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cw: skip first paragraph for mentions of graphic anti-LGBTQIA violence

It has been a brutal week for LGBTQIA communities in Brazil. A queer Brazilian friend is heartbroken over the murders and suicides of 3 people close to him in just the last 4 days. The stories of these deaths are grisly: one was a gay male professor who was followed home from a bar and killed, another transmasculine friend and his partner committed suicide following prolonged financial struggles. Especially appalling is the murder of a travesti (a Latin-American identity in the transfeminine spectrum) who was accused of being a demon and had her heart removed by an evangelical man. This sequence of events demonstrates the increased hostility towards LGBTQIA people in Brazil following the election of right-wing president Jair Bolsanaro in January, 2019.

This increase in hostility was easily predicted by those most likely to be affected by it. As an activist stated in the Guardian’s documentary Marielle and Monica, “By the time Bolsanaro rises to power, even if we still don’t know how his government will be, there’s already a legacy of violence and hate [by him]. Dissemination of hate between people.” Bolsanaro legitimizes violence against LGBTQIA people by being “explicity homophobic, biphobic and transphobic,” according to Salomão Cunha Lima, from GAMES, an LGBTQ employment organization in São Paulo. Bolsanaro’s words, Lima stresses, “have empowered fascist, homophobic and racist people, who started feeling free to commit hate crimes against this population.” Such increase in hate crimes has been seen in the United States, where, in the year following the election of right-wing president Donald Trump– and the visibility of white supremacist groups his election endorsed– reported hate crimes increased by 17%.

Bolsanaro has then followed up on his promises. In the first 48 hours of his presidency, he enacted executive orders to the Minister of Human Rights to ignore all complaints and violations involving lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender, and queer Brazilians. The Minister of Human Rights herself is an evangelical pastor quoted saying, “Girls will be princesses and boys will be princes. There will be no more ideological indoctrination of children and teenagers in Brazil.” In addition, a guide to STIs for transmasculine people was taken off a government website. This initial flurry of homophobic and transphobic policies were accompanied by threats to indigenous lands and undercutting funding for public art, youth fitness programs, and programs that address hunger.

Recall that this increase in violence against LGBTQIA people is happening in what is already the country with the highest rate of travesti/trans* murders in the world, even before Bolsanaro was elected. Also, those numbers have already been increasing: in 2017, a record 387 murders of people who identified as LGBTQ+ were recorded; there were 346 as of October 2018, with 167 of them trans, according to Grupo Gay de Bahia.

The Center for a Stateless Society, acting in response to this alarming uptick in violence against LGBTQIA people in the wake of right-wing fascism, has decided to double its commitment to match donations made to our fundraiser for “Extravasa: Defesa Pessoal,” a self-defense project serving LGBTT people in Florianópolis, Brazil.

C4SS will donate an additional $250 match to donations in this round of fundraising for a total of $500 made to the GoFundMe.

Acknowledging that Self Defense is Self Care, C4SS moves to empower those struggling to survive under fascism all over the world, and encourages you to do the same. Please donate if you can, and share among your networks.

What the Hell?

We have found ourselves in the fortunate position of making enemies with fascists, the Kremlin, western feds, and tankies all at the same time. What kind of genius sorcery have we channeled to deserve such a gift? Well, we simply researched disinformation wars and red-brown fascist networks surrounding the alt-right. We slept in a bad motel and presented our findings at an IEEE (a leading engineering/tech organization and scholarly journal) on Big Data. About a month later Alexander gets a blackmail-ish email from none other than leftist commentator of some renown, Max Blumenthal more or less accusing us of being spies embedded in a vast conspiratorial network. Then, as if to hand us credibility on a silver platter he co-publishes a weird and grasping article claiming the same with, of all people, notorious misogynist Mark Ames who literally gave a column in his expatriate tabloid based in Moscow, The eXile, to notorious National-Bolshevik Liminov. (Ames’s own former co-editor at The eXile called Limonov a “fascist revolutionary”). Our research struck a nerve it seems.

Some Notes on Perspective

The hardest part about disinformation is the extent to which positionality informs what various actors consider to be disinformation. One presenter in the disinformation workshop we attended suggested that people filming cops are “possibly paid protestors” as an extension of the bizarre and lowkey anti-semitic Soros conspiracy theories. When Emmi confronted him publicly from the audience about spreading disinformation in a workshop about combating it, he made a classic “oopsie” face, and shimmied around the question. Because for him, all narratives from the periphery might be disinformation. For him, information is that which has a federal stamp of approval. Surely no one would film the cops for free without the influence of some nebulous and possibly Jewish or foreign cabal. Power does not change ground truth but it does impact what is accepted and propagated. So where you stand doesn’t change reality, but it does change where you buy your maps of reality from.

So then as a result of this, various actors, competing to hold the monopoly on truth, develop and propagate “evidence” in favor of their view. Biases become implicit rather than explicit and two or more sides barrage each other with information and both sides see nothing but propaganda from their opposition. A fun fact about reality though is that it doesn’t change. Complexity and nuance can lose you points in a status contest. It can give your enemy easy dunks on you. It’s an order of magnitude easier to create bullshit than to get to the bottom of something. Power defines what is considered to be propaganda without changing the actual truth.

Blumenthal and others get this on some level. They understand the feds from both the US and the UK to be involved in an imperialist project and fighting illegal wars, overthrowing governments, and engaging in right-wing coups for decades. Alexander edited an anthology on these issues—and granted it came out four years ago and lacks a bit of a polish—but it lays out important intersections of environmentalist and workers movements given an anti-imperialist framework of political ecology writ large. While we won’t claim to know the extent of CIA information operations, we will say this. Much of what came out of the Gerasimov doctrine was a best guess at what the west was doing, and trying to couple that with the philosophical project of people like Dugin and the Izborsky club. But of course this is where it starts to gets sticky.

Anarchists have the somewhat unique position of being able to hate multiple sides that hate each other at the same time while simultaneously recognizing historical crimes and power imbalances. We can look at harm done from many directions without defending any states. We aren’t encumbered by protecting the good name of Russia or the US. Max is smart but he has allegiances and a narrative to push that conveniently aligns with the Kremlin’s talking points. And while we’ve never been invited to or attended fancy CIA galas, he has done that with the Kremlin and then abruptly begins to shift his tone on critical topics such as Syria. We won’t speculate on the degree to which he is friendly with the Kremlin, but just point out that his sources are often specious in this regard.

That being said, because we aren’t here to protect the feds, we are just as interested as he is in potential US/UK disinformation networks. If Integrity Initiative is the tip of some vast spy network we’d love to know about it. Unfortunately the sources for the majority of reports of them are RT (Kremlin controlled initial report source), Zerohedge (pro-Kremlin conspiracy peddlers), a report done by a 9/11 truther and an Assadist (discussion of the White Helmets has tell-tale Kremlin disinformation signs), a Grayzone article (Blumenthal’s baby) that casually uses the phrase ‘Knights of Templar’, this new “exposé” on Grayzone that frankly kind of sucks, and a weird sketchy blog that claims to be Anonymous (check out their theme music). It doesn’t exactly instill a great deal of confidence. But sure, Integrity Initiative (via the Institute for Statecraft) seems to at the very least get military money. A lot of think tanks and institutes do, not to mention universities. All of which are indeed worthy of critique and being exposed.

It seems to us that Russia and the U.S. are locked into what in the old days leftists used to call an “inter-imperialist rivalry,” a fight over influence, resources, and hegemony that takes place on the world stage. Journalists are at the frontline of this struggle, since much of it takes place behind closed doors. That doesn’t mean that you’re on one side or the other—quite the opposite—and that’s the whole point. Blumenthal is currently being sued by a wonderful journalist, Sulome Anderson. She says that articles like his most recent one put people in real danger by leveling false accusations (we’re not in any way connected to MI6, obviously) in the midst of international contestation. RT wants to make the CIA look bad; western disinformation firms lobbying for federal funds want to make Russia look bad. It’s not that hard of a job either way. The people who get caught in the middle are the ones attempting to undermine a kind of global hegemony of state-sponsored Truth and use reason to contravene myriad political distortions and lies.

The conclusion of our paper and presentation had an extremely light touch. We never said anything resembling “Russia is controlling the White House and the alt-right and responsible for everything bad happening everywhere,” like the conspiracy theorists that Blumenthal thinks he’s engaging with. We said something simple and objectively true: that there are elements within the Kremlin that support hybrid warfare tactics against the United States (that in many cases they learned from the CIA) and that the alt-right, far-right, hard-left, and syncretic red-brown networks are a potential pawn in this battlefield. This is such a weak claim that it shouldn’t be very contentious to anyone familiar with the terrain.

