The People Aren't Alright

Yes, and this is how we can build (or keep building) an international anarchist society. Changing society... that's a foolish, lame project that leads to hitting a Leviathan of normies anyways.

You're unironically saying fuck the masses?

When did this become fascistnews.org? Holy shit.

NO. Yours is the project that is not only delusional, stupid, and lame, but also, quasi-authoritarian, like all efforts to organize the masses for your idea. you disgust me. throw fascism out all you want, it means nothing at this point.

You mean the working class that have been instrumental in electing increasingly authoritarian and fascist adjacent government representatives? The working class who is brutalizing immigrants on the street? I disgust you, but they, whose only attribute that you seem to care about is their status as working class, are where you focus your attention.

I do not owe those boot lickers my solidarity as they've given me none. They are not only complicit in systemic oppression but also active participants in the subjugation and brutalization of people I am in solidarity with.

Why do you have solidarity for them but not for me? Why is their potential more valuable to you than the work of anarchists who exist outside of the framework that you're ostensibly trying to dismantle. While you're desperately trying to convince people who have access to generations of information about the world, the same information you had access to, we're out here struggling to survive and provide for each other. And we disgust you.

Not the people who vote for fascists. Not the people who think the only acceptable society is one where people of different races live segregated lives, and women ought to be subjugated to men. Not the people who would illegalize queer and trans people. Not the people who thinks cops are fine and jails are not only neccesary, but that the rape of people in prison is what they deserve for breaking "the law".

They don't disgust you. But it's us that do... You are disgusted by the anarchists who are suggesting that maybe we don't need them. That maybe we just need each other. That maybe while we're the potential subject of overwhelming state violence that we ought to take care of each other. That maybe if these working class people that you're so worried about are interested in their own liberation they'll figure it out based on any of the millions of pages we've written over the past the 150 years in trying to reach them.

Sounds so gay and fun! But what did it achieve against the devolution of America into a fascist dictatorship run by pedophiles and rapists?

Oops! Could it be that organizing with the proles toward the Global Mass Proletarian Communist Revolution wasn't that much a great idea for humans with such a limited lifespan?

Yes being cognisant of the tyranny of the masses when they feel the squeeze and rally to fascism means we want to build concentration camps for them, very astute, very historically literate

" They have no interest in changing the world for the better. Without a deliberate program, their implicit program is authoritarianism, with them as the rulers. "

I think you made a writing or syntax (?) mistake here, Wayne. That's the second type of "anarchists" you're referring to here. i.e. the socialists and commies who seek to imposed their grandiose outdated agenda upon others, under the label of "anarchism". Aaaaaand of course usually end up being just another sub-caste of petty bureaucrats just doing more classist politics on the poor.

You forgot the greatest revolutionary of all: anarcho-Democrat Wayne Price. His program, being more gloriously programmatic than anyone else’s, consists of explaining at exhaustive length why everyone else has misunderstood anarchism, ideally with a generous helping of historical name-dropping and a footnote reminding us that he, unlike the rest of us, has read the bread book and understands (with zero arrogance or elitism) that anarchy is what happens when democracy will let him "self-manage" the unwashed masses.

In his 60-something years, Price has finally had the epiphany that everyone in the milieu is either an authoritarian proto-dictator who wants to enslave their neighbors or a glorious revolutionary guiding the masses toward the wonders of democratic organizing.

Indeed, humanity may yet avoid authoritarianism and nuclear catastrophe... Assuming it first survives another 900-word lecture on who counts as a proper radical Democrat and who is a dirty lifestylist who hates their neighbors, women, peasants, People of Color, LGBTQ, oppressed nationalities and has no hope in their rotten black heart.

"We" have not agreed to anything. "We" do not have any collective ideas. "We" are not a hive mind with a single understanding of anything.

This "we" that you imagine is just your imagination.

ziq writes about radical friendships, building relationships of solidarity and mutual aid, of trust and joy. But gets dismissed as individualistic, arrogant, and elitist because they aren't appropriately polite.

ziq didn't decide who their "enemies" are - those people self selected by being authoritarians, fascists, homophobes, transphobes, racists, misogynists, Zionists, etc., and one is left to wonder why you might be considering courting those same people if liberation from those very systems of oppression are supposed to be "our" goal.

Do you imagine these people are incapable of educating themselves? Of thinking for themselves? Of looking at the world around them, deciding that this not how they want to live without being guided through some programmatic system of education and persuasion? What separates this from the 'transitional state' of Marx? Not much in my opinion.

It's also interesting that you write here about oppressed people (women, peasants (???????!?), People of Color, LGBTQ, oppressed nationalities, etc) seeming unaware or perhaps not caring that ziq carries the weight of many of these identities themself, including disability, which you seem to have forgotten to consider.

A global "anarchist" revolution is not around the corner and no amount of "organizing" with the general population is going to shift the world toward a more liberated future. But a fascist one is.

The people are able to make their own decisions. They have access to more information than anyone in the history of human knowledge, and they choose fascism. They choose authoritarianism. They choose conservatism. The idea that we need to align ourselves with those who would celebrate the boots on our necks is frankly dangerous, and puts at risk the very people who are at the targets of their oppressive tendencies.

You have no solidarity with the folks who would travel down the road toward liberation with you. You should be ashamed.

What makes you think you can't dismantle their world while living in the margins of society? Are you under the impression you need to join the billionaire class and reform capitalism from within or some bullshit? Anarchists have always lived in the cracks, on. the periphery, in the slums and prisons of the world.

Furthermore, your freedom being tied up with what other people do for fun is all kinds of absurd. You don't need to make your freedom dependent on the crowd's approval.

> an ideology...

It's not. Anarchism is a tendency or at best a political standpoint.... that's apolitical.

