Introducing ‘Distroism Now!,’ a New Monthly Podcast on It’s Going Down

Saturday, October 30th, 2021

Originally published by It’s Going Down on October 30, 2021

Distroism Now! is a new monthly podcast on It’s Going Down. Each episode is hosted by a different distro, and the style, length and content of each episode is whatever the hosts want it to be. At the end of each episode, the host nominates a new distro to do the next episode.

In this episode, Filler Distro tells a ghost story that Pittsburgh’s tried to bury beneath its bullshit progressive image, talks distroism with the Portland Litter Bloc, and bumps some of our favorite punk, hardcore, crust, and hip-hop tracks…among other things.

Original stream available on It’s Going Down

Stream on archive.org:

TRACKLIST

– Ghost Town – The Specials (1981)

The Specials – Ghost Town [Official HD Remastered Video] – YouTube

– Blinded by Power – Cop Problem, “S-T” (2012)

Self-Titled E.P. | cop problem (bandcamp.com)

– Wolf Dancin’ – Savage Fam (2020)

SAVAGE FAM: WOLF DANCIN ((Official Video)) – YouTube

– Eternal War – Storm of Sedition, “Howl of Dynamite” (2019)

Music | Storm of Sedition (bandcamp.com)

– Four Teeth – True Widow, “Circumambulation” (2013)

Circumambulation | True Widow (bandcamp.com)

– 5.45 – Gang of Four, “Entertainment!” (1979)

– Extinction – Existence, “Out of Time” (2018)

Existence – Out of Time | Existence | Blown Out Media (bandcamp.com)

– Insurrection – Conspiracy of Denial, “S-T” (2013)

Self Titled LP | Conspiracy Of Denial (bandcamp.com)

– Violencia en las Calles – Muro, “La Masacre Continua” (2021)

An anarcho-punk benefit compilation album that Chaos-T Records released a few months back. not only does this shit rip but all the proceeds from the album directly support anarchists on the ground in Colombia, so support our troops and go pick up the album. you can find a link to the bandcamp in the shownotes for this episode

The massacre continues V/A | CHAOSTRECORDS (bandcamp.com)

– First In, First Out – The Suburbanists, “Eat From The Tree” (2021)

Eat From The Tree | The Suburbanists

– Run it Up – Atlas Telamon (2020)

https://www.instagram.com/iamtelamon/

– alienate – fluoride, “disentanglement” (2019)

disentanglement | fluoride (bandcamp.com)

– Exempt – no right (2021)

Exempt | no right (bandcamp.com)

– Fight or Die – Arid, “S-T” (2021)

ARID | ARID (bandcamp.com)

Just a Few Zine Distros/Archives we Print From, in No Order Whatsoever.

(Tor and vpn recommended, if your sketched by the content of an interesting PDF, you can try bypassing downloading the file straight from the site by preparing it for printing and then saving the print preview pdf.)

https://fillerpgh.wordpress.com/
https://actforfree.noblogs.org/
https://untorellipress.noblogs.org/
https://warriorpublications.wordpress.com/
https://www.littlemouse.fun/
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/index
https://uprising2020.noblogs.org/
https://warzonedistro.noblogs.org/
https://littleblackcart.com
https://nogods-nomasters.com/
https://counterflow.noblogs.org/
https://fugitive.keybase.pub//
https://1312press.noblogs.org/1312-published-titles/
https://azinelibrary.org/
https://mtlcounterinfo.org/
https://rosecitycounterinfo.noblogs.org/
https://anathema.noblogs.org/
https://www.sproutdistro.com/
https://enoughisenough14.org/
https://libcom.org/library/latest
https://freedomnews.org.uk/
https://crimethinc.com/
https://north-shore.info/
https://ftpdistro.noblogs.org/
https://pugetsoundanarchists.org/
https://civfucks.noblogs.org/

Format normal PDF for zine printing:
https://wieke.gitlab.io/bookletify/

*EDIT 11.11.21*

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT:

intro:

That track was, of course, Ghost Town by The Specials. And yes, you guessed it, tonight’s show is gonna be all about getting you and your crew in the ungovernable halloween spirit.
Over the next hour we’ll be sharing some of the ghost stories that Pittsburgh’s tried to bury beneath its bullshit progressive image, talking distroism with the Portland Litter Bloc, and listening to some of our favorite punk, hardcore, crust, and hip-hop tracks…
- because music is more important than reading theory ever will be
- etsy banter idk

coming up next, we’ve got our all time favorite ghost story, but first, here’s a song by a philly crust band called Cop Problem
If anyone listening happens to knows someone who played in Cop Problem, could you do me a favor and tell them that the crimethinc zine they gave me at a show over a decade ago ruined my fucking life and that you heard it first on It’s Going Down.

Smoky Island (after the Cop Problem track, around the 8:20 mark)

In Pittsburgh there’s an area called the point where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers converge into the Ohio.

It’s a pretty famous scenic view, and even if you’re not a tourist it can be nice to hang out and look up and around at the three converging river valleys surrounding you.

Sometimes when I’m at the point looking out at the Ohio River, I notice my gaze drifting to the right, over to the North Side. I catch it and wonder Why am I staring at the Science Center — it really isn’t that hot of a building, and so I try looking back out at the water. I blink and next thing you know I’m staring over at the north side again, this time at the casino.

I never really thought much about staring out that way until I started hearing stories about the island and what used to be there.

The island was a couple hundred yards out to the northeast side of the point. It was a little wooded patch of land that rested about 70 yards from the north side, leaning a quarter mile into the Allegheny and maybe a football field wide. The island’s most striking feature was its great hill, a small space on the upper end that was oddly clear of most foliage except overgrown grass.

When british forces came to the point to attempt capture of Fort Duquesne in 1755, the Delaware and Shawnee people held their war council on the island. After the battle of Monongahela, the native warriors returned to the island with prisoners. While we can assume most surviving accounts have been embellished to dehumanize the indigenous people and advance a colonial agenda, we can also acknowledge the validity of all forms of native resistance to colonization and genocide.

The Delaware and Shawnee warriors are said to have tortured and burned the captured colonizers alive in great bonfires atop the island’s hill, in full view of Fort Duquesne. At night, the fires reflected brigthly across the surface of the Allegheny, and some records claim the tortured screams kept soldiers awake until morning. When day finally broke, the soldiers did their best to keep their eyes from wandering over to the plumes of smoke rising above the island. Settler legends claim that the island was known to native tribes as the Dark Place, because they only gathered on the island to channel spirits of war against the encroaching civilization. To the settlers themselves, the little strip of land was known simply as Smokey Island.

After the Seven Years’ War, Fort Duquesne fell to the English and became Fort Pitt, and the city of Pittsburgh began to take form. But even before the war between colonizers came to a close, many native peoples recognized that the moment offered an opportunity to strike back in the war for their land.The region remained a hotbed for indigenous insurgency for years to come, and Smokey Island became an essential part of the insurgent’s strategy – especially during Pontiac’s Rebellion. From the perspective of Fort Pitt on the point, the island’s hilltop functioned as a natural blind spot. For Native warriors advancing from the North Side, Smokey Island served as a critical staging ground for hit and run raids against Fort Pitt.

As word spread and new native uprisings gained steam, what settler’s initially dismissed as Pontiac’s conspiracy grew into a full-blown insurrection, an insurrection that many historians believe could have pushed the English all the way back to Philadelphia, if it weren’t for the tragedy at Fort Pitt.

