TOTW: Against the map makers

even anarchist map makers?

Topic of the week - Anarchist decolonization. Settler colonialism is ongoing and continues to play into the fabric of contemporary society, and what this means for resistance becomes an important question for anarchists who seek radical liberatory visions of the future. Continuing the long tradition against colonialism, the state, and capitalism, this week we’re taking a look at anarchist decolonization.

What does anarchist decolonization mean to you? Upon waking up, is the first thing you ask yourself: “how can I contribute to the struggles against ongoing forms of colonialism?”[1] For example, depending on how one arrives and engages with land, how do anarchists contribute to the struggles against ongoing forms of colonialism? What are your favorite anarchist articulated radical future visions of land and space? How do anarchists step outside and away from the academic language of decolonization to support actual struggles?

What is anarchist settlerism and who are settler anarchists? How can anarchist settlers resist in context, and against a settler colonialism that is intimately connected to capitalism and the state, while strengthening the anarchist space and creating anarchist futures here and now?

[1] Peter Gelderloos said this in a recent interview with Alexander Dunlap, who has written some anarchist texts on decolonization, also published on this website

There are 98 Comments

Not to make anyone sad, coming up on anniversaries and all, but I really appreciated Aragorn!'s perspective about the difference between being native vs. being indigenous. I think it was "Locating an Indigenous Anarchism".

While the indigenous people are the original victims of settler aggression other marginalized and subaltern people are roughly in the same boat. We can see a diverse convergence of characters standing together against ongoing capitalist aggression for example at Standing Rock and in the BLM confrontations with police brutality. This demonstrates the possibility of new alliances across identify boundaries and class devides that may at times seem insurmountable except in the intervals of rupture and conflagration.

I thought the snark was razor sharp when it came to the "decolonize people"? As in, whenever you find yourself in a space with somebody who wants to have a serious talk about it, you're gonna have a bad time!

half kidding, I went to exactly one decolonize workshop years ago that was cute and fun and nobody lectured me about settler guilt at all. oh and they made an amazing stew!

anyway, outside of scene spaces and discussion, "decolonizing" is on par with "smash the state". how's that going?

I hear you, I feel like it should be obvious for us to have these conversations, even if they only go as far as "smash the state" in terms of action/results. The thing that resonated with me was your experience at your decolonize workshop, because as I've gotten older I realize how important it is for anarchists (or any radicals tbh) to have your fucking "chill-switch" turned on sometimes.

That said, as far as practical decolonization, there are individual things to do, maybe . . . I try to not to fetishize pristine, old growth wilderness and reject connecting to the land as mysterious green scenery viewed monolithically. Ecosystems exist all around us and it's important to me to connect with them where they are, instead of where I assume they should be. I also try not to look at land and see what I can do to shape it to benefit me, this is a tricky one because I also like permaculture and swidden/fallow type relationships. I learned the names and some of the uses of the plants and fungi that assemble themselves into the bioregion I live in and appreciate what that has done to shape my worldview. I try and encourage those attitudes and practices when I raise my child. I also do things on my own to physically combat colonization , I pull Ivy, Clematis and Scotch Broom when the mood strikes, which might not seem like much, but it means something to me and I think that matters. And just reading the history and beliefs of the original people, even if anthropology is pretty whack at times, can provide an important context/perspective.

appreciate the thoughtful reply, doesn't happen much around here!

yeah, truth is I spent many years doing similar little things. just trying to learn more about the history, spend more time on the land and get to a place where whatever I had to say or tried to do wasn't really misguided and worse than doing nothing haha

like to think I'm there now but who knows?

Totally. My inroad to these ideas was supposed to be green anarchist theory, but that failed me (or maybe it was a necessary precondition? I dunno). But it was mushroom hunting that really did it for me, because it forced (or reinforced) a new world-view, a meaningful change in perspective. What was a trip though, was then learning that none of the original people where I live ate mushrooms. But emulating or, probably a better word, copying, the lifestyles or diets of the tribes that used to steward my bioregion doesn't seem right to me either.

I think I might be onto something when I instill certain values, lessons and perspectives into my parenting, but who knows how that will shape out? I do think the question of colonization and what to do about it is linked to multi-generational healing and creating or relearning ways of relating to each other and the creatures around us. It's also probably about arson and a ton of other things.

Decolonization is a historical term referring to the expulsion of European colonial powers from (mainly) Africa and Asia in the 1950s-60s. There's a clear conceptual structure here: the countries were colonies, the coloniser was removed. These days it's become a buzzword with unclear reference: there's epistemic decolonisation, economic decolonisation, decolonisation of anarchism, decolonisation of universities, health systems, law, subjectivity, the mind, etc etc. It all leaves me rather confused. What's decolonization in a settler-colony anyway? The expulsion of settlers? The integration of settlers into the host society? The subordination of settlers to indigenous minority rule? The general adoption of an "indigenous" perspective, whatever we take that to be? There's a lot of population movements and invasions in history, at what point does a settler stop being a settler? Are the Finns settlers? What about the non-Dravidic Indians, the Turks, the Iranians? If a settler group successfully assimilates an indigenous group, does the latter become "settlers" too? Given that indigenous cultures are not unchanging and there are disagreements within indigenous communities regarding (e.g.) development, capitalism, bureaucracy, etc., which perspectives count as "indigenous"? How does anyone (indigenous or settler) tell an authentic indigenous perspective from a coloniser's perspective which happens to be held by a person of indigenous origin?

I know people sometimes take "decolonization" as a synonym for disalienation or rewilding. Some people also use it as a power-move, meaning "decentering white people" or "decentering white perspectives". Often it's tied up with making race or the North/South binary into the principal contradiction, so that "decolonization" is to race what "revolution" is to capitalism. It's all rather unclear and often looks like a buzzword. Some of the things it covers are progressive or even anarchist - such as anti-extractivism and prison abolition. Often what's taken as "the indigenous perspective" is actually a kind of cybernetic or postmodernist relationality which treats individuals as worthless or nonexistent because they are "really" nodes in external socio-linguistic or ecological/behavioural systems. This is a type of reactionary collectivism complicit in the current cybernetic recomposition of capitalism. Social and ecological relations are real but so are desire and meaning and the unconscious, and a lot of indigenous cultures also recognise this. Behaviourism is incompatible with anarchism. Sometimes "decolonization" is taken to mean turning off our crap detectors and critical faculties and personal ethics, and acting as pawns for middle-class indigenous/black/POC/designated group members' upward mobility. This is also completely reactionary and authoritarian. Let's not lose our heads and our principles to guilt-tripping please.

A lot of the currently dominant global system and everyday practices are European/colonial in origin. We need to have serious discussions about which of them are irreducibly dominatory and which are not. The state is inherently dominatory whether or not it has colonial origins, and police were initially designed as an occupying force. But there's a lot of grey areas with other things. For instance, I see discussions about "decolonizing education" which don't seem to recognise that mass schooling is a European-derived system. The idpols recognise that hierarchies of access are racialized and reproduce racial hierarchies, but they're broadly pro-schooling. They see decolonizing in terms of equalizing access and changing the content of curricula and having more POC teachers and so on. I don't see how stuffing a European-derived hierarchical institution full of non-European people and contents is decolonization, but I suppose this is also what largely happened in the countries which were decolonized in the 1950s-60s: local POC officials filled the exact same roles in the same state structures that existed under colonialism, and replaced European content with nationalist content. And I guess that's the limit to decolonization as a metaphor: the anti-colonial revolutions were failed revolutions, they removed the European powers but didn't liberate the people of the South.

Personally I don't think it's very useful to use colonialism and decolonization as a root-metaphor for everything. It makes a lot more sense to me, to think in terms of different ways of life. Indigenous ways of life are/were alternatives to capitalism with non-capitalist economies - subsistence, petty commodity, gift economy, mutual aid, resilience not efficiency - and more immediate social relations and relations to nature which aren't necessarily extractivist or dominating. Rebuilding these kinds of relations, or reinventing new kinds of systems which aren't capitalist or ecologically or socially alienated, is and always was an important part of anarchism. I don't think race has any particular place in this, besides the fact that anarchist communities shouldn't be proactively racist (& in the same way shouldn't be discriminating based on any other spook). Anti-capitalism has a major place because capitalism is today the main way the elites of the North plunder the South, as well as being one of the biggest forms of alienation. But it's also absolutely essential to keep the focus on desire, agency and fighting the system.