Further Fact-checking

As to the quality of our paper, we used widely accepted statistical and data-mining techniques such as Latent Semantic Indexing, Topic Modeling, and External Link Analysis and our paper was deemed of high enough quality to be accepted into a high impact scholarly technical journal. That’s more than can be said for your essay. But even so, it’s a conference paper. An initial investigation not a full-scale research project which is why we were cautious in our takeaways. Additionally we suspect some of your fear of the network graphing done about topics like the White Helmets conspiracy networks is in part because your crew is implicated and in part because maybe you don’t understand how edges, nodes, and measures of centrality/clustering work? Math can be used to lie, but you can’t really critique that if you don’t understand how the actual math is determined to be accurate.

Integrity Initiative was not the host of the event. They had one employee [edit: two] who gave a talk and have worked with Adventium Labs before (according to your semi-sketchy sources). His talk was pretty problematic as you can see. When someone asked him how we would know when we could end this “war mentality” he dodged it as if he’d never considered it. The conference, however, was by IEEE who are a cutting edge, high-impact scholarly journal in the topic of big data which the conference was on. There was a huge range of people at the conference from terrible to amazing. There was even an excellent presentation on civilian journalism against despotic regimes and police violence. Most of the attendees were *gasp* academics from *gasps deeper* information and data schools. This is the nature of most academic conferences.

Attending a prestigious conference is not the same as supporting, being funded by, or otherwise collaborating with skeezy feds. Oxford University was recently asked by the U.S. Senate to produce a report on social media meddling by the Internet Research Agency. Does that make Oxford and everyone who attends an MI6 agent? Of course not. And here’s the most dissatisfying part. Ready? No we did not get paid to present at the event and neither of us are under the employ of any of the sponsoring or participating organizations. In fact we paid for registration at the conference like anyone else, because we hoped to learn more about how people are automating and forwarding systems of disinformation detection. We’re grad students who presented at a conference, not part of some elaborate spy network but you’re welcome to make yourself look like a crackpot if you wish.

A favorite block-quote of the article typifies this willingness to grasp for straws to make a point:

That ability to shamelessly smear and denounce leftists over the most crudely manufactured links to the far-right —  while cozying up to groups as sleazy as C4SS and authoritarian as the Integrity Initiative — is the sort of adaptive trait that MI6 spies and the Rendon Group would find useful in a covert domestic influence operation.

So, because we presented at an academic conference where some people in attendance support the feds (like literally every academic conference we’ve gone to, such as the American Political Science Association and American Association of Geographers) that automatically makes us MI6 field operatives? Sweet. Maybe Emmi’s gonna get to see the UK someday.

Speaking of “ability to shamelessly smear and denounce leftists over the most crudely manufactured links to the far-right,” Kevin Carson publicly cut ties with Keith Preston a decade ago as his racist and queerphobic views became apparent which you even cited and yet couldn’t let go of the catchline of “White nationalist associates.” Wow, congratulations. Someone was revealed as a fascist entryist and Kevin denounced him. Much sleuth. Many investigative journalism.

But incidentally, C4SS is a model of how to block fascist entryism at all points. The Right Stuff has hated C4SS since the beginning and targeted us on multiple occasions because of our steadfast opposition to the alt-right since before they were well known. Closed border right-libertarians with racist views have hated us since our inception because we resist them at every turn. You can see this in the longstanding hatred we garner from the Ludwig Von Mises Institute and Lew Rockwell  over the years. If you can find a secret fascist under the employ of C4SS let us know and we’ll be happy to burn that bridge too. As far as courting the right or promoting right-libertarianism goes, the group has facilitated a lot of dialogues between a wide range of anti-authoritarians including even at times people who identify as libertarians or lefties. C4SS even tables at SFL to pull people left and downward on the political spectrum. Who cares? We table at lots of different things. This just shows that although we prioritize countering fascist entryism we’re not actually stomping out all discourse or political dialogue more generally. We walk the walk of encouraging dialogue while no platforming actual fascists.

We are invested in nerdily following questions to their roots which means we don’t choose a team over a truth. This is a novel concept to people like Blumenthal who would think being a leftist means propping up every shitty dude-bro like Ames whose convenient, or unflinching allegiance to people like Corbyn and John “contributed white nationalist talking points solicited by Richard Spencer to Taki’s Mag” Dolan. Gross allegiance to an ingroup is a neurological malfunctioning functioning similar to racism, but we still fight against actual fascists. If you want the left to be better you don’t cozy up to rapists, you give them no quarter as C4SS does. The fact that you deflectingly imply that Kevin’s distrust of Ames is anti-Semitic rather than, anti-pieceofshit, is a laughable example of the heroic leaps you’re willing to make.

We don’t get any Koch or Soros money. We probably never will. We wouldn’t take MI6 money even if it did come. Ames worked for Pando, a startup partly funded by neo-reactionary Peter Thiel. The world goes round. C4SS gets its funding entirely from small personal donations, built up over a decade of providing anarchist and anti-authoritarian analysis and commentary in the long tradition of individualist anarchists like Voltairine de Cleyre and Benjamin Tucker.

With regard to Brad Spangler, C4SS practices what they preach. They expose and kick out shitty people, unlike countless socialist or libertarian organizations. In the early days Spangler contributed notably to the formation of C4SS and occupied the informal position of “director” for a few years. He later began to post sketchy anti-feminist shit on his personal social media at which point C4SS stopped working with him (although he’d already began creating distance at that point). Much later, after many had lost contact with and blocked him, he announced his having sexually assaulted a child at which point C4SS immediately publicly denounced him without hiding the fact that he had written articles for them and helped run things (you see how we’re accepting responsibility not dodging it?). One scumbag helped with early C4SS which they later denounced. That is not exactly a smoking gun and is much better than could be said for Alternet, for years led by notorious Don Hazen, or it seems, Grayzone. But of course, you don’t actually care about the fact that we push out shitty dudes. You even mention that later. You just want a catchy and misleading headline.

But of course, kicking out shitty people from the left is actually the opposite of what you want, so of course you’d minimize that because how many of your buddies would be implicated? You can’t even cut ties with Ames who bragged about raping a 15 year old in a sharply misogynistic book self-described as “non-fiction” but who has recently attempted to claim it was ironic.

You’re right that we connected Zerohedge to right-wing militia groups in the borderlands…. Because there was a relevant connection. Tim “Nailer” Foley, founder of Arizona Border Recon, a group currently doing anti-refugee civilian military operations in the borderlands constantly shares things from Zerohedge, many of which are conspiracy theories fueling the ideology behind his operations. Any wingnut can share an article from anyone, the issue here is that their articles are specifically about anti-immigrant conspiracies that feed his violence. So congratulations on almost getting a fact straight. We’re not sure why such a pure and untainted leftist as yourself would feel the need to defend a crackpot website…unless …. They’re in your broader pro-Kremlin “alternative news” circles.

But please continue to take weird potshots at us because it makes us look moderate and reasonable by comparison. It seems that when you shine a light on conspiracy theorists they make up conspiracy theories about you. Go figure.

Why Does He Care?

So we struck a nerve. What was it exactly that earned us this ire? Was it that we presented at a conference with some sort of connection to this weird disinformation research firm? It seems this isn’t a strong enough reason to target us specifically. Why not just target the person who actually works for that organization with that same degree of malice you show us? What seems more likely is that it was how, in our research of the alt-right, we began seeing potential connections to larger red-brown projects using conspiracy theories to forward their state-aligned agendas. Why does this strike such a nerve for you? If you are so confident that your work is well sourced and not rooted in state-line conspiracy theories and information war why are you panicking so hard and targeting a couple of young academics at a tiny workshop producing a nerdy little conference working paper?

We’re happy to help expose western spy networks supporting fascists abroad. We support Blumenthal and others to do honest work on this topic and generally agree with him on a range of issues such as being pro-BDS or anti-Christian fundamentalism. But in the process of exposing fascist networks, we’re not going to protect vulgar “anti-imperialists” who use that as a shield against any claims of authoritarian brutality. We’re against all fascism which means we don’t stop looking for it at the highest level. We follow it down to the roots and in all its strange incantations.

Max, we’d invite you to join on this nerdy quest but it seems your interest in uncovering brutality, fascism, and imperialism has limits when it begins to touch your networks and pet projects. Because you care more about protecting your crew than finding truth, your claims of combating misinformation will always have these tell-tale stamps of propaganda that you’ve shown here. So I guess thanks for letting your true unhinged colors fly. It makes it easier to spot a crank.