Under the command of Colonel Henry Bouqet, the besieged English forces at Fort Pitt called parlay rather than admit defeat (pirates of the carribean sample), They requested the Delewares send two representatives into the fort so that they could begin negotiations. On June 24, 1763, colonial forces provided the native delegates with two blankets and a handkerchief. The ensuing smallpox outbreak was, in a word, genocidal.

After the revolutionary war, colonizers tried to solve the problem of this eerie, still undomesticated island by giving it as a gift to Chief Killbuck of the Delaware. Naturally, they did so without transferring any legal titles of ownership in his name. Chief Killbuck was quickly chased off his land by his settler neighbors, but, for a time, local authorities referred to the strip of land as Killbuck’s Island, perhaps hoping its nickname would soon be forgotten. This would not be the case.

The island remained relatively untouched by settlers until the year 1818, when David Morgan and his family built a small cabin on the land. Morgan had considered settling there for some time, but his family was hard to convince. The first few nights they camped out on the island in 1817, his family was frightened by, as he put it, “the melancholy cry of the loon sporting in the waters of the Allegheny, by owl hoots, and by other weird sounds.”

Eventually, Morgan convinced his wife and four kids there was nothing to fear, and the family lived happily on Killbuck Island for some time. That is until one autumn evening in 1820. After putting their children to bed, Morgan and his wife rowed their little boat to the mainland to enjoy a night out with some neighbors on the mainland. At some point in the night Mrs. Morgan heard faint screams coming from the direction of the Allegheny. She shot up and ran outside, her husband and friends not far behind. In the distance, a great bonfire once again lit the sky around Smokey Island. By the time they made it back, flames had already devoured the Morgan family home. All four children were burned alive, the fire’s cause unknown.

Ownership of Smokey Island continued changing hands until 1874, when leading citizens of Allegheny County announced plans to build [quote] “a permanent exposition of the arts, sciences and industries of Western Pennsylvania.” [end quote] Construction for the Tradesmen’s Industrial Institute began shortly after. The project was massive, representing the first major cultural site of its kind in the region. In 1877 the hall came under the auspices of the newly-formed Pittsburgh Exposition Society, and was expanded to one thousand feet long and one hundred fifty feet wide. If the Tradesmen’s Industrial Institute were still standing today, the building’s size and glamor would rival the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

In October, 1883, the Pittsburgh Exposition Society planned to host one of the largest industrial expositions in history. The exposition society modeled their event after the World’s Fair, and invited companies from all over the world to showcase the latest in labor-saving technology. Wealthy socialites and industrialists from far and wide travelled to Pittsburgh to attend. But sometime in the night of October 2nd, 1883, the Tradesmen’s Industrial Institute mysteriously burned to the ground. Damage estimates were in excess of $1,000,000… in 1883 money. The inflation calculator only goes back to 1903, so today that’s in the ballpark of $30,000,000. The exact cause of the fire was never determined.

Oh hey, funny coincidence – did you know the International Workingmen’s Association, better known as the anarchist black international, held one of their first conferences in Pittsburgh’s Northside… in October 1883? >=]

There used to be an island where the waters of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio meet. And for over a hundred years, this island haunted the colonizers and capitalists who tried to claim it.

The mysterious destruction of the Industrial Institute dominated newspaper headlines in October, 1883. Meanwhile, a few hundred yards from Smokey Island, the black international debated the first manifesto of the global anarchist movement, or The Pittsburgh Proclamation, as the document came to be known. quote:

What we would achieve is, therefore, plainly and simply:

First: Destruction of the existing class rule, by all means, i.e., by energetic, relentless, revolutionary, and international action.
Second: Establishment of a free society based on co-operative means of production.

That last great bonfire in October 1883 would prove to be Smokey Island’s final performance. Throughout gilded age, the 70-yard channel seperating this defiant little island from the North Side became a dumping ground for industrial waste, and in 1883 it was already rapidly accumulating enough junk and soil to fill the entire gap. By the turn of the twentieth century, Smokey Island was completely landlocked.

Today, few remember the story of Pittsburgh’s lost island. That’s because they tried to bury it in concrete.

The Frick Fine Arts Center, Phipps Conservatory, all that shit Carnegie slapped his name on—these monuments define Pittsburgh’s historical memory and cultural identity. They function like religious sites, attaching explanations of modern life to the skyline itself. The downtown courthouse, the symbolic center of law and order, is built upon the flattened earth of a sacred Adena burial mound. Bouquet Street in Oakland is named for Henry Bouquet, the man who gave smallpox-infected blankets to the Delaware during the siege of Fort Pitt.

But Smokey Island is still there, beneath the Carnegie Science Center, beneath the casino parking lot.

(section after The Suburbanists album review banter, at about 1:00:00)

For many of us, there’s always been something different about the month of October. But as we get older, it can get harder and harder to discern anything tangible to justify that feeling. And so it fades with each passing year.

The historical fact that mischief, bonfires, and the blurring of identities have remained central to Halloween’s character for over two millennia speaks to something deeply desirable about gathering communally and burning away the old world together.

If you feel like your losing some connection with this time of year, it’s not just you. We are living in the 3rd wave of an anti-halloween counterinsurgency.

Nah but for real though. If you want to read more on the ungovernable spirit of Halloween, check out a zine called The Devil’s Night – a link to the pdf is included in the shownotes.

https://www.sproutdistro.com/2017/11/06/zines-october-2017

The Devil’s Night traces halloween’s insurgent legacy, from its origins in the dark ages to the recurring arson sprees that rocked Detroit for decades after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

after the Atlas Telamon track, around 1:07:00

It’s rare to really get a chance to slow down and think about the place you live, how it’s changing, how it’s navigated, how the past is always present.
And when you do, some things are just pretty fucking obvious.
Oakland isn’t just Pittsburgh’s college town anymore.
The jags are spelling it out for us…

https://innovatepgh.com/ sample from this progressive propaganda

Around the turn of the twentieth century, over 500 perished in the factories each year.
Their families rarely received compensation, and their coworkers were pretty unfazed.
Historian Roy Lubove noted that, quote “Few communities were so often compared to hell.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUUpWo04u9k
[first few sentences sampled… maybe bit about universities towards end]

If you’ve ever seen old photos of Pittsburgh, you’ll notice that even the streetlights worked overtime,
pulling a double shift to cut through the smog.
They shone day and night like they were fucking lighthouses, but for cars and pedestrians.
On days when the pollution completely blacked out the sun, only the din of the steel furnaces lit up the sky as the soot and ash pluming from the smokestacks crackled with molten metal. Kind of like a thunderstorm, but forever.

The progressive narrative is the lynchpin of their strategy. This narrative functions to reimagine all social conflict as two differing visions of progress that will gradually compromise to build the city we live in today, together. It’s the narrative built into the foundations of all their museums, monuments, statues, libraries, factories and schools. It’s how their version of local history can explain away unforgettable moments from the first industrial revolution, like the Battle of Homestead, and somehow avoid mentioning the key fucking issue, which is that entire era of history’s contradictions were never resolved. The ruling class wants us to forget that they transformed Pittsburgh into a literal hell on earth so that they could hoard previously unimaginable amounts of wealth, and these disparities in wealth and power continue to grow to this day.

And guess what. Take a look around.

The smart city they are building may look all fancy and new and shit, but their sleek new economy promises the same old hell.

Today, the historically Black and working class community of East Liberty is rapidly being gentrified. Walnut Capital’s Bakery Square in East Liberty is where tech giants like Google are now rolling out the new company town.

But this time it’s green. This time it’s diverse. Pittsburgh is a progressive town.

We’re in the 4th industrial revolution, we’re in the climate collapse, we’re in the combination 4th industrial revolution climate collapse. The jags are doing it all over again.