Fighting the good fight, @critic. These idpols will not replace you! Where can we read more on the subject of anti-decolonization anarchism? Thanks for helping anarchists keep their heads against the idpols and their annoying complaining so we can focus on hiding from the state.

Nice fash-jacketing. But ironic: in many ways the idpols (lots of whom are white and middle-class) HAVE replaced the various strands of anarchism/anarchy (left, post-left, eco, etc) across a lot of anarchy's former range. Look at the multiplication of conduct codes and safe space policies in social centers and online anarchist groups for example. The trick is: not only are they authoritarians disguised as anarchists, they are also adherents of a puritanical ideology which has all its origins in Europe and Euro-America (American behaviorism and cybernetics, German-American puritan anti-body morality, Euro/American/Australian Third Way and Eurocommunism, French poststructuralism, Maoism based on European Marxism). But they spray around the signifiers "Black", "Indigenous", "decolonize", "racist", "white supremacist" until everyone imagines they are actually derived from colonized peoples and that Twitter deplatforming is an ancient Native American custom and the idea that people are just effects of positionalities is some ancient wisdom that everyone except Europeans already knows. I've met idpols who literally think that huge numbers of African workers and peasants are sitting around worrying about white Americans checking their privilege. This kind of ventriloquism, speaking "as" and thus "for" "the Other", has the effect of fooling a lot of nice (and not-so-nice) middle-class white people into amplifying this bullshit and fooling the poorer members of "their own" groups into dropping their pre-existing beliefs and their everyday concerns and throwing their energies into supporting the upward mobility of a nationalist elite fraction who happen to have/claim the same ethnicity or other positionality.

I never realized how awful you were until your recent crusade against idpols these past few days. Keep punching down, @critic! Teach those pesky ""Black"" and "Indigenous"" idpols a real lesson about the real anarchy. Shove their stupid authoritarian ""safe space policies"" down their idpol throats!

Idpols are overwhelmingly white. Black and native idpols are actually the exception. Can’t say I’ve met very many at all. Those who I have met have always had some fucked up attention-seeking politicians’ complex.

Most POC in political scenes tend to get put off by the intense fetishization white idpols subject them to. The POC that remain are the ones who enjoy the fetishization as well as being surrounded by a gaggle of useful morons.

My experience has been the opposite. But as long as we're making gross generalisations let's just agree that the anti-idpols are always white men detached from the scenes they are scrutinizing. A gaggle of racist analysts.

yeah ... I love the class reduction of any and every person who wants some guidelines in a space too. there's no other reason to do that except if youre a middleclass authoritarian, huh? just going to ignore occam's razor on that one? hmmm?

It's not always but it often is. In the "wider society" middle-class people love rules, forms, norms, procedures. Lumpen people like you're meant to be, get by with informal groups most of the time (whoever heard of a gang with a membership form?) When working-class people want formal rules it's often the "respectable" working-class trying to keep out the lumpens. Though, I've also come across petty gangsters who love formal structures they can dominate from behind the scenes.

There's plenty of valid reasons people might want formal rules or guidelines - to clarify things, to keep out political enemies, etc. There's good reasons for "rule of law" and "due process" type regimes (in contrast with personal tyranny) which come out in the rare cases they are upheld versus pigs, or how science works at its best (your arguments need evidence to support them and have to be logical), or some of the indigenous conflict-resolution systems (though those tend to be informal). I don't think the benefit outweighs the cost in terms of entrenching hierarchy, if I thought these systems worked better then I might become a liberal, in practice I see them getting corrupted by power 99% of the time, but if there's gonna be rules/hierarchies it's better that they be clear, non-arbitrary, and available to the accused and the outgroup as well as the powerful. But this is pretty much never how I've seen the idpol stuff used. Like, they don't have specific rules, they have stuff like "no racism" or "no abuse", then it's left up to the hivemind of the moment as to what gets called-out and whether it's acted on. They also pull shit like "if a POC says it's racist then it's racist", which if they happen to self-identify as POC because they say their great-granny was a Cherokee princess or something, means "we have a rule saying you can't do anything I personally dislike or disagree with"; they can just drag out the R-word whenever they aren't getting their way. Which generates a very sharply hierarchical structure with the worst of both formal and informal hierarchies.

My goodness you’re the most mansplainy duck on this site. We get it, you don’t like POC. Move on. Write a book.

I never said I "don't like POC". I don't like the idpol ideology. I have no particular animus against any particular ethnic group. And it's pretty hard to rebut the idpols' bullshit misunderstandings of what I say without explaining anything. For the record: you don't know whether I'm a man, and "mansplaining" is explaining stuff you don't understand or the other person understands better... which is not what I was doing. These nasty little vindictive character-slurs may cut it on social media but you're in the real world now.

"These nasty little vindictive character-slurs may cut it on social media but you're in the real world now."

LMAO. Hey, pal, this is anews. Go take a walk out in the real world and stop digging yourself deeper by pretending to not be whomst you are and whomst we all know are, for the record.

Anti-idpols are generally excluded from the scenes they're scrutinizing by idpols. Duh.

Yeah, I'm awful. I'm Hitler. Because I disagree with you. That's how it works, right?

The whole punching up/down thing is dubious, because what's up and what's down? Would you seriously say that an impoverished white working-class man shooting a black female billionaire politician, even if he's a Nazi, is "hitting down" rather than "hitting up"? Clearly she's higher up the social ladder all-axes-considered than he is and he is therefore "hitting up". If his action is objectionable then it's for some reason other than "up/down". Is a white middle-class woman allowed to defend herself if a black working-class man tries to rape her, or is that "hitting down"? Are we meant to support ISIS because they're "hitting-up" against the European Christian West and the Alawi-minority Syrian elite? I could carry on with this forever. Fuck, even Hitler thought he was "hitting up" against the "elite" and the foreign powers dominating Germany, so I could flip the fash-jacketing right back atcha.

In my view I'm hitting-up not down by attacking idpols because I'm a marginalised person driven out of most anarchist and left spaces by a bunch of middle-class college kids, most of them white, who hold neoliberal-adjacent positions and are utterly unprepared to make any allowance for difference. But it's justified because of ideology, not because it's "hitting-up". Idpol is an authoritarian ideology which is corrosive of the struggle to destroy authority. And I constantly see idpol middle-class academics, lawyers and journalists hitting-down on white working-class men, people with so-called mental health problems, and members of their own demographics who disagree with them, without regard for anything but ideology; they only use the up/down criterion to crybully. I've seen a white middle-class American idpol tell a working-class Mexican Marxist to go kill themselves, with a picture of a noose, and none of the other idpols seemed to mind.

Safe space policies are based on behaviorist psychology which is a WHITE AMERICAN ideology based on separation of mind from body and the illusion of perfect rational self-control, plus the misreading of emotion/affect as strategic choice. They have the effect of requiring perfect self-control and ideological conformity in a manner which excludes most of the working-class, the abuse-traumatised and others with psychological problems. In practice they are "unsafe" and manipulated by a minority of rhetorically-skilled wannabe dictators who keep everyone else in a state of fear lest they be called-out, viciously abused, then banned. These mini-tyrants will of course feel "safer" from the existential threat they feel when anyone challenges their power.

Also please note that I avoid giving any details about my race, sexuality, gender or gender identity, class, disability status, etc., partly because it's irrelevant to my arguments (I'm not an idpol), but also for security reasons and to not give opponents ways to bully me. This often leads to assumptions I *must* be a white, cishet, middle-class, non-disabled man... but you have precisely zero proof for this. You're stereotyping as usual.