BACKSTORY

Brazil is the country with the highest rate of travesti/trans* murders. In 2017, Brazil accounted for 52% of the deaths registered by International Transgender Europe (TGEU): 179 travesti/trans* people were murdered in 2017.  Alarmingly, the new political scenario is contributing to a further rise in violence against vulnerable populations.

(Note: Travesti is a Latin-American identity in the transfeminine spectrum.)

In Florianópolis (Santa Catarina) an estimated 70 cases of gender violence are registered monthly. Most of them aren’t officially registered in police reports, not only because survivors fear facing more institutional violence, but also because gender violence is not considered a hate crime in Brazil. According to Lirous (trans woman, coordinator of ADEH – Associação em Defesa dos Direitos Humanos – and president of Fórum da Diversidade Grande Florianópolis) police departments send victims of gender violence to ADEH instead of filing police reports:

We suffer violence every day. The proof of this is the cases that we take in here. Here we welcome not only to low income people, we welcome the general population, especially in the summer, when the number of cases triple. And still we have a lot of tourists coming here [to ADEH] to be cared for because the police department sends them straight to us. Before making a police report, they send them here [saying]: “The place for gay people is ADEH”.(25:57)

After and during this year’s election there was an exponential rise in the number of aggressions against LGBTT people due to the general population’s alignment with transphobic and homophobic discourse disseminated by the newly elected extreme right-wing, Evangelical, and ex-military president Bolsonaro, who openly remarks: “Yes, I am homophobic, and very proud of it,” “I would rather have a son killed in an accident than a homosexual son” and “I won’t combat or discriminate, but if I see two men kissing in the streets, I will beat them up.” As a result of the institutional endorsement of such practices, during the elections an alarming number of LGBTT people got harassed, beat up and even murdered by attackers chanting Bolsonaro’s name.

Taking into account the fact that Santa Catarina was the State that most voted for Bolsonaro in the first round of the elections and witnessing the rise of gender violence in Florianópolis, Lirous established a partnership with Sérgio Raulino, who is the coordinator of “Functional Self Defense” workshops. Together they are leading “Extravasa: defesa pessoal,” which is an initiative to teach self defense techniques free of charge to LGBTT people and to promote the formation of autonomous self defense affinity groups. The project will provide a total of 6 classes starting December, but needs funding in order to establish itself as a regular activity.

To support this activity C4SS will be matching $250 in this fundraiser for Extravasa.

Please share in your networks!

I think it’s a shame that anarchists don’t write more on either geopolitics or analyses of the future; over the last two centuries our greatest successes have come from our imagination and foresight. For this reason I applaud Peter Gelderloos’ recent attempted forecast, published in a variety of forms by Crimethinc.

There’s much to agree with in Gelderloos’ analysis and I applaud his effort, but there’s nevertheless much in his analysis I find askew.

We could do with more predictive evaluation of geopolitical or institutional forces, and I hope this opens the door to more writing in these arenas by anarchists, but there’s an ever-present danger to such lenses: you start seeing the world primarily in terms of big social structures and miss other critical dynamics — often assuming too much solidity, integrability, or centrality to said social structures. In my opinion Gelderloos’ analysis falls into this trap when considering capitalism, fascism, and technology. To be more specific on each account: he follows a rather marxist notion of capitalism as a unified whole system with a tendency to self-preservation, he frames fascism in terms of dictatorial institutions rather than an ideology of hypernationalism, and he struggles to maintain the dated narrative of a unified technological global social system.

What’s common across these is the projection of solidity to abstractions where the institutional macro structures are privileged as the most relevant causal forces. This glosses over the root dynamics of individuals, ideologies, and tools, treating them in short as mere cogs making up the broader “systems.”

Gelderloos’ analysis of fascism should be the most glaring issue for anarchists since he attempts to break with the longstanding near-consensus in antifascist analysis by instead casting “fascism” purely in terms of dictatorship — a structure of institutions — rather than as an ideology. Gelderloos is correct that fascists are ideological opportunists on a variety of things, for example they really don’t give a shit about economic systems. But it’s profoundly mistaken to assume fascism hasn’t had a stable and coherent ideological core. Fascism is always a hypernationalism, a “might makes right” fetishization of raw power and denial of empathy with beyond one’s tribe, community, or imagined “people.” This doesn’t require a centralized state apparatus, much less one structured in dictatorial terms. The last few decades of fascist permutations have shown clearly that you can have democratic or decentralized variants of fascism (eg “national anarchism”). Indeed these are arguably the most common varieties of fascism today, from the populists of the new European right to the goat sacrificing tribes of the Wolves of Vinland.

Gelderloos demands to know what conceptual clarity is provided by analyzing fascism in ideological and philosophical terms rather than as a specific lost historical moment. Well first of all, it can give us insight into the actual fucking organizing of fascists, or at the very least their descendants. But second of all it’s useful because — despite their opportunism on some fronts — fascists are often refreshingly clearheaded about things in a way liberals cannot afford to be. Liberalism is the tortured grab-bag of contradictions, with capitalism and democracy desperately trying to distract us (and themselves) from the functioning of the existing system. If liberalism is a pack of lies and distractions, fascism infamously doesn’t bother disguising its lies, flak, and prevarication. Fascism is the most confident and explicit expression of the ideology of power itself: Might makes right. Care only about your own. That there is a philosophical position diametrically opposed to anarchism is important and provides a lot of illumination. Fascism clears the air. Just as anarchism is not a fixed blueprint or system, fascism is not a system but a set of values, a motivation and take on power utterly at odds with our own. This means it has just as diverse expressions as anarchist ethics do. But at the end of the day you are either for or opposed to power, you either care about all or just a few. Inevitably the scales tend to fall and everyone is forced — as in the Spanish revolution — to side with anarchism or fascism.

Ideology and philosophy matter. They’re not always post-facto rationalizations of an existing context or system, but often the sincere source of new developments. The problem with lenses as sweeping as geopolitics is you get into the habit of evaluating the behavior and function of institutions and ignore the roots — the actual people and psychologies and patterns of relation that give rise to these structures.

One of the worst legacies the left has infected anarchists with is a totalizing molochian view of capitalism. This often leads to some really skewed predictions when we start freaking about “commodification” (often really just meaning a more fine tuned accounting of certain considerations). A certain type of pop-marxists have convinced many that “commodification” is magically in-differentiable from capitalism per se. Got some commodification? Someone’s keeping finer-grained track of something? Fuck son, you’ve got a bad case of capitalism — with all the attendant things we associate with it, nevermind tracing any specific causality. If you’re filling out an itemized form on a dating site (“commodification of romance!”) somehow that’s class society and workplace hierarchies growing stronger. Never you mind what the causal mechanisms are, think holistically!

This leftist view of capitalism as an unified monolithic megamachine with its own clear plan and needs — rather than conflicting loci of power, orthogonalized mechanisms, and acidic currents of bottom-up market pressures — blinds people to possibilities today and ultimately encourages us to cast our dreams off beyond the veil of a magical revolution. If the abstraction is treated like a cohesive whole, if we treat institutions as the only relevant agents, and ignore everything below as constituent cogs, well then there’s no hope for anything substantively different save via some kind of total break.

For those well and truly spooked with this kind of leftist thinking, there’s ultimately little option besides despair, or a reification of the same old rituals of subcultural community. When the world is filled up with gods like “capitalism” or “civilization” and drained of actual living breathing human beings there’s no hope of salvation, save through some kind of divine intervention.

So something new gets mystified and worshipped, The Revolution, or The Collapse. The Party or The Natural Order.

What gets lost as our attention focuses entirely on these big abstractions is the concrete issues of freedom. What possibilities are available to us in our social relations, in our projects, in our environmental conditions, in the configuration of our bodies?

Gelderloos unfortunately writes,

We are increasingly being sold a transhumanist narrative in which nature and the body are presented as limitations to be overcome. This is the same old Enlightenment ideology that anarchists have fallen for time and again[.]

We’ve “fallen for” transhumanism because it’s fucking correct. Anarchism’s aspirations are not to become fucking stewards of some kind of reactionary “natural order” but to champion positive freedom, to collaboratively expand what is possible rather than retreat to a single blueprint or ecological niche. Those who would tell you to make do with and embrace the current configuration not just of the world but of your body are reactionaries of the highest order.

This endlessly repeated mantra that technology is not methods or blueprints, not even the specific infrastructure being built (which is surely skewed to the interests of power), but is some kind of closely knit together global political system, where every component props up the whole, contains the DNA to inexorably rebuild the whole, is becoming an ever more desperate rhetorical maneuver. While there are certainly countervailing authoritarian pressures in certain normalizations — like bosses in certain sectors of the first world demanding you be on call via a cellphone — what we also see is across the planet is greater diversification among technological forms and uses from the bottom up.

