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Today’s guest is Lyn Ulbricht. For those unfamiliar with the Silk Road case, Lyn is Ross Ulbricht’s mother and she became a crusader for due process after his 2013 arrest for developing the dark net trading site. In this episode, we consider issues of due process, the precedents set by the Silk Road case, and the right to privacy. An important conversation for anyone living in the Internet age!

Next month, we’ll cover the issue of immigration rights and reform. With so much talk of immigration issues in the current political cycle, it’s important to think about how we can help and support our neighbors who have moved from somewhere else. From ICE blockades to providing safe houses and advocating for sanctuary cities, there is a lot to be done. But we also have to win the ideological battle here, and next week, we’ll get deep into the weeds on the right to free movement and anarchist positions on immigration. 

In the meantime, head over to the C4SS Patreon and consider supporting this project. From there, you can support this podcast and other C4SS projects by making a monthly pledge of $5 or more. We’ll be updating our Patreon tiers next month as well, and offering more cool prizes and opportunities for our supporters. We appreciate all you do and look forward to continuing the growth the podcast has seen so far. 

We anarchists are usually very good at being edgy, and edginess is one of the personality traits that probably attracted many of us to anarchism. Anarchists, like any fringe movement, need to counter-signal against the political mainstream in order to remain relevant. These two things are not necessarily bad; an edgy predisposition enables you more easily see through the lies most people believe, and counter-signaling is necessary to distinguish a marginal movement from the mainstream, to signal to one’s fellow anarchists where one stands, and to reinforce radical critiques of the status quo.

However, sometimes in our efforts to counter-signal against centrists, we let our edginess get the better of us and start embracing ideas that are hostile to the very core of the most appealing and fundamental aspects of anarchism. A recent example of this is Black Cat’s “Pacifism and the Pacifistic: a Tale of the Politically Dead.” The author argues that while most anarchists are not explicit pacifists, too many are possessed by a pathology of pacifism that makes us too hesitant to engage in violent forms of resistance. Black Cat tells a story of an anti-police brutality protest in which most of the crowd refused to force their way into a building past cops. They argue this example of reluctance is a sign of this pacifistic pathology that inhibits the effectiveness of anarchist movements. Too many anarchists, they claim, have not gotten rid of the “cop in your head” that tells us that we must follow the edicts of authority. Finally, they conclude with a strong argument that pacifism does not acknowledge that “all politics is violence.”

There are three problems with Black Cat’s article. First, they seem to implicitly rely on the false claim that individuals are usually obligated to violently resist authority. Second, their analysis in their example confuses a collective action problem all movements—both violent and non-violent—face with a pacifistic impulse as such. Finally, and of most concern, they think that in rejecting pacifism, it is necessary to embrace a radically illiberal Schmittean view that politics as violence is desirable.

The first problem is that Black Cat seems to jump from the correct and obvious point nearly all anarchists accept — that we are permitted to violently resist political authorities — to the much stronger and more often incorrect claim that any individual is obligated to violently resist authority. I might be misreading them here, but those two points do not follow from each other. The former point is a simple upshot of accepting philosophical anarchism and rejecting pacifism. Philosophical anarchism is the claim that there is no legitimate political authority nor obligation on the part of citizens to follow the law as such. If you accept philosophical anarchism, then you think there is a moral parity between government agents and non-state agents. Nothing about government agents is morally special that we should treat them any differently from non-state agents. If you reject pacifism, you believe that there are times when one may justifiably use violence to defend oneself or others. For example, if you justifiably believe someone is imminently attempting to murder you or someone you know, you may kill them in defense. These two views together entail that one may violently resist state agents out of self-defense or defense for others. The fact that they are state agents changes nothing about the right to self-defense.

Nothing about that argument, however, implies that anyone has a duty to do violence under most (or even any) circumstances. To be clear, I think there are very limited circumstances where such a duty does exist. Suppose I walk down the street and I see a cop about to shoot a defenseless kid, and I justifiably believe the only way I can stop the murder is to kill the cop. In this case, I am likely obligated to do so for reasons similar (though not identical) to why I’m obligated to save a child drowning in a pool. However, when the context is a violent expressive political protest, it is odd to say anyone has any similar obligation. In the case of a cop holding the gun to a defenseless kid, 1) the danger to the kid imminent and 2) my individual action will determine the outcome. If I do not act, I am nearly certain a person will be murdered almost immediately as a direct result of my inaction. In the case of expressive violence at a protest, the danger is very real but is not imminent in the same way, nor can any individual action stop it.

To be clear, I do think protestors are permitted to violently break down the doors and resist the cops. The state clearly does not have just ownership over the property on which they are protesting and the moral obligation to obey the cops does not exist. They are especially permitted if it can be reasonably determined that such forms of resistance are the best way of reducing some injustice the state is committing, such as police brutality against communities of color.  However, no individual is morally obligated to do so. There are many prudential reasons why an individual would not want to participate in such a protest. They would risk the full violence of the state, both in potentially being arrested and jailed and in the risk bodily injury by cops who are typically much better armed and can call for backup to overwhelm the crowd relatively quickly. Being arrested might result in them losing their jobs and not being able to feed their families—even if wearing a black mask helps mitigate that risk. Just for the purposes of a single expressive protest, nobody should be obligated to incur such huge risks.

It might be consequentially better if protestors did incur those costs more often. I doubt this because political action, both nominally violent and non-violent, often carries hidden downstream costs that are hard to detect. Regardless, it is clearly outside the scope of this argument to empirically determine when and where it is prudent to engage in violence. Whatever one’s views on such issues, it does not follow that there is an obligation to do so.

One might object by saying that we do have an obligation to resist injustice. That may be true, but such an argument does not entail a duty to participate in violent resistance. This argument fails for similar reasons that arguments that there is a duty to vote fail (beyond the fact that voting is ineffective). Even if we do have a general obligation to resist injustice, we can discharge that duty through any number of means that are not explicitly violent. One might engage in mutual aid, work at a food kitchen to feed the homeless, participate in agorism to make the state irrelevant, protest peacefully, or even write articles criticizing and spreading awareness of injustice. The reasons for not participating in violence are often very prudential and valid: one might justifiably think they are not physically fit enough to violently resist, participating in violence might undermine one of their other ways of combating injustice (eg., losing a job at a charity), or the costs of engaging in violence might just be too high. We must be pluralists about our praxis and to pretend the only way to resist injustice is to beat up a cop is simple-minded.

On the other hand, perhaps Black Cat is not saying a duty to participate in violent protest exists. Perhaps I am weak manning them and they simply think it would be preferable for people to be more cavalier about violence more often. Perhaps so, but then it seems clear that such excerpts as “We need to not just reject pacifism with our words, we need to also reject it with our actions. We have given up pacifism, and now we must give up being pacifistic” are worded far too strongly.

The second problem is that Black Cat’s analysis of their example seems off-base. The protestors’ hesitance seems more a result of the collective action problem all political movements face regardless of how violent they are. It is not necessarily an example of an implicit fear of “the cop in your head” or having some unconscious pacifistic impulse. To be clear, I was not at the protest in question and perhaps there were other things said that Black Cat can use to strengthen their argument. However, from what was written it seems just as likely that the protestors’ hesitance flowed from the fact that violently resisting was just too individually costly. The only way it would have succeeded is if everybody, or at least a majority, would have violently resisted the cops as a group, but if each individual did so without the others also violently resisting they would have lost. Black Cat themselves made this point rather explicitly. Further, even if everyone there thought they were permitted to engage in violent resistance, there might have been reasonable disagreement as to how prudent it would have been under those circumstances. It seems just as likely that this particular protest is just another example of a classic prisoner’s dilemma stemming from the incentives of the situation as it was that people implicitly thought violent resistance was somehow wrong.

Whatever was going on in that particular example, these type of collective action problems are a separate problem from the problem of people being too pacifistic. Both pacifists and non-pacifists can agree they have no duty to follow the law, they just disagree about whether they may actively use violence while violating the law. Non-violent political actors are also subject to severe risks when they passively refuse to follow the law. A pacifist who conscientiously refuses to pay taxes or who refuses to participate in obligatory military service might be imprisoned. A peaceful protest movement or sit-in that refuses to disperse when the cops demand it might face brutality from the cops and the threat of arrest. Think about Thoreau’s imprisonment, the famous picture of the man from the Tiananmen Square protest, the countless pacifists arrested for “draft dodging,” or any number of examples of non-violent protests from the American civil rights movement. The pacifist only rejects that they are permitted to actively participate in violence when they defy the law, they usually do not believe they must follow the law as such due to the “cop in their head.” There are better and worse ways of solving this collective action problem, and because non-pacifist movements have more options on the table they might fare better at solving it in certain circumstances. However, it is an independent problem from whether one thinks violent resistance is permissible or not.

The final and most important problem with the piece is Black Cat’s contention that “All politics, including anarchist politics, is organized violence.” This is where it becomes clear that the contrarian counter-signaling has undermined a consistent commitment to anarchism. Black Cat argues all politics is violence because the only way to hold a society together is to either convince everyone of shared principles or materially incentivize them to comply with a given societal structure. Any degree of material incentive must involve the threat of some sort of implicit threat of violence, whether it be threats of violence to follow the law or the threat of violent self-defense.

However, this is not true. One of the key insights from liberalism worth preserving is that even if people might reasonably disagree on a set of comprehensive principles of justice, they might be able to generate enough of an overlapping consensus on a narrower set of secondary, freestanding principles from their very different philosophical backgrounds and traditions so that social cooperation is possible without the need to constantly rely on violence for social interaction.  As Jason Lee Byas puts it, there is a “natural harmony of real interests” between individuals in any just society. Even where rational argumentation for one’s principles fails, sentimental education to make people take the livelihoods of others seriously even where there is deep and persistent disagreement is a powerful tool to encourage social cooperation without needing to resort to threats of violence.

Black Cat might respond by saying that such tools as rational argumentation, a reasonable overlapping consensus, and sentimental education are not enough. They might think that I am being too idealistic and there still need to be threats of violence to encourage social cooperation. They probably are right that some degree of violence and threats thereof are necessary to maintain social cooperation. Even market anarchism still has security agents to violently defend its clients, after all, it just does not have a monopoly on such violence. I disagree with the pacifist claim that violence can be eliminated. However, it is worth noting we have more options on the table than resorting to political violence the minute rational argumentation fails. What makes such a society so appealing is precisely that it is less violent, it replaces the sheer threat of force from a monopolistic state with more consensual forms of governance. Violence should be a last resort, even where necessary. We should strive for institutions that reduce its necessity as much as possible.

Even if it is true that “all politics is violence,” so much the worse for politics. The whole purpose of anarchism–and the aspiration of liberalism that it rarely if ever lives up to–is to abolish politics as violence, or at least restrict the control it has over our lives. Even if violence is necessary, we should strive to reduce it as much as possible and get more and more spheres of social cooperation where the threat of violence is not the controlling force. To embrace and glorify violence simply to rationalize certain forms of resistance is how social anarchists slip into becoming tankies, and anarcho-capitalists slip into becoming fascists. We must not glorify violence, both for the sake of allowing a less violent society to emerge and for our own sakes, for the pathology of glorifying violence is the exact pathology upon which authoritarians are parasitic. This is not to say we become pacifists or lie to ourselves by pretending we never will or do engage in violence, this is what is so frustrating about statist liberal euphemisms on violence. We can and should cultivate the virtue of peace without falling for the vice of authoritarian violence nor the vice of naïve pacifism.

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is quickly becoming a hot topic this presidential cycle due to the likes of Andrew Yang and his supporters. Since he began his campaign, many other candidates have been interrogated about their support for the idea and more and more are responding positively, even if half-heartedly. Sadly some, such as Bernie Sanders, have remained skeptical of such a program and have instead called for measures such as a higher minimum wage and a federal jobs guarantee. Such solutions are rooted in backwards economic thinking and only serve to tie us further to the current state-capitalist system. A UBI, however, would offer us much more freedom from economic oppression and state bureaucracy while possibly paving the way for us to build an economic situation that is far better than what we have now.

First off, let’s start out by deconstructing the common alternative solutions before diving into the criticisms of UBI. The traditional solution to poverty wages comes in the form of minimum wage laws. In the past, I’ve written about why the Fight for $15 movement is misguided and how minimum wage laws merely serve as a distraction while effectively only offering a temporary bandaid to our problems at best. Such sweeping laws only serve to benefit some workers at the expense of others who are priced out of the market for various reasons.

Of course, a federal jobs guarantee would solve that issue, right? A higher minimum wage would have a net positive effect if no one could be priced out of the market due to the government guarantee of a job. And sure, there are absolutely lots of jobs that need to be done. Creating green energy jobs, infrastructure jobs, and the like would open up a lot more opportunities for work, but enough to guarantee a job for every single person? Between the prevalence of “bullshit jobs” in existence currently and increasing automation, it seems highly unlikely that there would be enough productive work to provide a truly universal job guarantee. As such the only ways to do so would either be to produce to such excess that we create a surplus of waste or to run production so inefficiently as to require extra labor and with it a larger carbon footprint, both of which are counterproductive to their proponents’ claimed environmental goals. Besides, no one feels truly satisfied when they know their work is pointless.

So why is UBI a better alternative? Well because it helps everyone regardless of job status and doesn’t pretend that ones’ worth should be based on ones’ production, while also compensating currently unpaid labor such as housework, childcare, and community volunteer work. But, of course, there are many detractors who have a number of criticisms to lob at the proposal. Some are worth taking more seriously than others, but I will do my best to tackle criticisms made by those with a variety of different viewpoints.

The most common criticisms surround the UBI’s relationship to our current welfare system. Conservatives fear that it will be a massive expansion of the welfare state and will stack upon current benefits without cutting down on costs at all, while liberals tend to fear the exact opposite, that a UBI would be seen as an excuse to cut current welfare benefits while not being an adequate enough replacement. Both fears make sense. We neither want a system so costly that it collapses, nor do we want people to lose out on aid they currently need and are receiving. However, none of the proposed plans feed into these fears. Most proposals either fund the UBI via a new established tax (i.e. Fair Tax, VAT tax, negative income tax, etc.), obtain funding by cutting the budget in other areas where it is much less needed (i.e. military spending, current welfare bureaucracy, etc.), or more commonly a mix of the two. Most proposals would not stack on current welfare benefits but are proposed as an alternative.

As an alternative to our current welfare system, a UBI would be far less bureaucratic and costly to administer. Currently, there are over 70+ means-tested welfare programs in existence. These include everything from renter’s assistance to food stamps to medical coverage. Currently, however, these programs come with a whole host of qualifications which require one to stay within certain criteria in order to maintain benefits. The problem with this model is that it limits opportunities for growth. One must manage their economic life in such a way that they either truthfully meet the criteria by way of turning down opportunities for advancement, or one must arrange their work to be off the records entirely which also limits one’s job opportunities even if less so. To top that off, the benefits received come with a multitude of restrictions. Someone getting $200 in food stamps per month doesn’t have the option to use said money to invest in a business opportunity which would supply them with way more grocery money than food stamps alone while also offering a chance at more long term stability. Hell, someone on food stamps can’t even buy hot food legally which doesn’t make much sense for those who are homeless and receiving such benefits.

So collapsing these various means-tested welfare programs into one program which everyone qualifies for regardless of income level or other such qualifiers would not only allow people more economic mobility, it would also allow them much more freedom in how to spend the money they receive. Of course this could be harmful to those currently receiving more benefits than what the UBI would pay out, however there is a solution that has been proposed. Andrew Yang has suggested that instead of fully replacing one system with another, we offer people a choice between the two systems. This way they would not stack on top of each other costing the taxpayers tons of extra money, but rather people would be given a choice between heavily restricted means-tested benefits or cold hard cash with no strings attached. As long as the UBI is set at a livable level, most people would likely choose the cash, allowing the current welfare system to fade into obscurity. Partnering a UBI with other solutions in the fields of healthcare and schooling access can also go a long way towards making sure individuals don’t fall through the cracks.

The other major criticism from the left is based upon the notion that we should be fighting to increase our bargaining power whereas UBI serves more to make us into passive consumers. This idea is still based on increasingly outdated modes of production. While there will always be other work to do, job retraining programs have largely proven to be ineffective at helping a large majority of manual laborers and other skilled and unskilled workers retrain for much more high tech jobs such as coding. With the current rate of automation, the idea of worker-ownership within our current economic model increasingly looks like a handful of capitalists owning fully automated companies while the rest of us are unemployed and starving. Now of course not every industry can be automated in such a way, but the point is that with the threat of automation displacing workers, focusing on bargaining power only helps those workers not currently automated away. For everyone else, they just have to hope that the bargaining power of the employed is used to benefit the working class as a whole (including the unemployed) and not just themselves and their co-workers.

