Submission from Denise Bosynak received on 07.12.21
A Critique of Pittsburgh’s Anarchist Milieu
In reading the recent piece submitted to Filler about murals motivated by socialist realism point to an ideology that is inherently reformist and demobilizes people, I could not help but feel that this was a strange (albeit very literary and beautiful written) vague post.
Anarchists locally have abdicated the responsibility of revolutionaries everywhere, which is to look at past defeats and failures with thorough scrutiny. It has been unable to grow and instead withers every few years, is replaced by new recruits usually coming to town as students, and then ebbs again. Rinse and repeat.
If Communism bears responsibility for heaping piles of corpses produced by Communist regimes, if Christianity is to be blamed for the Crusades, Inquisition and witch-hunts, then we likewise must look at the practical results in peoples’ lives and not by the pie in the sky promises of helping people “live communism.”
What Responsibility?
This critique is not necessarily directed to the author of that piece or to Filler specifically, it is not to those whose political horizons extend no further than establishing either a “temporary autonomous zone” or a semi-permanent Bohemian enclave in the form of squats, distros, and bars where many frequent consistently. For many who cry about “red fascism” and “tankies,” it is clear that anarchism for them is less interested in overthrowing the existing oppressive order than of washing one’s hands with it. This concern with ensuring the passage of one’s soul to anti-authoritarian heaven can range from the obsessive efforts to perform a certain lifestyle that is “anarchist” to the sectarian refusal to join or work with any group or organization that shows any sign of being “authoritarian” in any way.
For the people, who believe in the need to overthrow the institutions and social relationships that stand in the way of realizing the majority of humanitys needs, this one is for you. Those who are interested in creating a movement from that point rather than presuming we are at that point and those few disparate and disunited individuals engaging in (some good, some bad) shoplifting, gardening, petty vandalism, and riots are already part of that living movement, this one is likewise for you. It may be possible that H.C., because of their references to civilization, is thinking that this oppressive society will collapse on its own without anyone needing to intervene, in which case, this may not even be for them. Hopefully it can be instructive to others who see similar problems.
If one thinks an authoritarian society can collapse on its own, or if they’ve succumbed to such an expectation that the people can’t possibly overthrow this government and that its more probable for society to fall apart, then they should question what was drawn them to politics in the first place.
Mutual Aid’s Lack of Mutality, Or How Survival is Not Automatically Revolutionary
Most anarchists in Pittsburgh have been able to involve more people than are in their immediate scene or proximity through mutual aid projects, usually revolving around free food, meal and/or clothing distribution. While this has perhaps fed some empty stomachs, it still perpetuates small groups working in isolation by creating very minimal political links with those that it is started to serve.
In the abstract politics of “solidarity, not charity” tables are set up at local parks and people are encouraged to come and grab what they need. This orientation of creating services for people to use can often serve to support struggles (of tenants, of youth, of workers, of prisoners, of queer people, and colonized people everywhere) and are thus undeniably important, but divorced of them actually supporting active struggles, it often appears as strangers in different geographic areas providing food items to people.. The interaction between these people is one of help, of being granted something that someone can use to survive, and then typically ends or is continued later on by future asks for additional help. But it seldom, if ever, leads to the initiation of a larger struggle.
This is because most “mutual aid” serves to suffocate class struggle, because instead of organizing people in a political class struggle to ensure that they don’t have an empty stomach in the first place (with those services as a support), it instead treats that support as an end in of itself. This thinking of ‘to survive is revolutionary’ exalts the individual and provides to their needs, but does not provide any road map to getting to liberation. Where have anarchists been for local rent struggles? Around workplace struggles?
This is because one, these services are provided in a way that does not threaten the state, two, because it has not arisen from a struggle, so it is not perceived by the people as the basis for fighting the current social order. In other words, even anarchist-led mutual aid projects do little to look different from any NGO project with funded staff. Its celebrity may win temporary support with the activist left, but results in making few friends with the mass of people who are struggling against the current order. We have a responsibility to note this and change course.
Objective Conditions
It is hard to understand what the Hell H.C. is talking about. Flowery language should be made more direct. As H.C. argues, the comrade-artist thinks the worker needs evangelism and the revolutionary education of the Party, and that the necessity of attacking one’s individual poverties is in contradiction to this, as the Party-teacher helps the workers slowly become aware and capable of governing society. The comrade-artist just does not understand that human nature is such that we are not bound by some convention of “historical determination” (does H.C. mean that Marxists are making up rules for what people are capable of doing? Who knows) and that what we’ve always been doing is out looking for some opportunity to create some sort of unnamed and non-territorial anarchist space. This drive has always been innate in all humans, besides those who have congenitally been drawn to joining authoritarian organization.
One thing is just facts: creating “anarchist spaces” is not some unconscious and spontaneous result of people wanting freedom, it is the result of the historical development of social antagonisms. While treating Marxism as an opportunist ideology that is pre-existing to and ultimately alien form the people and that is then popularized from the top-down by vanguardist parties, H.C. privileges their anarchist theory as being natural to how humans have always thought. Any time anyone regardless of their class background or social circumstance riots or goes on strike, they are “living” anarchy. The only time when anarchist is posed in opposition to some practical-activity is when it involves organizations which are “authoritarian,” in which case, abstracted, dehistoricized people have left this metaphysical area of existence for something which is then determined and external to the people.
The facts are that people belong to classes, where people are from and what their relationship is to others in society creates certain forms of thinking and modes of being, and that this determines ones social and political line of combat. Another is that if everyone was spontaneously anarchist or if spontaneous rebellion alone could construct a revolutionary society needed for our liberation, this would require no intervention by anyone. Given that people have taken the time and pains to label themselves anti-authoritarian and anarchist, one can presume that they want others to assume this political label and to “evangelize” the necessity of this. If one does not think its important to talk about this idea with people, then maybe they should just shut up, because if everyone has some inherent revolutionary potential to them, then there is no need to openly talk about what we believe in. Such propaganda is evanglization and we need none of that, says the anarchist.
H.C. creating a boogeyman of democratic centralism is ridiculous for this reason, anarchists have created their own distinct political circles and like any other Marxist wants others to see the world as their small group does, so as to create one that is free like they want it to be. They are their own “vanguard” without actually taking the responsibility of creating the world that they purport people to need. Leninists, likewise as smaller group, see that there is a relationship (can I say “dialectic” instead of relationship without being fined?) between the mass knowledge people have and the class knowledge of the Marxists, the latter which fuses with the former by the militant participating in the spontaneous movement of the people in order to develop a political program.
The anarchists see the Marxist understanding there needs to be a voluntary intervention on the basis of spontaneous antagonisms in order to create a political party of the proletariat at this point as inherently authoritarian. Whereas their smaller group that is likewise comparing their subjectivity in the form of the affinity group, “crew,” etc. to the people and the organizations they participate in are not authoritarian because they do not dare to encourage them to take leadership. Keeping an invariance from the people allows them to stay pure.
Anarchism in One Neighborhood? One Squat? One workplace?
Under what we are to presume anarchy to be, one can “live anarchy” in just about any space that people temporarily illegally occupy. This does not make sense and is not revolutionary for two reasons, one is economic and the second is militarily.
Capitalism is a world system, meaning no one anywhere is self-sufficient. Obviously some countries have more or less potential for self-sufficiency, but certain problems are effectively universal. Neighborhoods, as a consequence of their population, simply can not hope to meet their own food needs. Some countries, as a consequence of their underdevelopment under colonialism, don’t have the means of producing manufactured goods (clothing, tractors) on which they depend. Another thing is revolution and revolutionary spaces erupted unevenly, because different parts of the world are exploited and face oppression more, so they are required to make decisions in their sociological space that require concessions.
The point here is that there can’t be the eventual creation of a self-sufficient economy (whether one created under conditions of gradual collapse by a vanguard of crust-punks who take upon seizing increasingly re-wilded spaces for the people) within a particular small area, but rather than the economies that revolutionaries inhereit are not self-sufficient and the severing of links with one another will have very disruptive consequences.
The practical answer inevitably is that dependence on the world market and on larger economic systems is reduced in steps. Whether the administrative apparatus is a “federation of free collectives” or a “worker’s state” does not matter, must be able to retain some element of capitalism and of a structure in which decisions are made that may not be voluntarily accepted by one group or another. Good intentions or flowerly language are feeble.
Likewise it is impossible to repel the police or the military on ones own. Making war, even a war of resistance, involves a certain authoritarian logic. In every guerrilla war today, from Colombia, to Philippines, to Vietnam or Cuba in time’s past, there has to be decisions to kill people and send some people off to die so that others may live. Anarchists sometimes claim that decentralized, non-authoritarian structures are inherently so much more efficient than centralized ones and that, as so, this can be applied to military operations. Yet when it comes to day to day planning and operations of war, whether it be in a street battle or in a massive theater of war, decisions of how to strike the enemy can not be decided by a simple up and down vote or by consensus. There has to be an element of surprise and the ability to swiftly strike an enemy, there likewise needs to be internal discipline to make sure there is no defections.
To Marxists, these questions are far more simple. People can not be expected to defeat the enemy in one day, we all (including the comrade-artist’s political organization’s members) must gradually learn how to, and must do it under leadership that creates a relative centralism necessary to manage the economy and to win in a war. I have my own criticism of PSL but to ignore the work that they have done in getting people to understand this is wrong. The responsibility of seeing the cultural gutters most anarchists have put themselves in as dead-end in achieving liberation for the people must be grasped.
Martyrdom, Or Why “Join An Organization” Is Better Than Being An Anarchist
The prevailing anti-Communism on the Pittsburgh left has meant that most people who consider themselves anarchist find themselves uncritically tailing whoever has the courage to make themselves a leader. “Reflections on Leadership and Collective Autonomy” calls for good leadership but ultimately ceded it that day, as it has again and again and again.
Most anarchists in Pittsburgh talk about “fuck left unity” but end up showing up to rallies organized by other “authoritarian” groups and then inevitably feel betrayed or like the people have been policed when the rally organizers do not do something that they think matches the revolutionary credentials of opening up ground for autonomy.
When they have marched with groups who permitted direct action or more illegal forms of struggle, they have acted sectarian towards these groups, baptizing themselves with sectarian behavior and distancing in order to feel cleansed of having to actually engage in something. The truth is many individual anarchists in this city are capable organizers and, yes, leaders, but because of their attitude to political organization and to those who are not anarchist, they find themselves being more friendly with liberal and social democrats who likewise have a preference for handing out lukewarm vegan burritos because of how nonthreatening it is, then to get their hands dirty with Marxists and other revolutionaries willing to take an arrest.
Denise Bosynak, July 2021
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Our material environment arranges life into a procession of neat little rituals. All that is possible or desirable is administered according to the routines built into Campus Life.
No one is quite sure why the lobby of Litchfield Towers is first and foremost a place to glide through in passing, to dodge the solicitations of student clubs, or to purchase coffee. Nor is there much reason to question such fixtures of everyday life; these structures are simply taken for granted as part of our unspoken consensus on reality.
And who really even gives a shit in the first place?
Well, try using a university space for even slightly different purposes and you’ll find out pretty quickly. After all, there are people whose paychecks are predicated on having to give so many shits that they will physically retaliate against any breach in routine. But uniforms are easy targets, rhetorically speaking. The relations encoded in the blueprints of the places they are paid to defend, on the other hand, are what reproduce normalcy.
For an education that liberates. For a classroom that no longer spectates. For house parties where Pitt students, workers, and faculty can throw down together. For a campus culture that terrifies Pitt’s board of trustees. For a campus that celebrates life.
For a University Against Itself
Back in the spring of 2015, a couple friends brought hot food, some boxes of clothing, toiletries, books and zines into the lobby of Litchfield Towers to give away for free. This was the same school year that the University of Pittsburgh’s administration decided to raise tuition, organize a food bank for its students as a sort of half-assed apology, and then jack up tuition a second time just a few short months later. Needless to say, shit was getting rough for a lot of kids at Pitt.