You can send your report-backs, zine submissions, critiques, graffiti/action photos, demo tapes, hate mail, & memes to…

Filler_PGH@protonmail.com

We’ll try to get back to you in a reasonable amount of punk time.

Send reports in email form, as an attachment, or better yet, on an easy to use (and free) Riseup Pad or CryptPad.

Posted in Distro Collection | Comments Closed

ZINE || Fuck Identity, We Need Solidarity

Wednesday, November 11th, 2020

FUCK IDENTITY,
WE NEED SOLIDARITY
by ~~William Peduto~~
Pittsburgh Radical Perspectives
October 2020

Pittsburgh Radical Perspectives is a collective of students who have been participating in the movement for black lives and in the struggle of latinx people against state-sanctioned violence. We are anarchists, afropessimists, maoists, and socialists that are united in our desire for an autonomous revolutionary movement.

PDF formatted for online reading Download

PDF Zine, imposed printing format (short-edge binding)Download

Contents
Synopsis – Page 2
I. We Need Autonomous Organizing! – Page 4
II. The Situation Today! – Page 5
III. Anti-Oppression Theory & Practice in Pittsburgh has Failed! – Page 9
IV. Pittsburgh as an Example – Page 11

Fuck Identity, We Need Solidarity was written collaboratively by a group of people of color, women, and queers – most of whom are students at Point Park University and University of Pittsburgh – in deep solidarity and in the spirit of conversation with anyone, be they anarchist, Marxist, progressive, socialist, or what have you, who is committed to ending oppression and exploitation materially. We’d also like to extend our unconditional solidarity with all Pittsburgh protestors who are facing charges.

This is a critique of how privilege theory and cultural essentialism has been a boom in our city and how it has incapacitated antiracist, feminist, and queer organizing in this country by taking identity categories and equating them with culture, and culture with solidarity. This conflation minimizes and misrepresents the severity and structural character of the violence and material deprivation faced by oppressed people, and plays up the division among the people who are out rebelling to a point of making liberation impossible in the long-term.

You can send your report-backs, zine submissions, critiques, graffiti/action photos, demo tapes, hate mail, & memes to…

Filler_PGH@protonmail.com

We’ll try to promote your content // reply in a reasonable amount of punk time.

Send reports in email form, as an attachment, or better yet, on an easy to use (and free) Riseup Pad or CryptPad.

Tags:anarchist zines, filler pgh zine, filler zine distro, fuck identity we need solidarity, pittsburgh, pittsburgh anarchists, pittsburgh anarchy, pittsburgh protest, pittsburgh zines
Posted in Critique, Distro Collection, Zines | Comments Closed

Filler Distro Presents: A SCAM FOR THE BIG IDEA

Monday, October 21st, 2019

A SCAM FOR THE BIG IDEA is a Pittsburgh anarcho-punk compilation album benefiting The Big Idea Cooperative Bookstore & Cafe.

You can buy or stream the album on bandcamp. It’s also available for streaming on spotify, youtube, and a bunch of other sites. All proceeds go directly to The Big Idea.

https://filler-pgh.bandcamp.com/

Over the last 18 years, The Big Idea has become a second home for many Pittsburgh anarchists. The space’s rent got jacked up recently, and it’s likely to get raised again in the coming months. With that in mind, some Filler kids figured it was time we pay The Big Idea back for all the coffee, books, zines, pins, patches and vegan goodies that we’ve nabbed over the years.

We found some cheap recording equipment and decided to hit up our friends to see if anyone wanted to record a track or two for a benefit compilation album. Now that the album’s done, we’re offering free recording to anarchist bands/musicians living near the three rivers, so hit us up for free recording!

The accompanying zine will be released in the coming weeks, be sure to check it out! It’s gonna have art/lyrics for every track, as well as some perspectives on anarchy in the East End.

SCAMIDEA

An excerpt from one of the introductions to the compilation zine.

Bloomfield remained relatively affordable throughout the last decade of gentrification in the East End, and it’s made us complacent. This supposed hub of radicalism has failed to meaningfully contribute to the ongoing struggles against cultural erasure and displacement in other East End neighborhoods. And now, as developers rapidly encircle Pittsburgh’s so-called “Little Italy,” the rent hikes are accelerating again. How many friends have already been priced out?

Anarchists cannot continue to passively rely on Bloomfield’s proximity to whiteness as a shield. The fact that fucking “Little Italy” is experiencing another wave of development is proof that the capitalist class has already outmaneuvered community resistance elsewhere. “We” have failed to materially disrupt revitalization, even now as everyone seems to be scoffing at Peduto’s “Most Livable City” propaganda.

Gentrification functions differently in every neighborhood. Here in the East End, the rent hikes threaten a budding inter-generational anarchist community(ies). We don’t all hang out in the same spaces or roll with the same crew, and this benefit album is not an attempt to cohere around a single space (sorry infoshop vanguardists) — but if we lose our infoshop, it’s safe to say we lose our neighborhood.

The Big Idea is a project that spans nearly two decades of Pittsburgh anarchy. In other words, it’s one of the few remaining places capable of retaining collective memory.

If it weren’t for the things I’ve read, the people I’ve met, and the boxes of old junk I’ve dug through at the Big Idea, I would have never heard of the Pittsburgh Organizing Group, East End Mutual Aid, the Greater Pittsburgh Area Anarchist Collective, Indymedia, Anti-Racist Action, Occupy Pittsburgh, The Yinsurrectionary Times, Landslide Community Farm, Fight Back Pittsburgh… on and on.

If it weren’t for The Big Idea, I would not know the names of our dead. I never met Mike Vesch, but The Yinsurrectionary Times is what inspired me and some other Filler kids to expand our fanzine into a local counterinfo website; I never met Daniel Montano, but I’ve read his writings about art and resistance nearly every day since I moved here in 2012—MF1 is still all-city, even after years of buffing and gentrification.

As the years went by and I began to lose some of my own friends and comrades, The Big Idea also became a place to remember them, to share stories about the life they breathed into Pittsburgh anarchy.

Stephie was a Big Idea collective member. If you drop by Big Idea and look at the wall above the comfy chair in the corner, you’ll see a black and red flag with an angry cat in the center. That’s Badcastki, that’s Stephie. Her art was subversive; her ideas as dangerous as she was kind. She organized at the intersections of anarchism and mental health during a time when few people in the scene seemed to recognize just how militant you have to be to fight on that front. Badcatski chose to commit suicide on May 5, 2016 at the age of 34. Knowing Stephie, her decision was patient, deliberate, conscious, intentional, necessary. Like all anarchists who have died in the social war, her act can also be remembered as martyrdom. Sometimes during quiet shifts at Big Idea I sit in the comfy chair in the corner, drink coffee from her favorite mug, and understand that she is here. That realization reminds me to take a minute to be honest with myself, to confront my feelings. She reminds me to take care of myself and my friends as if the fate of the movement depends on it—and she’s right, it does.

In acting and learning to act, we find that we can share stories, skills, lessons, memories, tactics, and ideas. We should never be content to just survive, to go through life as a passive spectator in the spaces you inhabit. There’s a difference between life and survival. We are at war. Every decision we make—from where we live and who we live with to what we do for fun and how we do it—might be better understood strategically, and taken with intent.

I often hear stories about the glory days of Pittsburgh anarcho-punk scene and wonder what the fuck happened. Of course, there are still some really good bands and cool spaces, but the reality of the situation is that anarchists and punx don’t really organize much together. It seems that when someone burns out from one scene, they turn to the other.

But if we think our scene(s) are lacking something, that shouldn’t mean we just drop out of them. Instead we might ask ourselves how we could contribute materially, artistically, and sincerely to all the shit that we can’t help but care about.