But the entire notion that UBI doesn’t increase bargaining power is completely untrue. The main reason most people hesitate getting involved with labor unions is due to fear of losing their job in retaliation. This fear is automatically less immediate if one has a UBI to fall back on to meet their basic needs. This means that the labor movement would have more freedom than ever. And workers who wish not to work under a boss can pull their UBIs together with others in their communities to form worker cooperatives, collectives, partnerships, and sole proprietorships. Between a newly unleashed labor movement and a newfound capital base, workers are much less tied to the whims of their bosses and are freer to shape the economic situations they desire than they would otherwise be able to under our current system.

Lastly, UBI has been criticized for giving people no incentive to work. While it does lessen the coercive aspects of working since you will still have your basic needs taken care of regardless and you are not put in a “work or die” scenario, that is in no way a bad thing. Such coercion is completely unnecessary. Establishing a UBI would allow us to rid the market of “bullshit jobs” and focus on more meaningful work. People will still work to solve problems in their communities because it actively improves our lives as a communal species. People will do the work necessary for the survival of themselves and those they care about and as a communal species, we realize we can better survive by helping our communities. In fact, with fewer people tied up in “bullshit jobs,” we will have more people with the free time to focus on the work needed to survive and solve other problems which may come up. People will also be inspired to create new technology as proven by the open source movement and others. These things do not happen because we are coerced into them, they happen because we actively enjoy doing these things and/or see the benefit to them getting done. And sure we will see a shift away from mass production of rather pointless goods and accessories and towards everyday necessities, cherished luxuries, and artistic ventures. However, freed from the coercion of “work or starve,” these goods and services that we find most valuable will influence the dynamics of supply and demand and the market will naturally shift accordingly. In other words, a market more free of coercion tends to be better at reading actual market signals and functions better. After all the freer the market, the freer the people.

So all in all, a UBI provides us a means to shrink the welfare state (and possibly the military budget and other bloated areas), gives workers more control and bargaining power, and gets us closer to a truly free market. It is not the end goal but rather a useful transition in the here and now. A solution that no anarchist should have qualms fighting for,

This is not a review of Bullshit Jobs. My verdict on the book is simple: it is good, and you should read it. You should, actually, probably read it before you read this. I’ll be re-explaining some of the concepts in it, but I will not cover them in the same depth as the book itself. Further, I will be —to some extent— offering explanations that run counter to Graeber’s. Instead of a review, this is an explanation of some of its concepts from the economic angle.

Graeber starts out with a definition:

Bullshit jobs are jobs that are primarily or entirely made up of tasks that the person doing that job considers to be pointless, unnecessary, or even pernicious. Jobs that, were they to disappear, would make no difference whatsoever. Above all, these are jobs that the holders themselves feel should not exist.

Graeber provides an anthropological explanation of why bullshit jobs exist, in the form of what he has termed ‘managerial feudalism’. I remain ambivalent on whether or not I think that managerial feudalism really exists in all of the ways that Graeber describes it, and I will be ignoring it as an explanation in this article, in favor of explanations that are more individuated and differentiated, smaller in scale and scope, and focus on economic ways of seeing rather than anthropological ways of seeing.

As I have said, while he provides a single overarching explanation, I aim to provide many small ones. To the extent that my many small explanations do point to a single large one, it is towards the calculation problem. I would not say that all bullshit jobs are explained by the calculation problem — merely that many of the explanations for many of the world’s bullshit jobs are unsurprising if one is already aware of the calculation problem. But, then, the calculation problem is so intrinsic to any real understanding of capitalism or socialism that saying that the calculation problem explains something is almost meaningless.

The core of his data lies within his taxonomy of bullshit jobs, based on all of the testimony that he has collected. In his taxonomy, there are five kinds of bullshit jobs. These are: “flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters.”

He explains: “Flunky jobs are those that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important.”

Goons are “people whose jobs have an aggressive element, but, crucially, who exist only because other people employ them.”

Duct tapers “are employees whose jobs exist only because of a glitch or fault in the organization; who are there to solve a problem that ought not to exist.”

Box tickers are “employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing.”

Taskmasters are a bit different: “Taskmasters fall into two subcategories. Type 1 contains those whose role consists entirely of assigning work to others… Type 2 taskmasters may also have real duties in addition to their role as taskmaster, but if all or most of what they do is create bullshit tasks for others, then their own jobs can be classified as bullshit too.”

Flunkies are the most interesting category because flunkies are evidence of how terrible of an idea it is to have decisionmakers in a company with minimal incentive to make the company do well. Graeber thinks that flunkies exist because those who hire them (middle- and upper-management) enjoy having them around. While I don’t think we should discount this as an explanation, it is only a partial one. In Graeber’s own words: “Flunky jobs are those that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important.” Graeber, in his book, mostly focuses on the “feel” part, rather than the “look” part. Looking important is an asset within the structure of a large corporation, or at least might be. This is especially true at the levels of middle-management; put another way, it is especially true if one is in a position of simultaneously having an overlord and being an overlord, and helps if your overlord has more than a handful of other comparable underlings.  

If you are one of these middle-managers, then having a bunch of underlings means that you can send out dishonest signals that you must be important and powerful, and can manage to also send out dishonest signals that you must be doing many important things and so should be paid more — because you’re obviously very skilled, and might leave for a better offer. These signals work both horizontally and vertically. That is to say: a large staff commands respect amongst one’s peers and can manage to signal to one’s superior’s that one is of value to the company. Because neither your superior nor your peers are able to subject your domain to frequent checks to see what it is that all your underlings are actually doing, they must make use of approximate signifiers such as ‘number of underlings’.

Because your peers and superior would possibly suffer backlash if they called you out and were wrong, they have an incentive to not do so. Because your superior would look bad if it was revealed that you got away with wasting company money to send dishonest signals, they have a disincentive to uncover your waste. Because your peers would be stepping on their superior’s toes, and uncovering your bad behavior might raise the general suspicion of their boss, they have some disincentive to uncover your bad behavior — though, it should be noted, they could potentially take some of the resources freed up by your fall from grace. Your underlings, of course, have a strong disincentive to uncover your waste — while one or two of them might have some potential to get promoted to replace you if things go so far as to result in your firing, there is a strong risk that they or their friends/allies might be fired in the correction of your behavior. The result is that no one has much incentive to actually stop you from having as many flunkies as you can get the corporate budget to say that you should have.

This leads into the key thing about flunkies, the thing that really makes the entire subject a window into the deeper dynamics of capitalism: that their boss isn’t paying their wages. The company is. But the boss gets the benefit.

As Kevin Carson said in his Economic Calculation in the Corporate Commonwealth:

This calculation argument can be applied not only to a state-planned economy, but also to the internal planning of the large corporation… The large corporation necessarily distributes the knowledge relevant to informed entrepreneurial decisions among many departments and sub-departments until the cost of aggregating that knowledge outweighs the benefits of doing so… In treating the internal policies of the capitalist corporation as inherently profit-driven, Mises simultaneously treated the entrepreneur as an indivisible actor whose will and perception permeate the entire organization… The question, though, is whether those making investment decisions—whether senior management allocating capital among divisions of a corporation or outside finance capitalists—even possess the information needed to assess the internal workings of firms and make appropriate decisions… Whether an apparent profit is sustainable… is often a judgment best made by those directly involved in production… One big problem with Mises’s model… is this: it is often the irrational constraints imposed from above that result in red ink at lower levels. But those at the top of the hierarchy refuse to acknowledge the double bind they put their subordinates in. ‘Plausible deniability,’ the downward flow of responsibility and upward flow of credit, and the practice of shooting the messenger for bad news, are what lubricate the wheels of any large organization.

In a way, Graeber’s empirical findings about flunkies echo Carson’s theoretical musings about the calculation problem in corporations, though it took eleven years for this empirical answer to come to the fore. There is more going on here than a simple and complete empirical confirmation of theoretical predictions, though. It is also the case that Carson’s writings suggest that Graeber’s findings are only one manifestation of a more general issue: the calculation problem within large corporations. Indeed, we should expect that the general inefficiencies of a hierarchical mode of production (such as, but not limited to, the capitalism we all know and hate) should have many symptoms beyond that of the flunkie.

Another such symptom (though, it should be emphatically noted, only another of many) is the existence of the taskmaster. This is most obvious when examining Graeber’s “Type 2 taskmasters” who “may also have real duties in addition to their role as taskmaster, but… all or most of what they do is create bullshit tasks for others,” as, really, this is just the other side of the coin of which the flunkie is the other face. There is no bullshit underling without a superior handing out bullshit work. In fact, it almost seems excessive to say that the flunkie and the taskmaster-2 are two different jobs — if you wanted to be charitable to capitalism, you could undercount the bullshit by saying that this is a single bullshit job being done by two people. The taskmaster-2 exists through exploiting the information and incentive problems of large organizations:

Where things really get interesting is when we examine the type 1 taskmasters. Type 1 contains those whose role consists entirely of assigning work to others. This job can be considered bullshit if the taskmaster herself believes that there is no need for her intervention, and that if she were not there, underlings would be perfectly capable of carrying on by themselves.

There is one obvious utility to the taskmaster-1s, though it would not usually be apparent to the taskmaster-1, their underlings, or the company’s customers — indeed, only to the taskmaster-1’s superior. This is the ability to assist in and recommend firings. Though the workers are surely competent to run things by themselves, it would be very hard to tell which ones could or should be fired (or, perhaps, reassigned) without someone on the ground to monitor the workers. In the event of lay-offs or ‘misbehavior’ resulting in mass firings on the part of the taskmaster-1s underlings, those who exploit the labor of a department of workers would lack crucial everyday information about who actually does what — and, thus, would have to choose between firing the entire department and hiring a new one, or not firing the department at all. Both are costly choices for the company. Further, in the event of simple, everyday activities, the superiors of the department would really have very little idea of what goes on in the office — especially in the case of workers that are highly knowledgeable, and whose work is highly abstract and mysterious to the MBA’s who run the company. In light of this, the taskmaster-1 reveals itself to not be a leader of anyone. The taskmaster-1 is a spy, operating to send information on what would naturally be a worker’s co-op back to those who supposedly maintain control over the means of production used by the department’s workers. However, since it is not particularly normal for lay-offs or firings to happen, the taskmaster-1 can comfortably delude themselves into thinking that they do not collect a regular paycheck to betray people they spend 40 hours around every week. And certainly, the taskmaster-1 provides no real value to society or to themselves. They’re a snitch and would have no place in a free society. In a free society, after all, the workers would be the owners of the company — one way or another.

Duct tapers are similar to taskmasters, in this respect at least: both exist because firms are not generally worker cooperatives. Though, it should be noted, while taskmaster-1s exist to impede the formation of a shadow-cooperative within an ostensibly autocratic firm, duct tapers exist because —at least somewhat— autocratic firms do not value workers the way that cooperatives do. To put this another way, your boss will never care about you as much as you do. Though, there is a caveat: duct tapers (unlike taskmasters and flunkies, though —as we shall see— like box tickers and goons) would still exist within socialism. There would be fewer of them, certainly. But they’d still exist. This is because, to some extent, duct tapers really do provide useful work to their company. It just feels like it’s useless because it very much appears that there are better ways to do the job of a duct taper. Graeber notes that: “Duct tapers are employees whose jobs exist only because of a glitch or fault in the organization; who are there to solve a problem that ought not to exist.” I hold that there are really two sorts of duct tapers, and I’ll call these type 1s and type 2s.

Type 1s are those employees whose job it is to clean up after the messes caused by superiors. This feels like bullshit when the superior is uncaring about their mess — when the mess doesn’t have to exist. The most likely cases of this to be reported are those wherein the superior themselves is useless. However, Graeber himself makes no note of this distinction. Graeber’s point is that “…cleaning up after someone who makes a completely gratuitous and unnecessary mess is always irritating. Having a full-time occupation cleaning up after such a person…“ is a bullshit job. However, regardless of whether or not the duct taper appreciates it, some people’s labor is very valuable and some people’s labor simply… isn’t. Doctors are more in demand than janitors, after all. And, sometimes, this difference is so large that it really does make sense to have the doctor be as messy as is convenient for them, and then have the janitor go around after them. If the doctor’s time is a hundred times more expensive than the janitor’s, it would be criminally inefficient to have the doctor waste time to save the janitor some bother. However, somewhat tellingingly, Graeber doesn’t provide examples like this. Both examples of type 1 duct tapers that Graeber mentions are of type 1 duct tapers assigned to cover up that someone is completely unable to do their job. The bullshit resides with the superior in these cases, never with the supposed type 1 duct taper. The type 1 duct-tapers in these examples do indeed have bullshit jobs, but they are merely what Graeber refers to elsewhere as “second-order bullshit” — non-bullshit jobs that are completely in the service of bullshit ones. Remember, Graeber’s definition is that: “duct tapers are employees whose jobs exist only because of a glitch or fault in the organization; who are there to solve a problem that ought not to exist.” Of course, these problems that “ought not to exist” are created externally from the person whose job it is to solve them. The bullshit of his example duct taper-1s is not intrinsic — there is, after all, nothing wrong with substituting inputs of cheap labor for inputs of expensive labor.

Type 2s are those duct tapers who job it is to do something that could be automated away, easily. Things like: “My day consisted of photocopying veterans’ health records for seven and a half hours a day… Workers were told time and again that it was too costly to buy the machines for digitizing.” Or: “if a homeowner, upon discovering a leak in the roof, decided it was too much bother to hire a roofer to re-shingle it, and instead stuck a bucket underneath and hired someone whose full-time job was to periodically dump the water.” The awkward thing about these examples is that factor substitution and time-preferences exist and explain some of these behaviors as being perfectly rational.

Factor substitution is when you substitute one factor of production (for this explanation, we’ll pretend that the two factors of production are merely capital and labor. For those only familiar with the Marxian usage of that word, when I write ‘capital’ you should read ‘means of production’, not ‘money’) for the other, in order to maintain the same level of production. Time-preference is the name for the fact that a dollar today is worth more to you than a dollar tomorrow. Because of this, it is possible to construct a geometric series to compare the value of making a big one-time payment and a series of small payments forever.

Combining the two means that you quite easily see how it really, actually, makes more sense to pay someone (especially someone doing labor that is not especially expensive) to do a job that you theoretically could instead spend a lot on a relatively expensive machine to do instead. A lot of instances of type 2 duct taping really are the most efficient thing that an organization could be doing to accomplish a task, especially if you’re willing to extend the concept of capital to the organizational structure itself. It might, after all, be more expensive to fix the problems within the organization than to pay someone to run around and put out fires. This is not true of all instances where duct tapers are employed, but it is true of many.

Some type 2 duct tapers really are examples of organizational inefficiency. This inefficiency does not come from anything intrinsic to factor substitution, but from who gets to make the choice about when to substitute and how, and under what incentive structure and set of rules that person operates. Organizations, after all, do not exist in any real sense. They are social constructs. It’s people, actual real people acting under messy and weird constraints, that make decisions. They might have been provided with an inefficiently small budget, one insufficient to purchase the more efficient, more expensive, capital. They might have to operate under rules about large expenditures that do not govern hiring. They might be forced to take on a certain number of employees. Anything is possible. And further, there’s no particular reason to be certain that they (or their superiors, or anyone else) have any incentive to try to maximize the firm’s (or the CEO’s) utility, rather than maximize their own — which might be at odds with the firm’s, after all. They might keep on the duct taper-2 as (effectively) a flunkie (to make themselves seem more important, and thus gain advantage within the firm’s internal politics), or they might merely not wish to make the duct taper suffer by firing them — and, after all, it is not as though the boss is responsible for paying the duct taper.

Box-tickers are a little similar to duct-tapers, in that they’re really about substituting one thing for another: though, in this case, box-tickers are about substituting appearances for results, rather than labor for capital. I’m also going to break them down into two subtypes. Both types are about creating appearances rather than results, but type 1s are about creating the appearance of doing something for customers or the public, while type 2s are about creating the appearance of following government regulations. Either way, they’re still “employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing.” The simple truth here is that it’s sometimes cheaper to act like you’re doing something than to actually do that thing and that sometimes you really can get away with it. To anti-statists, the existence of type 2s might seem like a great indictment of the state — ‘look! It’s not even being effective with our stolen tax dollars!’, they’ll say. But, while it is an indictment (and a cause for hope — what can we get away with, then?) it isn’t a great one. After all, a number of these type 2s would just be enforced by public reputation if they weren’t being enforced by the state. However, it should be noted, public opinion can be deceived as well — or else type 2s wouldn’t exist, either. Still, though: in the absence of the state protecting the owning classes, these firms could be directly punished for their bad behavior. Perhaps institutions could be developed to better track these companies, and see if they really are doing what they say that they’re doing.

