Anews Podcast 198 – 1.22.21

From Anews Podcast!

Welcome to the anews podcast. This podcast is on anarchist activity, ideas, and conversations from the previous week on anarchistnews.org.

U Mad Bro? continues talking about the constructing anarchisms workshops.

Sound editing by Greg.

What’s New written by chisel and Greg.

Music:
1. Vernon Dalhart – The Prisoner’s Song
2. Big Black – Kerosene

There are 10 Comments

Ok one thing or two about J6 you still apparently aren't getting:

- J6 was a "little Reischtag Fire" event. Not merely just for the Democrats, but for whatever State that'll be installed. All is there to support that claim... the bullshit/spectacular nature of the clown coup, and how in the hours and days that followed the remaining GOP opposition to the Biden election fell into line not only to confirm Biden but to further restrict "free speech" over social media, lockdown D.C. and else.

- anarchists had no stake in J6 whatsoever. The people behind J6 are dumbfuck political fanatics, regardless of where each and every gang is from. It's dumbfucks just like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTTJ25-vGdY Yes, they are that stupid. On the other hand, they are playing their part willingly or not, in pushing for a reinforcement of security easures around government facilities, so the State just becomes the dictatorship they want! This is Al Qaeda politics.

Regardless of its apparent bullshit character, this was not an insurrection against the State but an insurrection for a dictatorship, or a more autocratic dictatorship than liberal democracy. Any anarchist who saw a cause in the clown coup is deeply retarded, no matter how anarchists feeling for US democracy are just being liberals.

But the only dictatorship that matters at the moment, now that the neonazi tools were put in the trash where they belong (at least for a while), is the Covid dictatorship, or more broadly the tech dictatorship. My concern when I saw J6 happening wasn't for the sanctity of democracy to have been violated, or for the lives of the bureaucrats inside. My concerns were for the obvious backlash and power consolidation in response, now that the Democrats are more powerful they ever been in half a century (bravo, "insurrectionists"!), and now it's very likely that the same Covid dictatorship you've seen applied in other countries will get passed in the US without much opposition.

And here I'm talking rule by decree... that's breaking up liberal democracy anyways, as well as re-balkanizing the whole fucking world. You like that, "anarchist"? Me, "anarchist", I really don't. Just like with Covid, we don't KNOW where it's going, what are the longer-term consequences, but it's much likely to stick around, and get worse.

despite anon's style of rhetoric, this is pretty good analysis^^^

the whole thing reeks of that shapeshifting hypnotic theatricality style of spectacle that some people like Adam Curtis attribute to Vladislav Surkov and Putin?

note that I'm not suggesting Trump is Putin's puppet or any of that garbage but there's a lot of very strange details around the capital "riot" that indicate a staged spectacle. one last splash of sacred cow terror for the american centrist establishment and all their millions of casual supporters, really gets everybody in to line so Biden can smoothly take office and continue burning what's left of country down for wallstreet.

This does indeed look like Surkov/Vaino manipulation of social media aggregates. Some social media influencers were rooted back to Russia, including the Russian instance of Parler that was restarted after the platform was shut down https://finance.yahoo.com/news/parler-partially-reappears-support-russia...

The people trying to shame anarchists for not supporting blatant Neonazi "insurgents" helped by police undercovers are at best retarded, and at worse, hostile agents that should be put under serious scrutiny by Thecollective, imo. No anarchist has any moral imperative to support ANY insurgency, especially when it comes to fascist and islamist insurgencies. Those having these moralist expectations are many times worse than anything "Antifa" moralism will ever be.

yeah, I hear ya. worth noting that i have reason to believe thecollective is well aware that some of their longtime trolls are something much worse than just stubborn old cranks, although there's that too!

