Section 1: The composition of insurrection

What is insurrection?

'The goal of any insurrection is to become irreversible. It becomes irreversible when you've defeated both authority and the need for authority' (CI)

'The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides. To no longer wait is… to enter into the logic of insurrection' (CI)

'It's enough just to say what is before our eyes and not to shrink from the conclusions' (CI)

What strategies and orientations can develop insurrectionary anti-politics into a movement actually able to destroy global capitalism? This is the question taken up by The Coming Insurrection, as well as by author such as Bonanno. I aim here to use insights from The Coming Insurrection to open onto discussions of various aspects of the future of insurrection. The purpose will be to think through strategic implications of attempting to use a mainly expressive form of action for strategic purposes, and ways to deal with the obstacles faced in the process.

But first of all, what is insurrection?

Insurrection differs from revolution in being an attack on the existence of state power, rather than a seizure of such power. It follows in the tradition of Walter Benjamin's idea of 'law-destroying violence', which is directed against the capability for use violence to make or preserve laws. It is not instrumental violence to subordinate others, but rather, exists beyond the mythology of statist violence, destroying the power of death for the sake of the living. Bonanno's theory of insurrection relies on a concept of social war, which refers to an irreducible antagonism between included and excluded. Insurrection for Bonanno involves the rejection of alienation, especially of subordination to production, and involves both an affirmation of life and desire and assault on the structures of power. 'Unfortunately civil war is an obligatory road which must be passed in any historical moment of profound, radical transformation'. Yet it must also be playful, generating excitement and a sense of empowerment against the social system as death-machine. Insurrection pits active force against reactive force, and is the point of explosion of accumulated discontent.

It is fundamentally connected to non-renunciation, the refusal to compromise on desire. It is thus connected to an active, affirmative type of desire. It is also fundamentally connected to affinity-networks and bands, as opposed to organisations. It most often arises from standpoints of exclusion or marginality, as opposed to those which are included but exploited. Insurrection has at least three political components. It has an affective or expressive component: attacks which respond to indignity and violation, which are psychologically liberating and inspiring. It has a strategic component: it imposes costs on repressive or oppressive forces, and serves to carve out spaces of autonomy by altering the balance of forces. And it has a prefigurative component, with each act of insurrection pointing towards and attempting to produce in the present a total insurrection resulting in the destruction of the system. Insurrectional agency is effective when the three components are articulated. And this creates issues of their interconnection and the passage between them: how insurrectional acts which are affectively motivated and expressive can nevertheless serve instrumental purposes such as carving out spaces of autonomy and imposing costs, and how and when these spaces and costs reach the point of bringing down the system. We can think of issues ranging from summit protests to squat defence to the SHAC model as examples of how the first connection comes about. The second is more tentative, but raises questions of why for instance the Greek insurrection fizzled out after three weeks. Is there a time-limit on insurrections in the global North, and how can it be overcome?

Just-in-time repression

'The lid on the social kettle is shut triple-tight, and the pressure inside continues to build. From out of Argentina, the specter of Que Se Vayan Todos is beginning to seriously haunt the ruling class' (CI)

There is no question that insurrection is growing. This is because the paths of reform and revolution are failing. At present states are becoming less attuned to social struggles, because they are seeking comparative advantage to attract global capital. They are increasingly reluctant to make the concessions they would once have made, to keep social peace. They will accept immovable objects (the Peruvian Amazon struggle for instance) – but only when they are absolutely forced to; and one can normally expect all viable tactics of repression to be employed first. The field of insurrection thus comes to overlap with the fields of reform and revolution, which can succeed only by way of insurrection (though the revolutionaries and reformists are slow to learn this).

Things have changed. Gramsci's old notion that the frontline of capitalism is now buttressed by the 'trenches and fieldworks' of civil society is no longer valid. It spoke of a Fordist and corporatist era which has passed. Today, capitalism is once more engaged in a war of movement. More than this: it is like an army which has all its troops on the frontline. It has corroded all its deep supports, such as legal due process and civil rights, as too costly to maintain. It has pushed its forces of repression further forward, onto a frontline where people can barely speak out without facing repression. But behind this frontline there is an open field all the way into the system's territory. The mentality of just in time production has been expanded into the fields of politics, security, repression. Just-in-time security means events like 911 are always just about to happen, only just averted – in Powell's words, they had the information it would happen, but there was too much information to handle, to filter.

So, too, the field of protest: the frontline forces are vicious but are always only just in time to prevent an event. Unexpected events, like the unrest on the first of Britain's student protests, the Melbourne taxi drivers' protest which shut down the city, the 'Anonymous' DDoS attacks on Wikileaks' persecutors, the flash mobs which periodically hit major cities, can flare up out of nowhere, taking the state completely by surprise. Emerging like a snake from the spaces of quiet suffering, they pose a constant threat of 'unknown unknowns' the system cannot handle. The closer insurrection is to these unpredictable modalities of protest, the less it can be pre-empted, and the more the vast space behind the front lines is open to it.

This provides opportunities for exciting events. But there is also a certain danger in the upturn. Anarchists are not affected by who's in power, but the wider field of potential resisters clearly are, and this in turn affects things like the numbers resisting and the general level of energy. This ultimately seems to affect anarchists too. Take the situation in Britain. Today, there is a wave of militant resistance to the new Tory government's cuts programme, with impressive actions in London. Yet it is strange that this has come only now. Things were no better under Blair. Then, a militant opposition emerged (in events like J18 and Mayday), precisely because the broad constituency of resistance was decomposed by Blairism's clever use of incorporation and lesser-evilism. Now, because of a recession and a Tory government, the masses are moving once again. But the future does not lie with those who will be quieted by a change in government. The future lies with those who do not compromise – which is to say, with the network of bands. The danger we face today is the reabsorption of the bands into a movement of resistance hegemonised by the mass. The opportunity is that people can be drawn from the mass into the network of bands by the experience of struggle.

Texts like The Coming Insurrection are charismatic. They resonate on the basis that they make claims which appeal to the reader, subjective truths which are otherwise hidden. Insurrections, too, are charismatic. And it is impossible to know in advance how resonant they will be, given their exclusion from public discourse by the dominant system. Resonance with the hidden transcript, or with psychologically repressed material, or with groups denied a voice, is hard to predict. Insurrection is also expressive. 'Instrumental action relates to only one sphere of the lifeworld, another sphere being… [the] expressive'… [T]he pursuit of expressive authenticity is a form of protest against disenchantment, which is brought about by the rationalization of the lifeworld' (Routledge and Simons 476). The replacement of instrumental with expressive orientations should be one of an insurrection's goals. There is something inherently appealing in meeting state violence with a counter-attack, something which is missing in other responses, for all their usefulness and bravery. 'It is high time for them to understand that we refuse to put up with this abuse any longer' (Black Block Papers, p. 80).

The experience of the excluded and the right to be angry

'We can no longer even see how an insurrection might begin… our sense of the war in progress [is dulled]… We need to start by recovering this perception' (CI)

'No one can honestly deny… this was an assault that made no demands… and it had nothing to do with politics' (CI)

The intensity of experience sustains insurrection beyond its specific goals. Above all, insurrection is a question of intensity. In bourgeois rhetoric, intensity and violence fuse into one another. Intensity is frightening to the system because it does not take part in the politics of inclusion, it does not sell itself to power. The images of the “violence” of insurrection thus fuse real attacks with imaginary violence, with the state's fear of its own collapse.

There are of course dangers of insurrection slipping into roles and reproducing the system's violence, but these dangers are overplayed by critics. Insurrection is not at all a masculine thing, a performance of social roles – it is all about the right to be angry. Similarly, activism of whatever kind if not above all a publicity stunt, not a performance for the mass or state gaze, but something else, an expressive action, an act against or in radical antagonism with the state, imposing costs on it. Fighting the police as enemies stands in the tradition of indigenous warfare, of "popular defense" in Virilio's sense, not the modern warfare which exterminates the enemy as irreducibly evil or which closes space to prevent action.

Another criticism we can safely ignore is the leftist objection that insurrection is an action of a minority, and that images of insurrection are alienating to the majority. Insurrection is performed to bring about a better world, it is not performed for the gaze of the Other. There is no reason insurrectionists need to be accountable to the majority; we are the excluded, those who are not part of the community, so the majority is not part of the same collective as we are. Why should the excluded always be the ones expected to dialogue, compromise, appeal to others? The system has made clear it has no time for such things. It is putting itself further and further from any possibility of dialogue. Leftists tend to assume that capitalist power is nothing but the alienation of our own power. This is true, if the “we” is cast broadly enough (it is alienated life), but it is not maintained by the insurrectionists, the people who resist; it is maintained by others, whose positions are incommensurable with ours. They are not simply seduced by false consciousness or forced to alienate their labour; they actually desire the present system. Hence, we should not imagine that all of this will dissolve in the event that individualism is replaced by collectivity and struggle. For one thing, insurrectional struggle is on a certain level very much individual.

But more crucially, the structural analysis underpinning this view is flawed. Leftism makes excuses for people's reactionary ideologies by taking a starting point of ideological submersion as axiomatic, and imagining community or struggle to be a messianic antidote; if anarchists criticise people for being reactionary, they're prone to call us 'moralistic' (meaning we have our own ethical principles, instead of a historical teleology). Of course, insurrection often transforms those who are a part of it, and many people go through moments of revelation in the face of police brutality. Yet insurrectional bands are most often formed from prior individual refusals; the refusal constitutes the community, it does not result from it. On the contrary, movements which start out as reformist or reactionary do not miraculously become insurrectionary simply because people come together. This is because the real basis of revolt resides in desire, not community. People are not simply products of ideology and subjectification until they miraculously break its spell in revolt; the system needs hooks in desire to draw people in. People vary in the degree to which their desires resist this process of attraction. The facts that the social relations have to be continually reproduced, that fetishism is incomplete and can break down at any point, that systems left to their own devices go into entropy, do not at all affect the fact that the system will not collapse while those who desire it exert dominance over those who do not.

The included (including people who are exploited, but nevertheless identify with the system) have betrayed insurrection time and again. In doing so, they have harmed their own position as well as ours. If the included do not care enough about the most basic rights and needs of the excluded, or do not have the power to force the system to concede – why on earth should the excluded hold back, out of concern for their approval? In any case, the mass doesn't think, it just reacts. Greek “public opinion” supported unrest while it happened, then fell on board with the government line. British “public opinion” was massively against Thatcher at the height of crises, only to return to her at elections. We need a more constant compass than this. The Coming Insurrection is right: there is no prior community, no “we”, only the affinity of those who are linked in aspirations and actions. The ground of resistance is not the community or the majority, but each person's right to be angry and to resist, based on our difference, our refusal, and our non-renunciation. We shouldn't feel a need to form links with others who have no desire to form links with us. Against alienation, yes: alienation from ourselves, from others who resist, from the environment… but separating ourselves from reactive force and those who bear it is not alienation, it is autonomy. In Clastres' account, indigenous groups maintain autonomy by separating not only from the state form but even from one another, to defend the autonomy of each group. We need to get past the simplistic association of separation with alienation. Of course we can, and should, ask how, if at all, we can bring over some of the people who aren't resisting to our side. But we must not subordinate our will to theirs, nor imagine we're doing good by indulging their self-limiting aspirations or their reactionary beliefs, in other words, by compromising on our own desires. We aren't all in it together

Short of the final collapse of state and capitalist power, the maximum effect of insurrectionary actions occurs when it is nevertheless pushed back, rendering the effects of such actions cumulative, and expanding open or liberated spaces. These strategic effects are difficult to produce, and can only come from a fusion of the brain with the heart: using expressive actions to produce instrumental improvements, which in turn reinforce the expressive states productive of further action. Strategy comes easy to organised movements because they can turn mobilisations on and off. It is harder for expressive movements and bands, but it is still possible, because expressive affects have triggers and varying intensities.

Insurrection rejects the state's claimed monopoly on force, largely because it pursues a diffusion of all forms of social power. The mainstream attitude to violence in the global North is like the Victorian attitude to sex. There is at once an emotionally invested prohibition, replete with condemnations and silencings, and an attempt to restrict its legitimate expression to a confined proper context in which enjoyment and excess are excluded… and a proliferation in practice, from structural violence to police brutality to organised crime. The ridiculous outrage about insurrectional violence is not only hypocritical – it isn't really about violence at all. It's about what are known as 'feeling rules', in particular, a prohibition on feeling angry against the system.

A qualification, however. There is a lot of talk in The Coming Insurrection about events, decisions, subjective truths and so on. This is a big theme in French philosophy today, probably lifted from the work of the Maoist Badiou, and can be traced back to the debate between the fascist Schmitt and critical theorist Walter Benjamin. The problem with the use of decisionism in insurrectionism is that the act of decision, the 'sovereign decision' as Agamben calls it, is constitutive of the state. Hence why Schmitt, the founder of this concept, could still be a fascist. We need to be clear on how our anti-politics is different from that of the statist suspension of the ethical, the sovereign decision. For Agamben, this distance is created by being all-inclusive and immanent, which is to say, it rejects normativity, it diffuses ethics. For Virno, by a kind of decision which is not sovereign, but which simply emerges from a distributed network. For Benjamin, in the difference between a violence which founds law and a violence which destroys law, which is to say, which diffuses power. I think, too, that the Invisible Committee's version is different: we do not make the decision, it takes hold of us. It 'will occur to us rather than being made by us'. What these views have in common is diffusion, the replacement of concentrated relations with diffuse relations (ethics for Agamben, process for Virno, violence for Benjamin). Decisionism is associated with the concentration of power, and hence is part of statist reason. We need instead a diffusion of the power to decide.

Insurrection and band societies

'the decomposition of all social forms is a blessing. It is for us the ideal condition for a wild, massive experimentation with new arrangements, new fidelities' (CI)

'We're setting out from a point of extreme isolation… FIND EACH OTHER. Attach yourself to what you feel to be true. Begin there' (CI)

'All affinity is affinity within a common truth' (CI)

There is a special kind of group which is the agent of insurrection. I have variously seen it called a band, neo-tribe, neo-sect, bund, pack, fused-group, subject-group. Anarchist groups are, at least partially, band societies. For some, in all or most aspects of life; for others, as the most emotionally intense aspect of lives also lived less intensely in other political forms. As Virilio observes (Speed and Politics, p. 4), street insurrection reproduces the raiding party of our ancestors. Anthropologists such as Ingold have shown that bands are fundamentally different from societies in the usual sense. The band involves a way of constructing social relations which does without the usual hierarchical props. It is absolutely immanent to everyday life. Militant resistance gets its power from its articulation in everyday life, not only in the moments of insurrection themselves, but in the full set of autonomous practices of which they are a part. (What is sometimes attacked as 'lifestyle activism' is actually the embodiment of this immanence). The band as a social form seems to reappear wherever organisation isn't fully implanted. Bands seem to come naturally to children. Anarchists, and far-leftists too, usually end up in bands, even when they want organisations (like Makhno for instance).

Anarchist bands are somewhat distinct from indigenous band societies, being rather closer to the 'bund'. Schmalenbach's account of the sect or 'bund' suggests that it achieves a social form irreducible to community and society, held together by a special kind of emotional bond he terms 'communion'. Immediate emotional experiences (often produced through ritual) hold together such groups without the mediation of abstract identities or organisations. Existing without a basis in ascriptive ties such as kinship, the bund cannot exist independently from the social acts which constitute it. It must constantly be re-enacted, or disappear. It is thus an absolutely immanent form of social life. Acts of insurrection constitute insurrectional bands, playing the function of ritual. Bands are counterposed to rational, linear history (since are based in immediacy of affective fusion, not representation).

Perhaps the most commented-on discussion in The Coming Insurrection is the critique of milieus and the argument for communes. Milieus are constituted by the problematic aspects of many activist groups, such as informal hierarchy. They are deemed reactionary because they betray truths and are only concerned with their own 'sad comfort'. In contrast, communes arise when people find each other and forma common path. A multitude of communes could replace all the various institutions of the dominant system, forming an entire counter-society. 'The commune is the basic unit of partisan reality. An insurrectional surge may be nothing more than a multiplication of communes, their coming into contact and forming of ties'.

This raises the question of the transition between the two. When do milieus turn into affinity-groups and vice-versa? The difference seems to be defined in terms of their animating social logic and emotional formation. Crucially, communes are defined by 'the spirit that animates them', 'the density of the ties at their core', and not by 'what's inside and what's outside them'. This defines them in distinction both from right-wing networks and from states and other hierarchies. It also establishes them as very close to the categories of band, pack, neo-sect, fused group, subject-group, and bund. A 'truth' is here associated with the intense, immediate emotional connection at the heart of these kinds of groups. The loss of this leads to a 'milieu' as direct connection is replaced by some kind of normativity.

In other words, insurrectionists, communes, are always bands. But not all bands are insurrectionist. Formally, all band societies are rather similar. But they differ in how their identity is constructed. The autonomous kind of band should be distinguished from those types of 'sect' and 'neo-sect' which claim to be the one true way, viewing themselves from the start as something akin to a universal church. Band societies can be reproduced only if they coexist with other bands in a terrain of multiple voices and horizontal connections.

Networks and the everyday

'The maintenance of the self in a permanent state of deterioration, in a chronic state of near-collapse, is the best-kept secret of the present order of things' (CI)

'We count on making that which is unconditional in relationships the armor of a political solidarity as impenetrable to state interference as a gypsy camp' (CI)

If the band is the basic unit of insurrection, networks are necessary to reproduce it across time and space. In The Coming Insurrection, it is argued that we can no longer find each other in sites such as the factory; instead, affinity is formed through everyday insubordination. It has long been argued that coming-together as affinity-groups is already an act of insurrection; Hakim Bey, for instance, views it as defiance of the capitalist distribution of time. The Coming Insurrection stands in this tradition of emphasising affinity.

Major insurrectional events involve bands, but also swarms. The band coexists with the swarm; swarms emerge when bands come together for an event. Movements over time switch between swarms and bands. When swarms decompose, bands tend to come to the fore. A swarm may arise when a number of bands coalesce. The transition between the two requires a degree of critical literacy, dialogue, inclusiveness, avoidance of silencing. Inclusive networks are the means to make bands into swarms and swarms into bands.

If everyday life forms a site in which insurrection can be built, it follows that insurrection is not limited to those acts the system demonises as 'violent'; it also encompasses an entire range of 'nonviolent' approaches: building links among excluded groups and bands, reconstructing subsistence economies, 'social weaving', emotional healing, forming bands and networks which create their own values, the construction of autonomous spaces. The strategies proposed by authors such as Colin Ward and Hakim Bey, or autonomist strategies of 'exodus', of defecting from capitalism and withdrawing life-energies and creativity from it, are not counterposed to those of insurrection, but operate as its everyday level, its condition for reproduction. In practice, insurrections emerge from, and extend, networks of power and meaning already operating in everyday life, often submerged or hidden. (This also suggests that insurrection is in continuity with, not entirely separate from, resistance). It is easy enough to find useful things to do, other than actually fighting the system on the frontlines. But this cannot be a substitute for insurrection. Ultimately, the state will respond with violence to the recomposition of forces it cannot control, and the recomposed bands will either have to deal with dispossession or fight – and defeat – the state. We need to radicalise the idea of diversity of tactics as it applies to protests, embracing interdependency and the insufficiency of each actor to the total struggle as part of a broader radicalisation of interpersonal relations. Not everyone can fight the police; not everyone can forego fighting the police.

Insurrection should thus be part of a broader process of reclaiming life from capitalism and the state. This is not to say, however, that unrest short of a final destruction of the system is unnecessary or unproductive. Small, apparently ineffectual insurrections, often deemed ritual protests by researchers, become crucial means for building the subjectivities, repertoires of action and 'action spaces' which prepare for insurrections which can bring down the system. An event like the Greek insurrection of 2008 is made possible by the more ritualised showdowns of the November anniversaries and other events all year long.

Place

'to keep the riots going for a month, while keeping the police in check – to do that you have to know how to organize, you have to establish complicities, you have to know the terrain perfectly' (CI)

The relation to territory also changes: instead of possessing territory as in state projects, insurrection increases the density, circulation and solidarities of communes, rendering the territory 'unreadable, opaque to all authority'. This requires a proliferation of existential territories: 'the more territories there are superimposed on a given zone, the more circulation there is between them, the harder it will be for power to get a handle on them… Local self-organization superimposes its own geography over the state cartography, scrambling and blurring it: it produces its own secession'. The text portrays this, not as a return to local slowness against state speed, but a surreptitious overtaking of the state. Territory should here be understood in relation to the distinction in geography between places, which are sites of meaning for participants, and space. Capitalism is premised on spaces which are not places, 'non-places' such as airports, hotels and supermarkets which resist being turned into local places.

The reconstruction of local space creates which is sometimes termed 'homeplace', a type of place in which people feel emotionally secure and at ease. The imposition of non-place also imposes generalised insecurity and anxiety. Place, or existential territory, exists in the dense indigenous relations to particular local ecosystems, the detailed spatial knowledge and sense of belonging to a locality of inner-city and banlieue rebels, even (in a mediated way) in the worker's relationship to the factory. The current phase of capitalism (and not necessarily earlier phases) seeks to replace the experience of place with a mixture of 'telepresence' (virtual images) and non-places in which people are controlled and equivalent. In this phase, the restoration of place can be a means to restore autonomy which has been lost by localities. Of course, caution is needed here to distinguish the autonomous construction of place from exclusionary and oppressive types of local identity (such as nationalism and racism), and from a purely defensive orientation to place (such as rural conservatism and working-class nostalgia). An autonomous relationship to space is a localising relationship but also an immanent relationship counterposed to the transcendence of any particular spatial imagining. It is, in the Zapatista slogan, 'a world where all worlds fit'.

Section 2: The power of insurrection

'to know that a certain coexistence will end soon, that a decision is near' (CI)

'any loss of control would be preferable to all the crisis management scenarios they envision' (CI)

Insurrection has power when acts are available to insurrectionists which are not available to hierarchical power. The state tries to destroy such advantages, both through recuperation, bringing in approaches which begin outside, and through repressive countermeasures. Insurrections often arise in a cyclical way. The emergence of a new tactic to which the system cannot respond generates new forms of insurrectional power. These new tactics create cracks in the dominant system, which attract other people amd groups who were formerly disempowered. The tactics reproduce virally. In contrast, downturns in militant activity occur when existing forms of action seem to have stopped producing powerful effects.

The motor of change is the instability of the existing order's ability to 'govern' or 'command'. This relies not primarily on its ability to suppress, but on the persistence of obedience. Each insurrection disrupts or destroys the system's ability to command. Each time, the system will either collapse or recompose. So far, it has recomposed. Of course, neither insurrectionists nor statists can foresee the other's ability to invent new tactics or weapons. So both new insurrections and new recompositions of the system are unpredictable. A final collapse of the dominant system will occur when the system cannot invent new responses or weapons quickly enough to contain the ability of an insurrection to undermine command. This also leaves the question of how to reconstruct spaces outside command once the system has collapsed, or while it is collapsing.

Asymmetrical conflict

'The police are not invincible in the streets, they simply have the means to organize, train, and continually test new weapons. Our weapons, on the other hand, are always rudimentary, cobbled-together… [and] don't have a hope of rivaling theirs in firepower, but can be used to hold them at a distance, redirect attention, exert psychological pressure or force passage and gain ground by surprise' (CI)

The tactics and techniques which form weapons of insurrection and repression, as well as the literal weapons, are constantly innovated on both sides. The Coming Insurrection plays up the state's research capacity to generate new weapons. This is, indeed, a serious problem, though the state tends to develop new weapons modelled on old ones, new weapons which do the same things in slightly different ways (is there really a world of difference between microwave beams, LRADs, water cannons, tear gas and shooting in the air?) In contrast, it suggests the improvised weapons of insurrectionists are necessarily inferior, and implies they do not develop. This is not necessarily true. Firstly, activists through time have innovated a whole range of tactics which later catch on, such as the various innovations in lock-ons, tree-sits and tunnelling in the 1980s. Secondly, there are a great many actors – from smaller state powers to organised crime networks and armed opposition groups – doing research into undermining asymmetrical power. These actors often discover things that are later used in insurrections. Molotov cocktails were invented by the Soviets as a cheap way to fight an invading army. The Internet was originally invented by, of all people, the US military, as a defensive measure against massive assault, before being taken up by hacktivists (consider the Operation Payback actions for instance). Thirdly, age-old knowledge can be rediscovered, as when activists borrow consensus decision-making from indigenous groups. We should look for new vulnerabilities, and tools which exploit such vulnerabilities. In China, the next big wave of asymmetrical technologies are already emerging, in forms such as electromagnetic pulse weapons which take out enemy technologies, and cheap micro-satellites which destroy satellite surveillance. In Iraq and elsewhere, insurgents are pioneering the use of mobile phones as triggers, and even making moves into remote-control and robotics. How many of these measures will eventually have insurrectional uses? Already a remote-controlled graffiti machine has been created. We can expect to see the constant innovation of new asymmetrical techniques for as long as domination persists.

Raising costs

To defeat or push back states strategically, it's helpful to understand how they think. This is not easy: they think in a way which is so alien to non-renunciated life that it is hard to understand. It helps to think of the state as an instrumental machine: it functions in large part on cost-benefit rationalities. Costs are the Achilles' heel of repression. They ultimately constrain states, because they can interfere with states' abilities to pursue other activities, or the competitiveness of their capitalist tax-base. States want control, but on the cheap; and they will usually choose between tolerance and repression based on which costs more. Actually, their thinking is more complicated than this, for several reasons. Firstly, they'll sometimes bear a large immediate cost (such as the expense of the Battle of Mainzerstrasse) in the hope of future benefits (such as a smaller, more demoralised squatters' movement). Secondly, the 'cost' of the destruction of the system is for the state infinite, and justifies any cost. Thirdly, states sometimes seem to react to incalculable costs (such as moral panics) in unpredictable ways.

If done right, imposing costs allows statists (and capitalists) to be pushed back a bit at a time, cornered, disempowered, and reduced to a much less threatening position. Roughly speaking, this works as follows. If the costs are high enough, states can usually be prevented from repression. For the costs to be high enough, they need to be higher than the costs of toleration. The state may or may not choose to invest in 'speculative' repression, which aims mainly to alter the future balance of forces. It is less likely to do this, the less disposable income it has. Hence the reason insurrections are usually more effective during economic downturns. The state's reasoning will also be affected by activist responses. The less easy activists are to demoralise, the less beneficial the gamble of speculative repression will seem. Spaces crucial to insurrection can be imposed on states. States will concede a lot rather than risk collapse. Most often, these concessions feed back into recuperation. But they can also be used to carve out autonomous zones. Think of examples like autonomous student spaces in pre-neoliberal Japan, squatting in 1980s Germany and Holland, the Zapatista zone in Chiapas, de facto self-governed shanty-towns in major Southern cities, or university asylum in Greece. These are not recuperated spaces, but autonomous spaces the state was/is forced to tolerate.

We can see this statist reasoning across a number of cases. In the case of the UK animal rights movement, the state did not intervene to save various small operations such as Hillgrove Farm, but was prepared to go to very extreme lengths (from government financial bailouts to bogus trials) to protect HLS itself, viewed as central to an accumulation strategy based on biotechnology. The German squatters' movement was highly successful in the 1980s, mainly by imposing costs – a squat eviction would be met with militant protests, fierce squat defence, and the formation of new squats. This position was reversed in the early 1990s, and some cities are now squat-free. This is partly due to recuperation (most of the old 1980s squatters were legalised), partly to just-in-time policing (the tactic of attacking squats the moment they're formed, is costly, risky, often effective, but vulnerable to just one or two failures rendering it unsustainable; it is only viable because of the mass legalisations of squats and reduced numbers in the movement). Hence, the state reduced costs of repression, but also took on more costly repression – which can be made sense of in terms of rapidly rising real-estate prices in most of the affected cities.

This allows us to upgrade our sense of our own effectiveness. It must be remembered here that what seem like positive things for the state, such as jailing an activist or fencing in a summit, are actually immensely costly. States regularly spend millions on summits. The Toronto G20 summit reportedly ran to an $850 million bill. Jail costs $20,000 per prisoner per year in running costs alone. In the case of the London Mayday protests, the 'successful' repression of Mayday 2001 through mass 'kettling' cost £20 million in pre-emptive business closures alone, compared to a £500,000 total cost of Mayday 2000, deemed unsuccessful because of property damage. (The state gamble – which ultimately succeeded – was that this cost would be worth it if demoralisation and fear caused the annual protests to fizzle out). Protest often imposes costs, even when it seems to be effectively repressed. It should be added that Southern regimes often operate on a different basis, mainly because they rely on forms of repression which are less effective, but lower-cost.

This calculation on the state side can be used to modulate insurrection. Reducing the costs of autonomous activity to a point where they are small enough to be tolerated is not an option, as it increases disempowerment. There are exceptions in terms of selectivity: indirect targeting of smaller firms in campaigning against a major company, and squatting lower- rather than higher-value buildings, are two examples. Another option is to actively nibble away at a target in cumulative ways, which never cross the threshold where repression becomes cost-effective, but which add up to the collapse of the target. Usually, however, insurrection implies that ordinary action imposes extensive costs, and cutting these costs is impossible without betraying insurrection.

Raising the costs of repression, on the other hand, is viable. For this to be done, each movement needs, so to speak, capacity held in reserve. This can be achieved in two ways. Firstly, it would be helped by being less 'hyperactive', doing fewer things but doing them better, while staying ready to respond to a crisis. Secondly, it would be enabled by links between movements, such that repression of one band which was already fully-stretched produced responses from completely different bands which were not part of the same mobilisation. Hence, effective networking around issues of repression can be an effective way of preventing it. Either way, keeping in reserve a capacity to respond to repression is crucial to preventing it. Keeping up a high level of movement composition – strong connections, sustainable emotional forces – contributes to preventing repression. In Manipur, the Meira Paibis provide an example of a 'reserve' force constantly on watch for repression, something like a vastly extended Copwatch scheme, patrolling for hours each day on the lookout for state forces, ready to sound the alarm if abuse occurs. Overcommitting to the moment, at the expense of failing to keep forces in reserve to respond to new developments, impedes the ability of insurrections to handle repression. Activist bands and affinity-networks need to find ways to distribute activity sustainably through time, avoiding overcommitment and burnout.

Another way to think about insurrection is in relation to the SHAC model. This puts a particular inflection on permanent attack: there is still constant action, constant attack, drawing on expressive modalities, but it is varied in intensity and target, to increase its instrumental power. The model is often misunderstood as operating on a human level, as 'intimidation'. Primarily it operates at the level of the basic logic of capitalism, which is instrumental and inhuman: it imposes costs. Capitalists make decisions to disinvest, because the risk of suffering losses outweighs the profit which can be made. This has proven very effective in pushing HLS to the point where it can no longer function in the capitalist market. SHAC's vulnerability is that, while it imposes costs on animal abusers, it is open to retaliation by the state, on which it does not, on the whole, impose costs. It can be predicted that people will apply this kind of strategy across a range of issues, and especially, apply it to create the conditions of permanent attack: to prevent the state from repressing, to corrode its repressive capability, to carve out autonomous zones, to retaliate against state atrocities. This would in turn enhance its existing uses too, rendering the likes of SHAC less vulnerable to state repression.

One way to sustain movements in the face of repression is to turn repression itself into a source of anger, and hence of further action. This is shown in certain Southern contexts where killings by police (of activists or of ordinary people) lead almost automatically to responses: police stations attacked, mass protests called, and so on. In Iran during the 1979 Revolution, the tide was maintained because activists' funerals, held after a delay, became a site of renewed resistance, spreading into new demonstrations. In Kashmir today, when police kill, protests always follow. Even in America, police killings and deaths in custody sometimes spark unrest, such as the recent Oakland uprising. Is it possible to duplicate this kind of response in contexts where the violence used is not usually lethal? If it happened, it would probably turn a particular event (such as conviction) or the use of a particular tactic (such as 'kettling' or abuse in custody) into a trigger for protest or for other actions.

Analysing summit protests

The response to summit protests shows the strategic situation clearly. The police effectively lost in Seattle, Prague and Washington, partly because they were unable to hold space, partly because the images went against them, and partly because real disruption occurred. Police responses have followed a standardised model, and have ranged from the relocation of summits to fortified out-of-town encampments, through the use of pre-emptive arrests, “kettling”, and attacks on convergence sites, to a general increase in brutality. There are three strategic rationales to this response. Firstly, it aims to disrupt protest in general (not only militant protest), the apparent purpose being to reclaim media space by showing the police on the attack (rather than delegates besieged, or police being routed). The goal here is to hegemonise the media space. Secondly, it aims to make activists feel powerless, to disrupt devices such as the creation of temporary homespaces at convergence sites and the division of protests into zones to modulate risk, to deploy weapons designed to produce pain and disorientation, and to produce situations of frustration and sheer terror. These measures aim to break morale. Thirdly, the relocation of summits changes little in spatial terms, but reframes a forced outcome as a choice. Previously, it seemed like a defeat that summits occurred under siege, and protesters occupied the surrounding town; now, it seems like a deliberate strategy. This created dilemmas for activists. The previously highly effective 'swarming' tactic had to be abandoned. Morale-boosting symbolic victories became less likely.