Who are you trying to convince, why, and to what end? Are you on this mission to convince the anarchists that the “middle class college kids” who were mean to you are bad? When will you be satisfied? When your gang is bigger? When they hang from ropes made by the hands of the poor marginalized white lower class nazis that are acktschully the real victims here? When they leave you alone? Also don’t be silly, everyone here knows your race, gender, name and ethnicity already. Use anon if your ego allows.

Hi, third party here. Wanted to chime in. So I, for one, have honestly no idea who @critic is, nor do I care to know in the first place. If you think you know their name, ethnicity, location, wtv. then I invite you to exercise a little maturity, responsibility, self control, etc. and stfu about it.

Secondly, and again, I can only speak for myself, but I actually really appreciate @critics contributions because they so articulately express exactly how I feel about a lot of this stuff as well, and in ways I’m not eloquent enough to adequately express on paper. There’s a lot of people in anarchy and in general who are beyond fed up with identity politics and how they are often more of a hindrance than a help to achieve anarchic outcomes.

Hi, fourth party here. I think @critic’s positions are awful and only appeal to bad people and serve as a dog whistle for fascists and white supremacists. There are a lot of people in anarchy who are beyond fed up with racist apologia in the guise of anarchy and how they are always a hindrance to achieving anarchic outcomes.

This whole thing began bc @critic and others were saying anarchists, regardless of identity, should desert the cities and set themselves up innawoods on the periphery where they could be more successful in their struggles for autonomy and illegibility against the new police state. A logical proposition, wouldn’t you agree?

The argument started when some idtroll accused them of “white supremacy” for not wanting to live in the city where they are easier to monitor, track and control. In other words, the idtroll’s argument, if followed to the letter by [white] anarchists, would create a situation where more and more of the anarchist demographic, you know... pretty much the only demographic with an explicitly anti-state position, is under the boot and watchful eye of the urban cyber state, whereas @critics argument, if implemented, would lead to a situation where the state has less and less control over that demographic.

Hence, ignoring absurd fundamentalist idpol ideology in this hypothetical leads to a more anarchic scenario, out of the state’s control. How would you respond?

I think the problem most people have with your political religion and why they can’t take it seriously is bc you and others have stretched the definition of racism into something so broad as to amount to anyone or anything that disagrees with you and your religious doctrine, regardless of the outcome IRL.

It reminds me of WSBs ongoing Gamestonk insurrection. Wall st. hedge hunds are losing trillions of dollars as a result of coordinated market manipulation by mostly pissed off white dudes on Reddit and 4chan.

They have literally done more damage to the power structure apparatus in a few days than all the useless whiny protests and busted windows in the history of the world. But, because it’s mostly white dudes, SOME of whom have far right politics, the idpol left has automatically sided with Wall st. hedge fund managers and their state puppets who are desperately trying to stop WSB from burning down the financial system. Hence, yet another example of idpol contributing to a situation that favors capital and the state.

Well, I say “contributing”, but really all they’re doing is crying on Twitter for people to sell their stonks bc making billionaires cry on live television and driving them to want to kill themselves is “anti semitism” or wtv.

Fuck idpol. Be free. Move to the woods. Get into options trading. Follow WSB. Don’t sell. Crash the system.

“It’s not about the money, it’s about sending a message... Everything burns.”

:^)

different anewsian here that's just bored af from this endless stupidity...

> ... A logical proposition, wouldn’t you agree?

no. this proposition is predicated on this narrow definition of what anarchists should be doing and also this idea of success and what that would look like. I disagree with this.

> The argument started when some idtroll accused them of “white supremacy” for not wanting to live in the city where they are easier to monitor, track and control.

this is false. all the "idtroll" said was "Zone's closed. Go colonize someone else's land." (https://anarchistnews.org/comment/28079#comment-28079). which caused @critic to flip the fuck out. there was no mention of cities or any of the other altered history you've mentioned. It was two singular sentences that hurt @critic's butt so badly that he's been ranting about it for days and has made everyone on anews dumber for it, not to mention has called all the racist idiots to the conversation.

> In other words, the idtroll’s argument, if followed to the letter by [white] anarchists, would create a situation where more and more of the anarchist demographic, you know... pretty much the only demographic with an explicitly anti-state position, is under the boot and watchful eye of the urban cyber state, whereas @critics argument, if implemented, would lead to a situation where the state has less and less control over that demographic.

none of this is real life. none of this needed to be falsely imagined in @critic's (nor your) butthurt brain. everything else in your (and every additional reply from @critic) is based upon a bad faith and provably false misreading of the original reply that launch these rants for days. because of this I won't continue to pick it apart because it's in your (and @critic's) head only.

we get it: dpol bad, poor white anarchist people can just as good as poor poc anarchist people. hurt butts hurt. the fordist state is bad. idpols are authoritarian acttually. organise in the woods to fight bad fordist state! fuck off authoritarian idpols! etc.

this is no longer the totw. let's move on to new adventure! to the woods perhaps? yay!

You're trying to plant some type of plausible deniability in that moron zona's comment. The fact of the matter is that anarchic off grid existence WILL involve some kind of recolonization in the way that a non neologistic anthropologist would define colonization. What this ends up being about is the fallacy of dibs on land which is ANTI-FUCKING-ANARCHY. There is some basic truth to the song this land is yours and mine. The issue has always been state and land monopoly among other things. This is not even getting into the fact that there were land wars between archaic americans BEFORE euro-colonialism. A good example would be to look at that nazi colony that Nietzsche's sister founded. It's basically a bolo bolo type fash area that is all but harmless to the surrounding locals even though they are seen as inferior non German stock.

Me, the critic and other 3rd parties are not but hurt, we are just sick of your leftarded idpol institutional leftism which is millstoning any good and novel development of anarchy. The original reply was a fucking L post as many idpol 'anti-colonial' posts are. The bad faith ain't coming from the anti-idpollers. It's not a matter of binary good and bad, its a matter of who is driving and enabling capital state and institutional power and the answer is pretty obvious. You're a dead ringer for one with your stupid use of the word actually which is a key point of any kind of socratic styled logical debate. It's a rhetorical language tool idpols use to cover up the fact that your language is logically bankrupt.

sireinzige coming to your defense while ignoring what actually happened and also moving goal posts, to build the most butthurt of hurt butt straw men, is a sure sign your position is idiotic. the fool’s butt hurts so much he thinks nietzsche sister existed before the colonization of the americas it’s equally funny how he always included himself in lists of far more intelligent and accomplished individuals. before it was “stirner, myself” and now @critic has that honor.
“are ants colonizers?!? checkmate idpols.”

You mean Sir-“we should start using the swastika and the number 88 because I like them”-Einzige’s endorsement isn’t a blessing?
Fuck off IDpol!

The zonut idiot in question did not even have an argument, just a stupid comment that one can infer is related ‘post-colonial ‘ IDpol purity and some erroneous notion who legitimate land inhabitants(a position that is inherently anti-anarchy).

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QpbPcosXO-4

This is the context for the non harmful colonization that I was bringing up. It actually has some racist in group preference remnants still going on but the lack of state/capital fortification makes these particular colonizers harmless. Stateification and aid by a power monopoly is ultimately the deciding factor in whether this becomes a greater problem and not the colonization itself. That’s my overall point and it stands irrefutable. This all shows that all ‘colonization’ ever was was a leftist neologism that masks a counter state building nationalist agenda.

The fact that zona’s argument would likely be that stupid and illogical is probably why they won’t make it beyond a stupid comment.

Also, yes, I’d like to see the swastika and 88 comeback. One of the annoying things about post ww2 leftism is how much occultic mythological territory they’ve ceded to various far right nazi ideologies. The symbols in and of themselves are fine and very much useful particularly if you like archaic occultism. There will be a time where your type will be seen as hysterical and overreacting.

Thanks for the support 11.56 and 14.04 and SirEinzige.

To the haters (who also sound pretty butthurt to me; although I thought idpols weren't allowed to say butthurt cos muh rape culture?):

>Who are you trying to convince, why, and to what end?