And what conceptual value would there really be in seeing “technology” as a unified system rather than an ecosystem or a vast arena of complex conflict? Sure there’s a kind of mental reassurance in clustering a bunch of mechanisms together and declaring them a unified whole, a sum of their varying parts, a single megamachine. The simplicity of totalitarian thinking has always held an appeal, but that doesn’t make it a correct or an adequate lens for anarchists.

This sort of thinking can cause us to cluster too much together and fail to see the joints, the root causes, or ways things can be reconfigured (for better or far worse).

The danger and constraints of geopolitical analysis — of thinking in terms of the macroscale institutions — is that you risk growing as stupid as they are with as confined a scope of attention. You see things purely in terms of the persistent macrostructure and miss the degrees of freedom among the base, shifting or pushing in ways sometimes deeply antithetical to those macrostructures. Institutions seem invulnerable, infinitely capable of appropriation and cooption… until suddenly they fail.

I suppose it’s better that Gelderloos, in his categorization system, frames transhumanism as a liberal project rather than fascistic or dictatorial one. But of course he views it in terms of technocratic flows among the ruling classes rather than as a sincere grassroots ideology. Thus he misses the intensely anarchistic bent of morphological freedom.

This smacks of nothing so much as a myopic preoccupation with the neoliberal ruling order, with the existing systems and institutions, like Glenn Greenwald’s infamous tendency to dismiss the threat of fascism/nationalism while hectoring us to go back to focusing on the usual capitalists and imperialists.

There is of course a serious danger that neoliberalism will eventually triumph again and use fascism as a specter to better ingrain its own technocratic democratic order, but there is also a threat of nationalism winning, and a nationalist victory is in fact worse. A forthright fascism that isn’t twisted in on itself in obfuscation and delusion can be clumsily brash, but it can also grasp the longer game in a way liberalism almost never lets itself.

The greatest weapon of anarchists is that we see the roots. We are in a long war between power and freedom. Liberalism — being an ideology of the existing order, of existing institutions — can never allow itself to recognize this. And so it is only in the roots, the unruly masses beneath the institutional structures, that we will find the opportunities liberals can’t see or plan for. The little twists and turns, the reconfigurations, the unexpected degrees of freedom, to what liberals (and marxists) see as mere cogs inexorably a part of a whole.

Gelderloos writes,

Capitalism has invaded every corner of our lives, turning us against ourselves. The power of the State has grown exponentially and they have defeated us so many times before.

But we are still here. We are not merely here as marginal spectators whose one good trick — rioting — is increasingly toothless. We have been coursing through the veins of this system, reconfiguring things and pressuring back in countless ways. Central to our success has been our appreciation for the possibilities beneath the feet of the giants and the actual terms of the millennia old conflict we’re all in.

Unfortunately the very leftist legacy of preoccupation with the macrostructures, of reifying them into giant omnipotent monsters can only grasp two equally absurd paths: reform or revolution. Maintaining the monsters or making some kind of magical sudden break with them. This traps radical leftists in the mental cycles of depression.

Anarchism needs to break with this leftist frame and instead view things in more diffuse, myriad, and dynamic terms of erosion and insurrection.

There are no magically holistic megamachines, just complex ecologies and chaotic weather systems. And history is not a drama of giant storms, but of the butterflies beating our wings.

Even if you’ve never read a comic book or seen a superhero movie, Stan Lee has affected your life. His storytelling. His approach to heroism. His moral lessons. His ethos, embodied in the catchphrase “Excelsior!” The Mount Rushmore of modern pop culture surely has a spot for him. His imagination permeates humanity’s modern collective imagination. Through the countless worlds and characters he brought to life, Stan Lee will live on longer than most of us.

Younger people mostly know Stan Lee from his unforgettable, 18-year string of cameos in Marvel films, especially the MCU. Sadly and poetically, his likely final cameo is already filmed for the upcoming untitled Avengers film, which is the finale to the MCU’s Three Phase, 22-movie, 11-year saga. My own early memories of Stan Lee come from the 90s Marvel cartoons: “Fantastic Four,” where “Mr. Marvel” himself would enthusiastically introduce each episode to the viewer, and “Spider-Man,” where our hero meets the real Stan Lee in a cross-dimension finale, equal parts heartfelt and meta.

First-Generation Marvel fans surely remember Stan Lee from the 60s comics bookended by his exuberant introductions and editorial columns, as well as the broader “superhero spokesman” public persona he developed at conventions and college campuses (no doubt helping to salvage a comics industry plagued by PR troubles and government censorship in the 50s).

If you’re here to learn about Stan Lee’s life as a comics writer, especially his complex legacy with his creative collaborators (after all, comics are primarily a visual art form), I strongly recommend you read the informative and respectful obituaries written by Spencer Ackerman and Jeet Heer. It would be unjust and ahistorical to fail to note how Lee’s artists (particularly Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko) were just as much, if not more, central to Marvel’s legacy and that Lee ultimately added the dialogue and written ideas onto their drawings and visual ideas.

While I don’t think the contributions of the artist and the writer can be totally disentangled in a meaningful way, I do think it’s mostly Stan Lee as the editor who seemed to guide the broad philosophy and ethos of 60s Marvel storytelling. This influence shows across all the artists (and is then articulated it in the characters’ thoughts and words), and it was Stan Lee’s contributions that made the most lasting changes to superheroes.

It’s hard to overstate how revolutionary Marvel’s 60s lineup — Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, etc. — was for the superhero genre. Before, superheroes were more like parental figures, buff cardboard cut-outs without much real human personality or individuality. Side-kicks like Robin were created so the young readers could identify with someone, while Batman could tell them what to do, how to act, who to respect, and when to buy war bonds.

But in 1962, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko created Spider-Man in direct subversion of the side-kick trope. Now, the side-kick was the superhero. Young readers no longer imagined themselves fighting alongside, and taking orders from, the superhero. Instead, the reader was the superhero. The superhero’s struggles were their struggles. The superhero’s world was their world. The superhero’s moral quandaries were their moral quandaries. Lee pushed for Spider-Man to be an ordinary teenager first, and superhero second. Likewise, the Fantastic Four was an ordinary family first, and superhero team second (*cough* Guardians of the Galaxy *cough*). And the Hulk was a guy with anger issues first, and superhero…barely ever.

By subverting the genre expectations set up by their Golden Age predecessors, Lee, Ditko, Kirby, and company brought superheroes down to Earth in the Silver Age. They made them relatable, vulnerable, flesh-and-blood people with whom we could identify and learn from, not through obediently taking orders, but through sharing their experiences, using our empathy, and achieving an emotional catharsis. Superheroes were transformed from two-dimensional mouthpieces for authority into three-dimensional weirdos, teenagers, and outcasts. Their stories were transformed from unabashed wish-fulfillment escapism into something that more closely resembled the real world, including its strife and failure. 

Aristotle was basically right that art can help us expand our understanding and reflect on our own life. By stepping outside our ordinary perspective and experiencing things through the eyes of fictional characters, we can discover things about both the world and ourselves. Aristotle placed moral learning at the center of his ethical theory, which is why he heavily emphasized the importance of tragedy in his writings on aesthetics. As creatures of both imagination and habit, art can dispose us to act more virtuously or more viciously. And through tragic art, we learn moral lessons central to the human condition; lessons about perseverance, loss, triumph, fear, acceptance, power, and responsibility. Using the comic book medium and the superhero genre to teach these lessons is one of the most aesthetically important and influential pop culture innovations of the last 100 years.

Where the comics creators of the 30s and 40s seemed to agree more with the views expounded in Plato’s Republic, that art was intellectually impotent and morally shallow, Stan Lee sided with Aristotle. What now seems like an obviously perfect fit — especially since the superhero genre was sparked by the Hercules-inspired Superman and infused with the epic heroism of Ancient Greek and Roman mythology ever since — was groundbreaking. By applying Aristotle’s ancient insights to the superhero genre, Stan Lee changed the world. Now, young readers were able to relate to, and learn deep insights from, their heroes. After their Aristotelian turn, superheroes reached a new echelon in American pop culture. Slowly but surely, they went from cheap pulp rags to modern folklore.

