+Representation= Attack on Revolutionary Theory Everyone on college campuses recognized that there was a profound difference between their class reality and what people outside the campus were experiencing. Usually this was understood in some shallow-sociological form of class. That no one was able to make deeper connections with those outside college campuses was a reality no one could ignore. This is part of the material basis of the politics of representation which came to fill such a role in the contemporary revolutionary left. WCERs needed representatives to play a fill-in role since none could be found outside of college campuses. These representatives were almost always POCCERs.

But to be representative of something, you need some claim to authenticity. No discussion of authenticity can happen without discussing the problems of race which are inherent to the concept. We can expose the problem by framing it in terms of a question. Who is an authentic POC? What kind of music does an authentic POC listen to? How does an authentic POC talk? How does an authentic POC dress? Where does an authentic POC live? What does an authentic POC eat? What are the politics of an authentic POC? The list is endless. But this line of questions exposes the racialist/ white supremacist thinking which are the very foundations of the questions themselves.

No one in the WCER would openly ask such questions. Their white skin prevents such public statements. But the way WCER behave in college, exposes their method of thinking. This is where the POCCER enters. I will not forget when I recently heard a POCCER claim that he sagged his pants low so he could make a political statement, connect with the hood, and remind others of his true origins. This is a classic moment of authentic representation. The WCER sees someone who they believe has an accurate understanding of the POC working class.

The authentic representation combination leads to an attack on revolutionary theory. The authentic representative is someone who hates revolutionary theory. The following things are essential for this authentic representative to say: a) people in the hood do not read or care about books; b) people in the hood worry about the police, wages, or rent; c) people in the hoods’ experiences are enough to politicize them.

Ignorance or White Supremacy? College campuses are so politically correct that open white supremacy is rare in the left. There is something to be said of young people coming together. Mistakes will be made and often very silly things will be said. It is difficult to be a white revolutionary today around POC revolutionaries. The slightest slip is taken as white supremacy and the POC revolutionary is quick to make accusations. Strangely, I have noticed that POC often say as many ridiculous things about other POC from different religions, nationalities, class backgrounds, gender etc. However, there is much more negotiating and conversation going on within the POC space then with white counterpart.

The reality of white supremacy and the broader ignorance of white people regarding white supremacy has a lot to do with the frustrations POC revolutionaries have. Too many white people know little of what is happening in POC workplaces, schools and neighborhoods. Many well intentioned, but slightly naive WCER get caught in this dynamic. Unfortunately, nobody grows out of this dynamic. They continue to perpetuate it well past their years in college. Buried in this field of land mines is the assumption that politics and history is something you know or you don’t, but it cannot be taught. The anti-educational bent of the WCER and POCCER re-enforces the notion that either you know it or you don’t. The most common statement coming from POCCER is that people in the hood do not need to read about police brutality, they experience it everyday. How are white people supposed to know about police brutality? If something is learned from a book, its cultural credibility is put into question. Knowledge from a book is seen as less pure, authentic, etc. The real knowledge, the claim goes, is from the streets, from poverty, and raw oppression. The common refrain usually goes, “I do not need a book to tell me about oppression” x, y or z. This is often very radical sounding positions, but underlying them is poverty of knowledge, history, and strategy in how to fundamentally defeat the root causes of oppression.

If politics is something you either know or you do not, the implications are deep. People who advocate this position should think very carefully about what those implications are. Why/ how would white working class people have solidarity with working class POC? Why/ how would POC have solidarity with one another considering the amount of internal divisions within POC? Why/ how should working class POC/ whites stop believing in the anti-Semitic theories of the Illuminati? Why should men stop thinking women are ‘bitches’? Why/ how do some of these changes occur? The point of is in a society filled with horrible ideas spewed from ruling class media and oppressed people, how do new liberatory ideas gain traction? Of course, part of the story is people struggle, and change their views. But, is that enough? Obviously, I do not think so. Theoretical engagement with the working class is crucial. Related to this is that politics is purely culture and personal interactions. This is has particular origins in the United States. This has its own deeper history going back to feminism, rejection of vanguard Maoist-Stalinist parties of the 1970s, and the defeat of the 1980s all leading to contradictory developments. I do not mean to slight in any way the important insights regarding how the personal is political, the importance of unpaid care work, or the destructive nature of the voluntarism of the New Communist Movement. Attached to these healthy developments have also come the singular focus on culture and personal interactions as representative of political struggle.

This intersects with the contemporary experience of WCER and POCCER in countless classrooms where they are trained to be professional cultural critics. This should not be dismissed as something minuscule. I argue that the highest form of counter-revolutionary culture today is the radical chic cultural critic which is the emblem of sexy and cool politics. This is criticism with no historical, strategic, and organizational perspective. It is the cultural criticism of neo-liberalism disguised as radical politics which has fundamentally shaped WCER and POCCER. It is the practice of people who are not responsible for building a community, but only act as ‘critical dissenters’ who ultimately land a job at a university ‘speaking truth to power’ while actually never challenging it. At best, many WCER and POCCER walk away from college hating such cultural critics, but I argue the essence of those critics are stamped permanently on the former. And unknowingly it becomes a part of political practice, social life, and relationships. Culture and personal interactions absolutely matter. But they cannot be divorced from broader material and ideological realities of this system. This means that if we take white supremacy seriously, then we should take into account that our little groupings cannot be divorced from the effects of white supremacy.

Considering everything I have said, I want to end this section on a different note. The revolutionary left in the USA has had its fair share of internal white supremacy. What else is to be expected in a society so saturated with such a sickening racial order? This is not meant to excuse the failures of the past, but to place them in a certain ideological and material reality which we continue to deal with today. It is undeniable the revolutionary left has made gigantic leaps from the days of the Socialist Party of America when Eugene Debs could foolishly proclaim that socialism has nothing special to offer to the Black man. Today, I could not imagine anyone saying something like that without facing serious challenges from all quarters.

This begs the question of having some measurable standard for what constitutes white supremacy. Signs of white supremacy in the revolutionary left are: a) a lack of POC leadership b) a political program that does not take racial oppression seriously c) no organizing with racially oppressed groups d) the dismissal of POC revolutionary militants, thinkers, and histories. It seems that these four criteria are clear and measurable points of struggle that every revolutionary formation should be measured on.

The People of Color College Educated Revolutionary Who is the POCCER? Just like the WCER from Maoist and Trotskyist backgrounds, the POCCER from the same backgrounds also has a serious commitment to the working class. The one addition for POCCER, are nationalists, who are also some of the most committed to the development of working class people of color. Whether it is the determination of slaves to read or Malcolm X, the importance of being a well rounded and educated revolutionary is taken seriously. It is a particular point of honor in a society which has done everything to deny the masses of Black people decent education. And it is one of the most powerful ways to exist as equals with other whites.

POCCER can be divided into two camps on the question of revolutionary theory based on their reaction to the chapter “Saved,” in Malcolm X’s autobiography. For one set of POCCER it only made a momentary impact on their lives. It was just another moment. But another group of POCCER read it and it changed them forever. It recast their entire life. Their lack of knowledge of the past, their feelings of insecurity, their failures in school, their peoples’ oppression, etc. all got reworked by this chapter. And one of the dramatic lessons of this chapter was that ignorance was not a gift, but a great curse which had to be overcome. For these POCCER, reading and writing would become a crucial part of revolutionary politics and liberation. I do not mean to say that it was simply this chapter which was the magic trick. I am only using this chapter as a pivot into what was a developing current in the second set of POCCER. They were waiting to read such a piece of literature their entire life, as if all the events in their life had prepared them to sit in that lonely prison cell with Malcolm X and finally discover the power of knowledge.

The attraction to purely personal experiences by POCCER is a classic sign of weakness. It is weakness in a particular social context. In revolutionary organization where abstract thinking, theory, generalizations, history, etc. matter so immensely, POCCER who have been so poorly educated, in a moment of being intellectually overwhelmed, defend themselves by reverting to personal experiences. It is not just being intellectually overwhelmed, it is an emotional reaction. It is a reaction of bitterness. Even in the struggle for liberation, they cannot compete with many white revolutionaries. I am not saying personal experiences are not vital, but I see it in a 3-way relationship with theory/ history, experiences of political struggle, in relationship with personal experiences. That is a liberatory way of looking at one’s life and what many white and POC revolutionaries in the past have done.

There is a defensiveness when an “other,” but especially WCER, know the internal politics of POC. There is insecurity. The dirty secrets of the POC community have been revealed to an interloper. How did they learn this? The sad truth is that there are no more secrets. The current access to information is unlike anything humanity has known before. Gone are the days when secrets can be hidden. In a world of multi-racial dating, books, youtube, twitter, etc., the racial secrets are out. POC who are resentful over the dirty secrets are living in the 19th century. This gives further ammunition to POCCER who think that theory and history are no good. It is purely an emotional reaction. Healthy, multi-racial, working class politics do not exist in WCER and POCCER scenes. Instead of strategy and revolutionary politics being the driving force, it is our feelings. Much of how we treat each other reflects the experiences of WCER and POCCER more than an anarchist/ communist movement rooted in the working classes. Something new has to be built.