I see a false claim, I rebut it. I'd *like* to convince the morons to open their minds, but that seems unlikely. I want any third parties reading this and sympathising with the idpol buzzwords to think more carefully.

>Also don’t be silly, everyone here knows your race, gender, name and ethnicity already

Was that a doxxing threat? Seriously, how low do you lot stoop?

>serve as a dog whistle for fascists and white supremacists.

Pretty hard to prove or disprove, since these "dog whistles" are only known to fascists and those who whistle them. But. Last time I ran into a fascist online they called me a n****r, a f*g and a Jew. Hardly what you'd expect if I was pandering to them.

*I have not said a single racist thing in this whole conversation*. It's not just racist because you disagree with it.

>all the "idtroll" said was "Zone's closed. Go colonize someone else's land."

Implying every rural/wilderness/land project is colonial (since I hadn't specified any particular zone). Implying autonomous zones as such are colonial. Completely indefensible claims hidden behind a vicious little comment which added nothing to the discussion. Which LOGICALLY means anarchists should stay in cities under ever-increasing surveillance so as not to offend idpols. Logical deductions of assumptions and implications are NOT "falsely imagined" in someone's "butthurt brain". You now try to gaslight us that the comment didn't imply any of these things and we're crazy to think it did. Logic = madness. Seriously, you belong in an Orwell novel. (Incidentally, the far right do *the exact same thing* with logical criticisms).

Leftists: “snitches get stitches!”

Also Leftists: “you said something I don’t like? I’m going to dox you to your family, your boss, the police, your uncles’ cousins’ neices’ brothers’ former roommate, your dog, and the CIA”.

This IS a stupid argument. Because at the end of the day: no butthurt @news idpol is going to actually stop me from moving innawoods anymore than no butthurt Twitter idpol is going to stop me from wrecking shop at Wall st. So who cares?

Its those like you who perpetuate the myth of the noble savage and race identity into a layered hub of favouritism who ultimately suffer the butt-hurt when the monster you created begins dividing into sectarian fighting.

It is sacred magic for the retards with some bucks to burn on the money pile, to likely become millionaires and own your booties with DIAMOOONDS for the next few years as you were still stuck into the Pleroma soap operas. But I agree that they done a gazillion times more damage than the OhWS woke idiocy from 10 years back, that was really just about the fun of camping and getting laid in big business districts, which is ok at that (even if a lot of weird pig smell down there), but that was it.

Wtf with Twitter ID pols telling ppl to sell their stocks? I didn't see that.

Hi, 5th party here, I'm loyal to open discussion and a factual data rant anytime and @critic seems to follow these very strict requirements.

"Would you seriously say that an impoverished white working-class man shooting a black female billionaire politician, even if he's a Nazi, is "hitting down" rather than "hitting up"?"

Not the other commenter you're replying to, but it's definitely "hitting down".

Why? Coz the Neonazi does so to eradicate Black people in charge, not to eradicate the wealthy.

ISIS also were "hitting down". Hitting down on women, children... and everyone that doesn't agree with their demented ideals. I haven't even seen much hitting up against Assad, as they were more focused on getting rid of their horizontal enemies.

To you @critic and a few others here: Quit trying to turn fascists into anarchist militants, okay? Coz everything is context and context is everything, and that includes "insurrections". Who does what for what purpose is more important than the means they use, and the means they use tell very little about the rationale and agency behind.

So what? So everything. As context is everything, dumbasses.

My point still stands for those people "anarchist-jacketing" fascists due to "poor White ppl!" or "Islamists oppressed by US/Israel imperialism!". I just got carried along the way.

Idpols are evidently too stupid to understand analytical arguments. My point was that the whole up/down criterion is stupid if it's taken literally, and often it's not clear who's up and who's down, it varies with the axis you focus on. Though, you're showing how you follow the counterinsurgency approach of reading "enemy" movements just as ideologies i.e. bad thoughts and ignoring the affects involved. You're here centuries behind Wilhelm Reich (a German Jew forced to flee the Nazis) who says fascism mixes anti-capitalist appeal with reactionary politics, it's not just extreme conservatism.

>everything is context and context is everything

Another of these glib idpol slogans with no meaning. Which context? How do you decide? With ISIS, we have downtrodden Sunni Syrians and global Islamophobia victims fighting back against Assad and the Iranian-backed Iraqi regime - that's one context. Then we have ISIS the unrecognised microstate resisting bombardment by the worlds 20 top imperialist powers - that's another context. Then we have ISIS attacking the Kurds and Yezidis, killing gay men and random civilians, keeping sex slaves, beheading NGO people for being the wrong nationality, that's another context again. A kid from London goes there thinking he'll find a paradise and getting disillusioned; an ex-Anon hacker joining ISIS after the trauma of imprisoment and racial abuse; Uighurs from Xinjiang travelling to Syria to get combat experience to take back home, the US continuing to torture Islamists at Guantanamo and elsewhere - all part of the context. Whether it's up or down depends on the context. Basically ISIS is a form of idpol: a revivalism of Sunni Muslims against western culture which also posits them as the new ruling group with a right to dominate everyone else, same way all the idpols do. A lot of today's fascism is just idpol of the white working-class. Complex is not fucking simple.

That's my take on what you do to play on the famous House Of Pain song. There is no clear delineated path to punch all the time. In the case of low class reactionary white types a certain amount of punching down makes sense to the degree that they are any serious threat. It also makes sense to throw a punch at certain black nat types or those with social conservative repressive viewpoints. Perhaps there should be deferred and default striking to those who hold fusional hegemonic default discursive power but this does not mean that those out of power don't warrant it.

I also, as a sperg who's into good argumentation, notice these idiots inability to make good analytical arguments. You'll notice they try to skirt logical forms of debate by using gaslighting rhetoric like 'ackchyually' or the deployed term 'whataboutism' as well as insulting terms like neckbeard toxic individuals. They do this because if they got down to ackchyal logical debate they'd be blown out of the water by those who aren't stupid and know the foundations of their worldview. I've done it to these types many times. Needless to say this has fundamentally retarded any continuing or emergent radicalism and is much more in the service of consensus institutional thinking(The Cathedral as some like to say) and a sign of recuperation and ideological capture.

But we’re dealing with people who are used to successfully shutting down conversations with cheatcodes like, “dAs RaCiSt!” or wtv as well as living in ideological silos. They don’t associate with people who challenge their ideas, which makes them weak af.

"A lot of today's fascism is just idpol of the white working-class. Complex is not fucking simple."

Let's also keep in mind how the ID pols that started it all was White supremacists and their enslavement of non-Whites, and non-males. This ID pols was clearly evident in the US colonies, at least within the political/financial class.

Sure, religious ID pols were HUGE back in the days in Europe, but in Modern era they were taken over by the new race/gender based ID pols, as religion was no longer as lucrative as it used to be while skin tone and sex (the binary organ-based identities, not the act) had become key factors of making profits in industrial scale exploitation.

"Identity" is a concept based on the assumption of being identical. So to socially format & flatten people to a point of being uniform drones. This works for the dead-eyed, conformist people without strong, assertive personalities irl. Just like with cults, it works a lot for these types...

Identity based on skin tone is an awful pattern. It's bluntly throwing people into boxes based on their external appearances. Now I know that as "White" dude, this "Black" person looks quite different to me... but that's just ONE THIN ASPECT of our persons. One exclusively physical, and visual aspect. Like some blind person will not see much a difference, beyond the accent that is related to ethnic-cultural background.

We may be living in similar conditions, have similar interests or views, have same sense of humor, might even have feels for each other. All this racial shit gets in the way of this. So this racial ID pols ends up being nothing else than a perpetuation of racism, by other means.

Identity categories are not real. The racism and sexism they create is real, yet their ID grounds are not. What I stand for is the absolute negation of social identity... toward a restitution of more realistic ontologies based on similarity, yes, but also uniqueness and diversity.