Why do so many of us find ourselves living in the East End? What would a new anarcho-punk movement look/feel like in Pittsburgh? What are the first steps? Here’s a collection of preliminary answers/thoughts/desires/filler from a few of the kids featured on this comp:

I want to know that my broke ass won’t be turned away by a $10 cover charge at the door, so I guess I could reach out to the promoter and put up a few flyers around town earlier that week.

I want to hit the bagel dumpster before my shift at the Big Idea so the staffers during the rest of that week can eat for free.

I want to know who the harm reduction distro kids are so I can cop more narcan without having to go out of my way.

I want to know what my friends’ basic boundaries are with strangers so I can understand when I’m expected to step up to a jag, when I just let the homie handle it, and when I should just chill out and stop being such a PC cop.

I want to write hyphy reviews on my friends’ bandcamp releases.

I want to learn to make tapes and record music and help my talented friends finally put that album out.

I want to be the designated driver and get my friends to the gig because I know the homies will buy me some merch from the touring band as a thank you.

I want to know that my skill set can help my friends save money (or at least keep it in the solidarity economy) because they won’t be overpaying some capitalist to repair their bike/car/phone/drywall.

I want to film my friends’ protests, shows, music videos, skateboarding—fucking whatever, honestly—cos I know I’m pretty good at making that shit look wayyy harder than it felt at the time, and I like to hype my friends up.

I want to know that my friends won’t judge me when I tell them that I’m in active addiction, again.

I want to start writing again because all my friends love sharing their zines with each other, and because I know they will actually read what I give them and invite me out to talk more about it over a coffee or a few beers.

I want to start going to shows again because I realized most of the people I run into are passionate about the music, the spaces, the ideas, the projects, the food…

I want to know every word to my friend’s band’s songs, and when that drop comes I want to rush to the front of the pit and shout I THINK THERE’S SOMETHING IN THE WATER!

I want to stop buying dumb shit online because I’d rather buy the clothing and furniture and jewelry and patches and art that my friends make, not just because I can save money though! I know that those earrings they made will turn heads.

I want to start tabling again because sometimes there’s honestly nothing hotter than a crew of six dekt queer punx rolling up to an event, nodding to the person running the door, and walking in for free with 3 boxes of zines, a foldout table, a bag of narcan, and a stack of flyers for next week’s show.

I don’t want this shit to feel like a job or duty. I can’t do everything I would like to. And I especially don’t want to have to prove my worth just to feel like I’m allowed show up to an event. I don’t have to do jack shit if I’m not feeling up to it. And I don’t find myself wanting to do this shit for the woke internet posturing, or to climb some scene’s social ladder. Sometimes I just want to throw a beer can across the room, or tag some toy shit on a condo, or toss a U-Lock through a windshield. And I sure as hell don’t feel like justifying that to anyone.

I’m a punk because I’m a fucking nerd. I’ve only ever had like 3 or 4 close friends at a time. I’m constantly cycling through tides of depression, anger, and mania. Most of the time, I feel like I can’t really hang, and so I don’t really go out much, unless it’s to a show or something. Socializing is a lot easier for me if there’s something creative or fun or useful I can bring that might make it easier to talk and connect with people. The lyric sheets I that grew up on told me that punk’s not a fashion show— it’s a fucking way of life. I feel like that punk should mean something more than whatever bullshit it is I find myself doing these days.

Find each other, because the Something we’re waiting for is never going to happen unless we become Something. If each of us acts on our own ideas and desires, a shared perception of our situation is temporarily understood every time we act collectively—every time we create spaces, projects, and experiences together. Which is really just a roundabout way of saying, what you do or don’t do makes all the difference.

It’s time we see ourselves for what we are and have always been: a movement. We’re an international web of relationships, held together by a few DIY spaces, bars, art collectives, bands, distros, niche skillsets, and the mutual aid that arises from common needs and interests, from the experience of building something together: from living communism and spreading anarchy.

Punx and anarchists cannot face down these monied developers alone, but together we can face these faceless profiteers and build something resembling a community in the process. With all the struggles in our own personal lives, the raging fires across the planet and our neighborhoods can seem like someone else’s problem. It feels like we don’t have the strength, the time, or the resources to face these problems, but your own resilience, endurance, and passion can surpass even your most arrogant self-confidence. Now is the time to come together in solidarity. Keep moving, keep fighting.

punx is weapons // punx is small town

– Filler Distro

“East End, the fashionable residence quarter of Pittsburgh, lies basking in the afternoon sun. The broad avenue looks cool and inviting: the stately trees touch their shadows across the carriage road, gently nodding their heads in mutual approval. A steady procession of equipages fills the avenue, the richly caparisoned horses and uniformed flunkies lending color and life to the scene. A cavalcade is passing me. The laughter of the ladies sounds joyous and care-free.

Their happiness irritates me. I am thinking of Homestead. In mind I see the somber fence the fortifications and cannon; the piteous figure of the widow rises before me, the little children weeping, and again I hear the anguished cry of a broken heart, a shattered brain….”

– Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist

fillah

Tags:a scam for the big idea, anarchism, anarchist, anarcho-punk, anarchy, benefit album, compilation album, filler distro, filler pgh, fillerpgh, steel city autonomous movement, the big idea cooperative bookstore, the big idea pittsburgh, zine
Posted in Distro Collection, Zines | Comments Closed

Revisiting “The Relevance of Max Stirner to Anarcho-Communists” Two Years On

Thursday, June 6th, 2019

the-relevance-of-max-stirner-to-anarchocom-imposed(1)

click here for a print-ready PDF of the zine

Matty T

It’s been two years since my comrades at Filler published my essay The Relevance of Max Stirner to Anarcho-Communists as a pamphlet. As such, I thought it would be worthwhile and a little fun to look back and offer a few observations.

I deliberately wrote of the relevance of Stirner to anarchist communists, as opposed to choosing a title like “The Necessity of Egoism” or “Everybody Loves Stirner”. Like it or not (I like it), Stirner is relevant to anyone interested in or involved with contemporary anarchism. I think even the most diehard orthodox Leftists could gain something from being familiar with egoist ideas, and not just the reductive caricature of them put forth by both champions and detractors. The goal of my essay was exactly that – to provide a primer on Stirner’s ideas, a general introduction targeted especially toward mainstream Leftists and anarchists. I think it’s succeeded in its humble way. If I had been writing for the post-left milieu or for people who were already egoists or egoist-adjacent, I would’ve written something very different.

Of course, since the pamphlet was written, Wolfi Landstreicher’s new Stirner translation has finally appeared. I would replace all the quotations from Byington’s translation with Landstreicher’s if given the time and opportunity. Anyone interested in reading Stirner should refer to the new translation, which is an improvement on Byington’s from the title page onward, accurately translating the German as The Unique and its Property and hopefully removing a major stumbling block by excising the word ego and all its implications of some absolute, conceptual, apotheosized I. This is not to disparage the late Stephen Byington, who offered an admirable service by making the text available in English at all, but Landstreicher’s rendering should become the new standard.

Throughout the essay, I used she as the generic pronoun. This was an attempt to challenge the still prevalent use of the generic he, but in retrospect I should have simply used they. As Jason McQuinn points out elsewhere, Stirner’s unique is not gendered; its gender is constructed, not given.

Stirner’s ideas concerning interpersonal relationships are sketched in the pamphlet, but perhaps should have been more thoroughly laid out. Intercourse, as Stirner called it, is the subject of more than half of his book. I consider this extremely important to understanding the union (or association) of egoists as both an alternative to the relationships of bond or property and as a tool for insurrection. I would have stressed the nature of union as an activity. I refer interested parties to Massimo Passimani’s excellent essay “Mutual Utilization: Relationship and Revolt in Max Stirner.”