The People of Color Alliance with White College Educated Revolutionaries Against the Working Class of all Colors For POCCER there are conflicts with the POC working class revolutionaries. I see two conflicts: a) who gets to represent the authentic person of color and b) who will be the organizational top dog and the gatekeeper of the POC community to whites. This struggle is actually a mini class struggle which has so far gone unnoticed in the entire revolutionary left. The WCER with the POCCER who do not like to read, discourage working class people of color from reading so they can play a role in revolutionary organization, politics, and struggle. Earlier, I wrote that WCER impose their experiences and needs on working class people of color. That is not entirely true. A more accurate formulation is that the POCCER and WCER together accomplish this goal. Although these two groups have slightly different reasons and approaches, the results are the same. Both, WCER and POCCER argue that what they are doing is completely justified. They both tend to know academic versions of Marxism, academic versions of feminism, academic versions of fill in the blank. If social consciousness is the product of social being, what else is to be expected. Those four years of undergraduate school and more years of graduate school in the defining intellectual years of WCER/ POCCER play an over-determining role. Both tend to have a theory of pedagogy that says personal experiences are what counts and that politics is something you either know or you don’t, in contrast to something you learn.

Both have fundamentally accepted in a-historical terms the profound attacks on the working class. Every bit of historical evidence shows that the working classes in the USA before the 1970s had a profoundly rich political culture, whether Nationalist, Maoist, Stalinist, Trotskyste, Anarchist, etc. It was a political defeat of epic proportions that these currents were separated from the working class. It is also accepted as eternal that working class people cannot read, do not like to read, do not like to think…etc.

Neither takes seriously what the working class thinks. My case in point is that no current in the United States has written one serious essay on what young working class people are thinking about today: New World Order and the Illumanti. How many people in the revolutionary left have heard of books like The Pale Horse? This is what the young working class is reading. Perhaps most dangerous of all are thoughts which imply that working class people of color have an inherent disposition to learn through song and dance, i.e. hip hop. There is no doubt of the rich history of resistance in musical form. To ignore that is to have a reductionist understanding of politics and culture. At the same time, there is a romanticization of the form/content of pedagogy. It is borderline white-supremacist and very patronizing.

For POCCER, being a gatekeeper is a vital part of who they are. There is a crucial social relationship which is masked by this gate keeper function. That the POCCER are not able to ‘mobilize’ POC working class communities any better than their white counterparts is a painful admission. The POCCER usually chalk this up to the fact that white culture, politics and ways of doing do not resonate with POC. Or that there is a lack of multi-racial solidarity. All these points have a grain of truth which are a factor. But I argue that the fundamental reasons why whites or POC cannot mobilize POC working class communities are: a) POC working class communities are not revolutionary in this period b) they are trying different strategies other than militant confrontation with the system c) they do not see a real winnable alternative in the revolutionary left d) the one thing which the revolutionary left could provide, strategies and intellectual discussions, it does not do, because it does not take those questions seriously e) paradoxically, and most importantly, when there is an immense militancy or ‘revolutionary’ discussion going on in the working class, WCER and POCCER are nowhere to be found .

In the absence of working class struggle and politics, it is the middle class whites and POC which have defined everything about the revolutionary left. It is understandable. It is very difficult to escape your class background. What is not understandable is the intellectual failure by the WCER and POCCER to understand themselves in light of this particular problem. The Left Minstrel Show: Time to Dance for the College Educated I have come to believe one of the most dangerous places in America for POC is the left. Where overthrowing capitalism will require excellence, the revolutionary left is the home of intellectual mediocrity, and for POC who have had education denied to them, this is not an option for freedom, but for ignorance and death. To be an authentic POC, you have to play the game of personal experiences, tragedy, etc. If you discuss things at the level of white revolutionaries, they will begin seeing you less as a POC, less as someone part of the POC community, etc. They will deny that any such POC could possibly come out of such conditions. At best they will see you as the exceptional POC or simply erase your identity as a POC. Your best chance of getting heard in the WCER scene is by playing a very specific role which has been mapped out for a long time. The WCER and POCCER ultimately create one of the fundamental divisions in capitalist society in its own relationship with POC working class revolutionaries. This is a racialized mental and manual division of labor. Secretly the WCER and POCCER are on powerful email lists, have their own blogs where everything is debated, and journals, etc. Most of these forums are largely white. The POCCER/ WCER does not develop the skills of the POC working class revolutionaries so that they can participate in these forums. What happens is that the WCER are the thinkers while the POC working class revolutionaries are the brawn/workhorses of the group. Occasionally the POC working class revolutionaries will write about their own personal experiences, but rarely in a broader historical or theoretical sense. That is the job of the WCER. The POCCER/ WCER cannot see that this mental and manual division of labor must be transcended. The POCCER/ WCER has no conception of a worker-militant; no conception of the relationship between theory and practice; no conception of the relationship between personal experiences, history, and political struggle. Both groups ultimately have a rigid divide between theory and practice. Theory is for private discussions among mostly white college educated people. Everything else is for working class people.

The job of the authentic person of color is to dance a game of ignorance, personal experiences, tragedy, and sob stories which all the POCCER and WCER can listen to. After a while, most sensible working class people leave such formations, because one does not go to meetings to share personal stories. It is called hanging out with friends. Without a clear revolutionary vision, one does not need to organize protests. A Sunday afternoon watching NFL is much more entertaining and potentially liberatory. This reveals that the revolutionary left has very little to offer working class people.

At times in this essay it might sound like I believe it is WCER who will teach working class people of color. As if the only relationship that can be developed with WCER is one of them as teachers and the working class people of color as obedient students. I believe that what the WCER and POCCER have to teach the working class is fairly limited today. Largely because of the degradation of revolutionary politics and theory. In some ways, I believe the working class is on its own and has been abandoned by the revolutionary left. But even if the WCER and POCCER did have things to teach, it would be a dynamic relationship of theory and key skills informed by political work and experiences. College educated people, especially from the middle class or working class, will tend to have a leg up in terms of reading, writing, and speaking skills. There is no point in denying that. The question is toward what ends are those skills used. Currently little of those skills are used to develop working class revolutionaries. If the trajectory of the past is any indication, most of the WCER and POCCER today will be the chic professors, gentrifiers, and ‘progressive’ state bureaucrats of tomorrow.

Being Scared To Say Anything The worst is that the WCER is always afraid to say anything critical of their POC college educated comrades or the POC working class comrades–especially if they are in the same group. Every speech a person of color gives is powerful. If you say a POC was being inarticulate, is that racist? It becomes impossible for the WCER to help their comrade grow because they are trapped in a psychology of guilt.

For the POCCER what is at stake is their confidence. They are always worried that what they are doing is reflective of their race. And failure in a specific task speaks for the entire race. This is a specific problem white revolutionaries do not face. POC revolutionaries tend to be defensive and come off as authoritarian because criticism is taken not only personally, but ultimately as a commentary about their ability to be race men/ women/ non-gender identifying. That is the crux of the problem. Psychologically, while understandable in a historical sense, this is completely destructive for the individual militant. The white college educated militant, while usually not aware of this internal war going on in the POC militant, claps endlessly, regardless of the quality of the writing, speech, contact work, organizing event, etc.

We need to destroy these behavior’s of white-POC college educated revolutionaries. They are in the way of oppressed people learning. These so called revolutionaries are closer to Booker T Washington than anything resembling revolutionary politics. Yes, WCER and their counterparts are no different than Booker T Washington on many fundamental questions of education. For those who want to see a real contrast, compare it with W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James or Malcolm X.

The Hidden Battle: College Educated Revolutionaries Obscured from Working Class Women of Color Due to patriarchy across the globe, historically, there has arisen a larger grouping of men of color who have left their mark in the written word: Amilcar Cabral, Steve Biko, M.N. Roy, CLR James, Jose Carlos Mariategui, Ali Shariati, Walter Rodney, to name some. The list of women is considerably shorter although that is beginning to change. One of the factors which unites many of the men is that they were able to go to the university. The women were not. The very ideological, social and material divisions created by patriarchy end up creating a powerful problem to overcome. The WCER and POCCER take the results of oppression and naturalize them into their own internal dynamics. Many women and feminists will jump and shout that I am ignoring the efforts of Lucy Parons, Elma Francois, Laila Khaled, Elizabeth Gurley Flyn, Assata Shakur, and/ or Rosa Luxemburg. My point is that few of these women left considerable theories or histories behind. For the super majority of these women, we read their autobiographies. This is not because women are biologically or inherently more prone to write autobiographies. That is not true. It is because they were denied the education that more of their men counterparts received. Many had to take care of children. Others were also the secretaries of the very men comrades who were supposed to be fighting for ‘their’ liberation. Many of these women subordinated the struggle for women’s liberation in the hopes that class or race liberation would grant them increased freedom. The reasons are many, but all tied to patriarchy.

