A hot topic among the left right now is the issue of gun control. While  radical leftists have traditionally been in favor of gun rights, some have begun to justify gun control measures in the hope that it might de-fang white supremacist movements and end gun violence against marginalized communities.

Many groups, including Dream Defenders and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, have made alliances with the March for Our Lives movement in the name of intersectionality. Of course, expecting a white supremacist state to fight against white supremacy is a pipe dream at best and gun control actually mainly serves to disarm marginalized communities. The more realistic way to tackle hate crimes and violence is through community defense — including gun rights.

Oddly enough, many of these more radical leftist groups that have allied themselves with March for Our Lives have also allied themselves with various strains of the prison abolition and reform movements. Aside from calls to disarm state agents such as the police, these movements have contradictory goals. If we disarm the police, who will enforce gun control measures enacted against average citizens? Given this contradiction, much of the politics surrounding gun control in this segment of the left is muddled and conflicting, with many of the measures they call for only serving to expand the police state and increase incarceration.

Despite all of this confusion, there are several forms of gun control the left is almost uniformly opposed to, and loudly so. The issue is that they usually fail to mention guns at all when discussing these policies. When it comes to practices like Stop-and-Frisk, Zero Tolerance policies, and mandatory minimum sentencing requirements, they want to talk about how these policies impact marginalized communities, but conveniently forget that these are all forms of gun control.

Stop-and Frisk has received the scorn of leftists for years. Many see the policy as inherently racist and a violation of the fourth amendment. Most of the time, when the issue is discussed, it is usually talked about in terms of the War on Drugs. And while Stop-and-Frisk policies were definitely meant as a way to randomly search for drugs, they were also after another major big ticket item: illegal firearms. Of course these efforts have been found to be wildly ineffective and have mostly been repealed and left to rot in the past.

Similarly, the school-to-prison pipeline has been rightly condemned by leftists for its role in mass incarceration. School Zero Tolerance policies are a big part of the problem. These policies insist that schools resort to suspension, expulsion, and/or legal action against students for violent or potentially violent actions, including bringing weapons or drugs to school. Zero Tolerance policies were in fact implemented in the 90’s in response to growing concerns over school shootings and were meant to target gun violence in schools. Instead, they have led to many kids being expelled over petty fights and other normal youth aggression as well as for things like habitual disruption, disrespect, and playing with fake or imaginary weaponry.

Finally, mandatory minimum sentences have long been fought against by those concerned about prisoner rights. Mandatory minimums increase the rates of mass incarceration, resulting in longer sentences for certain types of crimes, including those involving firearms. In most states, there are mandatory minimums for any crimes involving firearms, no matter how petty the crime or how the firearm was used (or not used). There are even mandatory minimum sentences for those caught possessing firearms illegally even if you did not commit a crime with said firearm.

This means that even carrying a firearm on your person can potentially lead to a longer prison sentence if you are caught doing anything else illegal, do not have proper licensing, or have priors.

In spite of the fact that some leftists seem just fine with gun control measures in theory, when certain gun control measure are enacted they can’t help but stand against them in practice — as long as you don’t mention guns during the conversation. You can talk about all the other harms these policies bring but there is always silence when their role as forms of gun control are mentioned. It’s time to break that silence. It’s time to reclaim our rights and affirm that we cannot fight against mass incarceration without fighting for gun rights!

Di Kevin Carson. Originale pubblicato il primo febbraio 2016 con il titolo Je Suis #ResearchParasite. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

In un editoriale pubblicato sul New England Journal of Medicine (“Data Sharing,” 21 gennaio), Dan Longo e Jeffrey Drazen inventano un nuovo curioso termine: “parassita della ricerca”. Gli autori in teoria dicono: Condividere le informazioni è bello. Ma all’atto pratico è una di quelle cose che, buone in teoria, nella realtà non vanno bene. “Il timore principale è che qualcuno che non contribuisce alla produzione e alla raccolta delle conoscenze possa non capire le scelte fatte nel definire i parametri.”

Ancora di più, però, preoccupa la possibilità “che possa emergere una nuova categoria di ricercatori, fatta di persone estranee alla creazione e la messa in pratica di idee e che si limitano ad utilizzare conoscenze prodotte da altri per i propri scopi personali, magari prendendo dalle produzioni scientifiche fatte da chi ha raccolto conoscenze, o anche persone che usano le stesse conoscenze per confutare le tesi di chi le ha originate. Esiste il timore, presso alcuni ricercatori impegnati in prima persona, che del sistema possano prendere il controllo quelli che sono stati definiti “parassiti della ricerca”.

Detto più semplicemente, l’espressione “parassiti della ricerca” includerebbe sia chi si serve di conoscenze prodotte da altri ricercatori per poi confutarle, sia chi si serve di tali conoscenze come base per ulteriori sviluppi senza il consenso dei ricercatori originali. In altre parole, questi parassiti della ricerca sarebbero persone che fanno ciò che un tempo si chiamava “scienza”.

Fin dalle origini della scienza sperimentale occidentale, simboleggiate dalla leggenda di Galileo che spiega la fisica aristotelica lasciando cadere due sfere dalla Torre di Pisa, il suo ethos ruota attorno all’idea di piena trasparenza e libera condivisione delle informazioni. Il motto della Royal Society, che risale alla comunità scientifica internazionale del diciassettesimo secolo, era “nullius in verba”, “non [fidarti delle] parole di nessuno”.

Questo scientifico ethos open-source è stato descritto dall’autore di fantascienza Kim Stanley Robinson in Blue Mars:

“Tutto era alla luce del sole, pubblico… Per ogni problema scientifico, quelli che rappresentavano l’avanguardia e che costruivano il progresso formavano un gruppo speciale, qualche centinaio al massimo – spesso con al centro un gruppo che faceva sintesi e innovava, non più di una dozzina in tutti i mondi –, crearono un nuovo gergo nel loro dialetto per comunicare le nuove scoperte, discutere i risultati, suggerire nuove strade di ricerca, offrire spunti per l’attività di laboratorio, ritrovarsi tra specialistici, parlarsi con tutti i mezzi a disposizione. Era lì, nei laboratori e nei luoghi di ritrovo, che il lavoro progrediva in forma di dialogo tra persone che capivano i problemi…

“E tutta questa vasta struttura culturale così articolata era alla luce del giorno, accessibile a chiunque volesse prenderne parte, a chiunque avesse la volontà e la capacità di aiutare; niente segreti, nessuna carboneria…”

Fin dall’inizio, la comunità scientifica internazionale è stata caratterizzata dalla libera condivisione delle conoscenze, dalla disponibilità accordata a chiunque di testare o sviluppare le idee, senza confini nazionali.

Vista su questo sfondo, la paura espressa da Longo e Drazen, che “i risultati delle ricerche effettuate da chi raccoglie dati possano essere rubati”, assume un significato particolare. Ciò di cui parlano è il diritto di proprietà della conoscenza o, più precisamente, il diritto in esclusiva di chi possiede certe conoscenze di trarne profitto. I confini aziendali sono, nell’attuale panorama economico globalizzato, l’equivalente più prossimo ai confini nazionali. E la recinzione delle conoscenze, delle informazioni scientifiche, da parte delle aziende, rappresenta una violenza contro la libertà di fare ricerca, qualcosa di simile ai segreti del complesso industrial-militare attuale, o alla ricerca scientifica ai tempi di Newton se ad essa fossero state applicate restrizioni sulla base dei confini nazionali.

C’è un’espressione popolare, “l’era del vapore”, che fa riferimento a quelle invenzioni epocali, come la macchina a vapore o la radio, sviluppate contemporaneamente ma in modo indipendente da persone diverse. Questo avviene perché, quando esistono tutti i prerequisiti tecnici, tutti i mattoncini necessari a sviluppare un’invenzione, è la stessa esistenza di un corpus di conoscenze diffuse nella società a diventare una forza produttiva. Vediamo in opera ciò che qualcuno definisce “stare sulle spalle di un gigante”: ogni nuova scoperta dipende dalle precedenti, e dalla fertilità che hanno le idee quando si connettono tra loro e generano nuove combinazioni di idee più grandi della somma delle singole parti.

Siamo chiari: Longo e Drazen chiedono l’imposizione di pedaggi che impediscano la condivisione e lo sviluppo di conoscenze acquisite. Vogliono che lo stato usi la propria autorità per far valere i diritti di “proprietà” sulle conoscenze, così che istituti di ricerca protetti da proprietà industriale, come lo stato stesso e i centri di ricerca aziendali, possano tassare l’utilizzo produttivo delle conoscenze acquisite da loro. Questo è un colpo mortale a quella produttività basata sulla conoscenza sociale al cuore della scienza.

Citazioni:

• Kevin Carson, Je Suis #ResearchParasite, News LI

• Kevin Carson, Je Suis #ResearchParasite, P2P Foundation Blog, 2016-02-26

• Kevin Carson, Je Suis #ResearchParasite, Augusta Free Press, 2016-02-04

James C. Scott’s latest book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, is sure to become a classic and a brick in the wall of core anarchist theory. It covers somewhat different but complementary ground to Peter Gelderloo’s Worshiping Power: An Anarchist History Of Early State Formation. I have some significant critiques of the narratives it pushes, particularly around the character and downfall of early stateless sedentary agricultural societies, but on the whole I loved this book.

Scott is admirably nuanced and attentive to more complex contemporary discoveries and insights. This is not a book pushing the simplistic primitivist line. It notes in detail the kind of exceptions that I’ve been pointing out for over a decade, the complexity and diversity of the historical record, as well as the marked non-inevitability of it. If Gelderloos documents sociocultural pathways for state formation, attacking marxist and primitivist narratives, Scott carries a similar nuance to detailing the ecological and technological context. Certain environments and technological forms made states possible, but certainly not obligatory. (Whether one reads possibility as probability depends on where one stands on the independent power of culture.).

Scott has become something of a patron saint among left market anarchists and he is consistently honest about the depth of trade throughout human history and social forms. I hate beating this dead horse but a never ending stream of fresh-faced communists continue asserting to me that states created the very premise of markets. The idea is laughable and clearly wrong in every nook and cranny of human history. Just because trade often took the form of informal credit within tribes, doesn’t mean their societies weren’t broadly riven with trade. Hunter-gatherers had elaborate and far-reaching trade networks. Stateless agricultural societies did as well. Scott, being infamously attentive to illegibility, recognizes markets and merchants as deeply antipathetic to state power, both when without and within.

“One reason for the official distrust and stigmatization of the merchant class in China was the simple fact that its wealth, unlike that of the rice planter, was illegible, concealable, and fugitive. One might tax a market[place], or collect tolls on a road or river junction where goods and transactions were more transparent, but taxing merchants was a tax collector’s nightmare.”

Responding to my review of Worshiping Power, Peter Gelderloos agreed that markets, even very mature ones, in no way oblige the creation of a state. His quibble was that they nevertheless provide an exploitable precondition for the existence of states. Well let us remember that the adoption and use of fire is probably something of a precondition of states too. A whole narrative could be spun about how tribes that avoid using fire to instead eat raw meat are less likely to form anything like states without the caloric surpluses that fire unlocks. One could even go on about how the absence of campfires renders a populace more illegible and of course detail all the ways fire is utilized by state warfare. This doesn’t mean fire is fucking bad or that we should outlaw it to better avoid statism. I’ll say no more on the matter here.

Scott’s focus in terms of “necessary preconditions” is more specific: sedentary grain agriculture. And to his credit he is very clear that states were only a “subspecies” of sedentary grain societies. Many avoided the state form.

He is also clear that states were inconstant and unstable, but also that “collapse” of a regime usually looked more like the decentralization of power rather than some kind of catastrophic reduction in population or cultural/economic complexity. The culture of civilization — presumably both its positives and negatives — often remained even as the abusive centralization of the state itself was demolished.

And Scott is quite good, like increasingly many other writers, at pointing out just how biased the historical record is towards state societies rather than the sophisticated stateless societies that seemingly now crop up everywhere in the historical record. The absence of centralized archaeological sites with titanic monuments certainly doesn’t mean the absence of healthy stateless civilizations.

This is a profound bias to our current historical records that Gelderloos and myself have both been screaming about. If the perpetual anarchist cry is “We Are Still Here” what desperately needs emphasizing is that “We Have Always Been Here.”

Scott also covers, albeit briefly, one of my favorite topics: the centrality of early writing as a statist technology. Writing is one of the most powerful computational augments to human cognition ever developed, and written records have unimaginably potent impacts upon culture and individual perception because they introduce a relative inflexibility of accounts. Early writing was also intensely inaccessible, requiring memorization and thus an elite scribal class. Eventually we see semitic slaves take up writing that mirrors speech and very quickly unleash millennialist religious uprisings of the oppressed. But in its initial introduction writing always served to strengthen state power.

Scott avoids most of these latter details in Against the Grain, but he is correct that early writing was an instrument of state power, a technology hard to apply to any other ends. He quotes C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky:

“[Why did] every distinctive community on the periphery reject the use of writing with so many archaeological cultures exposed to the complexity of southern Mesopotamia? … Perhaps, far from being less intellectually qualified to deal with complexity, the peripheral peoples were smart enough to avoid its oppressive command structures for at least another 500 years, when it was imposed upon them by military conquest.”

Those of us who see writing — and indeed other means of augmented cognition — as liberatory desperately need to pay attention to the complex strategic landscape that such augmentations exist within. A limited and clunky version of a tool can be worse than no tool at all. I’ve argued repeatedly that many of the downsides of the present internet are a consequence of just how starkly limited our information technologies still are. The same consideration should be taken in the case of agriculture.

Scott’s nuance tears apart cartoonish primitivist narratives from the 70s that indict the entirety of agriculture. According to his arguments only a small subset of agricultural products or practices were edible to state forms. Caloric density, ease of mass preservation, legibility of crop yields to tax collectors, subdivisibility, and regularity of harvests were all needed. A state could not efficiently collect and store silos of beans, bananas, or tubers.

It’s a good point, although as someone of Irish rebel and Ukrainian rebel ancestry I don’t need to be reminded that potatoes are a starch crop that facilitates resistance to taxation.

Yet many primitivist narratives remain in Against the Grain, at least in some overarching form.

One example is the creeping conflation of domestication in the form of mutualistic symbiosis with domestication in the sense of enslavement. Scott talks of “domestication” in very negative tones — needed perhaps to push back against more mainstream schoolbook narratives, but still a limited counter-narrative.

Scott details ways in which domestication was a two-way street, but he casts both directions in terms of domination, rather than the obvious mutuality. He talks about how domestication changes brains, and breeds more neotenic traits. But what’s wrong with extended childhood? I can think of no stronger representation of anarchism’s aspirations than the triumph of childhood — of wild compassion, play, inquiry, and creativity — over the ossified alienation of adulthood.

And what does domestication do to brains? Scott focuses on how it breeds the fear out of animals. Lowering their anxiety about other creatures. This is not unto itself a necessarily negative thing. It facilitates cross-species collaboration and solidarity.

Wolves domesticated us just as we domesticated them, a process of deeply beneficial symbiosis. We became less afraid of them just as they became less afraid of us. And — it must be said — a marker of progress if one’s ethics values the expansion of our empathy and circles of care.

Scott talks of villages as massive resettlement camps, a phrase with intended negative valences, but we might just as easily see them as new self-generating ecological niches. Mutualism between species doesn’t evolve easily, the complexity involved not easily tunneled to when all you have are incremental gene changes over generations. Indeed the degree to which mutualism is present is seen as a marker of a highly evolved ecosystem. Human cognition, in short, allowed the pioneering of entirely new relationship webs that benefited a vast variety of species as well as an explosion of genetic development through cultivation.

Yet Scott portrays this interdependency in a negative light, as if a species’ autonomy is some kind of primordial ethical good. I think this implicit notion deserves exposure, at the very least.

It must be emphasized that autonomy is not the same thing as freedom. Greater interdependency can radically expand the options we have. Indeed strictly speaking the negative liberty of “autonomy” or self-sufficiency can be a very isolating and stultifying sort of “liberty.” Surely freedom is not retreat but the extension of our agency out into the world.

I make this case repeatedly when engaging with anticiv narratives but it’s a point that bears repeating. Certainly “freedom to” sometimes critically requires some “freedom from” but we shouldn’t confine ourselves to only a reactive defensive notion of liberation.

Scott’s history is documenting stateless people’s resistance to huge established power structures, usually through methods of retreat and obfuscation, so it’s unsurprising that he reads historical situations through these lenses, but I think such ultimately limits his evaluations.

There are a couple big ways.

Scott sees a mystery in the fact that the neolithic revolution didn’t lead to a population explosion and postulates disease as the explanation. Certainly less diverse ecosystems and higher density populations have a greater tendency towards plague, but — as usual when reading these accounts — the anarchist lens seems to be missing. What is unique about our present era that stopped the supposedly inevitable malthusian pressures? Culture. From a youth liberationist lens contemporary urbanization has been groundbreaking because it detached elder survival from how many child slaves you could generate. Freed to live longer, richer, more secure lives, the developed urban populations shifted their orientation towards child-rearing dramatically, allowing empathy to take over. Parents instead began to conceive of their children as almost human, and consequently focused on nurturing them. Instead of applying excess resources to make more children they utilized them to provide more for one or two children.

While parental relations to children remain almost universally toxic and abusive, they still shifted quite dramatically, and we might optimistically take this as a case of a preexisting tendency towards compassion reemerging the moment the shackles of agricultural serfdom came off and it became economically viable.

Simply put, it is likely the cold inhumanity of malthusianism that is the aberration.

Hunter-gatherer birthrates are generally drastically lower than agriculturalist birthrates, with cultures often deeply focused around showering attention and resources on a very a few kids. In fact hunter-gatherer birthrates look a lot closer to modern progressive first world birthrates. The materialist explanation often given is that dramatic differences in body fat precipitate vastly different frequencies of ovulation — and huntergatherers tend to have very low levels of body fat. All other things being equal if you increase the fat, constant sex is likely to lead to more children. But a fourth or fifth as frequent ovulations would be insufficient mechanism to prevent regular births and ignores very deliberate cultural and technological practices in hunter-gatherer societies like contraception, infanticide, and lengthy postpartum sex taboos, as well as more the complex mechanisms of practices that suppress puberty, fertility, or ovulation (eg longer periods of breastfeeding).

Since hunter-gatherers didn’t try to shit out as many child slaves as possible and indeed were strongly culturally oriented around parental full attention on one child for as long as possible, then the transition to agricultural modes deserves an explicit analysis. What cultural shifts were likely as a consequence of the neolithic revolution? Were they likely — in the absence of a yoke — to immediately abandon a nurture model of childrearing and shift to a slave model? Perhaps if the prompt for the revolution was purely environmental catastrophe, but if the environmental prompts were much slower or lighter we might instead see the neolithic revolution as being a shifting of cognitive complexity towards the production of lasting and more significantly networked culture.

One might choose to waste less cognitive overhead mapping distinct food networks, and instead embrace some simpler work habits because it frees up more cognition to invent and create. The labor may have been more arduous in specific ways, but we have hardly any reason to believe individuals were under as immense survival pressures as in the ages of agricultural serfdom.

There is no reason in this context to expect a shift of parental relations to children into the slave model. And thus no reason to assume a population explosion to match the resources they had available.

Scott talks at length about how disease possibly could have had a huge role in constant population winnowing, but he admits it’s all deeply speculative, without archeological evidence. But the very malthusian problem he just assumes to be present is deeply suspect.

To be clear, there is not — that I’m yet aware of — definitive archaeological evidence to support either Scott’s or my hypothesis. There may yet be some uncovered — disease and youth coddling are conceivably discernible in bone records — but in the absence of strong empirical data from that era we’re left with a question: Do you think that stateless crop-raising humans are likely to treat children as slaves and thus reproduce malthusian population growth? Or are they more likely to turn any abundance inward upon their existing offspring?

Scott cites Richard Lee’s contemporary studies between the !Kung and contemporary farming societies, but given that contemporary farming cultures are post thousands of years of contact with and shaping by widespread statism such a comparison would be completely irrelevant to evaluations of the original pre-state farming societies.

No one disputes that sedentary societies — much less mass societies — provide greater opportunity for disease, and that imbalanced diets as well as concentrated food supplies can emphasize this. But disease rolls in waves rather than as a consistent population suppressant and was even more of a problem for later societies whose populations skyrocketed. Not to mention — if we’re making comparisons to modern farming societies — plague is hardly the omnipresent catastrophic population suppressant he makes it out to be. Scott correctly points out some limitations and frailties to early sedentary farming societies, but he treats them as such extreme barriers that he can only claim the explosion of such lifestyles and infrastructure is “a miracle.”

