TotW: The Dying Streets

Topic of the Week: The Dying Streets

As long as there have been cities, the streets have been a place not only for commerce, but also for gatherings, festivities, sharing gossip and news, demanding justice and witnessing its execution, and all sorts of other social activity. This is so much so that we regularly use the term “street” to indicate various attributes of things like food, clothing, music and other cultural artifacts, the source of news, the nature of justice, etc. Just to be clear, that is street food, street clothes, street music (street punk), the word on the street, and so on. More recently, many places where streets have filled these traditional functions have changed dramatically due to a mix of gentrification, changing modes of socialization (the internet), COVID-19, and other shit. At least to me, it even seems like the streets are losing their cultural meaning as a result.

What does this mean for anarchists? Since anarchism saw a revival after the 1960s, the streets have played a major role in how we organize, protest, represent ourselves in art or as social media personalities. If the streets become purely commercial areas or vacant or mere liminal spaces then how does that impact the way we think of anarchist spaces and actions?

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I'm a zoomer so can't say much about how things have changed but I find using the internet can be v handy for finding like-minded people as not a lot of people share a similar perspective to me where I live and there aren't a lot of cool things like radical street events nearby but I still aim to go out to events afk more even if it means travelling a little further than I normally would bc I would def like to meet people with similar perspectives in person and be at least a little less terminally online lol

whose streets?

their streets.

move on.

i fight for the forests.

no you don't

Novatore in the streets, Neech in the sheets!

No, wait..... syphilis :-(

Heidegger hating streets, hiding in high mountain wildernesses where dasein thrives.

Stirner smiling and silently stalking the streets serendipitously, sighs!

Stirner was a literal bore. Engels swung the big duck around town. Ask any dasein from the fatherland and they’ll confirm.

Engels was obese and only swung his beer gut around the streets. Stirner laughed at Engel's primitive sociological leanings.

Stirner looked upon Engel's magnificent duck with such seething ressentiment he had to take the coward's way out and go taunt the bees.

I'm done with investing myself in the streets now I'm out of the city. When I lived in the city, the streets were all there was. As much as they are ours, they are more theirs. They're a shitshow. A massive dump on the brain and spirit.

All streets everywhere lead to the city. The streets are the avenues for that multi-dimensional anus with teeth. It shits, it eats, it eats what it shits, then eats some more, and shits plenty. The streets can die.

If my hitched journeys disappeared and my treks went from hours to days I might get more done here, and likely have more an adventure when I did journey out onto a desire path.

I'm cheering on the pot-holes every time I see a flattened animal. I wonder what I'd look like after being run over 10 times by a lorry.

More pot-holes, more punctures, more cracked suspension, more motors for flower pots.

The motherfucking streets can die.

Mmmkay, I've got a weightless float tank for bong/meditating in, , wifi headphones in East LA brah

That's very Jünger-esque, the forest anarch living by their own independent means.

"If the streets become purely commercial areas..."

Seems to have already happened as far as I can tell. My experience when I'm on the streets is one of depression, and not a whole lot else. Not to state the case too strongly, as I do enjoy myself when I'm out with my extremely limited friend group somewhere. But as far as my observations of the flood of strangers that surrounds me, that is only cause for despondency. I assume that this is not true everywhere, but it appears to be true in my particular location and is undoubtedly not unique to me. At the same time I try to withhold judgment and to understand where people are coming from. I do believe in the possibility in people and in life. But sometimes it's a difficult belief to maintain, in a world that so aggressively incentivizes and is permeated by lowest common denominator behaviors.

I have met people and had worthwhile experiences on the streets (specifically doing performance or activities related to literature, I don't attend protests generally), even made connections that penetrated more deeply than most. But the general feeling is not one of excitement out there, it's one of routine and (un)comfortable expectations (commodities are like family).

As to the closing question, how does that impact the way we think of anarchist spaces and actions? My experience is that the *vast* majority of passersby don't give one single fuck about anything that anarchists think is important so perhaps that means -- for the time being -- more insularity. In other words our projects should be oriented toward each other rather than a public that, at best, doesn't care. Maybe make the slogan "solidarity not charity" actually mean something and stop competing with Christians over doing the most social good. Handing a bag of food to someone who I have absolutely no connection to is not as worthwhile as growing food with and for people who will continue to be around and contribute at even the most basic levels. Caring about what the people you know are doing rather than the latest spectacular protest movement (Cop City) is also preferable. That concern for our immediate relationships is only going to become more crucial as time goes on, with social circumstances on a downward spiral, as the world grows more fragmented, etc. That also means that those immediate relationships have to actually exist, so maybe anarchists should think about (re)locating themselves somewhere where that is possible, since I know many anarchists are quite isolated.

In short: deeper relationships between anarchists (and our friends), less transparency to the public, and less investment in spectacle and representation (including superficial conflict with our supposed enemies).

them immediately and directly:

"My experience is that the *vast* majority of passersby don't give one single fuck about anything that anarchists think is important so perhaps that means -- for the time being -- more insularity. In other words our projects should be oriented toward each other rather than a public that, at best, doesn't care."