Working class women of color are just as capable as their male counterparts in doing what the latter has done. There is nothing inherent in men which allows them to be more theoretical. But the debate as it has been dominated by WCER and POCCER blocks this development.

Female WCER fail to politically understand the specific battle that women of color must have with men of color. When female WCER push against theory, reading, and writing, they rob women of color revolutionaries of an important weapon which is specific to their historical experiences. And of course many male WCER think they are doing their duty by supporting their sisters in attacking theory and study.

The WCER think they are developing a block around their oppressed women counterparts. It is an opportunistic block not based on liberation, but based on sociological and romantic desires to be close to women of color. Male POCCER can continue to speak on questions of race in a gendered way which equates race with male gendered identified people and continue being the authentic representatives of POC with no challenge to their perspectives. But what gets lost in the debate is the battles that women of color must have with men of color in asserting their legitimate need to do exactly what men of color have done on a world stage.

In the one place where serious education and theory could be learned, the revolutionary formation, the WCER and the PCCER block them from doing so. The framework of WCER is most damaging for working class women of color.

What about the Working Class? It is true that there are plenty of working class people who hate to read and write. Many who disagree with what I have wrote, can point to many examples of this reality. Many will also correctly point out how the K-12 education system is designed to create McDonald’s workers, prisoners, and unemployed workers. Many will also point out that for many working class people, the best defense mechanism for survival is to ignore the racist, patriarchal, and homophobic education taught in school. These are only some of the realities working class kids face in school.

The question then becomes what conclusions are to be drawn from this situation. Basic questions should be asked. What kinds of knowledge is needed to destroy capitalism and social relations of oppression? Is reading and writing automatically white supremacist? Patriarchal? Class based? If you are trying to organize with millions of people is some type of reading and writing required? If music or youtube is your response, are those things any less patriarchal, homophobic and potentially white supremacist than reading and writing? Many working class people, after being told by their teachers and peers in K-12 that they are stupid for not being able to read and write as fast, react by never taking forms of intellectual practice seriously. Again, this makes sense. Working class people also have a contradictory relationship to these questions. I have been told by working class POC that I am an achievement of the race for my ability to speak and write well. I have been looked at as a white-boy by other POC working class people. There is probably no principled position I could discover by doing a sociological study of what working class people think about education, especially the young folks. Perhaps from the adults with young children, we could see a general trend towards the importance of education as a key concern.

Another critique is that working class people need to think about bread and butter issues and do not have time for theory. I am currently reading Red Star Over China. In this book, peasant soldiers, in the middle of a war, are taking 3-4 months to study theory! Let me say that again, in a middle of a war, where their comrades are being hunted down and killed, they are taking time out to study. Where their daily caloric intake is probably less than what many working class Americans eat in one McDonald’s meal! At a certain point, some of these arguments are simply just racist arguments which implicitly say POC in America are too dumb to think about anything other than bread and water. And besides, I also notice that whenever POC think about more than bread and water, the common revolutionary response is that those POC are bought off. It seems a trap has been set up: if you are a poor working class POC, then you can only think of food, shelter, and cops; but if you are able to think about other things, then you are bought off.

It is probably true that the most common encounters that revolutionaries have today with working class people tends to re-affirm that working class people do not like to read or write. There is a truth to this. A few words regarding the choices of the working class. To the extent that the working class can be thought of as a unit, as a conscious being, as a subject in capitalism, it certainly makes choices based on need and survival. The working class fundamentally needs to make choices on how to get food on the plate. What are the choices which will allow this to happen? At what point do working class adolescents in school figure out that their childhood dreams are no longer achievable? To what extent is this a realistic assessment of white supremacy, class, and patriarchy? This has huge political potentials which everyone recognizes. It is an insight about the realities of the system. It is gained through lived experiences. At the same time, what is the difference between being an object and a subject? We should not ignore that working class people are also objects in this society. They are objects for the capitalists to impose their ‘rationality’ upon. If this dimension is not understood, then the very premise of oppression cannot be grappled with. Oppressed people are made into objects by the system. There is a dynamic tension between this object-subject relationship.

The point of bringing up this subject-object relationship is not to discount the real and sensible choices that many working class K-12 or college people make. To point is to look at how these choices also lead to limitations in destroying the very system which created the oppression. In the immediate sense of the question, the choice to stop paying attention in school makes sense. But it becomes much more complicated when it comes to figuring out what amount/type of knowledge is needed to overthrow the system. I want to recognize that it was millions of peasants or slaves who could not read or write (which does not mean they were not smart) who destroyed oppression in China, Russia, Haiti, and many other places.

This reality should not lead to sloppy understandings of the education required to overthrow the system. Every revolutionary movement has had a set of educated (either from the university setting, through revolutionary organizations, or through their own networks) revolutionaries who have either led or fundamentally shaped the revolution. In my years of study, I have not encountered a single movement that escapes this dynamic. The other choice which I do not want to discount is that the subjects/ working class–as I mentioned earlier in the essay– determined to continue learning, dropout of school, to continue their education. Some find themselves tucked away in libraries, some in front of youtube videos watching Illuminati vidoes, others at the corner of the street talking about politics. There are a million ways to learn outside of bourgeois educational institutions.

Conclusion It should be no surprise that the revolutionary left is shaped by the class, gender and racial politics of this country. A big part of that shaping has been done by the counter-reaction to the college experience by the WCER and POCCER. Both currents have failed to historicize themselves in the proper way. They take their experiences for granted. They impose their experiences with learning and education onto the working class. They impose their experiences of race onto the working class. This cannot go on any longer. To be clear: in no way is this meant to say that POC working class people only learn through reading and writing. There are a thousand ways to learn and revolutionaries should ferociously support and develop such ways. The only reason this piece was so one-sided is because many revolutionaries are anti-intellectuals, anti-reading, anti-writing etc. except when it comes to their private lives. And of course this is racialized, as I have noticed in my experiences. The white revolutionaries who argue in public against theory and reading, read and theorize privately. So the argument was forceful in emphasizing key dimensions. Everyone learns through experience. And to be more precise, they learn through mass struggle and in their daily lived experiences against oppression. The challenge is to connect this to a broader understanding of capitalism, anti-capitalism, and revolution.

It might appear that I have argued for separate organizations of POC only. I can certainly see why people would draw such a conclusion. That is not the conclusion I hope people reach. While I do not feel confident there are any organizations which can pass the tests of this essay, the tasks still remain. Yes many tears will be shed, as the color of your skin will not be your savior from criticism. Encouragement and hard ass work to develop ourselves as better humans and revolutionaries is the only path.

My argument still rests on building a multiracial movement with WCER. At the same time there needs to be a massive reconstruction of the revolutionary left. While I hope to see it happen, with millions of working class people of color joining, I also recognize that it will not happen overnight. Millions of people do not join revolutionary organizations or become involved in revolutionary struggle casually. It takes immense crisis and self-development before such social relationships are created. It is not something revolutionaries can conjure out of thin air. To the extent revolutionaries exist in non-revolutionary times, they will be a small minority of society. We need to become comfortable with that.

Many will point out that the very author of this piece is a college educated revolutionary person of color. While this observation is correct, this is a continued reflection of the fetishization of sociology in the United States political scene. Radical sociology is not revolutionary politics, but has become one of the most powerful substitutes for what counts as such. Based on how ‘American’ revolutionaries conduct themselves, they would have ignored Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunasia, because he did not fit the correct sociological profile. Lastly this essay is not promoting ‘consciousness raising’ or that revolutionaries are saviors of the working class. I have emphasized certain things which can only be understood in the context of the US revolutionary left.

Books Which Influenced the Writing of This Essay Black Boy by Richard Wright Auto-Biography of Malcolm X Modern Politics by CLR James Hubert Harrison by Jeff Perry Revolutionary Suicide by Huey Newton Black Skin White Masks by Frantz Fanon -by WILL

[1] I recognize the problems of the People of Color category. Most who use it ignore the specifics of race in the United States and the globe. I stand by my usage of POC in this essay largely because it explains a general trend of a reality which does affect POC. This is not to say it is equal across racial groups. No doubt more specific pieces should be written on what this means for different racialized groups.

Original credit: @marxianergonomics

#white organizers please read #BLM #black lives matter #white radicals #adademics #longread #to read #white organizers in academia

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tanadrin · 4 years

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It’s funny to consider what categories of political thought I can have fruitful, interesting disagreements with, versus what categories of political thought feel like trying to find purchase on the walls of Orthanc covered in bacon grease. Neoliberals, center-right types, even many conservative religions types (the ones that aren’t super racist)--I won’t agree with them on much, or maybe anything, but I feel like a discussion can be had. I think of myself as leftish with strong libertarian socialist sympathies, but anarcho-primitivists, tankies, and the kind of dogmatic libertarian that sees a 5c grocery bag tax as the first step toward Mecha-Stalin rising from his tomb and enslaving the Earth, these all feel like impossible conversations. The analogy that springs to mind is trying to talk to a hardcore conspiracy theorist, the kind who thinks we didn’t land on the Moon, and can’t be convinced otherwise[1]. Clearly we come to the world with such fundamentally different assumptions that there can be no possibility of agreement. The best we can hope for is civil harmony, and to avoid each other at parties. But on paper, at least, I should have more in common with your average anprim or tankie than I do the Catholic parish priest where I grew up, so why does it feel like I have much less?