I’d rather not have to appeal to miracles.

The supposed correlation between the onset of agricultural practices and child maximization for use as slaves is suspect at best. It would take a lot to shake cultural practices of high individual-investment childrearing and re-conceptualize our relation to our offspring as slaves rather than comrades. It would take, in short, something like a state.

And Scott is quite detailed about how states aggressively controlled their populations and saw them as property to be maximized. Having additional children as an early agriculturalist may not have provided more assistance or less precarity, but having additional children definitely provided the state with more conscripted soldiers and raw slaves.

In a context of raw and unending raiding wars there’s a very intense pressure upon state entities to maximize the number of children AND shrink how much they each get down to subsistence levels. Thus does the emergence of states necessarily create and depend upon the emergence of a radically new culture or way of relating to our children. Political power has long depended critically upon ageist justifications of parental power. Early states emerged as pillaging engines, gangs at war that offered a protection racket almost certainly closely aligned with culturally pre-existing hierarchies of elder and parental power. And when your children are being press-ganged into service with small survival odds it actually does make some sense to have more children so that you don’t outlive all of them. Thus does a relatively compassionate — if still deeply problematic — relationship provide its own internal rationale for a cultural shift to shitting out as many kids as possible. And it’s easy to imagine how this would have shifted over time to an orientation more and more alienated from and dictatorial over one’s progeny. When you have lots of kids left over in a time of relative peace you just honestly have less time for each one. When you have more mouths to feed you risk becoming more resentful of the care you are culturally and taxationally pushed to provide and expect more stark recompense for it.

It seems very likely that the macroscopic phenomenon of the rise of states — massive engines of slavery — was inextricable from changes in the culture and psychology of parenting. Arising simultaneously in feedback loops of dehumanization and hierarchy worshiping.

In this sense is the broader culture of statism directly the culture of malthusianism, adult supremacy, and patriarchy.

Scott explicitly covers tax breaks given by early states for the production of more children and refers to states as “population machines,” and yet his failure to tie these things together is jarring. Early states were engines of systematized rape, extending the pillaging of earlier war tribes to structured and cataloged systems that saw women as capital for making more slaves. Scott even talks about how populations will generally adamantly refuse to produce a surplus unless forced by states. Scott is of course talking in terms of food (and commodity) production but why doesn’t he extend this to children? Why would a stateless sedentary agricultural population work to produce surplus children? Especially with the severe cost and risk this bore upon women — who we must remember are fucking people and before systematic enslavement probably had goddamn priorities and desires beyond an existence as breeding stock, not to mention usually some access to herbal contraceptives. Surely malthusianism is an unreasonable default characteristic of humans and was likely imposed.

I harp on this point so strongly because Scott’s book — unlike Gelderloos’ — largely avoids cultural or psychological analysis. Thus the systems of adult supremacy that choke our world and underpin myriad forms of power go almost entirely unconsidered. But also because such a lens creates strong reasons to doubt that early agriculturalists were as miserable as Scott implies.

I think this matters because this narrative of agriculture being terrible implies a lack of agency on the part of early humans as well generally curtails the space of the possible, implying that one of the most radical revolutions in human history was entirely a mistake. I’m not a huge fan of historical agricultural forms or even purely sedentary life — my residual primitivist instincts run too deep — but I think it’s worth charitably reading some agency into the early sedentary peoples.

Scott uses the low population growth of these societies as a case against them, to imply that life must have been just above survival, a destitute and desperate affair that could only have been foisted upon them through short-sightedness and catastrophic environmental pressures.

I think this is false, I think that people have hungers beyond food, and will demonstrably fight time after time to accumulate together in great numbers for the benefits of knowledge, cultural complexity, and choice in one’s relationships.

I think our hunter-gatherer ancestors settled, closely clustering tribes with one another in the wetlands and delta regions, because they wanted to. Because of the rich diversity of resources available not just at one’s fingers but though waterway trade. But the food they found most nutritious was culture. I think humans hunger for cognitive complexity and consequence to our actions. Graeber covered this in his recent book Bullshit Jobs, referencing the piling psychological data that people hunger profoundly for our actions to have consequences, to expand our agency outward into the world. I think this need for choice, for the positive freedom to act and to change things, drove an explosion of culture in the regions where humans settled in large numbers close together. And that these people were unwilling to give up the nutrition of that richly buildable and consequential cognitive complexity, even to the point of enslaving their bodies in repetitive tasks rather than spending their mind on the complex considerations of hunting instead.

As hunter-gatherers we were brilliant scientists, but we were nodes locked in a complex network we had little to no say in. And so we warped and mutilated our world with fire and countless other inventions, trying to have as big of an impact as we could, to extend our reach beyond our arms. When we had the opportunity to more densely settle in towns of thousands in rich wetlands we not only leaped at the chance, we became our own ecosystems. Cambrian explosions of the meme, even while we warped the land to collapse diversity of the gene.

Scott emphasizes again and again the exponential advantages to communicative diseases with population increases, but the same is true for mental diseases — otherwise known as art, science, and the like. Because what good are humans — lumbering oaf like creatures — if not as carriers for ideas, experiences, dreams, and aspirations?

Civilization is literally ‘the culture of cities.’ The explosive ecosystem of wild new lifeforms whose evolution speeds forward at dizzying paces far beyond the stunted evolution of material biological beings confined to gene changes over generations. A rich and complicated niche only made possible by the accumulation of large numbers of humans.

It is an ecosystem full of unparalleled monsters and mutualism, vastly different forces and conflicts, but it is an ecosystem that will fight to survive. That will — unless it matures soon — continue burning down the planet that its host meatsacks still depend upon.

Accounts like that of James C. Scott would largely paint thought and culture out of the picture, would reduce it to merely a reactive role, responding to environmental conditions and pressures. Against the Grain is a relatively materialist account, of the sort that can’t help but diminish thought and culture, to see it as a kind of static noise overlayed over deeper shaping structures. There are of course important and critical influences played by material conditions, by the structures of technologies, by the limits of computation in the face of complexity. But what you risk missing with such a lens is literally everything else.

Malthusianism reduces people to unthinking bacteria, to rabbits without the foresight to consider the carrying capacity of their environment. Today much of the anticiv discourse depends upon notions of inevitability, historical forces that we are powerless in the face of, that we must simply run and scurry from. But malthusianism turned out to be utterly and profoundly wrong. It was a simplistic induction of structure from a limited dataset, it assumed people were simpler than they really are. That all that culture, ethics, ideology, and philosophy stuff was just empty meaningless flak that could be ignored. It turned out instead that their model was empty.

I encounter such thinking throughout anticiv and green milieus. Great big abstractions and narratives like “civilization” or claims about the inevitability of states from agriculture are taken to be cold hard realities, whereas the wild jumble of ideas and desires that permeate human life are seen as toothless spectres. The reverse is often true. The world is not determined by giant molochian demons striding above us, impregnable and deterministic. The world is far richer and more complicated. Civilization is not merely a bunch of unthinking rabbits responding blindly to environmental pressures and a chain of unforeseen consequences grinding out inexorably, but a site of dazzlingly rich conflict, between tendencies like freedom and power, complexity and simplicity, always present in human life, but scaled up. The stakes doubled and doubled again, compounding gravely but also with great promise.

This wild unruly project we call civilization, the culture of cities, has unleashed incredible freedom and incredible oppression, locked in ever more complicated tangles around countless particulars. When we assume that one tendency innately has the driver’s seat we blind ourselves to myriad opportunities to influence history ourselves, or just to identify and strike at weak points.

In his best moments Scott explicitly recognizes this, and as I say his account is far more accurate and nuanced than prior popular narratives. But in his pushback to those high school textbook style narratives I worry he creates momentum for a similarly un-nuanced anticiv narrative. So I do want to intervene against that reading.

Every time I write on this topic there is obstinate irritation in some quarters at my use of the term “civilization” to mean something other than Perlman’s Leviathan. But I think it’s very important to contest whether “civilization” actually represents anything remotely like the power structures of the state. What is at stake is everything the forces of freedom have struggled for and won in the long battlefield of civilization.

The greatest anarchist victory in history is cosmopolitanism, the expansion of our circle of care to strangers, to other species. It is has long been a central term to the conflicts over “anticiv.” Those who stridently oppose “mass societies” because “humans were not made to care about or deal with strangers” have always been prominent in primitivist and anticiv discourse, coming to a repulsive head with Individuals Tending Towards Savagery, their murders and bombings explicitly intended to revoke and declare war on universalistic compassion.

Such widening empathetic horizons are deeply enmeshed with city culture. Indeed they are quite arguably synonymous with it. It is — if anything — those who sought to turn peacefully trading settlements into engines of raiding that represent the forces or tendencies opposed to civilization, attempting to devour and digest it.

We can even speculate of it being the “barbarians” that brought the state into existence. As stateless civilization spread so did militant raiding cultures of outsiders emerge in reaction — abandoning more complex hunter-gatherer pathways for a specialization in raiding the wealth that accumulated in sedentary societies. Rich knowledge of ecosystems withering in favor of the very simplistic focus of warfare.

Raiding is such a distinct specialization that it seems a little counterintuitive to me that sedentary agriculturalists would smoothly turn to it. Raiding looks more like a smooth extension of hunting than horticulture, and as Scott points out it often is. Might it be instead those still enmeshed in the hunting and then raiding orientation that helped develop warfare? Might in fact it be the parasites who refused to partake in the mutualism and cosmopolitanism of sedentary settlements that founded the state form?

We know that there was crossover between settled and nomadic raiding populations. Scott primarily focuses on this in terms of instances of escape from the city core and enslavement back into it once states had overtaken cities. But we obviously also know many instances of raiding societies deciding to set up permanent shop in the states they raided. Why wouldn’t the same thing have happened to cities prior to the emergence of states?

And doesn’t this seem like the most reasonable genesis for state behavior?

While he avoids considering them as sources of primordial state genesis I was pleased that Scott indeed brought up the close parallels between raiders and states:

“Raiders are most likely to adjust their strategy to something that looks more like a “protection racket.” …In extracting a sustainable surplus from sedentary communities and fending off external attacks to protect its base, a stable protection racket like this is hard to distinguish from the archaic state itself.”

Gelderloos has mapped many pathways in which more recent societies can be tracked tiering up into administrative hierarchies, and no doubt there are many many dangers to watch out for. But it’s worth noting that the more concrete examples we have available take place in the cultural shadow and influence of thousands of years of state societies.

Early agricultural settlements required a great degree of voluntary collaboration; enslavement certainly wasn’t an option for the initial populations that still retained hunter-gatherer skills. It is reasonable to expect an egalitarian culture, one of expansive circles of care, to overcome suspicions of strangers beyond Dunbar’s number. We see seemingly peaceful, egalitarian, and stateless city societies throughout the archaeological record from Çatalhöyük to Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, often with rich trade networks. How does city culture or even just sedentary grain culture suddenly shift to brutally othering outsiders much less their own children? The state has always been first and foremost an engine of warfare, taxation, and slavery. What does that look like? It looks like the raiding culture of some nomadic societies, indeed a subset of hunter-gatherer communities throughout history, but with the power of entire cities under their heel.

I’m not saying that this is necessarily the case. Humans are unbelievably complicated, history is richly contingent, probably literally everything that could happen did happen, including the endogenous formation of states within city societies. But the very plausible counter-narrative I present here should give us pause.

I’m hardly unaware of the history of how narratives around “civilization” and “savages” have been weaponized by the most vicious and genocidal forces in human history, to unparalleled atrocities. We have every reason to be suspicious and to instinctively want to flip the narrative entirely. But the risk of rhetorical misuse shouldn’t blind us. If indeed states do not have that strong of claim to “city culture” we cannot afford to slapdashedly conflate them, or to obscure the distinct roots of the transition to states, of the culture of states. We should recognize that even if it means the loss of simple rhetorical narratives, it opens up more possibility for resistance if statism is a cultural strain in some real sense alien to and parasitic on the city, on the culture of mass settlements and agriculture. A cultural strain that has in many ways consumed many hosts and zombified others, but one that is nevertheless not synonymous with its hosts.

The outbreak known as fascism in the last century has been illuminating in that it revealed the deep hostility that power feels to cosmopolitanism, compassion for the stranger, and positive sum collaboration. The tools it used it also openly despised and resented.

As anarchists we are all intensely aware of how our projects are inevitably co-opted by systems of power. They raid us of our ideas and insights, take our unruly fire and try to harness it to better drive their engines. But this is not without tension on their part — they do this because they are forced to adopt and consume our projects lest they become overrun or defanged against them. It is disheartening for us, but this process of appropriation and consumption is the nature of our struggle. The question is whether our projects give them indigestion, infect, and undermine them, or whether our fire is enslaved and repurposed.

In this, civilization is a race.

This piece was co-authored with the late Syd Eastman. Rest in power Syd. 

The War on Drugs is a failure. This seems more and more to be the modern consensus among the population as incarceration rates skyrocket only to line the pockets of a few greedy corporations feeding off of cheap prison slave labor. The opioid crisis rages on. Doctors push pills for profits while state crackdowns force corporate-made junkies to find alternate fixes on the streets. There’s no denying that many of the so-called problems with drug use are actually problems caused by the state, capitalism, and social attitudes towards drug use. However it is also just as naive to think that drug use does not have its inherent risks. As anarchists, we believe that people should be able to consume whatever they wish, but as people who wish to see a society built upon mutual aid, we also wish to engage in harm reduction.

The most common form of “harm reduction” proposed in mainstream political discourse is drug legalization, usually restricted to only cannabis and “softer” drugs. However legalization does almost nothing to solve the problem while actually exacerbating these issues in many ways. First and foremost, legalization usually does not include the pardoning of those imprisoned for drug crimes and the expungement of all drug crimes from one’s criminal record. Legalization is basically useless if we are not freeing people from prison. All legalization does is further regulate the industry, taking it out of the hands of the black market workers who built it and into the hands of corporations while still threatening to imprison anyone who engages in black market drug sales. Even with legalization, people with drug felonies are typically kept from working in the legal industry. Keeping working class black market entrepreneurs under threat of the police state while letting bourgeois capitalists take the demand away from the very people who survive off that income is not something anarchists of any stripe should be in support of.

So what do we fight for legislatively, if anything? Well as far as reforms go, decriminalization would go a long way towards freeing the market and keeping the police state off the backs of some of the most marginalized in our communities. Unlike legalization, decriminalization does not allow one to open up a white market drug business. Instead it actually means that possession, use, and in some cases even private person-to-person sales, are no longer crimes. This means that the preexisting black market network is finally left alone without having to worry about the pharmaceutical industry or other corporate interests stealing away some of the few honest jobs left for the lumpenproletariat to survive on under capitalism. Partner decriminalization with pardons and record expungements for all previous drug offenders, and we have a start. And unlike liberals we don’t stop at cannabis decriminalization, we demand the decriminalization of every single drug in existence.

We also should fight to deregulate the pharmaceutical industry. As harmful as it is for big pharma to be over-prescribing medications for profit, regulatory limits on opioid prescriptions have actually been among the leading causes for the current so-called opioid “epidemic” as people lose their prescriptions and move to the black market for alternatives.

But how do we deal with the “bad” drugs? Open and honest education. Most importantly that includes de-stigmatization. So much propaganda has been thrown around over the decades that many have an uglier view of drug use than is often the reality. Even for drugs that do have negative side effects, open, honest, and non-judgemental communication can go a long ways towards harm reduction. Websites like Erowid.org and Bluelight.org are fantastic resources for freely educating the public on a large variety of drugs.

Of course even with all the knowledge of what these drugs are supposed to do in their pure forms there are always cases of people cutting drugs with other substances or cases of flat out substitution. Keeping an ear to the streets and knowing what popular substitutions are can go a long way towards helping figure out how to care for those cases. Tools such as the Bad Batch Alert app can help drug users communicate within their own communities, warning each other when they find cases of drug tampering. Of course you can always test the drugs yourself using such things as fentanyl test strips and Ehrlich’s reagent. If one knows what possible substances one has consumed, it is easier to reverse or treat an overdose. This is true regardless of whether one’s drug of choice has been tampered with or not.

As far as treating overdoses it is important to remember that we are not there to diagnose people, only to treat the symptoms they are facing so that they may be safe. Common overdose symptoms include overheating, anxiety, paranoia, dehydration, and semi/unconsciousness. To treat overheating or dehydration, make sure they drink water and electrolytes. You can also try removing their clothing and running a cold bath in more extreme cases. If someone is suffering from paranoia or anxiety, they should be taken to a safe environment with supportive care and calming imagery and/or activities. If one starts to lose consciousness though, it is maybe best to get them immediate professional medical attention. In cases of opioid usage, Narcan can be used to counter an overdose. Benzos can also be used to treat symptoms of amphetamine overdoses. For guidance in treating those suffering from a bad psychedelic trip, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies’ Manual of Psychedelic Support and similar guidebooks are useful. For mild caffeine overdoses, “drinking water, getting mild exercise, and eating foods high in potassium or magnesium, such as bananas or dark leafy greens” should do the trick as you await the caffeine to exit your body but for more severe overdoses it is best to visit your local hospital where they can keep an eye on your heart rate and give you laxatives or pump your stomach as necessary.

If it is known that a particular dealer is cutting their product than it is useful to let other users know. Groups such as the Black Panthers used to confront fraudulent and violent dealers and drive them out of business. Doing such while supporting and promoting untampered drug sources helps to keep drug users safer while driving down violence in the industry.

Since the creation and demise of Silk Road, many other dark web marketplaces have surfaced providing a more secure way to buy and sell drugs on a mass scale. With guides on how to ship safely via government or private mail services, customer reviews to weed out shoddy products, and a wide selection to choose from, the dark web has been a haven for those looking to expand their reach. This is why we must continue to bring attention to Ross Ulbricht’s case and fight against internet censorship. Ultimately this means ditching corporate and state internet sources altogether in favor of autonomous internet networks.

Another important form of harm reduction is clean needle exchanges. Access to clean needles is proven to drive down the rate of infectious diseases such as HIV. Standing outside one’s local methadone clinic and passing out clean needles until you get kicked off of the property or starting a needle exchange out of your house in an area where use rates are high are good ways to distribute. In a pinch when clean needles are completely unavailable, one can rinse old needles through with water for at least 30 seconds, rinse again with bleach or coca cola for another 30 seconds, and then again with water for a final 30 seconds before reusing. This is said to effectively lower HIV risk but should only be used in emergency, opting for new needles whenever available.

Grassroots safe injection sites also play a vital role. Teaching people how to safely inject not only helps drive down disease and avoid injury but it also provides users more autonomy. In cases where a user relies on their partner to inject for them, such knowledge can provide that user with the autonomy to leave that relationship if it becomes abusive.

In cases where a user wants to get clean, support groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous offer a wonderful model built on anarchist praxis. This sort of mutual aid can extend beyond group therapy and individual sponsorship however. Grassroots recovery support can stand as a much needed alternative to the corporate rehabilitation institution model, allowing for much more individualized care. Such support can come in the form of shelter or rent assistance, food, medicine, comfort, distraction, or company.

At the opposite end of creating safe injection sites and other safe spaces for users is the need to create sober spaces for those who need them. Some people have triggers around certain drugs for various reasons and/or are former addicts and choose not to be around such substances. These spaces also allow those in recovery to have social circles which do not revolve around vices which they are attempting to break.

At the end of the day, we will never stop people from engaging in drug use. It is something we naturally seek out whether for fun, stability, or escape. Alleviating poverty and alienation by abolishing capitalism and the state will also alleviate the need for escape for many but not all. Instead all we can do is make sure to reduce harm for those who still choose to indulge in whatever vices they choose.

Authoritarian regimes are brutal and untrustworthy. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, an agreement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in effect from 1939 to 1941, shows how dangerous the schemes of authoritarians can be to people who live within their reach. The Pact helped Hitler launch the racial war he sought, helped Stalin launch his own expansionist wars, and ultimately ended in a betrayal that cost millions of human lives.

Joseph Stalin’s ideological framework and strategic objectives shaped the Pact. Stalin was an opportunistic expansionist who acted as if his regime was the global leader of true revolution. In Stalin’s view, if capitalists and fascists fought each other their position against the USSR would be weakened. Yet Stalin’s goal was not merely to stay out of the coming war, but to gain from it at the earliest opportunity. Soviet planners believed that gaining territory held by Poland would benefit the USSR’s defensive capabilities and help eliminate Polish nationalism. Stalin would make greater territorial demands in the late 1930s.