This response occurred because the state did not wish to concede the space it had effectively lost with the rise of summit protests; it preferred to try to seize back this space through fascistic measures. The state thus gives up many of the deep supports of its existence, the ideology of legitimacy which disguises social war and keeps up an appearance of civil rights. This is, once more, an effect of 'just in time' policing: the state has all its forces on the frontline, and no deep support behind it; it has given up the trenches and fieldworks the maintenance of which would formerly have provided security in the event of a frontline defeat, but which restricted what the state could do on the frontline. This basic vulnerability is often missed in critiques of the effectiveness of such protests today. This said, it creates certain problems. The expected effect of such measures would be to reduce overall numbers, make it less likely that first-time protesters will attend, but also to increase militancy among protesters, who will become increasingly angry with the repression. This seems to be what has largely happened. The gap which needs to be addressed on our side is that, if such protests no longer self-recruit so easily, there is an increasing need for other kinds of bridges into everyday life, to bring new people into activism. Protests can no longer be expected to self-recruit.

Hitting the infrastructure of power

'Power is no longer concentrated in one point in the world; it is the world itself, its flows and its avenues, its people and its norms, its codes and its technologies… Anyone who defeats it locally sends a planetary shock wave through its networks' (CI)

'Every network has its weak points, the nodes that must be undone in order to interrupt circulation, to unwind the web' (CI)

'Nowadays sabotaging the social machine with any real effect involves reappropriating and reinventing the ways of interrupting its networks' (CI)

'It's within the malfunction and short-circuits of the system that we find the elements of a response whose logic would be to abolish the problems themselves' (CI)

'All the incivilities of the streets should become methodical and systematic, converging in a diffuse, effective guerrilla war that restores us to our ungovernability, our primordial unruliness' (CI)

The idea of targeting crucial nodes of power is not new to insurrectionism. According to Bonanno, because power is exercised through control over physical spaces, it can be attacked in its presence in physical space. A single act of destruction is not the same as bringing down the entire system. But multiplied enough times, it renders parts of the system unworkable. Effective insurrections often take the form of the sustained reproduction of the destruction or blockage of nodes, through time and space. Everything depends on keeping the action going, expanding it, and responding to moves to make it more difficult. There is not a qualitative difference between the small victories, tearing down all the surveillance cameras in an area or making squat eviction impossible, and the eventual destruction of capitalism and the state. The latter is an accumulation of the former, to the point where the system's functioning becomes impossible. Furthermore, if mechanisms necessary for state control or capital accumulation are taken out in this way, the state and/or capitalism would be expelled from the space in question. Social relations themselves can't be destroyed by sabotage, but they are embedded in infrastructures which can be physically targeted. The power and extent of such infrastructures affects greatly whether autonomous spaces can appear, and the costs of sustaining them make them a weak link.

There is, of course, also the question of building other worlds in liberated spaces. This process is affirmative, not destructive, and may involve quite different 'virtues', quite different forms of social relations from those involved in destroying capitalism. This needs to be done well, because the problems with the system (particularly informal hierarchies, exclusion, and patterns such as racism and sexism) are often reproduced in autonomous spaces. But this process by itself, without insurrection, could not be enough. Furthermore, since social relations recompose whenever a crisis disrupts the status quo (think of New Orleans, the Argentinazo, etc), it seems the insurrectionary part is the more difficult part. In addition, sabotage can help in the reconstruction of other worlds. Sabotage is often highly emotionally empowering. In a Black Block statement (see The Black Block Papers, p. 45-6), it is described as cracking the veneer of legitimacy, exorcising structural violence, turning limited exchange-values into open-ended use-values, changing how we see objects, increasing the 'potential uses of an entire cityscape', and breaking spells by making the impossible possible.

The Coming Insurrection makes various contributions to the strategy of sabotage. In particular, it argues for surprise attacks, which it views as central to the banlieue revolts: ambushing police patrols, attacking police stations at night and so on. In demonstrations, the equivalent tactic is taken to be bypassing the Red Zone and choosing one's own terrain. 'The important thing is not to be better armed but to take the initiative'. Another tactic suggested is opening up multiple fronts. 'Harassing the police means that by forcing them to be everywhere they can no longer be effective anywhere'.

The Coming Insurrection argues that insurrection starts with an unconditional refusal, 'a truth that we refuse to give up' – non-renunciation. This then spreads until there is victory, like the proliferation of the German squatters' movement and the French anti-fascist resistance. To this should be added Bonanno's observation (And We Will Still be Ready, 26-7) that insurrection requires replicability, not decipherability. The means by which an insurrectionary act spreads is not its comprehension by viewers, but the fact that it can be imitated and taken up by others with insurrectionary intent.

Blocking nodes

'Jam everything – this will be the first reflex of all those who rebel against the present order. In a delocalised economy [using] just-in-time production… to block circulation is to block production as well' (CI)

'the metropolis is one of the most vulnerable human arrangements that has ever existed… A brutal shutting down of borders… a sudden interruption of supply lines, organized blockades of the axes of communication – and the whole facade crumbles… The world would not be moving so fast if it didn't have to constantly outrun its own collapse' (CI)

On the longshoremen's strike: 'With ten thousand people, the largest economic power in the world can be brought to its knees' (CI)

'through the systematic occupation of institutions and obstinate blockading, the high-school students' movement of 2005 and the struggle against the CPE-law reminded us of the ability of large movements to cause trouble and carry out diffuse offensives' (CI)

Today, systemic vulnerabilities are concentrated in strategic nodes: transport and communications infrastructures (key roads, airports, high-speed rail links, ports, cellphone towers, electricity infrastructure), symbolic sites linked to capital accumulation (e.g. tourist sites), and distribution depots (e.g. petrol stations, warehouses). Targeting such sites is a growing trend among movements the world over. It is effective because just-in-time production and reduced state spending have left the infrastructure increasingly vulnerable, the system increasingly close to the wire: a small shutdown can shut down a massive network dependent on it, and have immense effects, since the system requires constant flows in the absence of stockpiles.

Just-in-time production leaves the system increasingly vulnerable to blockades. The Coming Insurrection refers to the Argentine piqueteros and the Oaxaca uprising, deemed by statists a disaster on the scale of a hurricane, and an incident in Rennes where only 300 people were needed to shut down the main access road to the town for hours. Examples could be multiplied: the struggles in Bolivia and Ecuador, the Manipur uprising, the costs imposed by blockades of timber sales, the airport and road intersection occupations in Thailand. In the successful Baliapal land grab resistance movement, checkpoints were set up on the four entrance roads to the area, and staffed around the clock. When state forces appeared, conch shells were blown and metal plates beaten to summon protesters to create human roadblocks (Routledge and Simons 488). It might be predicted that blockades will be multiplied, sustained through rolling series of blockades, used as a way to impose costs whenever the system attacks, used to defend and carve out autonomous zones. Indian social movements have pioneered a tactic known as the bandh, in which an entire local area is shut down in response to a (usually localised) abuse or grievance, complete with roadblocks, and sometimes stone-throwing. More than the workplace strike, the bandh is a strike in the full space of capital, creating autonomy in an area by shutting down 'normal life'. Something like the bandh might be used in areas where local populations are resistant to neoliberalism, to link insurrection to the wider opposition and eat away at state power. There might be a future period, for instance, in which every time American police killed a black person, the nearest city was shut down for a day. One might predict that the number of murders by police would decrease, and that autonomous spaces and feelings of empowerment would increase.

Invisibility

'turning the anonymity to which we've been relegated to our advantage, and through conspiracy, nocturnal or faceless actions, creating an invulnerable position of attack… To be socially nothing is not a humiliating position… but is on the contrary the condition for maximum freedom of action' (CI)

'And once we become visible our days will be numbered' (CI)

The theme of invisibility has a long history. James Scott's work focuses on invisible tactics of everyday resistance, some of which not only disguise the actor, but also disguise the fact that resistance has even happened. David Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology speculates that there are a huge number of liberated zones around the world, but most of them have stayed liberated by being invisible, and will only be stumbled across by other anarchists. Resistances usually stay invisible because this makes it harder for the state to crack down. It makes it harder to induce moral panics, or to distinguish resistances from passive effects. There are many forms of invisibility. There's the most familiar forms, such as masking-up, late-night sabotage, security culture. There's others which create an appearance of being recuperated, without actually being recuperated. There's still others which make people invisible as part of a large movement, whose members are too numerous to track down in detail.

The more militant an action is, the greater the risk that the state will turn its gaze towards it. This can often be warded off to a degree by forms of invisibility which make it difficult for the state to catch activists. Yet once visibility is established, the state may lash out in other directions, looking for a target – an innocent activist to stitch up, a community to collectively punish, a social movement infrastructure to close down as a scapegoat. When doing things which bring about partial visibility, planning should not be limited to avoiding individual detection. Preparation should also be made to impose costs on the state should it engage in repression.

Fraternising and decomposing the state

'A massive crowd would be needed to challenge the army, invading its ranks and fraternizing with the soldiers… It is not impossible to defeat an army politically' (CI)

Can an insurrection win by decomposing the state? Historically, there are cases where statists have gone over to the insurrection, as in Albania and Serbia. Yet this usually occurs when the state machine is already collapsing, and is a prelude to their hijacking of the revolt. We need to realise that statists, as long as they remain statists, are inculcated into a mentality which precludes the emotional responses necessary to identify with revolt. It is hard for compassionate people to understand the brutality of the state, and realise it is not going to decompose through statists' basic humanity. It happens sometimes with soldiers who are conscripts, or recruits from poor backgrounds (the 'poverty draft'), but it happens rarely with properly induced state agents. In the colonies, the risk of the military identifying with insurgents is managed in a simple way: they don't speak the language. In the case of the police, the same effect is achieved through 'cop culture', and often the very real blocking of communication through helmets and visors. Not to mention that, as for Crisso and Odoteo, this absense of a common language is now true for all of us when faced with the police. David Graeber argues that activists find police impossible to understand, mainly because the police's authoritarianism and the situation of conflict provide a barrier to emotional exchange. Berardi argues that the scarcity of attention available today has turned many people into ruthless executors of decisions taken without attention. Virilio argues that today's warriors are so supplemented with artificial vision that they can no longer relate on a human level. And then there's the risk that they'll simply replace human police with robots. If the state ever resorts to sending conscripts or poverty-draftees against insurrectionists, it's asking for trouble. As long as it can rely on police, robots, or tonton macoutes, it can get away with repression.

Rules of engagement

'We live under an occupation, under police occupation' (CI)

Rather than fraternisation, it is more helpful to think in terms of the transformation of the 'rules of engagement', expanding the scope for insurrectional action while restricting that of the state. In his paper on the phenomenology of giant puppets, David Graeber observes that, in conflicts between police and protesters, each side acts as if playing a game whose rules it had invented entirely by itself. In fact, the field is conflictual, and rules of engagement between opponents sometimes emerge. Aside from normally prohibiting certain kinds of deliberately lethal force, police in many Northern countries seem to recognise no limits in their rules of engagement. The reason for this is that police seek a monopoly on defining situations – they do not wish to admit the existence of an adversary.

But it does seem that the rules of engagement can be pushed in either direction. Protesters are more daring in some countries than others. Police violence is more indiscriminate from Genoa onwards than before. In practice, rules of engagement are set in two ways: in indirect effects after the event, and in impact on morale. The police have found ways to dominate certain indirect effects, notably 'bad press', through psychological operations. But this does not leave them immune to other kinds of indirect effects which impose costs on repressive actions. The ups and downs of each side's emotions are more fluid and dynamic. Insurrectional acts exist on a continuum between hope and anxiety: there is always enormous gain, in emotional self-empowerment, but this system tries to balance this with enormous risk. The level of risk varies with the countermeasures taken by the system and its ability to handle the broader context. The state tries to terrorise us because it is afraid. Though it is hard to tell when it is truly afraid, and when it simply simulates fear (to cause moral panics, for example). On the insurrectionist side, in principle rules of engagement are rejected as concessions to power, but in practice activists do hold back in all kinds of ways. The question of altering the de facto rules of engagement to our advantage – by losing our own fears, and by imposing limits on the state – may be crucial during prolonged struggles.

Sustaining Insurrection

'a blockade is only as effective as the insurgents' capacity to supply themselves and to communicate… Acquiring the skills to provide, over time, for one's own basic subsistence implies appropriating the necessary means of production' (CI)

'the state… instinctively grinds down any solidarities that escape it until nothing remains except citizenship… [The citizen] can't help envying these so-called “problem” neighbourhoods where there still persists a bit of communal life, a few links between beings, some solidarities not controlled by the state, an informal economy, an organization that is not yet detached from those who organize' (CI)

'Inhabiting a nowhere makes us vulnerable to the slightest jolt in the system' (CI)

'The destruction of the peasant's world… meant the disappearance of the means for dealing with scarcity' (CI)

The longest uprisings in the global North in recent memory have been the Greek insurrection of 2008 and the French banlieue revolt of 2005. Both of these lasted around three weeks. This has, of course, inspired activists used to four-day summit protests or even shorter upheavals, but ultimately, a month is not long enough to bring down the system. In both cases, the state largely sat out the revolt, waiting for it to fizzle out. If the state was genuinely afraid that the revolt could last forever, it could not have responded in this way. Bolivia has experienced a number of peasant shutdowns which have lasted for months. Thailand has seen protest camps which have taken over key intersections in the capital for months on end, eventually repressed by police, only to reappear a month later with similar staying-power. The Manipur uprising of 2004 was six months long at its peak. Parts of Palestine, such as the village of Bil'in, manage to continue recurring waves of protest. Argentina, Albania, Oaxaca, Ecuador, Kabylie, Kashmir… the list goes on. In other words, Northern insurrections face a pressing problem of endurance.

One possible reason movements in the South have such temporal resilience is that they are operating out of local economies which are only marginally subsumed in capitalism, and networks of everyday practices which produce a social fabric irreducible to the system: they could persist because they were really autonomous across the board, and could shut down the capitalist economy without destroying themselves. To be able to endure, an insurrection needs an autonomous economy or subsistence-system. This intersects with issues of defeating the commodity system by re-localising 'production', and expands onto broader issues in green anarchism around gift economies and ludic alternatives to work. 'Subsistence perspective' writers such as Maria Mies argue that subsistence provides a global alternative to commodity production, recognising the importance of nurturing the forces which actually produce life. The Coming Insurrection also refers to the Kabylia uprising of 2001, which effectively pushed the state out of the region. 'The movement's strength was in the diffuse complementarity of its components', irreducible to its most formal manifestation the village assemblies. The 'communes' ranged in this case from the young people fighting police to the producers of resistance symbolism and people sustaining subsistence production, without which the blockades of the commodity economy could not have been so constant and systematic.

Subsistence is also a question of producing types of bands which can be sustained over time. In a paper on precarity, Silvia Federici has argued that 'no movement can survive unless it is concerned with the reproduction of its members'. Whereas the peak of struggle today tends to be associated with events such as demonstrations, we need to be alert to questions of how to reproduce the movement through time. When communities in struggle are able to reproduce themselves – as in the indigenous movements of Bolivia and Ecuador – she argues that their anti-system struggles can become more radical. She also argues for a reexamination of the tradition of working-class mutual aid, prior to the Fordist period. These arguments echo with Hakim Bey's discussions of recreating sociality, autonomist discussions of recomposition, and primitivist discussions of rewilding. What links these fields is the creation of conditions in which insurrection can be sustained through time, which in turn, is necessary in rendering the state superfluous, and hence in destroying it. Would a successful insurrection lead beyond the current status of activism as 'bund', as entirely non-ascriptive band? This question comes down to the issue of the place of childhood in sustainability through time. Ultimately, it can be hoped that loose bands and overlapping networks can provide a context in which ascription remains redundant.

The issue of subsistence also speaks to broader issues of vulnerability. Subsistence economies operate on an orientation which favours systemic redundancy, and hence resilience, over efficiency./ Efficient systems usually produce one thing as cheaply as possible, leaving people vulnerable to shocks if what they produce is no longer in demand or if production is disrupted by social or natural crises. Subsistence economies spread their activity across a wide range of sectors, so that problems in any one sector aren't as likely to destroy the entire band. Resilience is an alternative to 'security' (the control of space to pre-empt the unexpected) in dealing with human vulnerability.

The limit in subsistence capabilities is what is holding back the temporal scope of insurrection in the North. Today's activist bands in the North do not have the degree of autonomy that some Southern movements achieve. Most often, such bands are sustained by marginal employment or state support. This is supplemented by what might be called a 'raiding' economy, taking items from the system by means such as squatting, skipping, urban foraging and autoreduction. This should not be viewed as simply an extension of the system. Indigenous groups besieged by state forces similarly rely on a mixture of raiding, marginal production and benefits. Raiding, marginality and bottom-up tribute extraction are strategies whereby systemic capture can be prevented or minimised. Yet there is a limit to how far it can sustain a movement which actually poses a threat to the system. A commune, The Coming Insurrection rightly observes, can't bank on a raiding economy forever, it needs to increase its self-organisation to meet needs. Ultimately, what prevents recomposition is dispossession: it is easy enough to live without forces work, provided one can seize back enough of what one needs.

Local knowledge

'The circulation of knowledge cancels hierarchy; it equalizes by raising up' (CI)

'Freedom isn't the act of shedding our attachments, but the practical capacity to work on them, to move around in their space, to form or dissolve them' (CI)

The recomposition of subsistence goes hand-in-hand with the recomposition of local knowledge. The Coming Insurrection recognises the need to recreate and draw on local knowledges in order to sustain insurrection. 'There's a whole set of skills and techniques just waiting to be plundered and ripped from their humanistic, street-culture, or eco-friendly trappings', not to mention 'the intuitions, the know-how, and the ingenuity found in slums'. Such techniques will have to be deployed both to 'repopulate the metropolitan desert' and to sustain insurrection beyond the early stages, in fields such as food, transport and communications. At present, our ability to attack the metropolis is compromised by our dependence on its services. Escaping this situation requires a long 'apprenticeship' in a wide range of practical skills. Communes should seek self-sufficiency, and should seek to limit their own size to prevent hierarchies emerging. In effect, what is proposed here is a recomposition of local knowledges, corresponding to a recomposition of bands.

This is excellent, as far as it goes. But it needs to go a few steps further. Band societies and subsistence economies do not begin and end with practical knowledge, though they have plenty of it. They also have very different epistemologies and cosmologies from those familiar in metropolitan societies. In practice, this always includes a spiritual element, which if examined closely, turns out to be a way of managing and reproducing emotional states. The question is not only practical but cosmological, because cosmology is necessary to sustain indefinitely the emotional states which produce insurrection. Indigenous cosmology interconnects with local knowledge, providing the frame within which it has meaning, and creating narrative structures which render local knowledge memorable and emotionally resonant. This is a situation where the truth which the band society refuses to renounce is not empty. It is, rather, the truth of a local context in its entirety. Similarly, it is not entirely the case that '[e]verywhere it's the same chilling void, reaching into even the most remote and rustic corners' (CI). There are still places where stones can speak.

“Walking through the Witches Market in La Paz – a day after the road barricades were cleared on January of this year – I realized how deep the Western view has been innoculated in my mind… I realized that my perception of reality has been modified and trained according to one model of interpretation, which standardizes the notion of the world in order to impose on us a set for socialization… In this world, life is about something else. If you cannot hear the murmur of stones there is no way you can communicate with this secret world.' – Jesus Sepulveda, 'Stones Can Speak', Green Anarchy 21

This re-localisation also changes the nature of knowledge. Local knowledge does not function like global science. Instead of recording a set of facts, it diffuses the power to create knowledge. There is much in the process of insurrection which must necessarily be a matter of situated, local knowledge and which thus, cannot be expressed in articles or books. Local knowledge has characteristics very different from those in dominant forms of knowledge in the global North. Studies of local and indigenous knowledge reveal that it usually involves a very reflexive sense of locality, situatedness, and relationality, i.e. the fact that knowledges are produced by particular people in particular places, and are relative to their process of construction and the place where they're produced. Indigenous languages tend to encourage all claims to be situated in the speaker's social position, and use words which refer to relations instead of things. (And it is quite possible that we will need to create a new language, or at least, inflect our existing language-use in ways which restore these characteristics). The Andean conception of wealth emphasises wealth in connections, not in things. An emphasis is placed on the practice of 'doing' knowledge-production, rather than the outcome. Hence, local knowledge is not a set of facts, but rather, a process of learning and sharing knowledge located in particular ways of life. It is often expressed in practices rather than communicated through books. It usually takes a holistic perspective on knowledge, rejecting the division of the world into spheres or categories, the separation of humanity from nature, and the separation of both of these from the supernatural (whether through the disenchantment of reality or the abstraction of transcendental religion). Local knowledge tends to be expressive rather than instrumental. And it tends to prefer inconclusiveness and difference to rapid decision, involving for instance long consultative processes when reaching decisions. It can be argued that local knowledge is largely a product of a subsistence economy, corresponding to a way of life which is itself situated and relational.

How can local knowledges be recreated? It is not a matter of simply importing content from other local knowledge systems – borrowing DIY skills, indigenous medicinal knowledge and so on – because this misses the importance of process in local knowledge. Nor is it about copying the rituals of other groups, or playing at being like them, which turns the immanence of local knowledge into a transcendentalism of social roles. Of course, the importation of particular knowledge-content and of techniques such as rituals can play a crucial role. Yet is it more important to recreate the generative level of local knowledge, its construction as process in an intensely situated locality. The concepts of local knowledge should not belong to the massified world, but to an intense connection to a local ecology and to those with whom one relates to this local ecology. Other aspects of local knowledge need to be recovered: an intense awareness of relationality (and corresponding rejection of 'unmarked terms' of privilege), and a replacement of instrumental orientations with a cosmology oriented to expression. Both the reifying tendencies of existing language (to focus on things instead of relations), and its pressures towards universalism and generality (towards taking one's own subjectivity as “obvious” and meanings as shared), need to be resisted.

Section 3: Dangers to insurrection

Strategies of tension

'As an attempted solution, the pressure to ensure that nothing happens, together with police surveillance of the territory, will only intensify' (CI)

The most visible danger to insurrection is the danger of repression. Its contemporary manifestation as "war on terror" follows a model of counterinsurgency shown clearly in Italy in the 1980s: creating a civil war of a type the state could use to destroy the movement under the ideological shadow of a struggle with an invisible enemy. What went wrong in Italy was not that the movement was drawn into conflict, but that sufficient costs were not levied on repression (in contrast, for example, to the pariah status which strategies of tension often bring on regimes in the South). This lack of costs has two dimensions. The first dimension is ideological: the state was able to rely on ideological gestures such as moral panics and media imagery to maintain legitimacy even while cracking down. The second dimension is the failure in the Italian case to find sufficiently effective asymmetrical means for imposing costs on repression. In other circumstances – in Chiapas, the Niger Delta, Bougainville – the strategy of tension has backfired. Research on armed opposition groups shows that repressive counterinsurgency only works with a specific kind of group, whose basis is in any case rather weak. In any other case, repression simply emboldens resistance. What's more, refraining from insurrection is no guarantee that the state will not resort to terror. And there are cases where the existence of more 'extreme' forms of opposition creates the conditions in which states are forced to tolerate less 'extreme' forms. Above all, we need to avoid aiding the state's order not to think. The point of terror is to make resistance unthinkable. Any move which aids this, aids the power of the state.

It can be argued that the global 'war on terror' is actually an indirect response to the failure of existing mechanisms of domination in the aftermath of Seattle. A strategy of tension has been unleashed which uses moral panics around terrorism and other issues to create a sense of fear which is used as a pretext to close space. This strategy plays to the psychological vulnerabilities, not only of the mass, but of activists too. A part of this dynamic is the state's attempt to 'contaminate' activism by ignoring the diversity of tactics and the division of protests into zones, adding in random attacks on less-militant protesters, bystanders, associates of protesters, people with similar ideas… In a more alert context, this could easily be met by vigorous responses. It seems, in fact, that the strategy of tension is revived to deal with each protest wave. It will fail when the fear is insufficient to curb a wave.

Moral panics

'The new economy cannot be established without a similar screening of subjects and zones singled out for transformation. The chaos that we constantly hear about will either provide the opportunity for this screening, or for our victory over this odious project' (CI)

'”Terrorist threats”, “natural disasters”, “virus warnings”, “social movements” and “urban violence” are, for society's managers, so many moments of instability where they reinforce their power, by the selection of those who please them and the elimination of those who make things difficult' (CI)

'It's useless to react to the news of the day; instead we should understand each report as a maneuver in a hostile field of strategies to be decoded, operations designed to provoke a specific reaction' (CI)

Moral panics serve as perhaps the most important state weapon today, turning what are otherwise empowering events into sources of anxiety, fear and isolation, eliminating the 'bad press' which repression would otherwise cause, and providing an enabling context for escalating repression. News coverage often functions as counterinsurgency. Police and other state agencies consciously deploy psyops to hegemonise the media field. The media complies, running police reports as fact. But there are also cases where the media targets a movement, particularly a sphere of everyday resistance, and draws the state in. Moral panics function through the dynamics of what Virilio terms 'telepresence': they focus on a single image, taken as iconic, and make the image stand for the event, at the same time turning the glare of attention on it, on condemning it, on catching the perpetrator and so on. Usually, the image is unrepresentative. Sometimes, it is created or set up deliberately by the state. Always, it is taken out of context, and used to slander entire movements. It is a major reason insurrections sometimes fail to resonate, to be replicated: they are received by potential supporters through a distorting frame.

The function of moral panics within anarchist and related movements is weaker than in the wider society, partly because people reduce exposure to, or selectively interpret, mainstream news. But there are still effects. Particularly worrying in this regard was the response to the Greek movement to the Marfin Bank incident which, while tragic, was at worst an accident and quite possibly a state set-up. The effect was to paralyse the movement, destroy the day of action and create a context where the police could storm Exarcheia with little opposition. It also led to recriminations among anarchists, and in particular, other currents turning on insurrectionists, internalising the wider demonisation inside the movement. This is not the only instance. For example, a strike wave in Korea has been defeated because support evaporated after a media scare over a video with a parodic execution of a boss. Tree-spiking went into sharp decline after an accidental death. And I suspect 911 had a similar effect on activism in America: the less composed layers were drawn into the paralysing effects of mourning, at the expense of the broader context.

Moral panic is not a tactic we can afford to recognise as legitimate. Of course we have our own ethical positions, but these can have nothing in common with systemic moralities. An incident like Marfin can only be viewed in the context of far greater slaughter and suffering resulting from the system's actions, in normal conditions of everyday life. The biggest danger here is in holding back from actions for fear of moral-panic responses. The state will not stop with one wave of panic; if the tools are allowed to work, they will be used against every form of resistance until none is left. It is always possible to deduce some risk, however unlikely, which could rule out an action. Derrick Jensen's As the World Burns contains a powerful parody of this strategy: an eco-sabotage action which might, indeed, would have killed children, if only they'd walked two miles from the nearest school and thrown themselves into the burning building. In Germany and in Britain we've seen moral panics about how police 'could have been' killed by people throwing stones, or dropping objects off buildings (despite the fact that such acts have been done a million times, without killing police). Then there's the roadblocks which 'could have' stopped ambulances, the tree-sits which 'could have' caused an agent of repression to fall while removing someone, etc. Giving in to moral panics lets the state close all autonomous space, issue by issue, band by band. Instead we need to build emotional and social barriers among our bands, which prevent moral panics from being internalised either in our psyches or our social groups. We should not be trying to distance ourselves from others deemed to be truly excluded, whereas we are the 'good' protesters. We are the excluded, and we reject the boundary between included and excluded, the state's right to select, the division into good and bad subjects.

So, what to do when a moral panic is turned on activists? The current responses fall into two categories: either to persist, to ignore the newfound visibility and carry on as before (which happens with animal rights), or to back off, holding back from action until the hostility dies down (which seems to have happened with tree-spiking). Neither is very effective. Persistence lets the state get away with persecution, which becomes more likely as activism continues as before. Backing off actually rewards the state for persecution. Yet alternatives seem limited. The third option is to meet escalation with escalation, but opponents may not have the forces in reserve to do this. A frontal confrontation on an issue is difficult, because the state can and will concentrate forces in the aftermath of a moral panic. The possibility remains, however, of sideways forms of retaliation for moral panics, disempowering or costing the state in broader ways. In particular, while it may prove difficult to get around the blockage at the site of repression, the fact of repression can be used as a trigger for actions elsewhere. This requires among other things that the affective impact of state terror be offset or transformed.

There are precedents for responses to moral panics, which involve a certain intensity of action being 'normalised', so that the response of moral panic becomes increasingly unavailable or is denied an effect. The German autonomes provide, at their peak, the main example: in the early period, moral panic was in full flow, and activists were often given long jail sentences; as the movement grew, it became impossible to suppress, and moral panic was actually reeled back, with sentences reduced and previously suppressed activities tolerated. A crucial aspect of this movement was that any act of repression, from evicting a squat to jailing activists, was met with militant protests or direct action. A similar effect might be achieved if, for instance, convictions of activists, deaths on protests, or incidents of 'kettling' led to sabotage sometime in the following weeks. If the link was clear, a cost of repression would be established.

The danger of massacre

'When things get serious, the army occupies the terrain. Whether… it engages in combat is less certain… a bloodbath… for now is no more than a threat, a bit like the threat of using nuclear weapons' (CI)

The one remaining rule of engagement, that the state normally refrain from lethal force, is rather anomalous. It does not seem to prohibit occasional statist murders which can be passed off as situationally justified or as aberrations by individual bad cops (from Carlo Giuliani to Ian Tomlinson to Alexis Grigoropoulos, to the Kent and Jackson State shootings). But it is very noticeable that the state has not so far adopted a policy of large-scale shooting into crowds. This is a historical and geographical exception. Massacre was a normal accompaniment of state repression of insurrection in the nineteenth century and perhaps up to the Second World War – think of the massacres at the Paris Commune, the 1848 insurrection, the 1918-19 German council rising, the Haymarket Martyrs, and various labour disputes in the US. And while massacre is not exactly normal in most of the global South, it certainly happens with disturbing regularity. 60 people were killed during the El Alto 'gas war', to take just one example; think too of Acteal, of Bougainville, of retaliations in West Papua, of the Argentinazo of 2001, the Peruvian Amazon protests, events in Kashmir and Palestine, not to mention that twenty years ago, some regimes (such as Indonesia) used massacre as a matter of course at every minor protest or dispute.

Why is the state holding back? It is impossible to imagine for a moment that it cares about the lives of insurrectionists or about human rights. Most probably, the state has realised that massacre has unwanted effects. Even with the current psyops dominance, a massacre generates 'bad press'. It produces further waves of protest, as people mark the funerals of the dead or turn against the police. It risks the emergence of armed opposition (the long IRA campaign, for instance, was caused by the Bloody Sunday massacre). It shows the world that social war is going on. The allergy to 'violence', the Victorian attitude to it, is notably absent in much of the global South. The current system is premised on the denial of social war, the denial that an adversary exists. It is also sometimes argued that recourse to massacre defeats the point of power, which is to rule, not to destroy: in showing that the state can crush resistance only by failing to govern, by recognising that the spirit of resistance cannot be defeated, the state effectively admits its own illegitimacy, its basis in violence. On this view, a spirit of resistance can always render a state powerless (Routledge and Simons, 493-5). Understanding this is crucial, because a successful insurrection, in which 'less-lethal' weapons had failed, would push the state to the point where massacre would be considered as an option. The state will only use the option if it believes it will work. The way to make it certain it will not work, is to make the state certain that it will not stop the insurrection this way, that it will only inflame it further. The Argentinazo and the 'gas war' were largely successful, in spite of the state turning to such measures. During the Gujjar protests in India, the police were given orders to stop killing protesters, apparently when protesters started responding in kind against police. The state's 'zero option' is not undefeatable. A situation needs to be created in which its activation would be suicide for the state.

The danger of state conspiracy

The basis of insurrection is affective and immediate. It is thus dependent on how people feel. People either get angry about something or they don't. People either feel empowered by an act or they don't. Insurrectionists can't conspire to produce effects the way the state can. The state can do things in sneaky, instrumental ways which minimise the risk it faces. For instance, it can realise cumulatively, or under the veil of recuperation, things that would spark revolt as one-off measures.

As a result of its instrumental basis, the state can also conspire to change the 'rules of engagement' almost overnight. There is a frequent problem that, just as some issue is about to be won, just as Huntington Life Sciences is about to close or summit protests are successfully holding cities, the state makes a move which can only seem unfair, altering the entire situation in which the conflict occurs. Bush famously boasted that his opponents analysed reality, but, being driven by belief, he could simply change it at will. While his opponents are busy catching up, he'll change it again. It is necessary to be prepared for such moves. At present, they have a highly decomposing effect on activist movements, particularly when repression is ratcheted up (think of the impact of Genoa and its aftermath in Italy, or the effect of the post-911 period in America). Being aware of such problems can help avert them, but it is also necessary to keep active on the current terrain, and not hold back out of fear that the state will make such moves. It is hard to come up with answers as to how to respond to this risk, but three possibilities come to mind. Firstly, that a capacity to respond overwhelmingly to escalation, held in reserve, could serve to ward it off. Secondly, that enabling the state to make other moves of partial retreat can make such options of escalation less attractive. The risk in any such preparations is that they could also enable recuperation. Thirdly, enacting similar alterations of the 'rules of engagement' on one's own side can disempower the state's own ability to change the rules. Insurrection needs to stay unpredictable, and innovate constantly.