Is this just the narcissism of small differences? That feels like an adequate name for the phenomenon, but not a good explanation. Is it because if you share some assumptions, or some object level beliefs, major differences in interpretive frameworks are thrown into sharper relief? It may be that incidental object-level similarity in beliefs can produce outlooks which are (in our overly simplified way of thinking about political spectra) apparently similar but fundamentally divorced from one another, i.e., nobody goes from social democrat to hardcore Stalinist, or hardcore Stalinist to left-libertarian without revising fundamental elements of their personality.

Is it because these ideologies are actually super uncommon, and therefore mostly encountered online--where the takes are hot and being mildly abrasive about politics is rewarded rather than punished?

Is it because other kinds of ideological rupture--racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, etc.--I understand better, because I’ve actually been exposed to them in various forms in ordinary social interactions, and so grappled with them as actual attitudes rather than theoretical constructs divorced from people’s personalities? Either enough to say, “oh, this is the product of complex emotional attitudes that it would take a team of therapists and a minor miracle to untangle,” or “oh, this person is just Actually An Asshole.” If I realize someone is being an asshole, I feel like I am giving my brain license to disengage. You don’t owe malicious actions--even if the actor in question comes by them honestly, from a place of deep conviction--any kind of consideration. Whereas a fear of Mecha-Stalin and his plastic bag tax doesn’t make you an asshole. It can’t be ascribed to pathology or malice, it’s just one of those epiphenomena of radically different life experiences and interpretive toolkits you have to learn to tolerate in other human beings.

But on its own, that’s not satisfying! Arguing on the internet for me isn’t about convincing each other. I think that’s mostly impossible. But it is about finding the source of disagreements, and maybe exploring the exact shape of disagreements, and where despite disagreements unexpected shared goals might exist. I find that much harder to do, even that last one (which seems like it should be both the easiest and most desirable objective of any argument about politics) when I struggle to really grok someone else’s interpretive framework. I guess you could treat all ideologies as black boxes, caring only about their specific policy positions, but that makes any sustained cooperation harder, because you don’t know to what extent disagreements are the product of rhetoric/emphasis versus intractable conflict. It makes it harder to hammer out larger regions of policy agreement you can cooperate on, if you can’t recognize those exist. Also, it’s no fun. Political opponents aren’t human-shaped varelse with whom you can only cooperate in austere game-theoretic terms, and sometimes you can learn things from them and reconcile your fundamental differences a little, and I like it when that happens.

[1] I realize on rereading this sounds a little like I’m saying ‘people who disagree with me are clearly idiots.’ That’s not what I’m saying. I don’t think being a moon landing truther makes you an idiot, but it clearly places you outside the the average range of interpretive frameworks for how you view the world. I think it’s also factually wrong, but the issue isn’t not knowing enough, or not being able to correlate enough information. After all, both anprims and moon landing hoaxers usually can muster quite a lot of supporting evidence for their positions, and discuss it in depth. It’s the framework, the methods of knowledge, at issue, and where methods of knowledge clash I don’t know that calling the other side idiots is wise. Epistemology is hard, and I am willing to bet mine has some serious flaws in it.

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all-things-are-nothing-to-me · 5 years

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Degenerations – Between Pride and Gender Victimhood

I am an anarchist, I am not a feminist because I see feminism as a sectarian and victimist withdrawal, I have never made any gender discrimination although I don’t use gender-friendly linguistic conventions, on the contrary I often use dirty politically incorrect language. I think that the annulment of gender privilege and similar oppression is already contained in the search for anarchy, that is to say in the practice of anti-authoritarian relations, and should be cultivated there. Ah, I forgot, I loathe consciousness-raising in public meetings and I also consider assemblies to be blunt instruments. I understand and also have the will to meet. But I see how all too often the assembly degenerates into sterile self-representation.

You see nowadays you risk having to start off with such a preamble in order to enter the thicket of clichés on gender and feminism, disentangling yourself in the intricate incapacity to relate to the anarchist galaxy, with a range of behaviors going from hyper-emotiveness to the bureaucratic calculation of what stand (and degree of negotiable compromise) to take in a struggle. I don’t think that authoritarian and sexist behavior can be fought by trying to spread new linguistic conventions or by cooking up shreds of mainstream indignant rhetoric (among which #nonunadimeno [enough is enough], the femicide count on TV, pride, red shoes and rainbow ribbons) in an alternative sauce.

Rather these should be recognized as signs of yet another operation of the deconstruction of real meaning and recuperation in act. Convinced that one is opposing them, in actual fact one is adapting to the very behavioral and normative codes conceded by dominion as ways of releasing tension.

It’s nothing new that economic and political power is tending to swallow up and re-digest everything, faster and faster; consider for example the pearls of anti-sexist, anti-racist or whatever it might be neo-conservatism and conformism that are being dispensed by the media every day.

I believe that the first misunderstanding is the inability to put certain kinds of behavior into context, within what should be a wider critique of relations and communication and interaction between individuals in the anti-authoritarian sense, reducing them to the level of questions of gender.

Gender categorization, in LGBTI (XYZ…) style, should be left to those who need to feel themselves a protected category, in pigeonholes more suited to a Linnaean categorization of individuals than free bodies and minds. Instead, we find such pigeonholes in anti-authoritarian milieus, which should already have internalized their refusal.

By the way I’m far from believing that so-called liberated spaces really are such, in fact they often become parking lots for various forms of malaise and instead of enhancing the quality of life and relationships they risk lowering it even more.

For example it’s not possible to see every inability to interact in a meeting as sexism, authoritarian imposition or gender violence: I read in a pamphlet [1] that was around last year stigmatizing the latent violence in relations between comrades ‘the oldest exercises power over the youngest, those with more experience impose themselves on those who have less, whoever is stronger on the not so strong, mirroring the relations of the existent we say we want subvert.’

This is supposed to be a critique of authoritarian attitudes in anti-authoritarian milieus and it would be valid, were it not that it banalises and flattens everything: there is a fundamental difference between imposition of strength and the expression of experience. The inability to express oneself or to act is neither authoritarian nor anti-authoritarian, and can only be solved individually… otherwise we come to the idiocy of praising inability and inaction.

The concept of emotive violence or the violation of emotional integrity is even more ephemeral, because it promotes this analytical junk among anti-authoritarian individuals who should have far sharper critical weapons and practical capacity of intervention. As well as emptying of meaning the inflicted and brutal violence it is being compared to.

How can we claim to engage in an unrelenting struggle against authority and dissertate on revolutionary and liberatory violence if we cannot even react individually to some ‘undesired comment in the street’ (by taking it for what it is, and dealing with it accordingly with the person who spat it out) or keep up an animated discussion during a meeting without having recourse to the shield of violated sensitivity? Why do we find ourselves reading the disarming and obvious idiocy that advises making love with a woman in order to avoid an unwanted abortion? [2] Why codify, even in the field of gender, only for “female gangs”, like conquest, self-defence from aggression and harassment? Isn’t this a problem common to all genders among liberated beings?

Why should we revisit the most outworn products in the wardrobe of 1970s feminism, such as separatist meetings… maybe calling them workshops (a really ugly term that combines work and shop, borrowed from business conventions and unworthy of free discussions)?

I read the spectre of the same reductive and banalising mechanism in another recent publication, the Italian edition of the Rote Zora claims [3], i.e. the intention to sensitize only a female audience about a group of women who carried out armed struggle in the 1980s and 90s in Germany, insisting on the choice of gender, of very great interest on some feminist topics, as a privileged discriminating factor for taking them out of oblivion… given that one doesn’t want it ‘to belong to official history. It is written by men’ [4]… What?!? Is it not that official historiography tends to not talk about them because they were angry, not angry feminists? Just as it doesn’t deal with – or distorts – the history, actions and writings of so many other angry men and women? The partial vision is not that of Rote Zora who experimented their own path of individual and collective struggle and liberation in the context of wider anti-imperialist and anti-capitalistic action, but of those who try to make a flag out of it in order to give more credibility and specific weight to their own theorizing, to then reduce themselves to looking for ‘paths of self-defence’.

Why entrench oneself in a ‘feminist and lesbian’ discourse [5]? Why yet another protective cage, rather than develop the beauty and infinity of more advanced ideas of the critique of domination (not only gender), put forward and tested?

‘Sisterhood’ has always seemed to me to be a form of allusive alienation of transversal political alliances between oppressed and oppressors, between ‘inter-classist’ as it has become fashionable to say again… adverse parties. I also happened to see a booklet [6] recently containing an Italian feminist’s interviews of some female veterans of the Spanish revolution in 1936, aimed at finding a questionable ‘sisterhood’ between women anarchists engaged on the front line (and in the background with Mujeres Libres), the POUM and Stalinist women.