Shared art can shed light on a culture and how its people think about the events that shape them, process collective trauma, and (hopefully) achieve collective catharsis. During “Hollywood’s Golden Age,” not coincidentally coinciding with the Great Depression and World War 2, people found comfort in escapist films: mostly adventure, romance, comedy, cartoons, and propagandistic war movies, populated by larger than life heroes like Robin Hood and Rick Blaine. But by the time of the counterculture and Civil Rights movements of the 60s and 70s, the “New Hollywood” style took over in response to the need for a different kind of collective catharsis. Audiences wanted realistic violence, risque sex, up-close criminality, and the brutality of war presented in movies populated by grounded and relatable heroes like Bonnie and Clyde or Easy Rider’s freewheeling stoner motorcyclists, Wyatt and Billy.

Like Hollywood’s Golden Age, the Golden Age of Comics — which spawned Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Captain America — let depression and wartime audiences escape into stories of wish fulfillment. If Rick Blaine joining the war effort was the great wartime hero, surely the great wartime superhero was Captain America, fulfilling the wish of toppling Hitler with a single punch. Historically a medium for young people, comics avoided the dark grittiness of 60s movies. But like filmgoers, comics-readers during the era of counterculture and civil rights demanded more grounded heroes and stories with more substance. Stan Lee recognized that and infused the Marvel Universe with the perfect balance of moralizing and escapism, message and story, philosophy and legend.

Lee, Kirby, Ditko and company envisioned the fantasy and sci-fi elements of the superhero genre as vehicles to explore more substantive issues through symbolism, subtext, and melodrama. Mutants were victims of bigotry and the X-Men sparred with the Brotherhood of Mutants over an ideological disagreement about when violence was justified in fighting oppression. The Fantastic Four’s abilities were metaphors for their psychological struggles and personas (Reed stretched himself too thin with work, Sue felt invisible, Johnny was a hothead, Ben felt like a monster). The Hulk was a part of Bruce Banner’s personality that he couldn’t control and which fed on his rage. Captain America, who was more of a Rick Blaine-style propagandistic hero when he was created in the 40s, was revived as a “man out of time” who eventually lost his patriotism. Marvel readers got to see real people talking about real issues.

The Center for a Stateless Society wants to bring about a world where individuals are liberated from oppressive states, structural poverty, and social injustice. We use academic studies, book reviews, opinion editorials, and social media to spread left-wing market anarchist ideas far and wide.

Students For Liberty’s LibertyCon (January 17-20) is the year’s premier gathering of libertarian minds from all over the world – and C4SS is a mere $750 away from getting an exhibitor table at this event. This is a wonderful opportunity to promote radical left market anarchist ideas among libertarians from around the globe.

Every penny counts and the Center appreciates any and all help you are willing to give. Let’s get C4SS to LibertyCon and start building the new world in the shell of the old!

Donate Here

Yesterday C4SS’s own Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory, Kevin Carson, appeared on the popular libertarian podcast Liberty Chronicles, produced by Libertarianism.org.

Together with podcast host Dr. Anthony Comegna, Kevin discusses the possibility of a post-capitalist world, the nature of capitalism as an economic system, and market alternatives to capitalist economics. Listen below, or at Libertarianism.com.

Are the wildfires that have been devastating California a gift from government?  So argues William Finnegan in a recent article, “California Burning.”

According to Finnegan, the seeds of disaster were planted when the mission of the U.S. Forest Service was expanded in the early decades of the 20th century:

The Forest Service, no longer just a land steward, became the federal fire department for the nation’s wildlands. Its policy was total suppression of fires …. Some experienced foresters saw problems with this policy. It spoke soothingly to public fears, but periodic lightning-strike fires are an important feature of many ecosystems, particularly in the American West. Some ‘light burning,’ they suggested, would at least be needed to prevent major fires. William Greeley, the chief of the Forest Service in the 1920s, dismissed this idea as ‘Paiute forestry.’

Finnegan explains the “Paiute” reference:

Native Americans had used seasonal burning for many purposes, including hunting, clearing trails, managing crops, stimulating new plant growth, and fireproofing areas around their settlements. The North American ‘wilderness’ encountered by white explorers and early settlers was in many cases already a heavily managed, deliberately diversified landscape.

These facts incidentally give the lie to the common notion that American indigenous peoples were not entitled to property claims to their lands because they had not engaged in sufficiently transformative labor upon them.

Greeley’s sneering dismissal of ‘Paiute forestry’ was ill-placed. As Finnegan reports:

The total suppression policy of the Forest Service and its allies (the National Park Service, for instance) was exceptionally successful, reducing burned acreage by 90 percent, and thus remaking the landscape again — creating what Paul Hessburg, a research ecologist at the Forest Service, calls an ‘epidemic of trees.’

Preserving trees was not, however, the goal of the Forest Service, which worked closely with timber companies to clear-cut enormous swaths of old-growth forest. (Greeley, when he left public service, joined the timber barons.) The idea was to harvest the old trees and replace them with more efficiently managed and profitable forests. This created a dramatically more flammable landscape.

In other words, an alliance between big business and big government is responsible for rendering America’s wilderness areas exceptionally vulnerable to massive wildfires.

Starting August 21st, prisoners nationwide went on strike, demanding better working and living conditions. There are currently strike actions confirmed at: Northwest Detention Center, Georgia State Prison, Broad River Correctional Institution, Lee Correctional Institution, McCormick Correctional Institution, Turbeville Correctional Institute, Kershaw Correctional Institution, Lieber Correctional Institution, Hyde Correctional Institution, New Folsom Prison, Toledo Correctional Institution, Wabash Valley Correctional Institution, Lea County Correctional Institution, Charlotte Correctional Institution, Dade Correctional Institution, Franklin Correctional Institution, Holmes Correctional Institution, Apalachee Correctional, Burnside County Jail, Stiles Unit, and Michael Unit, with more suspected prisoner strike activities being silenced to outsiders, and hundreds of solidarity actions continuing to happen nationwide among outside supporters. Going into week three it is important to assess where we are at and how we can help efforts moving forward.

Aside from solidarity actions such as banner drops, leafleting, business boycotts, divestment campaigns, noise demos, and other forms of solidarity protest, we can also provide much needed resources behind the scenes. Write letters to striking prisoners, coordinate and participate in phone zaps, and support the strike fund.

One of the most important forms of communication in this campaign has been letter writing. Most of the work of groups like the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) consists of corresponding with inmate organizers via mail, and checking in on them and their needs as they organize behind bars. On their website, IWOC has a list of prisoners who are currently striking and would love to hear from you. Write them and let them know they are not alone. Let them know that you are here to help however you can. Knowing they have the support of those on the outside keeps them strong and regular correspondence lets guards know that people are keeping tabs on them.

Phone zaps have also been an indispensable tactic during this strike and others before it. Phone zaps let their targets know that folks are paying attention and are outraged. It lets them know that there is public support for these demands and that they are not going away anytime soon. Phone zaps have been used to halt the torture of prisoners, convince politicians to change their stances, and harass business owners and other public figures into amending their practices. An updated list of phone zap campaigns can be found here.

Finally, if nothing else, throw a few dollars into the official strike fund and/or spread it around to those who will. In the aftermath of these types of actions, many prisoners face state repression and will need things like legal help and other resources. The groups involved in the fundraiser include not only IWOC but also Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, San Francisco Bay View, and the Anarchist Black Cross who will use that money to continue to organize to support prisoner efforts to organize for their own freedom.

These three simple actions provide endless amounts of support and all play their part in helping make this a sustainable movement that can reach its goals. Together we can make a difference. So let’s stand in solidarity with our comrades behind bars.

The Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conference has long been one of the more explicitly leftist and politically conscious hacker conferences. Unlike hacker conferences like Defcon and BlackHat, where the atmosphere has been relatively permissive of sexual harassment, state collaborators, and reactionary politics, HOPE has a reputation for being better. A little outpost of European hacker radicalism in America, HOPE has slowly improved; this year anarchists and anarchist propaganda were everywhere, talks featured reports from antifascists on their efforts to dox nazis, and heroes like Chelsea Manning were headline speakers.

And yet at this year’s HOPE some shitbag got up during a Q&A and bragged about having marched in UniteTheRight in Charlottesville, the nazi rally that murdered Heather Heyer. This fascist was joined by a small crew of reactionary provocateurs including Thomas Ryan, an FBI snitch in Occupy Wall Street. Naturally conference attendees rapidly mobilized themselves to respond in a variety of ways to this explicit reactionary presence. Yet the real clusterfuck ensued when many conference organizers and security staff refused to even remove the bragging fascist and threatened conference goers if they took action themselves.

Individual staff members sneered about “SJWs,” declared that wearing a nazi flag wouldn’t be grounds for expulsion, and claimed that no action taken outside the conference (like marching in a famous neonazi rally) would be relevant to expulsion from the conference. This absurd and infuriating stance of “ideological neutrality,” which has since set off numerous articles and the possibility of HOPE itself dissolving, must be read in context.