Recuperation

'no guaranteed income… will be able to lay the foundation of a New Deal, a new pact, a new peace. The social feeling has already evaporated too much for that' (CI)

Where repression fails, there is always recuperation as an alternative. It is a quieter, less obvious way of defeating insurrections. Recuperation is an ambiguous response. It often involves real problems being addressed, sometimes even with the same responses which might occur in a liberated context, and with the recognition or tolerance of autonomous spaces. Yet it addresses such problems one by one, in such a way as to keep the system in place and hence to keep generating problems.

Recuperation follows a common pattern. The state will decide, in the event of defeat, to tolerate the costs of autonomy, because they are less than the costs of repression. But it will also try, simultaneously, to alter the future strategic balance by decomposing the basis for resistance, usually by drawing people inside on the margins. There is thus a common pattern of the state conceding something (squatters' rights in Germany, Aboriginal autonomy in Australia, a halt to road-building in Britain…), waiting for the struggle to abate, and then attacking again 20 or 30 years later.

The main threat posed by periods of recuperation is that the networks sustained by resistance fall apart, and the emotional states arising from struggle become harder to sustain. It can be difficult to retain social composition at times when recuperation is at work. There is a tendency for the number of activists to decrease, and for people to be less angry. Previous partial victories, such as the creation of autonomous spaces, then become vulnerable to a backlash after a period of time. Ways need to be found to 'lock in' such victories during periods of downturn in struggle. This could be achieved by deepening resistance in everyday life, or by radicalising the break with dominant ways of seeing.

In place of a conclusion: crisis

'What makes the crisis desirable is that in the crisis the environment ceases to be the environment. We are forced to reestablish contact, albeit a potentially fatal one, with what's there, to rediscover the rhythms of reality… [of] something to inhabit' (CI)

'Reconnecting with such gestures [of defying the state and making do with what's available], buried under years of normalized life, is the only practicable means of not sinking down with the world' (CI)

'There is a clinically dead civilization… only decision will rid us of the corpse' (CI)

Capitalism is in crisis. Maybe this is one of capitalism's periodic cyclical downturns. Or maybe it is something deeper, a crisis of the dominant system, connected to the ecological crisis, to the end of abundant energy supplies, to ecological exhaustion. The world-systems analyst Sing Chew suggests that civilisations eventually collapse from ecological exhaustion, when they run out of resources to exploit. After the collapse, there follow 'dark ages', which Chew, as a progressivist, tends to fear – but which for us, could be periods of hope. In 'dark ages', diffuse power proliferates, populations disperse from centralised spaces, local knowledge predominates over global knowledge.

Crisis creates opportunities for rebuilding. The Coming Insurrection refers to the experience of New Orleans: crisis created a space in which accumulated practical knowledges were deployed. This suggests something important: recomposition is only ever a crisis away. It has to be actively prevented by keeping the lid on the pressure-kettle, by actively decomposing. It reappears the moment a crisis makes the lid come off. They argue that movements are strongest when they take advantage for the opportunities for self-organisation created by moments of suspension of normality – from Islamic parties providing para-state services in marginal zones to left parties exploiting crises. The implication is that gaps created by crises can also be filled by activist bands, recomposing other ways of living.

Hence, we have a range of paths forward for insurrection, a range of possible futures. Certain strategies seem likely to proliferate. In particular, the warding-off of repression is likely to produce new strategies, and subsistence orientations could well re-emerge. Insurrections should be thought of in terms of counterposing a social network based on bands, swarms and affinity to a social system based on hierarchies. It is also a struggle of expressive against instrumental conceptions. The success of insurrection depends on the prevalence and intensity of diffuse power, counterposed to concentrated power. The current crisis provides a potential opportunity to expand spaces of autonomy, but certain fundamental problems would have to be addressed before Northern movements can sustain an insurrection indefinitely. Whether these problems will be addressed, remains to be seen.

It’s that time again, when after four (or eight) years, the presidential election becomes “the most important of our time.” The clowns might be different, but the circus remains the same: filling vacancies on the Supreme Court, a rollback of abortion rights, foreign wars and targeted assassinations, the growing prison population, the expansion of the surveillance state… The campaigns of Trump and Sanders will surely be remembered as footnotes; the former is so buffoonish that even other Republicans can’t help making fun of him, while the latter, a Socialist Jew, is obviously unelectable to the Executive Branch. Sure to be forgotten as well (at least until the next time) is the excitement of a certain group of self-described anarchists who, every so often, throw aside what might generously be characterized as a half-hearted adherence to anarchist principles, and proudly embrace and exercise their rights as American citizens. To vote. Over the years, plenty of these part-time anarchists have chosen to engage in electoralism, but they have usually done so privately, not daring to try to convince anyone that such engagement furthers any anarchist vision or project.

It was bad enough that there was a Hope Bloc to greet Obama’s 2009 inauguration; this time around we have to stomach the spectacle of anarchists being shills for a Social Democrat Surprisingly — or not! — pro-Sanders anarchists have something of an actual history to draw on. Murray Bookchin (when he was still pretending to be an anarchist) was a Sanders booster from the days when the current senator was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont; Sanders’ tenure as an elected official may have been part of a real-world experience that contributed to Bookchin’s municipal, and state-level pro-Green Party electoralist deviation.

A quick reminder: when anarchists use the term direct action, we mean any activity undertaken individually and/or collectively outside/against/without the use of elected or self-appointed representatives, especially those in government. Like all principles are supposed to be, the anarchist promotion of direct action is non-negotiable. One of the contributing factors to the definitive dissolution of the First International was a split over the electoralist strategy of Socialists; anarchists embraced direct action as an explicit rejection of legal politics. It doesn’t necessarily mean breaking shit (although that can be part of it), but it doesn’t mean volunteering to get arrested, and it certainly doesn’t ever mean petitioning politicians to change policies or laws.

From the 1870s, most anarchists have not considered legality and parliamentarianism to be worthwhile strategic or tactical principles; when Socialists — who do — set up their Second International in 1889, they almost automatically excluded and/or ejected anarchists from it. Social Democracy, the ideology originating in the Second International, has different wings, from the electoral-fetishist, right-wing, non-Marxists all the way to the left-wing, insurrectionary, Marxist state capitalists (who eventually rejected the gradualism embodied in the Second and set up a Third International in 1919) more commonly known as Leninists. It's Important to recall that all Leninists (and their various sectarian subgroups who worship Trotsky, Mao, Che, Ho, Stalin, ad nauseam) have showed themselves to be among the most implacable enemies of authentically radical social change. For the last 100 years, from Mexico to Russia, from Germany to Spain, from Vietnam to Hungary and Cuba, social democrats have proudly presided over the slaughter of anarchists and other radicals who have promoted the non- hierarchical self-organization — aka, direct action — of working class and poor people.

There’s no reason to think that Bernie Sanders would be any different.

A presidential election year could be a time to point out and decry the many deliberate inadequacies of what constitutes American-style democracy: the near-total focus on religious issues; self-appointed Super Delegates; the pro-slavery origins of the Electoral College; the continual erosion of the provisions in the Voting Rights Act; the inordinate focus on Swing States; the Citizens United decision; to say nothing of the absurdity of having a two-party system that refuses proportional representation… Instead, pro-Sanders anarchists acquiesce to the junior high school level, lowest common denominator, internally contradictory, mythology of one- person-one-vote majority rule, and the average citizen’s (alleged) full participation in political decision making. That’ll show the state!

Regular readers of this journal may find the observation unduly trite, but it bears repeating that most of what’s wrong with American anarchists, especially the activist subcategory, is that a sizable segment remains committed to some form of Leftism. From being immersed in projects championing some vague notion of Social Justice” to acting as unpaid social workers, too many American anarchists continue to wallow in the strategic mire of defacto social democracy, constantly working to ameliorate the worst aspects of neoliberal post-industrial capitalism. This was seen most clearly in the various Occupy camps around the country; horizontally organized charities are still charities; eviction/foreclosure defense is predicated on the idea of private property; representation (with or without the famous mandated delegates) remains unchallenged. It’s not that projects that provide food and shelter are useless or unhelpful; plenty of people otherwise unable to squeeze out a basic level of survival at the bottom of the capitalist pyramid certainly appreciate the help. But to pretend that these activities are the seeds of the new inside the shell of the old is a delusion. Like voting. Most of the organizational structures and decision-making processes in such projects tend to mirror the worst aspects of virtually all varieties of the Left, like paternalism, bureaucratism, and institutionalized authoritarianism.

Electoralism, as an integral aspect of good citizenship, can’t be separated from this. Perhaps there’s some alluring residue of the patriotism left over from those junior high school civics classes, some form of loyalty to the whole “right of petition for the redress of grievances” thing. For whatever reason(s), too many anarchists continue to harbor illusions about the responsiveness of the duly elected legal representatives of the citizens of the United States; that’s why they still organize and participate in demand-based protest, justified by rights-based discourse. Shamefully, too many anarchists can’t seem to resist the temptation of propping up political parties espousing moderate progress within the bounds of the law. @

Spectres, Joylessness, and the contours of ressentiment

Identity Politicians (IPs) are a particular kind of leftist who use the spectre[1] of an identity-category (gender, race, sexuality, etc) as a lever to obtain power. In the sense discussed here, they should not be considered coterminous either with groups of people oppressed by identity categories, or even that subset who prioritise identity as a key site of struggle. Not all women, Black people, People of Colour (POC)[2], or members of other specifiable groups are IPs; not all feminists, anti-racists, or even separatists are IPs. Racism, sexism and other oppressions along identity axes are sociologically real, and not every person involved in the struggle against such oppressions is an IP.

Intersectionality – the recognition of multiple forms or axes of oppression, with complex interacting effects – is an effective theoretical response to the problems of Identity Politics, but there have clearly been difficulties putting it into practice. In identity-linked movements, some people use intersectionality as a way to avoid the idea of principal contradiction, although occasionally in practice, people who claim to be intersectional end up treating one or two oppressions as primary. Nevertheless, the fact that not all identity-related theories or movements need to be treated as Identity Politics does not mean that the influence of Identity Politicians is trivial. The writers and activists discussed here not only exist, but their ideas and practices are often insidious and unfortunately widespread. Recognizing the importance and necessity of countering that deleterious influence is my motivation for writing this essay.

It should here be emphasised that this is not a critique of all forms of radical theory focused on racial or gender oppression. This critique of IPs is by no means a critique of every position which focuses on a particular type of oppression (such as gender or race). Indeed, aspects of this critique are already present in a number of theorists who work with identity. For instance, the iconic anti-colonial writer Frantz Fanon argued that dualistic identities deform interpersonal relations and reproduce colonial power. While the struggle against colonial power is in fact an irreducible antagonism, and moves similar to those of IPs are strategically useful to fight it, the ultimate goal is to overcome such binaries in a future of the disalienated “whole [hu] man” (Wretched of the Earth, 238-9). He even articulates an almost Stirnerian’ claim that “the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence … I am endlessly creating myself” (Black Skin, White Masks 204). Similarly, in her later works, Gloria Anzaldúa argued that we are citizens of the universe, sharing an identity at a cosmic or subatomic level which is wider than any racial or social category (This Bridge We Call Home, 558). She came to criticise IPs for putting up walls and causing violence between groups (Interviews, 118). Neither of these authors arrives at a Stirnerian position: Fanon moves towards humanism, and Anzaldúa towards spiritual holism. However, their rejections of fixed identities overlap and intersect with mine, and serve to counter any suspicion that the rejection of Identity Politics entails a failure to take patriarchy, colonialism, or racism seriously.

Some feminists and Black radicals do not deploy the reactive affects discussed below, and instead seek to regenerate a force of becoming to one degree or another (e.g. Mary Daly, Germaine Greer, Audre Lorde, Edouard Glissant). Others, notably dependency theorists and socialist-feminists, emphasise structural oppression, and struggle primarily against macro-structures – destroying capitalism, modernity, or the world-system – rather than focusing on the micro-politics of privilege. None of these approaches falls within what is being critiqued here. Academic approaches that draw on poststructuralism are also distinct from Identity Politics, in that they typically reject the primacy of any particular position. Academic theories related to oppression and identity – for example, Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Postcolonial Theory, and poststructuralist feminism – generally reject the idea of principal contradiction. The popularity of Identity Politics among radicals is partly due to the influence of academic work on identity, but, in academic spaces, most strategies of IPs would be rejected as essentialist (there are other issues of disagreement between post-left anarchy and poststructuralism, and between post-left anarchy and leftist types of structuralism, but these issues will not be covered here).

What is being criticised here is a particular political style, rather than a theoretical orientation – a style which labels as oppressive any deviation from a particular political line, which resorts almost immediately to public denunciation and exclusion, and which entails analytical and categorical rigidity, with corresponding boundary-policing. They can be distinguished from those whose approaches pursue open-ended becomings through the deconstruction of identity-categories (eg Heckert), which are minoritarian becomings rather than minority identities.

IPs see one axis of oppression as primary – the principal contradiction[3] They demand that everyone focus on this axis. If someone fails to do so, IPs label them racist, sexist, white supremacist, patriarchal, etc. Ditto if they refuse leadership by the oppressed group (often meaning the IPs themselves), deviate from the IP’s proposed political line, or criticise an IP. Such terms are deployed only by a member of the correct group, and are used to silence criticism – in the case of Patriarchy Haters, even the word violence is monopolised; those who oppose them “do not get to decide what counts as violence” (Voline). The idea of a principal contradiction leads to contempt for other issues and priorities. For instance, IPs in APOC, who focus on race, argue that “bleating about gender and class” is an instance of “diversionary tactics” to deflect from race (Anon, Open Letter). Early CWS work treated issues other than racism as “dis- tractions” (Dot Matrix), and Lorenzo Ervin demands that “anti-racism/anti-colonialism” be made “the core concern” of every activist group (315). He also dismisses anything outside his own agenda – from climate change to anti-fascism – as a “white rights” issue (133, 290, 302).

This political style boundary-polices identities in a way which renders them rigid and authoritarian. In many cases, fighting alleged racism or sexism inside radical groups is seen as the most important issue in radical politics – more important than fighting racism/sexism in the wider society. Ervin calls white radicals the worst kinds of racists, worse than hardcore conservatives (240, 272-3). Usually, these attacks take the form of militant struggle from the Maoist milieu: public denunciation and/or disruption, criticism/self-criticism, purging/ exclusion, and the policing of micro-oppressions within the movement or scene; activists refuse to draw distinctions between allies and sympathisers, active enemies, and anything in-between. Ostracism, “the ultimate form of social control,” “is very infrequently used” in indigenous cultures (Peaceful Societies), but is used almost immediately by IPs for the smallest perceived transgressions.

Ervin’s repeated tirades against white anarchists provide a textbook case of this approach; his recent antics include labelling the entire Anarchist Black Cross racist because, at their recent convention in Denver, someone – at the request of Black political prisoner Jalil Muntaqim – read aloud a racist letter by a prison guard. Roger White’s Post Colonial Anarchism exemplifies this too, as do the faction of APOC who disrupted the Crimethlnc convergence in Philadelphia in 2009, verbally abusing participants and damaging their belongings. Kill Whitey, one ofthe cheerleaders for this attack, later extended the disruptors’ accusations of“white supremacy” to Food Not Bombs and other anarchist groups, demanding that all such groups accept black leadership. The attack by activists from the Qilombo social centre on the CAL Press table at the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair in 2014 is another case; subsequent comments online by Qilombo supporters clearly show the same rhetoric. Patriarchy Haters, the group which emerged from the Patriarchy and the Movement event in Portland, represent a feminist variant; their most notorious intervention was to shout down Kristian Williams at an unrelated event for criticising their political style in his article, The Politics of Denunciation.

Identity and Spectres

From a Stirnerian anarchist perspective, at the root of the problem with IPs is the spectre – the use of an identity-category as a transcendent, abstract category which possesses and defines values. In Stirner’s theory, the problem of oppression is the problem that people value spectres and the things which benefit spectres – instead of valuing the things which they desire as a “unique one.” All categories, words, concepts, can become spectres if they are allowed to possess and dominate us – even those which refer to our properties or attributes (59, 151). If people are defined as essentially and primarily something – whether it be humanity, whiteness, blackness, masculinity, femininity – this is always alienating, because the category is always “his essence and not he himself,” and therefore something alien (28), which requires “my valuelessness” (145). As a real person, each of us is a processual being, an embodied self, located in a field of becoming.

From a Stirnerian perspective, systems of oppression such as racism and patriarchy are oppressive impositions of a particular spectre. Systems of oppression based on gender, race, and so on are sociologically real, but ultimately rest on other people imposing a particular spectre – treating another person not as a unique one, but as an instance of femininity, or “just another X.” Such systems entail valuing a particular category to the exclusion of others, leading to violence against those excluded.

However, the subordination of one spectre to another is not the base level of the problem; the problem is that spectres do not liberate or empower those who belong to the category they value, because those belonging to the category are valued only as instances of the category, not in their full, unrepresentable being. Hence, a right of humanity or a white privilege is never my right or privilege, because my unique being is not identical with humanity or whiteness. Even if I qualify as human or white (by falling within the extensional set of each category), there is some residue of uniqueness which is prohibited by the spectre. Stirner’s concept of the un-person expresses this clearly. An un-person falls within the category human, but is deemed to deviate from the essence, for instance by putting uniqueness before humanity. The un-person is not liberated, but jailed or hospitalised. Indigenous people always fell within the extensional set of humans, but were historically exterminated or assimilated because they fell outside the essence of what colonisers defined as having human value. The hierarchising of representational categories is secondary to the initial oppressive gesture of subordinating real becomings to abstract categories.

By analogy, white or male privilege is the privilege of the spectre, not of the extensional set. There is the spectre as a category, which usually has a set of normatively defined characteristics (such as masculinity, whiteness, humanity). And then there is the set of people who are classified as part of the spectre, who may or may not have these characteristics. A male white person becomes un-white or un-male when he ceases to conform to dominant ideas about the category. We might say that white privilege is not something which is owned by a person defined as white; it is owned by an alien spectre (112), the category of whiteness.

Spectres are connected to sovereignty, as theorised by Agamben. In sovereignty, a political ruler has the power to decide which instances of the extensional set conform to the essence of the spectre and are accorded value – who is “person” (qualified life) and who is “un-person” (bare life). This leads to “abyssal thought,” the devaluing of those who fall outside dominant normativity (de Souza Santos). In Maoism and Leninism, sovereignty operates in the form of vanguard ism or substitutionism. The Party or leader defines the spectre and hence claims to speak for all those covered by it – but such statements are really political decisions rather than empirical claims. The IP, the leader, claims to speak as and for POC, Black people, women, and so on – but never for all those covered by the category. In a sneaky semantic move, the moment the oppressed criticise the vanguard, they are no longer the oppressed, but objectively have become allied with the oppressors. An enemy of the IP becomes an enemy of the entire category — the spectre.

Identity Politics and Maoism

IPs IMAGINE SPECTRES TO BE MATERIALLY REAL. Whereas Stirnerians insist that becoming is unrepresentable, IPs follow Marx’s view that it can be identified with an essence. For Stirner, binaries are artificial effects of spectres; for Marxists, they are correct theoretical reflections of binary structures within reality itself. The IP’s style is descended from Maoism. Younger IPs are unlikely to have been directly influenced by Maoism, but important elements of Maoist political grammar were imported into earlier forms of Identity Politics and continue to operate.

Maoists and IPs are strong structural determinists. This means that they work with a model of social life in which macro-social structures determine people’s identities and political outcomes. For instance, Ervin says that any white radical has “middle class racial privileges… and it does not matter about their personal beliefs” (268). IPs deny that people exist as unique individuals at all; people are simply instances of spectres. As an APOC writer says, “It’s completely arrogant and pretentious to think you are unique. You are just another white person” (Anon, Open Letter). People are taken to be effects of, and reducible to, particular social structures: these structures determine their material interests, which determine their unconscious investments, which determine their beliefs and actions. People’s real, unconscious desires are always “racialized desires” stemming from “racialized, classed, and gendered subjectivities” (comments on Anon, Smack a White Boy Part Two). In the case of privileged people, desires are not to be liberated, but purified. In the case of oppressed people, what they desire is automatically, instinctively right — provided it follows from the spectre.

This approach depends on the conflation of the spectre (eg whiteness, masculinity) and the extensional set it covers (eg white people, men). Roger White asserts that “white, Christian men have held power and privilege” – without distinguishing between the spectres, the elite, and all members of the categories. And the founder of CWS writes of “the guilt that comes from being who I am: a white person of conscience in a white supremacist society” (Dot Matrix).

All of these positions entail the view that we are our spectres. As Williams argues, it classifies people as “particular types of people who are essentially those things,” and reduces oppressed as much as abuser/oppressor to “political symbols used by others to advance some specific ideological line.” Normatively, anything which aids the oppressed spectre is good; anything which harms it is bad. The same action – silencing, violence, abuse, eviction – is praised in the former case and condemned in the latter. A person’s intent is irrelevant; the real significance comes from the effect, as defined in the IP’s frame. Duplicating the historic role of the activist or militant (Vaneigem, 111; Anon, Give Up Activism), the IP makes her/himself indispensable as an Expert on oppression, based on claimed knowledge of the spectre and the correct response to it.

Such spectres are used to channel the anger of the excluded into controlled political forms. Maoism is a power-politics of ruthless control, but it is seductively appealing to marginalised people because it contains a moment of empowerment. Especially when out of power, Maoism encourages the expression of accumulated anger against real oppressors such as landlords and government functionaries. This practice is the origin of the culture of denunciation, and the reason why Black and feminist groups in the ’60s were attracted to Maoism. Once in power, however, Maoists cannot continue to allow attacks on power-holders. Instead they channel anger onto folk-devils, such as disempowered former oppressors, in carefully managed denunciation campaigns (Perry and Li, 7). In the Euro-American context this method takes the form of moral panics.

This contradictory role is also channelled theoretically. Maoists and IPs deploy a contradictory fusion of two incompatible ontologies: realism and perspectivism. Realists maintain that an external reality is knowable through rational methods by anyone, whereas perspectivists maintain that everyone’s standpoint is culturally unique, and there is no way to establish any standpoint as more true than others. Maoists/IPs are ontological realists in identifying the principal contradiction and depicting the actions of the privileged (which can be reduced to externally knowable structures), but perspectivist in their treatment of the standpoint of the oppressed: if a Black person says something is racist, it is racist (comments on Jarach et al); if a woman alleges abuse, the allegation is self-evidently true (comments on Black Orchid Collective). This turns women and Black people into Experts, to be unquestioningly listened to and obeyed – a position dehumanising for them as well as others. In contrast, the real meaning of a white person’s or a man’s actions is externally knowable, and intent is irrelevant.

There is method in this madness. In Maoist theory, knowledge is a fusion of experience, which comes from the masses, and rational theory, which comes from the vanguard (Mao, On Practice). In practice, this meant that knowledge emerging from mass meetings, denunciation campaigns, speak-bitterness campaigns, and so on was systematised and reprocessed by the Party into the Mass Line, which was presented as the unmediated experience of the masses. Disagreements within the movement are “resolved by the method of criticism and self-criticism” (Mao, On Contradiction). In practice this meant denunciation and self-denunciation. During the Cultural Revolution, different Maoist factions began denouncing each other as “objectively counter-revolutionary,” as part of a competition for resources. Elements of both of these approaches can be seen in the actions of IPs, the former as an insistence on leadership by members of a particular group (Black, women, etc), the latter in the distribution of prestige to allies based on conspicuous self-abasement and political performance.

Ultimately, denunciation, exclusion, border-policing, promoting us/them binaries among the oppressed, and harping on principal contradictions are the methods through which IPs/Maoists mould autonomy into political power. Anarchism is a threat to Maoism, not because it denies oppression or comes from privileged groups, but because it carries the self-expression of the oppressed further.

References to liberation, autonomy, decolonisation, and so on notwithstanding, in such perspectives, liberation necessarily means liberation of a spectre, not of concrete people – not even of concrete people categorised by a spectre (as women, Black people, POC, etc). By implication, leadership or authoritarian rule by a member of the spectre is unproblematic. It is still self-determination by the spectre – the spectre itself remains autonomous, even if its members do not. This is clear in Ribeiro’s essay Senzala or Quilombo: “[the quilombo] was no communist society” but had a king; “this is neither here nor [there] … [it had] freedom and self-determination.” It does not matter if an autonomous zone is hierarchically structured, as long as the leaders are POC.

To enforce this primacy of the spectre, IPs encourage massive simplifications, reproducing the wider equivalence between stereotypes and roles (Vaneigem, 134). Members of entire groups (white, male, straight, middle-class) are deemed privileged. Privilege is often alleged despite being a result of the actions of a third party (the police, for example), rather than one’s own. But it carries implications that the privileged individual is somehow a direct oppressor of the oppressed individual (Kill Whitey, in True Colors, refers to “white people” as the oppressor), that they are part of a small, isolated elite (Ervin, 309), and that they’ve “got it good” in an absolute sense (Anon, Open Letter). Strategically, the focus is on the privileged person, rather than the person who actually discriminates against or oppresses the oppressed person. Such a person is to admit, identify with, unlearn, or give up their privilege, as if it were an attribute they controlled, rather than an attribute of a spectre, assigned and reinforced by others.

In terms of political strategy, IPs declare that people should do what the Expert defines as structurally responsible, rather than following their desires. This encourages people to focus on their weaknesses or internal conditioning, rather than their strengths or outer struggles (Gelderloos), situating oppression mainly in individual activists’ psyches rather than the dominant social system. IPs insist movements must have leaders, and these leaders must come from the oppressed group (Dot Matrix, CWS; Ervin, 291). Spaces must implement extensive policies of normative regulation and enclosure to meet criteria of safe space, reflecting a “need for protection and security that eclipses the desire for freedom” (Landstreicher, 12). Any refusal to do so is taken to be an instance of racism/sexism within the radical movement – an instance which is tied to occasional cases of insensitive or prejudiced comments or actions to paint a misleading picture of a radical scene in which oppressive behaviour is pervasive and out of control. Normative policing through safe space policies often makes spaces less safe, by creating risks of denunciation and purging which are greater than the risks of micro-oppression (Anonymous Refused). Mixed movements are labelled not as incidentally white/male, but as deliberately white supremacist and patriarchal. The illusion is that exclusion creates inclusion; this rests on the implication that the power to exclude is unproblematic, provided it is vested in or exercised by the in-group. For anarchists, the best way to help people feel safer is to recreate autonomous forms of self-organized control over the basic economic and social conditions of life, and to provide care and support within networks of affinity. Without roots in material scarcity, spectres would lose their power to wound.

To create a politics of sacrifice, people have to be taught they have no inherent value, so they believe in and support the systems of compensation associated with roles (Vaneigem,139). IPs conveys this message by defining privilege as an ineliminable attribute of identity and encouraging guilt. Experiences of different groups – separated by social categories – are taken to be incommensurable and incomparable, whereas those of individuals in the same group are taken to be equivalent or identical: incidents of alleged anarchist racism are likened to slavery and genocide, but instances of police brutality against black people and white protesters are absolutely incomparable (Ribeiro). Objecting to IPs’ abuse is “entitlement,” which is always a bad thing, since privileged people need to “know their place” as docile subordinates of the new rulers-to-be. In some cases they are also expected to funnel resources to IPs’ groups, without anything in return, all the while respecting the group’s “autonomy” to bad- mouth and exclude them (Ervin, 291; Qilombo).

Despite their rhetorical radicalism, IPs, like all good Maoists, do not challenge capitalism. On the contrary, Perlman argues that national liberation movements – the inspiration for IPs – are actually means of capitalist nation-building. Why is a supermarket packer not a manager, or a security guard not the chief of police? Because of racism. “There’s no earthly reason for the descendants of the persecuted to remain persecuted when nationalism offers them the prospect of becoming persecutors” (Perlman). The point, however, is that they become persecutors and not free beings. The overall system remains intact, dominant, with the spectres reshuffled.

Between anarchy and identity politics

There is a common misunderstanding, going back to Marx’s critique of Stirner and exhibited in Roger White’s critique of Lawrence Jarach, that anarchists believe that spectres are simply figments of the imagination – “pretending [racist/sexist] discourse doesn’t exist just because you didn’t create it” (White). This means we can wish away spectres. Stop believing in them, and they lose any power to oppress. This is a mischaracterisation. While it is true that Stirner believes that spectres lose their normative force when we disbelieve them, we can also be oppressed by other people who continue to believe in and act on spectres. Structural oppressions are sociologically real but are not material in the Marxist sense. This simply means that one’s own will is pitted against the wills and beliefs of others – most of whom continue to be possessed by spectres.

For anarchists such as Stirner, normative thought, or statism, is a deeper structure of oppression which generates the various other axes. Binary thinking is itself closely tied to European thought and the underpinnings of patriarchy and colonisation. Eurocentric statism and capitalism are bound-up with colonialism, modern thought, rationalism, and the modern world-system, but at a deeper level, Europe was also self-colonised first (Clastres, Perlman). While European countries became the global imperial powers, the problem of imperialism and ethnocide are inherent to all states (Clastres). The irony is that IPs are in fact Eurocemtric, relying on European concepts such as rights and strong binary oppositions Aragorn!, Non-European Anarchism, 10). On a deeper level, to be anti-Eurocentric and anti-ethnocidal requires a rejection of the state.

With their inversions of binaries, IPs seek to reproduce institutions of hierarchical power. The alternative here is affinity: the attempt to form connections, informal groups, and unions of egoists without these groups being mediated by spectres. Creating unmediated intercourse across socially operative hierarchies (race, gender, etc) is complicated, but by no means impossible – nor necessarily more difficult than creating unmediated intercourse between members of the same category. Where radicalism works well, it manages to construct such direct connections. As Landstreicher argues, “[t]he awareness each has of the others’ individuality creates a basis where decision and action need not be separate” (21). Relating to others as unique beings, as non-disposable creatures valuable in themselves, makes possible communication even in contexts of radical difference. Anarchic affinity is undermined by the inability to challenge others’ views, the construction of oppressed people as Experts, and the idea of incommensurability (Dot Matrix, CWS). This actually reinforces binary thinking and relations of domination.

IPs start from a standpoint within the dominant system of spectres, and encourage us to identify with our position within systems of oppression (Gelderloos, 13). They require that “any person interested in radical transformation relinquish the ability to define her/ himself” (Jarach, 5). Instead, people are to dissolve themselves into the pre-existing social categories into which they are classified, both by the dominant system and by IPs. As Jarach argues, “they can’t conceive of the possibility that the elevation of any particular culturally constructed marker into a significant value-laden category could lead to oppression” (3). Indeed, they define the possibility out of existence: we really are our categories; to oppress is to oppress a category; to liberate is to liberate a category. And leadership of Experts is necessary, if the extensional set are to be reduced to the spectre.

From a Stirnerian point of view, instead of starting from a subject-position assigned by the regime of spectres and categories, anarchists should start from a standpoint of being a unique individual irreducible to any spectre or category (including those of uniqueness and individuality). A Stirnerian recognises racism or sexism, not as one’s own privilege separating one from the other, but as an act of normative repression against other unique ones, and an insult against one’s own uniqueness. The intensity of internal and external barriers to free expression vary with context, but there is a basis for networking together in the rejection of alienation and spectres. This is recognised from non-Eurocentric perspectives; some indigenous scholars argue that modern alienation is a kind of sickness, afflicting colonisers as well as colonised – indeed, that the colonisers infected the colonised because they were already sick (Duran and Duran, Burman). This position meshes with the Stirnerian view that oppressor as well as oppressed is possessed by spectres.

Anarchy does not necessarily stem from any identity at all. More often, it comes from a standpoint outside the field of available identities – as in Stirner’s idea of a standpoint unique to each person (190-1). Gelderloos argues that his own experience is that “[a]ll the identities that society tried to stitch me into don’t fit, and the fabric is coarse” (6), offering “an inheritance stripped of anything I value” (7). Similarly, for another anonymous anarchist, “Our task is not to give up some phantom privilege that has never really been our own, but to expose and move beyond the artificial identities that smother our individuality” (Willful Disobedience).

Rather than expressing white male privilege, anarchy should be seen as a form of ethnogenesis: the emergence of a subculture or counterculture which, if able to continue on its line of flight (or détournement ), would become a different culture entirely (New Travellers and, historically, Irish Travellers are good examples). The emergence of new cultures through ethnogenesis is well-documented, and often stems from flight from state power (Scott), a process which begins with a choice to differ from the majority of an existing group. In other words, forming a counterculture is the first step in becoming non-white. Ethnogenesis is a problem for essentialists because it entails fluidity in the very formation of the structural basis; it frustrates border-policing. IPs denounce both dropping-out and cultural hybridity, dismissing the latter as cultural appropriation.