I hope this essay continues to enjoy the circulation it’s seen so far, and continues to help clarify conscious egoism, which I consider more than ever to be an extremely valuable monkey-wrench in the toolbox of revolt. The calls for discipline, sacrifice, and all the other spooky rhetoric will continue flowing unabated from the mouths of authoritarians, whether they camouflage themselves in red, black, green, or any other color. But there are still plenty who are tired of “Serving the People,” which too many of us do already, 7 hours a day, 6 days a week, with or without french fries, and are ready to serve ourselves. It turns out that that’s the best way to serve the people, as long as the P stays uncapitalized. Egoism remains not only relevant but eminently practical to anyone interested in critically confronting the archist and capitalist world. Happy reading.

With egoistic love,

Matty T

Introduction

stirner02 Since the publication of Max Stirner’s book Der Einzige und Sein Eigenthum (translated into English as The Ego and its Own; more accurately, The Unique and its Property) in 1844, reaction has ranged from complete repudiation to total, uncritical acceptance. Many strange and contradictory things have been said about Stirner. The respected anarcho-syndicalist academic Noam Chomsky has labeled him an influence on the devotees of extreme laissez-faire capitalism erroneously known in the United States as libertarians. However, there are those who have made Stirner’s ideas the very basis of their anarcho-syndicalist organizing. Perhaps such varied interpretations are inevitable when faced with a book that at times seems almost deliberately intended to disturb and disconcert.

The goal of this pamphlet is to explore the ideas of the great German thinker and their value to anarcho-communists. Some readers familiar with Stirner’s work will bristle at this immediately, pointing out that Stirner was an outspoken critic of communism. He was indeed. But the communism that Stirner critiqued was the same variety of communism that anarchists critique – authoritarian communism. Anarcho-communism, as a developed political theory, did not really exist in Stirner’s day, and the communism that Stirner had in mind was the communism of the monastery or of the barracks, a communism of self-sacrifice and general leveling. Those who would instead prefer a communism that guarantees the freedom of each individual to develop themselves as unique can find much that is of value in Stirner.

Stirner’s Ideas

Stirner begins his book by asking, “What is not supposed to be my concern?” He answers that an individual is supposed to be concerned first with God’s cause, then humanity’s cause, the cause of the country, of truth, of justice, and 1,000 other causes. The only cause that is not supposed to concern the individual is her own cause, the cause of self. My cause is not supposed to be my concern. The person who makes their own cause their concern is a selfish person. Instead, the individual is always told to put another cause before their own. We are to work tirelessly in the service of an other or others, never for ourselves. To think of doing otherwise would make one an immoral egoist. We are moral only when we are unselfish, when we take up a cause alien to us and serve it.

Stirner will have none of this. He asks, Does God serve a cause other than His own? No, reply the faithful. God is all in all, no cause can ever not be His. Does Humanity serve a cause that is not its own? asks Stirner, and the humanists reply, No, Humanity serves only the interests of Humanity. No cause can ever not be the human cause.

The causes of God and Humanity both turn out, in the end, to be purely egoistic. God concerns Himself only with Himself, Man likewise. So Stirner encourages his readers to follow the example of these great egoists and make themselves the main thing altogether. In other words, to become conscious egoists. For Stirner, all individuals are absolutely unique, and once the individual has become conscious of her egoism, she will reject any attempt to fetter her personal uniqueness or to restrict her individual autonomy. This of course includes calls to act only in the service of something higher than one’s self. Those who sacrifice themselves to serve some higher being or cause are duped or unconscious egoists, seeking their own pleasure and satisfaction in the name of whatever cause they’ve subordinated themselves to, but refusing to admit it. They are egoists who would like to not be egoists:

“All your doings are unconfessed , secret, covert, and concealed egoism. But because they are egoism that you are unwilling to confess to yourselves, that you keep secret from yourselves, hence not manifest and public egoism, consequently unconscious egoism — therefore they are not egoism, but thraldom, service, self-renunciation; you are egoists, and you are not, since you renounce egoism.”

Stirner begins and ends his book by crying, “I have set my cause upon nothing!” This quotation from Goethe would have been familiar to Stirner’s contemporary German audience. The unstated next line of the poem is, “And all the world is mine.” The self, for Stirner, is something impossible to fully comprehend, because each one of us is constantly consuming and recreating his or her self. Stirner refers to this process of self-consumption and self-creation as the creative nothing: “Not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but nothing in the sense that I as creator create everything.” The external causes that are always asking the individual to put herself last, that treat her as if she were nothing, are now subject to being actively appropriated and used by the egoist as she sees fit.

The Ego and its Own is organized around a three-part dialectical structure. Stirner begins by giving us the example of a human life, and then compares the three stages of human development to the three stages of historical development. We begin life as realistic children. During this phase, the child is subject to physical, external forces such as his parents. However, the child begins to break free of these constraints through what Stirner calls the discovery of mind. The child, by using his wits and determination, begins to evade the purely physical forces which previously kept him in check. In this way, we move from realistic childhood to idealistic youth. The external constraints of the physical no longer hold any terrors for the youth, yet now he is subject to the internal constraints of reason, of conscience, of the ideal. The child is infatuated with the earthly side of life, the youth the heavenly. Only when one reaches egoistic adulthood is one free from both external, earthly constraints and internal, heavenly constraints. Stirner summarizes it thus:

“As I find myself back of things, and that as mind, so I must later find myself also back of thoughts — to wit, as their creator and owner. In the time of spirits thoughts grew till they overtopped my head, whose offspring they yet were; they hovered about me and convulsed me like fever-phantasies — an awful power. The thoughts had become corporeal on their own account, were ghosts, e.g. God, Emperor, Pope, Fatherland, etc. If I destroy their corporeity, then I take them back into mine, and say: ‘I alone am corporeal.’ And now I take the world as what it is to me, as mine, as my property; I refer all to myself. “

Stirner then shows these same three phases in the context of historical development: the realistic world of antiquity, the idealistic world of modernity, and the egoistic future that has not yet dawned. He compares the ancient, pre-Christian world to realistic childhood and the modern, Christian world to idealistic youth. With the rise of secularism, modern society claims to have escaped the domination of religious modes of thought over life. Not so, says Stirner. Modernity has only served to increase the domination of religion – the domination of higher essences set over the individual. One example is the Protestant Reformation. While the Reformation is and was widely regarded as a liberatory event which opened the door for “the religion of freedom of conscience” and freed life from the authority of the church, Stirner viewed it as an expansion and strengthening of religious domination. Religion was, through the Reformation, able to intrude into areas of life where it had previously been unknown. The Catholic church prevented priests from marrying; Protestantism made marriage religious. In a similar fashion, the Catholic church with its institutionalized, formal priesthood, placed religious authority outside of the individual. Protestantism, however, abolished the institutional clergy in favor of a “priesthood of all believers” and so placed religious authority within the believer – an authority that she could never escape. The result left individuals at war within themselves, torn between fulfilling their desires and being tormented by the fixed idea of internalized religious authority. Stirner compares it to the struggle between citizens and the state’s secret police.

This pattern, argues Stirner, has continued throughout modernity. Although there has been much talk of progress and achieving a freer society, of transcending the worn-out values and dead traditions of the past, modernity only transforms authority – enlarging and strengthening it by virtue of making it more invisible. The rise of humanism, for example, dethroned the crucified God and in His place exalted Humanity. But since Humanity is also an ideal placed above the individual for her to subordinate herself to, Stirner considers humanism just as much a religion as the Christianity it claims to have outgrown. “Our atheists are pious people.” Humanism, says Stirner, is actually more tyrannical than theism because the phantom Humanity is able to terrify non-believers along with the faithful. For Stirner, modernity has only increased the number of abstractions (which he called “spooks”) to which people subordinate themselves.