In terms of projects, I think the important thing is to free ourselves as much as possible from being under the control of the state and capital. The more we are also able to reconnect to other people, lifeforms and spaces as well, the better. The important questions then become strategic or tactical: how to sustainably survive without either being crushed by these big systems or drawn back in. Historically this has been done a lot in terms of urban projects: squatting, co-ops, social centers, free parties, skipping, etc. Today these zones seem to be being crushed or recuperated through sheer force of police numbers and policing technologies. So I'm encouraging people to look to more remote locations as having potential for regrouping and reducing the grip of these forces. Although there's also cases of rural occupations being crushed, it's been logistically harder for the pigs and the police occupation is usually more temporary. Without naming names in case pigs are watching, I know a few cases of longstanding rural projects which haven't suffered much repression. The rural zones in the global South also seem largely uncontrollable, the US in Afghanistan was able to capture the cities but lost most of the countryside and Latin American land movements are also very effective. As well as the obvious example of the Zapatistas, the MST has huge numbers on squatted farms and there are large areas of Colombia which are outside government control, and the Bolivian peasants can pretty much shut the country down at will. The Mapuche suffer a lot of repression but it's targeted at community leaders, people hardly ever get caught doing stuff like burning down timber plantations. In a lot of African countries, the rural areas are left to themselves aside from clientelist networks and punitive raids. The Niger Delta is a good example, the oil companies were pretty much pushed out by a mix of insurgency and protest. Ditto most of Somalia, DRC, etc; also see Graeber on Madagascar. Self-supporting local communities and guerrilla groups flourish in these areas. There's no anarchism so far, rather it's Islamists, ethnonationalists and wannabe politicians drawing on local discontent, and the level of violence is sometimes extreme, but the potential is there for autonomous zones in future. I could imagine something like an anarchist Long March or politicization of existing communities on the Latin American model, leading to a swathe of de facto stateless territories. Though as I've said before, race then becomes a significant hurdle and so does the risk of violence. In Europe and America at present I think the best thing is to create local nodes then try to network these outside of the major structures.

yeah, I mean, if you're referring to like Fanon or the 50s-60s in general, didn't that use of the term mean: get crushed under the boot or be fortunate enough to be "decolonizing" a colonial power that was on the verge of collapse anyway? only to have it replaced by neo-colonialism in the form of predatory loans from the western powers?

there's a total shift in consciousness and historical narratives that ties in to this stuff like with caliban and the witch. it's obvious to those of us who get it but it's like we're speaking a different language than those who don't. so that's not nothing and it's a shame to reduce all that to "just IdPol" although it often takes that form.

I don't think any of the 60s/70s stuff was much like today's idpol TBH. The 60s/70s stuff was mostly Marxism-literate and psychoanalysis-literate, and had a politics of desire of some form. And if someone was feminist, black lib, gay lib etc back then this usually meant they were anti-system, anti-establishment, pro-autonomy in practice even if their ultimate agenda was statist. The current stuff is infested with cybernetics, Third Way, and kitsch-postmodernism and most of them know nothing about desire. If they have any psychology at all then it's behaviourist or pop-psych. I often use the parallel with what happened to socialism in the 30s. If you look at socialism roundabout 1910 or 1920 then it's a diverse movement with a lot of radical and anarchic content, but then it gets turned into a monolith of either Stalinist hyper-orthodoxy or social-democratic technocracy.

Most of the 50s-60s movements succeeded at the minimum level of the colonial states leaving. A lot of the time the coloniser just decided to switch strategies to neocolonialism and installed a pliant elite before a movement could even form. A few places the colonisers hung on and eventually lost long guerrilla wars. In these places the subsequent regimes were usually Soviet-allied, but the long-term trajectory is the same. And you're right, it was only so successful because the colonial powers were already in decline and overstretched, though TBH even the Americans and Soviets lost guerrilla wars in that era. Post-independence there's basically a corrupt, authoritarian elite taking over the colonial state structures just about everywhere, then in the 80s-90s the ones who weren't helping core capital accumulation were forced to do so using structural adjustment policies/debt crisis. You'd be surprised how many of these regimes are still spouting anti-colonial, pan-Africanist, anti-west, nationalist and populist stuff even while enforcing neoliberalism and cozying up to the west. These days it's either sheer rhetoric or moralistic culture-policing (banning miniskirts, alcohol, porn, gay sex, skin lightening, whatever). Quite a few of the scholars spewing "decolonial" babble are just mainstream scholars in countries which still have official nationalist ideologies.

Fanon recounts particular emotional experiences of standing-up, which were part of the anti-colonial movement, and this is found a number of places, there's a similar vibe in Freire for instance. Most places it turned sour pretty quickly though. That only happened in Algeria because they had a real independence war, and the resultant regime lost a lot of its legitimacy in the 80s-90s due to structural adjustment. These days a lot of the social movement force is with the Islamists, and Algeria had another big war in the 90s plus a belated Arab spring in 2019. I guess political Islam is a variant anti-colonialism, but a lot of the social movements nowadays are about precarity, democracy or corruption... anti-colonialism and white privilege are not all that salient.

There's many INTENSE external forces and factors to the '60s national liberation movements that you aren't (just as thinkers of the time like Fanon weren't, more due to the obvious lack of historical distancing) taking into account here. Was Algeria a real independence war, in the sense that it was totally autonomous? I still ain't even sure about it. Looking at all the angles of foreign imperialist (or post-imperialist) influence, it's hard to find any example of national liberation movement where no foreign agency can be found. Algeria had ex-Nazi officers involved early on, for instance, and there was a reason why they wanted to remain hidden.

Anyways you're spot-on in your first paragraph, especially in regard to the absence of any notion of desire among today's ID pols crowd, and how it's light years away from the "libidinal" marxists of the '60s-'70s, who at least brought some much needed intellectual perspective on sexuality, instead of just misguided Butlerian superficial narratives tainted with moralism all over. I'd take these marxist analysis any day over the Anti-sex Committee of today's social media! And maybe it's a good idea to somewhat rediscover this tradition, just for critically growing out of it.

Okay, yeah, since I'm not writing a university essay on all the factors affecting decolonisation, of course there's a lot missing... main factors I'd add were, weakening of European colonial powers by World War II and rise of US and USSR, European powers losing their aura of invincibility through the Japanese invasions in WW2, guerrilla movements stemming directly from the anti-Japanese struggle taking on returning Europeans or seizing power (e.g. Burma, Indonesia, China), guerrilla tactics succeeding in China and being copied elsewhere, Soviet and Chinese support for "national liberation movements", the popularity of import-substitution industrialisation and state-led development in the 1950s-60s, the discrediting of racism and torture and concentration camps during WW2 and the consequent backlash against colonial atrocities, the spread of media coverage (not yet corralled into embedded journalism) so atrocities could no longer be covered-up so easily, economic cost/unprofitable nature of many of the colonies and high costs of developing them enough to be profitable for colonisers, the Cold War context as driver for proxy wars and opportunity-structure for rebels, the strategic pivot to Europe and East Asia, the election of Labour in Britain, the strength of Communist Parties in western Europe... probably some others I've forgotten as well.

Still, I think the big difference is that there were new nationalist movements and a cascade of effective resistance starting with the Indian National Congress and a few others. I think the main driver of decolonisation was the aspirational "native" middle-class of so-called evolues (i.e. modernised/Europeanised) who oriented to the national scale because their upward mobility in imperial bureaucracies was blocked; they organised the by-then widespread discontent among workers and peasants to press for independence.