It was quite significant that almost centenarian anarchist revolutionary women were far more lucid and open in their critique about the limitations of feminism than their interviewer imbued with 1970s’ clichés was: in the extreme calm of a life lived to the full, they were able to explain simply the equal relations between male and female comrades, and how they managed to ridicule and neutralize the machismos that emerged among the most retrograde and stupid of their comrades. In short the practices and theoretical contribution of these women are far more advanced along the path of liberation of the individual and the negation of authoritarian dynamics than those of feminists who glean from their experiences, defending simulacra of struggle instead of the struggle itself. The need for auto-da-fé, the ‘deconstruction of one’s male privileges’, the search for separate places for discussions, self-awareness and self-analysis in public seem a little too much like signs of these times of over-exposition and woolly thinking, parading ‘struggles’ by category and interior struggles, to end up not struggling at all.

Anna,

Women’s prison of Rebibbia, Italy

October 2018

[1] Violenza di genere in ambienti antiautoritari ed in spazi liberati [Gender violence in antiauthoritarian milieus and in liberated spaces], Italian edition translated from Spanish in 2017[2] Critica all’aborto [Critique of abortion], Jauria – Trans-feminist publication for animal liberation, issue 1, Summer/Autumn 2015[3] Rote Zora – guerriglia urbana femminista [Rote Zora – Feminist urban guerrilla], Autoproduzione Femminista, 2018[4] From the introduction to the same book[5] Which the Rote Zora women themselves didn’t think relevant. From a 1984 interview with Rote Zora: ‘Some of us have children, many others don’t. Some are lesbian, others love men’, page 51, ibidem[6] Donne contro [Women against], Isabella Lorusso, ed. CSA editrice, 2013

#Anna Beniamino #Féminas Brujas and Insurrectionalists #insurrectionary anarchism #post feminism #post feminist anarchy #queer nihilism #anarchism #communism #anarcho communism #feminism

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theculturedmarxist · 5 years

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What really makes me mad when I read critical (and even some favorable) reactions to my work is the recurring characterization of me as a postmodern cultural critic – the one thing I don’t want to be. I consider myself a philosopher dealing with fundamental ontological questions, and, furthermore, a philosopher in the traditional vein of German Idealism.

Everyone who has seen Hitchcock’s Vertigo remembers the mysterious scene in the sequoia park where Madeleine walks over to a redwood cross-section of an over-thousand-year-old trunk showing its growth history by date, points to two circular lines close to the outer edge and says: “Here I was born . . . and here I died.” In a similar way, we can imagine a philosophy muse in front of a timeline of European history, pointing to two date markers close to each other and saying: “Here I was born . . . and here I died.” The first marker designates 1781, the publication date of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and the second one 1831, the year of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s death.

For me, in some sense, all of philosophy happened in these fifty years: the vast development prior to it was just a preparation for the rise of the notion of the transcendental, and in the post-Hegelian development, philosophy returns in the guise of the common Judy, i.e., the vulgar nineteenth-century empiricism. For me, all four great German idealists — Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel — articulated a distance towards idealist subjectivity and gained a non-metaphysical insight into the essence of history and the alienation of our existence. They struggled with how to break out of the horizon of absolute subjectivity without regressing to pre-transcendental realism.

But which Hegel am I referring to here? Where am I speaking from? To simplify it to the utmost, the triad that defines my philosophical stance is that of Baruch Spinoza, Kant and Hegel. Spinoza is arguably the pinnacle of realist ontology: there is substantial reality out there, and we can get to know it through our reason, dispelling the veil of illusions. Kant’s transcendental turn introduces a radical gap here: we cannot ever gain access to the way things are in themselves, our reason is constricted to the domain of phenomena, and if we try to reach beyond phenomena to the totality of being, our mind gets caught in necessary antinomies and inconsistencies. What Hegel does here is to posit that there is no reality in-itself beyond phenomena, which does not mean that all that there is is the interplay of phenomena. The phenomenal world is marked by the bar of impossibility, but beyond this bar there is nothing, no other world, no positive reality, so we are not returning to pre-Kantian realism; it is just that what for Kant is the limitation of our knowledge, the impossibility to reach the thing-in-itself, is inscribed into this thing itself.

Furthermore, Hegel is NOT a critical thinker: his basic stance is that of reconciliation – not reconciliation as a long-term goal but reconciliation as a fact which confronts us with the unexpected bitter truth of the actualized Ideal. If there is a Hegelian motto, it is something like: find a truth in how things turn wrong! The message of Hegel is not “the spirit of trust” (the title of Robert Brandom’s latest book on Hegel’s Phenomenology) but rather the spirit of distrust – his premise is that every large human project turns wrong and only in this way attests to its truth. The French Revolution wanted universal freedom and climaxed in terror, Communism wanted global emancipation and gave birth to Stalinist terror… Hegel’s lesson is thus a new version of Big Brother’s famous slogan from George Orwell’s 1984 ”freedom is slavery”: when we try to enforce freedom directly, the result is slavery. So whatever Hegel is, he is decidedly not a thinker of a perfect ideal that we approach infinitely.

Heinrich Heine (who was Hegel’s student in the philosopher’s last years) propagated the story that he once told Hegel he cannot endorse Hegel’s formula “all that is actual is rational,” and that Hegel looked carefully around and told his student not too loudly: “Perhaps, I should say: all that is actual should be rational.” Even if factually true, this anecdote is philosophically a lie – if not an outright invention of Heine, it represents Hegel’s attempt to cover up from his student the painful message or truth of his thinking.

Such a Hegel is the central point of reference of my entire work.

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weirdmirrors · 5 years

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Study of Nostalgia

The second chapter of my dissertation is on nostalgia. I have been conducing a bit of research on nostalgia in my previous studies, and in particular, in my manuscript Debris of Utopia. I opened it to take notes on my notes and perhaps use something in my dissertation. Debris of Utopia and my dissertation have been functioning like a small system of connected retorts.

Political - socially acceptable to be nostalgic for the Soviet times, as opposed (at least recently) to the Nazi nostalgia. And it is understandable: Soviet project was a project for the world that still has its appeal.

Nostalgia for the Soviet times is not nostalgia for the Soviet times but a meta-nostalgia, nostalgia for nostalgia: "I sometimes think that what one deals with in the post-Soviet spaces is the sedimentation of ruins, the rubble that left from the ruins of the Soviet constructions and infrastructure: not with ruins as such but rather with ruins of ruins. And the affect that they bring is, in fact, not nostalgia but rather the meta-nostalgia: a nostalgia for the nostalgia. While nostalgia is an experience of longing for something that may or may not have been there, the meta-nostalgia is longing for the purity of this experience. But the always-already-polluted can only dream of purity."

Ruins produce nostalgia: "Ruins are generative in terms of affect, producing nostalgia and melancholy, and also creating lacunae of experimental social / bodily explorations and not-always-legal or simply frowned-upon usages."

Nostalgia is acute: "Gazing at ruins and exploitation of ruins is pleasurable, and the nature of this pleasure is complex, from purely distanced aestheticized savoring of the “elegiac elegance” of ruins to the more acute feelings of nostalgia and loss. Yet Soviet ruins, I tend to forget, ascribing my own sensitivities of a native observer to others, are foreign to the Western reader. Rann suggests Soviet ruins are attractive for a Westerner because communist iconography, refined and redefined, stripped from its threatening meaning, is a veritable succession of images of a dissolved empire: “Russia and eastern Europe serves as an imaginary space in which western nations can play out their own crises of identity, without having to confront them directly” (Rann, 2014). In other words, Russian ruins serve as a mirror of a polished shield looking at which Perseus does not risk to be blinded by the Medusa Gorgon’s exterminating sights."

Nostalgia is mythology-producing: "Similarly, it is too compelling to announce the Soviet past to be the past and to overlook the summoning of this past conducted most notably by the state in contemporary Russia, to say that whatever is happening now is something entirely different from the past. The USSR’s was a revealing collapse. It still is. This existence in the non-existence of the Soviet Union is still so painfully evident in a multiplicity of manifestations as perhaps its very presence wasn’t. The collapse of the USSR has started, and it is not near the end of its unfolding. Like the collapse of the Roman empire, it will reverberate through the centuries. Not surprisingly, therefore, not only the empire is thought and described in dualistic terms, but that it is also likely to evoke the sense of nostalgia in the observers. The sense of nostalgia is going to be purified by those invoking it until it reaches that ideal vision of empire which is entirely fictitious, mythological, and also mythology-producing. "The unexpected and the unsurprising" merged in the collapse of the USSR, according to Yurchak (282). But for whom was it unsurprising? Surely for many people, as Yurchak himself attests, the end of the Soviet Union was the personal tragedy. There was a lot of the staggering—not just the surprising before, during, and after the collapse. In “Conclusion,” Yurchak writes: “This book began with a paradox: the spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union was completely unexpected by most Soviet people and yet,…most of them also immediately realized that they had actually been prepared for that unexpected collapse.” (Ibid). But is this such a paradox? People seemingly smoothly went on with their daily lives. What else was or is there to do? Is it not what "always" happens in the times of significant transformations and social changes? Who can, goes on, and who cannot, does not. The latter might look quite differently. People could depart for the inner emigration and engage into escapism, find for themselves enclaves where the life goes on as if nothing happened, and people could die. While many didn’t die, many did. While in some regions the collapse went (seemingly) smoothly, in others there erupted wars and military conflicts, often with ethnic component and civil wars: Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Tajikistan. Many-years Chechen wars and the currently unfolding hybrid war between Russia and Ukraine is the consequences and the continuation of the collapse."