The Politics of Affect

If oppression is the imposition of a structure in which people are assigned to spectres – of which both privileged and oppressed spectre are largely effects – then IPs actually entrench oppression by locking-in the spectres and intensifying normativity. If one assumes that hierarchical power is wrong because it prevents (non-white) people from living joyously, in the flow of becoming of their own desires, then the subordination of autonomy to the primary contradiction is not an appropriate response. Anarchy goes further, because it opposes the underlying structure of domination of unique ones and flows of becoming by the order of spectres. IPs seek to abolish the privilege of a particular spectre; ideally, anarchists seeks to abolish the normative power of spectres in general – which necessarily also abolishes every spectre’s privilege. Stirnerian anarchy goes beyond unlearning privilege — the favouring of one spectre over another — to unlearning spectres — learning not to be subordinate to spectres.

Affectively, the orientation of anarchy is to unmediated, active joy. There is a level of immediate, free becoming which is deeper than the hierarchy of spectres. Stirner theorises a kind of intense, joyous exercise of capacities “without reservations” (171), giving “free play” to one’s capabilities (167), and playing “as freely as possible” (130). Bonanno argues that capitalism denies us an experience of active (rather than passive) joy, and counsels a “search for joy… through the search for play,” driven by a “vital impulse that is always new, always in movement.” In the excitement of play “lies the possibility to break with the old world and identify with new aims and other values and needs” (15-16). Hakim Bey argues that insurrections and autonomous zones should create peak experiences of extraordinary consciousness and intensity (TAZ). Such peak experiences are “value-formative on the individual level,” allowing a “transformation of everyday life” (Occult Assault). Various anarchist practices, from the TAZ to rewilding, from joyous insurrectionary struggle to dropping-out and living differently, are means of recovering this level of becoming and immediacy.

In contrast, the dominant affects for IPs are wallowing in the loss of immediacy and the inevitability of alienation (guilt, melancholy, inadequacy), a kind of joyless anger. They reproduce a style of politics which focuses on telling people “how to behave” (Dot Matrix, CWS), conditioning people into roles which reproduce the power of the spectacle. IPs reproduce conventional morality and its structures of ressentiment — negative affect (often including irrational, even self-destructive, verbal or physical lashing out) towards others as an expression of one’s own powerlessness, in contrast to celebration of one’s power. I have lost my capacity to enjoy; you have stolen it; you must be punished.

On the side of the supposedly empowered, Ervin encourages ruthlessness and “cold-blooded efficiency” as key virtues (245), reproducing the affective structur of managers, soldiers, and police. The practice of calling-out frames whiteness, white supremacy, and patriarchy as personal moral failures, even though the underlying theory frames them as structural realities. The cultivation of individual guilt and blame actually reproduces dominant Calvinist normativity (Gelderloos, 13), and the development of elaborate group norms reinforces white middle-class status orientations and etiquette.

For IPs, neither (those assigned as) privileged nor oppressed are able to escape ressentiment and become empowered. The latter become angry, rigid, and dependent on the spectre for their sense of power; the former become docile, submissive, and incapable of autonomous action. With intense joy forbidden, people become vulnerable to the mundane manipulation of transitory pleasure and prestige. IPs create a “system of rewards… to encourage compliance” with leaders from marginalised groups (Gelderloos, 12), reflecting the broader dynamic by which “skill in playing and handling roles determines rank in the spectacular hierarchy” (Vaneigem, 131). For the former out-group, anger and frustration with the dominant system are channelled onto other radicals, which sustains continued submersion in systems of oppression by providing a safety-valve for frustration, creating a substitute for a less reliable substantive rebellion. It also renders the oppressed dependent on the oppressors as either docile allies or targets of anger, and often leads to a politics focused on demands for recognition from those one also seeks autonomy from. The binary nature of the spectres adopted by IPs preclude ever becoming autonomous from the supposed oppressor, whom they paradoxically need to remain in place in order to ground their own role as Experts. Hence the irony when Ribeiro says of APOC “it is not about white people at all” — at the end of an entire article which is all about white people.

The structure of impotent anger, displaced aggression, and policing of etiquette is most notable in the practice of calling-out or denouncing other radicals — either for micro-oppressions (small comments or actions which are insensitive or latently racist/sexist), or for political disagreement categorised as racist/sexist. For instance, the CrimethInc disruptors call for a “culture of calling people out on their shit” (Anon, Smack a White Boy Part Two). In general, calling-out involves a crude, aggressive style; it carries a tone of I get to tell you what to do, and you have to obey.

Negative effects of anti-oppression normativity are paradoxically felt most strongly by the oppressed – poor whites, Black people, young people, people with psychological problems, and newcomers to a movement – who are less accustomed to self-policing their social appearance, less able to do so, or less aware of the operative norms. IPs thus close down radical groups into tightly bordered sects. Gelderloos deems the emphasis on micro-oppressions a kind of purism which seeks to banish deviance so as to create a monolithic personality-type (18). In practice, what is being challenged is not the person’s degree of complicity in regimes of oppression, but the extent of their knowledge of the appropriate anti-oppressive terminology and related normative codes.

Conceived as a struggle against the enactment of structural oppression, calling-out confuses the individual with the spectre they are taken to represent. It is understandable that oppressed people have a low tolerance threshold for prejudice and insensitivity, but it is unhelpful to glorify and encourage such reactions as politically valuable. Aragorn! says that “I tend only to ‘criticize’ when I am willing to take responsibility for the caring of the criticized” (Toward a Non-European Anarchism, 6). This position is more attentive to the affective consequences of calling-out, which, without suitable aftercare, leads to guilt, despair, and apathy. Alternatives to calling-out include rational debate, parody, ignoring provocations, trying to channel anger onto the wider system, and discussing the incident one-to- one outside the conflictual setting — also known as “calling-in.” Some anarchists advocate using nonviolent communication in such contexts (Heckert). In classical indigenous cultures, harmful deviance is taken as a kind of imbalance or sickness. They would seek to understand how a person has come into imbalance, and to gently guide them back to the right path (which is also the flourishing or becoming of their own personality). Most anarchists are very reasonable if they are told precisely why something is problematic.

IPs tend to react aggressively to any response to being called-out which does not amount to unconditional apology. Usually, the responses are not inherently objectionable. They deploy strategies of argumentative rebuttal, mitigation by context or motive, etc, which are standard in many conversational contexts. It is never entirely clear why these predictable responses are deemed intolerable by IPs (the claim that they seem to deny the other’s perspective [Tekanji] seems spurious), but it seems to be because they entail the absence of the desired affective response of submission.

Landstreicher suggests that IPs turns us into “a bunch of shy, yet inquisitorial mice tip-toeing around each other for fear of being judged, and just as incapable of attacking the foundations of this society as they are of relating to each other” (16). Instead, he urges us to become “a certain sort of being … capable of acting on our own terms to realize our own desires and dreams,” in struggle against domination (3). The point is “to transform ourselves into strong, daring, self-willed, passionate rebels” (6). This strength and passion is impeded by affects such as guilt, pity, and regret. We are aiming, remember, for a state of full life without reservations.

IPs conceive of their angry, disruptive style of politics as a way to express the authentic experience of being traumatised. But their distribution of commensurability (absolute within a spectre, but utterly absent outside it) entails downplaying the degree of specific traumas suffered by concrete people. And while it is true that listening to and believing a survivor’s story is crucial to healing, the sources and symptoms of trauma are too diverse to be dealt with through homogenised identities and prescriptive restrictions. Furthermore, the tactics of calling-out and excluding deviants can themselves be traumatic or triggering.

IPs often turn trauma into a source of power and identity, but marking trauma as an identity is also a barrier to autonomy. It prevents us reaching the level of immediacy and joy, keeping us in a field of scarcity thinking. It’s no coincidence that the most extreme regimes of oppression (such as Gitmo, supermax segregation, concentration camps, Native residential schools, and the “seasoning” of slaves) are designed to cause as much post-traumatic stress as possible. Trauma is also a block on active becoming and on living life to the fullest. In indigenous cultures, it is conceived as a sickness of the soul, in which part of the self retreats from the world or loses its life-energy (Burman; Duran and Duran).

Being open to people as unique individuals is the best way to respond to these kinds of problems. The fact that someone else has needs incompatible with one’s own, or that they can’t guess in advance what common action or object might be personally unbearable, does not mean they are oppressing someone.

Exodus versus submersion

One of the biggest disagreements between Stirnerian anarchists and IPs is on the question of exodus. IPs (and most left anarchists) generally condemn exodus as a privileged, middle-class strategy, instead favouring submersion in existing communities of the oppressed. For instance, the APOC disruptors claim that CrimethInc “encourage the culture of dropping out of society, which makes the assumption that the reader/attendee has that privilege” (Anon, Smack a White Boy Part Two). An anonymous Qilombo supporter terms the anarchist scene a “subcultural playpen” and an “all-white fantasy world” (comments on Jarach et al). Kill Whitey labels dumpster-diving as privileged, condemning “white college kids and middle-class punks hiding in drop-out culture” (Kill Whitey, Food Not Bombs), while Ervin classifies criticism of the “state’s ability to hold back a free lifestyle” as middle class (110). IPs allege that the entire tactical repertoire of horizontalism is privileged, in contrast with their preferred focus on community organising or intra-movement struggle.

The grain of truth in this position is that tactics of escape, exodus, and physical resistance carry different levels of difficulty and risk for different people. It’s easier to quit a job than to escape from prison. It’s easier to run from the police if one is physically fit. But anyone can adopt a perspective of escape, and attempt to create lines of flight from the system. While it may be easier for some than others, nobody should be under a moral obligation to remain oppressed just to avoid being different from others; any such obligation only reinforces oppression.

There are far more people who squat, shoplift, or dumpster dive who are from poor and marginal backgrounds; in the global South there are entire strata living in squatted shantytowns, abstracting electricity, and scavenging in rubbish tips. Historical practices such as the celebrated quilombos show that dropping-out is a serious, and often successful, strategy for the most oppressed.

James Scott’s work shows that peasants, slaves, and marginal groups use various tactics of exodus to minimise their subservience to elite power. Similarly, when highly oppressed groups become sufficiently angry, they often use the most militant forms of protest – as we have seen in cases like Paris 2005, London 2011, Los Angeles 1992, and so on. Poor people also use all kinds of high-risk survival strategies, from undocumented border-crossing to involvement in the drug trade. There is also evidence that dropping-out worked to defeat aspects of capitalism in the 1970s (Shukaitis).

Why, then, do IPs oppose exodus? I would hazard a guess that the real underlying objection is not that poor people cannot drop out, but that they should not: dropping-out contradicts the IP’s political agenda, resting on strong spectres and identities within the existing frame. Structural determinism precludes escape on principle. IPs celebrate their current blockages, internalise their cage, and insist that the cage is both inescapable and revolutionary. This is not a perspective of escape — it is a perspective of entrapment in the guise of solidarity.

IPs’ emphasis on community really comes down to a fear of placelessness. Their ideological vision of society requires that everyone have definable positionalities: a conservative vision, but inverted. This requires that categories remain dominant over lines of flight, escape, and becoming. Hence the need to enforce a prohibition on exodus – a prohibition which reveals their similarities with states and other hierarchical systems, which similarly prohibit the withdrawal of participation and restrict mobility. It is easy to see how the fear of the uncontrollable and unknowable – and the parallel desire to order all of reality into a fixed schema – lies beneath these discursive strategies.

A lot of the objection to exodus comes down to a hatred of play. Drop-outs are accused of turning poverty into a game, of saying someone can be poor and have fun (Anon, Smack and White Boy Part Two). This may just as well be said of important strands of peasant resistance such as carnivalesque and folk culture. IPs flourish on a culture of deadly seriousness and urgency, tied up with a celebration of trauma. Real activism, after all, is hard work, sacrifice: I cant have fun, so you shouldn’t either. This entails denying pleasure to others whenever possible. Of course, dropping out does lead to a kind of privilege – the person who has escaped clearly has a better life than the person still trapped in the system. This is equally true of quilombos, maroon communities, pirate utopias, and so on. But is this really a case against dropping-out?

Common sense and the community

Instead of seeking to escape the system, IPs place great emphasis on serving the community, the people, the oppressed, or a particular oppressed group. Ervin insists that the usefulness of revolutionaries depends on whether they serve the community (136), as opposed to “Declasse punks with red Mohawks” (276). White suggests that the “first priority of resistance” is community consciousness raising. Ribeiro argues that the “people” are failing to flock to existing anarchist groups because they represent “a white, petty-bourgeois Anarchism that cannot relate to the people,” an anarchism which is “individualistic, self-serving, [and] selfish.” A Qilombo supporter goes as far as to argue that “involving oneself in the school system” is an “excellent… investment,” far superior to drop-out anarchism, while another posits a “need to emphasize community norms and practices” (Kurukshetra), and Veranasi tells anarchists to get a job so as not to separate from the oppressed (comments on Smack a White Boy Part Two). There is also a wider accusation, particularly in Ervin’s work, that the allegedly bad race, gender, or class politics of radical movements is the reason for their continued failure (303, 310). This is the Maoist view that a tide of latent energy is always waiting to be released, which is currently fettered by the principal contradiction and inadequate leadership (Mao, On Contradiction; Bouc, 137; Howe and Walker, 176; Gurley).

A collective proprietary attitude to geographical areas corresponds to this political bias. White anarchists active in poor communities are accused of failing to get community consent, disrespecting locals, and gentrifying areas by inserting whiteness (Kill Whitey, Smack a White Boy; Kurukshetra). Ervin suggests anarchists have no “right to be” in a Black area (282), Kill Whitey tells white radicals to “get the fuck out of POC communities” (True Colors); in effect, white radicals are banned from Black areas in an inverted reproduction of segregation. This is a double-bind, since anarchist events in rural locations are declared inaccessible to poor people (Ervin, Racism in ABC; Veranasi, comments on Smack a White Boy Part Two). This reflects a broader irresolvable predicament: radicals are both told to be part of the people, and told they cannot (since their perspective is incommensurable and their privilege is ineliminable). The glorification of ghettos as autonomous zones runs up against the reality of imposed racial segregation.

There is a strong tone of ressentiment in the position: I can’t drop out so you mustn’t. If I was jailed and unable to escape from power, I would take courage and hope from the fact that others are still able to do so. The objection to separation tries to force radicals back into avoidable systems of authoritarian domination, such as work and schooling, thus reinforcing these institutions. IPs glorify escape from controlled spaces, such as fleeing the senzala (slave quarters) to the quilombo (autonomous zone). Yet in practice, they tell us never to flee the senzala, but instead to work within it as overseers, conditioning children into conformity, or as exploited, joyless workers. There is nothing radical and empowering about getting a job. In a context of generalised entrapment, to separate is not to alienate, but rather to escape, to slip out of place, to flee dominant categories and those who impose them.

Community politics is hamstrung by a major problem: the community are not especially radical. The IP assumption that “the people” or “the community” has revolutionary instincts is an effect of its construction as a spectre, not a result of observation of actual people. It also embeds vanguardist assumptions that the role of radicals is to locate, lead, and imbue these communities with revolutionary interests. The orientation to liberate a spectre rather than concrete people is the source of IPs’ hostility to individualism, personal freedom, and supposed selfishness among radicals.

IPs also run up against the realities of contemporary capitalism. Today, most of us do not belong to real, substantive communities. As Landstreicher argues, “the dominant forms of relating are economic, based on the domination of survival over life … Today, neither the daily interactions of one’s ‘communities’ (these strange, disconnected ‘communities’ of family, school, work) nor the chance encounters (at the market, on the bus, at some public event) have much chance of sparking a real and intense interest in another, an impassioned curiosity to discover who they are and what we might be able to create with them” (7). Bey argues that simply coming together is already a victory over capitalism (Immediatism vs Capitalism), and the Situationists exposed the emptiness of everyday life and the role of urban residential areas as state-controlled warehouses for workers (Debord, sections 169-76). Even where some kind of community life persists, it rarely entails a unitary set of beliefs, demands, and interests, or even (outside of certain subaltern social movements and indigenous groups) any kind of collective power. In looking to “the community,” IPs are seeking a source of strength which is at once a product of the system, and thereby constituted as weak. If they want dense, mutually supportive, socially meaningful communities, then they – like the rest of us – will have to build these communities, often from scratch, on the basis of affinity and living-otherwise. When IPs speak for the community, they typically do so as a vanguard, a representative, who substitutes for a community which is absent in practice.

A short time ago, the new BBC class survey (Heyden) became a fad among those activists who use social media. Nearly everyone who completed it came out in a category called “emergent service workers” (ESWs). The survey has eight categories, and ESWs are the second-bottom category, defined by low income and precarious work. They differ from the worse-off precariat in only two ways – “social and cultural capital.” In other words, the average anarchist is in the same position as the poorest group, except that we have more education and stronger social networks. ESWs are not some middle-class elite, hovering over the authentic poor. The precariat make up only 15% of the population according to the survey. ESWs are well below halfway. And the moment a precarian becomes politicised, they tend to gain education and networks, and become ESWs. So, realistically, anarchy is not a movement of middle-class kids. It is a movement of politically conscious, socially networked poor people.

IPs believe that anarchy is irrelevant to the community because anarchists are privileged, and separate from the community. In fact, anarchy seems irrelevant to the community because most people who’ve been conditioned to live within such system-constructed communities have internalised repressive, statist beliefs, and accept capitalist common sense (the Gramscian notion of an incoherent everyday philosophy or ideology prevalent among subaltern people, which embeds uncritical, hegemonic, and reactionary beliefs). The idea that the oppressed are just waiting for the right activist leadership, which is blocked by the allegedly inherent racism/sexism in social movements, is a delusion. Working in wider communities entails putting up with (and even glorifying) a lot of common-sense ideologies, prejudices, and bigotry on a scale far greater than anything within radical scenes. The real problem is not organisation, or the correct line, or the right leadership. The problem is whether people actually desire revolution/insurrec- tion. In fact, no revolutionary “people” exists, because of what Stimer terms the police sentiments of actually existing people (116).

The hypothesis that the community is more radical than so-called privileged anarchists is simply false. Most anarchists already oppose work, police, prisons, government, and so on whereas most community members do not. It is not uncommon for anarchists fighting gentrification, CCTV and other forms of the surveillance state, or morality-policing to be pitted against other local residents. It might be in poor people’s material interests to oppose dominant institutions, but for the most part they don’t. People who lack formal or informal political education tend not to become anarchists because they tend to remain stuck in capitalist common sense, dependent on the discourses made available by the mainstream, and caught up in the pursuit of values of individual advancement. Their supposed interests have little effect in mitigating these influences. Any anarchist project directed at the worse-off need to start from some kind of political education or political de/resocialisation of the poor (not primarily of ourselves, though most critical pedagogy is also reflexive and dialogical). Otherwise, anarchists pursuing such projects will simply be overwhelmed by the unreflexive common sense of those whose perspectives they idealise.

The theme of urgency is closely connected to the community orientation. IPs often posit immediately apparent realities, which are deemed extra-theoretical and extra-political. Disagreement with the IP’s perspective or actions is belittled as a “topic ripe for a drunk PhD” (White) or “some intellectual’s grad thesis”(Weaver). The oppressed are said to “know oppression” from experience: “we lost the need to understand pain philosophically when we learned it physically” (Ribeiro). Ervin postures as having no particular expertise, except “a decent supply of good common sense and street knowledge” (10), and urges us to “trust the best instincts of the people” (119). Patriarchy Haters condemn political debate as contrasting with real, life-or-death stakes for them: “We do not agree with people having a ‘political argument’ at our expense” (Statement). They suggest that their positions come from their “BODIES,” which are not “to be politicized, theorized, speculated upon” (Weaver).

IPs advance a framework in which theory distracts from reality. The historical origin of this framework is the Maoist emphasis on “experience” (suitably processed by the party) as superior to “book learning,” and the corresponding “Red versus expert” struggles of the Cultural Revolution. The basic gesture is to split issues between the real reality posited by IPs and associated with experience and the principal contradiction, and a field deemed secondary or tertiary, and therefore trivial. This grounds apparently obvious, self-evident claims and is used to create a sense of urgency: IPs are doing real, life-or-death politics, and everyone else is just messing around (notice once again the prejudice against play). The function of this gesture is to “declare certain questions off-limits” because “the answer is already known” (Williams). Arguments against IPs’ claims are often displaced onto the issue of who has the right to decide, which is returned to the question of spectres

Black radicals don’t have to listen to white critics, male experts have no right to expound on survivors’ experiences, etc. This is a category-error, to which the appropriate answer is: I’ve not exposed your mistake because I think you need my permission – I’ve exposed your mistake because it leads to oppression, bad politics, or ineffectiveness. This strategy gives power to those who define which issues are urgent. In fact, none of the cases discussed here were anywhere near to being life-or-death situations. And paradoxically, to heal from trauma, one needs to theorise and intellectualise it.

In fact, the idea of obvious experiences is fallacious. There is no simple divide between reality/experience and thought/theory. Humans process experiences through conceptual categories, and in many cases, these categories affect the impact of an experience – or what, subjectively, is experienced. People don’t lack theories simply because they are not formally educated or academically trained. Rather, everyone has their own stock of theories and concepts through which they unconsciously process the world, and without which the world would simply be an incomprehensible mess of sense-impressions. Whenever somebody claims that their own conceptions are real, or are unmediated experience in contrast to others’ mere ideas or opinions, they are actually reifying and naturalising their own socially constructed beliefs – usually beliefs based on capitalist common sense. There is no such thing as direct, unmediated knowledge from experience (as distinct from unmediated experience, which is felt as unrepresentable). In any case, IPs create a regime of roles, which in Vaneigem’s terms, “express lived experience, yet at the same time they reify it” (131).

This does not mean that academic theories are always best. Academic thought is often tied-up with corporate and state power (Dot Matrix, Science As Capital). Everyday, local knowledges can also be effective ways of theorising the world. But it is a mistake to reify them into unmediated experiences which are somehow directly (and therefore more objectively) true. It shuts down dialogue and reinforces the enclosure of common sense. And in many cases, everyday common sense is also extremely oppressive, accepting and imposing normativities complicit with, and directly reinforcing, institutionalized forms of power. In addition, many key terms in IPs’ discourse – structural oppression, privilege, patriarchy, trauma, framing, supremacy, senzala, quilombo and so on – are not everyday common sense terms, but imports from university cultural studies texts or historical reading. Anti-intellectualism handily insulates IPs from rebuttal, but does not make their poorly based strategies any more effective.

For a World Without Spectres!

From all of this, we must conclude that IPs are just another type of leftist, promoting sacrifice and renunciation, posing as liberators of the oppressed. IPs are seductive in the ways they have of identifying and channelling the anger of the oppressed, the guilt of the (relatively) privileged, experiences of trauma, and awareness of the possibility of unintended oppression. But they channel these affects into political power, using them to entrench the role of IPs as Experts. This role requires that privi- lege/oppression be theorised as an ineliminable original sin.

Against this prevalent form of disguised vanguardism, let us hold forth the beacon of a world without spectres. Structural oppressions are sociologically real, but their roots can be traced deeper, to the structures of statism and representation. If we must theorise a primary contradiction, then let it be the contradiction between ourselves – as unique ones, forces of becoming, irreducible and unrepresentable beings – and the entire regime of spectres and alienation. Let us dispense with boundary policing, and instead nurture affinities across social categories. It is in rediscovering the level of immanent, abundant becoming, the joy of life, the flow of desire and direct connection, that we destroy the power which spectres exercise over us. Let us start always from this joy, share it with others when we can, and use it as a weapon to break down common sense, to rebuild and redefine community, to replace the graveyard of spectres with a world of life. May the alien privileges of spectres and the alien oppressions they engender never come between a unique one, a free being, and its immanent becoming. @

Bibliography

[1] Ed. note: In Der Einzige… Stirner uses spuk; the English cognate “spook,” while a decent enough translation in 1907, is currently an inappropriate (to say the least) option. We chose to use spectre (especially and deliberately retaining the British spelling) for its non-colloquial impact.

[2] Ed. note: There was a time when the term POC was inclusive of everyone who so self-identified (regardless of the term exacerbating certain unarticulated and unavoidable tensions about homogenizing the distinct experiences of people from diverse ethnic backgrounds, as well as the different ways those distinctions resulted in particular experiences of racism); in the past few years, however, the analytical category of Blackness/Anti-Blackness has become more popular in post-colonial discourse, especially among academics and activists. Michael P Jeffries writes that Anti-Blackness is “not simply about hating or penalizing black people. It is about the debasement of black humanity, utter indifference to black suffering, and the denial of black people’s right to exist.” The recent twisting of “Black Lives Matter” into “All Lives Matter” is a good example of how deeply the threat of a recognized Black humanity runs in the US. Despite the increasingly problematic term POC, we have retained it out of respect for the many who continue to embrace it as a self-description.

[3] Ed. note: The fundamental aspect of tension/destructiveness of class society; for traditional Marxists, it’s bourgeoisie-proletariat within the framework of capitalism. When resolved through the teleological process of dialectical materialism (The Revolution), the resulting synthesis is supposed to make the secondary (and tertiary, etc) contradictions like sexism, racism, and other ostensibly trivial forms of institutionalized oppression, melt away.

Dear Politically Challenged,

Getting three issues at once, as I just did, impresses on me the enormity of your output — that anthology you’ve considered will have to be huge to be at all representative. I am not going to try to make up for lost time, just lash out a little here and there. Imagine my delight at a Russian anarchist invoking my name as the epitome of intra-anarchist critique! “I seem to be a verb,” as the futurist idiot Buckminster Fuller once senascently mused.

Max Anger is up to the same old scam the situationists and many others (myself included) have too often pulled, it needs a name: imputationism. Imputationism is wishful thinking dressed up as critical theory, an esoteric variant on what the psychoanalysts call “projection.” Max Anger, like the S.I. before him, wants the Los Angeles riots (1965, 1992, same difference) to be revolutionary, therefore, inspection discloses they were exactly that.

Of course, this calls for some serious spin control. There is, for instance, the targeting of Korean-owned shops by black looters and arsonists. Class war was “subsumed, unfortunately, under the rubric of race.” Evidently the rubric of race trumped the imputation of class war since, as Anger sorrowfully acknowledges, many businesses owned by or employing blacks were spared. Like many white men before him, Anger knows what black folk are up to better than they do themselves. Words — his words — speak louder than actions — their actions.

“Fifty years of totalitarian disinformation” is to blame for this unfortunate misunderstanding on the part of rioters who just “happened” to be black regarding small businessmen who just “happened” to be Korean. Now maybe I don’t watch enough TV or something but I am entirely unaware of any media efforts in my less than 50 years (and Anger is younger still) to incite blacks to hate Koreans. Indeed the only media treatment of black/Korean relations I’ve ever seen, pre-riot, was Do the Right Thing by black filmmaker Spike Lee which I didn’t understand to be at all anti-Korean, and if it were, a black would be to blame. Anger is just making this stuff up. Too many blacks figured out how to hate Koreans all by themselves. Give them that much credit; if their anger was misdirected it was, at least, theirs. Anger’s anger is abstract and bookish.

Anger also has to explain away the brutal beating of white truck driver Reginald Denney by black thugs. Denney had nothing to do with the acquittal of Rodney King’s police assailants. Anger opines this episode was not “typical,” but first repeats an unconfirmed and self-serving allegation by the accused that Denney “taunted” them about the verdict in the King case. This is blatantly improbable — a white guy drives into a black ghetto to taunt the locals about the King verdict? — but even if it happened, does this justify beating him half to death? Whatever happened to free speech?

When Anger says “typical,” what does he refer to? Black-on-white street crime is much more “typical” than white-on-black street crime. Maybe he wasn’t thinking along these lines. Maybe he wasn’t doing much thinking at all. Rodney King wasn’t beaten by a random sample of whites. He was beaten by police. In this he has a lot of white, black, Asian and Hispanic company. Anger says we should “support” the black goons. Why? Why not support the white goons who beat up Rodney King? They’re not “typical” either.

What else? Why is everybody freaking out over Molly Gill’s white nationalist infiltration of anarchdom, although she has never concealed her opinions or claimed to be an anarchist, whereas nobody but Lawrence and I have noticed the red nationalist infiltration of anarchdom by Professor Ward Churchill and his partner Dr. M. Annette Jaimes? This pair is to indigenism what Dworkin and MacKinnon are to feminism. Churchill, formerly of Weatherman SDS, is that only too ubiquitous figure, the Marxist-turned-nationalist. He and his girl friend play good cop/bad cop, Churchill serving his racism straight up, Jaimes watering her drinks.

Jaimes’ article was, in Anarchy, a waste of space, although it might have been enlightening for its original leftist readership. It said nothing that has not been as well or better said in publications like Anarchy and the Fifth Estate for ten to twenty years now. Even some of her phraseology sounded like it was taken from people like John Zerzan and myself, both conspicuous by our absence from her footnotes. I’m not affronted by these omissions — the more this information gets around, the better I like it — but I wonder what they mean.

Zerzan was too gentle with Dr. Jaimes, intimidated, perhaps, by her privileged position as a woman and a Native American. She openly celebrates Amerindian civilizations like the Aztecs and Incas for their independent invention of the state, imperialism, slavery, priestly religion, human sacrifice and other Old World accomplishments. Euro- and Afro-Americans need no lessons from Indians in these activities, we need lessons in living in entirely different ways. What matters is not, as for Jaimes and Churchill, who, what matters is how. The thousands of Europeans who went native (“gone to Croatan”) in colonial America learned such lessons from their Indian hosts. So should Churchill and Jaimes. What they’re teaching we already know only too well.

(Wish I Were)
Gone to Croatan,
Bob Black
POB 3142
Albany, NY. 12203–0142

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]]> By Anonymous, AJODA #38 – Fall 1993

This introduction to a critique of social customs is a contribution to a necessary revolutionary anthropology. The communist movement possesses a dimension which is both a class and human one. It is a movement which is based on the central role of workers without being a form of workerism, and without being a humanism it moves toward a human community. For now, reformism thrives on separation by piling up demands in parallel spheres without ever questioning these spheres themselves. One of the proofs of the potency of a communist movement will be its capacity to recognize, and in practice to supersede, this gap and contradiction between the dimensions of class and community.

It is this gap and contradiction which flourish in the ambiguities of emotional life, making the critique of morality more delicate than other critiques.

What follows is not a text about “sexuality,” which is an historical and cultural product in the same sense as the economy and work. Along with work and the economy, “sexuality” came into being as a specialized sphere of human activity during 19^th century capitalism, when it was finalized and theorized (discovered). It was then banalized by capitalism in the 20^th and is something we can go beyond in a totally communist life.

For the same reasons, this text is not a “critique of daily life.” Such a critique expresses only the social space which is excluded from work and is in competition with it. “Customs,” on the contrary, include the entirety of human relations from a viewpoint of the sentiments. These customs do not exclude material production (the bourgeois morality of the family, for example, is indissociable from the work ethic).

Since in its own way capitalism sums up the human past which produced it, there can be no revolutionary critique without a critique of the customs and lifeways which preceded capitalism, and the way they have been integrated by it.

LOVE — ECSTASY — CRIME

Love

According to Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, “The most natural relationship between man and man is the relationship between man and woman.” This formula is comprehensible and can be of use as long as we keep in mind that humanity’s history is the history of its emancipation from nature through the creation of the economic sphere. The concept that humans are anti-nature, that they are completely external to nature, is clearly an aberration. Humanity’s nature is at the same time a purely biological given (we are primates) and the activity, within and outside of themselves, of people modifying what is a purely natural given.

People are not external to natural conditions because they themselves are one of them. But they wish to understand these conditions and have begun to play with them. There is room for discussion about the mechanisms which have brought this about (the extent to which it resulted from difficulties of survival, especially in the temperate regions, etc.). But what is certain is that, by transforming their environment, and being transformed in turn by it, people find themselves in a situation which radically distinguishes them from other known states of matter. Stripped of all metaphysical presuppositions, this capacity to play to a certain extent with the rules of matter is in effect human freedom. This freedom, from which people have been dispossessed in the process of creating it (since it is what has nourished the economy), is the freedom that must be reconquered. But without entertaining any illusions about what it is: neither the freedom of expansive desires which do not run into obstacles, nor the freedom to submit to the commands of Mother Nature (who could decipher them?). It also means giving full rein to our freedom to play with the laws of nature, a freedom which is as much one of re-routing the course of a body of water as it is one of making sexual use of an orifice which was not naturally “intended” for this use. It is a question of finally realizing that only risk guarantees freedom.