The western powers were terrified of a scenario where anti-colonial movements "radicalise" in the face of obduracy or atrocities, turn communist or anti-western, get Soviet support, and capture the colonies for the eastern bloc. This had been narrowly avoided in Malaya, but the west had lost China, and kinda half-lost Vietnam and Korea. Other countries were at an earlier stage in the movement curve and still had moderate reformist or nonviolent leadership, but it was anticipated they would radicalise if the pattern repeated and the west could find itself surrounded by hostile Soviet-aligned countries. And the pattern *did* repeat in cases where colonial powers (Portugal; France in Algeria) or local settlers (Zimbabwe) held onto colonies through repression. So an attempt was made to instead rush lots of countries to independence under the leadership of moderate nationalists or astroturfed movements led to colonial-power cronies - an attempt started early by the British state and somewhat later (after Algeria) by the French. In some cases there were then coups or assassinations to remove leaders who proved too radical. Then colonisers encouraged trade and lent lots of money for capitalist-oriented development projects, culminating in the debt crisis and imposition of structural adjustment in the 1980s. So decolonisation succeeded in winning independence but failed to break the dependency/unequal trade system. Postcolonial states include a large group where political power was simply handed over to western puppets (e.g. Cote d'Ivoire), another large group where it was handed over to very nascent independence movements without any real struggle (e.g. Nigeria), a third group where it was handed over to moderates after a social struggle (e.g. India), and a small group who had full independence wars (e.g. Algeria).

It's amazing how rarely unequal trade and dependency come up in idpol discourse, considering how important they were for Fanon, Maoists, etc. They seem to have been replaced by "epistemic privilege".

"In terms of projects, I think the important thing is to free ourselves as much as possible from being under the control of the state and capital. The more we are also able to reconnect to other people, lifeforms and spaces as well, the better."

Agreed.

"There's no anarchism so far, rather it's Islamists, ethnonationalists and wannabe politicians drawing on local discontent, and the level of violence is sometimes extreme, but the potential is there for autonomous zones in future."

"In Europe and America at present I think the best thing is to create local nodes then try to network these outside of the major structures."

How? Can you elaborate on any attempts at this in the US? I imagine word of the support work greek anarchists have done for immigrant communities might trickle back to their home countries in phone calls or letters when they explain that these anarchists set them up in a squat or whatever, but how much does that do? It's not quantifiable, not that I need it to be.

Well, the kind of thing I'm envisioning hasn't really happened yet. In Europe there's still communes from the 60s/70s wave and newer ones set up on cheap land, as well as squatted eco-villages. A few have been criminalised but most are still going. In Germany there's a cluster around Wendland for instance, often the German ones are wagenplatz (caravan parks); in Spain some are in remote valleys but a lot are within cycling distance of the big cities. La ZAD is another good example although it was eventually part-repressed. Poole's Land in Canada seemed to work pretty well though I've heard it's defunct, or maybe just closed to visitors. At the moment a lot of the rural sites are very low-tech, but there's no reason today why they couldn't be active online and have people doing distance work as well as drop-outs. Someone in the last TOTW mentioned Free State Project which seems to have worked quite well though of course it's not my politics. The way I'd envision it is, a cluster of several different co-housing projects within close proximity, plus sympathetic households moving into the area; attempts to create local autonomous services covering the different groups in the area; plenty of boltholes and defensive infrastructure just in case; a main route in and out with kinda concentric circles of those more or less dropped-out at different distances from it. Some kind of warning system in case of raids etc. Terrain complexity so it's hard for the state to know how many people are there at a given time. We'd have several of these in different states, counties or (in Europe) countries, ideally with low-surveillance travel routes between them such as canals, cycle paths, hiking trails; if one is repressed then people could disperse to other sites in the network. Ideally we'd use inclusive services and Latin American-style community conscientization to build good relations with and politically influence locals and neutralise as far as possible the threat posed by the local state.

In the global South, I haven't got a clear idea how it would work but at the moment there's hardly any post-left anarchists outside the core (the odd insu, punk or eco group in Latin America, Turkey, Southeast Asia aside, and these generally urban groups). There was a sudden growth of Marxist groups in the South previously from the 50s onwards, which seems to have happened via Southern elite students in Europe picking up Marxist ideas, taking them back "home", and then doing the run-to-the-hills thing as a strategic move. Village and shanty-town communities are generally quite anti-authoritarian in their way of life, but plugged into authoritarian politics and ideologies with a real disconnect from their needs at the moment. The way I'd see it working is that we put some basic theory out in digestible form, and set up affinity groups in each country whose role is to carry the approach to different areas, bringing it into communities in the same way Latin American movements do today with Marxism (I've really struggled to find how they do this as there is no literature in English, but it seems to be based on Freirean methodology: finding "generative themes" based on existing community concerns which communities are then encouraged to find their own solutions to, on an autonomous basis). In this way we could end up with large post-left "territories" in areas where state control is already weak. Then in 20 years time when we have the next 1968-wave or crisis of accumulation, we're set-up to really challenge the system.

Ok, for just a couple seconds let’s dwell on the fact that we’re talking about decolonization (which I know you pointed out is somewhat of a difficult word to define, because, uhh, the history of what that word usually entailed) & a proposed strategy that requires a huge undertaking of European & North American anarchist groups spreading ways of life to the global south. I can tell that what you’re proposing isn’t coming from a “I know better than you, follow me & I’ll save you” kind of place but I’m sure others would have a field day clumsily sweeping that perceived “white-savior” minefield.

But if you agree that that’s who we’re talking to on this site (mostly NA & Euro @‘s) & that neocolonialism was always a false solution & that if getting rid of these neocolonial states requires an anarchist response, then what are steps can we take to help from our limited positions that aren’t totally shitty?

Maybe anarchist college student groups can do something similar to the vein of how some of those Marxist ideas were introduced by international students returning home in the 60s. I’m wary of organizing like this, it’s odd to me for reasons I won’t get into. But maybe there’s something worth exploring.

Helping translate strong anarchist theory into as many languages as possible might be worthwhile, too.

heh! poole's land did NOT "work well", where the hell did you hear that?

not to jump all over one tiny little example you gave but I happen to know a bit about that place and this sort of when-viewed-from-afar effect is exactly how these things go in my experience.

I could tell you a bunch of the same old stories about naive hippy nonsense and takeover by petty gangsters who want to turn things in to a racket for themselves but we all know the stories already. It's just grim survival stories ... often with a wealthy benefactor who takes a very hands-off approach until things get pretty crazy.

Well, they lasted 40 years as an open community and had numbers. I don't know how they eventually imploded.

The thing is, you're still arguing from a position where this kind of thing can't work but you can't really tell us why. It's a bit like saying "well, my demo only attracted 10 people so demos never work" or "my squat got evicted so squatting never works". Well, OK, maybe we now know it's not as simple as drop-out and it's utopia and the problems all vanish, and maybe we didn't know that in the 1960s. But the real question is, *why* these things go wrong. Treat the ones we've had so far as beta versions and patch them next time around so to speak. I've seen the scenario you're talking about, a couple of times with squats; other stuff has gradually got more mainstream, or was repressed. So what's your strategic propsals, other than stand up to petty gangsters, don't rely on wealthy benefactors and make sure there's a survival infrastructure in place?

I really don't find the grimdark "nothing works" approach politically helpful, since it's only real endpoints are, make our peace with the system or kill ourselves. If there's no way forward, then what are you trying to achieve?

it's not that I'm arguing from a "doesn't work" perspective, I lived in these ways for many years. What I'm doing is troubling what I think you're suggesting ... as if it's a panacea or a much better way for anarchists to build and project power or whatever. That hasn't been my experience.

Isolation tends to make people weaker, the enclosure of the commons and all that blah blah blah. It was survival only and there's nothing inherently wrong with this but lets not pretend our rusty piss buckets are spaceships to a better tomorrow.

So what kinda thing are you suggesting instead?

Finally got round to looking up the Poole's Land situation BTW. Basically, they started getting some planner harassment because they were charging for camping without having a license to do so, and this was round the time Poole wanted to quit. Why the state waited 30 years to object is anyone's guess; seems they were happy with the cheap housing for local precarious workers. Poole was selling the land before he died, either to the residents' collective or else he was gonna use the proceeds to buy them a site which was more remote and less subject to scrutiny (I kid you not). They admit in the videos they are the "end of the line" for people who are "refugees from the modern economy", lots of people with "mental health" or "addiction problems".

"poole's land did NOT "work well", where the hell did you hear that?"