I thought using a student space to share stuff was a cool idea, so I grabbed a few sweaters I could spare on my way out the door that morning. But before I even made it to campus, our group chat started blowing up.
My friends had been kicked out within half an hour of setting up. By the time I got there, a Pitt cop was already chasing them out the door, frantically squawking into his radio, flailing his free arm and demanding they come back to face the consequences.
“Must fulfill duty to defend Law and Order,” said the robot in his head.
“Finally, some action!” thought the man behind the uniform.
Art by Tild Eath
The Task at Hand
Rather than deferring to age and experience, we can sharpen our analytical skills through discussion groups, general assemblies oriented towards communication as an end in itself, and more writing, theorizing, and critique. These are the processes that enable a crew, a community, or a distributed network of subversives to gain mutual understanding and refine their analyses in order to speak precisely about what is happening, what must be done, and—most importantly—how to do it. It is essential to find the time and space to do this with people you trust, whose analysis you also trust, and ideally who come from a range of backgrounds and experience.
– “After the Crest: Part IV,” Rolling Thunder #11
This is not a populist appeal. Nor is this a program to be enacted by some specialized minority of student organizers, “social justice” activists, or would-be insurgents. This issue of Filler is about starting a conversation.
In Pittsburgh, we’ve seen a small but exciting resurgence in everything from reformist mass mobilizations to insurrectionary shenanigans. I have no clue what might go down next semester, but some shit seems to happen over and over again. There are patterns, if you’re looking for them; Campus Life has a way of dissolving back into routine.
An effective analysis of our situation, and a healthy bit of introspection and reflection on our personal objectives, might offer a vision for momentum. But no analysis is fundamentally correct, and certainly no analysis is correct outside the context in which it is conceived. A correct analysis is simply whatever interpretation of social reality best informs our efforts to achieve a given objective. Ideas and conflicts persist, but radical youth scenes, and therefore coherent strategies, are as transient and short-lived as our attention spans.
The conceptual frameworks proposed in this zine are meant to work in tandem with the organizing that folks are already engaged in. The task at hand is to figure out, for ourselves, how to conceptualize and organize the University struggle: what entrances are we neglecting, and where might we find points of departure from which to rekindle the excitement we once felt? After all, the shit we pull off today will determine both starting points and horizons for the next generation of Pitt students.
This zine is also an attempt to contextualize Pittsburgh’s nascent student movement, to frame the coming unrest in a way that just might make some careerist liberal think twice before mentioning their time as club president on a future résumé.
~ I ~ Stories We Tell Ourselves
Organizing has never meant affiliation with the same organization. Organizing is acting in accordance with a common perception, at whatever level that may be. Now, what is missing from the situation is not “people’s anger” or economic shortage, it’s not the good will of militants or the spread of critical consciousness, or even the proliferation of anarchist gestures. What we lack is a shared perception of the situation. Without this binding agent, gestures dissolve without a trace into nothingness, lives have the texture of dreams, and uprisings end up in schoolbooks.
– The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends
History under capital is a history of erasure, or else it would tell a story far more personable than the presidents and cash crops so familiar to students.[1]☭
Today in Pittsburgh, we learn how to reproduce the logic of the men who stamped their names on lecture halls, museums, and libraries. Over a century ago, but only a few miles up the road in Homestead, 19-year-old Andrew Henry Striegel died as a partisan for the living wage: a gunshot to the neck, delivered courtesy of two men also named Andrew and Henry. What is lost in high school textbooks is no mere anecdote, but an entire way of relating, being, and inhabiting that sidesteps the mediation of capital: the urge to live and to act directly in accordance with one’s understanding of the world.
But this is nothing new. History is written by the victors or whatever, right? The histories told in the classroom are just the stories popular culture prefers, an interlocking web of myths to explain the modern world.
All of America’s fundamental myths—property, borders, nations, liberty, debt, democracy—were born in acts of violence, are affirmed by violence, and reality is now mediated through their logic. The mythology of the University is no different.
The reemergence of an american student movement carries two discourses. One is familiar; the other is older and emerges far less often. The first is positioned within the march of progress, the student struggle for peace and opportunity, heated debates in the “marketplace of ideas.” It’s always returning to notions of civic duty and a generation’s political awakening, to celebrations of American democracy with a push from below. And it’s not just liberals or reformists that prefer this discourse. Plenty of so-called radicals fester in nostalgia for the old movement: the workerism of labor leaders, the naïve conservationism of the Greens, the rebranded demands for all-too-familiar concessions (whose benefits hardly last a decade before the economy is again restructured to render them meaningless), or the fatalistic certainty of an impending “final” crisis of capitalism. For these populist radicals, the day will come when all of the single-issue campaigns finally merge towards a swift and (relatively) peaceful transition into social democracy. Progress and Democracy, the Bernie-Bro’s wet dream.
The other discourse revolves around interpreting the social violence that sustains Everything, seeking out opportunities for material opposition and counterviolence. These kids orient themselves according to the latest communiqués and spectacles of the global civil war—the call-and-response discourse of Social War. Youth struggling against the american University inherit war stories from those few generations that figured out what the word “peace” really means, although their historical moments have likely been interpreted beyond recognition. While we can scrounge through the fractured bits of text, theory, and counterculture that these kids left behind, these artifacts do little more than hint at their movements’ key points of departure. Still, the fragments of their stories that somehow survived history are at least enough to inspire. For each retelling, it’s a question of improvising the plot gaps needed to link the acts. Good improv is hard, but not impossible. Sometimes all it takes to work out a strategy for momentum is a contagious tactic, as the 2009 student movement proved by occupying campus buildings all across California. But more often than not, would-be insurgents are left recycling tactics without a broader vision for sustaining disruption or infrastructure.
Of course, no single narrative is capable of telling the whole story, and fixating on a single discourse risks suppressing improvisation. Behind every discursive wave of Social War, from Santiago to Athens, are the privatized ruins of failed social democracies. But the key point here is that, ever since the movement of the 1960s, it’s the youth who are improvising theories of change: rejecting routine, escalating populist campaigns, pushing movements to their limits, writing their own mythologies, and even forfeiting their lives to fend off both State and fascist reaction.
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
– Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Power, Routine, Legitimacy
The administration, the University, the student government, the State—none of these institutions wield power.
Power is a relation, a social structure, a logic. It is both the physical and the psychological force of routine, both the pigs’ monopoly on the legitimate use of violence and the racialized colonial alliances that so often complement it. Power is fused within the organization of space; it is the way in which the flow of things and people (in that order) is enforced and reproduced through infrastructural patterns, ritualizing social hierarchies to the point that they become material conditions. “Those in power” are simply the ones enforcing and rationalizing the arrangement, or perhaps slightly adjusting it to better suit the flow of capital.
Routine is a mechanism whose parts can be infused, even conflated, with one’s identity; both the material organization of a space and its accompanying roles and relations are dependent on popular, undisputed participation and faith. We see this in the games of respectability and professionalism played every day on campus. The dormitory resident assistant is your age, but you will never be their peer. How could you be? At any minute, they could receive an order to search your dorm, summon armed men to detain you, get you thrown out of school.
Behind all power relations are a series of affirming images, reproduced ad nauseum on billboards and social media, personalized in the commodified identities sold on shelves and television shows, and circulated by the institutions that assign and define roles and tasks. From your dorm’s overzealous RA, to the cops that he called on the stoners down the hall, “those in power” are really just fronting the aesthetics of power. They would have us believe that they own exclusive rights over arranging and organizing the places we inhabit, or over the deployment of violence to enforce those modes of relations. Look, they have even the shiny badges to prove it!
The continued reproduction of the images, roles, and identities within a given space is only stable so long as nothing interferes with the rhythms of routine. Whether it’s a student refusing to put her cellphone away in a San Antonio middle school, a young man suspected of shoplifting cigarillos walking down a street in Ferguson, or a few dozen Black youth hanging out at a public pool in a white suburb—any potential disruption of the routine functioning of power relations within a space threatens to destabilize the arrangement and function of that space. Which is to say, disruption carries the potential to temporarily rearrange and repurpose a space toward the production of subversive, non-hierarchical power relations.
Since disruption cuts off the dominant relations at the point of production, the social roles that have been granted “legitimate” uses of force are employed as the first line of defense. The student questioning her teacher’s authority is also questioning the relations encoded in her school; the prospect of a suspected shoplifter making off with a few dollars worth of merchandise warrants extra-judicial execution because it challenges the sanctity of property; the presence of Black bodies in a white space threatens a regime of segregation. Behind every identity that categorizes and enforces ways of being, behind every arrangement of space that directs and determines the relationships that comprise things and people, is a latent violence. Disruption exposes this reality, but it cannot experiment with new forms of life without the capacity for self-defense, for counter-violence.
Exercising force is a tactical maneuver in the discourse of legitimacy. The function and arrangement of a space (public school, convenience store, white neighborhood) must encode a distribution of power that considers the agents tasked with imposing it (cops, pigs, murderers) to be legitimate. In the heart of the Empire, spectatorship translates as passive compliance with the rules of the game, as deference to the legitimacy of white supremacist and capitalist logic; in each of the above examples, white police officers savagely attacked young Black people with legal impunity. The aesthetic of power, then, is also the aesthetic of legitimacy: legitimacy is white, he flashes a badge, he wears a suit, he is a professional, he works within the parameters of the law, he carries a megaphone, he is comfortable in his neon-yellow marshalling vest, he is a man.
Genuine acts of resistance make no appeals to conventional legitimacy, to the symbolic terrain of representation, to negotiation with those fronting the aesthetics of power. Rather, genuine resistance leverages force against the material structures that reproduce reality, in hopes of opening new possibilities.
The academic life contains reinforcing counterparts to the way in which extracurricular life is organized… academia includes a radical separation of the student from the material of study. That which is studies, the social reality, is ‘objectified’ to sterility, dividing the student from life…
– Tom Hayden, The Port Huron Statement
Factory, Colony, University
The University is a knowledge factory, a think-tank expanding capital, a colony in the service of Empire: a site of social control.
The University of Pittsburgh, and the surrounding Oakland neighborhood, is a fucking police state. City cops, Pitt police, Carnegie-Mellon police, Point Park police, Pennsylvania State police, and park rangers all have jurisdiction here (and this doesn’t include rent-a-cops like university security). The administration doesn’t even bother trying to cover up the University’s colonial project; Pitt raises tuition every single year, ensuring that each semester brings richer and whiter students to Oakland. Meanwhile, its legion of pigs occupies the remnants of the original Oakland community to stabilize the process. The colony must grow in order to survive; everywhere, the public University is in its death throes, self-cannibalizing in desperate hopes that the commodification of knowledge, paired with the expansion of its consumer base and labor force, might offset the crisis facing the traditional reproduction of the working class.
The social organization of the University-Colony is a voluntary caste system. The material reality of University infrastructure is sustained by the constant reproduction of social roles: student, faculty, employee, administration, campus police, etc. But those mythical identities only exist in relation to the routines of the University. So in order to ensure that social activity on campus is performed in accordance with the proper University-prescribed identities, Pitt must detach Campus Life from Pittsburgh life—the University “community” must exist outside of the society that constitutes it. And even that “community” is itself further divided into separate social groups, from the academics to the service workers, each premised on a series of affirming images. Pitt hoodies and student ID cards insist the spectacle of Campus Life is not simply a ritualized social performance, but a natural order.
So long as social interaction is directed by the logistics of the neoliberal University—so long as the worker’s labor is converted into the administration’s capital, or the student’s research and debt is transformed into the school’s endowments and marketable reputation, or the untenured professor’s job insecurity is realized as another boring-ass slideshow and multiple-choice exam—all relationships will be mediated by the caste system of Campus Life. So long as capitalists are in control of the University, so long as the University is comprised of capital, the University will oppress and exploit.