Stirner accuses those who fancy themselves “the free” (we might call them “progressives” in today’s jargon) of posturing as iconoclasts when in reality they are only “the most modern of the moderns.” He was highly critical of the left-Hegelians dominating German philosophy at the time and the liberalism that was rising as the prevailing force in political and social thought. Stirner grouped liberalism into three types: political liberalism (what would today be called classical liberalism), social liberalism (socialism), and humane liberalism (humanism). Political liberalism dealt with individuals as free citizens within a state, social liberalism with individuals as workers, and humane liberalism with individuals as human beings – but all of the varieties of liberalism essentialize some aspect of the individual and set it above her as something that they should subordinate themselves to. For Stirner, all individuals are more than citizens, workers, or even human beings. Human nature or the human essence can not be separated from the individual and set above her, because then it becomes nothing but another spook. For Stirner there is no universal human essence to be set above people, only individuals as they exist in the here and now as flesh and blood.

From his searing critique of modernity, Stirner moves to anticipation of the egoistic future. He urges individuals to demolish all sacred ideas and free themselves from the chains of authority. This liberation is not something the individual can let someone else do for her. Stirner makes his position clear in one of the most eloquent anarchist arguments for self-liberation ever penned:

“Here lies the difference between self-liberation and emancipation (manumission, setting free). Those who today ‘stand in the opposition’ are thirsting and screaming to be ‘set free.’ The princes are to ‘declare their peoples of age,’ i. e., emancipate them! Behave as if you were of age, and you are so without any declaration of majority; if you do not behave accordingly, you are not worthy of it, and would never be of age even by a declaration of majority. When the Greeks were of age, they drove out their tyrants, and, when the son is of age, he makes himself independent of his father. If the Greeks had waited till their tyrants graciously allowed them their majority, they might have waited long. A sensible father throws out a son who will not come of age, and keeps the house to himself; it serves the noodle right…. The man who is set free is nothing but a freed man, a libertinus, a dog dragging a piece of chain with him: he is an unfree man in the garment of freedom, like the ass in the lion’s skin.”

As more and more people become conscious egoists, they will deny restrictions to their individuality, whether these restrictions are physical or spiritual. It should be pointed out that Stirner’s idea of egoism differs significantly from other philosophies sometimes called egoism. Stirner was an advocate of self-interest, even selfishness, but he did not use these terms in the typical narrow way. Stirner was not an apostle of the never-ending pursuit of profit, nor did he preach isolation or use selfishness as an excuse to never give a damn about anyone else. For Stirner, self-interest consisted of the individual egoist actively seizing the world around her as her property. Stirner’s use of the word property has caused many readers to misinterpret him, but he was not referring to property in a limited, economic sense. Rather, he used the word to refer to anything that was not alienated from the egoist. Thus, when I take a personal interest in an idea, I reach out and make that idea my own, my property. To the conscious egoist, the only determining factor toward gaining something as one’s property is the willingness to reach out and take it. The aim of this active seizure of egoistic property is self-enjoyment. Even other people are, for Stirner, a means for (mutual) self-enjoyment:

“For me you are nothing but my food, even as I am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use.”

Those who see Stirner as an advocate of exploiting others fail to read what is written. Stirner used the example of lovers, friends going to a cafe, and children at play as examples of this kind of mutual self-enjoyment or consumption, relationships that he termed unions of egoists. The union of egoists is a relationship in which all who participate in it do so freely and voluntarily out of egoism. The egoist uses the union, the union does not use her. All participants in the union constantly renew the relationship through an act of will; if any participant is coming up short or losing out, then the union has degenerated into something else. The union was Stirner’s proposed alternative method of organizing society, a means by which egoists could “scuttle the ship of the state” and give rise to a state of affairs in which individual autonomy would flourish.

This has necessarily been only an extremely brief summation of Stirner’s ideas, intended to arouse interest and provide context for the second half of this essay. The broadness and scope of Stirner’s thought make him difficult to summarise, and this section could have easily been twice as long. Those hungry for more should refer to the recommended reading list at the end of the pamphlet. Everyone will have to decide how much of Stirner they want to take and what to do with it, but as Stirner himself said regarding interpretations of his work, “that is your affair and does not trouble me.”

“I have set my cause upon nothing!”

Stirner’s Relevance to Anarcho-Communists

It is a fact that until relatively recently, most of the anarchists inspired by Stirner were not communists. In the United States, the most well-known exponents of egoism were Benjamin Tucker and his comrades, centered around the individualist anarchist journal Liberty. Indeed, Tucker was the driving force behind the publication of the first English edition of Stirner’s book. However, he has also been a significant influence on thinkers more in the mainstream anarchist tradition. In the 1940s, the anarcho-syndicalists of the Glasgow Anarchist Group made Stirner’s ideas the basis of their organizing. They took Stirner’s idea of the union of egoists literally as a way of freely organizing within industry and thus explained syndicalism as “applied egoism.” The anarcho-communist activist and cartoonist Donald Rooum was introduced to Stirner by members of this group and has adhered to conscious egoism ever since. Emma Goldman’s anarchism was profoundly influenced by thinkers such as Stirner and Nietzsche. In the introduction to her book Anarchism and Other Essays, Goldman defends Stirner against shallow and erroneous interpretations, commenting that his philosophy contains “the greatest social possibilities.” Even the younger Murray Bookchin, whose attitude toward the German egoist later soured considerably, wrote:

“Stirner created a utopistic vision of individuality that marked a new point of departure for the affirmation of personality in an increasingly impersonal world.”

Clearly, socially oriented anarchists have been interested in Stirner’s ideas. They continue to be interested today, and for good reason. In a world where even revolutionaries too often find themselves lost among enemies of the individual and calls for self-sacrifice, the uncompromising egoism of Stirner is a breath of fresh air. So many communists, while rejecting God the Father, God the State, and God the Corporation, set up instead God the Community, a fearsome deity that Kropotkin called “more terrible than any of the preceding.” For Stirner, as for the egoistic communist, these are all spooks.

The communist egoist does not serve the People, the Masses, or any other spook. She serves herself, because she is part of the people, part of the masses. How can Humanity be happy when you and I are sad? As the self-described Marxist-Stirnerists of the Bay Area group For Ourselves observed, “Any revolutionary who is to be counted on can only be in it for himself; unselfish people can always switch loyalty from one projection to another. Furthermore, only the most greedy people can be relied on to follow through on their revolutionary project.”

Anarchists who wish to demolish the authority of the state and of capital but want to leave the authority of fixed ideas like morality, humanity, rights, or altruism intact only go halfway. For the egoist, these spooks can be even more vicious than the more visible forms of authority. Altruism, living to serve others, is one of the most pernicious superstitions extant in our civilization today. Workers engage in a terrible altruistic action every day when they labor to enrich the capitalist, who receives much simply by virtue of the fact that he has so much already. Women are victims of altruism when they waste away “living to serve” a man who is nothing but a tiny tyrant over the home. The other crimes that come from altruism are endless, and it’s clear to conscious egoists that altruistic socialism is a farce, capable only of transforming authority but not abolishing it. Egoism encourages individuals to no longer die slowly giving presents to those who give nothing in return, and from this idea flows the egoist communist desire for insurrection and expropriation.