This was the first year HOPE banned the famous hacker John “Captain Crunch” Draper after his proclivity for sexual harassment and assault had been an open secret for decades. Indeed the first outburst of the Charlottesville fascist was to protest Draper’s exclusion. Despite this very small step, HOPE still gave a prominent speaking slot to known rapist Will Scott. It should go without saying that these things are deeply interconnected.

The argument against kicking out a fascist that goes, “yeah but did he march with nazis at this conference?” is obviously an argument that can be applied to dismissing rapists with, “yeah but did he rape anyone at this conference?” But moreover the place HOPE organizers were coming from is clearly one of conflict avoidance. It’s very clear that their instinct and priority was “preventing drama” in the sense of visible conflict, and not combatting oppressive power dynamics. They were, in short, welded to a naive and childish notion of apoliticism and “neutrality” that is of course anything but.

Those who set up spaces help determine the culture and norms of those spaces. And, despite the longstanding presence of anarchists, there is also unfortunately a longstanding fraction of the hacker milieu that values an acerbic and calloused environment where the unifying identity is one of nerd toughness and competitive edginess, with serious issues of ethics and politics being sidelined as minor distractions or personal affectations. “Who cares if he’s a nazi???!” They would rather cling to policing a tiny set of “behavior” or “actions” in a myopic and context-less vacuum. The effect of such shortsighted policies has long been plain and has been demonstrated empirically in countless other subcultures: if you ever let literal nazis into a space you encourage them to bring all their friends, to aggressively hollow out your project, and turn it into a nazi project.

What’s more the first people you lose as a result of your “tolerance” for genocidal authoritarian street thugs are the people most at risk from them. While some have doubled down on staying and fighting — and some have preternatural capacities to persevere in hostile environments — the simple reality is many women, queer folk, and people of color, are never coming back to HOPE. A number of great hackers and pillars of the community already refused to attend this year because of HOPE’s refusal to kick out rapists.

Before last weekend’s conference and after much dragging of feet, HOPE finally adopted a “Code of Conduct.” But it was clearly weaksauce and the result of contentious negotiations with those who prioritize “ideological openness” over actual fucking openness to marginalized people. Prioritizing the inclusion of those who choose to identify as nazis over those who have no choice in things like their skin color and the disadvantage such brings in our society. But never mind that the Code of Conduct preemptively carved out a justification for the inclusion of nazis — as a code its exploits were obvious and manifold. I personally heard core organizers sneer things like, “Oh so this person got physically up in your face and loomed over you menacingly after you said something snarky about their reactionary politics? Bad on you for snarking at them, you started it.” Meanwhile someone openly broadcasting their identity as a fascist and bragging about having marched in Charlottesville was not seen as displaying threatening behavior. It’s alright for reactionaries to corner speakers, but those opposed to the explicit fascist were told that if we did the same or attempted to expel him we’d be expelled.

Devoid of any bare semblance of explicit political orientation, a “Code of Conduct” will always be interpreted by those individuals who set themselves up as a spaces’ police. And a few of those individuals doing security at HOPE were besties with the fascist, the snitch, and their reactionary buddies, hugging and meeting up with them at Hooters afterwards.

But I don’t want to whine about how the Code of Conduct was “unfairly” enforced. It’s quite clear that the words in it were always interpreted by different people in vastly different ways. And I care not one whit whether the explicit fascist and his buds were technically “harassing” — that is ultimately such an irrelevant and meaningless standard. Explicit fascists should not be welcome at any conference worth a damn and neither should snitches. Full stop.

This should be fucking obvious.

It takes an extremely impoverished view of free speech or freedom of information to defend the inclusion of neonazis in our communities. Freedom of information must be evaluated on the scale of a whole network. The inclusion of deeply malicious nodes out to impose fascism on everyone poisons the network, impedes the flow of information within it. Time during HOPE that would have otherwise been spent on productive conversations on hypervisors was wasted organizing impromptu security for Chelsea Manning and having the most basic 101 of conversations over and over again, arguing that yes nazis exist today, yes they constitute an active threat, yes we must stand against them, and yes the bare fucking minimum is kicking them out of our spaces.

Unfortunately it seems that for many — pickled in a proud ignorance of politics beyond their nose — “free speech” doesn’t mean a world of maximally efficient information transfer and processing, but a bro-y culture where communication is stripped of nuance and attentiveness in favor of inane performative edginess and competitive callousness. This is disappointing to say the least. Because the hacker dream of freedom of information unleashing historically repressed voices online to help tear down all antiquated boundaries like borders and create a new world with new cultural norms? We got it. We actually kinda won that. It’s called “social justice.” There are still some unfortunate bugs and failure modes to be worked out, but on the whole it’s been a stunning success. The internet has opened up the world to countless people marginalized by systems of oppression. It’s beyond infuriating that those upset with this, who want to roll back the clock and give speech welfare to the shittiest ideas imaginable like fascism have the gall to pretend they stand for “free speech.”

While I understand the attachment many people have to Codes of Conduct at conferences given how hard they had to fight for them, I think a focus on appealing to a CoC is deeply flawed. Not least because codified rules of behavior will always struggle to integrate context. I don’t give a shit whether a rapist happened to rape someone at the conference or whether a neonazi shouted “jews will not replace us” at said conference. Rapists & neonazis should obviously be banned entirely. We shouldn’t have to legalistically argue about CoC violations.

A Code of Conduct isn’t a panacea. Not everything egregious will fall cleanly under it. No code of clearly measurable behavior, whether a CoC or the NAP or some Constitution will ever provide us with everything we need. The real world is complicated and so are the threats we face. Anarchists and others have long used Points of Unity in addition to clarify our values and motivations so that we can at least argue individual situations from the same starting ethos. HOPE and the broader hacker community need to accept that there is no such thing as neutrality, that values are inescapable, and that having any values means some manner of political exclusion.

To defend an open world of freedom of information necessarily involves cutting out and routing around bad nodes in the network. If we let rapists or proud fascists and snitches invade our spaces we push out most everyone else. If we fail to resist fascists we are functionally complicit in their campaigns and aspirations.

What if we treated ICE agents and cops the way they treated those accused of the non-crime of illegal border crossing? What their crimes against personal freedom were met with the type of treatment they impose on others? Perhaps in such a world those arresting them would document their arrest using templates such as this one.

The following is a template to be used when arresting oppressors after liberation is achieved.

On [DATE] of [YEAR], [ARRESTEE’S NAME(s)] were arrested and charged with civil rights violations. Specifically, they were charged with willfully exerting harm or directing others to exert harm in violation of individual rights and/or generally accepted standards of ethical treatment toward their fellow human beings. The offending actions are listed below:

• War crimes, including intentionally targeting civilians
• Illegal aggressive actions
• Cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners
• Indefinite detention of innocent individuals
• [ADDITIONAL CRIMES LISTED]

As offenders have a tendency to flee prosecution, the accused will be held in a detention facility until the date of their trial. Typically, trial can be arranged within __ months. However, please be advised that recently there have been delays and processing times may vary. The accused may be able to shorten their detention by up to __ weeks by agreeing to plead guilty. Unfortunately, the policies and actions of recent presidents have led to a backlog of human rights cases. In particular, decisions made recently by the Trump administration have led to an increase in offenses along the border. The accused is advised to expect extra wait times if their trial is a ‘border problem,’ as it is difficult to convince highly-trained civil liberties judges to travel to such remote locations as Tucson, El Paso, or Washington D.C.
Any children of the accused will be detained and processed separately. Some offenders have claimed dubiously to have “families” that “need” them, without being able to immediately produce proof of familial relationship (document lists for establishing parentage are spelled out in Section 6 of the document). As such, children and other family members found in the offender’s custody will be considered illegally smuggled until proven otherwise. The accused need not worry about the safety of “their” children however as the children will be supplied with adequate plastic mattresses, foil blankets, and concrete floor space while being processed. Rest assured that our facilities fall well within U.S. norms for the care of children when parents are accused of a crime.

To that end, children will be held in chain-link enclosures for no longer than __ hours/days before being transferred to a foster care family, or whatever. If the accused is concerned about the well-being of the children, they can check in on them by calling the following number:____________. An operator will kindly advise where the child is being warehoused/re-educated.

Obviously the accused has the right to a public defender, however the accused should be advised that public defenders are over-worked and may only be able to meet with each client for a few minutes, if at all. The accused should be prepared to present their plea and the details of their defense intuitively. We understand this may be difficult for individuals who have little legal training.

