Good 2018 talk by Cory Doctorow on the impossibility of crypto-anarchy (or at least of crypto-anarchy alone).
Vera Ivanovna Zasulich (1851 – 8 May 1919) was a Russian revolutionary. She was friends with the nihilist Sergei Nechaev, tried to kill the governor of St. Petersburg, and co-founded the first Russian Marxist group.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
"There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
"To vote is to abdicate. To name one or several masters for a short or long period means renouncing one’s own sovereignty. Whether he becomes absolute monarch, constitutional prince or a simple elected representative bearing a small portion of royalty, the candidate you raise to the throne or the chair will be your superior. You name men who are above laws, since they write them and their mission is to make you obey."
Black originally wrote this in 1982. It could have been written today.
"the immiserating orderings of society have never been voted away, but that electoralism—for all the plaintive promises that we can both rabble-rouse and ballot-box—has regularly served as a mechanism of capture for potentially transformative social movements."
Some history on the anarchist tradition of abstention candidates
"As to the anarchist position that universal suffrage did not legitimize authority, it is worth taking seriously. ... Even if we disagree that authority is never legitimate and Dewey’s self-aware public has been achieved, not all uses of authority — especially when it comes to state violence — can be justified by the vote. To do so would be to treat suffrage as a mythical unquestioned good rather than a reasonable choice."
This is an audio documentary series. I've listened to the first two episodes. It is well produced, and I understand Trump a tiny bit better now.
The genesis of the Gadsden flag comes from a May 1751 editorial cartoon from Ben Franklin’s newspaper. It ran alongside a story calling for colonial governments to unify, act as one.
Today, it means almost the opposite.
On what it means to be grill pilled. "Basically, just a few people treating each other decently is about all we can hope for."
More than anyone ever wanted to know about Nick Fuentes and his Groypers.
Joshua Clover, as usual, with the good takes on the current riots.
"To Trump, the Bible and the church are not symbols of faith; they are weapons of culture war. And to many of his Christian supporters watching at home, the pandering wasn’t an act of inauthenticity; it was a sign of allegiance—and shared dominance."
The New Yorker's 2013 profile of Qassem Suleimani. He loved war and intrigue, and he died doing what he loved.
Just learned about August Willich who once challenged Marx to a duel (apparently because he thought Marx was too conservative to be a leader of international communism) before traveling to America to fight as a Union general in the civil war.
I started reading about his disagreements with Marx, but got bored.
An interview with Joshua Clover (author of Riot. Strike. Riot) on the biopolitical turn toward eco-nationalism
Nobody likes terrorists
The only social policy the Russian state pursues consistently is the policy of atomization. The state dehumanizes us in one another’s eyes. In the state’s own eyes, we stopped being human a long time ago.
"Haiti's land and people were abused when it was a colony of slaves. The world then shunned it with embargoes and independence debts when it was a new nation. And today Haitians in the DR experience racism that is overt enough to be enshrined in law."
I don't know anything about this organization, but I like their primer on dual power.
"Dual Power institutions come in two flavors: alternative institutions and counter-institutions. ... The two kinds of Dual Power institutions do this from different (but complementary) angles. Alternative institutions meet a need directly. Counter-institutions challenge capitalism’s way of doing things. Alternative institutions start making a system that’s just, while counter-institutions work against one that’s unjust."
I have a much more positive view of left-libertarianism, but I also always enjoy Alex Strekal's criticism.
Jerry would later invest in Apple Computer and become a multimillionaire.
One of my favorite Chris Hedges articles I've read (though most of it is Cone quotes):
"The lynching tree is America’s cross. What happened to Jesus in Jerusalem happened to blacks in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Kentucky. Lynched black bodies are symbols of Christ’s body. If we want to understand what the crucifixion means for Americans today, we must view it through the lens of mutilated black bodies whose lives are destroyed in the criminal justice system. Jesus continues to be lynched before our eyes. He is crucified wherever people are tormented. That is why I say Christ is black."
"By doing away with single-family zoning, the city takes on high rent, long commutes, and racism in real estate in one fell swoop."
"When I heard that 9.7% of San Francisco voted for Trump, I was puzzled, because does San Francisco even have that many cops?
"Turns out, no: 26k Trump voters, 2,100 cops. So the rest of them must work for Peter Thiel and his Brownshirt Combinator."
I just started reading Robert Paxton's book.
On the origin of the word 'capitalist'
David S. D'Amato's collection of 19th-century individualist anarchist quotations.
Churches, as already-existing social centers, represent one of the better chances of actually providing an alternative source of crisis counseling, protection, and aid which could displace the police in many of the roles they are the worst at.
Citations Needed is good.