It should be noted that Graeber is, in some ways, more confident that this is a problem of the political economy of hierarchy than I am! He notes that this is at least partially about satisfying the bureaucratic whims of large organizations: “Of course, on some level, all bureaucracies work on this principle: once you introduce formal measures of success, “reality”—for the organization—becomes that which exists on paper, and the human reality that lies behind it is a secondary consideration at best.” This is partially a manifestation of the need for executives to convince other executives that they are important:

Note here the importance of the physical attractiveness of the report. This is a theme that comes up frequently in testimonies about box-ticking operations and even more so in the corporate sector than in government. If the ongoing importance of a manager is measured by how many people he has working under him, the immediate material manifestation of that manager’s power and prestige is the visual quality of his presentations and reports. The meetings in which such emblems are displayed might be considered the high rituals of the corporate world.

And, partially, he blames this on the egos of executives:

Many large corporations, for instance, maintain their own in-house magazines or even television channels, the ostensible purpose of which is to keep employees up to date on interesting news and developments, but which, in fact, exist for almost no reason other than to allow executives to experience that warm and pleasant feeling that comes when you see a favorable story about you in the media, or to know what it’s like to be interviewed by people who look and act exactly like reporters but never ask questions you wouldn’t want them to ask. Such venues tend to reward their writers, producers, and technicians very handsomely, often at two or three times the market rate. But I’ve never talked to anyone who does such work full-time who doesn’t say the job is bullshit.

This last one is certainly interesting, in that it shows executives and other members of upper management diverting organizational funds to satisfy their own elaborate desires, in yet another example of how the informational and structural problems of autocratic firms (as opposed to worker co-ops) lead to a misalignment of incentives. After all, so much the better for them if these executives can consume on the company dime. Still, though, this focus on image and appearance feels deeper — if I was more knowledgeable about Situationist theory, I could probably work that in here, even. But the simple truth is that I’m somewhat uncertain about these explanations. I suspect that a certain amount of box-ticking would be extraordinarily difficult to eliminate. I can even imagine a worker cooperative hiring someone to convince the wider community that they were doing something that they were not actually doing. It certainly seems as though there could be benefits to doing so. And, to the communist peanut gallery, I should note that there is no reason to believe that organizations in a non-monetary society are a) good at doing many, many, many other things and b) would be any less likely to attempt to deceive the wider community for social and political benefit.  

All this brings us to the fifth and final category of bullshit job: the goon. Goons are “people whose jobs have an aggressive element, but, crucially, who exist only because other people employ them.” He goes on to say “The most obvious example of this are national armed forces. Countries need armies only because other countries have armies. If no one had an army, armies would not be needed,” which is something of an odd point. If no one had force of arms to bring to bear against anyone else, the first group of people who could break that balance-of-(non)power would be kings, at least temporarily — up until everyone else started to get guns, too. Which, as a prelude, illustrates the problem with the idea that goons are unnecessary — while it might be dissatisfying to be one, and it might be possible to imagine a fantastical world without them, such a world couldn’t really (fully) exist.

And, of course, soldiering is not a bullshit job, though it may contain bullshit tasks — after all, soldiers generally don’t say that they feel that their jobs shouldn’t exist. Quite famously, they speak of intense feelings of duty and purpose. As opposed as I am to statist militaries, I don’t think that I could call them bullshit by Graeber’s definitions.

In any case, he continues:

[T]he same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers. Also, like literal goons, they have a largely negative impact on society. I think almost anyone would concur that, were all telemarketers to disappear, the world would be a better place. But I think most would also agree that if all corporate lawyers, bank lobbyists, or marketing gurus were to similarly vanish in a puff of smoke, the world would be at least a little bit more bearable.

This sort-of points towards a separation of the category into two, largely unrelated, types. Type 1s are your lawyers and lobbyists. Type 2s are your PR specialists and telemarketers. Type 1s function to attempt to make the state do things — they’re the real-world proxies for the corporate militaries of science-fiction. Eliminating the state would eliminate these jobs. Type 2s are about trying to trick people into buying things that they don’t actually want. One could argue that they’re a result of there being organizations large enough to afford to hire them — or that they’re a result of people being poor from not owning the means of production, and so needing to be convinced to go the extra mile to make unnecessarily inconvenient sacrifices. One could also argue that they’re a result of people not being allowed to go to these places of business and begin smashing things till the people involved agree to stop. I happen to believe that it’s something of all three.

Before I give my concluding remarks, there’s one final thing that I need to say: it’s not actually notable that —as Graeber makes much of— jobs where you help people, or otherwise do something satisfying, are paid poorly. Graeber acts as though it’s a vast political conspiracy, but it’s really… not. Wages are defined by supply and demand. The more satisfying a job is, the more people will want to do it. The more people that want to do a job, the higher the supply will be. The higher the supply, the lower the wage. This doesn’t require that you believe in anything more complicated than supply and demand.

If you don’t understand economic ways of seeing, you will be likely to believe that much more of society is intentional than it really is. And, it doesn’t help that much more of society really is intentional than mainstream sources would have you believe. When you become a leftist, you begin to realize that there really are these vast ‘conspiracies’, hidden in plain sight. It’s easy, from there, to start thinking that things are conspiracies when they really aren’t — that there are grand explanations for everything to be traced out, that every piece of evidence about the inefficiencies of capitalism is covered up by a long and storied trail of historical developments.

Anthropology is prone to seeing big, society-level explanations for things. I’m not knocking anthropology as a science by saying this — many things really do have big, society-level explanations. Some subfields of economics also focus on the big picture — not all, though. Market-based ways of seeing focus on interactions between individuals. They focus on all the particular reasons why two (or more) individuals might enter into an exchange. Obviously, of course, many such exchanges under statism have an element of structural violence to them.

However, this structural violence is not inherent in the very concept of exchange. In fact, structural violence tends to hide itself as features of exchange — leading people to think that the existence of rents and the presence of exchange imply one another. Focusing on individual interactions, rather than a super zoomed-out way of seeing, lets one see the structural violence much more clearly — including the ways that it is resisted and taken advantage of.

The market perspective is uniquely useful in that it gives the effects of individual incentive structures and desires their due. There may be overarching reasons that bullshit jobs exist, but there are also many particular and individual reasons. Ignoring those gives us an incomplete view of what’s going on here, and the extent to which these problems can be solved under capitalism might continue after capitalism, or may not entirely be problems at all.

“Attention to all racists: we will not just “replace” you, we will erase you. All trace of your worthless empty lives will be discarded from history. Your murderous temper tantrums will be like so much static noise lost forever as you are shuffled into the dirt.”

– William Gillis, Twitter

The internet is a place of endless political discourse, and one of the main battlegrounds of  “culture war 2.0,” which I will generalize as a far-reaching conflict between social justice advocates and the political right. While the culture war’s flashpoints appear absurd when viewed from a distance — Twitter drama, banned subreddits, Discord raids, suspended Youtube channels, and street-fights involving Pepe cosplayers — the cascading political implications saturate our lives as emboldened right-wingers lash out at shifting social norms and act in tandem with liberals to leverage the state to their ends.

Although both sides of every discourse like to present their own views as “truth,” we all rely on personal preferences in our final calculus on whether political issues exist, whether they matter, and how they should be resolved. These preferences are, in many cases, reactions that do not necessarily follow from a fundamental set of moral axioms, which in turn vary significantly from person to person. Hence, there are unbridgeable epistemological gaps in communication between individuals, what I will call the is-is gap. Arguments in this space devolve in performativity and self-gratification, facts are leveraged to justify preconceived biases until the one participant stops responding, rarely out of wisdom but typically after running out of steam. The concealed point is to build social capital (upvotes, views, likes, applause) and at best, convince spectators who’re on the fence. Often, there comes a point where arguments achieve nothing and, whether or not there is common ground to be found, we are left at an impasse. Beneath the stacked layers of abstraction is a power struggle flamed by egoistic desire.

Our present conflict centers, in part, around moral preferences and categorizations. Social justice advocates emphasize intersubjectivity, the blurring of mental and physical borders, and the dissolution of hierarchy, while the political right works towards compartmentalization imposed by political authority. In an anarchist framework, reality is constituted through reciprocity in the center and absolutism at the margins (typically in cases of harm), this is reversed in a statist model. These differences are not a matter of truth, but relative truth. Neutrality that ignores this underlying balance of power is not neutrality.

Moral preferences and categories are subjective and relative, although they tend to cluster around certain norms. These clusters only exist when observed from a very high level. Once we zoom in, moral preferences diverge from person to person, between cultures, and over time. A more pronounced expression of this subjectivity and the potential for mutual accountability is curtailed by the state. Under all social systems, ethics are codified and propagated in order to uphold existing power structures; normativity is self-reinforcing. In present popular culture, concepts such as patriotism are presented as morally good, natural, and necessary as opposed to harmful and historically contingent.

Our moral landscape is shaped by power. We do not speak truth to power, but power into truth. In other words, by engaging in praxis, erecting counter-institutions, researching new technologies, writing and providing spaces for people to ask questions and learn, we are effectively striving to build power and hence reconfigure normative values and perceptions in line with our political ambitions. Similarly, the far-right has its own funding platforms and propaganda centers. The false objectivization of moral preferences and categories as neutral and universal is incoherent and provides shelter for bigots. One such example is free speech. A universal application of free speech dissolves into incoherence at the margins, a dynamic where people can endlessly shout over each other with no intervention. The is analogous to Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance where a society with unlimited tolerance for intolerance enables its own destruction. Legible dialogue, where privileged voices do not silence others, can only exist when a platform chooses which voices it wants to prioritize. Given this silencing dynamic, when one chooses to defend bigoted and fascist speech, they are implicitly picking a side. The state regulates speech according to its own interests; in America, whistleblowing is illegal, figures in power can sue for defamation, incitement of violence can be prosecuted, and criticizing government agencies like ICE can get you arrested and charged. Anti-authoritarians oppose speech that silences marginalized voices by spreading hate and making calls to violence in the form of nationalism. We use direct action to de-platform speakers as part of an ongoing conflict over who controls a given platform, where the fascist side is usually backed by state violence.

Thus, the debate is not about the universal application of free speech, which cannot and does not exist in practice. The free speech warriors of the political right are either leveraging it to serve their own ends or do not fully comprehend its limitations. If you accept that some forms of speech ought to be de-platformed, the debate becomes about who deserves a platform and which views we ought to prioritize, which can be further reduced to moral preferences. When white nationalists gain a platform, they organize outside cyberspace, spread their views, and ultimately commit acts of violence, as we’ve seen time and time again. The far-right uses the principle of free speech to protect itself, defended by hordes of idealistic liberals who focus on abstract principles, seemingly unaware of their role in the underlying power struggle. When anarchists and far-leftists get banned from social media platforms, the free speech mobs remain conspicuously silent or openly celebrate.

Other political issues get caught up in the same underlying power struggle, with the right making the same fallacious attempts to objectivize their perspective. Just as with free speech, concepts such as gender are presented as objective and universal. Bigots appeal to “science” in order to justify their views, while vilifying postmodern proponents of deconstruction as “cultural-Marxists.” This is an epistemological mistake that runs into the is-ought gap; our empirical observations do not entail ways of categorizing them with any finality.

Jean-François Lyotard defined postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives.” Postmodern theory does not devalue science but demonstrates that it is incapable of deriving absolute truths. While we cannot seem to transcend matter and the laws of physics, our interpretation of reality is mediated by a cacophony of symbols, denying us absolute lucidity, if such a thing exists. Our limited instruments and perspective can’t perceive or accurately conceptualize everything. It’s important to note that this does not mean science does not sufficiently allow us to accurately predict future conditions insofar as our conscious experience goes. Nor does it imply that our categorizations are false, but that they have no truth value at all, only usefulness. Of course, human perspective tends to prioritize certain clusters of symbols over others, which is conducive to our survival. Analyzing human sexuality is a good way to demonstrate exactly what postmodern philosophy is trying to get at. Sexual dimorphism can be deconstructed in both metaphysical and epistemic terms. In metaphysical terms, sexual characteristics follow a spectrum rather than a binary (this is basically scientific consensus). Chromosomes can manifest as XXY, XXXX, etc; intersex people are about as common as red-heads. People with androgen receptor insensitivity can have XY chromosomes and present with a vagina while people with XX chromosomes can present with a penis. Categorizing people by chromosomes or sexual organs loses its predictive power in this context.

In epistemic terms, binary categorizations of sex and gender are socially constructed. Categorizations are nothing more than clusters of observations in thought-space. We can draw any number of correlations between sexual traits while referring to them independently i.e. XY chromosomes and high estrogen which, together, can define a category. The terms “male” and “female” are just labels to describe clusters of observations, which are in turn conceptualized in terms of other abstract categorizations and perspective biases, which are in turn a product of further abstractions and biases.

“Truth and reality are clusters and networks of symbols interpreting symbols interpreting symbols, and at the top, we do not find ideal forms emanating down to us, but empty phenomena” – Ormi, Discord

The way we choose to cluster facts to form categories is relative and based on predictive power and personal motivations. In light of the experience of gender non-conforming folks, in our framework, people are the gender they identify as. Consider the boundary conditions for being a mathematician. Gender identification tends to be non-trivial, hence the set of factors that one might use to identify as a certain gender is highly predictive. Despite the largely binary statistical distribution of gendered traits, numerous historical cultures acknowledged and accepted the existence of GRSM (gender, romantic, and sexual minority) folks. The emergent, bimodal distribution does not give us any reason to force everyone into our heuristic categories. Doing so requires a conscious agenda. This is not to say that those who defend GRSM folks do not have an agenda either, but that we are not caught up in an immutable current of perception.  

Michel Foucault demonstrated the role of power structures in determining how we conceptualize reality. Dominant power structures teach people to internalize fixed categorizations, which they project onto the world. In this framework, free speech is analogous to science, a widely accepted symbol leveraged in a conflict that has nothing to do with truth but has everything to do with prioritizing experiences and our resulting values and categories. While cultural conditioning is impermanent, the matter of categorization represents an unbridgeable is-is gap between the two sides of our conflict.

For the political right, people or color do not truly experience racism but suffer from a victim complex (of course, this is easily contradicted by statistical evidence). When this evidence is acknowledged, the right shifts to not caring about racism, which they were only leveraging in order to vie for power in-itself (note that there is a difference between seeking power in-itself and acquiring political power for the ends of social justice and that this distinction doesn’t matter to our opponents). The gas-lighting would become increasingly systematized in a right-wing framework. Not so surprisingly, this way of interpreting the culture wars is shared by coherent right-wing commenters:

“Ideological feuds are battles between egoic relationships to the world where both parties deny the moral experiences of each other.” – Truediltom, YouTube

An illustrative example here are the feuds over defining the term “racism,” which is almost universally seen as a bad thing in popular consciousness. However, this definition of racism is often limited to verbal abuse and racial discrimination. For radicals, racism can also be institutional or systemic in nature. This is reflected in disparities in income, wealth, health outcomes, incarceration rates, and representation and is reproduced by algorithms, loan boards, juries, employers, and immigration officers. In cases of systemic racism, the variable on which discrimination operates is not necessarily race but income, neighborhood, nationality, religion, and so on, which all have a disproportionate impact on certain races. An intersectional approach to anti-racism threatens the privilege of various elites and white supremacists who have a vested interest in avoiding the label of “racist,” and who ignore the ways in which racism can apply to things like borders and the global caste system under our definition. As a result, we have new words for racism like “racialism” and a marked attempt by the political right (and liberals for that matter) to define it in a way that does not implicate them. The structure of language itself determines whether political issues exist and how we normatively define words is a function of power. This is exemplified by the American state’s recent attempt to define trans people out of existence.

Anarchists oppose fixed categorizations that erase the experiences of people who are impacted by the harmful effects of state authority. The aesthetic sensibilities of fascists are none of our concern, and our politics correspondingly strives to negate their lived experiences and desires, which by our metrics would be harmful. Our political vision actively denies a right-wing vision of reality, a world divided by borders, where gender non-conformity is pathologized, where individual autonomy is subordinated to teleology and the state continues to dominate our day-to-day lives.

When it comes to the culture wars, we’re not just participating in rational, good-faith discourse but engaging in a power struggle over the values and categorizations that constitute our shared reality.

“Emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”

– Mark Fischer

La natura lovecraftiana dei mari che si sollevano

Di Eric Fleischmann. Originale pubblicato l’undici aprile 2019 con il titolo ‘The Land Shall Sink’: The Lovecraftian Nature of Sea Level Rise. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Nel 1917, H.P. Lovecraft così scrive nel racconto Dagon: “Sogno un giorno in cui [le cose senza nome] sorgeranno dalle onde per schiacciare con il loro terribile tallone ciò che resta della patetica umanità sfinita dalla guerra, sogno un giorno in cui la terra sprofonderà, e l’oceano oscuro si solleverà nel caos universale.” Oggi, in questo ventunesimo secolo, è come se queste terribili immagini, dopo essere evase dal mondo della finzione lovecraftiana, siano entrate nel mondo della realtà. Come nota GlobalChange.gov, si prevede che il livello dei mari salirà da 30 a 120 centimetri entro il 2100, per poi continuare ad una velocità uguale o superiore per i secoli seguenti. Anche piccole variazioni di livello possono avere effetti disastrosi. Come nota Marine Insights, questa è una grossa minaccia per le aree costiere, dove risiede quasi il 40% della popolazione americana. Si calcola che la frequenza delle inondazioni crescerà da tre a nove volte rispetto alla media di questi ultimi cinquant’anni.

Tolti i recessi più remoti dello spazio, niente è più misterioso, niente è più terribilmente sconosciuto dell’oceano. Scrive il National Ocean Service che oltre l’80% del regno acquatico, che copre circa tre quarti del nostro pianeta, “non è conosciuto, studiato o esplorato.” Storicamente, il mare rappresenta l’infinitamente grande; ha ispirato leggende come quella di Cariddi, raccontata da Omero nell’Odissea, e poi il biblico leviatano e l’oscuro kraken. Tutto ciò (oltre allo spazio profondo) è sicuramente alle origini dell’interesse di Lovecraft per le profondità marine, che hanno ispirato entità come Cthulu, il mostro a forma di polipo che vive nella defunta città sommersa di R’lyeh.

Detto drasticamente, quando la nostra azione causa l’aumento del livello marino, significa che stiamo scherzando con forze che non capiamo pienamente. Dire nostra, però, è una generalizzazione fuorviante, come noterebbe qualcuno a sinistra. Anche se molti di noi hanno un certo impatto sull’ambiente, gran parte dei problemi è riconducibile ad una minoranza capitalista. Citando il già citato, appena cento aziende sono responsabili del 70% delle emissioni di gas serra, gas che causano aumento delle temperature e conseguente crescita del livello marino. Tornando a Lovecraft, questi capitalisti ricordano Obed Marsh in The Shadow over Innsmouth, che, pur di arricchirsi con l’oro e “strani gioielli sconosciuti”, arriva ad aiutare i mostri delle profondità marine ad infiltrare e infettare geneticamente la città. La tendenza del capitalismo globale a cavare fino all’ultimo centesimo di ricchezza dalla natura sta portando l’oceano dentro casa nostra, come se noi fossimo gli abitanti, in parte complici ma anche vittime, della città dannata di Innsmouth.

Il nesso, di cui dicevo prima, tra il riscaldamento della terra e la crescita del livello marino è dato, nello specifico, dall’espansione dell’acqua quando si riscalda e dal degrado delle calotte polari, ma il processo più conosciuto è certamente lo scioglimento dei ghiacciai. Si tratta di fatti ben noti a tutti. Tanto per fare un esempio, il ghiaccio antartico più antico risalirebbe a un milione di anni fa, mentre quello della Groenlandia supera i centomila anni. Non sono solo forze profonde, ma anche antiche; e forse nessuno come Lovecraft ha rimuginato su ciò che accadrebbe se si risvegliassero antiche entità ibernate. At the Mountains of Madness, uno dei suoi romanzi brevi, è ispirato al geologo William Dyer e al suo incontro con gli shoggoth, entità dall’esistenza passiva che si trovavano sotto l’artico. Con questo libro, l’autore sperava di scoraggiare le esplorazioni. Queste creature, come i 260 miliardi di tonnellate d’acqua rilasciate annualmente dai ghiacciai tra il 2003 e il 2009, ad un certo punto vengono riportate alla luce e minacciano l’esistenza dell’umanità.

Molti sono quelli che spiegano i cambiamenti climatici in termini di minaccia cosmica, antiumana secondo la nostra visione antropocentrica del mondo. Eugene Thacker, in In the Dust of this Planet: Horror of Philosophy (Volume 1), riflette sull’impossibilità di concepire “il mondo come qualcosa di assolutamente inumano, insensibile alle speranze, ai desideri e alle lotte degli individui e dei gruppi.” Nei media ritroviamo questo “pessimismo cosmico” sotto forma di immagini che illustrano “gli effetti catastrofici dei cambiamenti climatici.” In Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Timothy Morton parla degli iperoggetti, oggetti massicci diffusi nello spazio e nel tempo, collega in particolare il riscaldamento globale con oggetti ad impatto ambientale come i bicchieri di polistirolo, le buste di plastica e le radiazioni. Spiega Morton che “con la comprensione degli iperoggetti, il pensiero riconduce entità di tipo Cthulhu allo spazio sociale, psichico e filosofico. L’ossessione della contemporaneità con il mostruoso fornisce una confortevole via d’uscita dal pensiero su scala umana.” Ghiacciai e oceani sono sicuramente iperoggetti e vederli sciogliersi e crescere dà un’idea viva di ciò che intende Thacker; ma il sollevamento dei mari è lovecraftiano in un senso particolarmente vivo, visuale. L’oceano rappresenta una porzione aliena del pianeta, perlopiù sconosciuta, mentre l’acqua dei ghiacciai rappresenta una forza primordiale liberata dopo un sonno durato ere geologiche.

In un video di qualche mese fa, il sito accademico ContraPoints nota come uno dei problemi principali degli ambientalisti è il fatto che manchino gli antagonisti dei cambiamenti climatici. Aggiungiamo a Morton ciò che James Bridle scrive in New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, ovvero che i cambiamenti climatici sono un qualcosa di così vago che è impossibile inquadrarli, quantificarli, concepirli nella loro interezza. Bridle arriva a prendere il titolo di una sua opera da un passo di The Call of Cthulhu, citato nel libro: “Noi viviamo in una placida isola d’ignoranza circondata dall’infinità dei mari oscuri, ma non avremmo mai dovuto andare così lontano.” Nel contesto di questo articolo, significato metaforico e realtà convergono. Tenendo in mente tutto ciò, forse un’adeguata strategia mentale ambientalistica passa dall’identificazione di questa immensa, indefinibile e impensabile cosa chiamata cambiamenti climatici. Se riusciamo a rivelare la natura orribile, lovecraftiana, almeno dalla crescita del livello dei mari, forse possiamo anche suscitare una reazione simile a quella che si avrebbe se un’entità come Cthulhu risorgesse dagli abissi.

When a person with good intentions tries to penetrate into the nepotistic state-capitalist system, only one scenario awaits him. This system will swallow him, and — after indigestion — the system will tear up the remnants of all the good things in this person. A system that aims from the very beginning to rot will exist only in chaos. The rules of the game will never allow changing the existing system because the system itself is ready to encourage the destruction of its opponents.

Guy Debord correctly predicted that the collapse of the USSR and the establishment of a market economy would lead to the triumph of a new spectacle — an integrated one that combined the dictatorship of consumption with a strong repressive apparatus. The total destruction of the market economy led to corporatism. The impoverished population exchanged their rights and freedoms for consumption, which led to the establishment of Putin’s dictatorship. Freedom-loving people in Russia have had to deal with police batons, the rule of supermarkets, and kleptocracy for ages.

Created at the end of the life of the USSR, the spectacle of “socialism” set the stage for a system that rewarded both wealth and authoritarian overreach. Modern Russia is just another chapter in the long chronicle of treachery for the Russian people, and it presents a hypocritical eulogy of the previous hegemony. While the people were wearing rose-tinted glasses, the spectacle destroyed almost all the alternatives for noble people and administered an additional dose of anesthesia.

So what can people do?

The best resistance is to try to outwit the quirky system. Normally, a corrupt system reaches such a level of self-destructiveness that a possible alternative will become an expected option among people who need to be released (détournement). When creating such alternatives, though, the innovator must consider the desires of other people. The creator’s ideal should be secondary. In most oligarchic states, the most important thing would be to consider the class interests of the oppressed and their desire to improve social security. Such goals can make people think of their current situation, that’s how class war starts. Maybe you will be surprised, but not every “outsider” or even the defender of the system has a thoughtful plan. Most people try to chase the agenda, but not to create it.

People mostly expect to see a democratic state that will begin to give lots of privileges and will only improve the culture of consumption. This is not correct, the new regime can be the same after such changes. In Russia, the principle “boyars are bad, but more kind boyars are better” is pretty well spread. This argument about the existence of good authorities is shameful and incorrect. If people could start understanding that those in power make bad decisions in most cases, they could have the motivation to organize themselves.

Decentralization and pluralism are the keys to solving any problems with the state.

The feasibility of self-organization

What would you do if your city were captured by oligarchs and their corporations? What would an alternative to the government look like?

Kropotkin described society as “a very complex result of a thousand clashes and thousands of agreements, free and involuntary, a multitude of remnants of the old and young aspirations for a better future.” It is important for us to admit that mutual aid and self-organization are the main pillars of an anarchist society, without which it is not possible. Relationships between people are the strong bond on which a huge indissoluble linkage of interactions can be built. People who want to carry certain ideas and interests should be united in decentralized groups. Is it possible to imagine an association of tenants making mutually beneficial decisions on the improvement of their home, yards, and entrances? If we can imagine that minimalistic example, what about other communities? More complex structures are able to form organically with small ones, or they might be influenced by other organic structures.

Decentralization does not mean that associations cannot unite in a larger territorial organization. The main thing is that all associations should not be eaten by one person, giving them undue authority and influence.

Federalism is the opposite of government centralization. Power and freedom, the two ever-fighting principles, are always forced to come to an agreement with each other. Bakunin said: The federation resolves all the difficulties arising from the agreement between freedom and power. The French Revolution laid the groundwork for a new order, the secret of which is its heir, the working class. This new order, a new unit, is as follows: to unite all nations into a confederation of confederations,” — said Bakunin. His expression is not accidental: “world confederation” would be too huge; large federations need to be federated among themselves.

Like Proudhon, he recognized the superiority of federal unity over “authoritarian” unity:

When the hated power of the state will no longer force individuals, associations, communes, regions, and areas to live together, they will be much more closely connected and form much more alive, more real, more powerful unity than those that they are forced to form today under the equally oppressive and exhausting yoke of the state.

[Authorities] always mix formal, dogmatic and governmental unity with real unity, which can arise only from the freest development of all individuals and all collectives and from a federated and absolutely free union of workers associations to communes, and then communes to regions, regions in a nation.

Alternatives to the economy

For a practical example of building an independent economy, we should pay attention to the notes of Peter Kropotkin. In Dmitrov, he saw a manifestation of revolutionary restructuring, drawing his attention to the emergence and successful activity of local cooperation.

As Kropotkin noted, the rapid development of cooperation in Russia could be seen at the beginning of the century. In a letter to Marie Goldsmith, he noted in December 1912: “A major movement starts in Russia — cooperation. I received from the Kurgan a newspaper of the Union of Butter Artels. This is something amazing … In 625 villages there are cooperative shops, about 1,000 artels … ”. In some ways, Kropotkin “exported” the idea of such cooperation from England where it was born. In 1844, 28 weavers formed the “Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers,” essentially a consumer co-operative. They published their manifesto, initiating a movement that, at the end of the nineteenth century, swept most countries of the world.

What Kropotkin saw in England and in Dmitrov is an example of the strong partnership of people with the same ideas. Today it is impossible to imagine thousands of artels in the market controlled by the state and large corporations. But if people are ready to try to turn everything upside down, are the rich and the state a hindrance? The whole thing here, as Kropotkin understood, is in following the qualities inherent by nature of a man – sociability, solidarity, mutual aid. Every authority can be taken down if people could be motivated to do that. Cooperation starts with ideas of freedom.

Is it possible to embody ideas into reality? Yes, everything is possible. People must have a tradition of aversion to authority, otherwise, their conformism and loyalty will become destructive. The more people are immersed in the spectacle, the easier it is to pull them out and give the correct path. When all people voluntarily renounce the state, then the anarchists of the whole world will stop yelling at the statists.

Agorist theory has been enriched a lot since Samuel Edward Konkin III introduced the initial theory. Through the writings and work of visionaries such as Karl Hess, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Defense Distributed, and Derrick Broze, we have seen agorism grow and expand in ways never thought possible both intellectually and in practice. And the practice will continue to grow and adapt as time goes on, circumstances change, new technologies emerge, etc., as it should.

While Samuel Konkin focused specifically on the black and grey markets, Hess focused on localization, appropriate technology, and sustainability. Broze has expanded upon this in recent years, referring to the concepts of horizontal and vertical agorism. Horizontal agorism is the traditional illegalist Konkian agorism we all know and love. That includes tax strikes, drug dealing, sex work, gun running, contraband smuggling, hiding undocumented immigrants, etc. Vertical agorism is typically more focused on white and grey markets and includes things like farmers markets, worker cooperatives, environmental technology, grassroots labor organizing, etc.

It is in the vertical agorist tradition that we tend to have the most concern for the environment. Karl Hess’ experiments into community sustainability led him to champion such things as aquaponics, rooftop gardening, basement fish farming, solar and wind power, community workshops, warehouses, share sheds, tool libraries, and more. Particularly expanding upon the last bit, the sharing economy has sprung up around the idea of sharing goods that would otherwise not be used to full capacity by an individual owner. Broze has emphasized the 7th generation principle and concepts such as zero waste living in his teachings on agorism and he promotes community gardening, permaculture, minimalism, and the like. With environmental devastation an increasing concern, this emphasis will become more and more necessary.

Following the inspiration of Broze, if one is to look at agorism holistically, then we cannot just focus on the point of consumption but instead must focus on the entire cycle of a product’s life. As pointed out in The Story of Stuff, that chain goes from extraction to production to distribution and then consumption before finally ending with disposal. Through this holistic lens, we see that we must make the switch to a circular economy. Most agorists are already on this path of thinking in regards to food production, promoting local organic sustainable food production and distribution via home gardens, community gardens, guerrilla gardens, rooftop gardens, small farms, permaculture, farmers markets, CSAs, composting, and the like but, we as a movement need to think of the other products we consume in our lives.

The old saying goes, “There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism,” and the truth is that in our current rigged market, we as consumers are largely and purposely kept uninformed about the products we consume. Agorism, specifically with an emphasis on localism, gives us a more effective alternative to ethical consumption. Buying local goods from your neighbors makes it somewhat easier to know the history of those goods thus making one a more informed consumer who can make more informed decisions. However, not all items can be found via a local source and even those local sources are often utilizing products in the production process. For instance, your local screen printer may do it themselves but they’re still printing on shirts they bought from some chain corporation that are made in sweatshops by child laborers from synthetic fibers and plant fibers grown and harvested by prison slaves and dyed with harmful synthetic dyes that run off into the nearby waters causing pollution and death of the local sea life. Even if they do manage to find sources which claim ethical grounds because of various aspects of their production (organic, fair trade, union-made, etc.) there are always other issues (wage theft, monocropping, lobbying). But there’s a solution to getting most everything you need that you can’t buy from an ethical producer without contributing a dime to these corporations.

As agorists, we talk often talk of the white, black, grey, and red markets but there is one market that is surprisingly absent yet increasingly relevant to the conversation: green markets. Now by green market, I don’t mean cannabis, alternative energies, or deceptive greenwashed consumerism. Rather green markets include all white, grey, and black market transactions involving resold goods, meaning goods that have been previously owned, repaired, refurbished, and/or recycled. This includes thrift stores, clothing swaps, repair shops, fix-it fairs, the Right to Repair movement, used car parts, redistributing dumpstered goods in the vain of Food Not Bombs, and so much more.

Repairing things, buying or trading with friends, buying from local thrift stores and flea markets, effective recycling programs, and reusing and repurposing items are all examples of green market agorism. Now granted, this still only focuses on the distribution, consumption, and sometimes disposal aspects of a product’s life while not directly addressing the extraction and production aspects, however getting your goods from the green market lowers demand for extraction and production of new goods. Scaling down our current modes of production in general is necessary for curbing environment damage and thus a move towards reducing, reusing, repairing, repurposing, and recycling is a must. Moving to green markets allows us a chance to analyze our consumption and realize how much we can rely on what is already available instead of needing to constantly produce. Of course there will always be items which one will need to buy new such as hygiene products and new technology but relying mostly on green market goods allows us to scale back the problem of the question of ethical extraction and production methods to a smaller more manageable level. Instead of having to focus on how to ethically produce every product, we only have to focus on how to ethically extract and produce necessities.

All of the sudden these questions become easier to answer and we can begin focusing on how to produce those necessities. We can start making our own hygiene products from locally grown plant materials, 3D printing toothbrushes and combs using fiber made via scrap plastic and the open source machine designs from Precious Plastic, fighting for the labor rights of the miners of the precious metals that go into our those 3D printers and form worker collectives to assemble the parts, creating more effective recycling programs for the waste we still do create, and so much more. We can get extremely creative about it. But first, we must scale back the problem by scaling back our consumption of new items. We must become green market agorists.