Adolf Hitler saw the Soviet Union as a special enemy. He spoke of Soviet Bolshevism as an ideological foe, associated with Jews, that National Socialism must annihilate. Goebbels would later call the pact with the Soviets “a stain on our shield.” A pact between the two countries could only come about with both leaders exercising the most cynical opportunism, and Stalin exercising undue confidence in his ability to deal with Hitler.

Events of the late 1930s drove the unlikely allies together. Stalin needed time to rebuild the Red Army after the devastating purges of the late 1930s. He also grew more distrustful of Britain and France as they continually failed to respond forcefully to the acts of Hitler and Mussolini.

The Munich Agreement of September 1938, in which Britain and France agreed to let Hitler take the Sudetenland — and with it an advantageous position for occupying all of Czechoslovakia — convinced Stalin more than ever to not rely on the western allies. When British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain refused to consult Stalin during the negotiations the Soviet dictator’s distrust was affirmed. He believed that he should deal with Germany to divide Europe into spheres of influence. Like the western allies, he gravely miscalculated Hitler’s intentions and hunger for war.

In the spring of 1939, the USSR sent diplomatic correspondence to Nazi Germany encouraging friendlier relations. In launching the new diplomatic line, Stalin began a purge of the diplomatic corps, with a focus on Jewish staff. Maxim Litvinov, the Foreign Commissar, was sacked and replaced with Vyacheslav Molotov. Diplomatic staff were arrested and sometimes murdered. Stalin saw Jewish leaders as an obstacle to rapprochement with Hitler and gave the order to “Clean out the ‘synagogue.’” As Stalin made moves for German cooperation, he also negotiated a potential alliance with Britain and France. The latter efforts were unlikely to bear fruit. The diplomatic teams sent to the Soviet Union were unimpressive, and Stalin would not back down from his demand that Soviet armed forces be given freedom of movement through Poland and Romania in the event of hostilities.

As it turns out, Hitler and Stalin had more to offer each other. An agreement would allow Hitler to start the war that he wanted without facing the Soviet Union — at first. Stalin believed that German power would be weakened by war as Soviet forces were rebuilt. Both leaders saw an opportunity to subdue Poland, and Stalin also wanted lands from the Baltic States and additional territory held by Romania.

Negotiations took place in the summer of 1939, concluding with German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop leading a delegation to Moscow to meet with Molotov and Stalin. The friendly conference was briefly interrupted when Ribbentrop contacted Hitler to ask him about territorial demands Stalin had made, which Hitler quickly approved. On August 23, 1939, the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, or Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, was signed. It contained openly-published articles promising peaceful relations between the two countries as well as secret protocols describing the spheres of influence that would be established in Eastern Europe, a set of guidelines for aggression.

On September 1, 1939, German forces invaded Poland. Hitler’s war had begun.

Nazi-Communist cooperation was strong in the beginning of the war and the ideological foes became military allies. In Revolution from Abroad, Jan T. Gross describes how the Soviets agreed to broadcast the word “Minsk” over radio from the Minsk Broadcasting Station, which assisted German warplanes with navigation. The Soviets notified the Germans on the eve of their September 17 invasion of Poland, sharing a draft of a note they would send the Polish ambassador. The note was revised according to German requests. Germany and the USSR would hold more discussions to redraw spheres of influence and coordinate occupation troop movements. In a speech he made in October, Molotov boasted, “One swift blow to Poland, first by the German Army and then by the Red Army, and nothing was left of this ugly offspring of the Versailles Treaty.”

The consequences of German-Soviet cooperation were terrible for the people who became targets of the occupying regimes. The Soviets murdered over 20,000 Polish officers and others seen as potential leaders, and deported hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews to remote areas of the USSR, where they often lived in desperate conditions. On the German side of the line, Hitler’s race war had begun in earnest. German troops indiscriminately shot civilians, executed prisoners of war en masse, and forced Jews into overcrowded and undersupplied ghettos. Jews were robbed and murdered with no legal consequences. Plans to forcibly resettle the captured Polish lands according to Nazi racial ideology were disrupted only by the later invasion of the Soviet Union.

In the east, Stalin continued his expansionist moves. He launched a disastrous invasion of Finland in the winter of 1939-1940, further weakening the Red Army while creating a sure enemy. Showing what a treaty with the Soviet Union meant for people living near its borders, the Soviets pressured Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into signing treaties, then soon occupied them with Red Army forces. By the following summer, the USSR had annexed the three Baltic States and began deporting thousands of people to Siberia.

In the west, Hitler attacked Germany’s neighbors, capturing France by June 1940. His pact with Stalin ensured Germany would be well-supplied for its war effort, as the Soviets supplied precious grain, oil, and mineral ore, and acted as a conduit for other trade, including rubber.

Between the signing of the Pact and the invasion of the USSR, Communist party organizations controlled by Moscow supported the Nazi war effort. David Wingeate Pike shows that after the fall of France in 1940, French Communists acting on their own initiative did indeed commit acts of sabotage and anti- Nazi propaganda, but the leadership of the Communist Party of France did not support resistance. The Party newspaper declared, “Friendly conversations between Parisian workers and German soldiers increase by leaps and bounds. We are delighted. Let us get to know one another.” The party later claimed they were talking about efforts to indoctrinate and demoralize German soldiers, but it is difficult to read the passage as anything other than celebrating collaboration with the brutal war machine of Nazi Germany.

Hitler believed that National Socialist Germany would have to attack their ultimate foe, the Bolshevik Soviet Union, at some point in time, in a war which promised to be an existential struggle in which no mercy could be given to racial enemies. He also wanted to bring Soviet resources under German control and show the British that the USSR could not come to their aid. Despite the obvious danger of a war on two fronts, Hitler wanted to attack while the Soviets looked to be weak.

Stalin also expected to go to war with Germany, but generally believed that Hitler would not attack at the time he did, despite volumes of evidence available to Stalin that said otherwise. By the end of 1940, Stalin was preparing for war with Germany, yet he believed the military was not ready and hoped to delay war through diplomacy and appeasement. With war imminent, political favoritism still generally won over military experience and technical expertise in the Soviet Union, and a series of denunciations and purges added to the chaos.

By the spring of 1941, Stalin’s spies had even revealed to him the date of the planned German invasion. Yet Stalin acted as if Hitler must be a rational statesman who would not start a war on two fronts while the division of Eastern Europe was working well for both occupiers. In the months leading up to war, Stalin wavered nervously, relying on wishful thinking and the fearful obedience of his deputies. Despite his belief that war was going to happen, Stalin refused to believe the clear evidence that it was imminent, scolding generals Timoshenko and Zhukov within two weeks of the invasion for pointing out the mounting evidence from intelligence sources.

As war drew closer, even after multiple German deserters warned the Soviets of an imminent attack, Stalin said the Germans were trying to provoke them, not preparing to invade. He swiftly ordered the execution of a German Communist who left his unit to warn of the attack, accusing him of spreading “disinformation.” On the eve of the invasion, trains carried goods from the Soviet Union to Germany.

On the morning of June 22, 1941, the war machine of Nazi Germany and its allies opened a massive assault on the Soviet Union. Even with reports of numerous attacks, Stalin persisted in believing that the attacks might be a provocation by German officers, not the work of Hitler himself, until the German ambassador read an official message declaring war.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was brought to an end as bombs fell on cities, Germans and their allies waged indiscriminate war against people in their path, pogroms were encouraged, and the Nazis enacted a racial war of bullets, starvation, and finally poison gas. The killing centers the Nazis established on territory taken from Poland became epicenters of mass murder, in a genocidal campaign that would kill six million Jewish people. In their most optimistic fantasies, the Nazis expected to kill tens of millions more people in Eastern Europe and subject millions more to deportation or servitude. The Soviet people fought bravely, brutally, and heroically against this onslaught and took on a key role in the Allies’ victory over fascism. The brutality and recklessness of Hitler and Stalin cost millions of people their lives.

Stalin’s expansionist urges were mainly strengthened by the war. In 1939 he had wanted Poland wiped off the map, but by the end of the war he had in mind a Communist Poland with a puppet government. In 1944, the underground Polish Home Army launched the Warsaw Uprising to liberate the city from its German occupiers. Soviet troops, already in Poland, did not assist them. Though Soviet forces were exhausted after a long advance, this does not account for the failure to effectively aid the Polish insurgents with supplies, nor can it account for the obstacles Stalin placed on supply airlifts by Britain and the United States. The Polish Home Army did not answer to Stalin or to the Soviet-controlled “Polish Committee of National Liberation” he wanted to install in power, so Stalin preferred they fight alone.

The Nazis rampaged through Warsaw, routinely committing war crimes as they killed tens of thousands of people and levelled the city in a brutal campaign.

To avoid feeding nationalist myth-making, it should be pointed out that the many heroic acts of resistance by Polish people against the German occupation do not erase the fact that there were also Poles who collaborated with the Nazis’ race war by attacking their Jewish neighbors. It should also be pointed out that among the Soviet troops who defeated fascists in Eastern Europe, there were many who committed war crimes, including mass rapes of women in captured territory.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a deal between two dictators who expected to fight each other and wanted to delay the big fight so they could pursue more immediate objectives. Its own articles foretold of brutal occupations and its end was in a war of brutality on a scale that could only be pursued when at least one side sees the enemy as less than fully human.

The history of the Pact can act as a lens to consider the dangers of authoritarianism and the necessity of effective opposition. The brutality of fascism and the danger of those who admire the biggest fascist criminals should be obvious, but it should still be stated. It is also important to question people on the left who support right-wing authoritarians like Putin and Assad in their war-making, and to be wary of those who make party politics and personality cults into obstacles for work against fascism and authoritarian politics. It is good to question those who ignore or excuse the evils of Stalin, and question those who say that the history of appeasement has no lessons for the struggles against today’s authoritarian nationalists and their fascist kin. When authoritarians would divide the world into zones of control where they have free reign to accomplish their goals as brutally as they wish, people of conscience around the world must act.

Further Reading: 

1. Antony Beevor. The Second World War. Little, Brown, and Company, 2012.
2. Saul Friedlander, Orna Kenan. Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945, Harper, 2009. (Goebbels quoted on page 200).
3. Jan T. Gross. Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia. Princeton University Press, 2002. (Molotov quoted on page 12).
4. “Killing Centers in Occupied Poland, 1942.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
5. Mark Mazower. Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. Penguin, 2008.
6. David Wingeate Pike, “Between the Junes: The French Communist from the Collapse of France to the Invasion of Russia.” Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London, Newbury Park and New Delhi), Vol.28 (1993), 465-485. (Communist newspaper quoted on page 470).
7. Simon Sebag Montefiore. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. (“Clean out the ‘synagogue’ quote on page 304).
8. Anthony Read and David Fisher. The Deadly Embrace: Hitler, Stalin and the Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1939-1941. W.W. Norton, 1988.
9. Raymond James Sontag and James Stuart Beddie, Eds. Nazi-Soviet Relations: 1939-1941. US Department of State, 1948.
10. “World War II: The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (August 23, 1939).” Jewish Virtual Library.

When looking to solve the issue of climate change and other forms of environmental damage, people tend to look at two kinds of solutions: those targeting the individual, such as recycling, turning off your lights, bicycling, and unplugging your electronics when not in use, or more statist solutions, such as banning plastic straws, carbon taxes, or government investment. As anarchists one of the typical questions we face (aside from how will we deal with crime and how do we supply people with the medical care they need) is how do we adequately protect the environment before it’s too late without large-scale government intervention.

Now to be fair, as long as the state exists, it is much better for them to be focused on environmental protection and social welfare than warfare and policing. To be sure, the EPA will be abolished along with the rest of this wretched monstrosity that we call the US government, but we’ll worry about abolishing their voluntary Energy Star certification and clean water standards after we’re done abolishing ICE, police, prisons, and the military-industrial-complex. That being said, government environmental protection is a joke. Agencies like the EPA have been captured by many of the very corporate actors who they are supposed to be regulating, much like any other state agency. The EPA didn’t prevent or repair Flint’s water crisis and it damn sure won’t stop Big Oil.

Several variations of a Green New Deal have often been proposed and the idea is loved by many leftists, even those of a more libertarian persuasion. However the New Deal-inspired legislation mostly focuses on increasing taxation and corporate subsidies, and creating more government jobs, something any anarchist should rightly be skeptical of even if it is said to be for a good cause. After all, the state and the corporate interests they protect are some of the biggest polluters on the planet and it’s highly unlikely that they’ll regulate themselves. So what are the solutions? Do we just retreat back to the same liberal individualist tactics of reduce, reuse, recycle and leave it as that in fear that anything more will breed state oppression? Well, no.

While no one is saying to never recycle, is should be recognized that government recycling programs were actually a scheme concocted by big corporations to pass the blame off from them to the individual. Instead of placing the responsibility for waste and environmental degradation at the feet of the corporations who use unsustainable packaging for their products, we blame the consumer for littering or not recycling. It should also be known that some recycling programs are basically shams, with much of what is thrown in recycling still winding up in the dump, due to it being more difficult to process. The only main difference is the gas spent to drive an extra truck around to pick it up separately. And even for the things that are recycled, that still doesn’t take into account the energy used at the facilities and the air pollution caused by melting down certain materials.

The best approach is to reduce the amount of waste you produce in the first place. And when it comes to recycling the waste you do still produce, methods such as reusing, upcycling, trash art, composting, and tools such as the Precious Plastic machines, which recycle your plastic waste to be used to make new things including 3D printer fiber, offer much more efficient and reliable results.

The green anarchist movement has a rich history with organizations spanning from Earth First! to Food Not Lawns to the Earth Liberation Front to Murray Bookchin’s Institute for Social Ecology. These groups tend to use a mixture of social ecology, appropriate technology, direct action, and mutual aid to achieve their desired goals. So what can we learn from them moving forward? How can we reverse the damage already caused and prevent further damage moving forward?

Stopping Them Dead in Their Tracks

First of all, instead of fighting for state subsidies for renewable energy or taxes on carbon emissions, let’s get to the root of the problem which includes corporate subsidies themselves. We need to demand an end to corporate subsidies for the oil, gas, factory farming, and agricultural industries first and foremost, but we also need to end all corporate subsidies. Subsidies of any kind  offset the true costs of doing business, including the environmental costs, allowing corporations to survive despite unstable practices. We also need to break up the state-enforced public utilities monopolies which stifle competition and punish people for going off-grid.

But getting rid of their subsidies won’t stop them altogether. We must also block their projects. Banning fracking and stripmining practices, abolishing eminent domain laws, invoking personal property rights claims, especially indigenous property rights, against corporations, and utilizing environmental lawyers such as Water Protector Legal Collective and Earthjustice to challenge corporate and state actors are some ways to achieve these goals. More radical tactical examples include blocking pipelines, occupying construction projects, sabotaging equipment, property damage, tree sitting, tree spiking, blockades, and collapsing mines. Many groups, such as the Water Protectors and their allies, use a mix of lawsuits, property rights claims, occupations, blockades, and sabotage in order to achieve their goals.

We also need to stop factory farming practices and harmful agricultural practices. Factory farming is not only harmful to the non-human animals involved but is also harmful to the environment in general, between its overuse of antibiotics, its inefficient use of crops, and its concentrated production of methane. Agricultural practices such as monocropping and the use of synthetic pesticides and herbicides also add to this crisis. Organizations such as Food Not Bombs help reclaim otherwise wasted foods to serve to those in need.

Other groups, like the Animal Liberation Front, challenge factory farming through means of freeing animals and providing them sanctuary and damaging equipment and facilities. Meanwhile movements like the March Against Monsanto have provided some hope by challenging industrial farming practices, although MAM’s hyperfocus on GMOs and the anti-scientific rhetoric that it spawned, distracted it from the larger issues at hand and thus it mostly fizzled out. The March Against Myths About Modification was an attempt to correct a lot of the “frankenfoods” propaganda coming out of the March Against Monsanto but unfortunately the MAMyths largely ignored any failings of Monsanto and thus seemed mainly to be an anti-MAM protest.

But winning any of these struggles in the long run won’t be possible if we don’t have alternatives already in place to replace the current systems.

Building a New World in the Shell of the Old

That means that we also need to be spreading the use of appropriate technologies such as solar, hydro, wind power, biofuels, and biomass. Home fuel cells and microgeneration help to decentralize our electrical systems, reducing the need for large-scale energy grids.

Bicycling, public transportation, carpooling, ridesharing, biofuel, and electric cars are all wonderful ways of cutting down on transportation-related pollution. Projects like Local Motors allow for the possibility of localized car manufacturing, cutting down on the pollution normally entailed in shipping parts and vehicles over long distances. Combined with the use of recycled printer materials through means such as Precious Plastic and fuel technologies such a biofuel or electric car batteries (like the ones Tesla Motors released as open source) and one has a model for a much more eco-friendly mode of long-distance transportation.

Providing alternatives to our current mainstream food sources is essential. In the face of industrial and factory farming we must turn to solutions such as permaculture, vertical farming, organic farming, small-scale livestock farming, hunting, and buying from local farms, farmers markets, and sustainable sources such as the Zapatista coffee cooperatives. Technologies such as GMOs can also allow for crops to be grown in harsher terrains, require less water, or to be more resistant to insects and other common nuisances while using less chemicals, while scientific advances like lab grown meat can eliminate the need for animal farming altogether.

Transferring to these alternatives is a necessary start but it does not reverse the environmental damage already done to our planet. Luckily we are not lacking in solutions.

Let’s Fix Shit Up

Reforestation, trash cleanups, water filtration technology, air filtration technology, trash eating robots, Precious Plastic, composting, etc. all provide ways to deal with the damage we have caused as a species.

A lot of it just comes down to cleaning up after ourselves, our neighbors, and our ancestors. Schedule a trash cleanup at your local beach, park, roadway, or neighborhood. Plant trees and other plants native to the area. Start animal sanctuaries to rehabilitate and/or house endangered, harmed, or more domesticated populations. We also have to figure out how to clean up the garbage islands we’ve created on our oceans.

If all else fails, we can always ditch earth and go to space but even then we must still learn to be environmentally sustainable lest we continue our practices elsewhere, wrecking other planets in the process. Although if we end up inventing the technology to terraform another planet to sustain carbon-based life, then why couldn’t we use that very same technology here on Earth to reverse the damage we have created?

Hope for the Future

All in all, ending the state and capitalism will go a much longer way towards saving the environment than their Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Paris Climate Accord, or a Green New Deal ever could. A decentralized bottom-up approach towards environmentalism is something that is obtainable. Together we must stop their projects, create our own alternatives, and reverse the damage that’s already been done. We can do anything together. We got this.

Di Nathan Goodman. Originale pubblicato il 15 marzo 2016 con il titolo How Politics Empowers Remorseless Killers. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

In una recente intervista, il consigliere della Casa Bianca Ben Rhodes afferma che Barack Obama “non ha mai avuto ripensamenti riguardo i droni.”

Il fatto però è che gli attacchi con i droni autorizzati da lui hanno ucciso più civili che obiettivi dichiarati. Hanno colpito matrimoni, funerali e soccorsi. È stato anche ucciso un sedicenne cittadino americano, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.

Come fa una persona a non avere ripensamenti quando i suoi ordini uccidono così tanti civili, quando fanno saltare in aria matrimoni e funerali, e arrivano ad uccidere uno dei suoi concittadini? Tutto ciò è bizzarro, quasi sociopatico.

È l’eterno problema che affligge chi in guerra deve prendere decisioni. Le sue decisioni generano stragi, che però non lo toccano.

Hillary Clinton, ad esempio, ha avuto un ruolo decisivo nel decidere l’intervento americano in Libia. L’intervento ha rafforzato i ribelli che hanno torturato prigionieri e linciato neri africani. E ha fatto precipitare il paese nel caos, in una guerra civile da cui non è ancora emerso. E nonostante ciò, la Clinton ha definito l’intervento “il meglio della potenza intelligente”. Christopher Preble, del Cato Institute, ha commentato: “Se questo è ‘il meglio della potenza’… figuriamoci il peggio.”

Quando le tue decisioni generano stragi e distruzione, le scuse sono d’obbligo. Almeno un ripensamento.

Come dice l’economista Bryan Caplan, “l’atteggiamento razionale di chi ricorre alla violenza dovrebbe essere il risentimento, e la costante ricerca di una via pacifica.” Da un lato si riconosce che uccidere innocenti è un atto necessario. Ma dall’altro occorre riconoscere che il prezzo delle proprie azioni pesa sulla coscienza.