"The press, both local and national, humanizes some victims of state or corporate violence, while demonizing others. Despite good intentions and seemingly without noticing, the media all too often create tiered systems of moral worth by trying to find 'the perfect victim.'"
"It is obviously true that one cannot understand the complexities of contemporary geopolitics and imperialism simply by reading Lenin and Bukharin. But it is equally true that if one ignores their key insights, it is not possible to make much sense of the otherwise bewildering set of events that is currently being played out on the international chessboard and, just as importantly, to come up with a coherent political strategy to oppose militarism, war, environmental destruction, and all the other horrors that capitalism creates. The framework Lenin and Bukharin developed a hundred years ago, taken as a methodology and not as a set of dogmas, retains its relevance for activists today."
Sheldon Richman got an introduction to the libertarian left and free-market anti-capitalism published on The American Conservative back in 2011.
This essay by Spencer Sunshine is over ten years old now, but still very informative on national-anarchism and other attempts at fascist use of leftist ideas.
"The danger National-Anarchists represent is not in their marginal political strength, but in their potential to show an innovative way that fascist groups can rebrand themselves and reset their project on a new footing."
This American Life did a good bit on a free speech kerfuffle at the University of Nebraska where a sincere and sympathetic teenager tabling for the right-wing Turning Point USA was confronted and berated by a staff member/grad student for being a 'neofascist Becky'. But the program does not merely paint TPUSA in a sympathetic light, it also points out some ways in which the rights of white students are disproportionately protected.
The program also strongly implies that the grad student in question (who was removed from her teaching position after the incident) is affiliated with the activist group (or 'brand' for lack of a better term) called Betsy Riot. It looks like a liberal antifascist and anti-gun group which describes its members as "feminist patriots" and "punk patriots" (so maybe emphasis on the liberal). https://betsyriot.com/
A history of Troy Southgate's "national-anarchism" initiative. "Its importance lies in the case study it supplies of fascism as an amorphous and continually metamorphosing phenomenon." The paper concludes with a warning to anarchist activists they take care not to be national-Bolshevized.
Graham D Macklin. "Co-opting the counter culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction." Patterns of prejudice 39, no. 3 (2005): 301-326.
This is an anarcho-capitalist rap metal group. Politics aside, I like them better than RATM. See also this interview with the frontman by Reason: http://reason.com/archives/2017/04/20/meet-eric-july/
Episode of the Citations Needed podcast on the trope of using Trump to justify the more subtle version of the same thing.
"The desire to revamp the image of the pre-Trump Republican party and the United States in general – a concept Ali Abunimah coined “Trumpwashing” - is a favorite rhetorical tic of Russia-obsessed democrats and centrist extremists who’s primary charge is treating the phenomenon of Donald Trump as anomalous from American history, rather than its most pure, and even logical, manifestation."
The new Inquiry's reading list "created by a group of Black, Brown, Indigenous, Muslim, and Jewish people who are writers, organizers, teachers, anti-fascists, anti-capitalists, and radicals" for the Trump era.
One of the funniest r/ChapoTrapHouse threads ever.
A profile of RAM, a white supremacist street-fighting club that's been attending many of the right-wing rallies around the country lately.
"Kiyoshi Kuromiya, born in a Japanese American internment camp in 1943 in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, was a prominent underground civil rights figure and gay rights activist. Kuromiya worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. in the mid-sixties and tending to King’s children in the aftermath of his assassination. He was a founder of Gay Liberation Front –Philadelphia, worked with the Black Panther Party to advocate for gay rights, co-authored a book on a utopian future through technology with Buckminster Fuller, and was a leading pioneer in the fight to promote AIDS awareness after his own diagnosis later in life."
An interview with Bill Greenshields.
BuzzFeed gained access to a bunch of Milo Yiannopoulos's emails which give insight into how the Milo/Breitbart machine worked.
See also my list of guides to the alt-right:
http://americancynic.net/log/2017/3/2/guides_to_the_alt-right/
Good interview with Mark Bray on Democracy Now! in which he does the important work of correcting the liberal media's pronunciation of antifa (seriously, while I'm sure there's a lot of regional variation in pronunciation, every time I hear anTEEfa I can't help but think the speaker is an uninformed pundit (like "Black Block Anarchist" after Seattle '99). Amy Goodman even changed her pronunciation at the end of the clip, because she's a pro).
Part 2 is here: https://www.democracynow.org/2017/8/16/part_2_antifa_a_look_at
He also has an article up on the WaPo website called "Who are the antifa?": https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/08/16/who-are-the-antifa/
Good footage of the racist march and rally in Charlottesville, includes interviews with Christopher Cantwell and some of the other Fascists involved.