If the accused is sentenced to a period of incarceration, they may be assured that their prison stay will be as comfortable as is typical. Extreme punishments, such as solitary confinement, will only be imposed if guards or prison employees perceive a need for such punishments, and will only last as long as is required to inflict the desired effect. Food will be provided to nearly/barely meet caloric and nutritional needs (note that individual needs may vary) and many supplies including phone minutes, will be available for purchase at a ‘competitive’ price.

We appreciate your understanding and cooperation during this process. Please indicate below, on a scale from 1 to 5, how likely you would be to recommend this arrest experience to your friends/co-conspirators:

1 2 3 4 5

One big problem with border abolitionists and open borders advocates is a lack of focus on how unradical it actually is. Well, of course it’s radical politically, but the major concerns among restrictionists are cultural, and well, we live in a post-monoculture world. We have for pretty much all my life. Most people don’t understand the country they want to preserve from globalism is the country most responsible for globalism’s existence. One thing I’ve noticed is that communities, even in conservative areas, are not at all fearful of the actually existing immigrants living among them. They will even rally to protect them. The hopeful yet frightening truth is that if the US citizenry wanted to purge itself of its undocumented population it has the capacity and institutions. But as happy as we are to call the police on our neighbors in many circumstances, an extreme minority of the population possess the desire or motivation to make that call to ICE.

What they dread is a meme embedded in their head by the media they consume. Rather than presenting them with the neighbors that have participated and contributed to the life they wish to preserve, the media feeds them representations of some brave new world where what they know is overrun by, at best, strangers from a strange land, and more typically by a horde of amoral third world conquistadors. We too often insist that the natives learn to adjust to this imposition rather than point out this is already the world they live in, and the political movement that would need to wipe away the values and progress of our civilization is actually the closed borders crowd. Without some cataclysm tearing our ways of life asunder, the free flow of the world population is inevitable, and in many ways it is already here.

Problems have and may yet emerge as a consequence of national barriers breaking down, but those problems are often inflicted by the last gasps of a dying world that very few of us have lived in for much of our lives.

So if you wish to go back to that world, then find a community that wants to build up those walls, and leave the billions of us who love this rather familiar world in peace. And to those who wish to fight for the promise of a world that has evolved beyond these glorified gang lines, realize that it is not the forces of reaction against that goal that pose the greatest danger. The threat comes primarily from inaction and a lack of perspective. The likes of ICE and DHS were constructed overnight, not long before this night. They can be demolished at the same pace, as long as we possess the moral and historical clarity to strike at their shallow roots and expose their weakness, their contingency, and the damage they’ve inflicted on every person who wishes to live in a world that’s freer than the one they were born into. It has been over a half century since humanity escaped the gravitational pull of the earth. Let us not accept that the world as we’ve viewed from the heavens, open and united, is beyond our grasp. Anything less than the abolition of this whole state of affairs is uncivilized and beneath every individual upon the surface of this boundaryless rock.

Want to support the Center and the work we do? Visit our brand new store
where you’ll find amazing deals on a variety of left market anarchist books, as well as stickers, buttons, and more.

For years you’ve supported us through our relationship with the Distro of the Libertarian Left — which continues to host a vast variety of historical zines — but we wanted to offer a more direct relationship for our supporters as well as a wider array of material than just zines and books.

At its inception C4SS focused on getting timely editorials with an anarchist focus published in newspapers around the world. However, with the slow decline of print media, many of the community newspapers that served as our bread and butter have dried up. Meanwhile, thankfully, our profile has risen as an incubator of theory and discourse. Consequently over the last eleven years we’ve slowly shifted focus from getting republished in mainstream media to things like publishing academic studies, translating anarchist material into fifteen languages, and hosting symposiums and debate between anarchist thinkers across the spectrum. Over the last year we’ve expanded the number and role of our editors to assure consistent quality and help nurture new writers. Additionally we’ve built a more active social media crew. Looking forward we’ve invested major energy into a number of new upcoming projects.

That said, while many of us have become preoccupied with these projects it’s important that we continue to fill our unique role providing a source of timely anarchist commentary on current events and also avoid creating a sense of institutional remove or inaccessibility around the Center. To those ends we’re looking to train up new writers.

We’re proud to have have collaborated with ALL Distro for years and they’ve done incredible work spreading Left Libertarian materials, however the primary maintainer has become preoccupied in his academic work and so over the last year we’ve been working to put together our own full fledged store. We will offer a wide range of products, not just books and zines but a host of unique buttons, stickers, and apparel. Some of which was available early to fans who visited our table at a number of bookfairs and conferences. All of which will be accessible as public domain information in addition to purchasable material goods. Running a store for ourselves will enable us to provide more materials, to directly profit from purchases, and to generally lend the institutional weight of the Center to better fulfill customer demand.

Available in our store will also be book versions of our popular Mutual Exchange symposiums, which are in the process of going to publication. The first of these books was published not that long ago and we’ve loved the feedback so far. Nowhere else will you find anarchists thinkers from across the spectrum debating in good faith and with great depth topics like property, democracy, and antifascism.

We’re in the process of building towards a new mutual exchange this summer that we’re very excited about and can’t wait to reveal.

Eleven years of nonstop publication has given C4SS a rich backlog of material to pull from, but it can also become inaccessible. We’ve renewed our audio projects. Check out our youtube channel for uploads of the audiobook version of Markets Not Capitalism, read aloud by Stephanie Murphy as well as continuing new recordings of C4SS articles. You can also now download the audiobook on Bandcamp, for free if you like, of course.

While C4SS continues to reserve money each month for the efforts by our active translators, we’ve also undertook a massive translation effort to get several core articles like the introduction to Markets Not Capitalism, Charles Johnson’s The Many Monopolies, and Kevin Carson’s The Iron Fist Behind The Invisible Hand, translated into a number of world languages where anarchist content — to say nothing of market anarchist ideas — is rare. We’re now in the process of formatting those translations for distribution as booklets or pamphlets.

There are many more projects in various stages of work, from grants for investigative reporting and quantitative analysis, to reading groups and meetups. If you’re interested in getting involved drop us a line.

Next month (3-6 May) in San Diego I’ll be speaking at the Libertopia conference, which is back after several years’ hiatus. Here’s my topic and abstract:

Hoppean Libertarianism as Right-Wing Tribalism: A Critique
Roderick T. Long

One of the main conduits by which many libertarians in recent years have been drawn into the orbit of the Alt-Right is the work of Hans-Hermann Hoppe. I argue that Hoppe’s views on such matters as racial difference, immigration, monarchism, and the desirability of culturally homogeneous communities are systematically mistaken, as well as incompatible with a libertarian understanding of human action.

My Molinari Institute / Center for a Stateless Society / Alliance of the Libertarian Left / Bleeding Heart Libertarians colleague Gary Chartier will also be speaking; here’s his topic and abstract:

How to Think About the Constitution
Gary Chartier

Libertarians often defend particular theories of constitutional interpretation. But, at least for those who are skeptical about standard defenses of state authority, there’s a prior question: are we obligated to follow the Constitution? If we’re not, I suggest, then there’s no right answer to questions about the right way to read the Constitution. Instead, we should make constitutional arguments likely to advance liberty.

Other speakers include David Friedman, Scott Horton, Jeff Tucker, Spencer MacCallum, and many more. Check it out!

We at the Center believe ideas matter. We believe thoughtful discourse enriches, rather than undermines, anarchist praxis. We believe that a world free of compulsion and degradation is achievable through, in part, a culture permeated by anarchist ideas. Our mission as an openly anarchist think tank is to thoughtfully articulate and defend anarchist ideas. We strive to present the inspiring, yet practical, alternative of anarchism and serve as a consistent source of engaging thought.

If you’re an anarchist and you have something to say, we want to hear from you. If you yearn for a better future, free of power and authority, but value productive dialogue over tribal posturing or armchair theorizing, we want to hear from you. If you’re angry about or acting against police brutality, military occupation, ICE deportations, mass incarceration, social injustice, or structural poverty, and want to channel that anger into something that can somehow, somewhere, sometime change someone’s mind for the better, we want to hear from you. Whether it’s your first time publishing anywhere or just with us, C4SS is always welcoming new writers.

We offer $25 for your first article we publish. Send essays or commentary of around 500-800 words to editor@c4ss.org and we’ll work with you the rest of the way. We’re particularly interested in anarchist commentary on current events.

We are also looking for folks with the proper equipment interested in recording some of our expansive archive of literature (current recordings can be found here). C4SS will compensate you ($10 per recording starting rate) for new audio recordings of:

• Feature articles
• Classic essays
• Mutual Exchange contributions
• Book chapters

Audio submissions and/or any questions about audio submission should be sent to media@c4ss.org.