Al contrario, queste persone spesso scherzano e si vantano di uccidere stranieri senza provare rimorsi. Ted Cruz promise bombardamenti fino ad arroventare la sabbia.

Sostanzialmente simile la battuta di Obama nel 2010: “E poi ci sono i Jonas… Sasha e Malia sono grandi fan. Ma non fatevi strane idee. Ho una parola sola per voi: ‘droni’. Neanche li vedrete arrivare.”

Per un politico che ha il potere di decidere chi può vivere e chi no, la violenza di stato è un gioco da ragazzi. Questo vale tanto per un presidente in carica come Barack Obama quanto per un candidato come Ted Cruz.

Uccidono senza rimorsi, si vantano dei loro sciagurati interventi, e poi in televisione fanno le battute sulla violenza che hanno inflitto o che vorrebbero infliggere a persone innocenti che vivono all’estero.

Se una persona qualunque uccidesse allo stesso modo e dicesse le stesse cose riguardo i suoi atti violenti, verrebbe considerato della massima pericolosità. Verrebbe perlomeno isolato, ma più probabilmente finirebbe in carcere per il resto della sua vita.

Ma in politica gli incentivi sono diversi. Il nostro sistema politico incentiva i leader ad uccidere innocenti all’estero. Vantare il proprio programma aggressivo aiuta ad apparire duro alle elezioni. Uccidere durante il mandato serve a rassicurare la gente che stai facendo qualcosa per la loro sicurezza. E una volta che rispondi a questi incentivi, razionalizzare la tua furia omicida diventa un modo facile per dormire la notte senza pensare a tutte le persone a cui hai tolto la vita. Meglio dormire tranquillo e apparire duro con la base elettorale che lasciarsi prendere dai rimorsi.

Il nostro sistema politico offre il potere di uccidere. Ed incoraggia a farlo impulsivamente, senza pensarci, senza rimorsi. Lo stato, insomma, è un sistema che spinge ad uccidere senza rimorsi.

Citazioni:

• Nathan Goodman, How politics empowers remorseless killers, Augusta Free Press, 2016-03-28

• Nathan Goodman, How Politics Empowers Remorseless Killers, Strike the Root, 2016-03-17

The cages are rattling again all across the nation. Today marks the launch of yet another nationwide prison strike. Following the wave of strikes this year, from the MLK Day strike to the Juneteenth strike, prisoners are once more organizing to have their demands heard and things only look to get louder and more organized as time progresses.

The American prison-industrial-complex has a long history of racism, classism, and xenophobia, stretching back to its roots in the systems of chattel slavery and indentured servitude. In the aftermath of the 13th amendment, which simultaneously claimed to end slavery while blatantly enshrining prison slavery into the American constitution, the launch of the War on Drugs under Richard Nixon, the expansion of mass incarceration with the largest crime bill in American history (the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, written by Joe Biden and passed by Bill Clinton), and the school-to-prison pipeline, we are left with a system that is rigged against the average citizen, especially those most marginalized by society as a whole.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is an expansion of the police state under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security, all of which was established in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks along with the PATRIOT Act and all of those other wonderful civil right violations from the Bush era. Being a fairly recent development, a majority of citizens can still easily envision a world without ICE and therefore have fewer qualms about calling for its abolition as compared to other aspects of the prison-industrial-complex.

The fact is that the police state ruins lives, kills innocents both in the street and behind closed doors, separates families, extorts money, profits off of the misery and labor of others, enforces economic protectionism, and upholds the oppressive political will of the capitalist state. That rings true from the halls of the juvenile court system on down to the DHS. So how do we fight against it?

Well luckily folks already are fighting that good fight so the best thing to do is join their efforts. This year prisoners are striking nationwide from August 21st through September 9th, the anniversary of the Attica Prison uprisings.

The strikers are demanding the following concessions:

1. Immediate improvements to the conditions of prisons and prison policies that recognize the humanity of imprisoned men and women.

2. An immediate end to prison slavery. All persons imprisoned in any place of detention under United States jurisdiction must be paid the prevailing wage in their state or territory for their labor.

3. The Prison Litigation Reform Act must be rescinded, allowing imprisoned humans a proper channel to address grievances and violations of their rights.

4. The Truth in Sentencing Act and the Sentencing Reform Act must be rescinded so that imprisoned humans have a possibility of rehabilitation and parole. No human shall be sentenced to Death by Incarceration or serve any sentence without the possibility of parole.

5. An immediate end to the racial overcharging, over-sentencing, and parole denials of Black and brown humans. Black humans shall no longer be denied parole because the victim of the crime was white, which is a particular problem in southern states.

6. An immediate end to racist gang enhancement laws targeting Black and brown humans.

7. No imprisoned human shall be denied access to rehabilitation programs at their place of detention because of their label as a violent offender.

8. State prisons must be funded specifically to offer more rehabilitation services.

9. Pell grants must be reinstated in all US states and territories.

10. The voting rights of all confined citizens serving prison sentences, pretrial detainees, and so-called “ex-felons” must be counted. Representation is demanded. All voices count.

Please write to inmate organizers if you know any. Other options include finding a local chapter of the Industrial Workers of the World and see if the have an Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee. If they do not, then contact your local IWW branch or IWW national about starting an IWOC chapter. You can also look for solidarity protests or noise demos at your local prison, prisoner work camp, or a business that utilizes prison labor such as WalMart, Victoria’s Secret, or Starbucks. There are also phone zaps, letter writing campaigns, and other local and national efforts one can participate in. Is there nothing happening near you? Launch your own based on the needs of your area. If nothing else, you can always pass out leaflets and flyers or perform a banner drop to help spread the word and show solidarity.

While inmates have been coordinating and executing a series of strikes and actions, a brand new Occupy movement spontaneously formed after a vigil in Portland with a more radical bend and a more singular focus: #OccupyICEeverywhere. The Occupy ICE movement has taken off with people setting up encampments in front of local ICE facilities, disrupting daily business, and locking themselves down to blockade entrances in various cities across the nation. Many occupations have already been evicted but much like the Occupy movement of old, the loss of their physical occupation was by no means the end of their movement.

To support their efforts, consider linking up with your local Occupy ICE chapter or (re)forming one in your area. For those looking for efforts beyond physical occupation, many local Occupy ICE groups have localized efforts including targeted campaigns against landlords of ICE facilities, rapid response groups, sanctuary efforts, and more. Some have even joined forces with the Dream Defenders’ Geo Cages campaign to defund Geo Group, which is one of the largest private contributors and profiters of the prison-industrial-complex, from federal and state prisons to ICE detention centers. The Geo Cages campaign is one that strikes right at the intersection of both branches of the police state, uniting the campaigns against ICE and against prison slavery. After all, in truth they are the same battle. In response to the campaign, Geo Group recently sent a cease-and-desist letter claiming the group was libeling them but of course Dream Defenders and the ACLU are teaming up to fight back.

If we are to ever end this unjust “justice” system, we must united efforts and work together. Whether it’s as IWOC, Dream Defenders, Fight Toxic Prisons, Occupy ICE, the Free Alabama Movement, some other organization or affinity group, or just as an individual, we must all do what we can to support the efforts of those fighting to abolish the prison-industrial-complex in all of its incarnations. That is why we stand in solidarity with the efforts of striking prisoners today and through all their battles to come. Keep up the good fight, comrades. One day we shall tear down the prison walls.

When evaluations of reality become seen entirely in terms of their utility as rhetorical weapons it ruins a group’s capacity to get an accurate lay of the land and efficiently strategize. Everything becomes about winning debates, not about ultimately winning ground.

One of the main things the social media age has done is collapse divides between private and public conversations. This leaves everyone constantly on edge for how they posture and maneuver rhetorically contra the outgroup — to the point of overwhelming honest internal discussions. Most productive conversations require a limited  or specific audience. This is necessary to discuss any specialized topic or claim that not everyone on the planet agrees with or has caught up to. Since the social networking tools we use are clunky and don’t provide us with fine-grained agency in who we include in a given conversation, people revert to policing audience through sharply uncivil rhetoric and aggressively tribalist social norms. This is often a very rational stopgap measure given our very primitive internet technologies.

To give a classic example, antifeminists showing up in the mentions of feminists going “yeah but have you ever considered that women get free drinks?” is very much akin to someone interrupting a graduate philosophy seminar to declare “have you ever thought that the color green I see isn’t the color green you see?” Discursive exclusion is often necessary for the exploration of advanced topics or theoretical projects that haven’t become universally accepted. There are far more cranks than actual theoretical physicists, and we generally consider it valorous if physicists sometimes work among each other to develop ideas further rather than spending literally all of their time teaching the ignorant. The same sort of specialization applies in political and cultural movements. Since we can’t kick cranks — or just outgroup members — out of some conversations online, folks get increasingly aggressive with them and signal their willingness to get aggressive.

One standard is to barrage any outgroup member with asymmetrical argumentative devices where the response must necessarily be longer or more complicated than the initial claim. Most internet debate exploits different scales of complexity in language and argument rather than substance. This can take the form of flak — throwing up so many rapid fire claims or citations that someone is incapable of addressing all of them. But it usually takes the form of policing discourse to make sure it constantly fits simple slogans or narratives, avoiding thorny nuance that might be exploited by the outgroup. If the outgroup can point to a tension or apparent contradiction that requires much energy to explain, then the game has been lost. Thus do various camps defensively collapse themselves down to simplistic narratives and well worn rhetorical devices. They correctly intuit that anyone introducing nuance or undermining a simple established narrative poses a risk to the entire community and could open the floodgates to sealioning trolls.

The unfortunate consequence of this however is that people become increasingly pickled in nonstop exclusionary posturing. Everything is done to constantly fend off the outgroup getting a word in sideways.

If a group depends on an underdog narrative then it becomes impossible for them to admit when they have an advantage they can press. If a group depends on an inevitable victor narrative then it becomes impossible for them to admit when they face a serious danger and adapt to it. Language becomes less about trying to accurately model the objective underlying world that we operate in and more of a weapon or landscape of contestation. But while it’s certainly true that discourse is an arena of conflict and inherent social positioning, we risk entirely abandoning the individual’s prior-to-society need to get at objective reality.

Maps influence the state of the world, yes, but maps also model underlying objective reality. One can talk about the dynamics of social influence in the construction of maps, but a general that has a more objectively accurate map of a physical battlefield will do better than a general that does not. At the end of the day, popular or even ingroup perception is not the universe, and the universe kicks back.

A significant danger we all face is getting locked in strategies designed to win rhetorical positioning, not recognizing that the ground can shift and still trying to keep tabs of it or prepare for different contexts.

David Graeber’s best essay, in my opinion, “The Shock Of Victory,” explored how unprepared anarchists in the counter-globalization movement were for a change of context. The moment we started winning certain struggles we felt lost at sea, unprepared for a change in tactics. Incapable even of recognizing or admitting that we had won anything.

What’s interesting about underdog or destined-for-victory narratives is that they attempt to build up or give credibility to a position or group based not on their defining attributes — like the core values being asserted — but on a particular lay of the land. This makes them incredibly brittle in the face of actual landscape changes or even small deviations from the narrative. Members can no longer afford to even look in a direction contrary to the narrative, and thus they can’t exploit advantages or harden themselves against vulnerabilities.

Unfortunately this is a pathology that can hit anarchists especially hard in comparison to authoritarian groups. Maoists or fascists with very tightly policed organizational cores have space to talk frankly among themselves, space to admit, as Richard Spencer did, things like “antifa is winning.” Similarly the maoist cadre controlling a liberal group will often have a second meeting where they openly admit everything they said before the liberals was a lie and where they explicitly plan further lies.

Anarchists are less capable of deception. Not only because we instinctively recoil at dissonance between our means and our ends. Our movement is massive, decentralized, and open. In the era prior to the internet, “the scene” was isolated enough to make possible maneuvers like crying to the liberal media about how we were poor, innocent, oppressed normies — while raising funds with one another on the premise of “you should support us precisely because we are not innocent.”

Today “the scene” has become increasingly fragmented and vestigial to a larger, online movement. Some of us remain embedded in it and its refreshingly explicit spaces. But most anarchists do not have that luxury. And so our narratives and movement norms have warped to respond to a discourse constantly under siege. We must work hard to avoid being blinded. We must remember that discourse is not merely chess moves against one another, but also a net that can be draped over and pressed up against objective reality, so as to better empower ourselves.

Recensione di “Rise of the Warrior Cop”

Di Kelly Wright. Originale pubblicato l’otto agosto 2018 con il titolo Review: “Rise of the Warrior Cop”. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Questo libro arriva giusto a proposito dopo la mia ultima recensione per C4SS del libro Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism, di Christopher Coyne e Abigail Hall. Se Tyranny Comes Home rappresenta uno sguardo d’insieme delle generiche implicazioni dell’avventurismo militare americano, “Rise of the Warrior Cop” (Ascesa del Poliziotto Guerriero, ndt) analizza in dettaglio casi singoli, raid raffazzonati senza preavviso che fungono da precedente di una più generale militarizzazione delle forze di polizia. La prima cosa che mi ha colpita è come i periodi di espansione dello stato e militarizzazione della polizia seguano uno schema comune.

Il rafforzamento dello stato di polizia segue invariabilmente periodi di eccezionali disordini sociali. Oltre metà del libro illustra le origini e la storia della polizia nel mondo, in particolare negli Stati Uniti. Da un libro che parla di abusi della polizia ci si aspetterebbe una difesa strenua del Quarto Emendamento, e Balko non delude, ma mi ha fatto piacere trovare anche una difesa totale dello spesso ignorato Terzo Emendamento e del contesto che lo lega al quarto.

Il primo passo verso la militarizzazione, nota Balko, fu compiuto dall’amministrazione di Richard Nixon, quando scoprì che capitalizzare sulla paura che i bianchi avevano della criminalità dei neri rendeva molto. Il pubblico ignorava ampiamente i dettagli delle dinamiche del crimine, o banalità come il fatto che una migliore illuminazione di certe strade contribuiva alla riduzione del crimine più, ad esempio, di una squadra di intervento rapido (Squat) usata in interventi antidroga.

Negli anni 1960, Nixon riuscì a deviare l’attenzione dal Vietnam, così come dallo scandalo Watergate, agitando lo spauracchio dei disordini razziali e delle droghe pericolose. A microfoni spenti poteva anche ammettere che criminalità e uso di droga erano in calo, ma capitalizzava sull’errata credenza popolare che immaginava la criminalità in crescita. Il libro è un caso di studio che illustra gli incentivi perversi che infestano la pluridecennale Guerra alla Droga.

Molte decisioni di Nixon, inoltre, sembravano calcolate in modo da “dare le colpe alla sinistra”, tanto per citare il capo del suo staff, cosa non molto dissimile dalle linee guida degli attuali repubblicani.[1] Perché fare cose che funzionano quando si può ricorrere ad espedienti politici? Questo atteggiamento era evidente anche nella politica dell’ufficio per il rispetto delle leggi sulle droghe, precursore dell’attuale antidroga, il quale preferiva una tattica quantitativa (numerosi trafficanti minori) ad una qualitativa (colpire le poche imprese criminali che contribuivano alla diffusione della droga).

Scrive Balko:

L’amministrazione [Nixon] voleva qualcosa di tangibile da spacciare alla popolazione. Se i numeri reali non dimostravano l’efficacia delle sue azioni, si potevano però creare dati statistici impressionanti eseguendo un gran numero di arresti e condanne per reati federali.

Una delle conclusioni principali che si ricavano dal libro di Balko è che gran parte della spinta iniziale verso la militarizzazione della polizia fu il risultato di una campagna di pubbliche relazioni condotta dal governo federale. Nixon soprattutto era particolarmente ansioso di dimostrare come la middle America, la cosiddetta “Maggioranza Silenziosa”, fosse animata da odi razziali. Durante la sua presidenza, Nixon riuscì a far rientrare gli “indesiderati” sotto l’etichetta comune della droga. Era facile puntare il dito contro neri, hippy e antimilitaristi e dire che rappresentavano il problema, e dire che erano tutti sballati era un modo efficace per inoculare la sua opposizione.

Mi colpisce apprendere che, se siamo riusciti a ridurre gli abusi di potere generati dalla Guerra alla Droga, in certi ambiti abbiamo fatto passi indietro. Balko racconta un episodio significativo della fine degli anni 1980 in cui l’isteria collettiva contro la droga, vista oggi, quasi fa presagire l’amministrazione Trump.

Sebbene i numeri mostrassero un calo nel consumo e nella dipendenza, un rapporto della Drug Strategy [della Casa Bianca, nel 1989] dichiarava le droghe una ‘crisi in evoluzione’, ‘la principale minaccia alla salute della nazione.’ La nomina di [William] Bennett [da parte di H. W. Bush a zar dell’antidroga] e il successivo inasprimento politico accesero l’isteria antidroga di altri pubblici ufficiali. Il senatore texano Phil Gram e il rappresentante della Georgia Newt Gingrich, entrambi repubblicani, presentarono un progetto di legge che prevedeva la conversione di caserme abbandonate in centri di detenzione per tossicodipendenti. Il repubblicano Richard Ray, della Georgia, propose l’esilio nelle isole Midway e Wake. Lontano dalle distrazioni, era la sua tesi, la riabilitazione sarebbe stata più facile. La proposta di Ray passò alla Commissione Servizi Armati della Camera. Ray raccontò di aver ricevuto una standing ovation quando presentò la sua idea davanti ad una platea di sceriffi e capi della polizia… Chiamato a testimoniare davanti al Congresso, Daryl Gates [fondatore delle prime squadre SWAT e del programma antidroga DARE] equiparò l’uso saltuario di droghe ad un ‘tradimento’, e pertanto consigliò la ‘fucilazione’. In varie occasioni durante gli anni 1980, camera e senato accarezzarono l’idea di estendere la pena di morte agli spacciatori.

Queste proposte furono presentate e divennero oggetto di dibattito durante l’amministrazione di George H. W. Bush, un’amministrazione bizzarra se paragonata a quella di Trump. Ma anche Trump ha chiesto l’estensione della pena di morte per gli spacciatori. E la proposta di Newt Gingrich di convertire le caserme in centri di detenzione è sinistramente simile ad un attuale piano del Pentagono che prevede la conversione di vecchie basi dell’esercito in campi di concentramento per 20.000 immigrati. È bene ribadire che questo linguaggio, questo sfoggio di muscoli, sia negli anni 1980 che oggi, sono in risposta a “crimini” senza vittime e nonviolenti, come il passaggio della frontiera senza permesso o lo scambio di droga e denaro tra adulti consenzienti.

Poco dopo l’insediamento, Trump telefonò a Rodrigo Duterte, presidente delle Filippine, che negli ultimi anni aveva fatto notizia con la recrudescenza della guerra alla droga nel suo paese. Rivolgendosi ai filippini, Duterte li aveva invitati a prendere l’iniziativa e farsi “giustizia” uccidendo chiunque fosse sospettato di essere coinvolto nel traffico di droga. Nella telefonata, avvenuta a novembre del 2016, Trump elogiò Duterte specificamente per la sua politica antidroga.

Il libro di Balko è come un fuoco lento. Illustra metodicamente come, poco per volta, le politiche contribuiscano ad inasprire la lotta alla droga e militarizzare la polizia. La tendenza a rafforzare il ruolo degli agenti di polizia e dei pubblici ministeri, eliminando poco per volta le protezioni offerte agli accusati dal Quarto Emendamento, attraversa trasversalmente i partiti e i tre bracci del potere. Balko spiega come i democratici abbiano contribuito ad ampliare l’autorità del governo per paura di apparire “deboli col crimine”. Un nome che spunta continuamente è quello del senatore Joe Biden, noto di recente per essere stato, assieme a Hllary Clinton, tra i candidati più papabili nella contesa contro Donald Trump nel 2020. E questo sarebbe il partito di opposizione.

Quasi tutti i democratici che compaiono nel libro di Balko esprimono l’insoddisfazione per il fatto che la Guerra alla Droga condotta dai repubblicani non fa abbastanza. Ad un certo punto Dick Cheney, segretario della difesa di Bush senior, dice: “Individuare e distruggere la produzione, il traffico e l’uso di droghe illegali è una missione altamente prioritaria del dipartimento della difesa riguardo la sicurezza nazionale.” Allo stesso tempo, l’allora presidente della commissione giudiziaria del senato, il senatore Joe Biden, dichiara alla Associated Press: “…detto in tutta franchezza, il piano [Bush-Bennett] non ha quella forza, quel coraggio e quell’immaginazione che la crisi attuale richiederebbe.”