I thought this announcement was clear enough?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti_IIdn7tag

I never been there, even tho strangely I went to Tofino ten years back and no one ever told me about the site, so I presume it was already imploding or getting private?

Also there was apparently one elephant in the room of that place. Elephant was a dodgy old wingnut called Michael Poole. Was that the same free camping I heard about, where the guy in charge was using it to sell his coke? Regardless, communes run by an alpha male are definitely not anarchist, major fucking DUH.

yeah, there's like, decades of stories and different dynamics? the guy who's namesake is on the place was ill for a long time and elsewhere, during which time, other problematic ppl were slowly outstaying their welcome. every squat or land project that has a revolving door and lasts for awhile has these type of problems.

I had a machete flashed at me after one of these charmers told me where he kept his money. like, he offers the info unprompted, then gets paranoid, then brandishes a machete at the person who didn't want to know his bank details in the first place. real big brain stuff!

I had a random gas station worker try to talk me out of going there when I asked her for directions, cuz everyone was terrified of the place, much of which was yuppie bullshit but ANYWAY, not much about it was even remotely anarchist in this anarchist's opinion.

more just lumpen as fuck? which is fine but uhm ... don't tell me its the rain when poverty is pissing on my face.

Interesting... how are you defining "problematic people"? How else would you deal with them, other than just put up with them or avoid them?

& yeah, my impression with anarchist and anarchic spaces (particularly working-class ones) is, the authoritarian personalities and middle-class snobs will self-exclude, there will be a range of psychological "types" including some paranoiacs, impulsive people, schizoids, addicts, any of whom can distress others or get in fights sometimes, and there will be the occasional sociopath or narcissist, but usually they'll be told to fuck off unless there's a power-hierarchy for them to dominate. So the problem of "Problematic people" kinda unpacks into 1) how to support people with psychological problems in anarchic spaces, 2) how to resolve/mitigate conflicts without machetes, and 3) how to stop the types more prone to concentrate power from doing so.

To tell the truth, it would bother me less some paranoiac threatening me to leave his stash alone than seeing pigs walking round with guns, particularly if I had some minimal self-defence skills. I daresay he couldn't use his machete to scare the whole site into not going outside at all except for work or 30-minute exercise, while also giving him half their income and refraining from telling him to fuck off... which makes him rather less scary than the state right now (though some of the Brazilian gangs *do* have that kind of power). Relative power-dispersal is increased anarchy even if it's not full anarchy; I suspect we won't fully figure out stuff like conflict resolution and psychology until we're further towards destroying the state and capital.

how am I defining problematic people? well threatening me with a machete for little reason is pretty obvious. and he was paranoid cause he was a drug dealer and I didn't care about that at all but it nonetheless, was why.

more generally, it would be people who behave in very selfish and destructive ways that dramatically effect other people's use of the space and the devil is always in the details with this stuff. everybody needs to be interested in trying to deal with conflict because the alternatives are denial and/or replication of the same old power dynamics from outside the space.

but this is always what happens with squats and blockades and autonomous zones of almost every kind ... have you never experienced what you're talking about here?

"But if you agree that that’s who we’re talking to on this site (mostly NA & Euro @‘s) & that neocolonialism was always a false solution & that if getting rid of these neocolonial states requires an anarchist response, then what are steps can we take to help from our limited positions that aren’t totally shitty?"

Obvious to me (at least on paper... often less obvious in the real conditions, for sure) that it's about "land back". Which means, occupy the land and live on it in a way that negates property. If you buy it legally at least make sure it'll go public domain in some way, like through a trust, or a "religious group" status.

This is my biggest criticism of the "Bellamy crowd", not so much the assumption they might be Right liberatarians with racist tendencies. That they contribute nothing to this green anarchy project if they advocate private property of land. Maybe it's profitable for them... but then what? Same old story?

Many rich people who went the eco-sustainable way got bigger badder projects already. Even David Mayer de Rothschild has been running one or two private eco-communities in Aotearoa, and no doubt they're successful at their game. That's just a greener type of neocolonialism that is often found to be also filled with racists in the US at least.

If you cancel property that cuts off a huge portion of your monetary needs from the start. I don't think it takes a genius to get that. Operational costs for your eco-farm can be backed by several sources that aren't nearly as costly as buying a land will be, so why make it more complicated due to following the dominant legalist imperatives when you can just find an appropriate place (or area) where to develop an eco-community, then go the full ZAD FTW way!?

I write a lot on these matters all the time and get little response. I just hope some people compute that.

The fact a path is not *there* is only due to the fact not enough people walked it before. You gotta walk the path to make it exist!

Yeah I know that's the risks. White (or idpol) anarchist neo-vanguardism; white "settler" projects in the South with no local impact; or getting wrongly vilified as one or other of these. Anyone attempting this would have to be very sensitive to people everywhere having their own problems and worldviews and ways of life, and that this is about autonomy and empowerment and not about someone coming along with all the answers. But I'm also concerned that the dispersal of power and discrediting of capitalism are at the moment going in really reactionary directions and people are getting sucked into dewesternisation capitalism and nationalist, revivalist, fundamentalist kinds of projects which are effectively colonised.

I guess my definition of colonisation today would be the imposition of capitalist monoculture and/or its glocal variants, e.g. commodification of farming, growing dependence on wages or sales instead of subsistence, expansions of schooling, state ID schemes. The main resistance up to now has come from anti-colonial and Marxist-inspired groups, and these define the culture of popular movements in most of the South. I think an effective decolonisation today would be post-left, Situationist, autonomist-like and encompass the kinds of rejection of commodified ways of living that European social movements practiced in the 1970s; I think this is very viable in the world's poorest areas, it would solve a good portion of the problems, empower people who are today rather fatalistic or reactive, and generate potential to actually break statist-capitalist power in these areas (thus "decolonise"), but it would require a paradigm-shift from the Marxist, collectivist, nationalist, liberal etc. views which are currently dominant, and this means we somehow need to get people on the ground in these areas going "wow, this really explains/solves things/provides a way forward". And I think the ideological challenges are different to those we face in the North: collectivism and attachment to gemeinschaft-type communities impedes formation of autonomous-type communities in the rural South whereas in the North the problem is mostly atomisation; clientelistic politics is very different from massified politics; and there's kinds of sexism, homophobia, sexual repression and suchlike of an intensity we rarely encounter in the North, to take a few examples. Now, I'm sure there are people who would accuse anarchists (even local ones) who are trying to convince, say, an Aymara or Yoruba community to replace collective duties with desire-based ludic systems or to loosen sexual norms and recognise the polyamory that's already happening with being a coloniser. At the same time, I think a post-left Aymara or Yoruba community would still be very different from a European or American one, and would also be less colonised, more autonomous, for adopting post-left technologies of power so to speak; they would fuse the anarchist ideas with their own culture which is already anarchic, and produce something more radical than what we already have. The whole "learning from the Other" and "centering the perspectives of the marginalised" and the idpol critique of egoism are actually doing the opposite of this, using the illiberalism and collectivism of less-decomposed groups as a hammer to bash down radical critique.

". . . still be very different from a European or American one, and would also be less colonised, more autonomous, for adopting post-left technologies of power so to speak; they would fuse the anarchist ideas with their own culture which is already anarchic, and produce something more radical than what we already have. "

I like the, "Here, have this. If it helps, run with it. If you get good at it, then please try and show me how you do it, because, honestly, I kinda suck at it."

Humility is nice to notice sometimes, ya know?

Also how would you go about spreading pro-situ theory? Maybe I'm jaded personally because I've tried locally to reintroduce situ concepts like psychogeography into anarchist discourse and have been met with, "Well, thanks for that, I guess." Shakes head. "Okay, now that that's over let's . . ."

Or honestly any theory? Just showing up and handing out leaflets to the downtrodden is something NA anarchists associate with missionaries. I guess some people went to Rojava, so people are willing to show up in another country and help "fight the good fight", but besides sending extra copies of literature to infoshops ("at the moment there's hardly any post-left anarchists outside the core (the odd insu, punk or eco group in Latin America, Turkey, Southeast Asia aside, and these generally urban groups)") , which I imagine are doing their own translation work, how do you do that?