Campus Life is a frontline in the social war. Its pretensions of colorblindness, gender equality, and academic liberalism are little more than a smokescreen to cover up the fact that the University itself can never be a neutral institution. A cursory glance at Pitt’s track record is all we need to draw lines in the sand. The normalization and legitimization of misogynistand transphobicplatforms, the Pitt Police’s protection of sexist bro’s and subsequent harassment of queer students, the administration’s utter inaction in response to campus rape culture—this is not naive ignorance to the reality of conflict. This ispartisan activity.
To expand one example, Pitt will neverseriously address campus rape culture: not simply because acknowledging the routine violence of Campus Life might detract from the school’s reputation and therefore its income, but also because patriarchal violence is an integral part of the functioning of the University-Colony. Without that constant violence, and without the resistance to that violence being mediated by the relations of Campus Life, the governance of gender cannot be enforced, and patriarchy is left vulnerable to attack. Without that constant violence, the capitalist University might lose out on a highly profitable form of economic exploitation and social control. Some might go so far as to interpret this violence as an unspoken counter-insurgency strategy, where the brutal repression of half the population is so normalized that any resistance, let alone offensive militancy, is unthinkable.
The University is also a factory, and its owners control the means of knowledge production. Neoliberalism insists on reifying education as a product to be purchased, as a private commodity that can be divorced from daily experience and public life. But, of course, Pitt is somehow both public and private. And so some leftists desperately want to believe that education is still a public good to be defended, consequently ignoring the fact that all of the campus buildings (and everything inside of them) are University property…
If Pitt owns of the means of education, then our performance of “student” produces knowledge only as a marketable commodity. We don’t perform research to better understand our world. We don’t go to class for the sake of advancing, unpacking, and challenging our collective knowledge. Pitt isn’t searching for answers to the crises of this civilization. Finals week doesn’t mean shit. College is just work, except that we fund our bosses and get paid in promises. Academic labor is a glorified means of pushing the frontiers of specialization for the sake of economic growth; everywhere, the University promises its city an economic miracle that never materializes, swearing that the tech students are ushering in their very own Silicon Valley. A financial bubble to rationalize the campus bubble.
The true purpose of academic labor is obvious enough when we’re talking about the students with “practical” majors. Geology, engineering, environmental sciences? Training for the fracking industry. Economics, biology, business? UPMC is the new Carnegie Steel. Some cling to the liberal arts college as if it were the last outpost for receiving an authentic education purely in the pursuit of knowledge. Forbes Magazine calls the liberal arts degree the “hottest ticket” to the tech industry.
Each graduating class is the University-Factory’s latest upgrade to its most popular product: the designer labor force. Nearly a decade of state funding cuts can’t be balanced entirely through tuition hikes. Private and corporate donors funded around 62% of Pitt’s budget in the 2015-2016 fiscal year (30% came from tuition and other fees, a meager 7-8% from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania). These donors, which include corporations like Google and Chevron Oil, don’t shell out cash from the good of their hearts. They want returns on their investments, and Pitt prioritizes its funding accordingly. The University of Pittsburgh’s state-of-the-art Chevron Science Center teaches us commercial sciences that serve the interests of capital, not people.
Pitt’s annual harvest of designer workers is primarily recruited by thesame companies that funded their specialized education. The more innovative graduates join the writers of the algorithms—becoming programmers, city planners, UPMC specialists, engineers. The entrepreneurs among them eagerly await the opportunity to commodify what little remains outside of the economy, perhaps producing trendy apps for couch-surfing, socializing, or sex.
But those jobs are reserved for the cream of the crop; the infrastructure that once provided the conditions needed to support middle class life now lies rotting across the Rust Belt. Capital doesn’t know what to do with our generation, and so we’re sent to school for 30 years, locked away in prisons, or left to fight over menial jobs to keep up with loan payments. The majority of us will graduate as indentured servants. Our generation looks forward to settling the frontiers of economic life, where we will labor in the newly colonized fields of the service industry and the sharing economy. Bill Peduto eagerly prepares East Liberty for the new residents Pitt promised him. Like their liberal mayor, white hipster graduates mourn the postponement of the latest Whole Foods and nod excitedly while watching Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
The ongoing evictions tearing across predominantly Black and working class communities will never end so long as the University exists.
Radicals hardly obstruct this process. After all, Campus Life ensures that malcontents only mimic the appearance of resistance. We end up policing ourselves to build the legitimacy needed for the administration to take us seriously, organizing as “student allies” to abstract identity groups rather than fostering connections with individual workers and faculty, substituting the aesthetics of our countercultures for a concrete break from the images that reproduce Campus Life, working long hours to make Pitt a progressive and democratic university…
Pitt not only accommodates the appearance of resistance, but depends on it in order to stabilize the social groupings that make up the mythical University “community.” The University needs its student labor force to produce the kind of critical feedback that can reenergize and relegitimize its project of technical specialization, capital accumulation, academic centralization, and colonization.
To fight for a progressive and democratic University is to fight for a more brutal and pervasive exploitation, and better ways to disguise it.
Fuck Reality
Until our actions break free from the logic of legitimacy and consensus, until our struggles are oriented outside of all University-prescribed myths – until we openly organize against the University – our anger will be deflected and rerouted into more palatable channels for Campus Life to accommodate.
The interlocking series of myths, the University power structure and its relations, the spectacle of Campus Life that obscures the power structure—these all constitute consensus reality. Consensus reality is more than just the ways of relating that reproduce heteronormative patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, state control, specieism, and the myriad other hierarchies that constrain and destroy life. It is also “the range of possible thought and action within a system of power relations… enforced not only through traditional institutions of control—such as mass media, religion, and socialization—but also through the innumerable subtle norms manifested in common sense, civil discourse and day-to-day life” (Terror Incognita11).
It doesn’t matter what you think so long as you behave, so long as your sense of the possible and your experience of desire does not break with the popular consensus. “Consent discourse presumes that what we want is knowable and can be articulated within the framework of our shared reality” (Terror Incognita16).
Face it, our reality offers nothing to those seeking liberatory social change. Pitt’s consensus reality offers desires (potential courses of action, wants, needs, ways of defining and creating value) that serve only the interests of the University, of neoliberal capitalism. Nothing new can be built, let alone conceptualized, so long as those in power administer the frameworks in which we experience, express, and define our desires. If we have any hope of connecting our own stories to the growing web of insurgent realities waging social war against this reality, consensus must fracture into open conflict.
It follows that Campus Life can only be subverted in a situation of seductive and genuine participation, where the desire to act shatters the passivity and mediation of consensus reality. Should a number of folks at Pitt find a reason join conflictual spaces that negate Campus Life, which is to ask should they conceive of reality as a collaborative project, as participation in an ongoing war between autonomy and social control, how many might never fully return to their normal routines? Near-life experiences are addictive in that way. Suddenly, momentarily, Campus Life’s professional titles like “undergraduate,” “professor,” or “janitor” might be seen for what they truly are: barriers to forming relationships with others on your own terms, prescriptive categories constricting your capacity to define yourself, for yourself. Permits and property laws might no longer meet the collective consensus requirements needed for their reality to continue getting in the way of potential good times. Grades, bills, and three-day study sessions at the library might stop fucking with what were supposed to be the “best years of your life.”
Seriously, though. I sure as hell wasn’t radicalized after hitting up some student group’s meeting. I’m here because I’m still chasing the high from that first punk show in a squat house basement, that first queer potluck, that first renegade warehouse party, that first unpermitted protest, that first smashed Starbucks window.
For conflictual spaces to be truly dangerous, they must constitute a point of participatory, horizontal connection between as many social margins as possible. This requires mobilizing people beyond your social caste within the University-Colony, subverting the spectacular relations of Campus Life, and actively reorienting struggle in a way that violates consensus reality. Put another way, an effective conflictuality essentially breaks the spell, as a young militant told the cameras in Seattle ‘99. The broader social war is already raging beneath the fragile peace of consensus reality.
Last November, a student-led march ended with a brief occupation of the Litchfield Towers dormitory lobby. We seized a space that exists explicitly for our use, that is maintained through our tuition, and we briefly repurposed that space to suit our needs. We left the lobby peacefully, singing,
Don’t walk in front of me I may not follow, Don’t walk behind me I may not lead…
As people left, cops detained one kid from a crew that was trying to prolong the occupation by setting up a sound system from behind makeshift barricades of couches and tables. The march returned to the lobby to ensure the student’s safe release, and within seconds the University police brutally attacked the few protestors that made it back inside. The pigs even charged a student with felony trespassing on her own fucking campus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZEZciB98Tc
That night ended with radical questions circulating beyond our countercultural bubble for the first time in recent memory: Do the Pitt Police really have the right to beat the students they’re supposed to protect? Wait, don’t we pay to use that building? Well shit, do the police even have the right to dictate how students use our campus in the first place?
The following Monday, the crisis of legitimacy reached new heights. A broad coalition of campus organizations called for a last-minute rally at the site of the previous week’s police violence. That morning, the administration sent out a text message and an email to every student enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh, warning them about the demonstration. On Towers patio that afternoon, nearly the entire Pitt police force, many donning masks, manned a militarized zone that separated students from the dormitories we pay to maintain. Inside the lobby, the Pitt administration cowered behind their armed guards. Outside, a small crowd of about 50 students, along with a few faculty members and Pitt workers, refused the admin’s sheepish request for us to send a single representative inside for a dialogue with the administrators. Instead, we proposed they come out and join us in the cold, where they would have no opportunity to control us by appointing and manipulating a leader.
The crisis of legitimacy, no longer abstract, was reified in the guns and batons that prevented students from entering the very building many of us call home.
Disruptions, undertaken individually or collectively, can become a force of negation. Disruptions are a threat on the assembly line, in the streets, in the lecture hall; anywhere the logic of capital administers the structure of space. But disruptions are not enough. As Franz Kafka reminds us, “From a certain point onward, there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”
An occupation is the realization of the threats we make through disruption. To occupy is to strike, to remove a material place from capitalist time and space, to derail alienated activity and ride its inertia off the tracks, to rip open latent contradictions in the fabric of consensus reality. When we occupy, we create a base from which to launch new negations, but more importantly a subjectivity that is actively experimenting with new forms of life.
Disruption, negation, experimentation, occupation — the suspension of routine and rhythm, the conversion of a thousand plagiarized, angst-ridden zines into something terrifying and new: the insurrectional desire to experience unmediated forms of life here and now, to live communism and spread anarchy.
In a university that also operates within (and maintains) consensus reality, orienting action as a search for conditions that might solidify and circulate anti-capitalist relationships is more than mere prefiguration. It ensures the reproduction of alternative social ties, spaces, ideas or desires as an offensive tactic. It is an attack on isolation: an opportunity to share our experiences with one another, to celebrate our differences, and to expose the real lines being drawn in the social war. Elaborating insurrectionary potential requires more than blockading the flow of relations conducive to capital; it is a process of reorienting relationships and shared spaces towards the creation of new and transient collective realities. In other words, we must constantly recreate a “we” that isn’t a lie.
The crisis sparked by the brief occupation of the Litchfield Towers lobby drew lines in the sand, and suddenly kids from both populist and autonomous scenes found themselves sharing a declaration of “we.” The front page of the Pitt News read, “Students, administration clash over Thursday night protest.”
The front page of the Pitt News read, pick a side.
It’s been two years since the fabric of Pitt’s consensus reality really started fraying. In April of 2015, 78 Pitt faculty signed a letter protesting neoliberal-Playboy Chancellor Gallagher’s call for “Making an Impact Through Commercialization.”
Keeping knowledge free is in our own professional self-interest. The open and free exchange of research and data is essential to advancing scientific knowledge, and commodification threatens this fundamental principle of scientific inquiry…
In addition, universities are increasingly subject to pressure from their corporate “partners” to manipulate, suppress or simply avoid research that counters the interests of those who fund it…. We must be prudent in devising strategies for the production and dissemination of knowledge that maintain intellectual integrity, are inclusive rather than exclusive, and that create opportunity for and empower all members of our communities.
The university is one of the few places where our society might find leadership in developing the ideas and models we need to re-orient society in ways that can help to ensure that everyone today and in future generations can share in the benefits that so many of us at Pitt enjoy.