Rivela Balko come un decennio prima, nel 1982, Biden presentò un disegno di legge che dava all’amministrazione Reagan un lungo elenco di poteri aggiuntivi al fine di portare avanti la guerra alla droga; tra questi, il potere di confiscare i beni senza un’accusa precisa e la possibilità per i pubblici ministeri di stimare l’ammontare del guadagno realizzato da una persona con il traffico di droga così da poter confiscare beni per quella cifra. In precedenza, le autorità potevano confiscare i beni solo se potevano dimostrare che erano serviti ad attività criminali. Il disegno di legge passò al senato con 95 voti contro uno.

Il libro fa salire la pressione a chiunque abbia una coscienza. Certi passaggi fanno star male, soprattutto quando Balko illustra i dettagli di certi raid raffazzonati. Detto questo, si tratta di un libro importante per chiunque intenda capire a fondo quella atrocità bipartitica che è la politica antidroga americana.

Note:

• [1] Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure

Cory Doctorow (2017). Walkaway. New York: Tor

I.

The story opens at a communist party in an unspecified post-industrial town in Ontario sometime in the late middle of this century, from the first-person perspective of Hubert, Etc. A communist party, you should understand, is not an institution but a social event: something like a rave at an abandoned factory where, along with dancing, drinking, drugs, and hookups, illegal acts of post-scarcity are committed. In this case, which is presumably typical, the temporarily recuperated facility is a furniture factory with machinery that’s apparently user-friendly enough a random assortment of intoxicated teens and twenty-somethings can get it up and running and turn out fairly large runs of shelving, beds, or whatever. Using the abandoned machinery and large amounts of abandoned feedstock, one communist party can “do enough furnishings for a couple thousand families” in one evening. The next party is scheduled for a feedstock plant in a neighboring town to keep the supply chain going. And so on.

As Natalie — an attendee at the communist party who becomes a main character — describes it, the whole point of it all is post-scarcity.

Look… at all this. On paper, this place is useless; the stuff coming off that line has to be destroyed. It’s a trademark violation: even though it came off an official Muji line, using Muji’s feedstock, it doesn’t have Muji’s official license, so that configuration of cellulose and glue is a crime. That’s so manifestly fucked up and shit that anyone who pays attention to it is playing the wrong game and doesn’t deserve consideration.  

The larger setting is a society in which technology has become so cheap and productive that Muji, the company the factory belonged to, can relocate every few months as its tax holiday ends in one location and another would-be host offers it a bigger subsidy, and abandon the machinery every time as not worth the cost of moving. The main thing standing in the way of this ultra-cheap machinery being unleashed to provide the necessities of life for virtually free to everybody is the patents and trademarks of Muji and companies like it. Machinery is abandoned because it’s cheaper to replace on-site than to move, but communist parties are routinely shut down by police drones enforcing Muji’s monopoly on the right to actually produce things with processes that would otherwise be too cheap to meter.

For those outside the zotta class (and a few million or so of their hired overseers and providers of professional services to them and their overseers), the whole society is made up of precarious laborers who hold on to temp gigs for a few months at a time, with their first few gigs typically being unpaid.

It’s a fictional illustration of Peter Frase’s hypothetical anti-Star Trek scenario, in which matter-energy replicators can produce anything — including other replicators — at zero marginal cost, but capitalists can continue to extract scarcity rents from post-scarcity technology through ownership of patents on the replicators and the designs. That’s the trend in today’s actually-existing capitalism, where the rapid cheapening of production technology means capital’s main source of profit is ceasing to be physical control of the means of production, and profit is instead derived from legal control over the conditions under which people are allowed to produce. The ultimate outcome, if they get their way (which they won’t), is an economy where profit comes not from ownership of the means of production, but from making us sign a EULA to use tools we already own.

The personification of this mentality is Natalie’s zottarich father Jacob Redwater (“zottarich” denoting, in a society where inflation has dovetailed with the concentration of wealth to make astronomical numbers necessary, a level of wealth beyond giga-, tera- and petarich). After bailing his daughter out of trouble in the aftermath of the communist party, he defends the logic of the system in language that’s quite familiar.

Natalie looked grim. “…That factory we switched on last night. It was worth more as a write-off than it was as a going concern. Some entity that owned it demanded that it sit rotting and useless, even though there were people who wanted what it could make.”

“If they wanted the factory, they could buy the factory, Jacob said. “Then make things and sell them.”

“I don’t think these people could afford to buy a factory,” Hubert, Etc said….

“That’s what capital markets are for,” Jacob said. “If you’ve got a plan for profitably using an asset someone else isn’t using, then you draw up a business plan and take it to investors. If you’re right, one of them will fund you….”

“What if no one invests?” Hubert, Etc said….

Jacob took on the air of someone explaining a complex subject to a child. “If no one wants to invest, that means that you don’t have an idea worth investing in….”

“Don’t you see the circularity there?” Natalie said. If you can’t convince someone to turn on the factory to make things that people need, then the factory shouldn’t be turned on?”

“As opposed to what? A free-for-all? Just smash down the doors, walk in and take over?”

“Why not, if no one else is doing anything with it?”

The talking-to-a-toddler look: “Because it’s not yours.”

Jacob’s logic is even more circular than Natalie points out. In any rational society, the factory would be considered abandoned. And obviously, running the abandoned factory to produce furniture at near-zero marginal cost isn’t worth investing in, because the main source of profit is using the state to prevent the factory from being used. In a society where production costs next to nothing, profit results from the right to prevent production that can’t be sold for a monopoly price.

“What do you think about breaking into private property and stealing what you find there?”….

“No one was using it…. The hydrogen cells’d filled up. So the windmills were going to waste. The feedstock was worth practically nothing.”

Natalie said, “What’s the point of having private property if all it does is rot?”

“Oh, please. Private property is the most productive property. Temporary inefficiencies don’t change that. Only kooks and crooks think that stealing other property is a valid form of political action.”

But Jacob’s circular logic is necessary, as Natalie points out.

He wants to be the one percent of the one percent of the one percent because of his inherent virtue, not because the system is rigged. His whole identity rests on the idea that the system is legit and that he earned his position in it fair and square and everyone else is a whiner.

That same desire, in the real world, is the reason billionaires like the Koch brothers pour so much money into pet right-libertarian think tanks just to churn out second-hand pablum justifying their wealth. And it’s a successful strategy, at least with some people; all you have to do is check the reply threads under any social media post critical of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk to see dozens of sycophants saying some variation of “Who cares? It’s his money — he earned it” or “If you don’t like it work harder and earn some money of your own.” And beneath this meritocratic myth is an even uglier Hobbesian myth.

“…I think that the tragedy of human existence is our world is run by people who are really good at kidding themselves, like your father. Your dad manages to kid himself that he’s rich and powerful because he’s the cream and has risen to the top. But he’s not stupid. He knows he’s kidding himself. So underneath that top layer of bullshit is another, more aware belief system: the belief that everyone else would kid themselves the same way he does, if they had the chance….

“His beliefs don’t start with the idea that it’s okay to kid yourself you’re a special snowflake who deserves more cookies than all the other kids. It starts with the idea that it’s human nature to kid yourself and take the last cookie, so if he doesn’t, someone else will, so he had better be the most lavishly self-deluded of all, the most prolific taker of cookies, lest someone more horrible, immoral, and greedy than he gets there first and eats all the cookies, takes the plate, and charges rent to drink the milk.”

I suspect there’s yet another, equally twisted layer to this ideology. Deep down they believe that if people are left to their own devices, without being kept busy with the requirement to work in order to survive, they’ll run wild and wreck all the progress that people like Jacob Redwater have painstakingly built up over the millennia. People are naturally self-centered, short-sighted, and amoral, and stable societies are only possible when equally amoral — but more intelligent — elites keep them in line. It’s necessary to destroy abundance in order to preserve society.

In the same conversation Hubert, Etc disposes of Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” with the contempt it deserves.

“Sounds like bullshit to me.”

“Oh, it is…. It’s more than mere bullshit. It’s searing, evil, world-changing bullshit. The solution to the tragedy of the commons isn’t to get a cop to make sure sociopaths aren’t overgrazing the land, or shunning anyone who does it, turning him into a pariah. The solution is to let a robber-baron own the land that used to be everyone’s, because once he’s running it for profit, he’ll take exquisite care to generate profit forever.”

“That’s the tragedy of the commons? A fairy tale about giving public assets to rich people to run as personal empires because that way they’ll make sure they’re better managed than they would be if we just made up some rules? God, my dad must love that story.”

“It’s the origin story of people like your dad,” Hubert, Etc said….

II.

In a discussion of alternatives for reform, none of which seems to be satisfactory or politically viable, Hubert, Etc raises the question that the rest of the book spends answering: “What about walkaways?…. Seems to me that they’re doing something that makes a difference. No money, no pretending money matters, and they’re doing it right now.” Hubert, Natalie, and their friend Seth decide to check it out.

In keeping with convention for this genre, the reader is introduced to the utopian society through the eyes of the three outsiders and learns its mechanics along with them.

The walkaway society — which apparently emerged a decade or so earlier — exists in areas on the margins of neoliberal capitalism, mainly in rural or decaying places not worth enforcing territorial control over, and using waste or abandoned materials similarly not worth enforcing ownership of. Its largely post-scarcity and communistic economy is an ad hoc mix of high-tech open-source hardware hacking, p2p organization, and vernacular materials and design.

The Belt and Braces Inn, where the three travelers initially make contact with walkaway society, is our introduction to its basic principles. It’s a sort of combination restaurant/pub, hostelry, community hub, and co-living space. The Belt and Braces was built from scavenged materials located by surveillance drones, and put together according to an evolving wikified design by stigmergically organized, permissionless labor using a modified version of UN High Commission on Refugees software.

You told it the kind of building you wanted, gave it a scavenging range, and it directed its drones to inventory anything nearby, scanning multi-band, doing deep database scrapse against urban planning and building-code sources to identify usable blocks for whatever you were making….

These flowed into the job site. The building tracked and configured them, a continuously refactored critical path for its build plan that factored in the skill levels of workers or robots on-site at any moment.

The B&B power source was hydrogen fuel cells, recharged by wind-driven electrolysis of waste water.

As mentioned before, not only the construction process, but all day-to-day activities were governed by walkaway society’s combined ethos of permissionlessness and freedom from work ethic: “You’re not supposed to covet a job, and you’re not supposed to look down your nose at slackers, and you’re not supposed to lionize someone who’s slaving. It’s supposed to be emergent, natural homeostasis….” As explained by Limpopo, a veteran member of B&B: “Asking someone if you can pitch in is telling them that they’re in charge and deferring to their authority. Both are verboten. If you want to work, do something. If it’s not helpful, maybe I’ll undo it later, or talk it over with you, or let it slide.”

Another illustration of the technological basis of the walkaway economy is a community built in the relatively early days of walkaway culture, as recounted by Limpopo:

We’d built rammed-earth houses on the escarpment, two dozen of them. Real refu-luxury: power, water, fresh hydroponics, and soft beds. Took about three hours a day each to keep the whole place running. Spent the rest of the time re-creating a Greek open-air school, teaching each other music and physics and realtime poetry. It was sweet. I helped build a pottery and we were building weird wheels that did smart adaptic eccentric spinning in response to your hands and mass, so that it was impossible to throw a non-viable pot.

The harshest bit of the three new walkaways’ introduction to the new society was discovering their travel gear had been ripped off. Limpopo took that as a teachable moment for explaining the minimalist ethos of traveling light, keeping information backed up, and treating physical goods as replaceable.

The latter point was driven home by their visit to the community fablab, more or less standard for all walkaway settlements, where they replaced their stolen gear. The process involved shopping through the fablab’s large inventory of designs for just about any kind of good anyone could imagine, adding the selections to a checkout basket along with size and other options specified, and executing the production cycle (which usually took a few hours). It could be done faster, “but this rate allows us to use feedstock with more impurities by adding error-correction passes.” The inventory included medicine produced by wet-printers.

Communications infrastructure was largely ad hoc and with high degrees of latency; connectivity was sporadic, often involving large data dumps when broken connections were routed around or relay airships came into range and reestablished connection.

Some of the best R&D in the world took place at the various Walkaway U campuses.

For a decade, word around the world’s top research institutions was that the most creative, wildest work happened in walkaway. It leaked into default: Self-replicating beer and semi-biological feedstock decomposers that broke down manufactured goods into slurries ready to be dumped into printers. A lot of radio stuff, things you could only pull off through cooperative models of spectrum management, where any radio could speak in any frequency, all radios cooperating to steer clear of each other, dynamically adjusting their gain, shaping their transmissions with smart phased arrays.

One reason for walkaway’s superior technology is the absence of the proprietary capitalist restraints on progress.

“You know, when the first walkaway prostheses projects started, most of the people contributing had lost an arm or a leg in Belarus or Oman, and were tired of paying a loan shark for something that hurt and barely worked and could be remotely repossessed by an over-the-air kill-switch if they missed a payment. But once they got here and started living, realized how much had been left on the table by conservative companies that didn’t want to get into a patent fight and didn’t see any reason to add advanced functionality to something that you didn’t have any choice about, they got radicalized.

“They stopped saying ‘I just want to make an arm that’ll get through the day,’ and started saying ‘I want an arm that does everything my old arm did.’”

As Cory Doctorow has noted, he intended walkaway society’s discouragement of work ethic and reputation-scoring as a deliberate contrast to the Bitchun Society of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, where a reputational mechanism (“whuffie”) was used to allocate scarce goods like personal attention, preferred locations, etc. As explained by Limpopo:

“If you do things because you want someone else to pat you on the head, you won’t get as good at it as someone who does it for internal satisfaction. We want the best-possible building. If we set up a system that makes people compete for acknowledgement, we invite game-playing and stats-fiddling, even unhealthy stuff like working stupid hours to beat anyone. A crew full of unhappy people doing substandard work. If you build systems that make people focus on mastery, cooperation, and better work, we’ll have a beautiful inn full of happy people working together well.”

III.

A question that always arises, in discussions of interstitial projects that involve “building the new society in the shell of the old,” is how the old and new society get along and whether the old society just lets it happen. Will neoliberal society shut down post-capitalist experiments like it did Allende’s Chile? Will US or EU drones and mechas destroy server farms in Iceland to enforce global copyright accords, or engage in house-to-house fighting to stamp out federations of commons-based municipal projects in Europe?

In this case the old society — “default,” in walkaway slang — largely ignored walkaway society for most of its history until around the time of the story. There were sporadic attacks by state military forces on walkaway settlements, variously justified as reprisals for “harboring fugitives,” “terrorism,” and “intellectual property violations.” But they were mostly just that — sporadic. Walkaway society served as a safety valve for the surplus population of default society, without seriously challenging the zottas’ economic exploitation of those who remained in their jurisdiction.

But in the time-frame of Walkaway, there’s been a sharp uptick in the number and severity of government and corporate military attacks. The reason for the change is that walkaway scientists — themselves in large part deserters from default institutional science who find the walkaway atmosphere more congenial — are on the verge of achieving a breakthrough in human immortality before their counterparts in default. Since the whole zotta project involves withdrawing into fortified city-states, space platforms, and other stately pleasure domes — and ultimately achieving immortality while they abandon the rest of the human race as superfluous — the idea that a bunch of dirty fucking hippies might beat them there is intolerable.

What’s more, the idea that the zottas might speciate into a separate immortal race, on top of all the other indignities they inflict on humanity, is undermining their legitimizing ideology and rendering subject populations less governable. Hence the zottas are even more desperate to ensure that they reach the goal first.

“It’s one thing to imagine a life of working to enrich some hereditary global power broker when you know you got eighty years on the planet, and so does he…. But the thought of making those greedy assholes into godlike immortals, bifurcating the human race into infinite Olympian masters and mayflies, so they not only get a better life than you could ever dream of but they get it forever…”

She sighed. “They’re scared. They keep raising salaries, doesn’t matter. Offering benefits, doesn’t matter. Stock, doesn’t matter. A friend swears some zotta was trying to marry him into the family, just to keep him from defecting… It’s a race: either the walkaways release immortality to the world, or the zottas install themselves as permanent god-emperors.”

Researchers at Walkaway U successfully scan and upload a human mind to computer hardware for the first time, figuring out how to keep the personality running on a meta-stable basis without existential meltdown spinning into an out-of-control positive feedback cycle.

The prospect of human immortality is the ultimate development of the walkaway ethos of minimalism and non-attachment. Any physical good can be replicated in a fab lab in hours. Settlements can be rebuilt from scavenged materials bigger and better in a matter of months if they’re taken over or destroyed (as the B&B was at one point in the story). And now the same promises to become true of the human body as an accessory to consciousness. It will be possible to literally “walk away” from anything and start over.

Watching the new B&B conjure itself had been a conversion experience, a proof of the miraculous on Earth. They’d walked away from the old B&B when those assholes had shown up, and pulled a new one from the realm of pure information. That was their destiny. Things could be walked away from and made anew; no one would ever have to fight. Not yet — they couldn’t scan people at volume, couldn’t decant them into flesh. But there would come a day… when there would be no reason to fear death. That would be the end of physical coercion. So long as someone, somewhere, believed in putting you back into a body, there would be no reason not to walk into an oppressor’s machine-gun fire, no reason not to beat your brains out on the bars of your prison cell….

IV.

Of course the zottas realize this as well. With indisputable news of walkaway’s achievement of human immortality, the previous generation’s Cold War between default and walkaway turns very hot. Walkaway settlements all over the world are raided, obliterated, and have their populations either exterminated or taken into captivity.

At the same time, the dramatic rupture and sense of revolutionary momentum motivates entire cities within default jurisdictions — Akron, Liverpool, Minsk, and others — to go rogue and transform themselves into revolutionary walkaway communes. Take Akron, for instance:

Walkaways did a coordinated mass squat on the whole downtown, 85 percent of which was boarded up and underwater…. They’d flown under the radar, smooth and coordinated. One day, Akron was haphazardly squatted by homeless people, the next, a walkaway army reopened every shuttered building, including fire stations, libraries, and shelters. Factories turned into fabs, loaded with feedstock, powered by eggbeater fields that sprung up overnight, electrolyzing hydrogen from sludge flowing in the Little Cuyahoga River, feeding hydrogen cells that walkaways wrestled around in wheelbarrows.

Default was caught off guard. Connecticut flooding had FEMA and the National Guard tied up. The contractors who backstopped FEMA couldn’t use their normal practice of hiring local talent as shock troops. By the time they mobilized, their entire recruiting pool was walkaway.

It gave the Akron walkaways — they called themselves an “ac-hoc,” said they were practicing “ad-hocracy” — a previous week to consolidate. By the time default besieged Akron, they were a global media sensation, source of endless hangouts demonstrating a happy world of plenty salvaged from a burned husk with absentee owners.

The effect of the first genuine walkaway cities is revolutionary. Until the outbreak of open warfare, walkaway “tend[ed] to be a building or two, a wasp’s nest wedged in a crack in default,” in order to avoid presenting anything default would consider a threat to be destroyed.” The emergence of walkaway communities on the scale of Akron amounted to “walk towards.” In response to Limpopo’s prediction that the government would nuke Akron before allowing it to stand as an example, another B&B member — Tam — replied: “Seriously, fuck that. The point of walkaway is the first days of a better nation. Back when that was more than an eye roll, it was a serious idea. Someday, walkaway and default will swap places.”

Of course default responds by brutally suppressing the rogue cities. The US army and private contractors advanced in force with drones, mechas, and armored vehicles, officially in the name of fighting “the Four Horsemen” always used to justify state terror by imperialist nations: “pornographers, mafiosi, drug dealers, and terrorists.”

The two dozen buildings targeted by air strikes included a hospital, on the pretext that it was producing biological warfare agents. In reality it was printing out ebola and H1N1 vaccines without licenses. Missiles and aerostats also took out the city’s Internet with strikes on the fiber optic infrastructure and wireless routers. Next, the “boots on the ground phase,” tasing and tear gassing by “pacifier bots,” ensued.

But the assault on Akron only caused efforts to escalate on the walkaway side. Akron itself didn’t just roll over, and the repression inspired a worldwide support network to engage in resistance.