Nostalgia is “sentimental” in Etkind's reading (somewhat tautologically): "Alexander Etkind writes about the affective register of the “high Soviet period” that he defined as stretching from 1928-1953, overshadowed by the common knowledge and reluctance, impossibility to speak about gulag, as the atmosphere of “coercion, violence, and angrst,” which resulted in the “complex of feelings—fear, bewilderment, resentment, compassion, and mournfulness.” (Etkind, 2013, 30). For those who grew up in the Soviet republics which were on the subaltern position towards Russia, the mixture includes “political guilt, sentimental nostalgia, and apocalyptic mindset” (Ibid, 33). Etkind derives this formula from the analysis of Grossman’s novel Everything Flows, the protagonist in which recalls his childhood memories unfolding in the Caucasus, the land subjected to colonization by the imperial Russia and the enduring colonial practices during the Soviet time and beyond. I spent summers of my childhood in Ukraine, the country in many grievous entanglements with Russia; Summers here are about it. These feelings are familiar, but the affect that I lived are different. As much as guilt was present, there was denial."

I do not have nostalgic feelings about school: "Nostalgia is likely to emerge in connection to the memories of childhood, school years, family time, the blessed bygone are when our parents were young, the world was bigger, felt fresh, and trees were huge1. But I do not have any nostalgic feelings in connection to school."

Allegiance to nostalgia: "At the end of the Soviet times, young critics of Communism refused to wear ties. I, to the contrary, had been wearing my tie for longer than anyone else in class, longer than it was appropriate. Even teachers squinted at it, annoyed. It was my inverted resistance, directed, for some reason, at the new fashions, rather than past injustices. And, I think, it was my first pledge of allegiance to the all-encompassing, eternal nostalgia."

To evoke your nostalgia by describing my nostalgia is my goal: "Soviet nostalgia, Stalinist nostalgia, Mao nostalgia, and recently not admitted to the public spaces Nazi nostalgia, which seems to resurge, all coincide in the feeling: Life was far better during the past regime. You might have been killed but you were young; after all, you still might be killed, but you are no longer young. A collection of fleeting glances and interrupted shadows that I file, catalog, and number for my and, hopefully, your amusement, dear reader, is, for sure, endless. There is always something to elaborate upon, something to add, and something to retract. The politics of revocations and additions is complex. A non-intentionality of this phenomenological project is absolute and exceeds itself. I am trying to convey the value of valueless objects, a preciousness of things that are nothing in your eyes. Things are just present; they do not necessarily do anything except for making you understand me. I was swung in the cradle of ruins; I fetched debris out of the nonexistent and the unimportant. For an observer. All I want is to make you love my debris the way I loved it. My only intent is to contaminate your vision, to communicate the bittersweet disease of nostalgia for the world you did not know. To express longing for a never-existed past, for a number of glimmering pasts, in fact, contesting pasts which hint at the tournament of the futures. I want the world to conflagrate my slow exitless burning. I was born at the Parthenon of the Soviet civilization. I am an absolute cosmonaut, suspended in space, surviving the cosmic shipwreck. Hence the method: I do not document that much or situate it in any context, as I create an affective feel."

The work of nostalgia is transformative: "My mother and her friend’s braids, their heels, their modest chintz dresses add to my vision of Maidan Nezalezhnosti. This is the work of nostalgia transforming things and adding the second dimension to the reality."

Nostalgia is sickness: "With the social transformations that begin with the goal of ultimate obliteration of previously existing social relations and structures, many things die leaving next to no trace, which partly accounts for the severe forms of nostalgia for the Soviet times. Such nostalgia bears the semblance of homesickness, since a former Soviet citizen, never mind her allegiances, is displaced even having never transgressed the borders of the country. She did not go anywhere; instead, the borders in one moment trembled and shifted under her feet. One day hundreds of thousands of Russians found themselves living abroad without moving, and everyone had awakened in a different country altogether."

Apart from the nostalgia for the USSR, there is a wide-spread nostalgia in Russia for the 1990s, the time of social transformation: "Many of those who were young during the 1990s, recollect the time with nostalgia and regret, others, with horror or simply grudgingly, but most remember gazillions of details comprising the zeitgeist."

Ostalgie: "Oustalgie can refer to different aspects of Soviet experiences not only pertaining to the East Germany but to the former Soviet space in general."

Indulging in nostalgia is a method: "Indulging in nostalgia might become a method of understanding it—all the more alluring since it is predetermined to be imprecise. Ruins do not offer the full story, only hint at it and thus allow the observer to inhabit it, “to experience historicity affectively, as an atmosphere” (Boym, 2001, 15)."

Pages 152-158 devoted to nostalgia.

Then "nostalgia" largely disappears, although does a work because it is used to classify things along the lines of what they trigger: "Nostalgia is easily triggered by taste, smell, memory of disappeared texture (hand cream). From Proust’s famous madeleines, the connection of the taste and memory has been well established: "She set out for one of those short, plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines,' which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changed that were taking place." (Proust, Swann’s Way, 2012, page number)"

Caitlin's nostalgia: "My colleague Caitlin once remarked that during her fieldwork in Lebanon she could not even begin smelling the lemon trees, and I was greatly surprised: “How so? One could not choose, usually, whether to smell or not.” Olfactory sensations impose themselves on the preceptor. “But I mean, for someone it would be easy,” she replied. “Someone would say, maybe, ‘My grandma had lemon trees in her garden,’ but not I. My grandma did not have lemon trees, you know. That’s why when I was talking with that woman, and she was sharing with me her nostalgia, all the evocations that lemon trees had to her, I was not going along. She was only two years older than me and could not possibly remember the civil war in Lebanon; it was imprinted upon her, along with the lemon trees’ smell. I found it was hard to situate myself in the same mode evoked just by the lemon trees.”..."I was failing to be in this nostalgia with her.” Caitlin explained."

Nostalgia is evoked by audio and sound: "Nostalgia is triggered and propagated by the audio, by sound. Alexei Yurchak describes how compact radio transmitters brought to life new socialities deterritorializing the grand Soviet narrative (Yurchak, 2006, page numbers)."

We can make ourselves experience nostalgia: "Nostalgia is a reenactment, a reproduction of scenes that have been repeating. Nostalgia could be spontaneous, but it could also be deliberate. One sets herself out for the pleasant and poignant experience of recollection, and the listener signed themselves in to be reminded or enlightened, by virtue of being present with their cup of coffee with petals."

Photography is one of those technologies that reproduce nostalgia: "If the music, being a sound, and not unlike taste or texture, store nostalgia, if everyday technologies and the yesteryear technological advancements that rapidly go out of circulation can produce nostalgia, photography will be one of these technologies."

Family photography perhaps more than other types of photography has a potential to evoke nostalgia: "Perhaps Soviet family photographs will communicate to the attentive observer something about photographs in general, as well as about nostalgia, the imperial, the ephemeral, and the empyrean."

Nostalgia can be a powerful market motivator: "As if playing this game or possessing the object today would have given the former player or owner the sense of the days of childhood perhaps returning. All too often the first urge upon recollection of something long gone is to seek reacquisition. That’s why nostalgia is not only a feeling, a state of mind, or complex affect, but it can be a powerful market motivator."

Nostalgia turns terrible things into great memories: "Nostalgia turns terrible things into great memories."

Digital nostalgia (not a developed concept).

Nostalgia can be exploited by the state and by the agents active on the market: "Doubtlessly, Longing for Sleep project is not the only project exploiting the nostalgia for the Soviet times, debris “too worthless to plunger” (Brown, 2015) reframed as “another man’s treasure” are everywhere you look. (Examples include Crêpe De Chine and Georgette crepe “vintage-looking” fabric patterned in the Soviet style—in huge wide-branching flowers; ice cream rebranded as the “Soviet plombir (ice cream) sold in Russia and beyond, and something else perhaps I could use here.) All of it shows that nostalgia is the good to be sold, that nostalgia is turnable into money; it is able to bring revenue, and generate different communities, be it a huge and hard to define community of the “Soviet ice cream” eaters, or a refined little community of the former Soviet blankets’ wearers."

Nostalgia comes in surges: "Some two years before that, in one particularly unbearable surge of nostalgia, I searched the Internet for this lamp and found it, to my amazement, for sale on eBay."

Another two pages on nostalgia: 248-249

Of nuclear threat and its now almost-nostalgic affect: "What once was disturbing becomes merely nostalgia-inducing even if the threat itself did not vanish."