Because it must give human freedom full rein, the critique of human customs cannot single out one practice as opposed to another as a symbol of their misery. It is sometimes said that in today’s world, the freedom to be found in people’s lifestyles is simply a masturbatory activity (alone, two people, or more). To limit oneself to this given is to misapprehend the essence of sexual misery. Must the self-evident be belabored? There are solitary jerk-offs which are infinitely less miserable than many embraces. Reading a good adventure novel can be a lot more lively than organized excursions. What is miserable is to live in a world where the only adventures are in books. It is not the daydreams eventually followed by results which someone makes us experience that are disgusting. The disgusting part is the conditions which must be fulfilled in order to make it possible to meet the person. When we read a want ad in which a man with a beard invites the old woman and her dog who live upstairs over to have some fun, it is neither his beard, her age nor the zoophilia which disgust us. What is repugnant is that, by putting an ad in Liberation [a leftist daily], his desire becomes a means to market a particularly nauseating ideological commodity.

When someone is alone in a room writing a theoretical text, to the extent that the text provides insight into social reality, he or she is less isolated from people than at work or in the subway. Although the predominance of one of them may be symtomatic, it is not in one activity as opposed to another that the essence of sexual misery is to be found; it resides in the fact that, whether there are ten people, two, or if you are alone, individuals are irremediably separated from each other through relations of competition, exhaustion and boredom. Exhaustion from working; boredom with roles; the boredom of sexuality as a separate activity.

Sexual misery, in the first place, signifies social constraint (the constraints of wage-labor, and its cortege of psychological and physiological miseries; the constraints of social codes). These social constraints exert influence in a domain which is presented by the dominant culture and its dissident version as one of the last regions in the world where adventure remains possible. To the extent that capitalist Judeo-Christian civilization has been imposed upon people, sexual misery also signifies their profound disarray with respect to how the West has handled sexuality.

From Stoicism, the dominant outlook during the Roman Empire, Christianity adopted the double concept that: 1) sex is the basis of pleasure; 2) therefore it can and should be controlled. The Orient, for its part, through an open affirmation of sexuality (and not just the art of making love), tends towards a pan-sexualism where sexuality must of course be mastered but in the same sense as everything else; it is not given a privileged position. The West does not control sexuality by ignoring it but by thinking of nothing else. Everything is sexualized. The worst aspect is not that sex is repressed by Judeo-Christianity, but that Judeo-Christianity was dazzled by it. And not that Judeo-Christianity kept a lid ’ on sexuality, but that it organized it. The West has made sexuality the hidden truth of the normal conscience. But of madness (hysteria) as well. Just as a crisis of morality was getting underway, Freud discovered that sexuality was the big secret of the world and of civilization as a whole.

Sexual misery comes from an interaction between two moral orders, the traditional and modern ones which cohabit, to a greater or lesser extent, in the minds and glands of our contemporaries. On the one hand we suffer from constraints of morality and work, which keep us from attaining the historical ideal of a sexual blossoming and of a blossoming of love. On the other, the more we free ourselves from these constraints (in our imaginations in any case), the more this ideal appears unsatisfactory and empty.

A tendency and its transformation into a spectacle should not be taken as a totality. If a relative liberalization has occurred during our era, the traditional order has far from disappeared. Just try being openly “pedophile.” The traditional order functions and will long continue to function for a lot of people living in the industrialized countries. In many parts of the world it is still dominant and on the offensive (in the Islamic countries and in the Eastern Bloc). Its representatives, priests from Rome or Moscow, are far from inactive in France itself. The suffering caused by their misdeeds is still weighty enough that we should hardly be prevented from denouncing them with the claim that the underpinnings of traditional morality are being undermined by capital. Not every revolt against this order necessarily tends toward neo-reformism. Just as easily revolt can be the oppressed person’s cry, a cry which contains the kernel of the infinite variety of possible sexual and sensual practices which have been repressed for millennia.

We are not, it should be clear, against “perversions.” We do not even oppose lifelong heterosexual monogamy. But when litterateurs or artists (the surrealists for example) wish to impose I’amourfou (“mad love”) as what is most desirable, it must be stated that this is a recycled version of the great modern Western reductionist myth. The object of this myth is to provide a spiritual bonus for couples — those isolated atoms which constitute the capitalist economy’s best basis. Among the riches of a world free of capital will be the infinite variations of a perverse and polymorphous sexuality and sensuality. Only with the blossoming of these practices will the love praised by Andre Breton and Harlequin novels[1] appear for what it really is — a transitory cultural construction.

The traditional moral order is oppressive and merits being criticized and combatted as such. But if it finds itself in a state of crisis it is not because our contemporaries prize freedom more than our ancestors. It is because bourgeois morality has been unable to adapt to modern conditions of producing and circulating commodities.

The bourgeois morality conceived in its full scope during the 19^th century and transmitted through religious channels and secular schools arose from a need for ideological conduits towards the domination of industrial capitalism at a time when capital was not yet entirely dominant. Sexual morality and the morality of work and of the family went hand in hand. Capital was based on bourgeois and petit bourgeois values: property as the fruit of work and saving; hard but necessary work; family life. In the first half of the 20^th century capital reached a point where it occupied the entire social space, making itself indispensable and inevitable. Because there is nothing else, working for a salary becomes the only possible activity. Thus, even as it imposes itself on everyone, wage labor is able to present itself as a non-constraint and guarantee of freedom. Since everything becomes a commodity, each aspect of morality becomes outmoded. Through credit people gain access to property before saving. They work because it is practical, not out of a sense of duty. The extended family gives way to the nuclear family, which is itself thrown into disarray by the constraints of money and work. Schools and the media challenge parents with respect to authority, influence and education. Everything announced in the Communist Manifesto has been accomplished by capitalism. With the disappearance of community places to get together (cafés …) and their replacement by places to consume which lack feeling (discos, malls), too much is asked of the family at a time when it has less than ever to offer.

More profoundly, beneath the crisis of bourgeois morality lies a crisis of what is known as capitalist morality. It becomes difficult to make “customs” permanent, to find ways of relating and behaviour which go beyond the bankruptcy of bourgeois morality. What morality, then, does modern capitalism offer? The submission of everyone and everything, since capital’s omnipresence theoretically makes previous relay systems superfluous. Fortunately this doesn’t work. There is no purely, wholly, uniquely capitalist society, and never will be. Capitalism, for one thing, does not create something from nothing; it transforms people and relationships which come into being outside it (peasants who come to the city; petit-bourgeois déclassés; immigrants). And something from the old sociability, at least in the form of nostalgia, always remains. As well, capital’s functioning itself is not harmonious. The promises of the dreamworld of commercials are not kept, causing a reaction, a falling back upon traditional values like the family which on the whole are outmoded. Which results in the phenomenon of people continuing to marry although three out of four marriages end in a divorce. Because it is obliged to order about, push around and constrain wage workers, capital has to permanently re-introduce relay values of authority and obedience even though its present stage has made them obsolete. This is why the old ideology is constantly used in conjunction with the new one (participation, etc.).

Our era is one of a coexistence of moralities, of a proliferation of codes, not their disappearance. Guilt (being afraid of violating a taboo) is juxtaposed with anguish (a sense of a lack of guideposts with respect to “choices” to be made). Narcissism and schizophrenia, the maladies characteristic of our period, replace the neuroses and hysteria of the previous era.

What guides people’s behaviour today is less and less an unquestionable ensemble of dictates which is transmitted by a father or a priest than a sort of utilitarian morality of personal improvement that utilizes a fetishization of the body and a frenzied psychologization of human relations. An obsession with interpretation replaces confessional rites and the examination of conscience.[2]

Ahead of his time, de Sade simply announced our own, one in which, until people become themselves, there is no moral guarantee. The intolerable boredom the reader of the Marquis’ monotonous catalogue sooner or later experiences is recaptured when you read the want ads, where the traits of a communicationless pleasure are infinitely repeated. Sadeian desire aims to reify other people completely, to make them a soft dough which can be moulded by one’s fantasies. This is a deadly attitude: to annihilate otherness, to refuse to be dependent on the desire of someone else, means repeating the same thing, and death. But whereas the Sadeian hero smashes social impediments, modern people, with their logic of individual self-improvement, have become their own fantasy dough-to-be-kneaded. They are not overcome by desires; they “achieve their fantasies.” Or rather they attempt to, like they jog instead of running for the sake of it or because they have to get somewhere quickly. Today people do not lose themselves in other people; they activate and develop their capacity for pleasure, their ability to have orgasms. Insipid trainers of their own bodies, they tell them: “Come!”, “Better than that!”, “Run!”, “Dance!”, etc.

For people today, the need for work is replaced by the need to make leisure time a success. Sexual constraints are replaced by a difficulty in affirming a sexual identity. This narcissistic culture goes hand in hand with a change in the function of religion. Instead of invoking a transcendence, religion becomes a means of making it easier to handle life-crisis periods (adolescence, marriage, death). Also, not only religion is helping to keep people up-to-date: the family is invoked as well! “Not a family which is omnipresent, as in the previous century, but one that is omni-absent. A family no longer defined by the work ethic or by sexual constraints, but by an ethic of survival and by sexual promiscuity,” according to psychologist Christopher Lasch. (Le Monde, April 12, 1981).

In the midst of the crisis of morality that dominates Western society, people are more poorly equipped than ever to resolve the “question of sexuality.” And it is precisely when this question is posed most directly that the chances of noticing that it is not a “question” are best.

People today are panicking. They are all the more lost, as everything alive turns into a commodity, when this commodification concerns a sexuality which has been repressed for 2000 years, only to resurface as a commodity. It then becomes apparent that relentless sensuality (e.g. the film La Grande Bouffe), in a world of commodities, isolates individuals even more from humanity, one’s partners and oneself. Since they end up with the impression that the idea of sexuality is deadly and alienating, people ultimately readopt a Christian outlook.

For example, the work of someone like Georges Bataille reveals a lot about Western evolution since the beginning of the century. Going against the grain of the history of civilization, Bataille starts with sexuality and ends up with religion. From the fiction piece L’Oeil until the end of his life, Bataille searched for what was implicit in L’Oeil. On the way his trajectory crossed that of the revolutionary movement, only to veer away all the more quickly and easily when the movement almost completely disappeared. Nevertheless, during the last years before World War Two, he defended positions with respect to anti-fascism and the threat of war which lucidly cut through the verbiage of the vast majority of the extreme left. This is why his work remains ambiguous. It can be used to illustrate the religious impasses where the experience of the limits of unleashed sexuality ends up:

“A brothel is my true church, the only one that leaves me unquenched.”

But if, in the above, as in most of his work, he limits himself to going against the grain of accepted values, to refining a new version of Satanism, he has also written sentences which reveal a profound intuition about essential aspects of communism: “taking perversion and crime not as values which exclude, but as things to be integrated into the totality of humanity.”

Ecstasy

Through the cultural constructions to which it has given birth (love as it was practised by the ancient Greeks, courtly love, kinship systems, bourgeois contracts, etc.), emotional and sexual life has constantly been the stakes, a matrix of passions, a zone of contact with another cultural sphere: the sacred. In trances, in ecstasy, in feelings of communion with nature, the desire to go beyond the limits of the individual expresses itself through states of paroxysm. This desire to become one with the species which has been channelled towards the cosmos or a divinity has until now worn the prestigious rags of the sacred. Religions, and monotheistic ones in particular, have circumscribed the sacred, assigning it a leading role while at the same time distancing it from human life. In contrast to primitive societies, where the sacred is inseparable from daily life, in statist societies it has become more and more specialized. Capitalist civilization has not eliminated the sacred; it has kept a lid on it, and its various residues and ersatz manifestations continue to encumber social life. In a world in which obsolete religious ideas and commodity banalization coexist, a communist critique is double-pronged: it gets rid of the sacred, that is, it flushes out the old taboos from the places where they have taken refuge, and at the same time it begins to go beyond the sacredness which capitalism has only degraded.

The sacred aspects of the zones where the old obsessions such as the pubis have taken refuge must therefore be removed. To counter adoration of the penis, its conquering imperialism, the feminist ideology has come up with nothing better than fetishizing women’s genitalia, and, backed by piles of pathos and literature, making it the headquarters of what makes them different; the obscure fold where their being is located! Rape thus becomes the crime of crimes, an ontological attack. As if violently inflicting a penis’ penetration were more disgusting than forcing a woman into wage slavery through economic pressure! But it is true that in the first instance it is easy to locate the guilty party — an individual — whereas in the second it is a question of a social relationship. It is easier to exorcise fear by making rape a blasphemy, an invasion in the holy of holies — as if being manipulated by ads, innumerable physical aggressions at work, or having the apparatus of social control start a file on you did not constitute forms of intimate violence which are just as profound as an imposed intercourse!

Ultimately, what makes a Somalian rip out his wife’s clitoris and what animates the feminists flows from the same concept of human individuality as the object of property relations. Convinced that his wife is one of his belongings, the Somalian believes that it is his duty to protect her from feminine desire, which is seen as parasitically dangerous to the economy of the group. But in so doing, he profoundly reduces and impoverishes his own pleasure and his own desire. In the clitoris of his wife it is the human desire of both sexes which is symbolically targeted. The mutilated woman has been amputated from humanity. The feminist who shouts that her body belongs to her wants to keep her desire for herself.[3] But when she desires, she becomes part of a community in which appropriation dissolves.

The demand “My body belongs to me” supposedly gives concrete content to the “Rights of Man” of 1789. Has it not been often enough repeated that these rights only concern an abstract person and have only ultimately benefitted the bourgeois individual! Bourgeois, male, white, adult, it is said nowadays. Neo-reformism claims to correct this by giving real content to this hitherto abstract “man.” The real “rights” of the real “man,” in short. But the “real man” is simply the woman, the Jew, the Corsican, the gay, the person from Vietnam, etc. “My body belongs to me” follows directly in the footsteps of the bourgeois revolution which these feminists are attempting to complete and perfect for ever and ever by requesting democracy to cease being “formal.” What is being criticized here are effects which are said to be their cause!

The demand to control one’s body is a restatement of the bourgeois demand for property rights. To escape the secular oppression of women who were previously treated as objects to be possessed by their husbands (and who still are today in other ways), feminism has come up with nothing better than expanding property rights. By becoming an owner in turn, women will be protected: to each her own! This pitiful demand reflects the obsession with “security” which the media and all the political parties are doing their utmost to make contemporary people adopt. This demand arises in relation to a horizon which is blocked off: to master something (in this case one’s body), private appropriation is the only means which can be envisioned. Our bodies, though, belong to those who love us — not because of a legally guaranteed “right,” but because, as flesh and feelings, we live and evolve only through them. And to the extent that we are able to love the human species, our body belongs to it.

At the same time that it strips away what is sacred, a communist critique denounces the capitalist Utopia of a world in which people are no longer able to love to death, a world where, since everything has been levelled, everything is equal and everything can be exchanged — playing sports, making love and working would take place in the same quantified, industrial time frame chopped into pieces like a sausage. Sexologists will be around to cure any libidinal letdowns, psychotherapists to avoid mental suffering, and the police, with the help of chemistry, to prevent any excesses. In such a world there would no longer be a field of human activity which would create a different temporal rhythm by making questioning everything the stakes.

The a historical illusion which is the basis of mystical practices is a dangerous one. The only important thing about these practices is what, by definition, they don’t really possess: what can be communicated. We cannot escape from history, but the history of individuals or of the species is also not a purely linear unfolding which capitalism produces (and convinces people that it produces). History includes high points which go beyond and are part of the present, orgasms where people lose themselves in-other people, in society, and in the species.

“Christianity has substantialized the sacred. But the nature of the sacred (…) is perhaps the hardest thing to pin down which takes place between people. The sacred is simply a privileged moment of communal union, an instant of convulsive communication which is usually snuffed out.” (G. Bataille, Le Sacre, Works).

Today this instant of “communal unity” is to be found at concerts, in the panic which grips a crowd, and, in its most degraded form, in the great patribtic outbursts and other manifestations of the “union sacree” (”sacred union”)[4] — whose manipulation allows every dirty trick. As opposed to what is taking place in backward capitalist countries like Iran, it can be presumed that in modern war only a minority would participate; the rest would watch. But nothing is for certain. The manipulation of the sacred still has sunny days ahead, perhaps, because until now it is the sacred which has represented the only high point where people’s irrepressible need to be together has manifested itself.

If they have provided a more or less imaginary nook sheltered from class struggle, mystical practices have also cemented revolts. This has been demonstrated for example in Taoist trances in resistance to the central powers in ancient China, in voodoo during slave revolts, and in millenarian prophecies. If contemporary mystical quests play a counterrevolutionary role because they are just a way for bourgeois individuals to withdraw into themselves, the fact remains that commodity banalization of every aspect of life tends to empty existence’s passionate content. Today’s world asks us to love just a jumble of individual inadequacies. Compared to traditional societies it has lost an essential dimension of human life: the high points when people are united with nature. We are condemned to watch harvest festivals on TV.

But we are not interested in a ridiculous longing for the past, a return to the joys whose repetitive, illusory and limited nature history has made plain. At a time when capitalism tends to impose its reign without sharing, searching for “communal unity” and “convulsive communication” elsewhere than in revolution becomes purely reactionary. Since capitalism has banalized everything, this gives us an opportunity to free ourselves from sexuality as a specialized sphere. The world we desire is one in which the possibility of going beyond oneself exists in every human activity, a world which proposes that we love the species and individuals whose insufficiencies will be ones of the species and no longer those of existence. The stakes today — what is worth risking one’s life for and what could impart another rhythm to time — is the content of life in its entirety.

Crime

“The meaninglessness of history is delightful. Why torment ourselves about destiny’s happy ending, a final party that can only be earned through our sweat and disasters? For future idiots prancing on our ashes? In its absurdity a vision of a paradisiacal culmination surpasses hope’s worst wanderings. The only pretext to apologize for Time is that some moments are found to be more profitable than others — accidents without consequence in an intolerable monotony of perplexities.” (E.M. Cioran, Precis de decomposition)

Communism is not a paradise-like culmination.

Calling communism a paradise, in the first place, allows accepting everything in the meantime. In the event of a social revolution, not changing society from top to bottom will be accepted: a society without a state or prisons — fine, but for later, when people are perfect. Until then, everything becomes justifiable: a workers’ state, people’s prisons, etc., since communism is only fit for a humankind of gods.

Next there is the soothing vision of a desirable society which would disgust us if it were achieved. Any community, whatever its size, obliges its members to renounce a part of themselves. And, in the sense of positive desires — ones whose bringing to fruition would not compromise other people — to leave certain positive desires unfulfilled, for the simple reason that these desires are not necessarily shared by others. What makes such a situation tolerable is the certainty that there remains the possibility of withdrawing if someone finds that giving these things up threatens their personal integrity. This would not take place without suffering. But to feel fully alive, is not the risk of suffering and death indispensable?

The fact that humanity threatens to wipe itself out by playing with the laws of matter, and with it all life on the planet, is not what upsets us. What is intolerable is that humanity is doing so entirely unconsciously. And because it has created capital, which imposes its own inhumane laws, in spite of itself. It is true, though, that as soon as people began to alter their environment they risked destroying it and themselves with it, and that this risk will probably remain despite the forms of social organization in place. One could even conceive of a humanity which, having initially fought and then tamed and loved the universe, decides to disappear and to reintegrate into nature in the form of dust. There can be no humanity without risk in any case, because there can be no humanity without other people — which is also just as evident in the game of passions.

If we can easily imagine that a less harsh society would give women and men (men who have been condemned to wear only work clothes since the bourgeois revolution!) a chance to be more beautiful, to practice relations of seduction which are at the same time simpler and more refined, we are also unable to stifle a yawn when a world in which everyone pleases everyone else is evoked, one where making love is like shaking hands and does not imply any kind of involvement. This, however, is the world promised by the liberalization of customs.

So it would appear that Karl will continue to please Jenny more than Friedrich. But one would have to believe in miracles to imagine that if Friedrich desired Jenny, she would automatically desire him. Communism in no way guarantees that all desires will be complementary. And the very real tragedy of unshared desire would appear to be the unavoidable price to pay to keep the game of seduction exciting. Not because of the principle “anything obtained without effort is useless,” but because desire includes otherness and thus its possible negation. No human and social games without stakes and risks! This is the unique and seemingly unavoidable norm. Unless, by remaining in hock to the old world, our monkey-like imagination makes us unable to understand human beings.

Aside from its very poetic and extensive list of possibilities, what makes Fourier’s system less tedious than those of most other Utopians is that his system integrates the necessity of conflicts. We know that virtually all the accidents the old world considers crimes or offenses are just sudden changes of owners (theft), accidents due to competition (the murder of a bank teller), or products of the misery of human social customs. But in a stateless world it is not unimaginable that exacerbated passions could make someone kill someone else or make them suffer. In such a world the only guarantee that people would not torture other people would be that they feel no need to. But if someone needs to? If the person enjoys torturing? With the old eye-for-an-eye and blood price etc. representations swept away, a woman whose lover was just assassinated or a man whose lover had just been tortured would find it completely idiotic (in spite of their sorrow) to kill someone or to lock them up in order to compensate for the loss suffered in such a weird way. Perhaps … But if the desire for vengeance gets the upper hand? And if the other person continues to kill?

In the workers’ movement the anarchists are undoubtedly among the few people who have concretely considered the problem of social life without the state. Bakunin’s response is not really convincing: “The complete abolition of all degrading and cruel sentences, of corporal punishment and death sentences which have been blessed and carried out by the law. The abolition of all indefinite sentences or ones which are too long and leave no possibility for rehabilitation: crime must be considered a sickness, etc.” You would think you were reading the Socialist Party program before they took power. But the passage which follows in the text is of more interest: “Any individual who is condemned by the laws of any society, commune, province or nation will retain the right to refuse to accept the sentence which has been imposed by declaring that he or she no longer wishes to be a member of the society in question. But in this case the society, in turn, will have the right to eject the person from its midst and to declare that society’s protection is not guaranteed to the individual. Since the person is thrown back into a situation where the usual eye-for-an-eye laws are in place, at least in the territory occupied by the society, someone who refuses to submit can thus be pillaged, mistreated or even killed without the society becoming perturbed. Everyone can rid themselves of the individual as if he or she were a harmful beast. However, never must the person be forced into servitude or enslaved.” (Bakunin, La Liberté, Pauvert)

This makes one think of the solution of primitive peoples: individuals who violate taboos are no longer taken seriously; they are laughed at every time they open their mouths. Or they are obliged to leave and go into the jungle. Or they become invisible, etc. Expelled from the community, in any case, that death will shortly occur is assured.

If it is a question of destroying prisons in order to rebuild ones which are a bit less harsh and better ventilated, count us out. We will always be on the side of those who are unwilling to submit. Because what is a sentence that is “too long”? It is hardly necessary to have wasted away in prison to know that, by definition, any time spent in one is too long. But don’t count on us either if you want to replace prisons with an even more extreme distancing. As for treating crime like a sickness, this opens the door to a tranquilizer-ridden totalitarianism or to the discourse of psychiatrists.

“It is curious to state that one only has to lighten up (and in this sense someone not prematurely old cannot help but rival the most unruly child) in order to find the sleaziest thieves charming. Is the social order only a burst of laughter away from becoming unglued? (…) Life is not a laughing matter, teachers and mothers affirm, not without the most hilarious gravity, to children who are astounded by the news. In the unfortunate mind clouded by this mysterious training, however, I can imagine a still-gleaming paradise which begins with a resounding crash of broken dishes. (…) Unimpeded fun has all the products of the world at its disposal; each object is to be tossed in the air and smashed like a plaything.” (Georges Bataille, Les Pieds Mickeies)

What to do with the dish smashers? Today it is impossible to answer this question and it is not certain that there will be a satisfactory one even in a stateless society. That there will be people who refuse to play the game, who smash the dishes, who are prepared to risk suffering and even death for the simple pleasure of rupturing social bonds, such is the no doubt unavoidable risk any society will run if it refuses to expel anyone at all, however asocial they might be. The damage such a society undergoes will always be less than the damage it exposes itself to by turning asocial people into monsters. Communism must not lose its raison d’etre in order to save a few lives, however “innocent” they might be. Until now, the mediations conceived to avoid or soften conflicts or to maintain internal order in societies have caused oppression and human losses which are infinitely greater than those they were supposed to prevent or limit. In a communist world there will be no substitute state, no “non-state” which would still remain a state.

“To repress anti-social reactions would be as unimaginable as it would be unacceptable on principle.” (“Letter to the Insane Asylum Head Doctors,” La Revolution Surrealiste, no. 3, 15 April 1925)

It is not only with respect to the distant future that this question is pertinent. It is also at stake during periods of social unrest. Consider the fate reserved for looters and thieves during 19^th century riots and the moral order which was reproduced in these riots. In the same sense, during the first years of the Russian revolution a “Bolshevik marriage code” whose title is an entire program in itself was juxtaposed onto a powerful movement which was transforming social customs. Any more or less revolutionary period will witness the appearance of groups which are halfway between social subversion and delinquency, as well as temporary inequalities, hoarders, profiteers, and above all, an entire spectrum of nebulous conduct which will be hard to label “revolutionary,” “counterrevolutionary,” “survival tactics,” etc. Ongoing communization will resolve this, but in one or two generations, perhaps longer. Until then, measures must be taken — not in the sense of a “return to law and order,” which will be one of the key slogans of the antirevolutionaries — but by developing what is original in a communist movement: for the most part it does not repress, it subverts.

This means, in the first place, that a communist movement uses only the amount of violence which is strictly necessary to reach its goals. Not out of moralism or non-violence, but because any superfluous violence becomes autonomous and an end in itself. Next, it signifies that a communist movement’s weapons are above all the transformation of social relationships and the production of social conditions of existence. Spontaneous looting will cease to be a massive change of owners, a simple juxtaposition of private appropriations, if a community of struggle is formed between the looters and producers. Only on this condition can looting become a point of departure for a social reappropriation and use of riches in a perspective which is broader than one of simply consuming. (Which is not to be condemned in itself. Social life is not only productive activity but also consumption and consummation. And if the poor wish to offer themselves a few pleasures first, who but priests would think of holding it against them?) As for hoarders, if violent measures will be necessary at times it will be to reappropriate things, not to punish. In any case, only when a world without price tags begins to spread will the possibility of harm being done by hoarders be completely removed. If money is nothing more than pieces of paper, if what is hoarded can no longer be exchanged for money, what would be the point of hoarding?

The more a revolution radicalizes, the less it needs to be repressive. We are all the more willing to affirm this since human life, in the sense of biological survival, is not the supreme value for communism. It is capitalism which imposes the monstrous scam of an assurance of maximal survival in exchange for maximum submission to the economy. But isn’t a world where you must hide to choose the hour when you die a world that is extremely devalued?

Communism does not use values people adopt as a starting point; it uses the real relations they are experiencing. Each group carries out, refuses, allows and imposes certain acts and not others. Before having values, and in order to have them, there are things which people do or don’t do, which they impose or forbid.

In contradictory class societies what is forbidden is set in stone and simultaneously subject to be outmanoeuvred or violated. In primitive societies, and to a certain extent in traditional societies, what is forbidden does not constitute a morality as such. Values and taboos are constantly produced in every activity of social life. It is when work and private life became more and more radically opposed that the question of social customs imposed itself, becoming acute in 19^th century Europe with the rise of what the bourgeoisie called the dangerous classes. It was necessary for workers to be said to be free to go to work (in order to justify the capitalists’ freedom to refuse to provide it to them). At the same time morality had to be kept in good working order and people were told not to drink too much and that work equals dignity. There is morality only because there are social customs, that is, a domain which society theoretically leaves up to individuals against whom it at the same time enacts legislation from the outside.

Religious law, and, later, the law of the state, have presupposed a separation. This is the difference compared to communism, where there will be no need for intangible laws that everyone knows will not be respected. There will be no absolutes, except, perhaps, the primacy of the species — which is not to say its survival. There will be no falsely universal rules. Like the law, every morality rationalizes ideology after the fact; they always wish and claim to be the basis of social life while at the same time wishing to be without a basis themselves since they are based only on God, nature, logic, or the good of society … That is, a basis which cannot be questioned because it does not exist. In a communist world, the rules which human beings will adopt, in ways we cannot predict, will flow from communist social bonds. They will not constitute a morality in the sense that they will claim no illusory universality in time and space. The rules of the game will include the possibility of playing with the rules.

“Revolt is a form of optimism which is hardly less repugnant than the usual kind. In order to exist revolt implies that people must envisage an opportunity to react. In other words, that there is a preferable way of doing things which we must strive towards. When it is a goal, revolt is also optimistic; change and disorder are considered satisfactory. I am incapable of believing that there is something satisfactory.

(…)

Question — In your opinion, is suicide a last resort?

— Precisely, and one which is hardly less antipathetic than a job skill or a morality.”

(Jacques Rigaut, testimony in the “Barres Affair,” Ecrits)

An entire body of nihilist literature has set out the viewpoint of the “dishbreaker,” of people who resist any social connection (with a death urge as a compulsory corollary). But the attractive music of the nihilist thinkers, has not prevented most of them from losing themselves in the hum of daily life until they reached a respectable old age. This incoherence supports the contention that these purely refractory people are just a literary myth. For the rare individuals who, like Rigaut, have chosen the last resort of suicide, or have really tasted misery like Genet, this myth was lived passionately. But the fact that sincere intransigent mystics have no doubt existed hardly proves the existence of god. These “refractory people” foster an elitism which is a false approach from the very start. The worst part is not that they believe that they are superior, but that they are different from the rest of humanity. They would like to think that they are observing a world from which they have distanced themselves. People, however, can only understand what they are participating in. When they believe that they are lucid because they are on the outside, they fall into the worst trap. In Bataille’s words:

“I have never been able to consider existence with the distracted scorn of a man who is alone.” (Oeuvres, II, p. 274)

“For it is the tumult of humanity, with all the vulgarity of people’s big and little needs and their flagrant disgust with the police who hold them back — it is the activity of everyone (except the cops and the friends of the cops) which alone conditions revolutionary mental forms as opposed to bourgeois ones.” (Oeuvres, II, p. 108–9)

At times this refractory people myth has encumbered revolutionary theory, as in the case of the Situationists’ fascination with outlaws in general and Lacenaire in particular, a fascination which reached its high point with Debord’s last appalling film.[5] But if this myth must be criticized, it is also because it simply represents the flipside of the coin and thus tends to assist class society’s production of fascinating monsters.

At times a shudder of passion passes through the ocean of zombies we are swimming in. It is when citizens are served up a being which is completely foreign, a thing which looks like a person but to which any real humanity is denied. For the Nazi it is the Jew; for the antifascist, the Nazi. For today’s crowds it is terrorists, criminals or child killers. When it is comes to tracking down these monsters and determining their punishment, passions surge again at last and imaginations that appeared dead race. Unfortunately, this type of imagination and its fine-tuning is precisely what is attributed to that other guaranteed-non-human monster: the Nazi executioner.

It has never been possible to force everyone to respect laws which are in contradiction with the way social relationships really work. Nor has it been possible to prevent murder when there have been reasons to kill. Nor to prevent theft when there have been inequalities and as long as commerce is based on theft. So an example is made by homing in on one case. And what is more: this exorcises the part of you which would like to execute the defenceless bodies or the child killer/raper too. The element of envy in the crowd’s cries of hatred is obvious. Even to those who are naturally blind, like journalists.

Communism, on the contrary, is a society without monsters. Without monsters because everyone will finally recognize, in the desires and acts of others, the different possible shapes of their own desires and being. “Human beings are the true being-in-its-totality of man” (Marx). The words being-in-its-totality, or collective being, expresses our movement even better than the word communism, which is primarily associated with collectivizing things. Marx’s sentence is worth developing extensively, and we will return to it. For now it will be sufficient to grasp the critique of bourgeois humanism contained in this sentence. Whereas the Montaigne-type honest individual can become everyone thanks to the mediation of culture, communists know from practice that they only exist as they are because everyone exists the way they do.

Which hardly signifies that no desire should be repressed. Repression and sublimation prevent people from sliding into a refusal of otherness. But communism is a society with no guarantee other than the free play of passions and needs, whereas capitalist society is gripped by a frantic need to guarantee against every mishap of life, including death. Every conceivable danger and risk, except “natural disasters” — war and revolution, etc. — must be “insured against.” The only thing which capitalism is unable to insure against is its own disappearance.

When one is after a critique of the totality of this world, there is no question of remaining at a level of pure theory. There are times when subversive activity is almost entirely reduced to writing texts and an exchange of viewpoints between individuals. It is this “almost” that bothers us: to continue to view the world lucidly you have to possess a tension which is hard to keep up because it implies a refusal, a certain marginalization, and a profound sterility. This refusal, marginalization and sterility contribute to maintaining passion just as much as they tend to congeal it into misanthropic mean-spiritedness or intellectual frenzy. Those who refuse a world organized by capital know that none of the acts of social life are unquestionable. Even the manifestations of biological givens do not escape their torment! To accept to procreate appears suspect: how can someone have kids in such a world when there is not even a gleam of a possibility of transforming it?

However, beyond a few simple principles — no participating in attempts at mystification or repression (neither cops nor stars), and no careerism — there is no way that precise and definitive forms of refusal can be pinned down. There are no good social customs as far as a radical critique is concerned; there are just ones which are worse than others, and there is behaviour which turns theory into a mockery. To be a revolutionary in a non-revolutionary period… What counts is less the unavoidably fragmented and mutilating results of this contradiction than the contradiction itself and the tension of refusal.