In 2017, our teachers are no longer on the defensive. The faculty and graduate students are both organizing with the United Steelworkers, with many comrades among them. But in order for these efforts to force a rupture that reveals the social war raging behind every new Starbucks and tuition hike, radical agitation should also shift to the offensive. The discourse of Progress and Democracy is especially dangerous after the election of Donald Trump. Radicals working within reformist groups need to exploit the heightened polarization and emphasize an anti-fascist framework if they want to prevent liberals and Trump-collaborators from pacifying these campaigns. The radicals on the outside need to familiarize themselves with the new social terrain, identify opportunities for militant disruption, constantly reevaluate their ideas of autonomy, and develop a broader strategy for circulating alternative social ties and desires. If we can’t generalize such a conceptual shift soon, popular consensus will normalize not only the Trump regime, but also the impending escalation of reactionary violence and State repression.
On our end, student-faculty and student-worker solidarity efforts are almost exclusively defensive, not to mention predicated on the relationships between self-appointed representatives of abstract identity groups. Fighting for specific reforms that could help our friends survive in the short-term is no substitute for finding ways to meet those needs ourselves: a gradual accumulation of concessions will never outpace the march of neoliberalism and the resurgence of fascism, let alone offset the rising cost of living. Conventional approaches like “raising awareness” about issues like union neutrality, the far-right, shitty wages and tuition hikes are crucial in base-building, and they could potentially present a counter-narrative to the administration’s justifications and propaganda. But waiting around for the University to fuck up on its own isn’t going to start the insurrection.
“If you want to force a change,” Milton Friedman advised his Chicago Boys, “set off a crisis.”
~ II ~ Dead Ends
The same people who practice “critique” are also the most susceptible to cynicism. But if cynicism is simply the inverted form of enthusiasm, then beneath every frustrated leftist academic is a latent radical.
– Communiqué from an Absent Future
There is a peculiar grasp of method in the student organizing scene: the student group, the coalition, the teach-in, the petition, the letter-drop, the buttons and felt squares, the op-eds, the one-on-ones, the classic A-to-B march around Oakland, the discourse of accessibility or of buzzwords (intersectionality, systemic, anti-oppression, safe(r) space, self-love, revolutionary, collective liberation, community, consensus). Yet despite all of the base-building and the “meeting-people-where-they’re-at,” student groups at Pitt rarely break out of the initial education/negotiation stage of a campaign.
Each year’s new organizational leadership is drawn from that small base of students who spent their time as underclassmen slowly building their organizer cred: attending panel discussions and meetings, doing grunt work like flyering or gathering signatures, and then (maybe) hitting the streets during the occasional national mobilization. And each year the new board members, steering committees, core collectives, presidents, and “philanthropy chairs” mount their pylons of networking in-crowds and NGO internships only to gape helplessly at the massive turnover of the next semester.
For the student radicals working within reformist organizations, campaign strategies are inherited from the upperclassmen that bought them beer back when they first got involved. It’s chic to vaguely identify with anti-fascist and feminist politics, but some organizers cringe at –isms and are always sure to lecture newcomers on why it’s alienating to reference political theory. The only acceptable discourse is that of Progress and Democracy, which offers few tools for critiquing reform campaigns, but plenty of buzzwords for drafting petitions.
For the students who don’t try to disguise their analysis in the language of bourgeois populism, an unrelenting emphasis on intersectionality, autonomy, and horizontalism is the only authentic way forward—although nobody’s quite sure what these things look like in practice. This crowd is oftenlazily defined as the millennial activists; youth who conflate “organizing” with a directionless activism that is marred by ideological purity, adventurism, and (an admirably merciless) militancy. It’s a tired critique, but it definitely rings true whenever our organizing efforts and direct actions are oriented towards public visibility, rather than their emotional and material impact on both the community we long to build and the reality we despise. Besides, if the goal of an action is purely symbolic or designed to attract media attention, it ends up being little more than an impatient and unsuccessful populism (see: Democracy Spring).
Whatever way you spin it, student radicals in Pittsburgh are experiencing a degree of strategic polarization comparable to the tensions within highly mobilized campuses. One camp is acting out the politics of a populist routine, the other performs a pseudo-radical spectacle: one is base-building around modest demands without ever actually escalating, the other rides shotgun to trending hashtags from the latest revolt; one is checking off boxes on the never-ending list of “somethings” to accomplish before the final crisis of capitalism, the other desperately reblogs every adventurous breach in the anxiety of the everyday.
That being said, this section is not intended to define these tensions within some false dichotomy of “activists” versus “organizers,” or “autonomists” versus “populists.” Rather, I hope to challenge radicals working within one or both of the two most prevalent discourses (Progress and Democracy and Social War), to critically evaluate their relationships to the organizational frameworks, identities and desires produced by consensus reality. We won’t build momentum through the reconciliation of abstract tendencies, but there’s a chance things might start rolling if frustration can be articulated as the need for experimentation, or if the struggle to get out of bed nurtures a spirit of negation. [1, 2]
Critique illuminates all the errors of a society that its managers have overlooked. It is the perfect interlocking mechanism of stagnation, stunting the growth of burgeoning, subjective revolt by offering one a whole buffet of irresistible, irrelevant options for “change.” A release valve for intellectual dissonance, critique today resembles the state-sponsored “strikes” of communist countries, where the desire for resistance is satiated by a regimented diet of acceptable means of conflict, supervised by its very enemies.
– Preoccupied: The Logic of Occupation
The Populist
It’s true that the populist camp’s suspicion of ideology is a positive development. The tragedy of the 1960s is often told with fingers drawn at Maoist vanguards or lifestylist dropouts and escapist communes. But at least in the ‘60s you could generally figure out what the fuck it was that the people working with you really believed in. The problem today is that just about every populist, reform-oriented student group is a “Big Tent” organization, except that instead of involving the coordinated effort of multiple theoretical tendencies, there’s just a vague political spectrum that goes from “sorta liberal” to “hella radical.” With this in mind, it makes sense that the default discourse for most student groups is that of Progress and Democracy.
Regardless of one’s place in the spectrum, the ambiguous and moralistic populism surfacing alongside the Progress and Democracy discourse is now developing as an ideology.
The populist, much like their cultural mirror in the hipster, is quick to shed or appropriate new political aesthetics, shrugging off any attempt at classification with the flick of a hand-rolled cigarette. The absence of any theoretical framework or clear ideological affinity within student groups leads many organizers to act out populism as a sort of cautious defeatism, often under the guise of being “realistic” or “patient.” Populism is encouraged by the Unions and NGOs that assign demands to student front-groups, administer the organizing frameworks, and then recruit and fund young radicals. This practice is typically rationalized with talk of building power through a gradual procession of concrete “wins” and creating accessible, entry-level political spaces. Such arguments ignore the reality of the situation: most student organizations are reproducing the logic of capital.
Not merely capitalist logic, like equating brand recognition with public support, or choosing tactics based on the input of popular opinion (read: market research), but the logic of capital. The organizational leadership determines and enforces the character of the individual organizers’ productivity, extracting surplus value from their activism in the form of social capital, brand recognition, and financial donations or grants. The organizers’ productivity itself is valued according to event turnout, or by the sympathy that the student group wins from the administration (which is to say, the organizers’ efficiency in siphoning the inclinations of individuals into an agenda the student group controls). But most of all, the logic of capital emphasizes its own never-ending reproduction, of the definition of “activism” as it exists within the confines of Pitt’s consensus reality. Reformist organizations are ultimately conflating quantifiable “wins” and concessions with building movement momentum, conflating the range of possible reforms granted by the discourse of Progress and Democracy with the process of improving material conditions. Consequently, radicals working within the populist camp face a much higher risk of being co-opted; many end up adopting populism as an ideology, rather than using it as an accessible discourse for organizing conflictual spaces and materially supporting the people that inhabit them.
At Pitt, each and every student group is competing for our participation. Students really don’t have much free time, so of course it’s easier to focus on the things that are immediately accessible. Genuine concern for the working conditions of the people who create the products we consume translates into pressuring the administration to divest from this or that unethical company, or perhaps into individual choices like shopping fair-trade. But are these viable solutions? Now that the campus bookstore has a friendly face, the University can resume profiting from its brand name and new progressive image, and the “ethical” companies can continue selling their particular brand of green capitalism. Having a clean conscious is far too often a luxury that comes with the kind of price tag few can afford, although taking out loans is always an option. Good intentions are sabotaged by reality.
Time constraints force student radicals to narrow our rage into a single issue, or else risk overextending ourselves and sacrificing our mental health. After we’ve chosen a focus, reformist groups shape and mold that rage into a passionate-but-reasonable simmer in order to appeal to a broader audience. Each single-issue organization must specialize its labor force, lest its workers distract from the campaign narrative, or (god forbid) start assuming tasks that are generally reserved for the top-dog organizers, such as making PR decisions, organizing meetings and actions, networking with other groups, and writing propaganda pieces.
Sound familiar? That’s because it’s the same logic of our neoliberal education. Students’ skills are specialized during a point in our lives when we should be exploring our interests in ways that aren’t predicated on utility or dictated by specialists. I’m not trying to suggest there’s something inherently wrong with becoming skilled in a field, or committed to winning a demand, and it’s not like students have spare time to dedicate to every hobby we entertain. But just as students cannot keep ignoring the ways in which our education is centralizing knowledge production and training us for participation in the capitalist economy, the radicals working for populist organizations cannot keep ignoring the ways in which reformist campaigns are centralizing agency and training organizers for careers in the non-profit industrial complex. The liberal tendencies within student groups are dangerously close to monopolizing dissent on campus, and the populist discourse of Progress and Democracy is turning well-meaning radicals into another specialized class of students telling other students what to say and how to act.
Seriously, are there any radicals working in the populist camp that haven’t been lectured by some condescending liberal about cuss words and respectability? Hasn’t everyone heard an older, more “experienced” organizer exaggerate a sigh before vapidly explaining the difference between essentialist abstractions?
Between the “ill-timed” actions that are too disruptive/confrontational/alienating, and the merits of more “strategic” tactics, such as symbolic protest or asking super tough questions;
Between the events and meetings that are too broad or open-ended, and those that are building the movement (or rather, their organization);
Between the “good allies” passively following the instructions of a certain identity group’s self-proclaimed “leaders” (as if everyone within that identity has the same interests and beliefs as those that speak on their behalf), and the “bad allies” actively prioritizing social and political affinity?
Let’s not even bring up the violence vs nonviolence dichotomy…
The problems with the populist camp only amplify with scale. At the individual level, populist frameworks for activism and organizing do little to challenge the desires and social roles allowed by the University’s consensus reality. At the organizational level, the student group is structured by the relations of capital and thus depends on the perpetual specialization, reproduction, and exploitation of labor-power. The discourse of Progress and Democracy produces a populism that is both ideological and anti-theoretical, confining student groups to reformist narratives whilst depriving the radicals within them of the ability to collectively evaluate their efforts in relation to a broader vision for revolutionary change. When viewed as a whole, it’s clear that there is a widespread deference to the sorts of actions, decision-making processes, people, and ideas that are perceived to be “legitimate” within the campus Left; meaning that the majority of student-led campaigns—successful or not—do little to disrupt the Spectacle of Campus Life, cultivate actively (as opposed to passively) desiring individuals and collectivities, or subvert the myths that uphold Pitt’s consensus reality. The heteropatriarchal / white-supremacist / neoliberal University’s ongoing colonization of social and economic life remains unchallenged at best, reenergized and relegitimized at worst.
We seek to push the university struggle to its limits. Though we denounce the privatization of the university and its authoritarian system of governance, we do not seek structural reforms. We demand not a free university but a free society. A free university in the midst of a capitalist society is like a reading room in a prison; it serves only as a distraction from the misery of daily life. Instead we seek to channel the anger of the dispossessed students and workers into a declaration of war.
– Communiqué from an Absent Future
Reactive Autonomy
The emergence of an autonomous scene at Pitt is not the result of the spontaneous self-organization of radicals. In this early stage, it is a reaction-formation to the alienation of both Campus Life and the Populist Left.