That was the push; then came the pushback. The walkaways and Akronites who’d assumed control of the city planned for this kind of shock/awe. They had bunkers, aerostat-seeking autonomous lasers, dark fiber backups that linked up to microwave relays far out of town, offline atrocity-seeking cameras that recorded footage automatically when the network went dark, crude HERF weapons that stored huge amounts of solar energy whenever the sun shone, ready to discharge in a powerful whoomf the moment they sensed military spread-spectrum comms.

Once the word got out about Akron, there was online pushback, too. Walkaways all over the world battered at the comms and infrastructure of the contractors in the vanguard, the DHS, the DoD, the White House internal nets, the DNC’s backchannels, Seven Eyes chatter nets — the whole world of default super-rosa and sub-rosa connectivity. Walkaway backbones prioritized traffic out of Akron, auto-mirrored it across multiple channels.

The walkaway propaganda machine was also going full-blast, with suicide drones capturing and transmitting footage of atrocities despite default’s efforts to censor events in Akron from the mass media and control the narrative. Soldiers and private mercenary contractors were identified from video footage and doxxed, and open letters sent to their families to shame them. The doxxings often started a chain reaction of defections and destroyed morale.

Kids left home, leaked their parents’ private documents implicating their superiors, publishing secret-above-secret rules of engagement with instructions to use lethals when cameras were off, to buy evidence, or implicate insurgents in atrocities. Sometimes parents disowned children who’d done zottas’ dirty work, publicly disavowing slaughter. It split families and communities, but it also brought new ones together.

The ripple effect resulted in general strikes, and mass demonstrations in major cities on a scale sufficient to absorb all police resources — after which new demonstrators continued to pour into the streets. In some places walkaway prisoners were freed when guards simply unlocked the doors and abandoned their jobs.

Meanwhile, Akron itself was rebuilt after the jackboots withdrew from the scene.

The new Akron, built on the site of the leveled buildings, refused to be a graveyard. The people who’d flocked to it to rebuild after the army and the mercs and the guardsmen had joined returning locals to build new kinds of buildings, advanced refugee housing straight out of the UNHCR playbook, designed to use energy merrily when the wind blew or the sun shone, to hibernate the rest of the time. The multistory housing interleaved greenhouses and hydroponic market-gardens with homes, capturing human CO2 and giving back oxygen. They were practically space colonies, inhabited by some of the poorest people in the world, who adapted and improved systems so many other poor people had improved over the disasters the human race had weathered. The hexayurt suburbs acted as a kind of transition zone between default and the new kind of permanent walkaway settlement, places where people came and went, if they decided that Akron wasn’t for them.

Akron wasn’t the first city like this — there was Lodz, Capetown, Monrovia. It was the first American city, the first explicitly borne of the crackdown on walkaways. It put the State Department in the awkward position of condemning a settlement that was functionally equivalent to many it had praised elsewhere.

The wave of all-out violence between default and walkaway — popularly named World War Default — was followed, after an interval of turbulence, by the Walkaway Decade. Default more or less folded on its efforts to violently eradicate walkaway society, although the zottas persisted in their strongholds (“walled cities, the Harrier-jet-and-mountaintop set”) and default society persisted to a greater or lesser degree as contested terrain. Projects on the Akron model continued to spread among rust-belt towns like Gary, some of them technically the property of holding companies that had bailed them out of bankruptcy. All kinds of default facilities were simply abandoned and converted to walkaway use, like an enormous private prison complex outside Kingston, Ont. previously owned by TransCanada. The refurbishment project “followed a template that was developed and formalized in the stupidly named ‘Walkaway Decade.’”

Some walls came down, others went up. They’d build rammed-earth machines and add sprawling wings and ells, almost certainly an onsen, because that was de rigueur at anything walkaway bigger than a few people.

The rhythm of the place would change. On days when the sun shone or the wind blew, they’d run coolers with abandon, heat huge pools of water for swimming and bathing, charge and loose drones and other toys. When neither were around, the buildings would switch to passive climate control, the people would switch activities to less power-hungry ones.

Iceweasel (formerly Natalie) tries to tell a resurrected Limpopo, several years after the war, how much things have changed. 

“Limpopo,” Iceweasel said, softly. “It’s not like that anymore. Default isn’t the default. I know what it was like. It looked like war, they were going to lock us away or kill us. It changed. The zottas went to war against each other, fought for control over countries whose people refused to fight for any side, walked away with us, turned refugee living into the standard. It was the people who stayed in one place and claimed some chunk of real estate was no one else’s became weirdos. Everyone else hit the road when those people showed.

…“There are enclaves of people who pretend that it’s normal and things will go back the way they were or were supposed to be soon. These days, it’s not about armed conflict, it’s war of norms, which of us is normal and who are the crazy radicals.”

Walkaway culture is destroying nation-state governments’ ability to control their own people all over the world. An attempted Iranian invasion of Iraq failed because most of the troops on both sides were involved in a Gulf-wide walkaway affinity group. The Iranian pilots landed their jets in Kurdistan rather than carry out their bombing missions; infantrymen refused to fight and some officers deserted along with them. The same thing occurred on the Iraqi side, with the minority of soldiers who attempted to obey orders being disarmed by their comrades. Rumors circulated that generals on both sides had given orders to drone mutinous troops, but had tried to avoid drawing further attention to themselves after drone operators refused to obey orders.

An anti-climax of sorts occurs when TransCanada sends an army of private mercenary contractors to reclaim its private prison complex, presumably as a trial run for restoring default control of other walkaway enclaves. But the transition was already too far-gone for the attack to succeed. Things had reached a tipping point where most mercenaries were one or two degrees of separation from a walkaway relative, and they were relentlessly propagandized to defect. Many of them did, and gradually coalesced into a separate group within view of the standoff. At the same time, walkaway broadcasts of the attempted assault and the scale of damage to the facilities caused TransCanada share value to implode. In the end, the confrontation was brought to an end by a crowd of hundreds of civilians, accompanied by the walkaway private cops in full body armor, marching into the prison complex and simply surging past the paralyzed besieging forces and forming a human chain around the buildings. Some of TransCanada’s remaining mercenaries defected, and the rest retreated to their APCs and left in defiance of orders.

The story resumes a generation later, when walkaway scientists have developed the ability to download human consciousness back into cloned bodies. Iceweasel, who died of cancer, awakens in a new body and is greeted by Hubert, Etc in a more recent body of his own. The clear implication is that the conflict is long over, and walkaway is the new default.

V.

Doctorow has mentioned being influenced by Rebecca Solnit’s work on spontaneous grassroots disaster relief and mutual aid in writing this book. It comes through in Limpopo’s expression of faith that humanity will reach a tipping point towards default because “covered-dish people” outnumber “shotgun people”:

“If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with a) a covered dish or b) a shotgun? It’s game theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you’d be an idiot to pick a); if she believes the same thing about you, you can bet she’s not going to choose a) either. The way to get to a) is to do a) even if you think your neighbor will pick b). Sometimes she’ll point her gun at you and tell you to get off her land, but if she was only holding the gun because she thought you’d have one, then she’ll put on the safety and you can have a potluck.”

And the abundance of walkaway society turns people into covered-dish types. “There’s not any reason not to be one when we can all have enough, so long as we’re not fucking each other over.”

That’s borne out by certain accounts of history, by the way. In Riane Eisler’s typology, foraging groups and neolithic agrarian villages were, under normal circumstances, relatively egalitarian “cooperator societies.” “Dominator societies” — with authoritarian social hierarchies, harsh punishment of dissent, strict gender roles, and patriarchal sky-father religions — arose among nomadic peoples living under harsh scarcity conditions in marginal deforested or desertified environments. These people saw existence as a zero-sum game and turned to conquest. It’s a plausible hope — one I cling to, at least — that conditions of abundance and security will eventually heal the worst authoritarian tendencies in our society and lead to the predominance of a better type of human.

VI.

Cory Doctorow is by far the best author of near-future post-scarcity fiction I know of (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Makers and some short stories I reviewed on my postscarcity blog), and of some amazing stories about networked resistance and information freedom movements as well (Pirate Cinema and For the Win!, and a subplot of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town). About the only thing of his that ever just fell flat with me was Rapture of the Nerds, co-authored with Charles Stross. Marge Piercy (Woman on the Edge of Time), Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age), Daniel Suarez (Daemon and Freedom(TM)) and Bruce Sterling (The Caryatids) have written brilliantly on similar themes, some of their work very nearly as good. But none has been remotely as prolific as Doctorow on specifically post-scarcity themes while maintaining such consistent quality.

Of everything Doctorow has written, this book is my favorite. I can’t recommend it highly enough, especially to anyone interested in anything related to post-scarcity or the transition to post-capitalism.

Grayling, A.C. (2009). Liberty in the Age of Terror: A Defense of Civil Liberties and Enlightenment Values. London: Bloomsbury

In his 2009 book, Liberty in the Age of Terror: A Defense of Civil Liberties and Enlightenment Values, British philosopher AC Grayling sets out to do just what the subtitle suggests. He presents a case for civil libertarianism in a post-September 11th world, at a time when the political establishments in both his home country and the US were pushing for increased surveillance of the population.

In many ways this book feels quaint due to its coming out prior to the vast majority of Barack Obama’s presidency and the following backlash now characterized by Donald Trump’s presidency. It was written prior to Edward Snowden’s leaks, which revealed the extent to which the US government and its allies were engaged in bulk data collection of civilians. It also predates Benghazi, ISIS, and the Syrian refugee crisis. Additionally, when this book was written, today’s culture war flash-points — rhetoric about “fake news,” alt-rightism, and the related panics about safe spaces and trigger warnings on college campuses — were scarcely in their infancy.

Liberty in the Age of Terror is the product of a time when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney still loomed large in the collective consciousness. Public opinion had only recently turned against the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The wave of fear-driven patriotism that flourished following the events of September 11th had diminished as it became apparent the resulting wars were becoming costly quagmires with no end in sight.

The backlash against U.S.-led wars created an environment friendly to criticism of militarism, and led many mainstream commentators to question the value of mass surveillance. Critical analysis of the surveillance state was now marketable to mainstream audiences, including criticism of the signature post-9/11 legislation: the USA PATRIOT Act. This act authorized indefinite detention of immigrants, and permitted the FBI to search a person’s telephone, email, and financial records without a court order. Similarly, it expanded the power of law enforcement to search private property without the owner’s consent or knowledge.

The Patriot Act has since been replaced with the US Freedom Act, and while much of the names and details have changed in the years since, mass surveillance is still pervasive. Liberty in the Age of Terror reminds us how we got here, though enough has changed to leave the book feeling inadequate for addressing Trump-era discourse concerning such threats as border walls and travel bans.

Part of the problem is that this book is a surprisingly light and easy read. Readers looking for an advanced treatise on civil liberties will not find that here, as this is largely an entry level book. This is not necessarily a bad thing, in and of itself, as introducing civil liberties discourse in an accessible way is a laudable goal, but it leaves more well-versed readers wanting something more.

One gets the impression that Grayling’s purpose was to write a book that would do the much-needed job of convincing burgeoning surveillance statists, with only minimal knowledge of the civil liberties discourse, to reconsider their position. To that extent Grayling succeeds, he definitely makes the case that civil liberties are important, though I have to question his ability to change the minds of anyone who does not already have a pro-civil liberties bias.

While Grayling is able to write eloquently and with a great deal of passion for the topic of civil liberties, he is no libertarian. To his credit he is quite up front about this early in the book. However, he falls into the trap of mischaracterizing libertarians as licentious right-wingers, whose goal is to pursue their own ends without consideration of anyone else. He also characterizes libertarianism as “not especially friendly to ideas of rights,” claiming libertarians see rights as obstructions to their true aims.

In reality, libertarians tend to be deeply committed to the rights we see as legitimate, but question some conceptions of rights put forward by others. Grayling’s analysis also overlooks the existence the libertarian left, as well as anyone who favors libertarian conceptions of rights, not out of self-interest, but out of the belief that such a system would maximize the well-being of those who live under it. While Graying is wrong on this point, his wrongness here does not actually undermine the correct points he makes in the vast majority of the book.

Grayling identifies himself as being part of the “Liberal Left” in the European sense, which he associates with a commitment to social justice. Again this reflects the datedness of this book, as “social justice” had yet to become the snarl word among the right that it is today.

The author is also very much a globalist in the sense that he is highly supportive of international institutions. He devotes a chapter in the later half of this book to arguments in favor of the International Criminal Court, and includes as an appendix a copy of United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His trust in such super-states comes off as problematic, since the primary focus of his critique is the overly-concentrated power of the constituent states of these institutions. Furthermore these portions of the book, seem to exist for their own sake, and do not compliment the main thesis as much as Grayling seems to believe.

Grayling alternates between the threats to personal freedom posed by a United States government and a British government that has become increasingly intrusive. He blames the tough-on-crime posturing of the 1990s for the ultimate development of a CCTV system that has public spaces throughout the United Kingdom under constant surveillance. He discusses the Orwellian prospect of the CCTV cameras being augmented with microphones, essentially ending the existence of private conversations. He notes that politicians attempting to out-do each other on toughness towards crime are an ongoing threat to civil liberties. By extension, Grayling rightly rejects the line of reasoning that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, as it wrongly assumes that the authorities are benevolent and likely to remain so.

Grayling argues that states can easily tend toward abusive behavior if their power is not kept in check by the people, and he considers a right to privacy essential for a free society.  He expresses opposition to a parliamentary act which would require subjects of the United Kingdom to carry biometric ID cards — IDs that can allow any law enforcement officer to access one’s personal information. This legislation was passed but subsequently repealed in 2010.

As the book progresses, Grayling spends more time exploring some of the complexities of freedom. For example: the requirement that a free society must at least legally tolerate the free expression of those wishing to abolish its freedom. In the case of Muslim immigrants to the UK and elsewhere, he considers any threats such immigrant populations pose to be outweighed by the threats to liberty associated with trying to stop them. He notes that censorship of offensive speech, or imposing limitations on speech to promote social cohesion, are not acceptable actions when done by governments, and furthermore that self-censorship for these purposes can be comparably problematic to government censorship.

The book is structured with the basic arguments presented in the first 150 pages. These chapters make for a good introduction to discourse on civil liberties. In the following section he responds to counter-arguments put forward by series of specific adversaries. He covers each of these in a matter of a few pages each.

Common themes in this second section portion of the book include the tensions associated with pluralism, the relationship between civil libertarianism and secularism, and freedom vs. rigid traditionalism. Among the individuals addressed are British conservative Roger Scruton, the anti-managerialist John Ralston Saul, and the left-wing philosopher Slavoj Zizek.

Of these adversaries, Zizek has arguably risen to the greatest level of viability since the book’s release. Grayling presents Zizek as arguing that the supposed rights granted in capitalist societies largely mask the underlying exploitation such societies are built upon. Grayling on the other hand sees the rights granted in the capitalist west as hard-won, if not perfect.

As noted above, this book deals with some fairly complex ideas, but does so at a level appropriate for readers unfamiliar with the subject. The topics presented are not discussed much deeper than an introductory level. The writing is eloquent, and the book reads easily. Its biggest short-coming is that it is now a bit dated, but it is adequate for someone wanting a quick brush-up on civil libertarian discourse in the years following the second Bush presidency.

Di Harry Bentham. Originale pubblicato il 30 luglio 2018 con il titolo Seeing Through Synthetic Biology’s “Project Fear”. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

“Project Fear” (progetto paura, ndt), strategia usata in Gran Bretagna dalle forze contrarie alla Brexit, rappresentava il tentativo di salvare la situazione ricorrendo alla paura, a scenari catastrofici e alle peggiori profezie. È una tattica diffusa tra chi si oppone al cambiamento. A giugno scorso un’ondata di titoli minacciosi ha gettato un’ombra oscura su una branca nascente della scienza che potrebbe acquisire posizione centrale nella storia di questo secolo: la biologia sintetica.

Scrive il Telegraph: “Gli scienziati avvertono il Pentagono del pericolo rappresentato da armi biologiche ‘di facile realizzazione’ grazie ai rapidi avanzamenti tecnologici.” E Futurism aggiunge: “Le Armi Biologiche Sintetiche Potrebbero Essere Vicine. Ecco come Combatterle.” Mentre secondo Laboratory Equipment la “Crescita della Biologia Sintetica trova lo Stato Impreparato alla Guerra Biologica.” Sono tanti gli articoli che speculano sul cattivo uso della biologia sintetica. Il precedente sarebbe in un rapporto del dipartimento della difesa americano, in cui si paventava la riproduzione mediante ingegneria inversa di un virus reale, come il vaiolo, da usare come arma biologica.

La biologia sintetica non facilita di molto la creazione di un’arma biologica, che, va detto, sarebbe inizialmente prerogativa di entità statali come il dipartimento della difesa. Ma potrebbe servire a rendere più accessibili certi trattamenti medici o a fornire energia rinnovabile. Se i paesi e gli strati sociali più ricchi hanno ragione a temere gli aspetti pericolosi e distruttivi della biologia sintetica, è vero però che per il resto del mondo le potenzialità hanno un valore infinito.

La biologia sintetica porterà a innovazioni rivoluzionarie, e gli effetti sociali più significativi si avranno nei campi energetico e farmaceutico. Secondo J. Craig Venter, esperto di biologia sintetica che ha decodificato il genoma umano, i prodotti della biologia sintetica viaggeranno alla “velocità della luce” essendo semplici informazioni codificate e trasmesse da macchina a macchina mentre il prodotto finale sarà fabbricato direttamente a casa. La biologia sintetica sarà più o meno come i primi personal computer dotati di stampante per l’uso casalingo e individuale. I prodotti farmaceutici potranno essere scaricati gratis.

Secondo la direttrice di Genspace Ellen Jorgensen, obiettivo della biologia sintetica è semplificare al massimo la creazione di prodotti biologici. La biologia sintetica è come la già nota ingegneria genetica, ma “con la possibilità di standardizzare e automatizzare il processo” in termini di precisione e velocità. Con la biologia sintetica “diventa più facile assemblare pezzi del DNA rendendoli modulari” e “trasformare la biologia in una sorta di Lego.” La velocità e la facilità d’uso hanno potenziali rivoluzionari. La diffusione del progetto, con il passaggio degli strumenti creativi direttamente ai consumatori o a minuscole attività economiche, potrebbe segnare la fine del monopolio delle industrie farmaceutiche.

E le conseguenze potrebbero essere anche più grandi. Col perfezionamento dei biocombustibili si potrebbe arrivare a sostituire il petrolio con combustibili prodotti in casa. Questo potrebbe aiutare le famiglie nei paesi poveri a migliorare le proprie condizioni, o anche mettere fine alla dipendenza dai paesi tecnologicamente avvantaggiati. Utilizzando batteri sintetici, si potrebbero produrre combustibili ad alta densità partendo da abbondanti materie prime, o addirittura dai rifiuti. Prove condotte dalla Exxon Mobil su colonie di cianobatteri fanno capire che anche questo gigante energetico crede nell’idea: entità competenti stanno già pianificando la produzione di combustibili ad alta densità utilizzando la biologia sintetica. Produzioni in fattoria, se non in casa, significherebbero l’eliminazione dei costosi oleodotti. Combustibili prodotti in casa potrebbero ridimensionare gli sforzi volti a garantire le forniture energetiche, nonché eliminare la necessità dei costosi impianti di estrazione e raffinazione costruiti dalle multinazionali nei paesi poveri.

L’allarme che circonda la biologia sintetica riflette la minaccia che la branca scientifica rappresenta per i centri di potere nonché il compito sempre più arduo degli stati nazionali. Le cerchie del potere governativo e aziendale interpretano come terrorismo tutto ciò che minaccia il potere concentrato. Per far scattare l’allarme non è necessario dimostrare che esiste una vera minaccia.

Dobbiamo aspettarci tentativi di soffocamento di gran parte degli effetti antimonopolistici e antimperiali di tali prodotti e servizi man mano che si espandono le conquiste della biologia sintetica in campo medico ed energetico. Faranno leva sulla paura che circonda le armi biologiche per giustificare un rafforzamento delle normative. Gli stati imporranno regole che mirano ad impedire che la biologia sintetica migliori la vita dei più. Condividere questi prodotti, o anche solo le informazioni, sarà vietatissimo. Pirateria biologica significherà terrorismo. E la scarsità artificiale così prodotta servirà a gonfiare profitti, privilegi e potere.