Di Jacob Chavarria. Originale pubblicato il 3 aprile 2019 con il titolo A New Hope. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

C’è una generazione, una generazione nuova, che viene su in un mondo in cui i problemi più radicati sono anche i più gravi e diffusi. Migliaia di persone finiscono in galera per “crimini” senza vittime, incarcerati da uno stato di polizia reso più aspro da una vecchia aristocrazia decisa a tutto pur di preservare l’ordine sociale. Ancora di più sono quelli uccisi nel fuoco incrociato delle nazioni occidentali intente a portare la “democrazia” in paesi del petrolio troppo piccoli per difendersi. La società è tormentata da un collettivo senso di vuoto.

Il mondo appare in uno stato di caos continuo, di insoddisfazione permanente. Problemi tutt’altro che nuovi, certo, ma che oggi cominciano a destare una certa consapevolezza; e questo è significativo.

La generazione Z è la generazione nata tra la metà degli anni novanta e i primi duemila. È la prima generazione cresciuta interamente con internet, un’invenzione che ha già cambiato significativamente il corso della storia nei pochi decenni dalla nascita. A livello superficiale, la cultura popolare può sembrare sciatta, insulsa, ma quando la osserviamo con occhio più critico vediamo che cresce una generazione che collettivamente si oppone ai principi cardine della società che la precede. Internet ha trasformato questi giovani in qualcosa di unico e rivoluzionario. Una generazione che, con un senso dell’umorismo tutto suo, si rivolge ai re che ancora governano il mondo di oggi: le compagnie petrolifere e i governi corrotti.

La generazione Z possiede cinismo oscuro, un tratto distintivo che inconsciamente ci porta a vedere il mondo con più schiettezza. Vediamo negli stati quell’autorità ridicola e oppressiva che sono sempre stati. Non accettiamo più passivamente che si sparino innocenti dalla pelle scura, che si metta in galera chi si fa una canna, e il tutto con la compiacenza di chi ci sta attorno. Usiamo la forza di internet per trasformare il pensiero come mai è accaduto prima. Consapevolmente o no, portiamo con noi lo spirito del cambiamento. Non ci accontentiamo più di quella vita mediocre elemosinata lavorando in ufficio, sappiamo che possiamo fare di più. Quei meme che, a dozzine, sono espressione dei problemi che portiamo dentro, trasformano l’insoddisfazione emotiva in un senso di ribellione, inconscio ma acutamente presente, contro quelle classi dominanti che ci costringono all’immobilità. È questo particolare insieme di speranza cinica e realtà ottusa che può spingerci a cambiare la sostanza della società in modi che non vediamo dai tempi dei movimenti per i diritti civili.

È stata la generazione del millennio a far girare la ruota del cambiamento, ma sarà l’ultima dell’alfabeto a coglierne pienamente i vantaggi, così come è stata la prima a cogliere pienamente i vantaggi della forza di internet. Viviamo una realtà che è quasi una satira, un mondo durato troppo a lungo, e solo una generazione in grado di ridere di questo mondo può cominciare a cambiarlo davvero. C’è una nuova speranza, ed è la generazione Z.

Sull’archeologia zombie

Di Anon. Originale pubblicato il primo aprile 2019 con il titolo Night of the Living “Things”: Zombie Archeology. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

L’Oxford English Dictionary alla voce “archeologia” dice: “studio della storia e della preistoria umana tramite lo scavo di siti e l’analisi di artefatti e altri reperti fisici.” Lo stesso dizionario definisce “zombie”, nell’ambito della finzione popolare, come “persona o cadavere riportato in vita e trasformato in creatura capace di movimento ma non di pensiero razionale, e che si nutre di carne umana.” La prima si riferisce ovviamente a oggetti inerti. Ma, e se fossero vivi? E se si imponessero su di noi? Non sarebbe più l’archeologo che rivela il nostro passato, ma i manufatti del passato che tornano alla vita, che emergono dalla tomba per consegnarci il nostro passato. È qui che lo zombie entra in scena.

Molti archeologi professionisti, tra parentesi, storcerebbero il naso a sentir parlare di “oggetti inerti”. L’archeologo Michael Shanks definisce il suo lavoro “un rapporto attivo con i reperti del passato che tornano al presente”, e spiega che la sua missione consiste nel cercare di “capire il rapporto tra l’uomo e ciò che produce, inserirlo in una rete di rapporti con il contesto (altri uomini, cose, specie animali, la natura), che rende l’uomo quello che è.” Qui è l’uomo del presente che indaga sull’uomo del passato, non il passato che perseguita il nostro presente, che colpisce l’uomo come un’entità maligna. Io invece vorrei parlare di oggetti abbandonati che si trasformano in fantasmi del passato. Vorrei parlare di archeologia zombie.

Una particolarità del capitalismo è la produzione di merci. “Merci” non semplicemente in senso ontologico, formale, ma più nel senso inteso dai guru del riordino: oggetti assortiti di uso generale, desiderati e prodotti dall’uomo. Anche Karl Marx spiega come il sistema capitalista necessiti di una costante espansione della produzione al fine di sostenere il suo funzionamento. Allo stesso tempo, al centro della teoria marxiana delle crisi economiche c’è il fatto che si producono troppe merci per poter essere vendute con profitto. Nel Medio Evo, gli oggetti erano fatti a mano uno per uno, e se si guastavano erano riparati allo stesso modo. Non c’erano linee d’assemblaggio fordiste che producevano scarpe e se un paio si rompeva non c’era il negozio o il centro commerciale dove andare a comprarne un altro paio.

Il mondo del ventunesimo secolo affonda nelle merci. Secondo APLF ltd., il consumatore medio americano compra 7,5 paia di scarpe l’anno. Secondo il LA Times, “mediamente, in una casa americana ci sono 300.000 oggetti, dai fermagli al ferro da stiro.” Non tutti sono ricchi e dediti all’accaparramento, certo. Tra i problemi fondamentali del capitalismo c’è anche l’accesso diseguale a questa apparente abbondanza di beni. Con tutte queste cianfrusaglie in giro, però, è inevitabile che una grossa parte vada sprecata. In un articolo pubblicato su The Atlantic, Derek Thompson spiega che in un anno il mondo produce 1,18 miliardi di tonnellate di rifiuti, “come 7.000 Empire State Building.” In gran parte rifiuti di cibo, ma anche oggetti di plastica economica o altri materiali che si rovinano facilmente. Alcune società, come la Apple, programmerebbero i loro prodotti in modo che smettano di funzionare correttamente dopo un certo tempo, così da costringere il consumatore a sostituire spesso l’oggetto comprato.

Tutto questo spreco, tutta questa roba buttata via deve andare da qualche parte, ed è qui che entra in gioco il concetto di archeologia zombie. Il filosofo Manuel de Landa, intervistato da New Materialism, dice: “È assurdo pensare che complesse strutture auto-organizzate abbiano bisogno di un ‘cervello’ che le crei. Il sistema accoppiato atmosfera-idrosfera genera continuamente strutture (nubifragi, uragani e correnti d’aria coerenti) non solo in assenza di un cervello, ma addirittura senza organi di alcun genere.” Questo punto è importante. Pur prive di cervello, se non inorganiche, le strutture naturali hanno un comportamento organizzato. Ancora più importante è il fatto che, crescendo, la massa di rifiuti prodotti dall’uomo riesce ad invadere quel sistema naturale descritto da de Landa, diventando così un’entità attiva; che torna in vita passando dall’ecosistema.

Nella mia città natale di Cincinnati, nell’Ohio, si trova il famoso Mount Rumpke, una delle maggiori montagne di rifiuti degli Stati Uniti, che nel 1996 ha subito un grosso smottamento, un vero e proprio evento geofisico. Ancora più terribile è quello che è accaduto in Mozambico, dove è franata una collina di rifiuti uccidendo diciassette persone. E poi l’isola di plastica, che è nata e viene continuamente alimentata dai rifiuti catturati e concentrati dalle correnti oceaniche. Questa immondezza marina non solo entra a far parte dei grandi processi oceanici, ma invade anche i processi biologici multi-specie quando le tossine della plastica tornano all’uomo attraverso la catena alimentare. La spazzatura orbitale, pur non essendo prodotta dal consumismo, è un altro esempio. Secondo la Nasa, ci sono più di 20.000 oggetti più grandi di un pallone che orbitano attorno alla terra a velocità fino a 2.800 chilometri l’ora. Tutte cose che causano, o possono causare, enormi danni alla nostra esistenza. Abbiamo gettato i cadaveri del nostro ciarpame in enormi fosse comuni, necropoli che ora cominciano a prendere vita. Le merci del nostro passato strisciano fuori dalla tomba, spalancano le porte del mausoleo e seminano il panico tra i viventi.

Il capitalismo ha prodotto più merci di quante le generazioni passate potessero anche solo immaginare, e tutte queste merci vengono usate e gettate via rapidamente in quantità mostruose. È immondezza che entra a far parte della topografia planetaria, ne penetra l’ecologia, e infine torna all’uomo sotto forma di maledizione. È archeologia zombie: non siamo noi a riportare alla luce il passato, ma è il passato che torna da noi; per vendicarsi. La nostra è l’epoca del collasso ecologico causato dal capitalismo, un’epoca sempre più caratterizzata dal ritorno di questi zombie archeologici. Così Walter Benjamin a proposito di Angelus Novus di Paul Klee:

C’è un quadro di Klee che s’intitola Angelus Novus. Vi si trova un angelo che sembra in atto di allontanarsi da qualcosa su cui fissa lo sguardo. Ha gli occhi spalancati, la bocca aperta, le ali distese. L’angelo della storia deve avere questo aspetto. Ha il viso rivolto al passato. Dove ci appare una catena di eventi, egli vede una sola catastrofe, che accumula senza tregua rovine su rovine e le rovescia ai suoi piedi. Egli vorrebbe ben trattenersi, destare i morti e ricomporre l’infranto. Ma una tempesta spira dal paradiso, che si è impigliata nelle sue ali, ed è così forte che egli non può chiuderle. Questa tempesta lo spinge irresistibilmente nel futuro, a cui volge le spalle, mentre il cumulo delle rovine sale davanti a lui al cielo. Ciò che chiamiamo il progresso, è questa tempesta.

Cosa accade quando le rovine, vere o metaforiche, cominciano ad insinuarsi nel presente? Quando i morti, per così dire, si svegliano? L’archeologia zombie pone queste domande.

In 1917, H.P. Lovecraft wrote the following lines in his short story “Dagon”: “I dream of a day when [the nameless things] may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.” Now, in the 21st century, it appears as though his unnamed narrator’s horrific vision has escaped Lovecraft’s fiction and entered into the real world. As outlined by GlobalChange.gov, sea level is expected to rise anywhere from one to four feet by the year 2100 and only continue at the current rate or an even higher one in the following centuries. Even small rises in sea level can have disastrous effects and, as Marine Insights reports, this poses an extreme threat to coastal areas—where almost 40% of the population in the United States resides—with flooding frequency projected to rise from 300% to 900% in comparison to what was recorded fifty years ago.

Other than the outer reaches of space there is possibly no place quite as mysterious and terrifyingly unknown as the ocean. The National Ocean Service writes that more than 80% of this realm that covers about three fourths of our planet “remains unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored.” The ocean has also historically presented a seemingly unfathomable dimension to reality—spawning legends of enormous beasts like Charybdis from Homer’s Odyssey, the biblical Leviathan, and the infamous kraken. This is certainly a central reason for Lovecraft’s interest in—along with those furthest regions of space—the watery deep, which helped inspire such things as the octopus-like Cthulhu who resides in the sunken nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh.

To be openly dramatic, when we cause sea levels to rise, we are messing with forces we do not fully comprehend. But saying we, as many on the left have pointed out, is a misleading generalization. Although most individuals do have substantial impacts on the environment, many major environmental issues can be traced directly to a minority of capitalists. As the often quoted point goes: Only about 100 companies are responsible for around 70% of greenhouse gas emissions—gases which are causing the heating of the earth and consequently sea level rise. These capitalists are akin to Obed Marsh from Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth who, in order to obtain wealth in the form of gold and a strange “foreign kind of jewellery,” is said to have helped the undersea monstrosities known as the Deep Ones infiltrate and genetically infect the town. The drive of global capitalism to squeeze every last cent out of the natural world is bringing the ocean to our doorsteps, just as if we were the partially complicit yet also victimized residents of cursed Innsmouth.

The aforementioned link between the heating of the earth and rising sea levels is specifically the expansion of water when it warms and the deterioration of ice sheets, but certainly the most famous such process is the melting of glaciers. This is all well and widely known, but consider that the oldest glacial ice in Antarctica is possibly 1,000,000 years old and the oldest in Greenland is more than 100,000 years old. This whole affair is not just about the stirring of deep and mysterious forces but also ancient ones, and perhaps no one mulled over the consequences of awakening ancient hibernating entities more than H.P. Lovecraft. At the Mountains of Madness, one of Lovecraft’s novellas, is written as an account by the geologist William Dyer of his encounter with the strange Elder Things and shoggoths—existing in a formerly-passive state beneath the arctic—in the hope it will deter further exploration. These creatures, like the annual 260 gigatons of water released from glaciers between 2003 and 2009, are being brought back into play, and humanity is now under existential threat because of it.

Many authors have discussed how climate change poses certain cosmic and anti-humanist threats to our anthropocentric understanding of the world. Eugene Thacker, in In the Dust of this Planet: Horror of Philosophy (Volume 1), considers how it is difficult to think “of the world as absolutely unhuman, and indifferent to the hopes, desires, and struggles of human individuals and groups.” But this “Cosmic Pessimism” is represented by media images of, for example, “the cataclysmic effects of climate change.” In Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Timothy Morton discusses the titular hyperobjects—objects massively distributed spatially and temporarily—in particular global warming along with several other items of ecological concern such as Styrofoam cups, plastic bags, and nuclear radiation. According to Morton, “By understanding hyperobjects, human thinking has summoned Cthulhu-like entities into social, psychic, and philosophical space. The contemporary philosophical obsession with the monstrous provides a refreshing exit from humanscale thoughts.” Glaciers and oceans are certainly hyperobjects, and the images of their respective melting and rising can serve as some of Thacker’s representations, but sea level rise is Lovecraftian in a particularly vivid aesthetic dimension. The ocean is an alien and largely unknown portion of the earth and glacial water is a primordial force finally being released after a slumber that has lasted eons.

In a video released a few months ago, academic internet personality ContraPoints makes the observation that one problem facing environmental activists is that climate change fundamentally lacks an antagonist. Furthermore, an important point of Morton’s book as well as James Bridle’s New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future is that climate change is so vast and vague that it cannot be pinned down, quantified, or fully thought. Bridle even derives the title of his work from a passage in The Call of Cthulhu—which he also quotes wholly within the book—that contains the line: “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” In the context of this piece, this apt metaphor seems to verge on the literal. With all this in mind, perhaps a strategy of environmental thought could be to identify an antagonism within this gargantuan, undefinable, and unthinkable thing called climate change. If we are capable of revealing a more horrifying, Lovecraftian nature to at least sea level rise, is it possible we might induce a response closer to that which would ensue if Cthulhu truly rose from the depths?

Poetry has a long history in the anarchist tradition. It is often through poetry that we find ways to say the things we can’t say with prose, whether for fear or simply because they can’t be expressed properly that way.

Fits of emotion are a part of radical politics, and for many it is these emotions that drive our commitment to building a free world. Rather than shy away from our rage at injustice, our joy at living, or our longing for freedom, we should embrace these emotions and the truth that they carry.

Take, for instance, Voltairine de Cleyre’s last poem before her death, dedicated to Mexican activists during the Mexican Revolution: “Written in Red”

Written in red their protest stands,
For the gods of the World to see;
On the dooming wall their bodiless hands
have blazoned “Upharsin,” and flaring brands
Illumine the message: “Seize the lands!
Open the prisons and make men free!”
Flame out the living words of the dead
Written-in-red.

Gods of the World! Their mouths are dumb!
Your guns have spoken and they are dust.
But the shrouded Living, whose hearts were numb,
have felt the beat of a wakening drum
Within them sounding-the Dead men’s tongue—
Calling: “Smite off the ancient rust!”
Have beheld “Resurrexit,” the word of the Dead,
Written-in-red.

Bear it aloft, O roaring, flame!
Skyward aloft, where all may see.
Slaves of the World! Our cause is the same;
One is the immemorial shame;
One is the struggle, and in One name—
MANHOOD— we battle to set men free.
“Uncurse us the Land!” burn the words of the Dead,
Written-in-red.