Under Campus Life, each layer of alienation is turned into a private war with boredom, anxiety, and misery. The Pitt employee’s creative power is wasted on a 40-hour week of swiping IDs for students who will never learn his name. The adjunct professor must compete with her colleagues for a position, and even if she lands the job she’s not sure if she’ll be able to put food in her kid’s lunchbox. The student, perpetually intoxicated (if not through substance use, then through the countless other opiates sold to us), ironically satirizes and downplays the desperation underpinning their every attempt to balance life priorities—to finish class assignments, to keep in touch with distant relatives and loved ones, to calculate just how many hours of their life they must sell just to pay off their loans, to grapple with the scale of just how fucked we all are, to feel intimacy beyond the games of social capital and political manipulation. Everywhere, a quiet resignation to routine.
To be politically engaged, to root for one brand of elite interests against another, is no less a resignation to routine than going to work in the morning. To organize for University reform, to beg for the privilege to play faithful advisor to the administration’s strategic plan, is more of an endorsement of neoliberalism than an indictment.
Last year’s “strategic forums” once again channeled student anger into mediation, representation, and routine. The potential for a multi-front confrontation with the administration was outright squandered by a few prominent organizers, who leaped at the opportunity to represent the student body as student-advisors to Pitt’s strategic plan. In response to the populist left’s blatant complicity with these self-appointed student leaders and the administration’s recuperative efforts and propaganda, a few small crews of students broke away from their student organizations. Some of us opted to call for an alternative, autonomous “student action forum.” We thought the forum would create a space for students to discuss and self-organize around the issues closest to them. The forum was a flop (someone please remind me to at least hit up like a facilitation training or something before I ever try to call another general assembly), but it was also a turning point.
Autonomy attracts us because we’ve seen its potential to transform one’s sense of individual and collective power, to seduce spectators into active participation: its potential to inspire others to search for liberatory experiences and projects on their own terms. But autonomy is also a process. It requires intentionally theorizing and experimenting with our conceptions of autonomy in order to determine what practices will result in the active provocation, solicitation, and circulation of contradictory and complementary insurgent desires. Without continual experimentation and negation, without an intention that goes beyond “fuck that liberal bullshit,” we become passive consumers of the aesthetics and practices associated with autonomy, all the while reproducing the same relationships and arrangements of space that centralize power, agency, and legitimacy. In other words, we can cling to “spontaneity,” “horizontalism,” or “self-organization” (abstractions likely passed down from Occupy) all we want, but these words are practically meaningless until we start to facilitate spaces that provide the skills, platforms, tools, dialogue, material and emotional support required to inspire and nurture spontaneity, horizontalism, self-organization, autonomy.
The radicalism in our autonomous scene is reactionary primarily because it fails to break from the frameworks we are reacting to. Just because Pitt doesn’t recognize our crews as legitimate student organizations and none of us have “club presidents” doesn’t mean anything’s changed. The reactionary autonomist stagnates with their radicalism as an aesthetic; they parade their consensus processes, rowdy actions, militant rhetoric, nominally non-hierarchical meetings, and discourse pissing-contests in order to disguise the fact that they are reproducing the same organizing styles found in the populist camp, albeit with a sexier attitude.
If you think I’m projecting, that’s because I am.
How I became an organizer and started hurting people I care about.
Four years ago, my first real week spent “organizing” on a campaign ended with a series of banner drops that were timed to coincide with an SEIU strike. Shortly after, the more “experienced” student organizers suddenly stopped working with me. I found myself on a sort of unspoken blacklist after word got out that I allegedly dragged barricades into the street and vandalized University property with labor slogans. It was my first real mobilization; I honestly had no fucking clue what the word “escalation” implied, or how my actions might have made the campaign look bad. All I knew was that I wanted Something to happen, and that my decision to act on that desire managed to piss a good number of people off.
I still tried to be involved; I kept turning up at meetings long after I had stopped participating in any meaningful way. The older organizers gave me the cold shoulder, and I would leave early to cry alone in my dorm, or to smoke weed with you under the bridge in Schenley.
I don’t know where I’d be now if we hadn’t found each other. Like me, you were alone, stoned, and binge-watching that super dope first season of Vice on HBO. We rolled into every Free the Planet meeting high off our asses, even though we felt pretty unwelcome showing up there anymore. We spent most nights together, smoking by the Shrine under the bridge, throwing illegal bonfire parties on the lake by the train tracks, hitting every basement show at Bates Hardcore Gym, tripping face – sometimes twice a week – on Flagstaff Hill, passing around that grimey notebook I eventually scanned and printed as the second issue of Filler. I still remember holding your frostbitten hands as we climbed down from the roof of Towers Lobby; fifteen minutes spent fumbling with frozen wire, trying to drop our first banner together in the middle of a blizzard.
Months after the coalition splintered back into its original organizations, we realized we were still admins of the Facebook page. We hijacked that shit and told ourselves that we’d use it to organize differently, that we’d encourage militant action instead of shaming it, that we’d push the student movement toward the attack. We called for the first explicitly anti-capitalist march on Pitt’s campus since Occupy imploded, and all 40 of us marched for two blocks down the sidewalk…
Some older Pittsburgh radicals took notice, but despite their help we still had no idea what the fuck we were doing. We stagnated as those angry kids yelling on street corners, we fractured after our “formal” accountability processes proved worthless. We dedicated the weight of our emotional energy to the mere maintenance of our tiny organization before burning out one by one… by the end of the semester, we all retreated back into our respective countercultures.
We don’t talk much anymore, but it’s still comforting to read through the goofy shit you wrote in our notebook,
People come and go, it’s never going to change. But those times were still fun, and probably really strange.
By the end of 2014, I was slowly plugging back into the populist scene, albeit as part of a different student group. This time, I took their organizing trainings to heart, convinced that our failure to organize autonomously stemmed from a lack of organizational formality. I began rehearsing my interactions with people to the point that they were script-like, my voice echoing the cold, indifferent speech I picked up while attending countless meetings. I complied with every request to bottomline bullshit tasks; I found myself competing with the other underclassmen to get the most petition signatures in hopes that the older organizers might take my politics seriously.
It wasn’t all that long before a new “we” broke away once more to organize autonomous action, yet by that point I had already turned into a “serious” “organizer.” We threw benefit parties, but I stressed over attendance numbers and the zine table instead of enjoying myself and catching up with friends. We called for general assemblies hoping to inspire intersectionality, or to present alternatives to the administration’s “strategic forums,” but really I just wanted everyone else to adopt my proposals and integrate their work into my own vision for a student union. We organized Share Fairs and Really Really Free Markets to build community and practice mutual aid, but I secretly valued people for the material items they contributed instead of the energy they brought to the space. We wiggled our hands in all the gestures of consensus process, but it was always the same people proposing ideas and facilitating the meetings. I adopted all the aesthetics of radicalism only so I could pretend that I was creating space instead of taking it.
Still, this new scene had real momentum, and it was only a matter of months before some of us started conspiring to escalate a populist march. The escalation was part of our plan for a series of autonomous interventions in the 2016 United Students Against Sweatshops convergence, which the Pitt chapter was putting in hella work to host that year. We thought the convergence presented an opportunity to push a national organization, with chapters on dozens of campuses, in a more radical direction… but also, like, personal politics. After the populist radicals found out about our plan, they invited me to the organizing meetings for the big march. Finally! I had been given a seat at the table. People were taking our mess of an informal coalition seriously! I didn’t even mind when I noticed that the list of participating organizations printed alongside the meeting minutes concluded with “oogles” where it should have read “Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition.” I mean, shit, that was pretty funny.
But then the professional organizers started telling me what they needed “my” “organization” to do, and somebody gave me a clipboard. Which was, of course, the last thing my ego needed. When the big day came, I indulged my newfound legitimacy and took my place alongside the other march marshals. Clipboard in hand, I micromanaged each step my friends took, hoping to control every beat of the march so I could pull off a pointless escalation that was, in all honesty, motivated more by personal politics than a strategic vision. When the time came for the autonomous crews to escalate, no one followed the plan, because by then it had become my plan. I was too busy sulking to notice the circle of young radicals forming around the Food Not Bombs shopping cart. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but free food and a black flag did more to spark an autonomous scene than a strictly choreographed extra fifteen minutes in the street ever could have. Most of those kids are now close friends and comrades.
It is not a question of choosing between these two sides, nor of synthesizing them, but rather of displacing the priority of this opposition. The real dialectic is between negation and experimentation: acts of resistance and refusal which also enable an exploration of new social relations, new uses of space and time.
– “We are the Crisis” in After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California
Incite, Conspire, Diversify
The autonomous scene has grown exponentially since the USAS convergence. There’s no sense in constructing some fancy framework for analyzing our interpersonal relationships, as my use of the phrase “autonomous scene” is simply shorthand for a series of overlapping networks (of organizations, informal crews, circles of friends, accomplices, codefendants, bitter enemies) that are, to varying degrees, coalescing outside of the mediation of University-affiliated student groups or political parties. The “autonomous scene” is an intentionally vague phrase, and it’s far bigger than any of the various acronyms we use to form social clusters within it.
Our anxiety, boredom, and misery inhabit a critical historical moment. Our relationships are indisputably militant, as every time we manage to really, truly connect with someone, it’s because our realities merged along some plane of revolt against isolation, mediation, domination, control. Even the administration can’t ignore that “we” are experimenting with the communization of our segregated realities—that “we” are learning how to, if only briefly, create autonomous spaces in which there really is a “we.” And we want more.
If defining the scene in concrete terms risks suppressing its potential to nurture relationships that don’t fit neatly within Campus Life, then how can it be critiqued? Without a clear picture of what counts as being a part of “the” autonomous scene, without formal specialization or hierarchy, how can we generalize a shared perception of our situation? What sort of frameworks for decentralized coordination can extend beyond our immediate social circles, when we struggle to do so even on a scale as small as Pittsburgh’s radical youth scene?
The social war is already all around us. It’s not a question of merging the various social and political circles into some unified campaign, but of facilitating the realization of mutual desire.
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.
In California, the kids spray-paint We are the Crisis on the walls of occupied lecture halls. In Greece, they write We are an Image from the Future.
What could “we” be?
“We aren’t revolutionaries, but we are the revolution. And sometimes I think that the whole movement is just me and you…”
Appendix
There is at least one practice worth prioritizing and refining. Healthy doses of introspection, taken alone or with the guidance of trusted comrades, might be a step in the right direction. Some questions I find myself habitually returning to:
What are my short-term and long-term objectives? What are the first steps, and how can I take them while staying true to my beliefs?
Does my current project require bringing in, training, or even radicalizing new people? Or can it be better accomplished with a few close friends who are already on the same page?
Am I making time and space to hear my comrades’ criticisms, to learn together, and to unpack each other’s shit?
Is this crew/organization a closed collective with a formal process for integrating and welcoming new people? Should there be a separation between public events and collective meetings? What sort of decisions are made in these spaces, and how are they made? Is everyone in the crew/organization participating in planning the next public meeting/event, and if not, what’s the difference between being a member and part of the general public? Are there informal hierarchies that negatively impact the participation of others? Yeah, no shit there are, so what are you going to do about them? What’s the most strategic way to address them?
When was the last time I revised my personal theory of change? How can my crew and I intervene in campaigns that seem to be stagnating? Are my organizing efforts, actions, and events actually getting me closer to any of my objectives?
Is my crew prioritizing its abstract “organizing” work or its participation in an organization/campaign over its capacity to emotionally and materially support the people that comprise it?
If my crew for this project is just me and two friends, is there consensus on whether it’s actually necessary to form or participate in a formal organization? How is everyone doing on, like, an emotional level? Maybe it’s time to just chill and enjoy each other’s company for a bit?
Am I building affinity through trust and compassion? If not, how can I create space for healing?
Am I having fun? Am I getting enough sleep? Am I falling into the trap of capitalist conceptions of productivity?