People now adays (and probably throughout every generation, quite honestly) love to whine and stomp their feet when their comfort zone it violated, but they never stop and reflect about the fact that nobody voluntarily chose to put up with their bullshit to begin with.

Sometimes I am tempted to think, that maybe the salvation for The Anarchists rests in understanding that there is no christian free will? Unconditional love is really nice, but it's never totally unconditional.

i agree with emphasizing immediate (and real, preferably reproducible) connections and relationships, and de-emphasizing public facing stuff, but its also seems important to have spaces (that are also real, and preferably reproducible) for people to find the rabbit hole to go down, as it were. i think my city has a pretty good amount of street life left in it if you know where to go but i can't imagine this conversation meaning much of anything anywhere without acknowledging that there's gotta be places for people to find on their own. and i don't think infoshops fill that role, at least not in my experience. i'm thinking about housing on the one hand and cultural spaces on the other, not explicitly political and maybe specifically anti-political. even if street action is what you're into there's gotta be somewhere for people to go to so they can orient themselves to these ideas and the people who hold them.

as for the other commenters saying fuck the city and desert it all etc, thats fine i guess but i dont see a situation coming where it isnt primarily in the cities that the people with nascent suspicions about that kind of thing find each other first and then choose their style of desertion. i guess in short i worry as one does about the next generation and beyond. if we surrender the fortress cities to attend to each other and our gardens i'm not at all confident that there will be anything left for any future generations of runaways and rebels and so on than the internet and that seems like a bleak kind of thing, and an invitation to stagnancy and repetition.

"if we surrender the fortress cities to attend to each other and our gardens i'm not at all confident that there will be anything left for any future generations of runaways and rebels and so on than the internet and that seems like a bleak kind of thing, and an invitation to stagnancy and repetition."

So are you saying that the wilderness is the driving force for the internet? Im a little confused but i am still listening. Or maybe that cities are for the rebels, and everything else is for people who dont want to play that game?

I live about a 15 minute drive from a city, but i consider any sort of interaction with a person to be a "city" or civilization". What is a fortress city?

i'm thinking of cities (in the u.s., where i'm speaking from) as liberal havens that position themselves as offering a certain kind of standard of living and abundance for people who can afford it despite climate pressures. as those pressures increase the cities will more and more come, i think, to resemble fortresses, especially with regard to migration policy and heavily policing themselves etc. but even so, i expect people will still go to them for service jobs and for cultural productions of various kinds.

i'm not saying that cities have a special character for rebels or anyone else. i'm just saying i think people, particularly young people, who are inclined that way are likely to continue going to cities, or staying in the cities they came up in, to find like-minded people. and it would be a shame if there were no social, cultural, in short fun places there for them to go that maintained a kind of anarchist character or at the very least an openness to that kind of perspective and a hostility towards the collapsing-to-the-mean approach of spaces that cater to the liberal, middle class, urban or suburban everyman.

in my town i've seen art warehouses sold out from under the people who maintained them, show houses disappear for similar reasons (though that seems to be changing right now for the better), dive bars close or get overtaken by yuppies and out of towners, etc. the same old shit. i just think it is an interesting infrastructural problem that can't or shouldn't be solved away by abandoning it. again, unless the internet is going to substitute for it somehow people need to have places they can seek out from far away to meet each other. otherwise it's just luck and connections (so more luck).

Yeah I agree with you. I understand why people abandon the city (especially as someone who grew up in a rural environment), but it's not my intention at the moment. I would also like to see interesting cultural spaces open up, of the type that you're describing. Though I personally don't have any brilliant ideas about how to make that space in my area at the moment.

"can't or shouldn't be solved away"

you're describing austerity and neoliberalism. gentification is working as intended, it's the end stages of the class war.
This is the "labour shortage" narrative too, there's literally not enough people left to staff the service provider jobs because these yuppie vampire dimwits haven't thought about how their wage slaves need somewhere to live.

tyrants of the ancient world understood social planning better than much of what we're seeing. please note that this is a criticism of the ownership class today, not an endorsement of the old school haha

yeah no doubt and speaking to yours and mini's replies both i'm not offering any silver bullets here either. what i'd like to see is urban territory that can support enough people actively maintaining it to both bring others in and point them in whatever direction they care to go in. as nebulous as that is it's not the same as giving up on it, and also already exists in more ways at least in my town than i think the prompt suggests. in broad strokes i think illegibility is better than secrecy, hospitality is better than inclusivity, and its always better to have a space projects live and die in than a project pretending to be a space. to the extent those are all empty words without a kind of substance that i am also in no position to provide, i fall back on mini's original point i was bouncing off of which is, as i take it, that we stand to gain much more from building out our relationships with friends and likeminded people than we do from contesting the public square, which looks a lot more like an amusement park than a habitat half the time anyway

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