Why criticize the misery of social customs if this misery will persist? Only in relation to communism does our behaviour make sense. For, with respect to the Cioran quote which opened this section, the response must be that the sweat and disasters which do not belong to us and that the world imposes are the ones that are really intolerable. When time is killing us, the only excuse at our disposal is that history will avenge us. The meaning of what we do is the possibility that the social connection is guaranteed only by itself. And that it works!

If the social crisis worsens, there will be less and less room for half choices. Calling for “a few less cops” will become less feasible. More and more the choice will be between what exists and no cops at all. It is then that humanity will really have to demonstrate whether it loves freedom or not.

* * *

Love, ecstasy, crime: three historical products through which humanity has lived and lives its practical and emotional relations. Love: the consequence of indifference and generalized selfishness; taking refuge in a few people who, by chance or out of necessity, have been given a privileged role. Love is the impossible love of humanity which is fulfilled in a few individuals, for better or worse. Ecstasy: a voyage beyond the profane, the banal, and into the sacred; an escape which is immediately cut off and circumscribed by religion. Crime: the only way out when the norm can no longer be respected or circumvented.

Love, the sacred and crime are ways to escape the present and to give it meaning. Positive or negative: each of them include attraction and rejection and enter into a relationship of attraction and rejection with respect to each other. Love is put on a pedestal but people mistrust it. The sacred inherently contains the threat of being profaned; it evokes profanation in order to exclude it and in so doing reinforces itself. Though punished, crime fascinates.

These three means of going beyond daily life are neither generalized nor abolished by communism. All life (collective or individual) implies boundaries. But communism will be amoral in the sense that there will be no fixed norms which are external to social life. Not without clashes or violence, ways of behaving will circulate, and will be transmitted, transformed and produced along with social relationships. As an absolute separation between an interior and an exterior the sacred will melt away. Thus there will be no more room for religion — those of yesteryear or modern religions which no longer recognize gods, just devils which are to be ejected from the social body. People’s freedom, their capacity to modify nature, will project them outside themselves. Until now, morality — any morality — and, even more insidiously, those which do not present themselves as ones, turn these places beyond oneself into entities which crush people’s being. Communism will not level the “magic mountain”; it will make it possible to avoid being dominated by it. It will create and multiply distant places and the pleasure of losing oneself in them, but also the capacity to create what is new, what subverts a “natural” submission to any type of worldly order.

[1] Author’s note: romantic stories.

[2] Author’s note: Examen de conscience: A Catholic religious rite imposed on believers from time to time, especially before confession.

[3] Author’s note: this sentence and the following two paragraphs have been understandably attacked by many readers since they were based on our biased understanding of a famous slogan of the free abortion movements of the 70s: “My body belongs to me.” This slogan did not mean what we said it did (“I am the property-owner of my body”) but was just an ea»y way to say “My body (the right,to give birth or to have an abortion) is my business and not that of politicians, doctors, or priests.” If re-written today, this part would have to be entirely different. Translator’s note: Several people who read or proofread this part (and the preceding paragraph) had trouble with it too.

[4] Author’s note: Union sacrée: term used at the beginning of the First World War when the parties in France worked together against the German threat. We witnessed a broader “union sacree” (worldwide this time) at the beginning of the Gulf War.

[5] Translator’s note: In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni. A translation of the script recently became available from BM Signpost, London WC1N 3XX, England. Also see the review in this issue by John Zerzan.

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]]> By Dina Fisher, AJODA #38 – Fall 1993

On April 19, 1993, live broadcasts of armored tanks and burning buildings flooded my TV screen. Flipping from station to station, I gathered that somewhere between 70 and 100 people were burning to death inside the buildings.

The news reports cut back and forth between live footage of the fire and replays from earlier that day of a U.S. government tank repeatedly smashing into the buildings. I could see dark spots where huge holes had been ripped into the exterior walls. Over these blurred, grainy images, newscasters explained that up until several minutes before the fire started, the FBI had used a specially-equipped armored tank to inject massive amounts of tear gas into the buildings during the proceeding six hours.

What I was watching looked to me exactly like a military attack on civilians. Tanks and gas are blatant military weapons, and it’s not surprising that a building would burst into flames after a six-hour assault. As the fire began to die down and it became clear that there would be only a few survivors, I haltingly told my lover over the phone that the FBI had just killed dozens of people on national television.

The site of the fire was a ranch on wind-swept prairie land several miles outside Waco, Texas. The dozen or so adjoining wooden structures there, which would burn to ash and rubble within only 30 minutes, had been home to a tight-knit community of prophetic Christians called the Branch Davidians. The ranch and surrounding area had also recently become temporary home to an encampment of FBI agents and reporters focussing a slew of weapons and cameras on the residents inside.

For seven weeks leading up to the fire, the Davidians had been surrounded in their home by hundreds of heavily armed FBI agents who circled the buildings with razor-sharp concertina wire and bombarded them at night with amplified sounds of rabbits being slaughtered. The FBI quickly moved in after a raid on the ranch by 100 other federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) had erupted in a 45-minute gun battle. That initial raid on Feb. 28 left four ATF men and several Davidians dead. It too was recorded live and widely publicized by the news media.

From that day on, the FBI and ATF labeled the people inside the buildings with terms that were repeated by reporters around the country. The words “apocalyptic” and “cult” became media catch-words. Another key word emerged when an ATF spokesman claimed only hours after the initial raid that mass “suicide” amongst the cultists was a clear possibility.

On the day of the fire, in stark contrast with graphic visual images of the tank assault, the FBI claimed almost as soon as the flames started that the victims had in fact participated in a suicide pact and lit the fire themselves. Newscasters repeatedly used the word “suicide” during the live fire coverage. The next day, it was used nationwide in newspaper headlines, sub-heads, and text. The Chicago Sun-Times went so far as to use a direct FBI quote for a two-page-wide headline which read, “’Oh My God, They’re Killing Themselves.’”

While I was still on the phone watching the live fire coverage, one on-location reporter heatedly said that half the photographers watching the buildings through high-powered telephoto lenses didn’t believe the suicide story. He described the FBI’s claim as “one of the greatest hoaxes” ever played on the American public. The strength of conviction it must have taken for this man to clearly say what he believed on live television, despite professional consequences, was impressive. I was surprised by his admirable candor, but not by the content of his words.

Having been involved in grassroots political groups for years, I was not naive about FBI tactics. I’d heard the Bureau implicated in everything from intimidating political activists to assassinating civil rights workers. On a more personal level, the alternative high school where I teach in Chicago was subjected to a surprise raid in June of 1983 when FBI agents and Chicago police took files and caused as much as $40,000 in damages. Members of Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School say that absurd FBI claims about the building being used as a bomb factory were the pretext for the raid. Teachers say the school was actually targeted in an attempt to destroy its credibility among Puerto Ricans because it was exposing Puerto Rican students to alternative ideas about colonialism and radical independence movements. The FBI was eventually forced to publicly issue a statement distancing the school’s name from terrorism, but stolen files were never returned and the damages never paid for.

Two years later the FBI was involved in an armed attack which killed 11 members of MOVE, a communal group of socially radical African-Americans. The circumstances of that attack bear a striking resemblance to the recent assault against the Davidians.

On May 13, 1985, MOVE’s main house in Philadelphia was burned to the ground, along with 60 other row houses on the block, after an especially flammable explosive covertly supplied by the FBI was detonated on the roof. The fire ended a day-long shoot out between several MOVE members inside and hundreds of Philadelphia cops surrounding the house outside. Burned, dismembered bodies of six adults and five children were found in the rubble, some containing bullets. MOVE members, too, were labeled in the media as suicidal cultists and accused by the government of burning their own home.

Only two people inside the MOVE house that day survived: Ramona Africa, an adult, and Birdie Africa, a 13 year old boy.

Almost eight years later, on the day after the Davidians’ home was burned to the ground, an Associated Press article titled “Texas Flames Evoke Past Attacks” in the Chicago Sun-Times quoted Ramona Africa as saying “It’s May 13^th all over again…I hope it is an example for people…to stop hallucinating about the system they’re dealing with and realize that this system is insane.”

Given the disparity between the term “suicide” and what I had seen on TV, my curiosity and healthy distrust of government agencies were aroused. Comments made by Ramona Africa and the admirable on-location reporter started me on a library investigation of events surrounding the attack on the Davidians.

My investigation spanned eight weeks and included over 60 newspaper articles from around the country. The majority of these were published between March 28 and May 28 in two Texas dailies, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express News. For earlier newspaper accounts, I read microfilm articles from the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. Also included in my research were archival magazine articles about the 1985 MOVE bombing, plus one book by Margot Harry called Attention MOVE! This is America! and another called Burning Down the House, by John Anderson and Hilary Hevenor.

One of the most striking points I learned about, and perhaps the most crucial to understanding information about the Davidians in the news media, was the degree to which the FBI seized control over information going in and out of the buildings where the Davidians were holed up during the 51-day siege.

Almost immediately following the original raid, contact between the Davidians and people outside the FBI was severely limited when telephone service inside the buildings was disconnected and replaced by a direct line to federal agents.

Similarly, members of the press were forced to move a minimum of two miles away from the site when the FBI arrived. Although the grainy, blurred quality of ensuing photographs and TV footage hinted at this fact, there was very little mention of it by the media. One of only two direct references I found to this was a paragraph in the Houston Chronicle which succinctly stated the significance of moving the press so far away. It quoted Paul Fatta, a Davidian who happened to be away form the ranch on the day of the initial raid, as saying, “When the media was pushed way back more than two miles down the road, the FBI could say and do anything they wanted, and the whole world was just getting the information they were giving.” The same article also said Fatta believed the FBI had intentionally set the fire to flush the Davidians out.

During the second week of the siege, the Davidians began hanging large bedsheet banners out of windows in an effort to communicate with the world beyond the FBI. Two of these messages were, “God Help Us We Want the Press,” and “Rodney King We Understand.” The following week, after FBI spokesmen publicly accused the group’s religious leader, David Koresh, of effectively halting negotiations for surrender, the Davidians displayed another banner that read, “FBI Broke Negotiations, We Want Press.”

As far as I could tell, the only direct press contact permitted to the Davidians came within two days of the initial raid, when Koresh was allowed to air a 25-minute live interview and a 58-minute taped sermon on a Texas radio station.

After this, the only communication the Davidians were allowed outside the FBI (that I know of) was several face-to-face meetings and closely monitored phone conversations with attorney Dick De Guerin, who was hired by Koresh’s mother. Another attorney for the Davidians, Jack Zimmerman, was also present during some negotiation sessions, but was sometimes not permitted by the FBI to speak. Concerned relatives and friends were at no time allowed to speak with the people inside.

With such tight control over information and communication, government officials were able to make a series of unsubstantiated accusations and block any response from the Davidians. Much of the mainstream news media, having access to little material outside FBI and ATF statements, repeated these accusations daily. Emerging in the media was an image of the Davidians as suicidal, child-molesting cult members led by a madman fanatically bent on stockpiling weapons and explosives for a final confrontation with the U.S. government.

The Davidians were also specifically accused of converting semi-automatic weapons to fully automatic capacity. While the Davidians supposedly obtained this equipment with relative ease from an Illinois-based company in the weapons trade, it is illegal to actually make the conversions without governmental approval. This was the official explanation given for the February raid by the ATF, whose mandate it is to regulate arms flow within the U.S. The ATF additionally accused the Davidians of shooting first in the gun battle on the day of the February raid.

Many of these accusations have been seriously challenged by almost everyone — apart from government agents — who was directly involved during the siege, including attorneys De Guerin and Zimmerman as well as the nine survivors who managed to escape from the burning buildings.

De Guerin in particular has been an outspoken critic of FBI and ATF behavior in the case, saying that the government is conducting “a massive cover-up, a white wash” of its actions.

Approximately five weeks after the fire, De Guerin publicly released a lengthy tape-recorded telephone conversation he had with Koresh before the FBI disconnected the lines on the afternoon following the ATF raid. The Houston Chronicle reported that Koresh sounded tired on the tape due to being seriously wounded, but seemed agitated by government comments to the media: “They said we were throwing grenades at them, I mean, for crying out loud…you can’t believe anything they tell you.” The Chronicle stated also that Koresh sounded especially irritated by government suggestions that the Davidians were considering mass suicide, saying, “That’s not even sane, it irks me.”

The accusation that the Davidians were suicidal was also refuted after the fire by several of the survivors including Renos Avraam, Jaime Castillo, Derek Lovelock and others. Louis Aliniz, a Houston man who slipped past the FBI and into the buildings during the siege, said he was convinced the Davidians hadn’t committed suicide, due to their religious beliefs. He left the ranch two days before the fire.

Survivors also reportedly told De Guerin that those on the inside couldn’t get out because some were blocked by fire and smoke, while others were completely immobilized by massive amounts of gas pumped in by the FBI. Survivor Jaime Castillo, in similar statements, refuted accusations that Koresh had used death threats to prevent people form fleeing the fire. Castillo said he personally had been afraid to leave the buildings because of the imminent danger he perceived from the FBI’s attack.

Under the assumption that the government did not want an armed confrontation with the Davidians, the ATF’s action in the initial February 28 raid was widely criticized in the media as being poorly planned. More recently, the Bureau’s official statements about events leading up to and during the raid have been discredited by a series of contradictory statements and outright lies.

The ATF originally justified the raid by claiming that it was the only way to serve Koresh with arrest and search warrants because he never left the ranch. But preachers, merchants and other townspeople said in newspaper accounts that Koresh had been regularly seen purchasing goods in town.

The Bureau also claimed to have conducted the raid as soon as agents obtained evidence of illegal activity. Federal court affidavits by ATF officials later contradicted this. Agents allegedly discovered eight months prior to the raid that the Davidians might be illegally converting weapons. The Houston Chronicle reported that in the meantime, spies were planted in and around the Davidian’s home while 130 ATF agents spent several months preparing for the attack.

Through a series of disclosures by high ranking ATF officials during Congressional hearings and legal testimony, it was also brought to light that the Bureau carried out the raid with supervisors’ full knowledge that the Davidians had been tipped off by a telephone call. The ATF spy who had infiltrated and lived on the ranch, Robert Rodriguez, reported the telephone call back to the Bureau and advised that the surprise raid be canceled. ATF director Stephen Higgins also admitted that the Bureau invited six local press members and two from CBS news to attend the raid, ensuring national media coverage.

All along, government spokesmen contended that the Davidians fired first during the raid, setting off the gun battle that would leave four agents dead and 16 others wounded. The Bureau claimed that, having been warned the agents were coming, the Davidians had time to set up a surprise ambush.

Several people who participated in the gun battle, however, including anonymous ATF agents, Koresh, and Davidian survivor Castillo, were listed in newspapers as having said that the first shots were fired by ATF men.

Koresh was quoted on March 1 in the Los Angeles Times as saying, “They fired on us first…the bullets started coming into the door.” In the taped telephone conversation with De Guerin, Koresh said that the ATF’s guns were “cocked and locked” as agents jumped out of cattle trucks.

Weeks later, after the deadly fire, De Guerin said he wanted to keep the federal agents out of the ruins of the burned buildings. “It’s in the ATF’s interest to jimmy up the crime scene to make it seem like they were justified in going in like the marines,” he said.

In mid-May, 12 bulldozers hired by the federal government leveled the ruins. At that time, nobody outside law enforcement officials had been permitted near the crime scene since federal search warrants were still in effect. The closest that reporters would be allowed before the bulldozing, was 200 yards away, were they were escorted as a group by government agents. Zimmerman was quoted as saying, “I guess what it does, it forever prevents any checking on the ATF’s rendition, that the fire was intentionally set” by the Davidians.

Jeff Kearney, lawyer to Castillo, declined to publicly state in the Houston Chronicle that the fire was part of an intentional government plan. He did say that the fact the buildings burned “is a benefit to the government…These government agents can say whatever they want, and there is little physical evidence to dispute that. I felt they knew that if that building was damaged, burned or destroyed it would be to their benefit.”

The Houston Chronicle reported that the Waco fire trucks en route to fight the fire were held at an FBI checkpoint several miles from the buildings and that firefighters were ordered not to talk to reporters. By the time the trucks arrived, the blaze was out of control.

lthough the heads of 12 corpses could not be recovered after the fire, the charred bodies of the 12 youngest children were found in their mothers’ arms.

As of the end of my investigation, I had found no mention of any government agency clearly stating whether or not the Davidians possessed illegal weapons. The Texas Rangers released a list of weapons retrieved in the ruins, but ambiguous language made it impossible to discern whether any of these were automatic.

I was able to find almost no information about the Davidians’ political beliefs other than a few intriguing details. Listed in the original search warrant, which prompted the entire siege, was a video critical of the ATF and writings which detailed Koresh’s alleged hatred for law enforcement.

End note from E.R.

MEMO TO GOD (for future reference)
WE PRAY
YOU, DO NOT
SEND
THE MESSIAH
UNLESS
THE MESSIAH
IS
NICE
THE MESSIAH
OBEYS
AMERICAN LAWS
and
THE MESSIAH
CO-OPERATES WITH THE FBI

In order to rationalize events in Waco, a lot of rhetoric has been drawn from pop psychology. Koresh was “psychopathic,” “sick,” “suffered from paranoid delusions.”

There was also a kind of theologization of Koresh, so that he was spoken of as if he was Satan: the fires which consumed him were the flames of Hell. Not the flames of a burning home. This kind of rhetoric, on the covers of magazines and on TV, suggests they defeated the Devil down in Texas. But nobody defeated Satan. There was no Satan in Waco. There were people.

We never penetrate the facades placed before us, representing the “truth” of Waco. Nowhere have I seen any serious discussion of the consequences if Koresh really was the messiah. I am not advocating this view. But if you’re Christian, ask yourself why you did not ask: Could this man be the messiah? Must the True Messiah abide by the laws of an imperfect nation-state? Does resistance to the FBI prove a man or woman is not the True Messiah? Now, very few people believe in a Coming Age. If there really is a “God,” and if this God “sent” a divine incarnation to live among us, to usher in a milleniumn of perfect peace, would that Messiabh get good press? Or would we simply kill him?

Something to think about, now that a man is dead.

— E.R.

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]]> By Héme, AJODA #38, Fall 1993

Although I am involved with Interrogations, what follows does not flow exclusively from how I experience this activity. Nor is it independent of it. Rather, I would like to attempt to define what underlies an uneasiness I have felt in the last few months while reading texts from what, to simplify, I will call the radical milieu.[1] My intention is not to tell people what to do; it is to outline what to me would seem the degeneration of an outlook to which I remain attached. This would appear necessary vis-a-vis:

• the integrity of individuals participating in this current and of those who might be seduced by their positions.

• the possibility of encouraging a renewal of critical thinking which would eventually take the form of people in already existing groups coming together to form other groups, or in the creation of new ones — groups which would take the critiques below into account.

• an opposition to doing our bit to build a new ideology based on a desire for a “spiritual bonus” and a commodified New Age.

1. From a Definition of Radicalism to Half-Assed Radicalism

Over forty years ago, in The Root of Man, which was published in the American journal Politics, Dwight MacDonald suggested that we abandon the old separation between left and right (the progressives) and that the category “radical” be contrasted to them. For MacDonald, the word radical applies to those who “reject the classical notion of progress and judge things according to their meaning and their effect in the present; they believe that science’s capacity to serve as a guide in human affairs has been exaggerated, and that to re-establish a balance, the moral and political side should be emphasized. They think — or rather, we think — that whether people’s increased mastery of nature has had a good or bad effect on human life remains an open question; we are in favor of adapting techniques to people rather than adapting people to technical progress, even if this means (as it may well) a technical regression.” In general the above project already dovetailed with the project of those I am presently addressing. Today, as was then the case, this project is based on a serious critique of the progressive ideologies from which the radicals came (Marxism, anarchism or others) or which influenced individuals who took part in their reflections. But a critique is not as easy as the proverb would imply. And here it is a question of rejecting the schematization of ideologies and of analyzing debated problems with clarity, without fudging their complexity or contradictions.

In the past, an extreme left emerged from the left, taking up more extreme positions but ones which were based on the same premises as the left. In turn this favored the emergence of an ultra-left. I won’t go into similar splits in other milieus I am less familiar with, such as the anarchist and ecology milieus. On the whole contemporary radicals who have extricated themselves from these milieus in the last twenty years have been able to come up with neither a guiding concept nor a major project. Among a variety of reasons for this are:

• A belief in the power of the word. Inherited from a certain intellectual tradition incarnated in particular in situationism, this approach tends to confuse the glitter of words with depth of thought. The vacuousness of a slogan such as “Take your desires for reality” is an example. Modern desires are such an accurate reflection of reality that this has now become a way of life in the kingdom of France. Following this logic, the fact of being misunderstood is the ultimate stamp of radicalism, as is verbal extremism. I’m not certain but it seems to me that, for some, the language of Orwell in 1984[2] flows from the same logic. Writing “War is Peace” becomes a trademark which guarantees the purity of the radical product, even in the absence of any kind of project to share with others.

• How the eclectic nature of their influences has contributed to the evolution of contemporary radicals. The difficulty that currents developing a materialist critique have had in applying it to progressivism has led to a search for elements in milieus which, for lack of a better word, I would call dubious: spiritualists, people marketing various types of natural lifestyles, etc. But rummaging in garbage pails is not always without risk, and it seems the hardly appetizing but necessary process of sorting has not been thoroughly carried out.

2. From Dialectical Materialism to Charlatanism

Radical critiques of “dialectical and historical materialist” ideology have generally outlined well in what senses — faithfully reflecting its 19^th century origins — this ideology was based on a mechanical and progress-oriented vision. This critique concerns not only (ex)-Marxists: the same mechano-progressivism is to be found in other revolutionary ideologies (e.g. Bakunin, and in the book La reaction en Allemagne), and it is also found in certain individuals to whom it had simply contagiously spread. Seeing how this ideology has led to justifying capitalism has not been a wasted effort for contemporary radicals. But it remains equally necessary to grasp in what sense 19^th century “philosophical inquiry” corresponded to a desire for a rigorous approach in theoretical reflection. Without making any concessions to the gigantic historical mechanisms they have erected, or to Russian doll games, it remains crucial to avoid abandoning what is to be gained from a materialist approach to problems. I fear that it is the materialist rather than the mechanical aspect of mechanical materialism that modern radicals are tempted to reject. I also fear that these folks will be easy prey for various charlatanisms.[3]

But what kind of charlatanisms do I mean? The act of comparing, for any goal (serving a cause, making money), true or credible facts on the pretext of apparent similarity — or simply because everything is linked to everything else — and, from this, deriving laws, predictions or anything which is said to influence people. Let’s take a few simple examples.

Anyone who claims that the mythical heavens of the astrologers are a representation of the reality of constellations is an ignoramus or a joker. Anyone who asserts there is a deterministic relationship between this fantasy and the future of humanity is a charlatan. And there will be an inhibiting effect on anyone who, instead of looking for causal relationships between phenomena, bases his or her critique of the world on relationships of analogy or correspondence without perceiving the difference between correlation and causality.[4] In so doing, voluntarily or not, such a person tends to become a charlatan. A radical one no doubt, but a charlatan just the same. This radical charlatanism is all the more dangerous because it is simultaneously seductive and reassuring. Seductive because, on demand, exactly what one was hoping for can be demonstrated — like the fairy tales of our childhood which offered to make our deepest desires come true. Reassuring because it dispenses with having to really think about things “according to their meaning and their effect in the present.”

The scientific socialism which made it possible to prove everything (and the contrary of everything) since “objectively,” “in the final analysis” material conditions forced us to be what we have to be, is quite dead. Thanks to radical charlatanism anything remains possible, but this time individuals’ whims are in control since “everything is equal” and “everything is a part of everything else.”

3. From the Domestication of Nature to its Deification

In this text I will not again deal with calls to domesticate nature and to transform non-human living species into things, calls which are to be found in revolutionary ideologies and in progressive ones more generally. Once again, a lively analysis of this has been developed by “our current.” But this critique has used a variety of sources, which at times have tended to appropriate it, for example:

• neo-paganism, which all the more rapidly resurfaces since it is deeply rooted in our popular culture (resistance to Christianization) as well as in our intellectual culture (poetry, literature). It is no accident that some members of Interrogations have (re)discovered Giono. Personally I’m grateful to have done so, but the pleasure I am able to derive from Giono the writer or pacifist does not reconcile me to his agnosticism and his paganism.

• certain ethnological currents, which are the basis of primitivist ideology. I have already gone over this point in my letter to Michael William which appeared in Demolition Derby #2.[5] The undeni- ably attractive aspects of certain traditional (not primitive!) communities have kept them from being considered in their globality and, specifically, in what sense their spirituality is not only alienating but heralds other alienations which have been developed by today’s world. This point has been fleshed out better than I could in a series of texts which appeared in the American journal Anarchy. All this material should undoubtedly be translated…if someone had the time! In order to put this debate in context, I will just give a quote from Lev Chernyi which appeared in “Anarchy and the Sacred: an Exchange with Fifth Estate”:

“For me, the continuities between religion and scientific ideolo- gies are more meaningful than their differences. Why reject scientific ideology only to embrace the idiocies of religion, of spiritualism and the sacred? Isn’t it clear that your critiques of reification and worship with regard to technique in no way diminishes the importance of a critique of reification and of worship with regard to nature…

“…The concept of the sacred is the foundation of all religion, spiritualism, ideology, cult, faith, belief. It implies logically (and inevitably) the existence of the profane. Despite the fact that it can be transformed into many other dualities …good or evil, spirit and matter, god and devil…which all fulfil the same insidious role of dividing all the experience that we have naturally of our world into two conceptual and arbitrary spheres.”

Ultimately, this radical deification of nature boils down to the assertion that all living beings are equal. But if, for most of us, our reflections have led to certain changes of attitude (with respect to food, for example), it is necessary to remain wary of scams — which thrive particularly well on this terrain. Although some may well find it shocking, as a human being I deny that a vegetable, a bacterium and an animal are equal; or an animal without an evolved nervous system and a vertebrate with a brain; or an HIV virus and a rough-coated fox terrier. Horror of horrors, I would like to state that if I like to view and approach trees, it is not because we are playing a part in a cosmos[6] or something or other; it is because, for one, I find them attractive on a sensual level, and because, as well, I am aware of their importance in the ecological equilibrium which allows our survival. I admit to having repeatedly used weed killer to combat weeds I did not feel in communion with; and even occasionally insecticide against our little winged brothers. And for those who can fathom it, I adore rabbits (which doesn’t keep me from eating them on occasion), but I detest pigeons (even with green peas).

To remedy the frustrations that this world imposes on me, I am in no way interested in attempting to believe in a spiritual “grand totality” — nature, life, god, etc. — which would transcend our so-called little human problems.

“Religion is the sigh of the creature overwhelmed by unhappiness; it is the soul of a heartless world, the spirit of a spiritless epoch.” (a 19^th century German philosopher)

Translated by Alison Gross (Paris) and Michael William (Montréal) from Le Point d’Interrogations, Autumn, 1992. To correspond with the journal, write to the following address without mentioning Le Point d’Interrogations: Héme, c/o I.S., B.P. 243, 75564 Paris Cedex 12, France.

[1] This is a simplification in appearance only, since the “radical current” in question is hard to define. In this respect see Dwight MacDonald’s definition which is quoted in the first part of the text, as well as a longer version in Le Point d’Interrogations 1991/2. One could attempt to define it as all the groups and individuals which are attempting to use a critique of capitalism which attacks its roots, and not just its most blatant injustices. Although they do not share a program of defined positions, “radicals” generally reject electoralism and syndicalism and challenge wage labor, money and modern society.

[2] This is a reference to George Orwell’s novel 1984, in which the key slogans of the state and the party are: “War is Peace”; “Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength.” Numerous texts and tracts adopted these slogans as titles or subtitles, particularly around the year 1984, and then during the Gulf War.

[3] For some of these folks, I more than fear it! Modern radicals are into everything, from believing in horoscopes to Oriental esoteric practices! This inclination toward charlatanism is not always easy to discern because generally it does not manifest itself openly. This is not to say that we should become thought police, but simply that we should remember that fighting for a free and critical way of thinking has always implied fighting against superstition and religiosity as well. Just because it would appear that politicians and statesmen are the title-laden clients of sorcerers and fortune tellers is no reason to mimic them! An entire critical reflection should undoubtedly be undertaken in this area. Today the critique of religion has essentially been abandoned to P.C. rationalists, and the critique of parallel beliefs maintains autonomy from scientism only with difficulty. A certain reappropriation of the best aspects of these critiques, however, should not be overlooked. Of interest on this subject are works which appeared in the Collection Zététiques (L’Horizon Chimérique, 7, rue Leytaire, 33000 Bordeaux), and in particular Incroyable…mais faux (essai critique sur l’obscurantisme moderne) by A. Cuniot, and Médecines paralléles et cancer (modes d’emploi et de non-emploi), by O.Jallut.

[4] There is nothing very revolutionary about “reasoning” by analogy or coincidence, since this is the way the occult has functioned from the very beginning. This type of thinking would have us believe that individuals born the same day will have similar character traits and destinies (!) and, more generally, that if two events take place at the same time, one flows from the other (and vice versa). There are numerous examples of these types of hardly rigorous deductions. One will suffice — a text on AIDS that has been brought to our attention which attempts to be ultra-radical (and winds up ultra-pitiful). Follow closely! (a) One of the immediate consequences of May ’68 was the liberation and availability of means of contraception and abortion. (b) The first cases of AIDS appeared in New York in the spring of 1979. Conclusion of (a) plus (b): The HIV virus was perfected by the American army to put morality back into social customs — conclusion of the conclusion: therefore, to protect themselves, they must have created an antidote or a counter-poison. Thus a vaccination or anti-AIDS medicine exists. End of story!

[5] The label “primitivist” has been primarily used in North America to describe a current of thought which has critiqued the logic of progress, civilization and modernity. This milieu is anything but monolithic: some people posit a pre-language golden age, while others accentuate community and defend past and present indigenous groups. Still others want something new, something which, to our knowledge, has never existed.It was this group as a whole (with nuances)that I was referring to above when I was speaking of “our current.” The Fifth Estate is this outlook’s most typical journal. In recent years it has influenced a number of other journals: Anarchy in the U.S., Demolition Derby in Canada, and Interrogations in France.
My letter to Michael William, which was published following “Petite analyse de la différence” (in the publication section), was an attempt to distance myself from this label, which I considered and continue to consider harmful to our thinking and its clarity. My letter concluded in the following manner:
“Our vision is often deformed and idealized … everything is grist for the imagination’s mill. If, on the other hand, the imagination chooses a model, a reference, a whole world of possibilities is closed off; it even becomes difficult to understand those who imagine another kind of life in a different manner.”
“It is no easy task to radically criticize this world while living in it at the same time, to conceive of the possibility of another life which has no model one can attach oneself to and at times no words to express it; to feel a sense of affinity with others who are sometimes thousands of kilometers away — without being able to put a label on it which could help us to recognize each other and be recognized by others. The only weapons we presently possess are a confidence among those who compose our small ‘community of thought’ and an absence of compromises in our critique. These few remarks should therefore in no way be considered an attempt to distance myself or to search for differences between us, but as an element of our common reflection.”
This idea was completed in a letter I sent to a friend from the Fifth Estate in January 1990:
“I did not want to go back over the question of primitivism, which I don’t consider a major one, but I have the impression that a few misunderstandings persist:
— I am not critiquing ‘primitivists’(?). In fact I don’t believe any primitivists exist, and simply regret that some people accept this label, which only masks their true aspirations and refusals. In short, I feel that the label primitivist is the enemy of the so-called primitivists, who, luckily, are something else entirely. I was not, therefore, attacking these individuals.
— I think it is as ridiculous to label certain contemporary non-industrial societies primitive as it is to label them savage or pre-capitalist. All these terms express the same West-centeredness.
— I was not attacking being interested in falsely labelled primitive societies (I don’t believe they can be called ancient ones either). From these societies I think that we can learn that the mentality and customs of contemporary people in the West are not inevitable. But we must preserve the same critical attitude toward these societies as we do toward the milieu we are living in. This is why I stressed the question of Africa, which doesn’t appear to be the same as the native American example (I reiterate that there is nothing which demonstrates that primitive tribes exist in Africa). This reminds me of a letter I received from a friend who has been living in Africa for many years. He writes: ‘I believe that the Bantu philosophy is hell for thousands of blacks who are stuck in it with no chance to escape. It is hell in the literal sense of the word. In the Congo, for example, I saw people who were mentally and even physically suffering from it…’
Much could also be said about traditional Asiatic societies.”

[6] In radical spiritual language, one does not often speak of the cosmos (the world, the universe). Instead it is the Cosmos with a capital C, a term all the more esoteric since it refers to nothing precise. A propos, it is worth citing Réflections sur l’individualisme (1910), by the anarchist Manuel Devaldés: “By capitalizing the article and noun in this text we express the sanctity of ideas, according to the spirit of mystical or positive religions.” Right on, and let’s keep it in mind with respect to every discourse on Nature, the Earth, Science and Progress.