When one applies Stirner’s notion of the spook to one of Society’s most sacred idols, private property, the implications are almost necessarily communist. How many individuals have had their ownness sacrificed and lives ruined by this horrible Moloch? Stirner ridiculed the idea of any right to property (as he ridiculed rights generally), pointing out that property is based on might, or one’s power to get it and keep it. Private property – alien property – is just another spook, because the entire world is the egoist’s property, waiting to be taken. In other words, the communist egoist has for the object of her appropriation the totality of life. Stirner hinted at this with his memorable quotation, “I do not step back shyly from your property, but look at it always as my property, in which I ‘respect’ nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!”

Stirner likewise attacked such fundamental aspects of capitalist life as the division of labor and even work itself:

“When everyone is to cultivate himself into man, condemning a man to machine-like labor amounts to the same thing as slavery . . . Every labor is to have the intent that the man be satisfied. Therefore he must become a master in it too, be able to perform it as a totality. He who in a pin-factory only puts on heads, only draws the wire, works, as it were mechanically, like a machine; he remains half-trained, does not become a master: his labor cannot satisfy him, it can only fatigue him. His labor is nothing by itself, has no object in itself, is nothing complete in itself; he labors only into another’s hands, and is used (exploited) by this other.”

In contrast to enforced, degrading, regimented capitalist work, Stirner juxtaposed egoistic labor, which people would take part in purely from egoism and would provide opportunities for self-realization and self-enjoyment. Such egoistic labor might be done alone or in a union of egoists with others, but each participant would remain consciously egoistic. Indeed, Stirner recognized that cooperation was often more satisfying than competition:

“Restless acquisition does not let us take breath, take a calm enjoyment. We do not get the comfort of our possessions…. Hence it is at any rate helpful that we come to an agreement about human labours that they may not, as under competition, claim all our time and toil.”

Stirner’s principle critique of socialism and communism as they existed in his day was that they ignored the individual; they aimed to hand ownership over to the abstraction society, which meant that no existing person actually owned anything. Authoritarian socialism cures the ills of free competition (which Stirner correctly noted was not free) by alienating everything from everyone. This sort of communism was based on Community, on Society with a capital S, not on the union that Stirner desired. A communism that places possessions into the hands of a phantom while leaving nothing for the individual can not really be much more than a new tyranny. Anarcho-communism can benefit from these egoistic insights since they serve as a reminder that communism isn’t sought for its own sake, but as a means to guarantee each unique individual self-enjoyment and self-actualization.

Understanding Stirner’s union of egoists is crucial to understanding his ideas concerning insurrection and how they can be reconciled with more mainstream anarchist views of revolution. Stirner rejected revolution in favor of insurrection, in the etymological sense of “rising above.” “The revolution aimed at new arrangements. Insurrection calls upon us to no longer let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hopes on institutions.” However, Stirner recognized the liberatory potential of group action and the interweaving of each egoist’s personal insurrection, even commenting on the value of strike action:

“The laborers have the most enormous power in their hands, and, if they once became thoroughly conscious of it and used it, nothing would withstand them; they would only have to stop labor, regard the product of labor as theirs, and enjoy it. This is the sense of the labor disturbances which show themselves here and there.

The State rests on the — slavery of labor. If labor becomes free, the State is lost.”

Stirner urged egoists to unite, not out of any maudlin sentimentality or misplaced moralism, but out of a desire to see egoism become generalized in order for each egoist to know the pleasure that can be found in other fully realized individuals. The genuinely egoistic individual will never be satisfied with anything less than a universalized egoism. The egoist unites with those who share her interest, and all the exploited and oppressed certainly have a personal interest in putting an end to their oppression. What other anarchists have called the social revolution is, to the conscious egoist, a massive interweaving of each individual’s personal insurrection, a coming together in a union of egoist to perpetuate what Stirner referred to as “an immense, reckless, shameless, conscienceless, proud crime.” The crime of insurrection, of expropriation, of revolution!

“….doesn’t it rumble in the distant thunder, and don’t you see how the sky grows ominously silent and gloomy?”

Recommended Reading

The Ego and Its Own by Max Stirner. Stirner’s only book and magnum opus. Unfortunately, there is still only one English translation available, Stephen T. Byington’s. Wolfi Landstreicher is currently working on a new one, slated to appear in the near future.

Stirner’s Critics by Max Stirner. In this essay, Stirner (speaking in the third person throughout) clarifies some misinterpretations of his philosophy.

The False Principle of Our Education by Max Stirner. In this article, which predates the publication of The Ego and its Own, Stirner critiques both the humanism of the aristocratic style of education, which aimed to produce disinterested scholars, and the realism of the democratic school of thought, which aimed to produce useful citizens. Stirner, while tending to favor the latter, argues that the goal of education should instead be the cultivation of free, self-creating individuals.

“The Individual, Society, and the State” by Emma Goldman. Goldman’s most “Stirnerian” essay.

“Victims of Morality” by Emma Goldman. In this essay Goldman attacks the spook of morality as a lie “detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people.”

The Right to be Greedy: Theses on the Practical Necessity of Demanding Absolutely Everything by For Ourselves. An inspired fusion of Stirner and Marx by this short-lived Situationist-influenced group. For Ourselves argue that “greed in its fullest sense is the only possible basis of communist society. The present forms of greed lose out, in the end, because they turn out to be not greedy enough.”

The Minimum Definition of Intelligence by For Ourselves. A critique of ideology and fixed thought coupled with theses concerning the construction of one’s own critical self-theory.

The Soul of Man [sic] Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde. This beautiful essay is one of the most eloquent egoist defenses of libertarian communism ever penned. It is not known for certain whether Wilde actually read Stirner; however, he could read German and similarities in style between this text and The Ego make it seem likely that he did. In any case, this anarcho-dandy’s writing is invaluable to the serious student of egoism.

Max Stirner’s Dialectical Egoism: A New Interpretation by John F. Welsh. The most thorough and coherent exploration of Stirner’s thought available in English. An exploration of Stirner’s philosophy, his influence on the thinkers Benjamin Tucker, James L. Walker, and Dora Marsden, and an investigation of the relationship between Stirner and Nietzsche.

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Who is the Gender Abolitionist?

Wednesday, June 5th, 2019

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Who is the Gender Abolitionist?

L. T.

Dear friend,

I was surprised to hear from you today given how busy we both have become, but I am grateful for your letter. I have no doubt you’ve heard me mention the person you are inquiring after from across the room or have seen their text on occasion across the various social media platforms. I openly acknowledge the enigma surrounding the person you’re looking for. It seems they are too-often explained in only the fuzziest usages of language, and so this begs your question: who is the gender abolitionist?

It is probably best to begin by pointing out who the gender abolitionist cannot be. They are not a feminist, for what they strive for is neither the equality of gendered bodies nor the liberation of women from men. This latter point is important, because while the gender abolitionist admits openly that the millennia-old subjugation of women’s bodies is the root of immense and ongoing global catastrophe, they do not see the continuing existence of these bodies as possible after that patriarchy has been truly dissolved. The culmination of a global, years-long campaign to eliminate all misogynistic practices only arrives for the gender abolitionist when women and men have been rendered so materially indifferent to one another that the distinction between the two is decided to be eliminated. I will return to this point later.

The gender abolitionist is, similarly, not one who tolerates the crux of performative accounts of gender such as those advanced by scholars such as Judith Butler. Certainly, transgressions against norms of gendered practices are punished, but this does not reduce the vast structural forces that enforce those norms to the role of policing one’s appearance alone. It is true that trans women faces misogyny in-so-far as they attempt integrating into what is conceived as a normative womanhood, and that trans men may, conversely, reap social and political benefits. Yet we should not forget that it is equally true violence against a trans woman stems from their body’s challenges to a coercive and mandatory practice of strictly gendered sexuality; a body may be altered or disguised, but so long as these two methods by which one pursues performance lies strictly within the structure of gendered discourses, the gender abolitionist must reject them.