In this spirit, C4SS will be featuring anarchist poetry throughout the month of May. There is of course still much to be gained from studies, commentary, and analysis, but we’re excited to now also include poetry in our exploration of anarchy.

We will pay $25 for each submission published, or you can donate your writer fee to Chelsea Manning’s personal support fund. This fund is paying for her rent and bills while she’s in prison and is also being used to cover prison commissary funds as needed. Just let us know during the editing process that you’d like to donate your fee. Please do not include more than 3 poems in your submission.

To respond to this call for submissions, email editor@c4ss.org by May 1st, 2019.

Following his recent publication in The Independent, C4SS coordinator Cory Massimino was again in the news on the issue of immigration. Speaking with Tim Farley on SiriusXM’s morning show yesterday, Cory once again outlined the case for open borders, using El Paso, Texas as a model of success.

You can listen to the full segment here or below:

Di Alex McHugh. Originale pubblicato il 4 aprile 2019 con il titolo The Pernicious Protection of “Hate Crime” Laws. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Prima o poi la politica doveva saltare sul carro della protezione della “libera espressione”. Leggi come quella approvata nello Utah, che intende proteggere le opinioni politiche, non hanno niente a che vedere con la libera espressione. Si tratta invece di un’escrescenza di quella (perlopiù falsa) paranoia secondo cui i conservatori sono diventati una categoria emarginata, derisa dai media, esclusa dagli ambiti accademici, ignorata nei siti di incontri.

Ricapitolando, alcuni studi dimostrano come non esistano significativi preconcetti contro i conservatori nei campus, e io penso che non sia importante se gli amici conservatori non trovano amichette. Questo dibattito è una vera confusione in termini. Tengo molto alla libera espressione, ma controbattere non significa censurare, e nessuno ha diritto ad uno spazio in cui potersi esprimere, soprattutto se è uno spazio a spese dei contribuenti e se ciò che si esprime è un odio bigotto. Essere odiati a causa delle proprie idee odiose non è come essere soggetti a sistematico razzismo, o temere per la propria vita perché gay. Quando si diffondono idee odiose si sta deliberatamente promuovendo l’odio.

Qui però ci sono due grossi problemi. Non che la propaganda politica non debba essere protetta come le altre categorie, ma è l’idea in sé di una categoria protetta e di una legge contro il crimine d’odio ad essere profondamente viziata. La prima questione è pratica: le leggi contro il crimine d’odio aiutano le persone emarginate? La seconda è filosofica: cosa significano queste leggi in termini di individualità, identità e diritto all’autodifesa?

Se qualcuno su Twitter minaccia di uccidere il mio gatto perché odio i poliziotti, la cosa è certamente un problema, ma sarebbe un problema comunque, a prescindere dalle ragioni addotte. Se mi minacciano perché non mi piace il loro gruppo musicale o perché odiano i gatti, la cosa non fa alcuna differenza. A maggior ragione se passano dalle parole ai fatti. Abbiamo già gli strumenti per affrontare questa roba. Se la giustizia funziona (e ricordate che il crimine d’odio viene perseguito da questo stesso sistema), punirà chi ha ucciso il mio gatto, oppure mi darà gli strumenti per farlo, magari con un ordine restrittivo, una richiesta di risarcimento di danni civili o uno dei tanti strumenti disponibili. Fare differenza tra un crimine e l’altro porta a tutta una serie di problemi.

Prendiamo un caso esemplare: un assassinio per ragioni razziali. Anche in questo caso, eticamente e legalmente parlando, considerare il crimine in maniera diversa da un semplice assassinio, un assassinio per altre ragioni, è incredibilmente problematico.

Cominciamo dalla questione giuridica: giuridicamente, esiste differenza solo se il movente è diverso. Giuridicamente parlando, un movente o un altro non fa differenza; il fatto che si tratti di un crimine d’odio può indurre la corte a includere questo fattore come “aggravante”, cosa che la corte fa già di per sé. In altre parole, il sistema giuridico tiene già conto del movente quando emette una sentenza, e può tener conto di un movente razziale o di altra natura nella sentenza anche in assenza di leggi specifiche. Questo meccanismo è sufficiente a soddisfare qualunque richiesta di inasprimento della pena che dovesse essere ritenuto necessario (lasciamo da parte, per ora, il dibattito sulla giustizia riparatrice o retributiva).

A parte ciò, differenziare la pena sulla base del movente è un pessimo precedente. Le nostre leggi si basano sulla premessa filosofica secondo cui non esiste una ragione per uccidere qualcuno oltre l’autodifesa o la difesa altrui (l’attuale sistema prevede anche la difesa della proprietà, ma lasciamo da parte anche questo). Questo non solo conferma l’idea di uguaglianza davanti alla legge che sta alla base del nostro sistema giuridico ma, in teoria, alimenta anche il rispetto per la vita umana in generale. Quando facciamo differenza tra vite umane, stiamo minando questo principio e, cosa importante, stiamo dando allo stato il potere di formulare una scala gerarchica delle vite umane stesse. Allo stato attuale, lo stato dice che uccidere una persona per ragioni d’intolleranza è peggio che uccidere per altre ragioni. Ma come vediamo nel caso della recente legge approvata nello Utah, una tale gerarchizzazione non esiste ma dipende sempre più dalla volontà politica.

Infine, questa procedura è problematica perché ci costringe a sottoporre a giudizio, oltre all’accusato, anche l’identità della vittima. Al fine di determinare se si tratta di un crimine d’odio, dobbiamo stabilire prima se la vittima appartiene ad un gruppo oggetto di tale odio. Così si dà alla corte il potere di definire una persona, potere che invece dovrebbe restare unicamente nelle mani di tale persona. Un problema di tale pratica è che può portare ad attribuire ad una persona un’identità che essa stessa non riconosce. Per condannare una persona di un crimine d’odio, dobbiamo, ad esempio, stabilire che la vittima di un reato a movente razziale è per definizione negra, anche se quella persona ha varie discendenze e si considera altrimenti. Il che significa che, per poter avere giustizia, una persona è costretta ad accettare un’identità non di sua scelta.

Questo può portare a più discriminazione, non meno. Alcune persone hanno buone ragioni per nascondere la propria identità minoritaria, che un processo potrebbe costringerle a rivelare esponendole a dei rischi. Un transessuale potrebbe voler nascondere la sua identità di transessuale per evitare discriminazioni, identità che però un processo potrebbe costringere a rivelare in cambio di giustizia. Una sentenza, inoltre, non farebbe che vincolare, definitamente, una persona ad un’identità. Ma nella realtà le cose non sono così. In molti casi, l’identità di una persona non è X o Y, ma una sfumatura. Questo vale soprattutto per quelle persone LGBT che spesso riconoscono la fluidità della propria identità. Ancora, mettere nelle mani dello stato il potere di definire l’identità di una persona espone le persone la cui identità è marginale ad ulteriori repressioni da parte dello stato stesso.

Ma queste leggi servono davvero a dissuadere i crimini d’odio? No. Misure protettive ad hoc come queste indeboliscono la protezione vera e propria. Proteggendo, a parole, una minoranza, le leggi contro i crimini d’odio finiscono per indebolire altre forme di protezione e vuotare lo spazio politico. Molti pensano che l’approvazione di queste leggi, di per sé, risolva la questione, e pertanto abbassano la guardia, sono meno inclini alla lotta all’oppressione e meno preoccupati. Questo accade soprattutto in due modi.

La cosa più grave è che l’autodifesa diventa ingiustificabile agli occhi del pubblico. Quando lo stato dichiara solennemente guerra all’oppressione, l’opinione pubblica cambia, si pensa che un rappresentante di una minoranza non debba avere più ragioni per difendersi da sé. Caso esemplare è CeCe McDonald, che riguardava l’aggressione subita in un bagno pubblico da una transessuale, che ha reagito uccidendo uno dei suoi aggressori. Durante il processo, il fatto che il Minnesota avesse leggi contro il crimine d’odio è stato usato dagli avvocati degli aggressori per sostenere che la McDonald non aveva diritto di agire per autodifesa in quanto sufficientemente protetta dalla polizia. La giuria ha abboccato e la McDonald è stata condannata. Ma la polizia non era intervenuta se non quando la McDonald ha ferito qualcun altro. La polizia, apparentemente, ignora abitualmente i crimini contro le persone marginalizzate.

Secondo, l’approvazione di queste leggi esaurisce la volontà e l’attenzione politica, che invece potrebbe essere impiegata meglio per proteggere in altro modo queste persone. Da ricordare: queste leggi non aggiungono protezione perché aggressioni, persecuzioni, uccisioni, stupri e altre forme d’abuso sono già illegali. Queste leggi semplicemente aggiungono un aggravante al fatto compiuto. La volontà politica a favore delle minoranze è sempre limitata perché è più difficile che questioni di segmenti della popolazione più piccoli e meno influenti siano presi in considerazione, pertanto non abbiamo infinite possibilità d’azione.

Polizia e altre figure d’autorità (genitori, insegnanti, tutori), più che proteggere le minoranze, è probabile che le perseguitino, soprattutto quando si tratta di omosessuali. Pertanto, confidare nella polizia e nel sistema giudiziario per ottenere giustizia appare francamente ridicolo.

Ma l’aspetto peggiore è che queste leggi possono involontariamente alimentare il pregiudizio. Le persone condannate sulla base di tali leggi possono trasferire il proprio risentimento dallo stato che le ha condannate alle categorie protette. Imputano le proprie “sciagure” alle minoranze piuttosto che al governo, e questo alimenta il loro odio verso tali minoranze. Questo è particolarmente sentito in questo momento. E qui mi ricollego all’attuale accusa di censura contro la destra. L’accusa si ricollega al fatto che persone ideologicamente condizionate associano le minoranze al pugno di ferro dello stato. Una fantasia, certo. Ma che in parte spiega il vittimismo della destra, e perché la destra consideri censura il fatto che le minoranze denuncino certe espressioni contro di loro o quando controbattono. Lo stato dichiara, a parole, la volontà di soddisfare le richieste delle minoranze e quindi gli altri gridano all’oppressione. Non vedono la furberia: rappresentanti dello stato e minoranze sanno che questa volontà è di carta.

Quando poi le leggi dicono di voler proteggere determinate minoranze, di cui dà nome o descrizione, la cosa per riflesso genera un clima di esaltazione dei crimini contro tali minoranze stesse. Chi odia, ha adesso un obiettivo ben definito. Sa che, se preso, i suoi ci vedranno un “combattente” contro quelli che considerano il problema. I nazionalisti bianchi usano logore iconografie, atti visibili come le marce e le bandiere, per via dell’attenzione che attirano, un insano bisogno di identità alimentato anche da queste leggi. Leggi che danno loro l’attenzione che cercano, leggi che fanno di un criminale un martire.

In breve, le leggi contro il crimine d’odio non producono sicurezza. È più probabile, invece, che accrescano i problemi delle minoranze. Credo che stiano portando ad un precedente che permette allo stato di creare un ordine gerarchico nello status di individuo e vittima. Poco importa se alla base di quest’ordine gerarchico c’è l’intento di proteggere le minoranze; niente assicura che avverrà così. Il fatto che lo Utah abbia incluso i militanti della destra tra le categorie protette è un esempio di come questo slittamento può avvenire. Ed è solo l’inizio.

In both the US and UK, the political commentariat are gripped by two related phenomena: Brexit and Trump. It is now generally accepted that the rise of Trump and the vote for Brexit were driven largely by two factors. The first was anger at the unequal nature of modern capitalism, the second was fear of migrants, refugees, and the general ‘other’.This latter factor has been something that both the labour movement and wider political left in the UK and the US have struggled to combat.

Indeed, it can be argued that mainstream labour, social democratic, and left-wing parties have largely capitulated to the demands of the populist right and its anti-migrant stances. However, such rhetoric and politics are not a new phenomenon on the political left. Whilst it can be said that many younger leftists tend to embrace immigration (as illustrated by the calls to keep free movement or abolish ICE), the so-called ‘old guard’ and elected politicians have become either increasingly sceptical of migrants or have always been hostile towards them.

Solidarity, Friend (Unless You’re Not From Here)

The British Labour Party has always had something of a mixed relationship with migrants. Whilst leaders such as Tony Blair were initially welcoming of migrants from the so-called ‘Eastern European’ countries, the tone became much more hostile following Blair’s premiership in the comments of other party leaders such as Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband.

Indeed, Miliband was rather infamous for a mug the party sold that argued that immigration restrictions were in keeping with ‘proper’ Labour values. He was rightly criticised by many of the more left-leaning members of the party who saw the mug and Miliband’s further comments on migrants, which painted them as job stealers, as cynical, heartless electioneering. It was this wing of the party who would go on to help Jeremy Corbyn become the party’s current leader. Initially, there was much furore about Corbyn. Whilst I had many issues with his generally protectionist, nationalistic economic views, his views on immigration seemed to be much more positive than his predecessors.

Hopes of Corbyn being more open to migration were dashed however following the Brexit referendum and subsequent vote to leave the European Union on June 23rd 2016. In an act no less cynical and heartless than that of his predecessors, Corbyn claimed that EU free movement was “destroying working conditions” and that a Labour government would stop the “importation of cheap labour.” Finally, Labour recently announced that it would be firmly seeking to end free movement of people and labour from the EU into the UK in favour of ‘state-managed migration’. Besides the fact that the state cannot “manage” migration, such a move is an insult not simply to the Labour activists who campaigned to keep free movement but also to the foreign workers, students, and families Labour claimed to ‘stand in solidarity’ with.

The wider left and union movement also has form here. For example, the UK Firefighter’s Union representative Paul Embery has also called for the party to end free movement of people. Again, the same old, tired cliches are trotted out by Embery; he argues that both EU free movement, as well as more generally open borders, harms and “betrays” the working class by lowering wages (in spite of evidence to the contrary). Members of the wider centre-left such continuity Social Democratic Party (SDP) have also sympathised with this, claiming that all migration into the UK must be managed and capped at under 100,000 people per year lest the “traditional white working class” be purged from existence.

Life, Liberty, Happiness (Unless You’re Not From Here)

This sort of rhetoric is also present on the other side of the pond as it were (albeit in seemingly quieter and less frequent outbursts). Indeed, many socialists, left-libertarians, and anarchists have been amongst the most vocal individuals calling for the dismantling of the despicable organisation known as ICE and the opening of borders around the globe.

However, whilst many younger leftists are calling for the demolition of ICE and border restrictions, the ‘heroes’ they look up to seem to think otherwise. Many see Bernie Sanders for example as a progressive darling who wants everyone, no matter their class or background, to be happy. But, as noted by fellow C4SS contributor and coordinator Cory Massimino, Bernie’s language surrounding open borders and immigration more generally stands in direct opposition to his wish for the poor to be treated more justly.

In fact, Sanders has long-standing form when it comes to peddling in anti-migrant narratives. Reason magazine noted that whilst Sanders tried to position himself as the kinder, gentler candidate in the race for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, his opposition to the guest worker programme showed he was anything but, with Sanders commenting as far back as 2007 that he “didn’t understand” why the US needed to accept “millions of guest-workers” who in his eyes would lower wages and take jobs. Also, when asked by Vox Media’s Ezra Klein about whether open borders would be a good idea, Sanders responded by stating that open borders were a “Koch Brothers proposal” that would lead to the importation of cheap labour and the lowering of wages for everyone.

These and Sanders’ previous comments are, much like those of his English counterparts, classic anti-immigrant cliches that have been repeatedly debunked. Indeed, the opening of borders globally would double the world’s GDP and vastly diversify the economies of nations around the world. Far from destroying the notion of the nation-state, a more open US immigration system would actually solidify it through increasing economic competitiveness and making the country as a whole much more prosperous.

Concluding Thoughts

There is nothing new to these anti-migrant narratives being peddled by many on the left. You could argue that as soon as the USSR entered into the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that the notion of a ‘red-brown’ alliance would forever endure in left-wing circles at the expense of migrants, refugees, and minorities. What is new, however (not to mention worrying) is the near total capitulation to and endorsement of anti-migrant narratives by both liberal and leftist officials, all in pursuit of electoral power.

The left needs to stand up alongside libertarians, anarchists, and Georgists to challenge these narratives; otherwise, their claim of standing for social justice is bogus and nothing more than a phrase deployed to gain power at the expense of the migrants and refugees they claim to support.

This is the story of how I became an anarchist. I believe it to be fairly typical, though I could be wrong. Ultimately, these are merely my own, personal experiences — and, as such, these writings should not be taken as more or less than that. Dearest thanks and apologies to Miss Cleyre, as this essay follows in the footsteps of her own The Making of an Anarchist, though over a century later.