[1]☭So, what is capital? Fredy Perlman defined capital as, “…at once a name for a social relation between workers and capitalists, for the instruments of production owned by a capitalist, and for the money-equivalent of his instruments and ‘intangibles,’ …” Capital is a social relation that necessitates the use of things in a specific way, and it is those things in so far as they are directly reproducing this social relation in the process of value accumulation. As Marx emphasized in the Grundrisse, capital must be understood as a process. Marx defined capital variously as “a social relation of production,” “value in process,” “a Moloch,” “accumulated labor,” and most poetically as “dead labour which, vampire like, lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”
– Jan D. Matthews, An Introduction to the Situationists
Filler issue #6, “For a University Against Itself,” is out now! Physical copies are available for sale – all proceeds will go to our comrades’ legal defense funds here in Pittsburgh. The print-ready pdf and an online reading version will be released next week. In the meantime, if you can’t get ahold of us for a physical copy, enjoy this promotional video 🙂
Solidarity with all our friends and comrades facing state repression. We got this yall, stay strong!
A(n incomplete) compilation of quotes from anarchists, past and present, about what anarchism/anarchy is and what it means to them. Almost all of these texts can be found online for free.
Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man’s subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man. There is no conflict between the individual and the social instincts, any more than there is between the heart and the lungs: the one the receptacle of a precious life essence, the other the repository of the element that keeps the essence pure and strong. The individual is the heart of society, conserving the essence of social life; society is the lungs which are distributing the element to keep the life essence–that is, the individual–pure and strong.
– Emma Goldman, “Anarchism: What It Really Stands For” in Anarchism and Other Essays (1910)
In a nutshell, then, the meaning of Communist Anarchism is this: the abolition of government, of coercive authority and all its agencies, and joint ownership-which means free and equal participation in the general work and welfare.
– Alexander Berkman, “What is Communist Anarchism?” in The ABC’s of Anarchism (1929)
Anarchism means that you should be free; that no one should enslave you, boss you, rob you, or impose upon you.
It means that you should be free to do the things you want to do; and that you should not be compelled to do what you don’t want to do.
It means that you should have a chance to choose the kind of a life you want to live, and live it without anybody interfering.
It means that the next fellow should have the same freedom as you, that every one should have the same rights and liberties.
It means that all men are brothers, and that they should live like brothers, in peace and harmony.
That is to say, that there should be no war, no violence used by one set of men against another, no monopoly and no poverty, no oppression, no taking advantage of your fellow-man.
In short, Anarchism means a condition or society where all men and women are free, and where all enjoy equally the benefits of an ordered and sensible life.
– Alexander Berkman, “What is Communist Anarchism?” in The ABC’s of Anarchism (1929)
But ours is neither the Communism of Fourier and the Phalansteriens, nor of the German State-Socialists. It is Anarchist Communism, — Communism without government — the Communism of the Free. It is the synthesis of the two ideals pursued by humanity throughout the ages — Economic and Political Liberty. -Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (1892)
Anarchism is not a concept that can be locked up in a word like a gravestone. It is not a political theory. It is a way of conceiving life, and life, young or old as we may be, whether we are old people or children, is not something final: it is a stake we must play day after day. When we wake up in the morning and put our feet on the ground we must have a good reason for getting up, if we don’t it makes no difference whether we are anarchists or not. We might as well stay in bed and sleep. And to have a good reason we must know what we want to do because for anarchism, for the anarchist, there is no difference between what we do and what we think, but there is a continual reversal of theory into action and action into theory. That is what makes the anarchist unlike someone who has another concept of life and crystallises this concept in a political practice, in political theory. -Alfredo Bonanno, The Anarchist Tension (1996)
Solidarity, that is the harmony of interests and of feelings, the coming together of individuals for the wellbeing of all, and of all for the wellbeing of each, is the only environment in which Man can express his personality and achieve his optimum development and enjoy the greatest possible wellbeing. This is the goal towards which human evolution advances; it is the higher principle which resolves all existing antagonisms, that would otherwise be insoluble, and results in the freedom of each not being limited by, but complemented — indeed finding the necessary raison d’être in — the freedom of others. -Errico Malatesta, Anarchy (1891)
Insurrectionary anarchism is one such form, although it is important to stress that insurrectionary anarchists don’t form one unified block, but are extremely varied in their perspectives. Insurrectionary anarchism is not an ideological solution to social problems, nor a commodity on the capitalist market of ideologies and opinions. Rather it is an on-going practice aimed at putting an end to the domination of the state and the continuance of capitalism, which requires analysis and discussion to advance. Historically, most anarchists, except those who believed that society would evolve to the point that it would leave the state behind, have believed that some sort of insurrectionary activity would be necessary to radically transform society. Most simply, this means that the state has to be knocked out of existence by the exploited and excluded, thus anarchists must attack: waiting for the state to disappear is defeat.
Here we spell out some implications that we and some other insurrectionary anarchists have drawn from this general problem: if the state will not disappear on its own, how then do we end its existence? Insurrectionary anarchism is primarily a practice, and focuses on the organisation of attack. Thus, the adjective ‘insurrectionary’ does not indicate a specific model of the future. Anarchists who believe we must go through an insurrectionary period to rid the world of the institutions of domination and exploitation, moreover, take a variety of positions on the shape of a future society — they could be anarcho-communist, individualist or primitivist, for example. Many refuse to offer a specific, singular model of the future at all, believing that people will choose a variety of social forms to organise themselves when given the chance. They are critical of groups or tendencies that believe they are ‘carriers of the truth’ and try to impose their ideological and formal solution to the problem of social organisation. Instead, many insurrectionary anarchists believe that it is through self-organisation in struggle that people will learn to live without institutions of domination. -Do or Die #10, Insurrectionary Anarchy (2003)
Volumes have been written in answer to this question, and millions of people have dedicated their lives to creating, expanding, defining, and fighting for anarchy. There are countless paths to anarchism and countless beginnings: workers in 19th century Europe fighting against capitalism and believing in themselves instead of the ideologies of authoritarian political parties; indigenous peoples fighting colonization and reclaiming their traditional, horizontal cultures; high school students waking up to the depth of their alienation and unhappiness; mystics from China one thousand years ago or from Europe five hundred years ago, Daoists or Anabaptists, fighting against government and organized religion; women rebelling against the authoritarianism and sexism of the Left. There is no Central Committee giving out membership cards, and no standard doctrine. Anarchy means different things to different people. However, here are some basic principles most anarchists agree on.
Autonomy and Horizontality: All people deserve the freedom to define and organize themselves on their own terms. Decision-making structures should be horizontal rather than vertical, so no one dominates anyone else; they should foster power to act freely rather than power over others. Anarchism opposes all coercive hierarchies, including capitalism, the state, white supremacy, and patriarchy.
Mutual Aid: People should help one another voluntarily; bonds of solidarity and generosity form a stronger social glue than the fear inspired by laws, borders, prisons, and armies. Mutual aid is neither a form of charity nor of zero-sum exchange; both giver and receiver are equal and interchangeable. Since neither holds power over the other, they increase their collective power by creating opportunities to work together.
Voluntary Association: People should be free to cooperate with whomever they want, however they see fit; likewise, they should be free to refuse any relationship or arrangement they do not judge to be in their interest. Everyone should be able to move freely, both physically and socially. Anarchists oppose borders of all kinds and involuntary categorization by citizenship, gender, or race.
Direct Action: It is more empowering and effective to accomplish goals directly than to rely on authorities or representatives. Free people do not request the changes they want to see in the world; they make those changes.
Revolution: Today’s entrenched systems of repression cannot be reformed away. Those who hold power in a hierarchical system are the ones who institute reforms, and they generally do so in ways that preserve or even amplify their power. Systems like capitalism and white supremacy are forms of warfare waged by elites; anarchist revolution means fighting to overthrow these elites in order to create a free society.
Self-Liberation: “The liberation of the workers is the duty of the workers themselves,” as the old slogan goes. This applies to other groups as well: people must be at the forefront of their own liberation. Freedom cannot be given; it must be taken. -Peter Gelderloos, Anarchy Works (2010)
What is Anarchism exactly? People have asked and answered this question since the birth of the word as a distinct political philosophy within the revolutionary tradition. Most definitional tracts on the “ABCs of anarchism” were penned long ago. I will try to offer an introduction to anarchism from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century. More specifically, I will hone in on anarchism’s aspirations, as opposed to its history or current practices. That Anarchist projects, and anarchists themselves, fall short of these aims underscores how essential it is to transform society in order to also transform ourselves. “We’re only human,” the saying goes, but our humanity is profoundly damaged by the alienated world of control that we inhabit. Anarchism contends that people would be much more humane under nonhierarchical social relations and social arrangements. […] As will hopefully become clear, anarchism serves unflinchingly as a philosophy of freedom, as the nagging conscience that people and their communities can always be better. -Cindy Milstein, Anarchism and its Aspirations (2010)
The question “Why I am an Anarchist” I could very summarily answer with “because I cannot help it,” I cannot be dishonest with myself; the conditions of life press upon me; I must do something with my brain. I cannot be content to regard the world as a mere jumble of happenings for me to wander my way through, as I would through the mazes of a department store, with no other thought than getting through it and getting out. Neither can I be contented to take anyone’s dictum on the subject; the thinking machine will not be quiet. It will not be satisfied with century-old repetitions; it perceives that new occasions bring new duties; that things have changed, and an answer that fitted a question asked four thousand, two thousand, even one thousand years ago, will not fit any more. It wants something for today. -Voltairine De Cleyre, Why I Am An Anarchist (1897)
Anarchism is the idea that everyone is entitled to complete self-determination. No law, government, or decision-making process is more important than the needs and desires of actual human beings. People should be free to shape their relations to their mutual satisfaction, and to stand up for themselves as they see fit. Anarchism is not a dogma or a blueprint. It is not a system that would supposedly work if only it were applied right, like democracy, nor a goal to be realized in some far-off future, like communism. It is a way of acting and relating that we can put into practice right now. In reference to any value system or course of action, we can begin by asking: How does it distribute power? –Crimethinc, To Change Everything (2014)
Anarchism is the teaching of freedom as the foundation of human society. Anarchy (in English: without rule, without authority, without state) thereby denotes the condition of social order aspired to by the anarchists, namely the freedom of each individual through the general freedom. In this objective, in no other, consist the common bonds of all anarchists with one another, consists the fundamental distinction of anarchism from all other social doctrines and human faiths.
Whoever asserts the freedom of the individual person in demanding the community of all people, and conversely whoever equates the freedom of society with the freedom of all those who are communally bound within it, has the right to call himself an anarchist. Whoever, on the other hand, believes it acceptable to place people for the sake of the social order, or society for the sake of the presumed freedom of people, under external compulsion, has no right to be considered an anarchist. The different views about the paths which humanity must take to arrive at freedom, about the means by which the forces resistant to freedom are to be fought and conquered, about the endless forms and institutions of the libertarian society, comprise differences of opinion among anarchist tendencies within the common world view. Their comparison and evaluation is not the object of this work, which limits itself to expounding and promoting the principles of communist anarchism as considered correct by the author and those anarchists closest to him in conviction and engagement. -Erich Mühsam, The Liberation of Society from the State (1932)
Anarchism is the goal that we pursue: the absence of domination and of the state; the freedom of the individual. Socialism is the means by which we want to reach and secure this freedom: solidarity, sharing, and cooperative labor.
Some people say that we have turned things upside down by making anarchism our goal and socialism our means. They see anarchy as something negative, as the absence of institutions, while socialism indicates a positive social order. They think that the positive part should constitute the goal, and the negative the means that can help us to destroy whatever keeps us from attaining the goal. These people fail to understand that anarchy is not just an abstract concept of freedom but that our notions of a free life and of free activity include much that is concrete and positive. There will be work — purposeful and fairly distributed; but it will only be a means to develop and strengthen our rich natural forces, to impact our fellow human beings, culture, and nature, and to enjoy society’s riches to the fullest.