If the preceding two approaches do not set out satisfactory practices for the gender abolitionist, what does? I am not sure I can answer this question on every gender abolitionist’s behalf, but I will try my best to at least elucidate what I consider the most important points.

First, to return to a previous point: the gender abolitionist sees patriarchy, and not gender binarism, as the root of the gendered conundrum humanity has found itself in. This is a not unimportant distinction. To decry gender binarism as too limited a model for the possibilities of gendered expression is entirely anti-ethical to the understanding that it is the oppression of one class (women) by another (men) that gives rise to gender in the first instance. By shifting rhetoric from patriarchy to gender binarism, the critics of gender abolitionism immediately give up the ghost of any potential for revolutionary change, and instead embrace a comfort-oriented politics aimed at a mere expansion of terms for those beings men will ultimately, and usually already do, work to subjugate. As I’m sure you are already aware, the historical struggles of black anti-racists have shown us there is no room for the inaction of moderates who prioritize their personal comforts over substantive change during revolutionary struggle.

This is not to say that those who feel as if they to need to step outside of gendered terms in order to describe their way-of-being are at any fault for recent rhetorical shifts. Obviously, the constraints of gender have been felt by much of humanity for many thousands of years, and those who protest these limitations to their desires have always existed. Yet the ways in which this problem has been addressed have been historically unsatisfactory, often leading (if they lead anywhere at all) to the creation of new social roles which are still uniformly constrained but can function as a release valve for the pressures of ongoing, patriarchal oppression. For the gender abolitionist, the various alternatives to what is merely gender binarism, and not gender itself, are not satisfactory in a post-colonial world.

More contemporarily, an increasing number of people now describe themselves as non-binary, genderqueer, or some other variation of an essentially anti-gender impulse. For the gender abolitionist, this is an encouraging development, but it is also a potentially dangerous one. These anti-gender identities are not themselves revolutionary in content; this is all the more apparent to the gender abolitionist who, as I have already pointed out, rejects performativity as an accurate accounting of gender. On one hand, this allows the gender abolitionist to correctly locate the root of anti-gender identities and acknowledge them in their friends as something not based within performativity-based practices such as “passing”; on the other hand, the gender abolitionist recognizes that anti-gender identified friends who fall short of practicing a politics that centers the destruction of patriarchy are not yet themselves gender abolitionists. The non-binary person who still reproduces patriarchy by refusing women dialogue, by not acting in direct opposition to legislation targeting women, and by not even disputing gender directly outside their own self-affirmation cannot be recognized by the gender abolitionist as a comrade in pursuit of gender’s systematic destruction.

All of this to say: representation is dreadfully incapable of telling the gender abolitionist who can be called a friend.

As you know, it is not enough, nor has it ever been enough, for white people (myself especially) to simply call ourselves “not racist.” We long ago agreed that every white person worth their salt in a fight carries out anti-racist practices in order to not just abolish race, but specifically their own whiteness. The gender abolitionist would, I think, hold that this logic extends to gender, ham-fisted of an analogy though it may be. It is not enough for those who refuse the constraints of gender to be not men or neither woman nor man. Those who go about their lives being systematically recognized as a part of manhood must seek to be anti-men; not just among their fellow radicals, but everywhere they go. This is not a process that can leave any stragglers: trans men and non-binary people cannot abdicate their practical complicities in the subjugation of women due to a misguided belief that it is only the binary or the binary’s lack of inner mobility which is the fundamental problem. Such a belief reeks of all the mistaken judgements that characterize the white person who is racially “moderate” and believes the simple construction of a black middle class will soothe all the ills of society.

Ultimately, the gender abolitionist is the one who asks everyone to take up the practices of leveling gender just as readily as they would ask them to be anti-capitalist and anti-racist, because it is only via this leveling that gender’s horrors will be forced to exit from our collective history. Forcing some to give up their real or desired power over others will never be a peaceful or comfortable process, but it is a necessary one.

My friend, I am sincerely sorry for the length of this reply; I do hope it goes some way in prompting even more questions about this topic that we can discuss next time we sit down over a meal.

Yrs.,
L. T.

felix2

***

Filler is a DIY media platform, recording studio & anarchist zine distro affiliated with Pittsburgh’s autonomous student network and the Steel City Autonomous Movement (SCAM).

You can send your report-backs, zine submissions, critiques, graffiti/action photos, demo tapes, hate mail, memes, etc to FILLERCOLLECTIVE [at] RISEUP [dot] NET … we’ll try to get back to you in a reasonable amount of punk time.

We recommend using Tor and guerrilla mail together if you want to submit something anonymously.

Twitter @PghAutonomy
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Tags:anarcha-feminism, anarchism, anarchist zines, anarcho-punk, anarchy, destroy gender, feminism, filler anarchist, filler distro, filler pgh zine, filler pittsburgh, filler zine distro, fillerpgh, gender, gender abolition, gender abolitionist, gender nihilism, materialist feminism, patriarchy, pgh, pittsburgh, queer anarchism, queer liberation, radical feminism, trans feminism, transfeminism, who is the gender abolitionist, zine
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Breaking Binary: A Discussion on Gender Nihilism

Monday, September 18th, 2017

Our discussion with the IGDcast was originally posted to It’s Going Down

CLICK HERE to listen to the podcast.

Detractors on the Right claims that they are the only ones opposed to identity politics, but time and time again, we have seen that they are simply promoting another reactionary flavor. On the Left, many people instead push for a diversity of identities to be represented within capitalism. For those that want the destruction of all forms of domination, we must ask if there is an alternative. But what would that look like, and is it possible to push towards something that conceivably we cannot have a blueprint for? What does this mean for our day to day lives as well as how we struggle, organize, and build collective power?

In this episode, we caught up with several people involved in the Filler Collective, to talk about the concept of Gender Nihilism. In short, we ask if it is possible to understand gender and overcome it in a way that goes beyond liberal notions of inclusion within the dominant system. Is a genderless world possible, and what does fighting for one mean for those living in one where gender norms and roles define all aspects of our lives?

CLICK HERE to listen to the podcast.

Music: Harum Scarum

More Info: Filler Collective, Beyond Another Gender Binary, Destroy Gender.

Tags:anarcha-feminism, anarchism, destroy gender, filler collective, filler pgh zine, filler pittsburgh, gender, gender abolition, gender nihilism, insurrectionary anarchism, it's going down, itsgoingdown, pittsburgh, podcast, queer anarchism, queer liberation
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The Relevance of Max Stirner to Anarcho-Communists

Tuesday, January 10th, 2017

Matty Thomas of the Morgantown Ultra-Left Network
Click HERE for a print-ready PDF of the zine

The Relevance of Max Stirner to Anarcho-Communists

Introduction

stirner02 Since the publication of Max Stirner’s book Der Einzige und Sein Eigenthum (translated into English as The Ego and its Own; more accurately, The Unique and its Property) in 1844, reaction has ranged from complete repudiation to total, uncritical acceptance. Many strange and contradictory things have been said about Stirner. The respected anarcho-syndicalist academic Noam Chomsky has labeled him an influence on the devotees of extreme laissez-faire capitalism erroneously known in the United States as libertarians. However, there are those who have made Stirner’s ideas the very basis of their anarcho-syndicalist organizing. Perhaps such varied interpretations are inevitable when faced with a book that at times seems almost deliberately intended to disturb and disconcert.