Author’s note: This text was written during the winter of 1990–91 when — as stated in the first sentence — I was involved with the journal Interrogations. This may seem anecdotal for those who weren’t readers of this publication, which folded several months later (Summer ’91). I mention it primarily because I have not judged it necessary to rework the critique in order to bring it more up-to-date. The footnotes, on the other hand, did not appear in the original version (September 1992).

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By Manolo Gonzalez, AJODA #38 & #39, Fall 1993 / Winter 1994

In 1939, 350,000 Spaniards went into exile. Many Anarchists took refuge in Latin America — in Mexico, Argentina and Chile. Here is a personal memoir of an Anarchist family escaping Franco’s fascists and the horrors to come.

Part I. Catalonia!

At last we were ready to embark. We would leave Catalonia, Europe. We had been notified by the Greek Shipping Company that our ship “Artemiss” would be sailing out of Marseille in the next 12 hours. My father called Anselmo Palau and they agreed to mobilize our people in three hours. Probably the Basque were already boarding. Then he called our friends in the Jewish Emigration Agency and gave them precise instructions to get the children onto the pier and keep them together until they boarded the ship. We were very careful of our arrangements for fear of Nazi spies, or that Franco’s agents would prepare a trap as we passed the coast of Spain on our way out of the Mediterranean.

My mother was worried about our luggage. It contained our new French clothing, our only possessions. She had found a silk Russian peasant shirt for me; my father had dressed me in it and taken me to a professional photographer for a commemorative photo before we left Paris. Now when I see that photo, in sepia, 45 years later, I notice how old and tired I looked for my age.

We embraced Otilia and Josep Marinet. During our wait in Marseille we had been staying in their house. Otilia cried as she gave me a little bundle with sweet rolls. “I will see you again, Otilia. I will always come to see you!” I promised as she kissed me. My mother and Otilia hugged each other. The men shook hands. “Good luck, Commander.” “Thank you for everything,” my father responded.

It was about two in the morning. A taxi, driven by a Spaniard, arrived silently. Inside, the car smelled of garlic, tobacco, and oil. Fog hid the houses. The streets were wet. I saw last the lights of the Zoco.

Sudden blasts of the fog horns told me we were near the docks. A grey, cold, damp mass of mist enveloped the pier and the warehouse where, already, many of the refugees waited to board. We could not see beyond the pier, but the lights of the “Artemiss” cast soft, white beams across its structure. The ship looked small, but tough. Its white funnel had two blue lines, and on the bridge we could make out the Captain supervising the embarkation.

Gusts of wind pushed heavy salty balls of fog. We were shivering, but we had to wait until the French authorities approved out papers. Several men, still in bandages, came walking slowly, supported on the arms of their families. All the children looked pale and were trying to keep warm under layers of woolen sweaters and gloves. We were alarmed by two approaching trucks. A band of fierce and extremely young-looking men and women got out. They saluted with military precision and shook hands with my father and the Basque leadership. Then in clear Spanish one of them said, “Salud, comrades.” I was struck that they all had pistols in their belts. Then I realized they were the escort to the contingent of refugee Jewish children. Now the children were coming down. They formed a column. A young girl, no older than 14, carried a white and blue banner; the first time I saw what was to become the flag of the State of Israel. Stark in the odd light they marched, each with a knapsack. At the end of the column several youngsters carried the smallest of their warrior platoon on their shoulders. A French officer came down from the ship.

Saluting everyone, he started checking his passenger list. A line formed. I saw Coco and his parents. We both looked for Pilar. She was with her mother. Pilar waved to us. We blew back big spectacular kisses and jumped up and down like clowns to make her laugh. People started climbing the metal ladder onto the ship. A rare excitement came over me when it was our turn to board the “Artemiss.” There were over 200 persons, and they filled the two decks and even the cargo compartment. Food supplies were already aboard.

From the top deck I kept track of my friends. They moved fast and soon we were together looking down at the Jewish children saying farewell to their armed escort. No military precision. Now there were tears. We heard painful exclamations in an unfamiliar Eastern European language. The girl with the banner dropped it and embraced and kissed with passion one of the boys in their guard. Aboard they tried to resume their resolute formation, but it was impossible. We realized then how alone these children were. Their only family, perhaps for months, had been the young soldiers of a secret army of antifascists. The Spaniard men and women rushed to embraced the Jewish children. Following what was probably their last instructions, the youngsters drew together and sang a slow, deeply stirring hymn in Hebrew. It was not a farewell, but an expression of hope, of victory. The Greek sailors closed the rails. The ship was moving. Down on the pier the young men and women of the Hagganah raised their fists. Spontaneously from the ship we began singing the International, in Euzkadi, in Spanish, Coco, Pilar and me in Catalan. The ship’s horn blew several times. We were still singing as we disappeared into the fog, the pier a flickering of lights. Then it was dark.

We were too excited to go to sleep. While our parents made arrangements in the cabins, we went looking for the Jewish children. They had been given one of the largest rooms, formerly a recreation, social area when the ship cruised tourists between the Greek Islands. Cots and partitions were efficiently distributed. The older girls were accommodated on the upper deck, practically in the open. Some of the supervisors of the mission were American Quakers. I was surprised to see these religious workers aboard. We were used to the indifference of the western world to the plight of the victims of Fascism all over Europe.

It was not difficult to communicate with the Jewish children, Most of them spoke French or English, and soon we were all exchanging names and misadventures. I shared my sweet rolls with Chris, a Czech boy. Rapidly we discovered something in common; we liked books. My heavily accented French made him laugh. Coco introduced me to a blonde girl from Silesia. She told us, to our surprise, that her father had been in the Thaelman Battalion that fought in Spain with the International Brigades. By now he was probably in Palestine, the final destination of all the Jewish children.

It was about five in the morning, still dark and foggy, that we felt heavy and sleepy. There were people all over the ship. We separated, looking for our cabins. Finally, I found my parents. They were having coffee in what had been the bar, now an improvised food station for everyone.

“There you are,” my mother exclaimed, while urging my father to get to our cabin. I had no sense of location. Everything was grey, and only the vibration of the ship’s engines gave any indication we were moving. Our very small cabin had only two bunk beds and a cot for me. The porthole was wet, big drops of condensed humidity hung everywhere. I was tired and cold. Fortunately, the cot was warm with an extra blanket my parents had gotten for me.

I awoke in a pale yellowish light that illuminated the cabin. I found a note, “Come to lunch. Kisses, Your Mother.” She always left me kisses. What time was it anyway…?

I felt somewhat dizzy; my stomach grumbled. I wanted to drink something cool and refreshing. I found my pants — still short and stupid — my white shirt and, just in case, my blue pullover. Now was the time to wear my tennis shoes. Well, I was ready, but as I opened the door I was taken aback to see nothing but the greenish ocean and a pale sun struggling to pass through the mist. The air was damp, warm, and, in a few moments, I felt all sticky. The moving sea made me rather cautious. I walked close to the wall and held on to every available piece of support, pipes, rails, a chair. A large number of people had gathered at the stern of the ship, just sitting, perhaps enjoying the open air, the freedom, the mystery of the sea.

The mess hall was full of men and women in animated conversation. Laughter and the clatter of dishes and silver dominated the place. The vibrations of the engines were very noticeable here, but everybody was happy to be on the move. We were aiming to cross the Mediterranean and, hugging the coast of North Africa, rush into the open Atlantic. The Fascist Navy had a blockade, including Spanish and Italian war ships, but the intense traffic of all kinds of merchant vessels made it possible to escape detection. The British, implementing their doctrine of “freedom of the sea,” managed to keep the hostilities close to Spanish ports.

I could not tell what time of the day it was. The “Artemiss” was still in a cocoon of fog, an the sun was weak and pale. Only the fresh, pungent, biting breeze gave me a notion of reality. This was the open sea! We were actually escaping Europe.

In one of the little rooms next to the mess hall I found two huge marmites with coffee and tea. I chose tea, using a metal cup, and a strange looking bread roll with poppy seeds, tasting of anise. I came upon a lively group of the Jewish youngsters. At least four chess games were in progress. Onlookers were waiting patiently for their turn to play, all in profound contemplation, observing the moves in ritual silence. Two of the competitors were girls, looking happy and playing with zest. Obviously winners. When someone noticed me, I was silently admonished to be quiet. The etiquette was to be impartial, immobile, detached. The enjoyment of the confrontations was to be experienced only in an inner, secret realm; the observations to be accumulated preparatory of future encounters.

I moved away form this enclave of cerebral titans and went looking for Chris or the blonde girl I had met the night before. The first friendly face I found was Anselmo. He was on top of one of the bulkheads with a group of men and women I was sure was already a Committee, reviewing passports and compiling a list of all the passengers. I asked him for Pilar. “She’s still sleeping,” he responded busily. “That’s it,” I thought. Coco was sleeping, too. He had always had the same habits as Pilar. It had always been most mysterious to me. They went to sleep at the same time, woke up at the same hour, and they certainly got hungry at unusual hours, but always simultaneously. Sometime I intended to discuss this with them.

It was fun to explore the ship; people looked more content. Only once in a while would the fear of encountering a Fascist raider flare up, when we would see the distant smoke of passing ships.

“Hello! There you are. I’ve been looking for you all over the ship.”

I turned around. It was the blonde girl. I was pleased to meet her all by myself.

“Well,…it’s you. Tell me your name again, please.”

“Annelise. Want to lunch with me?” she asked.

“Lunch? is it that late? I haven’t had breakfast, but lunch is all right. Where?”

“Not at the mess hall. I saw and smelled the food. It’s abominable! Let’s get some kosher sausages, cheese, black bread and pickles, and a beer, all right?” It took me by surprise. I knew of religious diets. After all, in Barcelona even we during Holy Week ate dry cod with garbanzos as an expiatory food. But this was bold, exotic.

“Well, all right,” I responded, “but where are we going to get all that? Not on this ship, are we?”

“Of course, on the ship. One of the agreements the Refugee Agency made with the Navigation Company was to stock kosher food for us. Toby — you know, that lanky chap — he is the food commissar for us. He sees that all the Jewish children get a strict kosher diet.”

It was an education for me. I was fascinated. Kosher food. What a revelation. Annelise started to walk. “Coming?”

“Yes, of course,” I said eagerly, following after her.

We went to a corner room next to the kitchen, below the main deck. There it was, installed with a sign in Hebrew, German and Czech: “Refectory.” Toby was there, with a young girl as a helper.

“You’re late,” he told Annelise, smiling, “but who can refuse anything to lovely Annelise, the Rabbi’s daughter!” Annelise laughed.

“Oh now, stop that. I have a guest, Palitos, one of the Barcelona kids.”

“Is he a Communist?” asked Toby suspiciously.

“No, I’m with F.A.I. (International Anarchist Federation),” I said, fast and proud of my political affiliation. I was somebody among these warriors, chess champions and religious gourmets.

“Welcome, comrade,” said Toby, extending his arm. We shook hands with vigor and total commitment to our common struggle.

“Well, well, it’s back to the International Brigades,” Toby was a talker, just like me. He could go on and on.

“Toby…Toby, we are hungry,” interrupted Annelise.

The young man organized our lunch in a small cardboard box with the business logo of “Davy’s,” a well known delicatessen in Marseille.

“See you later, Toby,” I said. He raised his fist and responded with a friendly, “Later, comrade.”

Annelise and I climbed back to the fore of the ship, and, among ropes, vents and chains, found a spot where we could eat. The sun was now high over us. The delicious breeze played with our hair and Annelise’s skirt. She tucked it firmly between her legs, and we sat munching our lunch.

Under the sun, Annelise’s blonde hair shone. Cut short, it revealed her neck so that she resembled a Medieval angel or a page in a fairy tale about a remote Nordic kingdom. Her arms were golden white with a tinge of pink around the elbows. She was observing me, too. Her blue eyes were wide, attentive, alert to every expression on my face. She laughed at my faulty French, and we decided to use English to avoid embarrassing mistakes.

We had placed the bottle of beer under the shadow of a funnel vent so that it wouldn’t get warm. We were silent, just eating and smiling at each other. Annelise asked, “How are we going to open the beer?”

“Don’t worry, I have a Swiss Army knife,” I responded.

With a little flair I removed the metal cap. A small piece of ice was still stuck to the neck. It wet my hand. Annelise took a long sip and invited me to drink. The beer was a Pilsener, with a colorful, elaborate label showing a robust peasant girl offering a large stein of beer. It flowed bitter and harsh down my throat. If it had not been so very cold I would have thrown-up from the abominable taste.

“I’m sorry, Annelise, I’m not used to beer. We drink mild red wines mixed with a little water.” Immediately, I recalled my friends, the good times we had in Marseille and, with unexpected intensity, I remembered Sara Ponty.

“Wine, eh, like the Hungarians. My dad wrote me about the wine in Spain. He said it was sweet and generous…and made you drunk with less than a bottle. You can drink a lot of beer and not get drunk!” pronounced Annelise in her worldly-wise way.

Happily she did not insist that I drink more of the obnoxious beer. I was just about ready to throw overboard all the leftover boxes, bottles and napkins, when Annelise stopped me.

“No, wait, wait,” she cried in alarm. “We should put our trash in the container at the end of the kitchen.”

“But it will end up going into the sea just the same!” I protested.

“It doesn’t matter. That’s the way they want us to do it, okay?”

“All right,” I agreed meekly. Annelise wanted to talk. She was interested in something about me, just as I was fascinated by her.

“Do you know where you are going in Chile?” I asked as we walked toward the deck.

“Yes, we’re going to get visas to Palestine, through a deal with the British.”

“Oh no, not the British!” I exclaimed. “Those fellows never keep their agreements. Look what happened to Czechoslovakia!”

“Well, it so happens that England wants our trained pilots. Many of them are Jews. So the deal is us, for the cooperation of what remains of the Czech air force!”

“I see. Clever…just right!” We laughed. We were mature, realistic. We understood adults.

As we walked along the deck, I noticed that few passengers were around, only sailors on duty. Most of the Spaniards were in their cabins or in the compartments below deck.

It was time for siesta. To my great embarrassment I, too, felt sleepy. I wanted to take my “nap” and, perhaps later in the afternoon, after tea, to see a movie.

“Annelise, would you believe that I must take a nap? Will you excuse me?” I felt childish, like a kindergarten pupil, although I knew that Coco and Pilar were already tucked away in some cool corner of the ship, sleeping, close together. I was jealous.

“Oh, go ahead, don’t worry. I’ll visit Toby, and maybe see you later.”

I went looking for my cabin. My parents were sleeping. The room was cool and silent. Only the vibrations of the ship’s engines could be noticed, no human noises. As the breeze crossed the rails it produced a small humming sound. My mother’s clothes were draped over a chair. I touched her silky underwear and lay down on my cot.

After a few days of cautious navigation we approached the coast of Africa. The ship’s captain, Demetriopoulos — we called him just Demetrio — advised us he wanted to take on more provisions and spare parts and was radioing for permission to dock in Oran.

Algeria was, at that time, one of the most valuable colonial possessions of France and of great strategic importance in the struggles of the next 15 years. One of the generators was failing. The problem became evident the night the lights dimmed all over the ship and then kept going on and off. I was just a little annoyed, because it interrupted the after-dinner movie in the dining room, but many feared the blinking would attract the attention of Fascist vessels in these essentially-enemy waters. Now there was open alarm that the Captain would risk the radio, in addition to the lights, and bring the enemy directly to us.

Actually, it was more than that. Captain Demetrio had an exuberant social interest in both women and men. He favored the handsomest young men and the loveliest of the girls with invitations to his table where food and wine were exceptional and generous, as were his appreciative touches and caresses. Our cavalier captain had aroused the fiercest distrust latent in our group. After all, our people were not all cosmopolitan radicals, but a mix of different cultural backgrounds. All of us had just disengaged from desperate warfare and were still in jeopardy a common cause and certainly a common enemy, there were the conservative and less worldly among us. A few believed they had put their lives and children in the hands of a corrupt predator. So, at first, the leadership of our group had its hands full coping with both this Greek and the effect he was having on our group. Coco and Pilar’s attempts to enlighten me were not reassuring. My new friend’s casual observation, “Well, classical Greece is still alive!” only served to surround the captain in my mind with an aura of historical significance and special dispensation. Finally, though, it was his very exuberance that manifested itself in his sure handling of every aspect of running the ship in these waters, together with the cool heads of our leaders, who focused attention in this way, that overcame the terrible anxiety of those most fearful.

We noticed the weather changing. No more heavy fog, just a morning mist, and, after a little while, the sun shone. It turned hot in the afternoons. We were on the ocean. We saw no other ships except at a great distance but encountered many North African fishing trawlers with juvenile crews who jumped up and down when we passed close to them. Some screamed for cigarettes, and once we managed to float a bundle of “Gauloises” in an empty cookie tin to a fast swimmer.

Pilar, Coco, Annelise and I often found ourselves together. Then a young man, Eric Topf, joined us. He was Austrian. His father was in prison in Vienna for participating in the 1934 attempt to stop the Nazis. Eric’s mother had managed to escape Austria and was now waiting for him in Haifa. Eric was a very handsome fellow with dark curly hair, a full face, piercing eyes and impeccable European manners. He spoke a crisp, clear English and a diplomatic French. His father had been an art dealer; his mother an illustrator of children’s books. Eric was very well-educated, and, unlike some of us, he was as comfortable talking about sports as discussing art, politics, and religion. Mystical, with a fine memory, he recited Old Testament passages, Baudelaire, Donne and Whitman, the words accompanied by delicate gestures of his pale, marvelous hands. We were mesmerized by him. He was the favorite young man among the Spaniard girls.

My most vivid memory of him brings back a Saturday afternoon dancing party. My friends and I were eager to attend. Pilar loved dancing, and I considered myself a master of the fox-trot. Coco was an expert in rhumbas, and we all had a passion for the exotic art of tango. The loudspeakers of the ship were connected to the radio which could pick up a famous dance music program from Marseille. When we arrived about 30 or 40 young people were already dancing. Some of the Jewish and Spaniard girls were dancing with each other, waiting for the timid young men to summon the courage to ask them to dance. When Annelise saw me, she just said, “Dance with me,” and we were away. But it was not easy to dance with her. She had the heavy style of Eastern Europeans, sliding her feet and making turns to the right with difficulty. She held me too tightly and tended to bend her legs at the most unexpected moments. It was not like dancing with Pilar.

When the music finished, Annelise kissed me on the cheek and walked around holding me by the hand. I was embarrassed. She was too beautiful, too blonde, and about two inches too tall.

“Annelise, ask Toby to dance. He looks lonely,” I told her. She saw him in a corner, talking with one of the Basque girls.

“You think so?” she asked, incredulous.

“Just look at him,” I insisted, “He’s talking with one of those boring intellectual Basques.”

In spite of her doubts, Annelise went over to talk with Toby.

I sidled closer to one of the doors, just in case. Then I saw Pilar with Eric. He has holding her hand, looking into her eyes with total absorption. She was close to him, waiting for the music to start again. When the announcer’s mellifluous voice told his listeners the next number was “pour nous amis, les Englais, ‘The Lambeth Walk’,” couples lined up, eager to trot the silly novelty steps. I looked for a partner and almost bumped into a refined Catalonian girl. I knew her name was Julia and that, for a reason unknown to me, everyone called her Moncha. She smiled and said, “It’s me or Annelise.” The last words of an advertisement for Coty perfumes were fading away, so I just nodded and we got into position. We strutted around the room together with an enthusiastic bunch of other boys and girls. I liked the way this girl danced. She was fast, light and let herself go, moving her body away from me, then closer to me. In the midst of all the kicking and shouting I saw Pilar and Eric at the head of the columns. She was wearing a light green blouse and a white skirt. Eric in his pioneer white shirt and khaki military shorts looked so romantic, so heroic. They matched each other’s beauty. Pilar was happy, playful, and followed Eric in every comic movement. They pantomimed a pair of raggedy dolls. The music became sillier, a little hysterical, and we shouted with tremendous joy, “Doing the Lambeth Walk, Yeah!” The raucous noise attracted the attention of many adults, and some, peering through the doors and portholes, shook their heads, incredulous at the antics of the younger generation.

We finished dancing in a frantic burst of energy. My partner held my fingers and, with infinite grace, gyrated around me with a flair of her skirt, ending in my arms. Pilar and Eric ran into each other’s arms and embraced. He kissed her on the forehead, and she reclined her head on his chest. For a few seconds they stood together with their eyes closed. As the radio blared a litany of advertisements, we reassembled. My partner was going to leave me, but I begged her, “Please stay. Let’s talk. Would you dance some more with me?”

“Oh, all right. Why not? After all, we Catalonians must stick together.” I could no longer see Pilar and Eric. Then I noticed that Coco was not around either.

“Moncha, have you seen my friend Coco? You know, the fellow I’m often with.”

“Yes, he’s playing chess, on the lower deck.” she answered, waiting for the next song.

“What do you mean?” I asked her impatiently.

“I mean chess. You know, rook takes horse; bishop kills horse; checkmate!” she responded, annoyed by my slow mental process.

The music started again. This time it was a French waltz with lots of soulful accordions, painful violin solos and a dark feminine voice proclaiming her loyalty to a man who betrays her, abuses her and demands more money. I immersed myself in the dance. I liked Moncha. She had a natural way of accommodating her body with my movements. Once again I caught sight of Pilar and Eric. The four of us were moving closer, but we did not acknowledge each other’s presence. Pilar, just as I had seen my mother dancing in Marseille, had her arms around Eric’s neck, and he had his hands on her waist. Moncha rested her head on my chest. Her hair smelled clean, with a vague aroma of roses. I felt warm and tender towards her. I dared to bring her slightly closer to me, and she responded by dancing just a little slower and resting her nails on my hand, without hurting me. It felt delicious, intimate, a little wicked.

Then Moncha was asked to dance by someone else, taller than I. He was one of those rather aristocratic Basque, who smoked and smelled of English tobacco. Moncha asked me with her eyes if it was all right. I winked at her. I felt magnanimous, adult. Pilar and Eric were ready to dance again, but this time they saw me.

“Palitos, where you been?” Pilar asked. “Where’s Coco?”

“He’s playing chess,” I told her.

“Well, let’s go find him.”

“My goodness, chess!” exclaimed Eric in disbelief.

As we left the improvised dance hall, we found that most of the adults were either in the prow of the ship or down on the lower decks, possibly out of discreet respect for the young, but probably just to escape the irritating mating rituals of adolescence.

The air was nice, balmy, and the afternoon sun was still hanging above the horizon. In the tiny library a group of bridge players had taken refuge, oblivious to the tumultuous party on the upper deck. My parents were among them.

Going down one of the metal stairs, we found the chess players. They, too, had escaped from the noisy crowd and were engaged in silent combat. Coco was playing one of the Basque girls and was in trouble. He was folded into himself, his knees high on his chair, his arms knotted around them, ferocious concentration in his eyes. Two of the Greek sailors from the ship’s crew had taken on a pair of young opponents. The smoke of their big Turkish cigars was just the right thing for the occasion. Suddenly, Coco moved one of his pieces. The girl responded quickly and confidently. Then Coco roared like a tiger. The Basque girl looked again in disbelief. She had lost. We could not actually see the final positions, but the young woman, flustered, extracted from her blouse a wad of money and gave Coco a 100 Franc bill. He said, “Thanks, your game is great.” One by one, the other games ended. The losers complimented their triumphant opponents. One of the Greek sailors, with some embarrassment, was playing for his defeat. The winner was a very young boy with glasses. They shook hands. It was an agreement to meet again.

In some way, though, we were disappointed. Was this like gambling?

“Not really,” explained Coco. “You see, we agreed to play only among equal ranking players. That way the rather weak chaps don’t get taken.” We smiled politely, unconvinced.

“I’m hungry,” exclaimed Coco.

“How much did you win?” asked Pilar.

“Oh, about 500 Francs.”

“Well, it pays to have brains,” commented Eric.

“I lost two games, though. But now I have the money for my project,” Coco told us happily, pushing ahead towards the kitchen to get sandwiches and strawberry sodas for all of us.

From that day on, we were a group. Intimidated by Annelise, I wooed Moncha to be our pal. The attraction was Eric who gave dimension and magic to our friendship.

Part II. North Africa, freedom and much more

The “Artemiss” was now navigating in front of the coast of North Africa, directly across from Spain. War ships of different nationalities crisscrossed our path. We exchanged radio signals, identifying ourselves under the protection of the League of Nations and the agreements signed by most civilized countries.

As we slowly approached Algeria, fast French Corvettes drew close to inspect our ship. From the rapid exchanges we could tell that the documentation provided by France was accepted, and we were reassured we would make it to the next port in the territory under French control.

Oran had a small port, just a few cranes and buildings around a semi-military installation. The menace of war, of conflict that could break out at any moment, kept everybody in a state of alert. As we passed the quay leaving behind the jetty of open sea waves, we noticed a couple of French frigates, with all the sailors on board eyeing every part of our ship. From the vantage of the “Artemiss,” we saw the city, its well-defined avenues and wealth of palm trees. The cupolas of several mosques were distinctive landmarks, as were the minarets, located so that the call to prayer for the faithful could be heard all over the city.

Captain Demetrio was on the upper deck keeping an eye on his crew. A small boat, armed with a heavy machine gun, came close to us, and some French officers, policemen and Navy personnel climbed aboard our ship. My father, the Basque leadership and two of the Quaker women in charge of the Jewish children formed some sort of parliamentary group to deal with the French. The anxious refugees crowded around to hear what the authorities had to say. There was fear of an ambush, of dangerous deals with Franco or, perhaps, even a decision to inter us in a concentration camp.

We could hear the French, in pure Bureaucratese, asking for health certificates and visas to port of final destination, but, finally, they arrived at their real objective, a “landing fee” that would make it possible for all of us to “enjoy” Oran during the repair of our ship.

“Well, it seems that all is in order. We also have instructions for special care of the Jewish children,” said a man in a pristine uniform, with a loud authoritarian voice. This produced a reaction of alarm among the Quaker women, but eventually it became clear that there was a powerful local Jewish organization, and it had prepared a welcome for the children.

“It will take several hours to consult with all our fellow passengers about the landing fee, but we are confident a happy solution can be attained. After all, we are men of the world. We understand each other very well,” declared one of the Basque in eloquent French. Although we were the exploited, he managed to make us masters of the situation, sophisticates, dispelling the image of undesirable troublemakers.

“Of course, gentlemen, take your time. We see no need to delay your docking any longer. I will meet with you tomorrow in my office. A car will pick up your representatives. We wish you a pleasant stay.” The officer, his white uniform brilliant in the sunlight under its magnificent gold epaulets, saluted elegantly, and all the French functionaries marched after him, smiling and chatting, relieved to be living in a world of real gentlemen, simple, full of courtesy, and so profitable.

That night my parents and I had our dinner in the prow of the ship, where we could contemplate the lights of Oran and listen to the sounds of urban traffic and Middle Eastern music. But the powerful searchlights of the French warships played constantly against the sky above the port and the city, an insistent reminder that war was imminent.

The next morning, some of the Basque, the two Quaker women and Anselmo Palau were waiting for the automobile to take them to meet with the French authorities to pay the “landing fee.” Most people, after contributing to the pool of money, left the ship looking for the pleasures of Oran, especially its big open markets, in search of second-hand clothing.

Pilar, Coco, Moncha and Eric knocked at my door. My father shouted in English “Cut it out, you spoiled anarchist brats!” Then he pointed to me, “Out, out. See you later.”

My mother added, “Tell Moncha I’ll be calling on her mother to go into town.” I splashed my face and hands and washed my teeth in the saline water of our basin. The heat was already extreme, and all the metal parts of the ship were burning hot. Pilar had a cup of tea and a sweet roll for me. The roll had an acrid flavor of cinnamon and molasses.

“Moncha! My mom says she’ll pick up your mother to go into town.” “Yes, she knows,” responded my friend. It was then that I noticed two trucks waiting to pick up the Jewish children. The American Quaker ladies were imparting last moment instructions to a group of serious-looking, well-dressed men and women, who had come to escort the children to a reception by the large Jewish community of Oran. Eric was going with us. He wanted to be with Pilar. But other Jewish boys were staying behind. Six of them walked over to meet some young men in British uniforms. Eric pointed them out to us, “Our future army, the Hagganah. As soon as I get to Tel Aviv, I’ll join.” He was very proud.

“All right, all right. Come on, let’s go. Come on, Palitos.” It was Coco, already on the pier, waving the 1935 Baedeker of Oran he had found in the ship’s library. Terra firma, immovable and solid under our feet, surprised us. We were all a little wobbly, but, after a bit of duck-walking to keep up with our guide, we left behind the piers, the custom house and the heavy metal fence that separated the port from the city of Oran. Suddenly the sights and sounds of North Africa were all about us.

“Now, listen. Let’s agree on what we are going to do.” Coco knew when to take charge. We were attentive but apprehensive, especially me. I did not want to visit museums or, worse, end up wandering in dusty old markets looking for ancient coins or “rare” books.

“First, we’ll go to a public bath house….”

“What!?” we all exclaimed, hooting in astonishment at this suggestion. Except for Eric, who just said, “We all need it.” That settled it, and the girls agreed. “Then,” continued Coco, “we separate. Eric and I have some business. Pilar and Moncha can go with Palitos wherever they want. But at one o’clock we meet for lunch. Afterwards, delights for all, music, cinema, flamenco!” He pulled out a big wad of French money, his winnings at chess. “We are rich!” shouted Pilar. We were ready to follow Coco to the end of Morocco.

Several carriages pulled by diminutive horses were waiting for sightseers. All the horses wore straw hats, while the drivers wore red fez and multicolor Arabian tunics. Moncha ran toward one of the coaches. “Come, let’s go, my treat,” she shouted full of excitement. Groups of passengers from our ship could be seen here and there along the avenues. Our ride took us to the central area of the city. Big palm trees and impeccably clean gardens had the unmistakable look of European colonialism. As we moved further into the city the European look disappeared. The native population used its distinctive ethnic garb. Women covered their faces. Markets, coffee shops, open-air food stands, donkeys, dozens of idle children in wait for some opportunity, gloomy-looking adults skirting the mendicants. I liked Oran.

Our driver knew just the bath house. The proprietor received us at the door. There was a large pool of warm water, individual showers, a steam chamber. We chose the pool. We were given big white towels and gigantic bars of rose soap. A woman offered to wash and iron our clothing while we took our bath. “Sure, why not?” said Coco, “After all we can’t go back to dirty pants.” We were the only customers. Awkwardly, we boys set aside our clothing and jumped into the pool. The girls giggled nervously, but followed our example. The sun streamed down through the high glass roof. All around the sides of the pool, set in mosaic, were strange written characters, azulejos, Arabian calligraphy. Coco informed us they were admonitions from the Koran regarding the importance of cleanliness. Suddenly, Coco was swimming and splashing and screaming like Tarzan. In an inexplicable burst of energy, I had a furious water battle with Moncha, and Eric and Pilar moved away, laughing and talking.

“Ah-ha, my friends! Soap. Remember soap?” Coco brandished his bar above his head. I began to lather my arms and hair. With embarrassment and disbelief, we all realized how grimy we had become and proceeded to wash ourselves with great vigor. The manager came in and, moving two big levers, unleashed jets of clean water down upon us, all the while laughing at us. “Ah, Spaniards. Dirty, dirty.” And I had thought he was referring to our sharing the bath with the girls.

“Palitos, wash my back,” asked Moncha, “then I’ll wash yours, all right?”

“Sure, turn around,” and, with utmost care, I lathered my friend’s soft shoulders, gently soaped her neck and, with my little finger, worked around her ears. She submerged and came back up like a dolphin, spitting water and shouting, “More, more! Come on, Palitos. I promise to wash you, too.”

Pilar, Coco and Eric were playing a complicated mathematical game based on assigning numbers to the letters of the alphabet and trying to figure out their “lucky” number. “Mine is nine,” said Eric. “Me too!” shouted Pilar. Coco said. “You’re cheating. I know better!” Then the three of them jumped out of the pool, wrapped their towels about them and went to rest in a corner.

The manager came in again. “Perhaps the young ladies and gentlemen would care for some pomegranate juice, eh, and some figs?”

“Yes,” clapped Pilar.

Moncha and I were alone in the water. She said, “It’s your turn.” She grabbed my arms and began to soap my back, my neck, my shoulders. Then my chest. She was very close to me. I shut my eyes but could not manage to withhold a deep sound.

In a husky voice Moncha said, “Don’t turn around.” All other noises faded away. I was totally absorbed in this feeling, the touch of Moncha’s hands, aware of her breasts close to my back.

She pushed me down, gently shampooing the soap out of my hair.

“Are you going to see the blonde?” Moncha asked me.

I was confused. “Who…what blonde?” I sputtered.

The manager returned, followed by a young girl in a white tunic, carrying a tray with glasses of red juice, ice and a mountain of big black figs.

“Ladies and gentlemen, your refreshments.” He motioned the girl to leave the tray on a portable table. As he turned to go, he wagged his finger at me. The young girl remained and approached Pilar.