The post-Soviet nostalgia is syncretic: ). "In 2015, in Moscow people spotted (and there was a news item about it) that the high-school graduates sported the Soviet-school-style dresses, but the aprons were cut into the dresses. No way to take the apron off. It appeared to me that there was something symbolic about it: the apron as a part of the dress was a perfect metaphor for the Soviet nostalgia: it combined the previously familiar elements into the totally new whole, the order of things was rearranged the way it has not worked before. The syncretic nature of the Soviet nostalgia was thus revealed. One thing that does not belong attached to another, centaurus hybridized with griffin, the deer wearing the cherry tree for antlers, Stalin framed as a Christian saint, use the German photographs to illustrate the narrative about the heroism of the Red Army, and all of it for the purposes of reaching the authentic is, evidently, the common principle of the plastic restoration, the imperial nostalgia that does not really want the past restored, but merely toys with some of its aesthetic elements the meaning of which it nonetheless discounts and to the separate existence of which it refuses to attend."

-------------------------

1 “When the Trees Were Tall,” the film by Lev Kulidzhanov, produced in 1961.

#nostalgia #Etkind #Yurchak #USSR #Soviet project #Boym #anthropology #affect

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mikeo56 · 5 years

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“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize“

– Voltaire

Why do I speak of “AngloZionists”? I got that question many times in the past, so I am making a separate post about it to (hopefully) explain this once and for all.

1) Anglo:

The USA in an Empire. With roughly 1000 overseas bases (depends on how you count), an undeniably messianic ideology, a bigger defense-offense budget then the rest of the planet combined, 16+ spy agencies, the dollar as the world’s currency, there is no doubt that the US is a planetary Empire.

Where did the US Empire come from? Again, that’s a no-brainer – from the British Empire. Furthermore, the US Empire is really based on a select group of nations: the Echelon countries, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and, of course, the US. What do these countries have in common? They are the leftovers of the British Empire and they are all English speaking. Notice that France, Germany or Japan are not part of this elite even though they are arguably as important or more to the USA then, say, New Zealand and far more powerful.

So the “Anglo” part is undeniable. And yet, even though “Anglo” is an ethnic/linguistic/cultural category while “Zionist” is a political/ideological one, very rarely do I get an objection about speaking of “Anglos” or the “Anglosphere”.

2) Zionist:

Let’s take the (hyper politically correct) Wikipedia definition of what the word “Zionism” means: it is “a nationalist movement of Jews and Jewish culture that supports the creation of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the Land of Israel“. Apparently, no link to the US, the Ukraine or Timbuktu, right? But think again. Why would Jews – whether defined as a religion or an ethnicity – need a homeland anyway? Why can’t they just live wherever they are born, just like Buddhist (a religion) or the African Bushmen (ethnicity) who live in many different countries?

The canonical answer is that Jews have been persecuted everywhere and that therefore they need their own homeland to serve as a safe haven in case of persecutions. Without going into the issue of why Jews were persecuted everywhere and, apparently, in all times, this rationale clearly implies if not the inevitability of more persecutions or, at the very least, a high risk thereof. Let’s accept that for demonstration sake and see what this, in turn, implies.

First, that implies that Jews are inherently threatened by non-Jews who are all at least potential anti-Semites. The threat is so severe that a separate Gentile-free homeland must be created as the only, best and last way to protect Jews worldwide. This, in turn, implies that the continued existence of this homeland should become a vital and irreplaceable priority of all Jews worldwide lest a persecution suddenly breaks out and they have nowhere to go. Furthermore, until all Jews finally “move up” to Israel, they had better be very, very careful as all the goyim around them could literally come down with a sudden case of genocidal anti-Semitism at any moment. Hence all the anti-anti-Semitic organizations a la ADL or UEJF, the Betar clubs, the networks of sayanim, etc.

In other words, far from being a local “dealing with Israel only” phenomenon, Zionism is a worldwide movement whose aim is to protect Jews from the apparently incurable anti-Semitism of the rest of the planet.

As Israel Shahak correctly identified it, Zionism postulates that Jews should “think locally and act globally” and when given a choice of policies they should always ask THE crucial question: “But is it good for Jews?“.

So far from being only focused on Israel, Zionism is really a global, planetary, ideology which unequivocally splits up all of mankind into two groups (Jews and Gentiles). It assumes the latter are all potential genocidal maniacs (which is racist) and believes that saving Jewish lives is qualitatively different and more important than saving Gentile lives (which is racist again).

Anyone doubting the ferocity of this determination should either ask a Palestinian or study the holiday of Purim, or both. Even better, read Gilad Atzmon and look up his definition of what is brilliantly called “pre-traumatic stress disorder”

3) Anglo-Zionist:

The British Empire and the early USA used to be pretty much wall-to-wall Anglo. Sure, Jews had a strong influence (in banking for example), but Zionism was a non-issue not only among non-Jews, but also among US Jews. Besides, religious Jews were often very hostile to the notion of a secular Israel while secular Jews did not really care about this quasi-Biblical notion.

WWII gave a massive boost to the Zionist movement while, as Norman Finkelstein explained it, the topic of the “Holocaust” became central to Jewish discourse and identity only many years later. I won’t go into the history of the rise to power of Jews in the USA, but from roughly Ford to GW Bush’s Neocons it has been steady. And even though Obama initially pushed the Neocons out, they came right back in through the backdoor. Right now, the only question is whether US Jews have more power than US Anglos or the other way around.

Before going any further, let me also immediately say that I am not talking about Jews or Anglos as a group, but I am referring to the top 1% within each of these groups. Furthermore, I don’t believe that the top 1% of Jews cares any more about Israel or the 99% of Jews than the top 1% of Anglos care about the USA or the Anglo people.

So, here is my thesis:

The US Empire is run by a 1% (or less) elite which can be called the “deep state” which is composed of two main groups: Anglos and Jews. These two groups are in many ways hostile to each other (just like the SS and SA or Trotskysts and Stalinists), but they share 1) a racist outlook on the rest of mankind 2) a messianic ideology 3) a phenomenal propensity for violence 4) an obsession with money and greed and its power to corrupt. So they work together almost all the time.

Now this might seem basic, but so many people miss it, that I will have to explicitly state it:

To say that most US elites are Anglos or Jews does not mean that most Anglos or Jews are part of the US elites. That is a straw-man argument which deliberately ignores the noncommutative property of my thesis to turn it into a racist statement which accuses most/all Anglos or Jews of some evil doing. So to be very clear:

When I speak of AngloZionist Empire I am referring to the predominant ideology of the 1%ers, the elites which form the Empire’s “deep state”.

By the way, there are non-Jewish Zionists (Biden, in his own words) and there are plenty of anti-Zionist Jews. Likewise, there are non-Anglo imperialists and there are plenty of anti-imperialists Anglos. To speak of “Nazi Germany” or “Soviet Russia” does in no way imply that all Germans were Nazis or all Russians Communists. All this means it that the predominant ideology of these nations at that specific moment in time was National-Socialism and Marxism, that’s all.

My personal opinion now:

First, I don’t believe that Jews are a race or an ethnicity. I have always doubted it, but reading Shlomo Sand really convinced me. Jews are not defined by religion either (most/many are secular). Truly, Jews are a tribe (which Oxford Dictionaires defines as: a social division in a traditional society consisting of families or communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties, with a common culture and dialect, typically having a recognized leader). A group one can chose to join (Elizabeth Taylor) or leave (Gilad Atzmon).

In other words, I see “Jewishness” as a culture, or ideology, or education or any other number of things, but not something rooted in biology. I fully agree with Atzmon when he says that Jews can be racist, but that does not make them a race.

Second, I don’t even believe that the concept of “race” has been properly defined and, hence, that it has any objective meaning. I, therefore, don’t differentiate between human beings on the basis of an undefined criterion.

Third, since being Jew (or not) is a choice: to belong, adhere and endorse a tribe (secular Jews) or a religion (Judaics). Any choice implies a judgment call and it, therefore, a legitimate target for scrutiny and criticism.

Fourth, I believe that Zionism, even when secular, instrumentalizes the values, ideas, myths and ethos of rabbinical Judaism (aka “Talmudism” or “Phariseeism”) and both are racist in their core value and assumptions.

Fifth, both Zionism and Nazism are twin brothers born from the same ugly womb: 19th-century European nationalism (Brecht was right, “The belly is still fertile from which the foul beast sprang”). Nazis and Zionists can hate each other to their hearts’ content, but they are still twins.

Sixth, I reject any and all form of racism as a denial of our common humanity, a denial of the freedom of choice of each human being and – being an Orthodox Christian – as a heresy (a form of iconoclasm, really). To me people who chose to identify themselves with, and as, Jews are not inherently different from any other human and they deserve no more and no fewer rights and protections than any other human being.