Anyone who is not blinded by the dogmas of the political parties will recognize that anarchism and socialism are not opposed but co-dependent. True cooperative labor and true community can only exist where individuals are free, and free individuals can only exist where our needs are met by brotherly solidarity. -Gustav Landauer, Anarchism – Socialism (1895)
Our program can be summed up in a few words: Peace, emancipation, and the happiness of the oppressed. War upon all oppressors and all despoilers. Full restitution to workers: all the capital, the factories, and all instruments of work and raw materials to go to the associations, and the land to those who cultivate it with their own hands. Liberty, justice, and fraternity in regard to all human beings upon the earth. Equality for all. To all, with no distinction whatever, all the means of development, education, and upbringing, and the equal possibility of living while working. Organizing of a society by means of a free federation from below upward, of workers associations, industrial as well as a agricultural, scientific as well as literary associations – first into a commune, then a federation communes into regions, of regions into nations, and of nations into international fraternal association. -Mikhail Bakunin, Stateless Socialism: Anarchism (sometime between 1814-1876)
From the time anarchism was first defined as a distinct radical movement it has been associated with the left, but the association has always been uneasy. Leftists who were in a position of authority (including those who called themselves anarchists, like the leaders of the CNT and the FAI in Spain in 1936–37) found the anarchist aim of the total transformation of life and the consequent principle that the ends should already exist in the means of struggle to be a hindrance to their political programs. Real insurgence always burst far beyond any political program, and the most coherent anarchists saw the realization of their dreams precisely in this unknown place beyond. Yet, time after time, when the fires of insurrection cooled (and even occasionally, as in Spain in 1936–37, while they still burnt brightly), leading anarchists would take their place again as “the conscience of the left”. But if the expansiveness of anarchist dreams and the principles that it implies have been a hindrance to the political schemes of the left, these schemes have been a far greater millstone around the neck of the anarchist movement, weighing it down with the “realism” that cannot dream. -Wolfi Landstreicher, From Politics to Life: Ridding Anarchy of the Leftist Millstone (2000s)
Like revolution, love, friendship and the wide variety of other possible relationships are not events one waits for, things that merely happen. When one recognizes herself as having agency, as being an individual capable of acting and creating, these cease to be wishes, ghostly longings aching in the depth of one’s gut; they become possibilities toward which one moves consciously, projectually, with one’s will. That burning energy that goads one to revolt is desire — desire that has broken free from the channel that reduced it to mere longing. This same desire that moves one to create her life as a projectuality toward insurrection, anarchy, freedom and joy also provokes the realization that such a projectuality is best built on shared projects. Liberated desire is an expansive energy — an opening of possibilities — and wants to share projects and actions, joys and pleasures, love and revolt. An insurrection of one may indeed be possible. I would even argue that it is the necessary first step toward a shared insurrectional project. But an insurrection of two, three, many increases courage and enjoyment and opens a myriad of passional possibilities. -Wolfi Landstreicher, Against the Logic of Submission (2005)
Anarcho-primitivism (a.k.a. radical primitivism, anti-authoritarian primitivism, the anti-civilization movement, or just, primitivism) is a shorthand term for a radical current that critiques the totality of civilization from an anarchist perspective, and seeks to initiate a comprehensive transformation of human life. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as anarcho-primitivism or anarcho-primitivists. Fredy Perlman, a major voice in this current, once said, “The only -ist name I respond to is ‘cellist’.” Individuals associated with this current do not wish to be adherents of an ideology, merely people who seek to become free individuals in free communities in harmony with one another and with the biosphere, and may therefore refuse to be limited by the term ‘anarcho-primitivist’ or any other ideological tagging. At best, then, anarcho-primitivism is a convenient label used to characterise diverse individuals with a common project: the abolition of all power relations — e.g., structures of control, coercion, domination, and exploitation — and the creation of a form of community that excludes all such relations. -John Moore, A Primitivist Primer (1990s)
Anarchist individualism as we understand it – and I say we because a substantial handful of friends think this like me – is hostile to every school and every party, every churchly and dogmatic moral, as well as every more or less academic imbecility. Every form of discipline, rule and pedantry is repulsive to the sincere nobility of our vagabond and rebellious restlessness!
Individualism is, for us, creative force, immortal youth, exalting beauty, redemptive and fruitful war. It is the marvelous apotheosis of the flesh and the tragic epic of the spirit. Our logic is that of not having any. Our ideal is the categorical negation of all other ideals for the greatest and supreme triumph of the actual, real, instinctive, reckless and merry life! For us perfection is not a dream, an ideal, a riddle, a mystery, a sphinx, but a vigorous and powerful, luminous and throbbing reality. All human beings are perfect in themselves. All they lack is the heroic courage of their perfection. Since the time that human beings first believed that life was a duty, a calling, a mission, it has meant shame for their power of being, and in following phantoms, they have denied themselves and distanced themselves from the real. When Christ said to human beings: “be yourselves, perfection is in you!” he launched a superb phrase that is the supreme synthesis of life. -Renzo Novatore, Anarchist Individualism in the Social Revolution (1919)
You are waiting for the revolution! Very well! My own began along time ago! When you are ready — God, what an endless wait! — it won’t nauseate me to go along the road awhile with you! -Renzo Novatore, My Iconoclastic Individualism (1920)
Anarchism is a profoundly social movement as distinguished from the usual political movements we associate with The Left. Its vitality, its theoretical form, indeed its very raison d’etre stem from its capacity to express the millenia-long aspirations of peoples to create their own egalitarian or, at least, self-administered social structures, their own forms of human consociation by which they can exercise control over their lives. In this sense, Anarchism really constitutes a folk or people’s social philosophy and practice in the richest sense of the term, just as the folk song constitutes the emotional expression of a people in their esthetic or spiritual depths. -Murray Bookchin, Anarchism: Past and Present (1980)
The philosophy of anarchism is included in the word “Liberty,” yet it is comprehensive enough to include all things else that are conducive to progress. No barriers whatever to human progression, to thought, or investigation are placed by anarchism; nothing is considered so true or so certain, that future discoveries may not prove it false; therefore, it has but one infallible, unchangeable motto, “Freedom”: Freedom to discover any truth, freedom to develop, to live naturally and fully. Other schools of thought are composed of crystallized ideas — principles that are caught and impaled between the planks of long platforms, and considered too sacred to be disturbed by a close investigation. In all other “issues” there is always a limit; some imaginary boundary line beyond which the searching mind dare not penetrate, lest some pet idea melt into a myth. But anarchism is the usher of science — the master of ceremonies to all forms of truth. It would remove all barriers between the human being and natural development. From the natural resources of the earth, all artificial restrictions, that the body might be nurtures, and from universal truth, all bars of prejudice and superstition, that the mind may develop symmetrically.
Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals. -Lucy Parsons, The Principles of Anarchism (1905)
As for the Anarchists, never will we separate ourselves from the world to build a little church, hidden in some vast wilderness. Here is the fighting ground, and we remain in the ranks, ready to give our help wherever it may be most needed. We do not cherish premature hopes, but we know that our efforts will not be lost. Many of the ignorant, who either out of love of routine or simplicity of soul now anathematize us, will end by associating themselves with our cause. For every individual whom circumstances permit to join us freely, hundreds are hindered by the hard necessities of life from openly avowing our opinions, but they listen from afar and cherish our words in the treasury of their hearts. We know that we are defending the cause of the poor, the disinherited, the suffering; we are seeking to restore to them the earth, personal rights, confidence in the future; and is it not natural that they should encourage us by look and gesture, even when they dare not come to us? In times of trouble, when the iron hand of might loosens its hold, and paralyzed rulers reel under the weight of their own power; when the “groups,” freed for an instant from the pressure above, reform themselves according to their natural affinities, on which side will be the many? Though making no pretension to prophetic insight, may we not venture without temerity to say that the great multitude would join our ranks? Albeit they never weary of repeating that Anarchism is merely the dream of a few visionaries, do not even our enemies, by the insults they heap upon us and the projects and machinations they impute to us, make an incessant propaganda in our favor? It is said that, when the magicians of the Middle Ages wanted to raise the devil, they began their incantations by painting his image on a wall. For a long time past, modern exorcists have adopted a similar method for conjuring Anarchists. -Elisée Reclus, An Anarchist on Anarchy (1884)
One qualifier that we feel is important to begin with is the distinction between “anarchy” and “anarchism”. Some will write this off as merely semantics or trivial, but for most post-left and anti-civilization anarchists, this differentiation is important. While anarchism can serve as an important historical reference point from which to draw inspiration and lessons, it has become too systematic, fixed, and ideological…everything anarchy is not. Admittedly, this has less to do with anarchism’s social/political/philosophical orientation, and more to do with those who identify as anarchists. No doubt, many from our anarchist lineage would also be disappointed by this trend to solidify what should always be in flux. The early self-identified anarchists (Proudhon, Bakunin, Berkman, Goldman, Malatesta, and the like) were responding to their specific contexts, with their own specific motivations and desires. Too often, contemporary anarchists see these individuals as representing the boundaries of anarchy, and create a W.W.B.D. [What Would Bakunin Do (or more correctly–Think)] attitude towards anarchy, which is tragic and potentially dangerous. Today, some who identify as “classical” anarchists refuse to accept any effort in previously uncharted territory within anarchism (ie. Primitivism, Post-Leftism, etc) or trends which have often been at odds with the rudimentary workers’ mass movement approach (ie. Individualism, Nihilism, etc). These rigid, dogmatic, and extremely uncreative anarchists have gone so far as to declare that anarchism is a very specific social and economic methodology for organizing the working class. This is obviously an absurd extreme, but such tendencies can be seen in the ideas and projects of many contemporary anarcho-leftists (anarcho-sydicalists, anarcho-communists, platformists, federationists). “Anarchism”, as it stands today, is a far-left ideology, one which we need to get beyond. In contrast, “anarchy” is a formless, fluid, organic experience embracing multi-faceted visions of liberation, both personal and collective, and always open. As anarchists, we are not interested in forming a new framework or structure to live under or within, however “unobtrusive” or “ethical” it claims to be. Anarchists cannot provide another world for others, but we can raise questions and ideas, try to destroy all domination and that which impedes our lives and our dreams, and live directly connected with our desires. -Anonymous, What is Green Anarchy? (1990s)
What is Anarchism? Anarchism is free or Libertarian Socialism. Anarchists are opposed to government, the state and Capitalism. Therefore, simply speaking, Anarchism is a no-government form of Socialism. […]
Anarchists are social revolutionaries, and feel that the Social revolution is the process through which a free society will be created. Self-management will be established in all areas of social life, including the right of all oppressed races of people to self-determination. As I have stated, self-determination is the right to self-government. By their own initiative, individuals will implement their own management of social life through voluntary associations. They will refuse to surrender their self-direction to the State, political parties, vanguard sects since each of these merely aid in establishing or reestablishing domination. Anarchists believe the state and capitalist authority will be abolished by the means of direct action-wildcat strikes, slowdowns, boycotts, sabotage, and armed insurrection. We recognize our goals cannot be separated from the means used to achieve them. Hence our practice and the associations we create will reflect the society we seek. -Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution (1993)
Anarchy is the obliteration of property. -Ravachol, My Principles (1859-1892)
The Relevance of Max Stirner to Anarcho-Communists
Introduction
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.
CLICK HEREfor a print-ready pdf of the zine
Every Cook Can Abolish Governance (Part 1) can be read online here
From Occupation to Resistance
My opening shift and hangover are finally over. Time to get something to eat and have a smoke before I go back to close for another seven hours. The prep list is finally filled out and everything is mise en place¹, lunch rush is over, the manager is back at her desk taking an hour to reply to an email, and as I’m walking out the front door of the cult burrito chain, my co-workers are playing rock-paper-scissors to see who has to do dishes until I return. After playing catch-up and covering others all morning, I’m going to take an extra fifteen minutes.