Additionally, I should note that this is something of an emergency response to William Gillis’s views on the current crop of anarchists, those radicalized in 2015 and later. I don’t doubt Mr. Gillis’s accounts of the past. How could I? There aren’t a lot of people around to contradict him, after all. We burn out quickly. Anarchists generally either get jailed, get killed, or give up in despair and frustration. Gillis hasn’t done that. He was raised by radicals, ran away at 13 to fight in the Battle of Seattle, and has kept up his work in the world for more than three decades. That’s nothing to sneer at, and he is a great treasure and resource for modern anarchy.

That being said, there are two things that I have a different perspective on than him. They are: the new antifascism and internet radicalization. I will give my take on the first now, and then explain my take on the second after. I will do this because the first can be explained easily, simply by telling the events as they occurred, in the order that they occurred, starting with the start — while the second requires a retrospective.

Gillis, not to be funny, liked antifascism before it was cool. Before 2015, it seems many leftists thought of antifascists as boring janitors. Gillis refuses to call himself an antifascist because he sees that as a title to be earned through struggle. I respect that position and don’t entirely disagree. However: I became an anarchist because of black-clad antifascists on the news. It wasn’t because of local activists. It wasn’t because of clever essays or well-researched world-changing books. It was because of people punching nazis. These are simple reasons to join a cause, but they’re simple reasons that will fill most anarchists with rage. Before 2015, I didn’t know that anarchism was a thing. I read any references to anarchists or anarchism as either a non-literal insult or a reference to anarcho-capitalism, because that was the only sort of anarchism I had ever been exposed to. If someone had handed me a clever essay or well-researched book, I wouldn’t have read it — any more than you are going to read an essay or book on how the jews did 9/11 or how ancient aliens killed Kennedy. I regarded radical political philosophies as being that level of insane, and that level of uninteresting. Local activists were even more off-putting, given their focus on identity politics and being studiously and unnecessarily weird. It also seemed that they were mostly interested in telling me that I’m a bad person for being white and male. Which, even if it were true, isn’t exactly a great sell for recruitment.

This all changed in 2015, with nazis in the streets and the news telling me that “black-clad anarchists” were fighting them. The news, strangely, thought that the people fighting the nazis were bad. I knew that this couldn’t be right. Years of popular media of every sort had taught me a simple fact: nazis are always the bad guys. Unlike a lot of other things that the media taught me, this has turned out to actually be a pretty solid message. And, being of Jewish descent, I felt that I had something of a personal interest in the outcome of the struggle.

I went online and searched for anarchism and antifascism.

I found r/anarchism, and a series of discord groups. They told me the basics, though I recommend that anyone and everyone stay away from either. Both are toxic cesspools which I feel have revealed to me the darker nature of humanity. In any case, I declared myself (rather quickly) to be an anarcho-communist, because that was what all of the people who wanted to fight nazis called themselves. I eventually encountered mutualists, though, and found myself arguing with them often. They all seemed rather smart in non-economic areas, but I didn’t understand their views on economics. I thought that they were nonsensical. Eventually,  slowly, I came to understand. Minoring in economics at college (where I was during this) certainly helped. I declared myself to be a mutualist, and abjured anarcho-communism.

Soon, though, summer was upon me. Summer meant the end of the school year at college. It meant me going home, to Portland. More notably, though, summer meant the beginning of another high tide of neo-fascist activity — and, with it, another massive antifascist attempt to push back that tide.

I was itching to join up with the antifascists, though I hadn’t the slightest idea how I might do so. I busied myself with a summer job, and waited for something to happen — or, perhaps, for myself to have some sort of grand insight into the whole situation, one that would put me into contact with the antifascists. As it happened, both occurred. The former happened first, though. Jeremy Christian killed Ricky John Best and Taliesin Namkai-Meche, and put Micah Fletcher in the hospital for a month. About a week later, Patriot Prayer had another rally. Three thousand people showed up to counter them. We all gathered in Chapman Park, to stand guard over the horror in our midst.

There was a line of police in the street and, across the street: Them. They flew their flags. They hung them from trees and waved them in the summer breeze. They held them between each other and they wore them on their clothing. I knew them all. I had seen them online. I don’t think I will ever forget the vexillology of hate. The flag of the Thin Blue Line was there. It was gripped between two camo-clad rally-goers, as close to the police as the police would let them be. The Kekistani flag was there as well. It was like the nazi battle flag, but with the red replaced with green and the swastika replaced with an E surrounded on all sides by Ks facing out. It is a beloved symbol of the 4chan set, as it had that perfect mixture of intense racism and very slight deniability. Five feet long and three feet wide, it waved in the breeze like a bad dream. Others were more traditional. The rune insignia of the American National Socialist party was held up above the crowd. The confederate flag. The american flag. Half the confederate flag with half of the american. The gold-and-black of the “anarcho”-capitalists. My mouth hung agape and my heart wouldn’t beat. I felt like I was looking at the future and the future looked an awful lot like the worst of the past.

The horror of nazis marching in your hometown is greater than just “Nazis!”. It’s knowing that spaces that you identify with don’t actually belong to you in any concrete way. They aren’t magically safe just because of familiarity. Psychological horror is about your mind betraying you. Body horror is about your body betraying you. Cosmic horror is about God betraying you. Nazi horror is about your home betraying you.

There were good parts of the experience, though. Most of the experience was just waiting. Four hours of waiting. Even next to that horror, people found each other in the boredom and talked. I met up with some college boys who gave me a shield and engaged with me in some drills. Someone handed out free ice-cream. Someone had dressed the pioneer statues up with black and red bandanas and black and red flags. It was the first time that I had gotten to talk with a great mass of other radicals.

It wasn’t all waiting, though. I saw some action. It was fantastic, though I shan’t be saying more about it here. That counter-protest got kettled at the end. I wasn’t there for that. I left barely 15 minutes before that because I’d been watching the police redo their formations for another 15 minutes before that. I’d gotten my hits in already, after all. They said on the news, later, that someone had thrown something; as though that worked as a proportionate response, even if it were true.

Though it wasn’t obvious to me at the time, the big difference between this experience punching nazis and more conventional forms of activism was that there didn’t appear to be any meetings. There were no purity tests. There wasn’t a massive time commitment, or the requirement to be friends with a bunch of overly earnest hipsters with unfathomably twee personal views. When someone at an antifascist rally decides to start ranting at me about the need for “balance between the sacred masculine and sacred feminine,” I don’t stand there and awkwardly listen to them be crazy at me. I just walk away. Of course, if you want to get serious about punching nazis, it becomes nothing but meetings and training and forming weird cliques where you have to bow to idiots with lots of social capital. But at the lower level, the level that almost everyone starts at, that just isn’t a thing. You show up, you make your own decisions, you bring your own equipment, and you hold your own beliefs.

This sort of radicalization could never be performed in the careful and measured way that Gillis is nostalgic for, where a small group of local activists would involve recruits in their daily practices and let them learn through doing. Gillis brought this up in a recent twitter thread. To summarize, his fear is that internet radicalization has brought a number of horrible, previously fringe, marxist ideas into the mainstream of anarchism. I think that this is true for the internet left, sure. But people involved in actual anarchism tend to be less dogmatically ideological and to have better ideas. They tend to be less opposed to markets, less interested in working with tankies, less interested in pseudo-vanguardism, less interested in “left”-nationalism.

The old way of doing things that Gillis promotes certainly avoids these excesses of authoritarianism, nationalism, and marxism as well. But it could never have created crowds of thousands or a new, mass movement. Mass movements in the streets are composed of everyday people who are standing up for themselves. Everyday people are not going to have read all of the same theory that you, personally, like. Crowds of supposed radicals online are composed of everyday people, except they’re not even necessarily willing to go out into the streets. They’re just willing to sit there, talking, online. When they go out into the streets, they start to maybe matter. And when the people in the streets start to stick around and form or join institutions, they definitely matter. So: don’t worry about the internet left. They’ll sort themselves out or go away.

Internet radicalization is simply not that big of an issue. It remains on the internet to a much greater degree than one might imagine. The people actually doing things have to learn from what they are doing and how things actually work. Having to actually put your ideas into practice always pushes you towards pragmatism, and pragmatism looks a lot more like me than it does BadMouse or some random edgy anarchist on a discord server. The internet is the realm of ideas, but the world is the realm of actions.

It was after this first experience with antifascism that I joined a formal collective. It was as simple as someone (yes, someone online) telling me that infoshops were a thing and that Portland had one. The one I went to was called “the Anarres” after the planet in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. While there, I listened to a truly terrible punk show, ingratiated myself with people by sharing out my best friend’s girlfriend’s weed (at the time she was dating a weed farmer), and made contact with the people doing door security. I acted ridiculously, but they were quite willing to agree to recruit me. That summer was a truly incredible one, and I wish I could share literally any of the details of it without incriminating most of the people involved and probably pissing off any number of others.

That collective ended as some inevitably do: in tears and recriminations. One of the people involved decided that it was their project and tried to add their trotskyist friend without any discussion or vote, right in front of all of us. Another guy and I objected, and I left. I was told that I wasn’t allowed to do that, because, actually, I was fired. I pointed out that firing me sort-of supported my underlying point. I would later find out from one of my friends that I retain from this experience that our would-be king had relapsed on their heroin addiction. My friend treats this as explaining the whole thing, but I don’t really understand. My friend tells me that I would if I was a former heroin addict like him and our would-be king.

While this all might sound like a disaster, we accomplished a lot before this happened, and I had to go back to college anyways. Through doing this, as though doing antifascism on my own, I learned. What I learned from that, in particular, is that centralization of power often takes the form of centralization of information. I also learned that just putting together ostensibly well-intentioned anarchists does not necessarily mean that you will do anarchy. Saying that you have no leaders does not make it so. Power must be fought, even power held by those who have declared it to be their intention to fight power. These are things that internet leftism ignores, and that are impossible to ignore for too long in the real world. It’s all different out there in the streets.

You become an anarchist in the streets, with your fists (to paraphrase a bizarre TV show) and nothing else matters. Well, not only with your fists. But certainly, that fact that you do do something is the most important part. You become an anarchist through the act of doing things. Anarchism is a practice, not just a theory. For the most part, it cannot exist as an internet-only thing. It exists where we gather together and defend each other. It exists where we assert ourselves, our power, and our freedom. It exists there and nowhere else. Anarchism is not a matter of the right words, or the right thoughts. It is not something that you can find in a book, it is not something that you can find in a youtube video, and it is not something that the internet can really pervert.

Anarchism is a way of acting, of being. This way is a natural way and a manifestation of a set of natural human impulses. It is impossible to pervert anarchism by perverting the theory of it because anarchism is not the theory. Anarchism is the action. The theory is helpful, yes, of course. After all, am I not trying to be a theorist? And do I not say that I am a certain sort of anarchist — a mutualist, rather than an anarcho-communist? The theory is important, because the theory guides the action.

This essay should not be read as a call to retreat from the internet, to avoid making youtube channels and essays and thinking and discussing. You should absolutely do all of those things, and we will probably lose if we don’t make sure that there are good resources to find videos, media, essays, books, discussions, advice, etc. But I am saying that these are not the most important thing. Theory only matters to the extent that it inspires action.

However, the theory is not a created thing, but a discovered one. If they took every anarchist in the world and shot us all, and if they took every anarchist text and burned and deleted them, there would still be people fighting power in a thousand years. Not only that, but there would be market anarchists among them. They would just call themselves something different. We can’t be defeated without fundamentally changing human nature, because our ideas are implicit within human nature.

C4SS coordinator Cory Massimino has been published in The Indpendent on the realities of immigration to the United States. Despite the repeated claims of President Trump, the fact remains that immigrants commit less crime than native-born Americans. Trump has recently threatened to close down the border with Mexico, maintaining his line that immigration across that border constitutes a “state of emergency” and a threat to the United States. Cory explains just how ridiculous this is:

The idea that closed borders and more fencing will increase border security isn’t supported by the facts. In his State of the Union address, Trump made this argument when he credited the decline in El Paso’s violent crime rate to the local border wall. But El Paso’s violent crime rate had already fallen 34 per cent from 1993 to 2006 — the year George W Bush authorised the wall.

Meanwhile, welcoming immigration works.

In 2009, only a year after the local border wall began construction, journalist Radley Balko explained how El Paso — then the third safest city in the country and currently the seventh safest city— proves common stereotypes wrong. To immigration restrictionists, El Paso could look like a recipe for violence and anarchy: it has the seventh largest immigrant population of any American city. Its population is over 75 per cent Hispanic and over 25 per cent foreign-born and its poverty rate is twice the national average. Many residents are likely undocumented. Yet Balko found that “El Paso’s embrace of its immigrants might be a big reason why the low-income border town has remained one of the safest places in the country.”

Read the full piece here.

Politicamente morti

Di Black Cat. Originale pubblicato il 22 marzo 2019 con il titolo Pacifism and the Pacifistic: a Tale of the Politically Dead. Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Ci sono ancora, purtroppo, anche tra gli attivisti di sinistra, persone inerti, pacifisti ad oltranza. Ovvero, persone non solo intenzionalmente, esplicitamente pacifiste: tutti i pacifisti sono tali. Ma persone irrazionalmente (in senso strumentale) avverse alla violenza. Faccio un esempio.

Una volta ho partecipato ad una manifestazione di protesta contro la violenza della polizia. L’idea era di arrivare al sindaco e dirgliene quattro riguardo il comportamento dei suoi sgherri. Quando sono arrivato c’era una novantina di persone sulla scena. Erano mascherate e si passavano un megafono urlando verso questa o quella finestra del palazzo in cui pensavano che si trovasse il sindaco. Non ho mai capito con quale criterio scegliessero le finestre.

Ad un certo punto, qualcuno decide di entrare. Ci troviamo davanti due problemi, entrambi significativi di questioni più ampie e generiche. Primo, c’erano due poliziotti a guardia dell’ingresso. Erano in uniforme bruna smilitarizzata e sembravano disarmati. Secondo, entrando avevamo perso circa due terzi del gruppo: dentro il palazzo eravamo una trentina.

Il primo problema era curioso, perché noi eravamo molti più di loro: in proporzione, quindici contro uno. E però il gruppo si è bloccato al checkpoint, come se ci fosse un muro invisibile e invalicabile. Gli altri cominciano a mulinare a vuoto, passandosi il megafono per urlare qualcosa. Qualcuno ha chiesto ai poliziotti di lasciarci passare. Perché? Come potevano fermarci? Avanzando in gruppo, potevamo spazzarli via. Io non mi son mosso perché sapevo che se l’avessi fatto sarebbe stata una lotta due contro uno e mi avrebbero arrestato. Ho pensato che forse anche gli altri pensavano la stessa cosa per cui occorreva solo coordinare l’azione generale. Mi sono avvicinato a qualcuno che conoscevo. Gente sempre pronta alla lotta. Uno di loro lo prendevano sempre in giro per le sue bravate tanto casuali quanto inutili. Poi ce n’era un altro che istruiva altri attivisti sull’uso delle armi. Uomini d’azione, almeno di facciata; con una reputazione da difendere, perlomeno. Ma si scusano e mi incoraggiano a partire. Sembrano ottimisti, come se non stessero cercando di tirarsi indietro. Intanto, sono arrivati altri quattro poliziotti. Ma anche così eravamo cinque a uno.

Il secondo problema è interessante perché ha a che fare con la loro presenza. C’era un sacco di gente mascherata! Perché, visto che nessuno voleva fare niente di illegale? Neanche la bandana nera fosse una bandiera, o un’uniforme. E con obiettivi puramente simbolici. Mentre passiamo accanto a questi estremisti da marciapiede, vado a parlare con alcuni di loro. Faccio dei gesti come per incoraggiarli, spiego cosa stiamo facendo e li invito a unirsi a noi. Dopotutto, erano lì proprio per quello. Forse stavano fermi perché erano confusi. Qualcuno borbotta delle scuse. Quasi tutti restano in silenzio, confusi, mi guardano imbarazzati, come se io parlassi una lingua sconosciuta. Quando siamo entrati nel palazzo, con noi c’era solo uno o due di loro.

Alla fine la polizia ci ha mandati via dall’ingresso. Tre o quattro hanno opposto una qualche resistenza simbolica. I poliziotti sembravano terrorizzati anche da questa blanda reazione. Ce n’era uno che mormorava “no, no, no, no, no…” in continuazione, come in trance. Sembrava che qualche urlo e qualche viso coperto bastasse a fargli gelare il sangue. Insomma, la protesta è morta lì, senza grandi imprese da una parte o dall’altra.

Prima di allora non avevo mai creduto a cose come “avere il poliziotto in testa”. Pensavo fosse un’accusa che i più irascibili rivolgevano ai compagni codardi. Ora capisco. L’arma principale dell’autorità, dello stato e (più concretamente) della polizia è la paura che noi abbiamo di loro, l’inerzia che ci è stata inculcata, la nostra convinzione profonda che si può agire solo col loro permesso.