Governi nazionali e aziende sovranazionali condividono lo stesso odio verso la libertà d’informazione e l’indipendenza dell’individuo. Temono la biologia sintetica e la possibilità di un accesso popolare per la stessa ragione per cui la chiesa cattolica odiava la diffusione della stampa. Una paura che non è fuori luogo: i sistemi sociali sono fortemente influenzati dall’ampiezza della democratizzazione delle conoscenze. Democratizzare l’argilla della vita, così che le masse possano darle una nuova forma, scuoterebbe la società più di quanto non abbia fatto la stampa di un qualsivoglia numero di libri.

Dopo aver perso il controllo dei media digitali, cosa che ha dato capacità d’azione a dissidenti e informatori, gli stati temono ora di perdere il controllo anche delle cose e delle risorse. La volontà storica è contro di loro, si sposta inesorabilmente verso il rafforzamento dell’individuo e l’indebolimento delle strutture autoritarie. Tale è l’esito di una tecnologia, e di una sua miniaturizzazione a livelli microscopici, oggi sempre più accessibile. La tutela di potere e profitto cederanno finalmente il passo all’anarchia della nostra cultura digitale. La minaccia che proviene dalla biologia sintetica è un bene per noi e un male per loro.

Di Roderick Long. Originale pubblicato il 7 febbraio 2016 con il titolo “Arrow” and Anarchophobia. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Negli spettacoli televisivi i personaggi anarchici sono rari (i “Sons of Anarchy” non fanno eccezione). Nella popolare serie televisiva “Arrow”, mandata in onda sulla rete CW e ispirata al personaggio dei fumetti Green Arrow della DC Comics, ha fatto la sua comparsa un nuovo personaggio, Lonnie Machin, caratterizzato esplicitamente come anarchico.

In cosa consiste l’anarchismo di Machin?

Finora è comparso soltanto in due episodi, ma si è dato da fare. Nel primo tortura innocenti con scosse elettriche, rapisce e tiene in ostaggio una giovane donna, e quando questa viene salvata lui si indigna perché non può passare le ore torturandola (anche se non è esplicito, la tortura comprende lo stupro). Machin vorrebbe lavorare per il supercattivo della serie, ma è respinto perché troppo estremista!

Alla seconda comparsa, Machin uccide i genitori adottivi e fa simboli anarchici sui muri con il loro sangue. Minaccia anche di torturare la moglie e i giovani figli del suo nemico, ma il giustiziere di prima lo priva del divertimento.

Uno si chiede: cosa spinge gli autori contro gli anarchici? Ne hanno mai incontrato uno?

L’anarchismo è una filosofia politica che sostiene l’organizzazione sociale volontaria e si oppone ad ogni forma di dominio e di autorità coercitiva, compreso lo stato. Un anarchico tratta gli altri come suoi pari, non come padroni o sottoposti. Dato che il movimento anarchico si oppone alla violenza contro le donne, il trattamento che Machin riserva al suo ostaggio femminile sembra particolarmente contraddittorio.

Gli anarchici sono storicamente in prima linea nei movimenti per l’eguaglianza tra i sessi, il potere dei lavoratori e l’abolizione della schiavitù. Tra i teorici più noti troviamo Henry David Thoreau, Lev Tolstoij, Emma Goldman e, oggi, esponenti della critica sociale come Noam Chomsky e autori di fantascienza come Ursula Le Guin. Sono più che sicuro che nessuno di questi abbia mai torturato nessuno o fatto scritte sul muro con il sangue.

Nell’immaginario collettivo, l’associazione tra anarchismo e violenza è dovuta in parte al fatto che tra la fine dell’Ottocento e l’inizio del Novecento molti anarchici abbracciarono la politica delle bombe e dell’assassinio. Fu una politica disastrosa sia moralmente che strategicamente, ma è bene tenere in mente tre cose:

1. Questo approccio non domina più il movimento anarchico da oltre un secolo (e anche allora era argomento controverso tra gli anarchici). Gran parte degli anarchici persegue i propri obiettivi attraverso la cultura, i movimenti di base e edificando istituzioni alternative.

2. Quando gli anarchici hanno fatto ricorso alla violenza, solitamente lo hanno fatto per rispondere alle istituzioni oppressive, non per seminare il caos e basta.

3. In ogni caso, la violenza imputabile al movimento anarchico quasi scompare di fronte alla violenza perpetrata dagli apologeti delle autorità costituite, in particolare lo stato.

Perché allora gli autori di “Arrow” sentono il bisogno di portare avanti questa visione distorta degli anarchici?

Tra l’altro, il personaggio di Lonnie Machin non nasce in questa serie. È opera di Alan Grant e Norm Breyfogle, che nel 1989 lo fanno comparire sui fumetti nella figura positiva dell’eroico poliziotto privato Anarky. Così che la rappresentazione di Machin che viene fatta è uno schiaffo non solo agli anarchici in genere ma anche ai creatori del personaggio.

Ma l’odio degli autori di “Arrow” verso chi combatte i regimi autoritari non si ferma a Machin. Felicity Smoak, una delle protagoniste, ha un passato di hacktivista; apparentemente non è mai stata anarchica, ma molti anarchici appoggiano movimenti hacktivisti come WikiLeaks e Anonymous, e pubblicare segreti governativi è qualcosa che gli anarchici generalmente approvano. In un recente episodio Felicity rinnega il proprio passato di hacktivista, di quando avrebbe volentieri pubblicato documenti governativi segreti su internet, lo denuncia come errore di gioventù e arriva a bruciare una sua foto di allora.

Qui “Arrow” sembra ripercorrere le orme di un’altra serie ispirata ad un fumetto, “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”, mandato in onda dalla ABC. Il protagonista Skye, un hacktivista di un emulo di WikiLeaks chiamato “Rising Tide”, improvvisamente “si ravvede” ed entra in un’organizzazione spionistica dello stato.

Gli autori di “Arrow” e “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” non sembrano avercela con le attività criminali in genere. Nella seconda serie, Felicity lavora per una società di vigilanza illegale, ad esempio, e i dipendenti governativi di Skye formano una società privata illegale. Abbandonando l’hacktivismo vagamente anarchico, Felicity e Skye non abbracciano la legalità ma la segretezza. Pur stando fuori dagli apparati statali, come tutti gli agenti governativi considerano se stessi parte di un’élite che merita di accedere alla verità allegramente nascosta ai più.

E questo non è solo un insulto agli anarchici. È un insulto a tutti noi.

Citazioni:

• Roderick Long, ‘Arrow’ and anarchophobia, Augusta Free Press, 10 febbraio 2016.

• Roderick Long, “Arrow” and Anarchophobia, News LI, 10 febbraio 2016.

Radley Balko (2013). “Rise of the Warrior Cop.” New York: PublicAffairs

This book was a timely read after the last book I reviewed for C4SS, Tyranny Comes Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism by Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall. Tyranny Comes Home gives a “macro” overview of the broader policy implications of U.S. military adventurism, while Radley Balko, in “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” provides more of the “micro” investigations, referring to specific botched no-knock raids that set precedent for the broader trend toward a militarized police force. I was initially struck by the similarities throughout periods of government expansion that saw rapid intensifications in police militarization.

Much of the precedent that set the stage for the contemporary police state the U.S. occurred in tandem with periods of unprecedented civil unrest. Balko spends much of the first half of the book catching the reader up on the history of police in the world, and especially in the United States. He also provides a thoughtful background on the Bill of Rights. One would expect to find a staunch defense of the Fourth Amendment in a book about police misconduct, and Balko surely delivers on that end, but I was pleased to find a thorough defense of the oft-overlooked Third Amendment and the context that connects the Third and Fourth Amendments.

Balko notes that police militarization was initially kicked into high gear by Richard Nixon’s administration, which found capitalizing on white fears of black criminality to be particularly effective. The public was largely ignorant to the finer details of crime science, like the idea that mundane things such as increased street lighting did more to reduce the prevalence of crime than say, outfitting a police department with a fully-armed SWAT team to serve drug warrants.

In the 60s, Nixon could distract from the war in Vietnam and even the Watergate scandal by fanning flames of racial unrest and the scourge of dangerous drugs. Nixon would even admit behind closed doors that he knew drug use and crime were trending down, but he could still capitalize on the public’s misconceptions that crime was rising. It’s a case study in the perverse incentives that abound in the decades-old War on Drugs.

Furthermore, it seemed as though many of Nixon’s decisions were calculated to “stick it to the left,” to take a quote directly from Nixon’s Chief of Staff, which doesn’t seem far off at all from the contemporary GOP’s North Star.¹ Why do what works when you can do what’s politically expedient? This attitude was evident in the direction taken by the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE), the precursor of the DEA, which sought to make a high quantity of arrests of low level drug pushers versus high quality arrests of criminal enterprises that contributed to drug proliferation.

Balko writes:

The [Nixon] White House needed something tangible to tout to the public. If they couldn’t use actual crime data to show their initiatives were working, perhaps they could just create their own impressive statistics by generating lots of arrests and convictions at the federal level.

One major takeaway the reader gets from Balko’s book is how much of the early push toward militarized policing was the result of a PR campaign on the part of the federal government. Nixon in particular was keen to notice how white middle America, the so-called “Silent Majority,” was rife with racial animosity. Nixon could lump all of the “undesirables” during his administration under a common umbrella: narcotics. Black Americans, hippies, and anti-war protesters were easy to point to as “the problem” and characterizing them all as stoners was an effective way of inoculating his opposition.

A major feeling that I took away from the book was that while there have been major gains in scaling back in the egregious abuses of power within the War on Drugs there are a lot of areas where it seems we’ve taken a few steps backward. In one telling episode from the late 80s, Balko recounts a moment in drug war hysteria that reads today like a prelude to the Trump Administration.

Despite consistent data showing that drug use and addiction were abating, [a 1989 White House] Drug Strategy report declared drugs to be a ‘deepening crisis’ that presented ‘the gravest threat to our national well-being.’ [William] Bennett’s appointment [as H.W. Bush’s drug czar] and subsequent hard line instigated a new round of drug war hysteria from other public officials. Sen. Phil Gram, Republican of Texas, and Republican Georgia representative Newt Gingrich introduced a bill to convert unused army centers into mass detention centers for drug offenders. Republican representative Richard Ray of Georgia proposed that drug offenders be exiled to Midway and Wake Islands. With no distractions, Ray argued, it would be easier for them to rehabilitate. Ray’s proposal even passed the House Armed Services Committee. He said that when he proposed the idea to a conference of sheriffs and police chiefs, he received a standing ovation…. In testimony before Congress, Daryl Gates [founder of the original SWAT teams and the anti-drug program DARE] proclaimed that casual drug use was ‘treason,’ then recommended that users be ‘taken out and shot.’ In several occasions in the 1980s, the House and Senate also flirted with extending the death penalty to convicted drug dealers.

These were policy proposals that were floated and debated during George H.W. Bush’s administration, an administration that comes across as almost quaint compared to the Trump administration. Even so, Trump himself has called for extending the death penalty to drug dealers.The proposal by then-representative Newt Gingrich to convert Army centers into mass detention centers for drug offenders seems eerily similar to plans today by the Pentagon to convert Army bases into de facto internment camps for up to 20,000 immigrants. It feels worth repeating that this rhetoric and show of force, both in the 80s and today, are in response to what amount to victimless and non-violent “crimes,” such as crossing the border without permission or the exchange of drugs and money between mutually consenting adults.

Shortly after taking office President Trump took a phone call with Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, who has made headlines in recent years for ratcheting up his own country’s war on drugs. President Duterte himself has called on his countrymen to take matters into their own hands and exact vigilante “justice” by killing anyone they suspect of being involved in the drug trade. In that phone call with Duterte in November of 2016, President Trump praised Duterte specifically for his handling of drug crime.

Balko’s book is a slow burn. He is methodic in his documentation of piecemeal policy proposals that ratchet up the war on drugs and police militarization gradually over time. The trend to embolden police officers and prosecutors, and to chip away at Fourth Amendment protections of those accused is methodical across party lines and across the three branches of government. Balko shows how willing Democrats were to have a hand in expanding the government’s authority for fear of appearing “weak on crime.” One name that routinely pops up is then-Senator Joe Biden, who just recently made headlines when he and Hillary Clinton appeared at the top of the list of desired potential Democratic President candidates to face off against Donald Trump in 2020. This is supposed to be the opposition party.

Nearly every time a Democrat is named in Balko’s book it is to express how Republican efforts to crank up the War on Drugs and requisite police powers doesn’t go far enough. At one point Dick Cheney, acting as Bush Sr.’s Secretary of Defense, said “The detection and countering of production, trafficking, and use of illegal drugs is a high priority national security mission at the Department of Defense.” At the same time then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Joe Biden, is quoted by the Associated Press as saying, “…quite frankly, [the Bush-Bennett] plan is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative enough to meet the crisis at hand.”

Nearly a decade earlier in 1982 Balko notes that Biden would introduce a bill that would give the Reagan administration a laundry list of expanded powers to wage its war on drugs, including expanding civil asset forfeiture to allow the Feds to seize property from those not even charged with a crime and the ability of prosecutors to estimate the amount of money an individual had made in the drug trade and to be able to confiscate property equivalent to that number. Previously authorities had to actually make the case that the property being seized was itself used in some criminal activity. That bill passed the Senate 95-1.

This book will raise the blood pressure of anyone with a conscience. I found it hard to read at times, especially when Balko dives into the finer details of botched no-knock raids. That said, it is a crucial read for anyone who wants to get their mind around the bipartisan atrocity that is US drug policy.

1. Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure

The forum known as 8chan (8ch) is not just Susan’s racist grandpa, it’s the center of the most extreme branch of modern white-nationalism and wannabe right-wing terrorist death squads. They will no doubt take this as a compliment and object only to the fact that they’re “wannabe” death squads, insisting that they’ve already begun. This is true of course. Accounts of internet-bred white nationalist terrorism are on the rise and meanwhile there are countless threads on 8ch dedicated to arming yourself and preparing for the time when you will be called upon to form your own death-squad.

I can’t count the number of threads I’ve seen with people discussing what bureaucratic or ultra-violent job they would want in their fantasy of the coming white-power overthrow. Or even just ways to get away with killing trans people and other minorities now. They have a fetish for the extreme minutiae, discussing things like modernizing Auschwitz and world-building with esoteric Evola meets internet troll culture inspired kekistani religions. This is the kind of place where mass shooters are born. Just visiting 8ch would probably be enough to get an accessory or conspiracy charge if the feds ever decided to care about white terrorism.

The users are very conscious of being the vanguard that births white supremacy into the acceptable window of mainstream discourse, or Overton Window. The worst memes usually come from them and they run countless meme pages on mainstream social media sites like Twitter. You may have noticed that more and more explicitly white supremacist candidates are running for political office.

Through a modified search you can see a run-down of the various candidates that 8ch users have advocated and organized for. Many of them are even happy to support candidates they know will lose, such as the white-supremacist Patrick Little or the pedo and nazi Nathan Larson, just to shift public opinion and create openings for their world. But sometimes they back candidates that win such as the open neo-nazi, Arthur Jones. They’re messy with infighting and purity spirals but some of them are very strategic, self-actualized fascists.

They also take an interest in individual cases of cruelty. In one thread they were plotting ways to convince Chelsea Manning to kill herself, which she nearly did, in part as the result of such trolling. Elsewhere they go on various campaigns to destroy the livelihoods of people they deem enemies such as one person in Berkeley who they went so far in their doxx as to begin sending edited nazi porn propaganda with the person in it to their families workplaces and bosses. In the past they’ve called the feds on innocent people — particularly female gamers and their advocates during GamerGate — in a tactic known as swatting and even tried to set people up for crimes like pedophilia and drug sales.

I’m sorry if this is shocking but it’s real. This place is the rancid core of whiteness and the beating heart of modernized fascism. It’s our Weimar nazi beer-halls if they had instant access to every other geographically isolated piece of shit on the planet. It’s a tightly interconnected ecosystem of ultranationalism, repackaged traditionalism, fascist mysticism, misogyny, racism, transphobia, and hardly veiled fetishes for genocide, terrorism, and one-off slaughter.

What is 8ch?

Structurally 8ch is just an average forum where users are basically anonymous. While anonymity itself is an important aspect of internet freedom, when combined with the culture of 8ch /pol/, it creates this cesspit. The forum is host to a lot of different kinds of boards from all over the world (such as the Arabic board “edgyptians”) on a wide range of topics from video games, anime, and guns to vore, waifus, and hacking. They host a lot of political tendencies including a thread devoted to some pretty sketchy leftist tendencies called /leftypol/. In general though, 8ch is the place where all the failed niche nationalisms go to frolic in their own muck.

Most of the pol people tend to be somewhat pro-capitalist statists or libertarians, but there are also national-anarchists and a lot of Strasserite left-national socialists (nazbol). The nazbol people are largely communist nazis or advocates of a “red-brown alliance.” It’s the home of many “Maybe you can but should you?” sub-ideologies such as primitivist-nazbol (nazbol that wants to destroy civilization) and other such word soup. Paranoid prepper is definitely a common theme as are the technocratic, neoreactionary, silicon-valley, dark-enlightenment types. Religiously they are most commonly hardcore Christian or viking-fetishizing Pagans.

It all started when reddit began cracking down on nazis in the /pol/ subreddit in the wake of GamerGate. They then fled to an older forum called 4ch /pol/. The most extreme members of 4ch ultimately moved to 8ch /pol/ and began referring to the 4ch and people like Richard Spencer as “alt-light” for not embracing enough of the macho ultra-violence that characterizes their inane sociopathic incel dreams. They were the source of some of the most notorious acts associated with the GamerGate phenomena, where they first found their ability to transform trolling into violence in the real world.

In this archived thread you can see one member state what he sees as the ultimate goals of the 8ch project. He describes the methods by which they will make a tracking database of:

“Everyone who has and still is taking part in the slow destruction of white cultures, races and countries through a multitude of means including, but not limited to: spreading propaganda, race-mixing, economic warfare, establishing degenerate policies, physically attacking whites, participating in mass activities (rallies, social media) propagating anti-white actions and so on. This means, the List is not just limited to the garden variety leftist, but every banker, journalist, social media sheep, boss, co-worker, neighbor and so on.”

And what do they want to do with this list? Let’s not paraphrase:

How can this List be abused by evil people? Let’s not talk about that, since it is not our business, but if you really want to know. People could for example:
>form s.o. purge squads in a urban unrest scenario, hunting people with various political leanings or based on their past actions
>one could look up their co-worker and fire him upon finding him on the list
>someone could possibly check the mudshark-o-meter of their current date
>concentrated information warfare efforts could be established using more personal notes based on the list
>pressure people on the list, by simply pointing out their entry on it, since people rather like to stay in the shadows if they propagate the death of a race (anti-white, e.g.)
>after political turmoil and political shit, the List could be used to segregate people and make them ‘pay’ for their actions, down to their most distant relative.
>when technology progresses, facial recognition could come in handy in junction with mobile devises [sic], making evil people aware of others past and current political actions.

Let’s break this down a bit. He’s trying to have a little bit of plausible deniability, but he is advocating methods for making a list of fifth-column scapegoats and killing them all, including for things like “race-mixing.” They constantly harp about these “urban unrest scenarios” which they believe would give them the chance to begin building towards their goals.

Most of the details of such plans happen in secret threads on other mediums, but generally they are all in agreement that it needs to be done and they have already created such lists, focused on people they consider to be antifa. Until they are able to create their brown-shirt, steroid injected Proud Boy squads, they want to use things like doxxing and electronic warfare that can be done from the safety of their own homes.

They are efficient at mobilizing dispersed networks with obsessive attention to detail to find, expose, and destroy people. They are also incredibly wrong sometimes leading to things like swatting the wrong house, but nonetheless when they want to destroy you, they do their best.

They also have a fair number of hackers who are happy to try and get things like credit card numbers and amazon accounts to continue the mayhem.

Whenever there is a murder that is connected back to the alt-right, you can safely assume that 8ch played a part in it. Whether through direct propaganda and radicalization or through indirect Overton style methods. They are a major contributor to white terrorism. So they have these lists already, they’re already killing people, and they’re already engaging in electronic warfare. Their attempted coup has already begun.

What I Did and Why

I’ve been on and off 8ch for multiple years. Mostly I would just check it when I knew a big wave of doxxes was coming (such as during a major confrontation between antifa and fascists) to try and warn people but also I used it to study the culture of modern nazidom.