These chain restaurants (fast food, fast casual, whatever) apply the logic of the prep list to all aspects of the kitchen. Labor hours and wages are budgeted and enforced by management; just as with the prep list, they punish for any “waste” and “excess” for any purpose. Did you have more work than taken into account by the prep list? Was your lunch/dinner rush busier than expected? Too many people called out and no one can make it in? Staying late to clean for an inspection the next day? Never are the prep list, the algorithms, the management, or anything with power criticized for the shortcomings of those in power. The crew just needs to work harder, everyone just needs to cover each other and everything will be okay. As if a kitchen that normally runs on five people can run on two or three as if it’s not a major change from the regular flow of work. As if any of us want to do the work of three people for the wages of one!
The need for communism transforms everything. Through the need for communism the need for non-work moves from the negative aspect (opposition to work) to the positive one: the individual’s complete availability to themselves, the possibility to express themselves absolutely freely, breaking away from all models, even those considered to be fundamental and indispensable, such as those of production.
“Fucking watch it!” yells a man wearing clothes worth more than my yearly salary. Just let me smash bottles in the parking lot, asshole. I have fifteen minutes left to kill before they call me to come inside and stop being indignant, let me enjoy it. I step back to the curb and do what pissed off cooks do best: sit down.
Two years before I was in the same kitchen, somewhere further away. Doing the same shit for less pay, in a faster environment, with meaner management, and no smoke breaks on shift (unless you’re management). One day I clocked in for the mid-shift around ten, started the shift as normal. My coworker, the cashier this shift, was ten minutes late due to the bus schedule either arriving ten minutes late or before her child’s day care opened. That day the Area Manager (general manager of the general managers) was doing her monthly inspection, where she gets to blow off steam on crew members. As soon as the cashier arrives, the AM screams at her until she leaves the store. Myself and the rest of the crew were on-edge until the doors opened and we had no more time to worry.
Lunch rush approached, and I felt some beautiful combination of dread and fury brewing inside me. The AM went off for half an hour about “personal responsibility” and how “she had to do the same thing” as the recently fired cashier. She’s been a big mouth for awhile, we already heard those stories about her mom paying her rent and babysitting for her during those “tough times.” I couldn’t deal with anything I was feeling and decided I couldn’t just calm down.
The line goes through the door as the rush peaks. I walk over to the cooler, put my back to it, and slide down. The AM sees me and immediately gets red in the face screaming at me.
“What is this? A fucking strike?!”
“I guess so!”
Five minutes of back and forth screaming and the area manager agrees to rehire the mother she fired an two hours ago. Unfortunately, none of my coworkers joined in. Some thought I was absolutely out there to risk my job, some later thanked me and started talks of something bigger…
I walk back into the kitchen, say my hellos to the night crew who just came in, and relieve whoever was covering me at the dish pit. Unsurprisingly, no one kept it up after twenty minutes. Hard to blame them, we aren’t allowed to have to back door open and the industrial sized fan is more likely to knock you over than keep your cool.
Slowly I build up momentum again and start busting out dishes and keeping the back room tidy. The dish pit can only ever been caught up after the doors close, anything sooner is naive optimism. After awhile you need to accept it can’t be finished, and hope if someone needs something specific that they’re capable of cleaning it on their own. I put the plastic apron on the hook and head up to the front to back-up the grill cook during dinner rush. It goes by quickly, and during a lull in the action I make moves to make some food, steal a drink, and take my break.
During the first three or so weeks at this job, no one got breaks unless our “performances showed we deserved to have them.” If we didn’t get everything mise en place and swept clean before open, no one got to eat for the seven or so hours they were on the clock². Everyone in the crew hated it except the few who got the shorter shifts. Together we started taking our breaks at 10:30am on the dot every morning, despite pleas from the shift managers. Sometimes you just really want to be treated like a human being and have your needs met. Sometimes everyone around you feels the same way. After two weeks of taking back a half an hour a day, management decided to make it mandatory we all take breaks by at least 10:45.
Eventually it became common practice to just take break at 10:30 as long as your station was clean, regardless of how much of your share of the prep list you finished.
At this particular store, we ran a crew of five. Four working from 8-4ish, and two working 11-7ish, then night crew, with four working 4-12. Without the optimism of assuming everyone shows up, there are eight people working eight hour shifts. When each weekly (or bi-weekly) schedule comes out, the amount of money able to be spent on wages is represented as labor hours. Labor hours are wages put into ratio time and used to budget each store. Say the base wage is $9/hour, so each labor hour costs $9.
So if all eight people work eight hours at $9/hour, they spend sixty-four labor hours. But not everyone in the store works for the base wage. Shift managers make closer to $18/hour (two labor hours per hour worked) and kitchen managers closer to $13/hour (one and a half labor hours per hour worked). Five people work eight hours, using forty labor hours. One kitchen manager works eight hours, and two shift managers work eight hours each, using forty four hours.
Freedom is a destructive concept that involves the absolute elimination of all limits. Now freedom is an idea we must hold in our hearts, but at the same time we need to understand that if we desire it we must be ready to face all the risks that destruction involves, all the risks of destroying the constituted order we are living under. Freedom is not a concept to cradle ourselves in, in the hope that improvements will develop independently of our real capacity to intervene.”
The schedule limits labor hours each day by expected production (the same algorithms that decide on what and how much is produced each day on the prep list). A total of eighty-four hours means nothing except when put in comparison with the limit of seventy hours a day. Never was there ever enough time to properly clean and close the store. Any time spent over the limit warranted an angry phone call from higher-ups, or worse reprisals.
Clocking back into work after my break, I sneak out the back to take out the trash bags. Every trip takes me about ten or fifteen minutes, I wanna enjoy this cigarette. There’s a nice breeze outside and it would be a shame if I missed it to wash dishes. I go in once again, sneak over to the bathroom, then return to the dish pit. The manager, one of my best friends at the store, comes over to help me bust out dishes before we close. They already did my prep work while I was outside, no patience I guess. We go back and forth scrubbing and rushing to scrape burnt rice out of pans. Once shit gets ‘reasonable’, they dip to go clean the other side of the back of house. Without them, I’d probably have to pretend to do it. Saves me having to lie once again.
We finish whatever we can until there’s enough labor hours left for us all to piss for pay. Boss makes a dollar, we make a dime, that’s why we piss on company time. Then we clock out and step out for a cigarette together to commiserate the berating we’re going to get tomorrow morning for how sloppy everything is. I couldn’t care less, I don’t have to open tomorrow and I got to take an extra two hours break today. Going to the bathroom, taking out trash, sweeping outside, hiding out in the walk-in cooler, smoking a second cigarette, anything to increase the tension with management and reveal the absurdity of work.
So, when these gentlemen say, ‘You are utopians, you anarchists are dreamers, your utopia would never work’, we must reply, ‘Yes, it’s true, anarchism is a tension, not a realisation, not a concrete attempt to bring about anarchy tomorrow morning’. But we must also be able to say but you, distinguished democratic gentlemen in government that regulate our lives, that think you can get into our heads, our brains, that govern us through the opinions that you form daily in your newspapers, in the universities, schools, etc., what have you gentlemen accomplished? A world worth living in? Or a world of death, a world in which life is a flat affair, devoid of any quality, without any meaning to it? A world where one reaches a certain age, is about to get one’s pension, and asks oneself, ‘But what have I done with my life? What has been the sense of living all these years?’
An article from Filler #3 by A. Sid
[Filler Collective // Students for Justice in Palestine // Pittsburgh Student Solidarity Coalition // Pgh Autonomous Student Network]
For centuries, the American political system has served one primary function: to act as a safety valve for this nation’s most vital dissent. By funneling voters into one of two camps, the American ruling class has effectively nullified any and all populist causes that do not receive lip service from either political party. When one of the parties does decide to embrace the desires of their constituents, they do so in the least effective manner possible, opting instead for surface level changes that appease enough of the population to defuel the cause.
Bernie Sanders’s recent call for a “political revolution” has ignited a fire in the hearts and minds of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. Sanders’ economic populism is a welcome sight for a nation still struggling to escape the mire of recession. But for many on the left, Sanders’ decision to run as a Democrat is disheartening enough to dismiss him altogether. In conjunction with his stances on the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people and the Black Lives Matter movement, this has made Bernie seem soft in the eyes of the far left. Once again, our end of the spectrum has chosen to forsake the political process in favor of the tried-and-true methods of direct action and outside agitation.
Herein lies our failure. Our refusal to work with the system is borne out of an entirely justified fear of having our causes co-opted and our missions left incomplete. History has taught us that expecting the system to deliver the reforms we seek is a futile task. But if we’re willing to dig deeper, we find that systemic change can indeed be achieved through the system. A prominent example can be found in the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1989, a bevy of Soviet satellites held elections – preceded by massive protests – which freed these newly independent nations from Moscow’s clutches. By ousting the Communists, the former Soviet republics established democratic systems that, although still plagued by corruption and oppression, allowed for infinitely more freedom than the USSR did.
After centuries of inadequate solutions to economic injustice, systemic racism, excessive militarism, and every other battle the left has fought and lost, our fear is that the system will embrace our cause with one hand and legislate it into irrelevance with the other. But when the people cry out for the destruction of the system itself, the political elite find themselves in a bind: either deny the people’s wishes and reveal their so-called democracy to be a sham, or accept and cede control over the American political process.
Drastic restructuring of the American political system is not as radical a cause as one might think. Voters from all walks of life – whether Republican or Democrat, young or old, white or black – feel that the system does not serve them. Specifically, Americans harbor a great deal of resentment towards a bipartisan political system that is increasingly polarized and ineffectual. Although politically moderate (at least relative to the far left), these citizens can easily be convinced to support a seemingly radical cause so long as it comes draped in the phony fabric of political legitimacy.
As it stands, the only candidate capable of conveying such a message is Bernie Sanders. A lifelong independent, Sanders has repeatedly called for measures – such as the public financing of elections and rigorous campaign finance reform – which would drastically reduce the power of the two political parties. It is not unreasonable to assume that Sanders could be pushed further. But for this to happen, the restructuring of America’s political system must become the defining issue of the 2016 presidential race.
This is where we outside agitators must direct our efforts. By no means am I suggesting we devote our energy to the Sanders campaign. Rather, we must create an environment in which any viable presidential candidate must be dedicated to substantive structural reform of the American political system. Thus far, the only candidate for whom such a stance seems feasible is Sanders, but the identity of the mouthpiece matters not. What matters is that the only cause captivating the public during the much-touted first hundred days of the next Presidency be busting the two biggest trusts this nation has ever known: the Democratic Party and the GOP.
The ebb of flow of American political power has reached a pivotal point. We live in a nation ostensibly bound to the democratic process whose citizens feel alienated enough to abstain from democracy altogether. In this time and in this place, we have a chance to change everything. Our job? Converting America’s widespread political disaffection into action. Our targets? The very visible elected figureheads preserving the American oligarchy. By making our presence known in the traditional political sphere – through local direct action everywhere we can reach – we can break through the false dichotomy that permeates the chambers of power across the nation. By focusing on campaign finance and electoral reform, we can tap into two issues that draw the ire of broad swathes of the population while also possessing the potential to decentralize political power.
Eliminating legal barriers to entry for third-party candidates would be the next step, ensuring that the most pressing issues – whether local, state, or federal – have someone to speak for them. Further reforms to combat the exclusion of undesirable voters would be needed on a case-by-case basis, in situations such as Jeb Bush’s 2000 purge of Florida’s voting polls or the recent spate of voter ID laws. The specifics can be dealt with later. What cannot be postponed is the struggle to revitalize our democracy.
To many of my comrades who fight to end capitalism and bourgeois democracy, this may appear a betrayal. If our ultimate goal, however, is the decentralization of economic and political power, then certainly any step in that direction is progress – so long as we continue the fight. Furthermore, the existence of a mass movement can serve as a buffer to political subversion, particularly a movement with these goals. So long as there remain voices within the movement clamoring for further decentralization, power cannot remain apart from the people forever. These first steps are nevertheless vital, and it is vital we accomplish them quickly, for the clock is ticking. Climate change poses an existential threat to all humanity and dark clouds of war loom on the horizon. Will our system stand between us and destruction?