Two Molinari/C4SS panels are coming up at two different conferences later this week:

1. The Molinari Society will be holding its mostly-annual Pacific Symposium in conjunction with the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in San Diego, March 28-April 1, 2018. Here’s the schedule info:

Molinari Society symposium:
Author Meets Critics: Gary Chartier’s Public Practice, Private Law: An Essay on Love, Marriage, and the State

G9C. Friday, 30 March 2018, 7:00-10:00 p.m. (or so), Westin San Diego Gaslamp Quarter, 910 Broadway Circle, San Diego CA, room TBA

chair:
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)

critics:
Jennifer Lockhart (Auburn University)
Lori Watson (New Mexico State University)
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)

author:
Gary Chartier (La Sierra University)

2. We’ve also organised a panel at the Association of Private Enterprise Education conference in Las Vegas, April 1-4, 2018. Here’s the schedule info:

Topics in Free-Market Anarchism

4.A.6.. Wednesday, 4 April 2018, 8:00-9:15 a.m., Caesars Palace, 3570 Las Vegas Blvd S., Las Vegas NV, room TBA.

chair:
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)

panelists:
Gary Chartier (La Sierra University)
Jason Lee Byas (University of Illinois)
Nathan Goodman (George Mason University)
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)

Nathan is also on a bunch of other panels; he’ll be speaking on “Social Capital and Social Justice: Why Liberalism is Essential” (Monday at 1:10 p.m.), “Voluntary Associations as an Alternative to State Social Welfare Provision” (Monday at 2:30 p.m.), “The Political Economy of Whistleblowers” (Tuesday at 8:00 a.m.), and “Policing, Civil Society, and External Aid: A Polycentric Perspective” (Tuesday at 2:30 p.m.).

In other news, for a brief report on the recent PPE Society meeting in New Orleans, see here.

From March 2nd to the 4th, hundreds of libertarian-minded students will gather for the conference of the year in Washington D.C. For the fifth time, The Center for a Stateless Society will be promoting the ideas of left-market anarchism at Students For Liberty’s LibertyCon.

We are bringing all the ingredients for productive dialogue — eye-grabbing swag, thoughtful literature, and good manners — in the hopes that mainstream American libertarians will be more open to synthesizing concerns for social justice and structural poverty with their anti-statism, not in the form of sacrificing anti-statism for the other two values, but instead recognizing their interconnectedness. At a time when libertarianism is fighting off reactionary entryists left and right, the Center’s uncompromising radical vision ought to be at the forefront of the conversation.

Here’s a sneak peak at just some of the books, zines, stickers, buttons, and shirts we’ll have at our LibertyCon booth.

Whether you’re already a committed left-market anarchist and looking to stock up on various goodies and meet other like-minded folk, or you find the Center’s ideas somewhat compelling and want to bolster your knowledge about left-market anarchism, or you just know absolutely nothing at all about our ideas and want to learn more, take a second to stop by our booth this March 2-4 at LibertyCon.

And don’t forget our Saturday lunch event at Medaterra where we’re raffling off a free copy of Markets not Capitalism! You can register for LibertyCon here, and use the code CMASSIMINO for a discount! Travel and lodging information can be found here.

See you this weekend!

Political dialogue suffers mightily from a lack of categorizational clarity. This problem is attributable in part to the slipperiness of political concepts, which implicate and blend (often carelessly) the empirical, the historical, and the normative. To blame, too, is the cultural phenomenon of politics as entertainment or sport, team-rooting being more important than truth-finding or genuine understanding. Once one has settled upon a team, he systematically shields himself from any information that could compromise his allegiance to it, as even brain scans have been able to demonstrate. Still, conceptual or categorizational clarity (if you’ll pardon the mouthful) is worth pursuing if we aspire to more than talking past one another or angrily exchanging partisan talking points.

One who consciously identifies his political thinking with decentralism has a particularly hard time finding his place within today’s ideological taxonomy. To whose cause does the decentralist join his strength, the left or the right? Liberals or conservatives? Decentralists argue that centralization and its massive institutions encourage and engender unaccountability, that the proper goals of socially beneficial human organization are obstructed rather than served by all-consuming centralization. As the anarchist intellectual Paul Goodman pointed out, “In a centralized system, the function to be performed is the goal of the organization rather than of any persons (except as they identify with the organization). The persons are personnel.” Though clearly a man of the left, when Goodman discusses the “centralizing style of organizing” he doesn’t sound anything like today’s liberals and progressives, who have made of rigid hierarchy and centralization through distant, monolithic institutions practically a religion. Indeed, he sounds very much like today’s libertarians, except that his analyses are filled with trenchant criticisms of existing capitalism, which he perceptively contrasts with “Adam Smith’s economics.” If Goodman’s drawing of this distinction comes as a surprise to today’s political left (however defined), it shouldn’t, for there has always been, particularly in the United States, a tradition of market-oriented left-wing individualism.

Strong decentralist currents are an important part of the DNA of both the left and the right, just as are the opposite forces; this is one of the many reasons why the labels “left-wing” and “right-wing,” by themselves, can’t clarify or explain very much of substance, why they fail to express anything particularly meaningful about the arrangement of the social and political order. German National Socialism and Italian Fascism are examples of what we might call right-wing centralism, while American free-market libertarianism might be an example of right-wing decentralism. On the other side, Maoism, Soviet Communism, and the twentieth century’s various other forms of authoritarian communism may be regarded as left-wing centralism, with classical anarchism, certain localist and anti-globalization movements, and aspects of the cooperative movement perhaps understood as cases of left-wing decentralism.

Yet even this attempt at classification seems to fall apart upon inspection. It is not at all clear, for example, what it is about libertarianism that places it on the political right, other than, perhaps, the fact that it is putatively a reaction, at least in the American context, against Progressivism and New Deal Liberalism, neither of which itself arguably belongs on the left. Similarly, definitions of Nazism and Fascism that associate them with the right, thus failing to recognize the socialist extraction of both, seem extraordinarily inadequate and tendentious. We’re left with a puzzle, the lingering feeling that our need to classify in terms of left and right may actual obscure more than it illuminates.

Today, libertarians may be foremost among the flag-bearers of decentralism, though their role as earnest defenders of global corporate capitalism detracts from their decentralism. Indeed, much of the left’s anti-corporate and anti-capitalist message is historically bound to decentralism, to an opposition to monopoly power and grants of special privilege to the rich, together with a preference for local and cooperative forms of production. In the late nineteenth century and through the twentieth, decentralism fell out of favor and the global socialist movement embraced political and “industrial gigantism,” possessed by a spirit that transcended political ideology during that period, that of treating hierarchy and centralization as the scientific way. In his biography of the first self-described anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, George Woodcock argues that the political left took a wrong turn “in accepting so uncritically the phenomenon of large-scale and centralized industrial organization.” Proudhon, whose anarchism incorporated a radicalized federalism and decentralism, has become more relevant than ever “now that we know all the social, economic, and ecological evils of industrial gigantism.”

Proudhon and American individualists that followed him (Benjamin Tucker, for example) were keen to point out that market economies are not inherently or necessarily capitalist economies. Much depends on how we define capitalism, whether we treat it as just another way to express the notion of free markets or define it in terms of inequality, exploitation, and privilege (as socialists of all stripes have tended to do). We won’t get very far in a conversation or a debate until it is clear that we’re using the same language, and too often we aren’t. The current moment in American political life seems to call for a renewed interest in decentralist ideas, if only as a point from which to start real conversations. In his introduction to E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, Theodore Roszak remarks, “Bigness is the nemesis of anarchism, whether the bigness is that of public or private bureaucracies, because from bigness comes impersonality, insensitivity, and a lust to concentrate abstract power.” Notwithstanding the fact that today’s incoherent political categories would make anarchism and conservatism antitheses, there is certainly a current of Kirkian conservatism about which the very same thing could be said.

C4SS, or the Center for a Stateless Society, is a left wing market anarchist think tank. The Center utilizes academic studies, book reviews, op-eds, and social media to put left market anarchist ideas at the forefront of libertarianism and to eventually bring about a world where individuals are liberated from oppressive states, structural poverty, and social injustice.

Simply, the Center’s mission is to build a new world in the shell of the old.

Students For Liberty’s LibertyCon is the year’s premier gathering of libertarian minds from all over the world – and C4SS is a mere $750 away from getting a table at this event. This is a wonderful opportunity to promote radical left anarchist ideas among young liberty lovers from around the globe.

Every penny counts and the Center appreciates any and all help you are willing to give. Let’s get C4SS to LibertyCon and start building the new world!

Donate here.