The nerdy antifascists like myself who have been infiltrating and studying nazi communities for many years saw this recent upsurge in more explicit white-supremacy coming and tried to warn people… mostly to no avail. Cruising boards like 8ch /pol/ gave us this glimpse into a culture so gross that we struggled to even find the words to describe it. Most people that we tried to talk about it really couldn’t handle the reality of what was going on and remain in denial about the threat. Now people know that the resurgence of white-supremacist movements is real, but they still don’t understand the scope and depth of it. That’s why I started this project. It’s a tightrope to discuss extreme fascist movements. You don’t wanna platform or normalize them, but nor do you want to contribute to their safety by letting them hide in obscurity. You want to and must destroy them from all angles at once.  

In order to expose them and analyze these trends, I wrote some code that would allow me to scrape the pol forum and look at the ways they use language. With my tool I made a database of over 60,000 words that I pulled every few days for about a couple months. The board /pol/ alone has around 4 million posts per year.

In my analysis I excluded a bunch of very common and uninteresting words such as “the” and “when” so that I could focus on more telling uses of language. I did not, however, cull the data so much as to make it seem worse than it is. I kept most all adjectives and even most pronouns to give a better sense of how often they’re using various words relative to other words. I then made frequency counts to determine which words are most popular. 

Nazis are Racist??!!

Groundbreaking, I know, but hear me out. The way they use language tells us a lot about what they’re up to and how they think. For instance, we know that they are deeply obsessed with the mythical but structurally privileged category of “whiteness.” They use the word “white” more than they employ most common-use pronouns. If I combined it with the other 20 usages of the word “whites” they use it more than the pronoun “he” which aside from the deleted term “I” is their most popularly used pronoun. This doesn’t even count the other related usages of phrases such as “pro-white” or “anti-white.”

Masculinity

The fact that they use the words related to masculinity so often such as “he,” “his,” “him,” and “men” is also interesting. The pronouns “she” and “her” didn’t even make the cut of this graph. Whenever I would interact with the forum they would always (wrongly) assume I was a man whether because I spoke confidently or just because I was in their den to begin with. They advocate the extreme patriarchal traditionalism of Jordan Peterson after a month-long meth binge.

This is a movement so deeply misogynistic and patriarchal it makes the Handmaid’s Tale look liberal. This hatred of women is of course going to create mass-shooters. The vast majority of /pol/ users are men. The Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) and incel communities — and the killers they spawn — have a big mutual crossover with /pol/ and the alt-right for these reasons. That’s why you can also see the term mgtow (Men Going Their Own Way) — which is a moniker for a movement rooted in rape and outright hatred of women — showing up with some frequency as well. Fascist traditionalism is pretty rapey and infected by toxic masculinity it turns out. Shocking, I know.

Anti-Semitism

Another interesting thread of this data is the anti-semitism and German LARPing. It’s no secret that 8ch worships hitler and sees themselves as continuing his project. But within this list of commonly used words we see the German word, “der” which means “the” or “of the.” When we dig into it’s usage we find that it’s most commonly used by German speakers on this English board or LARPing non-Germans using the phrase “der Jude” to signify that something is from or controlled by Jews. This crossover is very telling. It shows that the active nazi-underground in Germany and its diaspora is still inspiring followers abroad and that these westerner’s are provable wannabe mini-Hitlers. The word “hitler” itself is used 68 times.

It is no surprise then that we see the phrase “jews” also ranking so highly. If I had chosen to combine the words “jews” (used 81 times), “jew” (43 times), and “jewish” (55 times) they would have ranked as the fourth most popular word just beneath “his” and above “my.” To establish some form of baseline I gathered 6,000 random English tweets and analyzed how often they used the word “jew” in any part of a word or phrase.

As compared to this baseline data we have a ratio of 8ch at 0.004936 to twitter at 0.00138 which is about a 3.6 times higher usage rate. Anti-Semitism and it’s related pantheon of outlandish conspiracy theories very clearly remains one of the critical backbones of modern white-supremacist terrorism including the red-brown crossover of the anti-semitic left. Combining the words “kike” (44 times) and “kikes” (41 times) would put it just above the word “jews” on this graph and well within the threshold of most common words.

They are also consistently frothing at the mouth, flat-earther level Holocaust deniers and consistently refer to it with terms like the “holohoax.” This is not to imply that 8ch isn’t also anti-black, anti-brown, anti-queer, etc. But it is important to note that anti-Semitism is just beneath whiteness itself as their peak focal point.

Other Slurs

Although most slurs did not make this top list of words, they are just beneath the surface. The n-word (when combined with its plural) was used 59 times. This runs parallel to the word “black” and “blacks” which come in at 66 times. Following /pol/ for years it is a deeply anti-black space. It proliferates in the images and comments.

They believe every stereotype about black people and question any positive narrative about even individual black people. In one thread I watched someone say they saw an African-American male help someone who had been hit on their bike and the rest of /pol/ just dogpiled on the commenter saying they were lying. They make constant references to lynching and hanging and openly encourage a return to slavery. They literally believe that black people are a subspecies and will happily tell you about it. Despite this, you will on rare occasion see comments from people who are supposedly black, supporting the fascist traditionalism of /pol/ and even, at times, it’s notions of racial superiority. There is also a non-negligible Latin American and Asian user-base on 8ch as a whole and /pol/ specifically. This coincides strangely with their ever present fetishization of asians with constant hentai and waifu references. While regularly talking about hating asians and making fun of white-supremacists like Richard Spencer for dating Asian women, they simultaneously swim in their closeted fetishes and the recognition that much of their deeply-dodgy race “science” actually suggests that Asians are the most intelligent race.

The word “faggot” comes in various forms at 41 times including the phrase “normalfags” which refers to anyone not sharing in their extreme views. They are widely of the belief that all trans people and queers are mentally deranged and deserve to be killed immediately.

Despite this you still see aspects of queer communities flocking towards authoritarian-nationalist ideals and occasionally showing out in these and other alt-right threads. Much has been speculated about why a minority of particularly white gay men and trans-women have at times participated in these movements that would surely murder them at the first chance they got. Regardless of why, these purge squads are poised to and already beginning to inspire a resurgence of gay-bashing, calling for the importance of projects like “Bash Back” and the “Pink Pistols.”

Amongst other slurs are a wide and creative range of ableist, anti-brown, and Islamophobic screeds. Almost every time a slur is used it is preceded by the prominent term “fucking” to drive home the degree of hatred.  

Pedophilia

There is also a consistent long-term battle between the elements of the 8ch movement that support pedophilia and the elements that oppose it. Long, spirited debates go down in the 8ch /pol/ threads about age of consent like it’s a group of anarcho-capitalists (ancaps) at a Libertarian Party convention.

This is no coincidence. Many of the people on /pol/ do identify as Libertarians and ancaps and are seeking to create in-roads in the Libertarian Party’s big-tent policy of desperately platforming every edgy weirdo with an opinion. Many of the people on 8ch see age of consent laws as being the result of feminism and queerness obstructing their alpha-lobster masculinity or some such other nonsense. This isn’t to say that everyone there agrees. Many are vehemently against pedophilia and, ironically, also see it as the result of things like feminism and queerness. There are “loli” boards on 8ch devoted to cartoon pedo porn. Google unlisted 8ch for its supposed role in sharing actual child porn and the founder defended their hosting of child porn as an inevitable result of free speech.

Politics and War

All instances of the word “Trump” come in at around 140 times. There is of course a clear connection here between Trumpism and the more extreme manifestations of the white-terrorism movement burgeoning on 8ch and elsewhere. On 8ch they were excited about Trump even though, unlike much of the more mainstream alt-right movement, they feel he is not nearly extreme enough. They constantly make fun of the white supremacists who think that he will represent them. They don’t worship him like so much of the alt-right does. They just see him, for what he is: a useful pawn in their movement.

This can be seen in incidents such as when Trump retweeted an anti-Semitic meme of Hillary with a Star of David and money behind her that was created on 8ch. Even this pales in comparison to the deranged “we are Q” conspiracy rabbit hole that is now catching fire in mainstream media that comes directly from the bizarre imagination of 8ch. It’s an elaborate conspiracy about government insiders trying to destroy Trump’s credibility and you can now glimpse it on shirts and signs at all of Trump’s events.

When we see the word “war” coming in at 67 times it reflects their craving for violence and what they often refer to as “urban unrest scenarios.” They lust for widespread violence. They generally side with the sort of patriot and three-percenter movement rhetoric about the coming civil war, FEMA camps, and Jewish/Muslim cultural-marxist takeover even though they can no longer pretend that Obama is doing it (although it doesn’t stop them from trying). They believe that if they keep pushing the Overton window of what they can get away with, eventually a state of emergency and civil war will break out, at which point all of their little splinter cells can start to activate and stage a total takeover or at least secure a large territory.

Of course they don’t actually have anywhere near the organization nor movement unity to accomplish such a thing, but the effects of them trying can be nonetheless terrifying. One of the ways they encourage these scenarios is by claiming all white-supremacist murderers as “one of us.” This is a way of saying, we back what he did and encourage others to do it. They want these one-off shooters to continue to escalate things and encourage the exposure of their views. Every time one of the murderers gets linked to the alt-right or a chan network they cheer it on.

Of course what they didn’t anticipate was that the primarily leftist communities that oppose them would be so wildly effective in pushing them back into the corners at every turn. So while they broadened the Overton window for white-supremacist violence, they also inadvertently made antifascist defense much more normalized. Plus, leftists and anarchists have much deeper experience with actually organizing movements, even if we do not have the monopoly of violence and cruelty.

Their fetishization of civilizational collapse and urban unrest scenarios is very reminiscent of a group that they speak highly of called “The Atomwaffen Division (AWD)” who are a network of autonomous National-Socialist terror cells that spread from the U.S. to Canada. The AWD is an accelerationist movement that believes they can bring about their vision through random acts of terrorism and murder and seeks to target major civilizational infrastructure as well as carry out  individual killings of minorities. They run weapons trainings and recently celebrated one of their members for killing a gay college student. Like some of the old off-forum threads formerly run by 8ch members, most of their organizing was happening on Discord servers until they got leaked and exposed. Some of the deepest goals they posses are hidden from online forums as epitomized by what one organizer said: “Don’t talk about the group’s terrorist ambitions in online chats or on social media.” Despite this though, not only do some members of 8ch speak approvingly about the AWD, members of the organization also recruit and encourage 8ch members to form their own cells.

Empathy and Ideology

One particularly strange thread underlines some of their “theoretical underpinning” if you can call it that. A user (probably from /leftypol/) started a thread saying that the left perceives the 8ch pol people as being basically psychopathic and asked if they were capable of empathy. While most made some version of the argument, “I’m not sociopathic or psychopathic, I just only like white people and my close tribe.” some were more blunt and self-aware admitting to their own violent tendencies and inability to empathize.

One user wrote:

I consider myself a psychopath and believe myself to be in the top 5% of psychopathy among non-Jewish whites. Among Jews I consider myself in the top 60% for psychopathy, and many that I’ve met I would consider to be significantly more psychopathic than myself. The ones I met in prison are capable of a level of deceit and malice that I don’t believe even really exists among my race….I actually relate to Jews in a way. I have some vague empathy for my own race, because I see ourselves having a shared destiny, and we are only strong if we are strong as a group, but I have to hold myself back from swindling them as I do see many members of my race as dumb and gullible. I think most whites have too much empathy. It may be beneficial when in closed homogenous groups, but it does not benefit you when your communities have out-group free-riders like Jews that are higher in psychopathy and prey on people that have empathy. Jews know that they can manipulate them by appealing to higher ideals, and stuff of that nature, and they seem to be able to use those ideals to manipulate the majority of whites at will.

This gives you a sense of the level of discourse and sheer off-the-rails conspiracy theory meets hyper racist predilections towards violence that are commonplace on 8ch. The fact that others would consistently reframe the original post by saying that they do feel empathy but only for their tribe, gets into the ideology behind what they’re saying. They’re on a fundamentalist branch of collectivism and see the world as zero-sum. They think that war, if not already occurring, is inevitable and that it’s essential to build a tribe that will survive. But rather than following their misunderstanding of Darwinian natural selection to its conclusion and picking a team based on merit, they just hang their hat on the vague and shaky notion of whiteness. They are incapable of realizing the lessons of so many game-theorists and evolutionary scientists in the last few decades (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) that deeply reinforce the possibility and necessity of realizing a non-zero sum world.

They are seemingly incapable of the rudimentary skill of meaningful cooperation. What’s almost more sad and frightening, is that they don’t have the capacity for empathy beyond a tribe. They see anyone not in their immediate circle as a threat. To them, the whole world is a warzone where all they can do is kill first. It’s not just a critical lack of imagination, it’s also the paranoid ramblings of someone who would stab anyone in the back if they saw it as even nominally shifting their position in the endless rat-race for power.

To them, love is a tool for power. To us, it’s a tool for freedom.

Dangerously Mediocre

In addition to all kinds of scariness, it’s important also to mention exactly how mediocre 8ch is. It’s the human equivalent of the magazines in your dentist’s but– if it’s even possible– more tryhard. That they consider themselves to be an intellectual vanguard is on par with a grown adult self-identifying as Rick from Rick and Morty. It’s laughably pathetic and sad.

That they see themselves as the rightful heirs to evolutionary dominance just means that their denial is as dense as their ability to recognize patterns. They whine and moan about how repressed their speech is but when given the freedom they pine for, they produce such slobbering drivel. The aggregated impact of manchild mediocrity can still be very dangerous though. According to one poster there’s less than 3,000 active users on /pol/ (that of  course ignores the iceberg of lurkers). That’s a lot of mass-murdering psychopaths, but for the internet being a place where you could easily find >100k people willing to actively engage in shipping count chocula and captain crunch, 3k ain’t nothing. It’s a good sign that /pol/ isn’t an order of magnitude larger and more coherent.

Semiotics and Images

Like all of meme culture, 8ch is built on a constant tribal in-group signalling. This usually takes the form of deeply layered memes and phrases that show that one is virtuous relative to the echo chamber that they’ve built for themselves. /Pol/ sees themselves as heirs to a deeply intellectually rigorous tradition. It’s important to understand that they see themselves this way, regardless of how far it veers from reality, because it explains much of the culture and how it interacts with people outside of itself. Rather than discussing the endless gigabytes of racist cartoons they bathe in, I’m going to focus on one example.

A particularly interesting example of this type of culture, which extends beyond 8ch and into the broader alt-right movement, is the kekistani flag. Without wasting words explaining the bizarre, semi-ironic religion of kek according to the alt-right, one of its symbols is a flag modeled after the iron-cross flag of the nazi war machine. It features a red background with a sideways cross, a swastika, and the iron cross. The /pol/ version is almost identical except for the green background, and the iron-cross is replaced by the 4ch symbol (a reference to the history of /pol/) with the swastika replaced by intersections of the word kek.

The flag has moved increasingly from a niche online thing, to a widely printed flag that shows up at practically every alt-right and Proud Boy gathering. They insist it’s just designed to trigger liberals when confronted in public. They use distorted dog whistles like “free speech,” “triggered,” and “SJWs” and minimize with statements like, “it’s only a symbol” or “it’s just a joke.” That’s their brilliant plan in a nutshell.

The practice of: “1) do a nazi thing but change it up a little, 2) make fun of anyone who challenges you for being sensitive, 3) repeat” is the super rationalist brainy plot it took them years and millions of words to invent. Almost no one is fooled, except for a noisy cadre of liberals who praise tolerance above practical safety concerns for minorities. The people who fall for this trick are extremely dangerous though, as they often platform and protect these people who utilize the opportunity to literally mobilize killers. When they make these performances, they’re saying, “Let’s kill more people this time. Come join me.” And some people will heed the call. The more people who hear them, the more people come.

Because the United States still has some “kill nazis” spirit stirring in it’s bones, these fascists still have to slightly obscure when confronted. Even groups like the National Socialist Movement took the swastika off of their flags so that they could play this same game. Places like 8ch are the safe-spaces where they can just plot genocide in peace and not have to pretend like they’re trolling or resort to a wide range of logical fallacies and manipulative argumentation strategies such as the motte-and-bailey. When their fairy-tale land of machismo crawls out of the internet sewers and reaches the light of day, they are forced to deal with how absurdly out of touch with reality and basic human empathy they have become. Even if they’re dangerous, they look like a goddamn joke. And a pretty funny joke at that.

Killing 8ch

Every friendship formed and joke shared on 8ch is a credible threat to violence. Fighting 8ch is equivalent to fighting an inbound genocide. They have shown both a willingness and ability to commit fundamentalist violence both in a sustained way that aims at overthrowing the current world-order but also through large-scale insurrectionary attacks and terrorist mass-shootings. Risks taken as part of the effort to cull the world of this spawn are equivalent to lives saved in the near and long-term. We need to burn it to the ground and salt the earth beneath it. We should also kill or render unusable any sproutlings they try to hide behind such as gab.ai or the various infinity-chan iterations. Most people should not go to 8ch. Don’t give them the traffic. But if you do, have the fight in mind.

Advertisers

Sites like 8ch make their money to pay their server and other fees largely through advertising money so naturally this is a first step in resistance. Simply reach out to their advertisers with some alarming screenshots of their products next to nazidom and let them know how bad for their business this is to be potentially publicly associated with terrorism. [EDIT: NordVPN has since said that they did not pay for the ad and have supposedly asked 8chan to take it down.] For example, one would imagine that NordVPN would love to pull their ads when they’re contacted about running there and look like this literally beneath a swastika.

Most of the rest of their advertisers seem to be for things like Japanese sex toys but it’s worth trying regardless. Their advertising is controlled through softserve.

Technical Support

Although no one should ever do illegal things unless they are certain they are ethical, 8ch can be hacked. They’ve been successfully attacked before and are regularly still attacked. The entire structure of the site is notoriously buggy and we know they’ve had a wide range of problems with their databases. Furthermore, their server configurations are historically very, very sloppy.

The server for 8ch is owned by Jim Watkins and run by his son Ron Watkins and the company, N.T. Technology (domains@nttec.com, 1-425-259-3201) and their internet services division is, according to them, at 200 Paul Ave, San Francisco, CA 94124. According to ARIN data they host their U.S. based servers at 9120 Double Diamond Parkway, Suite 5901, Reno NV, 89521. Whether this information is still accurate could be determined by going in person to the building and investigating or calling them.

Jim Watkins is pretty much the heart of 8ch. He’s their largest bankroller and most consistent supporter. He himself though actually lives on a pig farm just outside of Manila in the Philippines.

Their site is protected by cloudflare who will likely not respond but it’s worth telling them that they’re protecting child porn and terrorist groups. Cloudflare is based in San Francisco. You can also send specific reports to ICANN which probably won’t work either but we do know that it at least annoys Jim.

There are a lot of possibilities to spam the site and its emails (admin@8ch.net; dmca@8ch.net; ads@8ch.net; claim@8ch.net; apply@8ch.net) and it’s additionally quite easy to make a realistic sounding fake @8ch email address. Additionally, the threads themselves can be spammed. They will of course block the ip addresses of people who do so, but there are pretty easy workarounds.

Additionally, they are stuck in their own purity spirals of infighting that make the Left look like an advertisement for cooperative team-building across difference. They pretty much hate everyone who isn’t them. They will turn on just about anyone including each other. They even turn on some of their biggest supporters such as the nazi-hacker “weev” who helps run the daily stormer which has repeatedly been booted off the internet as the result of long-term campaigns. This infighting coupled with paranoia about feds and secret jews means that they are pretty wide open to disinformation campaigns geared towards creating mistrust especially amongst their higher ranking figures.

Additionally they seem worried about infiltration. This is especially true for their various off-8ch networks. They would also prefer that Global Volunteers not leak post history. What’s more, we know that they have ip logs. Many of which will be tor nodes and vpns, but the rest are largely nazi gps coordinates. Things like this certainly would require some dedicated social engineering except for that, Jim has left many of the logs in extremely leaky formats.

It’s also possible to track bitcoin and other crypto currency flows of 8ch and other white supremacist sites. There are many other identifying features that can be weeded out from careful study of various users who at times post pictures and make other such comments revealing location and possible workplaces or names. There’s a lot more to be said about the structure and vulnerabilities of the site but that stuff is better left private and the curious with shodan and nmap handy can find out for themselves.

Killing the Hydra

Sites like 8ch represent paradoxes. They’re both dangerous and completely nominal. They seem impenetrable, and yet also can come crashing down with sustained pressure.

In holding this complexity we must realize that we are fighting a hydra but just because chopping off one head doesn’t immediately kill the beast, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still do it while also constantly searching for the roots of the problem. The problem of white-supremacy is far deeper than any one forum but this gives us clues into how to fight it. We can kill 8ch, but we can also beat back fascism. Not only can we, we must.