“Violets? Sandalwood? Jasmine?” she offered small vials of perfume.

Coco jumped up, “For me, violets, like a Gypsy.”

I laughed and joined in, “Yes, yes. I’ll have Jasmine.”

Pilar chose Jasmine, too.

Eric, somewhat taken aback, asked, “This is acceptable for men?”

“Trust me, old man, go ahead,” encouraged Coco.

“All right, I choose sandalwood.”

Moncha decided on the violets. We applied our perfumes with the greatest delight.

“Ah, it’s so good. Oh, delicious.” we exclaimed over the fragrant drops. At that moment it was ecstasy.

We sipped the pomegranate juice and cracked the ice between our teeth. The chilled figs were fragrant and sweet. We all looked at Coco, and Moncha said, “Thank you, dear friend.”

Coco turned red. Then, breaking the spell, he said, “Oh now, don’t get sentimental. Eric, let’s go, we have much to do.”

The woman arrived with our newly washed clothing. Coco prepared to pay, but she referred him to the manager. Now we turned our backs in self-consciousness and dressed quickly.

The manager returned with the bill. “Let’s see…five Francs each for soap and towels. Juice and figs, five. And laundry, five. 40?”

“Yes, of course,” we all agreed, with a smile and a wink to each other. We were ready to give Coco our share, but he would not accept.

As he paid the bill, he added, “Here’s 10 Francs, for the girl who served us and the woman who washed our clothing. Be sure they get it, all right?”

The manager whistled, and the women — perhaps mother and daughter — appeared. “The gentlemen have a present for you….”

Outside, the morning sun was moving fast. Coco and Eric shook hands with us. “Remember, we meet at one in the Baltic. It’s a restaurant. Anyone can tell you where it is.”

“The Baltic? Here, at the edge of the desert?” I laughed.

Coco just turned, and he and Eric marched away. The image of Eric moving away, tall, handsome, vigorous, the sun highlighting his bronzed arms, always comes back to me as vividly as if it was the present.

Moncha gave me a provocative smile. “Now you’re in charge!”

Pilar suggested, “We could explore a bazaar?”

Moncha agreed, and we set off.

We encountered marvelous bronze objects, praying rugs, incense burners, exotic water pipes and fine silk and cotton shirts.

“Look, look,” exclaimed Moncha, pointing to rows of pearls displayed against black velvet in glass boxes. From the shadows, a woman, with a diminutive gold earring in her left nostril, came toward us. I noticed the red dot on her forehead. An Indian. I knew. I had seen them in the movies.

“Like my pearls, young fellow? Make an offer…100 Francs?”

Although it was Moncha who had expressed interest, the woman had directed her attention to me. We just looked. She moved away silently then and sat in a corner where she could keep an eye on us.

We went back out into the sunlight. Someone waved to us. It was one of the Basque children. They were loaded with packages and eating red peppers, onions and morsels of meat from long wooden sticks. “Hello. Come over, have a bite.” But we were much more interested in our own adventure.

“See you back on the ship,” I shouted, and we kept walking. We strolled into an area full of big white buildings. There was a Mosque, an imposing administrative palace, and, suddenly, we were walking through an elegant portal. We found ourselves staring into a garden where a very correct waiter was offering cold drinks to obviously wealthy French customers seated at many little tables.

“Want a cold drink?” I asked.

“Why not, Palitos, let’s find a seat,” agreed Pilar.

As soon as we opened the elaborate wrought iron gate a severe looking man, with a pistol on his hip, appeared beside us. In the same barking tone I had heard on the train to Marseille he told us, “No trespassing. Out, out!” A woman looked at us amused.

“Those must be the red Spaniard ruffians,” we heard her comment.

We stood there for a few seconds, dumb with embarrassment.

But Moncha, furious and enraged, turned toward me, arched one shoulder and, in a tone that must have made the walls ring, said, “Hey, red ruffian, come here!” and in front of all the onlookers kissed me dramatically on the mouth.

Pilar’s eyes were wide with astonishment.

Then in slow, perfect French, Moncha said to the crowd, “Mon macraux, nez pas…!” (My pimp, you know.)

There were whistles and applause. We turned and walked out.

We retraced our steps in silence until we came upon a large, open cafe with many tables on the sidewalk. There were a number of women seated about. We noticed their elegant European dresses, but then we realized they all had Arabian features. We sat down. A black waitress came over to us and in a low, quiet voice said, “You know, this is not a place for children.”

“What? What do you mean?” I exclaimed in anger.

“Look around you, see the ladies?” She spoke again in the same quiet tone, pronouncing “ladies” very slowly.

“So. They need a drink too!” I heard myself say scornfully. “Besides,” I added in a flash, “I could be a customer for them, you know!”

The waitress threw back her head in laughter. She gave up and asked, “What will you have?”

“That’s better,” I responded. “Three lemonades, plenty of ice, and maraschinos!”

Pilar was smiling faintly, “Palitos! A customer! Come now….” “Why not,” I insisted heatedly.

Under the table Moncha kicked me hard in the shin. “That’s why not,” she hissed.

Then we all three roared in delight and finally relaxed in our chairs.

The passing scene was a busy one. Carts pulled by donkeys, bicycles, a multitude of people continually milling about. We could hear music, cymbals, and the ferocious arguments of nearby merchants. Once in a while a man would approach the “ladies,” and after a brief exchange, they might depart together. We followed them with our eyes, for a clue to the place of their tryst.

It felt good to be watching all these exciting people. But eventually Moncha reminded us, “The Baltic…remember?”

With sudden daring, I announced, “Let me ask for directions.” I got up and walked over to one of the women, very beautiful, with deep black eyes.

“Pardon me, Miss, can you direct me to the Baltic restaurant?” Although it was apparent she did not understand every word, her comprehension was perfect, as was her reply in French, “Any coach can take you there.”

We arrived at the Baltic just minutes after one o’clock. Coco and Eric were waiting for us. They had ordered fruits, small pieces of roast lamb, “pita” bread, and yogurt. We enjoyed the meal, but it did not compare to our adventures of the morning. We agreed to cancel the rest of the program. Now we needed nothing more than to return to the ship. It was “siesta” time. Coco and Eric carried several boxes and a couple of long cardboard tubes. “Maps?” I wondered, “What for?”

We returned to the ship along with many of the other passengers, exhilarated. The landing fee had been accepted. The generator was repaired. The ship was ready to sail.

About five in the afternoon, the Jewish children came back. They carried packages of new clothing, new shoes and boxes of cookies and candies. Sailors were hauling up crates of fresh fruits and Kosher food for the duration of the trip to Chile. The generosity of the local Jewish Agency was evident, but the emotional farewell of the Jewish men and women of Oran to these children was for all of us a reminder of the brutality of Christian Europe. Little did we know at the time of the Holocaust to come.

Written in the stars

The “Artemiss” sailed about nine in the evening. Life on the ship returned to routine. People reading here and there, bridge players, romances, and for us, the surprise gift of Coco and Eric.

Our friends marched us toward the top deck. We carried the boxes and tubes, blankets, even a batch of sweet rolls.

“Okay, spread the blankets,” instructed Coco as he proceeded to give us large flashlights and a compass. He brought out a tripod, and low and behold, a telescope, which he and Eric mounted. He opened the tubes and brought out celestial charts. The stars and constellations. He lit his torch and pointed to a star.

“Now, what’s the name of that one?” he asked. We were silent. “Now check our position. Are we north or south of the Equator? In the Atlantic?”

We got busy looking for constellations. Alternately, we lay on our backs to pick out formations in the sky. Then we would pore over the charts to compare and identify what we saw.

“There is Aldebaran! There is Venus!” “Mars!” Moncha shouted.

We were caught up in the magic of the starry night. The universe was open to us. We lay there in wordless wonder. Then Eric started to recite. His voice carried the words of a poem in a simple, direct way, without artifice. It was a sonnet form Shakespeare. Looking at Pilar, he spoke,

If I could write the beauty of your eyes

And in fresh numbers number all your graces,

The ages to come would say, “This poet lies”;

Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces.

I moved close to Moncha.

Eric moved away, pointed to a star, and said very quietly, “That’s David’s, King of Israel.”

This went on for several nights. We could tell we were moving away form Africa, moving closer to the tropics, nearing Central America and, finally, crossing the Panama Canal.

Eventually, I noticed that Eric closed his poetry recital every night in the same way. He would pray,

Do not let the oppressed retreat in disgrace.

May the poor and the needy praise your name.

Rise up, O God, and defend your cause.

Remember how fools mock you all day long.

Do not ignore the clamor of your adversaries.

The uproar of your enemies which rises continually.

Many years later, when we remembered those moments, Coco told me, “It was the 74^th Psalm.” By then, the Nazis had been destroyed. Eric had joined the Army of Israel in 1948 and died in combat, defending his kibbutz, “Star of Hope.”

We kept our eyes on the changing constellations and, with the help of our flashlights, spent every remaining evening in our favorite corners on the deck of the ship. Often our parents would come to hear our careful recitations of the new stars we could identify. Sometimes, we fell asleep at our post, only to be awakened early in the morning by the tropical dew.

One night, as Moncha and I were discussing the fine points of Castor and Pollex and the story of Leda and the Swan, we heard a commotion. There were shouts, people running, voices out of control and somebody screaming, “Kill him! Kill him!” Most of the noise and the running was on the lower deck, so we could not see what was going on. Moncha, frightened but curious, jumped up quickly and ran down one of the metal stairs towards a large group of people. I followed her. We saw a man with his face bloodied, surrounded by a furious mob.

“What happened?” I asked a woman.

“None of your damn business! Get the hell out of here!”

I recoiled from the harshness in her voice. Moncha took me by the hand, “Come on, let’s go.” We went to the upper deck, and from there we tried to pick up some clue of the incident. We saw captain Demetrio. He held a revolver, and two of his sailors, holding large clubs, were poised behind him.

“That’s enough. Come on, move on. I’ll handle this.” shouted the captain.

“No, Demetrio,” said a burly Basque, a political Commissar for the trip. “We agreed that discipline was our business!”

“Yes, but not lynching.” responded the captain.

“All right, take him away, and then we’ll let you know what we’ve decided. Agreed?” insisted the Basque.

The culprit, still bleeding from a cut on his head, was taken away by the sailors, while the women taunted him, “You bastard! You’ll die, you rapist!”

We walked around the ship, asking here and there what had happened. No one would tell us anything until a young sailor explained, “Oh, that miserable idiot! A real pig! He raped a Basque girl.” He was ashamed even to speak of it.

The adults ordered all the children to the mess hall. The Jewish children were with the Quakers. We talked in quiet voices. We knew what had happened. Only Coco, Pilar, Moncha and I knew that the man would be executed.

We heard nothing more. People started to fall asleep. Then suddenly we heard a splash into the water. It was over.

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By Manolo Gonzalez, AJODA #37 – Summer 1993

Introduction

In one episode of his novel, Yawar Fiesta — Feast of Blood – , the Peruvian writer José Maria Arguedas describes in painful detail the combat of a condor tied to the neck and shoulders of a bull. Seldom does either animal win. The bird pecks madly, trying to get away from the enraged bull. Often the bull, blinded and exhausted, collapses and crushes the condor to death. This ritual has been performed at religious festivities for about three hundred years, since the Spaniards introduced European cattle into the Peruvian Andes. Arguedas uses this as an allegory of the violent, never-resolved conflict resulting from the invasion of the American continent by the Europeans. The rapacious policies of Spain, the super-exploitation of the indigenous population and the violent methods used to obtain total submission reflect one of the most cruel episodes of history. Perhaps up to 10 million Peruvians were murdered or died of European infectious diseases, and that in only the first 25 years of the invasion. Thousands of temples, administrative posts, roads and aqueducts were wantonly destroyed. Cities like Cuzco, Caxamarca were disfigured or almost demolished. The expropriation of the communal lands of the natives by the Europeans was a religious desecration of the beliefs of the Peruvians who revered the Earth, the Pachamama, as an all life-giving deity. Precious objects of art were melted for their gold or moved into European museums, or private collections. A practice that still continues today.

In Peru, class conflict has always been exacerbated by racial hatred. The lower classes are always Cholos, when not zambos or cutatos for people of African descent. There is the term chinitos for any oriental, like President Alberto Fujimori. The rich and powerful are always considered white, regardless the color of their skin.

Furthermore, different ethnic groups are antagonistic towards each other. Peruvians from the coast seldom recognize their brothers and sisters from other regions as their legitimate countrymen. Racial epithets fly around at the least expected occasions, be they soccer or politics.

In Peru, a sense of nation, of having a common background and common symbols to unify the country, has never existed. It is common for Peruvians to call themselves members of the “independent republic of Cuzco,” or ‘Arequipa’, etc. The middle classes of Lima identify with New York, Paris or even Moscow but reject Peruvians from the highlands or the jungle.

Geography is one of the most brutal challenges to the Peruvian people. The Andes cross the country from north to south, creating three regions: the arid, desolated coastal deserts; the highland sierras; and the Amazonic jungle. Each of these regions is a separate entity economically and culturally, always in conflict with the other regions. There has never been a cohesive policy of building roads or creating efficient systems of communications. Most railways are from the 19^th century, built by British or Americans. 20^th century travelers in Peru have observed that, if you travel from West to East, you will move from the present to the late 19^th century and when you arrive in the jungle, you will be in the Stone Age. Yet United Nations functionaries still manage to say that Peruvians, decedents of the Incas, live royally compared to the abject poverty and misery of Bangladesh or Northern India.

20^th century technology has blanketed Peru with the message of rock and roll and blue jeans. Radio and TV has transformed the descendants of the Incas into consumers of Capitalism’s junk. The most popular soft drink is called Inca Cola. But these stand in sharp contrast to another reality. The peasants of the Andes and the dwellers of the slums of Lima and other urban centers live in terrible conditions, victims of exploitation, unemployment and diseases long-ago controlled in most of the world. Cholera, tuberculosis, venereal disease are rampant in these improvised villages. No wonder an uncontrollable rage has exploded.

Paradoxes, contradictions and exaggerations are the biggest obstacles for those of us who deal with Peru’s history. An Italian geographer created a phrase that is a national obsession to all Peruvians. Antonio Raymondi said, “Peru is a beggar seated on a bench of gold.”

The Failure Of Ideology

In 1980 when Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) started its military operations, Peru was in the middle of the most profound crisis ever in its 150 years of Republican existence. Both economic illusions and long-revered ideological sacred cows had failed.

First, due to ecological reasons and overfishing, the fish industry had collapsed. Since 1950, almost a million highland peasants had abandoned their lands to work along the coast in a profitable new industry. Peru became the world’s largest exporter of anchovies and fish meal. A gigantic fleet of ‘Bolicheras’, high sea fishing vessels, annually caught over $75 million worth of fish. When the industry collapsed in the late ’60s, millions of Peruvians were affected. By 1970 the desperate, unemployed invaded the streets of Lima in a wave of crime and violence. Nevertheless, the government did not realize its political implications.

Second, the leftist military, in a period of State Socialism, managed to impose radical nationalization of mines and industries and the century old dream of social reformers: the Agrarian Reform. But workers could not control artificial industries or compete against international prices. The peasants did not benefit at all from the land given to them in a rather chaotic manner. No technical assistance, mechanical equipment nor seeds were available, and, without social incentives, the long-awaited Agrarian Reform turned into a disheartening tragedy. The peasants continued emigrating to the coast for jobs in factories and the fishing industry, abandoning the land to the despair of romantic social equalitarians and Marxist intellectuals.

Third, the election of Fernando Belaunde Terry in 1980 was the end of any democratic illusions about social change. Belaunde was a most inept man, arrogant and obsessed with expensive pet projects, like building a highway in the Amazonian jungle, ignoring the massive social problems surrounding him. Congress, controlled by the middle-class APRA party that had dominated the political scene for 60 years, followed a policy of sectarian opposition to Belaunde, more on a political basis than due to any programmatic differences. It is no coincidence that Abimael Guzman, the so-called Presidente Gonzalo of Sendero Luminoso, decided in 1980 to launch a frontal attack on all the institutions of Peru. In reality there was not much left after the chaos of State Socialism and the restoration of European democracy. Belaunde continued a hysterical purchase of arms because someone had the idea that in 1979, one hundred years after the War of the Pacific with Chile, there should be a revenge for Peru’s humiliating defeat. All this was paid for with money borrowed from international banks, monies that could never be repaid because Peru could barely afford to service the massive interest charges on the loans.

Coca: Just Another Industry

In the meantime, Peru had become the main producer of coca.

Recondite valleys in the Andes easily hid coca cultivation, as well as the army of Presidente Gonzalo. The cultivation and use of coca leaves is a cultural leftover of the Inca civilization. Among the peasants of the highland chewing coca was nothing more than a potent snack to combat fatigue and the physical demands of working in the high altitude of the Andes. For over a century, coca was a monopoly of the State. Cultivators sold the leaves to government agencies, which then distributed it to consumers in a rather ordinary way, through regular stores, together with liquor, matches and cigarettes, all monopolies of the State. It was the Coca Cola company that first decided to buy large quantities of the leaves for its famous soda, but it was the elegant elite of Europe and the United States that made cocaine a drug of choice. Even Cole Porter popularized the alkaloid. But, when poor Peruvian peasants began selling coca leaves to different organizations of drug traffickers, the success of the enterprise had unexpected results. Tragic consequences for Peru and the battle for control of the coca crop started. International agencies, mafias and political operatives from many nations fought for the right to buy, and thereby control, the superb leaves of the Peruvian Andes.

Prelude To Insurgency

The insurgency of Shining Path was a desperate, almost spontaneous movement of a provincial college professor, students, and unemployed youth. Cadres were easily recruited from the gigantic slums that surrounded Lima, Arequipa and ports like Chimbote, still suffering from the effects of the collapse of the fishing industry.

Since the beginning of the 20^th century, Peruvian politics had experienced a predictable left/right polarization, the usual array of Marxists and pseudo-Marxists versus the right-wing, including, in the early ’30s, black shirt fascists and Franco admirers. But the Peruvian aristocracy had always controlled the most effective political force, the Army. Since the 1950s, the Army had been indoctrinated in the anti-Communist doctrines of Eisenhower and the CIA, or the anti-insurgency ‘007’ tactics of Kennedy. But, in the classical style of tropical contradictions, the Army decided in the ’70s to try Socialism! Socialism failed, but things were not back to business as usual. Mass mobilizations had occurred and industrial workers, peasants and students were forming cadres for a Maoist revolution, at the moment the most fashionable theory for armed struggle among Third World revolutionaries.

The original Peruvian Communist Party, affiliated with the Third International and loyal follower of the Leninist ideology of the Soviet Union had become a bureaucratic apparatus, an active collaborator with the so-called “progressive bourgeoisie.” But the rift between the CPs or China and Moscow had repercussions on most of the radical left in Peru, as well as in the rest of the Third World. Abimael Guzman, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Huamanga (Ayacucho), fought inside the Moscow-oriented CP of Peru to follow a more radical line. In 1969 he was expelled from the party, and Guzman and his followers found a Maoist faction, reclaiming the name of the Communist Party of Peru for themselves.

Fire In The Andes!

The political parties of Peru were not ready for the offensive of Sendero Luminoso. Elections in 1980 were more or less normal, except for the minor inconvenience of the Maoist group in Ayacucho launching its first military operation. By the 1985 elections, won by APRA, Shining Path had devastated the capital of Peru with constant assaults on the police, bombings and mobilizations of its cadres in the slums, the “pueblos jovenes.” The European-oriented APRA party was, not only totally incapable of resolving the crisis, but actually precipitated in an orgy of corruption, petty revenge and sporadic brutal attacks on the regions where Shining Path operated. The Army routinely massacred thousands of peasants in Ayacucho, Alto Huallaga, Puno and other Andean points of resistance. To no one’s surprise, the armed forces became deeply involved in the ‘protection’ of the coca business organizations, both local and from abroad.

The violence of Sendero Luminoso, its irreducible dogmatism, and, especially, its mystical reverence for Presidente Gonzalo’s thought gives the movement a formidable image as an uncompromising political ideology. Peruvians have always managed to, somehow, combine political theories into civilized arrangements that have made Socialists of the Army or fashionable Communists of the children of the rich. Shining Path, however, is different, and perhaps, that is its biggest weakness.

It has been said many times that people with deep religious feelings cannot become capitalists or communists in their many forms. Peruvian middle classes are strongly indoctrinated in Catholicism. By and large, the peasants still keep the old pantheism of the Incas. Shining Path tries to define Peru as a peasant society, separated and segregated from the rest of the world. In the desolated mountains of the Andes, deep in the jungle, even in the small towns around Cuzco, Puno and Ayacucho, that vision of the country seems real, almost a justification for recreating the glory of the Inca Confederation. But neither Maoist ideology nor a nostalgic conception of history is adequate to solve the problems of Peru. With a population of twenty million, heavy external debt and pressure from the IMF, and the tutelage of the United States, the country cannot escape the ups and downs of the current world economy. If capitalism is trying to survive and retain its hold on Third World countries, Peru is a terrible example of future conflicts.

Guerrillas And Romance

When the news of armed struggle in Peru started to appear in the world press, there was, at first, a very sympathetic response. Especially among social agencies, Church workers and liberal intellectuals who decried the poverty of Peruvian peasants. The social horror of Peru’s misery had attracted the attention of the international press, observers and hopeful radicals.

Collage professors of Latin American studies called for support for the Peruvian revolution. The New York Times and The New Yorker dedicated long pieces of reporting and analysis to the armed struggle in Peru. The repressive methods of the Peruvian government, whether Belaunde, APRA or Fujimori, had moved organizations like Amnesty International to denounce the country as one of the most flagrant violators of human rights. Shining Path still maintains a rather well-organized network of supporters in Europe and the USA. In the mid ’80s, walls around Berkeley, California were covered with the slogan, “Support the Popular Revolution in Peru.” One very large, impressive wall could be seen from the entrance to the Bay Bridge, covered with hammer and sickle and exhortations for revolution.

Few Americans knew what was happening, but CNN and the magazines started to report on the brutal confrontation that was going on in Peru. Committees of support appeared on the campus of UC Berkeley. Videos, lectures and college agitation soon added the war in Peru as another cause for the American Left. The presence of American advisers only enhanced the concept that Peru was the next Vietnam.

Typical of the interest shown by young liberal intellectuals was an article published in the 1992 Winter issue of New Politic. Written by Professor Phillip Smith, a graduate of the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas in Austin, the piece concludes, “it is the responsibility of the U.S. Left to challenge the assumptions of ‘narcoterrorism’ and the international war on drugs as promoted by the Bush administration. It is certainly our place to fight against assistance to the Peruvian military — among the world’s worst human rights violators. The threat of direct intervention is real. With the U.S. government in a chest-thumping mood after cheap and easy victories in Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf, and a public now conditioned for militarism, the temptation for Washington to ‘straighten out the mess’ may well be irresistible.” His prediction of intervention, as many other predictions of the U.S. Left, is a reincarnation of the Vietnam syndrome. The Left forgets the lessons of El Salvador and Nicaragua, the war against the revolutionaries was by proxy and with mercenaries. In Peru the Army is an essential part of the privileged alliance, the backbone of the scared middle classes in Lima and other urban centers. The indiscriminate violence from both the Army and Sendero was a sobering effect that slowly penetrated liberal opinion.

Politics And Surrealism

The irrational political confrontation in the elections of 1990 left most observers flabbergasted. There was the old APRA, wasted and running scared, while the Ex-President was being indicted on charges of corruption. Traditional conservatives and Belaunde-followers backed Mario Vargas Llosa, novelist and admirer of British democracy. In a moment of irritation Vargas Llosa dropped out of the campaign, only to return to declare that Peru needed a Parliamentary Monarchy. (This while running for President of a 180- year old Republic.) Finally, there was the obscure candidate of a movement called Cambio 90, Alberto Fugimori. He only had to show his face and declare, “I’m more Peruvian than those other dudes!” While he made vague promises, it was his use of buzz words like ‘blanquiñosos’ (white crackers) that tapped into the profound racial antagonism that pervades Peruvian society. His strongest support came from the growing Protestant Evangelist movement that is challenging the Catholic Church, the official religion for centuries. No one won. The election went to Congress, and the APRA majority gave its support to Fujimori. Vargas Llosa wrote in Granta magazine, “After me Peru will fall into barbarism.” He was almost right.

Popular War

Years of popular war has not weakened the State. On the contrary, Fujimori was free to justify his policies by pointing to the difficulties of fighting an internal war and trying to repay the external debt. He reestablished Peru’s international credit in order to pay for the repression, a new bureaucracy and all the symbols of a modern nation. The condition of the poor continued to worsen, but the many calls for national insurrection by Shining Path have not been successful. Peruvians were certainly poor, but the violence of Shining Path was repugnant to the impoverished middle classes and, in a certain way, provoked indifference among the peasants. Certainly the murder of many cells of the Maoists, some in massacres within prisons, took a heavy tool on the direction of the movement.

In his many interviews, pamphlets and revolutionary literature, Abimael Guzman has never offered a political vision that could be embraced by the industrial workers or the unemployed. The new State, a vague phrase, like “after the revolution” in the ’30s, is not a promise of a brighter future, but demands indoctrination, work and obedience. In a tropical nation that still takes its siesta time very seriously, this is a letdown to any potential revolutionary.

Is The End Near?

The capture early this year of Abimael Guzman, the elusive Presidente Gonzalo and most of his staff, moved the strategy of the Maoists into a new, never before accepted phase-political accommodation. Recently President Fujimori has accepted the visit of international groups concerned with human rights. The official press blasted the international delegations, but, still, they made it into Lima. El Diario, the semi-official newspaper of Sendero has appeared again in Lima. Perhaps Fujimori needs to play to the new Clinton administration in order to get help for loans and investments. Perhaps some of the revolutionaries realize that the military struggle is not an end in itself. There must be political objectives. The capture of the State apparatus, or at least the destruction of enough of the old ruling class to ensure a degree of popular power, needs the support of a large section of the oppressed. The Russian communist, with Leninist theories of a small, conspiratorial elite of terrorists and intellectuals, produces only a dictatorship, ready to commit the most heinous crimes, just as Bakunin predicted in his debate with Marx at the First International.

Sendero, or any other revolutionary group in Latin America, needs a solid base in the industrial proletariat while still keeping emotional and family ties to the rural population. The impoverished middle classes will respond only to a climate of freedom and productive work, not political patronage or selfish professionalism. The peasant population will never participate in any movement that has European theories as its ideology. Catholicism, Marxism, Maoism spell disaster for the indigenous masses of Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Guatemala. Because the question of State, popular power are immaterial to groups that see race and class as an ambiguous concepts, even as distortions of the social order. The masses of peasants need a Federation of independent enclaves, united by collective technology and social services, not a State run by the white elite, Marxist intellectuals or progressive capitalists.

Peru, and many other Third World nations, reflect the cruelest evidence of the erosion of the capitalist system. There cannot be a constant growing economy. This means that millions of human beings are reduced to starvation in order to maintain the system. At the same time, ecological disasters have precipitated economic crises for which even the seven powerful, industrialized nations cannot afford to pay. Just observe the ecological disasters in the former Soviet Union, in the U.S.A., in the North Sea. But even more serious for Peru and other countries, is the aspirations of its people to control their natural resources and the uncontrollable appetite of international corporations backed by the most powerful armies of Europe and the U.S.A.

The invasion of Latin America by Europeans will never have a peaceful solution. When Germany invaded its neighbors it eventually had to withdraw. So it was with the U.S.A. from Japan. But the Europeans have never moved out of Peru. What is needed is a Peace treaty, perhaps paying reparations to the indigenous populations and restoring a more natural order with the pre-Columbian institutions that still survive in the large Indian communities all over the Andes, from Ecuador, Peru to Bolivia. That region of Latin America has so many elements in common that it is not farfetched to envision a new Andean Confederation, there is already a name for it: Indoamerica. Meanwhile the drama of “Yawar Fiesta” repeats. The condor should be allowed to fly free!

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By Neal Keating, AJODA #37 – Summer 1993

“you got a dog race
you got a horse race
you got a human race;
but this is a rat race…”

— Bob Marley

Race is a fiction. That does not preclude people from acting as if it were fact. Race is palpable, you can feel it on the streets and in the country. You can see its traces in everyone’s faces. Oh it is real alright. But does it not feel funny some times? Do you ever find yourself pausing to wonder how it is you go about classifying other people. Already I’m suggesting the initial classification: people other than…what? You? Or me? How did we get that way?

With exceptions, everywhere everyday people go about their lives as if this difference called race is somehow real. What is here suggested is that this acceptance of the propositions of race simultaneously serves as the basic constituent of its virtual reality. What the underlying concepts of race actually consist of is another story altogether. This latter story tells the tale of a mirage, a smokescreen of ostensible truths that conceal an entirely different cluster of interests. Do not look too closely at the concepts of race, for they will shatter under scrutiny. Which is exactly the point. The big dreams of the eighteenth century European theorists, collectively known as the Enlightenment, were to liberate us from such mirages. The rigorous scrutiny provided by Enlightenment theory was going to liberate us from every-thing-slavery, despotism, injustice, feeble minded people and above all, from myth, mysticism, and enchantment. Its great mistake-its black hole-was that it could not recognize itself. It could not tell its own nature. It could not tell that it was itself a myth. It was a serious understatement of (fuck you Joseph Campbell) the power of myth. This mistake has proven key to the unfolding of global history in the last two centuries. We have literally been paying the price ever since.

The Biological Concept of Race

“Look and see whether there is anything common to all, and if we do that we will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that.”

— Wittgenstein

The basic theory employed in the race concept is the theory of type. The races of humanity constituted types of Homo sapiens. In other words, a type is a sub-classification of a larger classification. Classifications have to be based on something. For instance, the primary biological division classification known as Kingdom is based on observed differences between plants and animals. The classifications of both Homo and Sapiens are based on measurements of brain capacity and tooth size. So what then is a racial type based on? Take a wild guess.

Skin color is the primary unit upon which type has been based. It, in turn, refers to the phenotype, i.e. the physical appearance of the individual. The essential difference between this unit, and say the unit upon which the classification Subphylum Vertebrata is based (the presence or absence of a spinal cord) is not just a matter of time (Subphylum Vertebrata addressing a change that took place over millions of years, whereas skin color can change in a single generation). More importantly it is a difference between variation and evolution. Evolutionary changes are irreversible. Variation, on the other hand, is much more malleable. Evolutionary changes usually can be reasonably well-fitted into a category, whereas variation does not fit very well at all. The problem is this: How do you arrange variation into types when the process of variation itself invariably undoes every racial type. It comes down to the ability to fuck and breed. All it takes are two people from different ‘races’ coming together and producing a baby to destroy the type. Interspecies sex will never result in offspring. However, inter-racial sex will. Aboriginals, Jews, Blacks, Wasps (I mean WA.S.P.s), et al, are all possessed of the ability to fruitfully copulate with each other, regardless of the doubts each of these may have about the other.

The Cultural Concept of Race

Skin color is but one characteristic out of many that is available for use in a system of differentiation. My hunch is that pointing out the differences between your group and their group has been a very common practice amongst humans throughout history, and throughout a considerable amount of prehistory as well. It may be an indicator of alienation, but it is just as much if not more likely an indicator of a desire to distinguish and differentiate amongst your fellows and fellaheen. A free people will always think of themselves as different from those they perceive not to be free. Skin color is an easy way to identify one group from another. It makes sense in a territorial kind of way. The two opposing teams wear different colors, or play shirts and skins. In New York City, the common gang practice is to match the colors of the caps on the crack vials they sell with the colors of the gang. Just so, in New York City demos, the police generally send in a lot of undercover cops into the throngs and “maintain order.” They can be more effective because they are less identifiable (although a second glance is usually enough to tell). They are at those times without their color. Differentiation and status are perhaps universal social desires. Race may, in the final analysis, be described as the pouring of these desires through the filter of market-based economics that are guided by Enlightenment theories. And like everything else that gets poured through there, it gets nasty.

The objective rational truth that gets hauled out in defense of racial types is just as much a component of one myth as is the muskrat who swims down to the bottom of the sea to bring up some earth to plant on turtle’s back a component of another. Everyday life, even in postmodern societies, does not function according to a set of codes established upon objective facts; at least, not entirely. A lot of what one does when one negotiates the quotidian (e.g., in New York or Des Moines) is active myth-interpretation, for in the end, one has to forget much in order to get anything done. Myths are stories that are comparably much more practical for integrating experience than are the raw data of biology. Were people to really pause and consider the reasoned basis for their views on race they would be thrown into a conundrum. Inevitably they would become less productive employees, for they would be compelled of their own trajectory to contemplate the reasoned basis of their society, a reflective activity that has always threatened the status quo with its revelations and subsequent disrupture. The myth of objective truth is the myth of the culture that sought the conquest of nature. It functions like a good myth ought to: it sufficiently explains the contemporary society in a favorable way that encourages an ongoing compliance with its rules and constraints. And just like a good myth, it conceals its mythical nature in a veil of truth. How very magical.

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Originally published in “Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed” #37 — Summer ’93.

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