Per questo la maggior parte degli estremisti, pur rifiutando l’idea di un pacifismo inerte, lo praticano. Temono l’azione violenta dell’autorità e, peggio ancora, la propria violenza. E questo non va bene. Questo pacifismo deve essere rifiutato non solo a parole, ma anche con gli atti. Abbiamo rinunciato al pacifismo, ora dobbiamo rinunciare ad essere pacifisti inerti.

Tutta la politica, compresa quella anarchica, è violenza organizzata. La politica è fatta di teorie su come dovrebbe funzionare la società, ma anche di pratiche per far sì che la società funzioni in quel modo. La società è un’astrazione. Non esiste. Esiste l’individuo. È come dire che non esiste un mucchio di sabbia ma i singoli granelli. “Società” è solo una parola usata per indicare grossi raggruppamenti di individui che interagiscono tra loro. Per far in modo che un certo individuo interagisca, o non interagisca, in un certo modo, occorre convincerlo ad interagire (o non interagire) in quel dato modo, magari con incentivi materiali. E siccome non puoi convincere ogni persona ad accettare un certo principio, foss’anche il più ragionevole, ogni società è costretta a adottare incentivi materiali, come l’offerta di un bene o di un servizio, o una minaccia.

Offrire un bene ha senso solo se l’offerta si può negare. Se non vuoi (o non puoi) usare la forza sull’individuo per impedirgli di prendere il bene, lui può appropriarsene. Puoi impedirgli di prenderlo (ad esempio, mettendolo in una cassaforte e rifiutandoti di dare la combinazione), ma lui può fare violenza su di te, può ad esempio batterti con un martello finché non gli dai la combinazione, se non usi la forza per fermarlo. Se non lo fermi, può anche forzare le tue difese, ad esempio con una fiamma ossidrica.

Anche l’offerta di un servizio può essere usata contro di te, perché ti si può impedire con la forza di accedere a tale servizio. Se non vuoi, o non puoi, farti valere, finisci alla mercé delle autorità, tanto per parafrasare il grande Fred Hampton a cui va tutto il credito. Un pacifista, uno che ha rinunciato pubblicamente all’uso della forza, non può essere credibile quando fa una minaccia.

Pertanto i pacifisti (e gli inerti, che sono il loro inconscio specchiato) non possono nulla contro quelle persone che non riescono a convincere a seguire i loro ideali. E il pacifismo in fin dei conti non è che la dichiarazione di resa davanti alla volontà di chiunque sia abbastanza forte da vincere qualunque altra persona che intenda reclamare la proprietà dei pacifisti stessi.

Tolti gli inerti, la società è composta di individui reciprocamente violenti che usano la loro violenza per organizzare la società secondo il loro volere, ispirandosi a modelli capitalisti, comunisti, anarchici, fascisti o altro. Tutta la politica è il risultato del processo con cui le fazioni, a cui appartengono questi individui violenti, concordano su come utilizzare (o evitare) la violenza per modificare la società.

Tutta la politica, compresa quella anarchica, è violenza organizzata. Dato che un pacifista non può nulla contro questa violenza organizzata, è una contraddizione in termini dire che il pacifismo può essere politico. I pacifisti devono ammettere che mentono, o che non riescono ad avere opinioni politiche, oppure attenuare il loro status di pacifisti (almeno portandolo al livello minimo e cercando di convincere altri a usare la violenza a loro vantaggio).

Questo è quello che fanno i pacifisti, soprattutto i liberal. Protestano con il sottinteso che, se le loro proteste vengono ignorate, qualcun altro userà la forza per realizzare i loro fini presunti pacifici. Fanno votare leggi che verranno applicate (con la forza) dalla polizia. Fanno gli scioperi perché sanno che se vengono attaccati qualcun altro interverrà in loro difesa. E però affermano di non essere in grado di usare la forza, negano quello che fanno, e ridimensionano così il loro potenziale politico.

Gli inerti, dal canto loro, per quanto non si pronuncino come i pacifisti, subiscono lo stesso destino. Gli inerti oggi combattono i fasci perché i fasci sono perlopiù privi dei simboli dell’autorità. Ma devono andare oltre e combattere anche la polizia. Devono uscire dalla sbornia dei liberal, e vedere il mondo per quello che è: una guerra; e una guerra da cui non possono sfuggire. Gli inerti devono uscire da questo stato se non vogliono diventare inutili come i pacifisti.

In analogia con il concetto marxiano di alienazione del lavoro, esprimo il concetto parallelo di alienazione della violenza. Che non è necessariamente il prodotto del vivere in una società capitalista, ma piuttosto del vivere in una società statualizzata, a prescindere dalla sua organizzazione economica. Se una persona viene punita per essersi difesa da sé, se si sente dire sempre che gli agenti dello stato sono lì per proteggerlo dalla violenza, se si sente dire che tali agenti non sono veramente violenti ma solo in apparenza… bè, alla fine uno arriva a pensare che la violenza non potrà mai interferire con la sua esistenza. Puoi pensare che non puoi fare violenza (perché ti è stato insegnato che saresti immediatamente fermato) e che neanche gli altri possono fare violenza su di te (per la stessa ragione). Da qui uno può facilmente arrivare alla conclusione che la possibilità di usare la forza non gli appartiene, e può altrettanto facilmente arrivare a vedere la violenza come un fatto raro ed evitabile, e non come parte intrinseca della vita.

Negandosi a quella lotta violenta che è intrinseca alla vita, si nega la propria esistenza; il pacifista è passivo, l’apparato dello stato ne fa un’altra vittima dell’impotenza inculcata e della morte vivente. Noi che ancora viviamo, noi ancora orgogliosamente violenti, noi siamo costretti a sentire il richiamo dei politicamente morti, che ci invitano ad unirci alla loro passiva nullità, al loro stile di vita insulso.

Gli inerti sono quelli che, pur negandolo pubblicamente, ascoltano il canto delle sirene. Sono quelli che non hanno ancora ucciso il poliziotto dentro la loro testa, per quanto dicano di odiarlo. Hanno alienato la loro violenza. Sono preda dell’impotenza inculcata. Ma l’aspetto comico dell’impotenza inculcata è che spesso basta un solo esempio contrario per eliminare l’indottrinamento. Ancora oggi in India si usano gli elefanti per trasportare tronchi. Solitamente, questi elefanti vengono catturati da piccoli e tenuti incatenati durante la crescita. Un elefante adulto può spezzare facilmente le catene, mentre uno piccolo non può. Una volta cresciuto, non sa di poter spezzare le catene. Sa solo che da piccolo non ci riusciva. A volte però capita che un elefante spezzi le catene accidentalmente. E allora sono cavoli amari. Soprattutto, per quello stronzo del padrone che pensava di possedere uno zombie di elefante.

It was only a matter of time before state legislatures jumped onto the bandwagon of “free expression” protection measures. Truly, laws like Utah’s recent bill to include political expression as a protected class in the state, have nothing to do with free expression itself. Instead, they are an outgrowth of the — largely false — paranoia that conservatives have become a marginalized class, derided by the media, excluded by the academy, and ignored on dating apps.

To recap that whole debate — studies have shown there is no significant bias against conservatives on campus, and I don’t think I have to tell you why it doesn’t matter if GOP bros can’t get laid. Really, this debate is a confusion of terms. Free speech is something I deeply value, but counterspeech isn’t censorship, and no one has a right to be given a platform for their speech — especially if that platform is tax-funded, and the speech is bigoted and hateful. If people don’t like you because your ideas are abhorrent, that’s simply not the same as being subjected to systemic racism or fearing for your life as a queer person. You chose to promote hateful ideas.

There are two deeper issues at hand here though. It’s not just that political persuasion doesn’t fit with other protected classes — it’s that the idea of a protected class and hate crime laws in general, is deeply flawed. The first issue is a practical one: do hate crime laws help people who actually are marginalized? The second is philosophical: what does the existence of hate crime laws imply about personhood, identity, and the right to self-defense?

If someone starts threatening me, maybe on Twitter, saying they’re going to kill my cat because I hate cops, that’s certainly a problem, but it would be a problem regardless of their reasoning. If they wanted to kill my cat because I didn’t like their band, or because they hate cats, it would be all the same to me. Even more so if they actually went through with it. The fact is, we already have mechanisms for dealing with this shit. If the legal system works at all — and remember hate crime cases are adjudicated through this same system — it’s going to punish this guy if he does kill my cat, or give me a way to stop him, whether through a restraining order, civil damages suit for harassment, or one of the other many existing mechanisms. Differentiating between these two crimes leads to a whole slew of issues.

Let’s assume we’re talking about the clearest cut case: a racially motivated murder. Even in this case, ethically and legally speaking, differentiating between the murder of one person and another is incredibly problematic.

To start with the legal issues: the only way that this is a meaningful legal distinction is if the intensity of the motive is different. Having a different motive listed does nothing legally speaking, rather hate crime laws instruct courts to include these factors as “intensifiers,” which the court already considers as a matter of course. In other words, the legal system already accounts for the intensity of motive in sentencing and could factor in racial or other bias as relevant without a single law on the books. This mechanism is sufficient to deal with any calls for increased punishment that some might think necessary to see justice done (putting aside debates about retributive versus restorative justice for now).

But further from that, differentiating punishment based on motive is a bad precedent to begin with. Our laws are based on the philosophical premise that there is no good reason to kill somebody beyond the defense of self and others (our current system often includes defense of property too, but let’s put that debate aside as well). This not only upholds the idea of equality before the law that undergirds our legal system but — in theory — fosters a respect for all human life. When we differentiate between different human lives like this, we undermine that principle, and — importantly — we give the state the power to set that hierarchy of lives. Right now, the state line is that killing someone for bigoted reasons is worse than doing so for other reasons. But, as we can see with Utah’s recent law, this hierarchy is in no way set and is entirely and increasingly dependent on public political will.

Finally, this procedure is problematic because it requires us to put the identity of the victim on trial with the perpetrator. In order to determine if this was a hate crime, we must know whether someone identifies as part of a hated group. This puts the ability to define someone into the hands of the court when that power should only ever be in the hands of the individual themselves. One issue with this is that it can lead to identifying people in ways which they would not choose. In order to find someone guilty of a hate crime, we have to say that, for instance, the victim of a race-based crime was definitionally black even if that person has a variety of ethnic influences and identifies otherwise. This means that, in order to receive justice, we’re requiring people to identify in ways they wouldn’t choose to.

This can also put some in a position that leads to further discrimination rather than less. Some minorities have good reason to hide their status as a minority, but by putting it on trial we bring it into the open and put them in danger. An intersex person may hide that part of their identity to avoid discrimination, but a trial like this requires them to put themselves in that further danger in order to receive justice here. Finally, in order to convict a court would need to say that the identity of the victim was either X or Y and therefore part of the targeted and protected group, or not. This fundamentally misunderstands how identity functions for individuals. In many cases, people are not definitively X or Y but some mix and spectrum of ways of being. This is especially true of LGBT people who often recognize the fluidity of their identity and don’t want it to be defined in these ways. Again, putting the power to define identity in the hands of the state further exposes marginalized people to state repression.

But what if these laws do actually help people by dissuading hate crimes? Not so. Nominal protection measures like these instead serve to undermine real protection. By paying lip-service to the protection of minorities, hate crime laws undermine other efforts at protection and use up valuable policy space. Many assume that hate crime laws have done something meaningful to solve oppression and so after they pass, people are less worried about, willing to fight, and on the lookout for oppression. There are two primary ways in which this occurs.

Most problematically, an assumption of protection undermines claims of self-defense by afflicted minorities. When the state makes such bold claims against oppression public opinion changes so that minorities are no longer expected to be in situations where self-defense is necessary. The best example here is the CeCe McDonald case in which a transwoman was attacked in a restaurant bathroom and fought back killing one of her attackers. Later in the trial, the fact that Minnesota has hate crime laws was used by the attackers’ lawyers to back up the claim that McDonald did not need to act in self-defense and should have been sufficiently protected by the police. The jury bought it and convicted McDonald. But the police weren’t on their way and didn’t come until she had injured someone else. The police, it turns out, make a habit of ignoring crimes against marginalized people.

Secondly, passing and promoting hate crime laws uses up political will and political attention that would be better spent on other efforts to protect minorities. A few things to remember here: Hate crime laws add no new protection to minorities because assaulting, harassing, murdering, raping and otherwise abusing them is already illegal. Hate crime laws merely add an intensifier once these things have occurred. Political will for helping minorities is always limited because the issues of smaller less powerful segments of the population have a more difficult time making it into policy in the first place, so we don’t have endless chances to try things out.

Rather than protecting minorities, police and other figures of authority (parents, teachers, probation officers) are more likely to abuse them, especially when it comes to communities like trans and intersex people. So, looking to the police and the courts as a means of protection is, frankly, laughable on face.

Most perniciously, hate crime laws can inadvertently intensify bigotry in areas they are passed. These laws embitter those who are convicted under them towards these communities by moving the blame in the mind of the convicted from the government to the protected group. This means that perpetrators now frame their “misfortune” as the fault of minority communities rather than the government and this intensifies their hatred of that group. This matters a lot right now. Remember that debate about censorship and right-wingers’ free expression? That debate is happening in part because bigots now associate marginalized groups with the powerful boot of the state. This is, of course, an illusion. But it explains some of the victimhood culture among right-wingers and the why they have the idea that when marginalized people complain about speech or engage in counterspeech it amounts to censorship. The state gives lip-service to enforcing the demands of the marginalized, and so the bigot feels oppressed. They’re just not in on the joke though: both state agents and people who are actually marginalized know this support exists in text only.

Furthermore, attaching the name or description of target groups to these laws increases the pride with which hate groups and hateful people view crimes against these groups. By focusing the action against these communities, those who oppose them are better able to target their activity. Since they know that if caught, they will be recognized for “combatting” those they see as the problem. White nationalist groups in part use overwrought iconography and visible strategies like marches and flags because of the attention it brings them, and hate crime designations feed this sick need for recognition as well. They want the attention that the hate crime designation gives them, and this makes them into martyrs for their cause rather than just another convict.

In short, hate crime laws don’t keep anyone safe, may be creating more issues for marginalized people, and lead to a dangerous precedent which allows the state to create identity-based hierarchies of personhood and victimhood. It doesn’t matter that these hierarchies were motivated by a desire to protect minorities — there’s no assurance they will continue to be used this way. Utah’s inclusion of right-wingers as a protected class shows us exactly how this shift could happen, and it’s just the beginning.

A new generation is growing up in a world where the deep-seated problems of society are at their most severe and most prevalent. Thousands are thrown in jail for victimless “crimes” by a police state which has been emboldened by an aging and desperate aristocracy who seem hell-bent on protecting the social order. Even more are killed in the crossfire of western nations bringing “democracy” to oil-rich nations too small to protect themselves. And society is plagued by a collective sense of emptiness.

Indeed, the world seems to be in a constant state of chaos and lingering unfulfillment. These problems aren’t new of course, but we are becoming wise to them – and that’s a significant distinction.

Generation Z is the new generation of people born roughly between the mid 90’s and early 2000’s. This is the first generation to really grow up with the internet, an invention which has already significantly changed the course of history in the short decades since it’s conception. On the surface level, popular culture may seem random and vapid, but when observed with a critical lens, we can see a generation collectively resisting the core tenets of the society before them is blossoming. The internet has transformed those growing up with it into something wholly unique and revolutionary. A generation which utilizes its own brand of humor to question the kings who still rule our world today in the guise of oil companies and corrupt governments.

Gen Z is darkly cynical, and this trait has subconsciously embedded us with a more honest view of the world. We see the governments of the world as the laughably oppressive authority it always has been. No longer do we just accept the shooting of innocent black men and incarceration of people with cannabis with the complacency of those before us. Instead, we use the power of the internet to transform minds in a way not done before. We carry the spirit of the change makers before us whether many know it or not. We aren’t satisfied with the middling lives office jobs scrape up for us, we know we can be more than that. The dozens of memes ironically expressing the deep troubles inside us all turns emotional dissatisfaction into subconscious but acutely present rebellion against the ruling class who keep us stagnant. It is this special mix of cynical hope and blunt reality that can guide us into the significant societal change that has not been felt since the civil rights movement.

While the millennial generation has begun to spin the wheels of change, it will be the final generation of the alphabet which will be the first to take full advantage of it, just as they have been the first to take full advantage of the power of the internet. We live in an almost satirical world which has been allowed to exist unchallenged for far too long, and only a generation which can make fun of the world they live in can begin to truly change it. There is a new hope, and that hope is Generation Z.