> bent on dismantling hierarchies

Dismantling on what level? Look, I totally encourage you to dismantle the hierarchy Meta holds and exerts over 3.6 fucking billion people worldwide. I'm no techie and hate coding, so if you want any kind of secondary support for this lemme know.

So there's the other option you seem to overlook or not care about: instead of devoting a lifetime of efforts fighting big externalities, putting efforts into building an actual anarchist society, without hierarchy. Within, without, under, over, beyond, outside or at the fringes of the "mass society".

Wayne... why are you pretending as though no one has any reason for their opinion here? Rather than outlining the response, how about you actually engage with the critiques? Why do we despise these workers and "ordinary people" (as though we're someone separate from either category)? These opinions do not form in a void, are not created whole cloth from nothing. Why is there this current? Is that not worth considering? Why are we easily dismissed but the people who are welcoming fascism are not only welcomed it in with open arms but is supposed to be the active subject of our "work," of our time and precious resources?

What could we be building if we focused (in the face of the fascist reality we exist in) on anarchists, people ready for liberation?

Kropotkin was instrumental in our understanding of anarchy and the way that humans can interact with each other, but it's been more than 120 years since Mutual Aid was written. That's 120 years of capitalism and the state refining their techniques, further entrenching fascist indoctrination, the co-option and liberalization of anything approaching liberatory ideas. Kropotkin can not speak to our current reality so perhaps, rather than worship at the shrine of anarchists (who would not want that mantle) we listen to the people alive now, struggling now, writing now?

Yes, the masses are being oppressed, Wayne. Not even I, Stirneresque anarcho-individualist-whateverian, will deny it!

What I (and many others) reject is the self-defeating absurdity of let's just organize for a few decades or centuries 'til the Masses are finally liberated from this oppression, assuming the Masses - and especially I - will still be around, to respond to seek to develop myself and answer to my desires and needs.

As, like... if there's an unwatched big box of apples at the entrance of the supermaket, I'm not going to wait for the Masses to be liberated through the reclaiming of both products and means of production by the Masses to grab & eat an apple out of this box. But this example shows how socialism will elicits a servitude... to mass servitude.

What Krackpotkin didn't seem to have understood (someone correct me if I'm wrong): living animals on this planet primarily do things for *themselves*. Individually first. Then, maybe, for a larger whole. But not in the reverse order.

It's one huge stretch to be putting some entity as abstract as "the Masses" before your self. You're not even doing this, yourself, Wayne... so quit expecting anyone else to do so.

There's a big difference between not caring about other people at all and not wanting to change society, and not caring about *everyone* and not believing in foolish notions of mass politics.

If anarchists just LARP the the previous century's failures, they will get nowhere. If we want to actually improve our lives, we need to forget about the masses and pursue more effective strategies. We need to learn to leverage the asymmetries we're faced with instead of fruitlessly trying to make them go away.

We need to recruit high value targets, not plead with every nazi scumfuck we need. We need to build our own power and create the world we want to live in, for ourselves, not sacrifice our lives on the pyre of mass revolution. There are a lot of things I'm willing to live and die for, but The People ain't one of them.

If we succeed, the masses will follow along after us anyway, and history will treat view it as a revolution all the same.

Call it elitist if you like. But if we actually have anything unique to offer to the world (and ourselves), we need to demonstrate it by practicing it. If not, well, we should just join the DSA or whatever the local socialist party is, since we'd be doing exactly the same thing while insisting there's a meaningful ideological difference.

christianity definitely still haunts all kinds of idea sets, including in the way that some anarchists want to save the ignorant masses, who have not yet seen the light. 

the original article here is blustery and simplistic, but most of the rejoinders have been similarly simplistic. we need a range of responses to people who disagree with us, including occasional breaks for emotional sustenance, as well as both covert and overt challenges to the status quo... 

this fight has never been and will never be a simple binary, y'all. come on now. 

"and since most anarchists reject marx entirely there are limited theoretical resources for understanding how social forces shape human consciousness and human behavior. (NOT to say that ideas lead directly to behavior, it’s often the other way around.)"

D & G: "The Desiring Machines", look it up, prole!

"since most anarchists reject marx entirely"

this has not been my experience, rather that many anarchists are still bound up in marxist rhetoric in ways that limits their capacity and understanding of anarchy.

rather than needing more marx, we ought to be rejecting his ideas further as his aims and goals and ends were never the same as ours. his focus on a specific population, to the exclusion of the rest, is counter-intuitive and builds toward a world where a violent coup is the crux of the revolutionary program. we ought to shift our focus on the individuals who will meet us where we are, who are already interested in liberation - not that need to be convinced that not only is liberation possible but also within their own power.

marx imagined a population ready to be shaped and lead to liberation.
anarchist thought rejects that, and understands that people must liberate themselves.

Besides Reich, may I suggest reading Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm? He too was a radical psychologist who analyzed why Germans of certain classes supported Nazism. Many of his insights are valid today, unfortunately.

"base the revolution on a system that can't be assuaged by a powermonger"

*sighs* You do realize how it's almost an oxymoron, rite? If you got a revolutionary elite shaping a revolution into a system they designed, then that means authoritarianism. That's yet another crowd of Bolcheviks taking over a mass uprising, but with a nicer, more Brave New World approach to managing the Masses' affects. But you just don't fucking steer the rev with mind powers or even nice speeches. One way or another you need to consolidate the means of control.

Overthrow the anarchists, trample their flags, declare a higher revolutionary order (in reality, the masses would not even take a sausage roll from them, and they know it).

Huh hmm, ummm,,,circuses and street theatre are cool, children love imagining worlds and circuses inspire flights of consciousness, SO SHOW SOME GODDAM RESPECT!!!