I will note here that while the vast majority of my readers are Anglos, they almost never complain about the “Anglo” part of my “AngloZionist” term. The vast majority of objections focus on the “Zionist” part. You might want to think long and hard about why this is so and what it tells us about the kind of power Zionists have over the prevailing ideology. Could it be linked to the reason why the (openly racist and truly genocidal) Israeli Prime Minister gets more standing ovations in Congress (29) than the US President (25)? Probably, but this is hardly the full story.

(This is the end of the 2014 blog entry. The current article begins below)

It is undeniable that Jews did suffer persecutions in the past and that the Nazis horribly persecuted Jews during WWII. This is important because nowadays we are all conditioned to associate and even identify any criticism of Jews or Zionist with the kind of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist rhetoric which the Nazis used to justify their atrocities. This is quite understandable, but it is also completely illogical because what this reaction is based on is the implicit assumption that any criticism of Jews or Zionist must be Nazi in its argumentation, motives, goals or methods. This is beyond ridiculous.

Saint John Chrysostom (349 – 407), the “Golden Mouth” of early Christianity, recognized as one of the greatest saints in history by both Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics, authored a series of homilies, Kata Ioudaiōn, which are extremely critical of Jews, yet no sane person would accuse him of being a Nazi. Chrysostom was hardly alone. Other great saints critical of Jews include Saint Cyprian of Carthage, Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Ephrem the Syrian, Saint Ambrose of Milan, Saint Justin Martyr and many others.

But if these saints were not Nazis, maybe they still were racist, no? That, of course, depends on your definition of ‘racism’. Here is my own:

First, racism is, in my opinion, not so much the belief that various human groups are different from each other, say like dog breeds can be different, but the belief that the differences between human groups are larger than similarities within the group.

Second, racism is also a belief that the biological characteristics of your group somehow pre-determine your actions/choices/values in life.

Third, racism often, but not always, assumes a hierarchy amongst human groups (Germanic Aryans over Slavs or Jews, Jews over Gentiles, etc.)

I reject all three of these assumptions because I believe that God created all humans with the same purpose and that we are all “brothers in Adam”, that we all equally share the image (eternal and inherent potential for perfection) of God (as opposed to our likeness to Him, which is our temporary and changing individual condition).

By that definition, the Church Fathers were most definitely not racists as their critique was solely aimed at the religion of the Jews, not at their ethnicity (which is hardly surprising since Christ and His Apostles and most early Christians were all “ethnic” Jews). This begs the question of whether criticizing a religion is legitimate or not.

I submit that anything resulting from an individual choice is fair game for criticism. Even if somebody is “born into” a religious community, all adults come to the point in life where they make a conscious decision to endorse or reject the religion they were “born into”. Being a Christian, a Muslim or a Jew (in the sense of “Judaic”) is always a personal decision. The same applies to political views. One chooses to become a Marxist or a Monarchist or a Zionist. And since our individual decisions do, indeed, directly impact our other choices in life, it is not racist or objectionable to criticize Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Marxism, Monarchism or Zionism. Criticizing any one of them, or even all of them, in no way denies our common humanity which is something which racism always does.

Having said all that, none of the above addresses a most important, but rarely openly discussed, issue: what if, regardless of all the arguments above, using expressions such as “AngloZionism” offends some people (Jews or not), what if the use of this term alienates them so much that it would make them unwilling to listen to any argument or point of view using this expression?

This is a very different issue, not an ethical, moral or philosophical one – but a practical one: is it worth losing readers, supporters and even donors for the sake of using an expression which requires several pages of explanations in its defense? This issue is one every blogger, every website, every alternative news outlet has had to struggle with. I know that I got more angry mails over this than over any other form of crimethink I so often engage in.

I will readily admit that there is a cost involved in using the term “AngloZionist Empire”. But that cost needs to be compared to the cost of *not* using that term.

Is there anybody out there who seriously doubts the huge role the so-called “Israel Lobby” or the “Neocons” or, to use the expression of Professor James Petras, the “Zionist Power Configuration” plays in modern politics? Twenty years ago – maybe. But not today. We all are perfectly aware of the “elephant in the room”, courtesy not only of courageous folks like Gilad Atzmon, Israel Shahak or Norman Finkelstein but even such mainstream Anglo personalities as John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt or even Jimmy Carter.

It is plain silly to pretend that we don’t know when we all know that we all know.

Pretending that we don’t see this elephant in the room makes us look either subservient to that elephant, or simply like a coward who dares not speak truth to power. In other words, if you do want to shoot your credibility, pretend really hard that you are totally unaware of the elephant in the room: some of your sponsors might love you, but everybody else will despise you.

What about the very real risk of being perceived as some kind of Nazi?

Yes, the risk is there, but only if you allow yourself to flirt with racist or even para-racist notions. But if you are categorical in your rejection of any form of racism (including any form of anti-Jewish racism), then the accusation will simply not stick. Oh sure, the Zionists out there will try hard to make you look like a Nazi, but they will fail simply because they will have nothing to base that accusation on other than some vague “overtones” or “lack of sensitivity”. In my experience, people are not that stupid and they rapidly see through that worn-out accusation of “anti-Semitism” ( a meaningless concept to begin with, as Michael Neumann so brilliantly demonstrates in his essay “What is Antisemitism?”).

The truth is that the Zionists are only as powerful as we allow them to be. If we allow them to scare us into silence, then indeed their power is immense, but if we simply demand that they stop treating some humans as “more equal than others” then their own racism suddenly becomes obvious for all to see and their power vanishes.

It is really that simple: since nobody can accuse a real anti-racist of racism, then truly being an anti-racist gives you an immunity against the accusation of anti-Semitism.

So what we need, at this point, is to consider the terms used.

“Israel Lobby” suffers from several major issues. First, it implies that the folks in this lobby really care about Israel and the people of Israel. While some probably do, we also have overwhelming evidence (such as the testimony of Sibel Edmonds) that many/most folks in the “Israel Lobby” use the topic of Israel for their own, very different goals (usually power, often money). Have the people of Israel really benefited from from the Neocon-triggered wars? I doubt it.

Furthermore, when hearing the word “Israel Lobby” most people will think of a lobby in the US Congress, something like the NRA or the AARP. The problem we are dealing with today is clearly international. Bernard Henri Levi, George Soros or Mikhail Khodorkovsky have no connection to AIPAC or the US Congress. “Zionist Power Configuration” is better, but “configuration” is vague. What we are dealing with is clearly an empire. Besides, this is clearly not only a Zionist Empire, the Anglo component is at least as influential, so why only mention one and not both?

Still, I don’t think that we should get too caught up in semantics here. From my point of view, there are two truly essential issues which need to be addressed:

1) We need to start talking freely about the “elephant in the room” and stop fearing reprisals from those who want us to pretend we don’t see it.

2) We need to stop using politically correct euphemisms in the vain hope that those who want us to shut up will accept them. They won’t.

Currently, much of the discourse on Jewish or Zionist topics is severely restricted. Doubting the obligatory “6 million” murdered Jews during WWII can land in you jail in several European countries. Ditto if you express any doubts about the actual mode of executions (gas chambers vs firing squads and disease) of these Jews. “Revisionism”, as asking such questions is now known, is seen either as a crime or, at least, a moral abomination, even though “revisionism” is what all real historians do: historiography is revisionistic by its very nature. But even daring to mention such truisms immediately makes you a potential Nazi in the eyes of many/most people.

Since when is expressing a doubt an endorsement of an ideology? This is crazy, no?

I personally came to the conclusion that the West became an easy victim of such “conceptual hijackings” because of a sense of guilt about having let the Nazis murder so many European Jews without taking any meaningful action. It is a fact that it was the Soviet Union which carried 80% or more of the burden of destroying Hitler’s war machine: most Europeans resisted shamefully little. As for the Anglos, they waited until the Soviet victory before even entering the war in Europe.

Okay, fine – let those who feel guilty feel guilty (even if I personally don’t believe in collective guilt). But we cannot allow them to try to silence those of us who strongly feel that we are guilty of absolutely nothing!

Do we really have to kowtow to all Jews, including the top 1% of Jews who, like all 1%ers, do not care about the rest of the 99%? How long are we going to continue to allow the top 1% of Jews enjoy a bizarre form of political immunity because they hide behind the memory of Jews murdered during WWII or the political sensitivities of the 99% of Jews with whom they have no real connection anyway?

I strongly believe that all 1%ers are exactly the same: they care about themselves and nobody else. Their power, what I call the AngloZionist Empire, is based on two things: deception and violence. Their worldview is based on one of two forms of messianism: Anglo imperialism and Zionism (which is just a secularized version of Judaic racial exceptionalism). This has nothing to do with Nazism, WWII or anti-Semitism and everything with ruthless power politics. Unless we are willing to call a spade a spade we will never be able to meaningfully oppose this Empire or the 1%ers who run it.

In truth, since we owe them nothing except our categorical rejection and opposition. It is, I believe, our moral duty to shed a powerful light on their true nature and debunk the lies they try so hard to hide behind.

If their way is by deception, then ours ought to be by truth, because, as Christ said, the truth shall make us free.

Euphemisms only serve to further enslave us.

The Saker

#anglo-zionist

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