What’s worse than the stubborn old crank crowd?

lots of things, silly! the web is dark and full of terrors ;)

Agree with much of this, not all but much, but the kicker is that the new dictatorship is less about the alt right coup that has not happened and more about covid and tech. Google et al are to the government what the Catholic Church was to the govt back in the day. There's a shadow war over arbitration of the truth, and the control of data. Not sure what it means for us but feels like we're still playing catch up.

I do enjoy the anews even when I have nothing to comment. Nice to hear you toss around thoughts about the workshop.

As interesting as this workshop is, in the similar way that you don't need to be a linguist to speak a language, one does not need to be a scholar or philosopher of anarchism in order to be and anarchist.

I agree that anarchy/anarchism can't be anything and everything, that not anyone that claims it is in fact a genuine anarchist, that not everything a self-denominated anarchist does or likes is automatically anarchist by default. But in the same way that most people get by interacting with the world around them without knowing the intricacies of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, etc., most anarchists can get by with rough working definitions, notions, intuition and instinct. By this I don't mean they are infallible through those means, but that many who are fond of texts, history, definitions, semantics, theory, etc. can miss the mark just as well.

The good thing about the workshop is that it tries to coax out some rigor out of the participants via examining and producing texts. There are many other practices besides reading/writing that can also give feedback and lead to examining and refining ones notions.

It's interesting and frustrating how to some anarchy can merely state an opinion of strong dislike and rejection of archy, while for others it prescribes an ideal model for a society, suggesting mode of production, economy and institutions. More and more I am embracing that (as Chisel also had mentioned) the fact that another person calls themself an anarchist guarantees no overlap of definitions, opinions or affinity by itself. Each anarchist is a stranger, as any other person would be, a person like any other after all.

For me the takeaway of making my own anarchism is cancelling out the noise of all the infinite dissonant versions of anarchism that scream arrogantly how it should and shouldn't be. I don't look forward to sharing any notion I develop anymore than I do reading most of the comments on this site (no offense to the exceptions and its caretakers). Looking away from endless potential disagreements online and in "anarchist spaces", I'd rather focus on a daily life that tries to maybe one day punch up instead of down or sideways. Most arguments among anons aren't even interesting conversations, unlike the conversations between friends like in this podcast, those are the ones worth having.

I was into the discussion about what it means to be an anarchist in a non-anarchist world. I liked what greg said, which I interpreted to mean pushing at the boundaries of non-anarchist activity, to incorporate some humanness into inhuman obligations that we all need to engage in at certain times. At the same time, chisel's pessimistic take, that if we are being paid it cannot be against the system, resonates with me. My question, I guess, is is there an outside to capitalism? Following chisels point to its end, there isn't, which seems to leave us with the position of Nihilist Communism. I mostly agree with this, but do think there are fringes and spaces that point to an outside.

I don't mean this in a dialectical/Marxist sense, in which the contradictions of capital will overcome itself, but I do think the idea of contradictions and living in those contradictions is important for anarchists living in a non-anarchist world. if we are not utopian who believe in the revolution, this seems to be where our anarchism should reside.

Thinking of a post-capitalist ATR is traditional Marxist, while thinking of an outside of Capitalism is autonomist Marxist. The anarchist perspective I prefer is that of the “anarchist tension” as described by Bonanno and as lived by Novatore for example. I prefer the phrasing as “anarchist tension” rather than “permanent insurrection” since the first phrase is more open to definition while stretching the meaning of insurrection to mean an individual life, while it has been used by many insurrectionists, I find it confuses more than clarifies since most people assume the literal meaning of insurrection, and also it has strugglist connotations.

A life is not a game you win, you get your satisfaction any way you can and you will likely have regrets and disappointments. Being an anarchist is not about making a lasting significant change in the macro order through sheer willpower or pretending you can affect things that are far beyond your control.

To me it’s about how you give sense to your world and your life through an anarchist perspective, critique, and antagonism. The anarchist tension is a how a set of values, ideas, desires that make up your own anarchy figure into a feedback loop that orients your life and you make choices, there are consequences and then you die.

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