Is it something similar to the Freedom Riders in the '60s driving down to the south and registering people to vote? But like, with books and good anarchy words? Is it an online thing? I know this sounds snarky but I do really appreciate your input, but seriously, how?

I'm not sure TBH. I don't think people arrive at post-left anarchy mainly by reading stuff, it comes from desire. But the ideas need to be around for the desire to have the hooks to attach to. I've mentioned a few times that Latin American movements manage to politicise communities, and they use stuff inspired by Freire, but other that this I've struggled to find details. Generally they're encouraging Marxism but the same thing would work with post-left anarchy, eco-anarchy, egoism etc. I think it kinda starts with: what's the problems round here, followed by: what can you/we do to solve the problems round here (done as discussion groups not propaganda), used as a lever to show that things are fucked because capitalism and that they can be unfucked to some degree by autonomous action plus people feel more empowered. Like, OK, suppose it's a Brazilian shanty-town and there's problems with police violence, the response might be organise to confront the police or it might be organise an early-warning system when they show up. The problem might be food shortages, the solution might be guerrilla gardening or making a rural co-op in the surrounding area. The organising could be very similar to how the Marxists do it, but with better politics. I think there's two big differences between post-left anarchy and Marxism which are relevant to politicising communities: the rejection of compulsory collectivism and the politics of desire (and corresponding aversion to repression/control by communities themselves). The former just means a different content to the dialogical work, the latter we probably need a consciousness-raising or (anti-)therapeutic toolkit which at the moment we don't have. I think an autonomous person usually has a strong sense of their own desire which rises from the id, and rejects the subordination of desire to ego or superego; the desire is there in everyone but it's usually buried under their character-structure or caught in alienated or reactive forms - so we need replicable methods of dismantling the character-structures and activating the desires underneath. I suspect this works best if the project of increasing autonomy from capital (e.g. re work) and the project of creating autonomous groups and sites of intense experience are also going on at the same time.

& yeah it shouldn't be either 1) Trotskyist-style leafleting/paper selling, 2) idpol/Maoist-style service to the people or 3) service provision to communities by anarchists. The point is that the community solves some of its own problems and becomes more autonomous (and more libertarian), which in turn opens up a whole world of theories and experiences which otherwise aren't there.

I ain't so sure about Latin America and I think that some Latino contributors of this site should be more in-the-know due to their background... but the post-left milieus appear to be mainly focused on urban environments.

This, aside from a spooky eco-extremist bunch in Mexico (who likely wouldn't take you at their places unless it's for throwing you down a very large boiling pot for a stew). And some native struggles there and there... but more "white-savior" shit? Also possibly interesting firefighters in Brazilian Amazon who also were reportedly fighting against loggers in some way. Brazil would seem to be a great place for giving it a go, if the brutal clusterfuck with violent gangs wouldn't be much an issue. Same applies to some Central American counties and parts of Colombia and Mexico, afaik.

Noteworthy that there's already bourgie eco-communities (by your usual White liberal yoga crowd) developing in these regions. Yes they're exclusive, yes they're private and for-profit and no they don't seem very friendly to anarcho-drifters and much less eco-autonomous radical communes. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't be overrun by some anarcho-drifter mutiny. Most of them got some very comfy set up in place so most of the work is done already. These places are well advertised on sites like Workaway so pretty easy to locate. "Decolonize" what else can it mean to you?

Furthermore, unless you've been living in a cave the past several months, but the Covid situation has greatly balkanized these regions.

Haven't heard much on the social effects of covid in LatAm, what do you mean by Balkanisation?... I know some of the rural places did their own lockdowns and kept out visitors, and the gangs in Mexico have made a big comeback, also the states did lockdowns/curfews but there was "low compliance" and sometimes unrest... you heard any more stuff?

Would it be possible to "partner" with MST or MSDT, try to shift them in a post-left direction? How about the Andean region (Bolivia, Ecuador)?

From the research I did, plenty of LA countries have been randomly shutting their borders to travelers, and even to transiting workers. Guatemala is still shut, and it's a major land obstacle for going either south or north. Some borders still are asking for negative PCR tests for entry, others not. For sure in general it seems less restrictive than other regions of the world. Situation appears a bit better in parts of South America I think.

A kind of balkanization is what we got with Covid measures. It got suddenly way problematic to travel the world, and each country came up with their own brand of Covid political opportunism.

Paramilitary-like gangs appear to be a major problem in these regions and I suppose you never know when or how bad it might hit your developing land utopia. Probably not unrelated as to why ELZN and FARC were armed groups or still are to some extent. But this view of mine could also have been fed by media perception management, and maybe things aren't that bad in most places.

I dunno about MST or MSTD...

Ah I see. Yeah, lots of countries making it harder to get in *or* out. I'm thinking strategically, medium-term, rather than right away anyway; we shall see whether borders stay closed. My impression worldwide is, some Southern countries went in hard to begin with but lockdowns were unenforceable, public opinion split or frayed and they haven't stayed in covid-mania so long. A lot of them have avoided second or third-wave lockdowns and are now freer than Northern countries. About half of Africa didn't have lockdowns and a lot of the rest had curfews which only applied in cities. Eastern Europe copied the west but with low compliance. India did nothing then had a hard lockdown overnight which caused a huge crisis and proved mostly unenforceable, they've avoided having a second lockdown. Southeast Asia hasn't had bad outbreaks and is mostly open again. Poorer countries which introduce second lockdowns seem to be having a lot of unrest. There's a few countries (Sri Lanka, Philippines, South Africa) went in harder than the west and didn't let people out at all. China have used the crisis very cleverly to expand cybernetic control without actually locking down most of the country; I'm anticipating large (possibly US-backed) guerrilla insurgencies in Xinjiang and Tibet within about a decade, then we'll *really* see what decolonization looks like today. Lockdowns are designed with the North in mind; I doubt they "work" anywhere, but they're particularly absurd in crowded shanty-towns with one tap per 100 people and with residents at risk of starving if they don't work for two weeks. Plus a lot of places with young demographics or mainly rural populations have hardly been hit by covid, there's a lot more deaths from TB which is both curable and vaccinatable but no-one cares.

As I say, I don't have a definite project in mind when talking about this stuff (land projects etc). I'm thinking in general and medium-term, how to escape the emerging control society (if it manages to emerge rather than just collapse) and get anarchy out of the rut it's in. In the North I think the best we can do is regroup as remote drop-out communities and recompose counterpower from there; we're a small minority surrounded by idiots. In the South I'm thinking more in terms of how to create a global movement by mobilising the poor and excluded on a huge scale, leading to large autonomous territories - because the poor in the South are considerably less idiotic than the average European or American and haven't been exposed to post-left anarchy yet. Projects in the South might work better as full insurgencies if anyone has the balls and the skills for it. Long March model but with post-left anti-politics, or like how the jihadis get all their people from all over the world in their warzones/base areas, but again with post-left anti-politics. The other main options are the Freirean kind of community politics but tweaked towards post-left approaches, or trying to work with existing quasi-autonomous organisations and move them in our direction (collectivism, vanguardism and self-sacrifice are the big problems I think). Wandering Teachers but with anarchist ways of living rather than literacy.

Yes, correct. You are missing the point, big time.

Since nothing you see here is about wage labor, or grasps the centrality of wage labor to contemporary life, how can this contribute to the rise of an anti-wage labor mass social movement? Instead you get hippie back-to-the-land idealism and IdPol guilt.

Capitalism destroys more livelihoods than it creates. The proportion of people worldwide making their main income from wage labour is likely going down. The informal sector (mostly petty commodity production) is booming. Drop-out movements are often ways out of wage labour via subsistence, scavenging, cooperatives, etc. In a scenario like Sing Chew's Dark Age theory (yes, it's Marxist-based), back-to-the-land will happen during system collapse.

How do you expect to have an anti-wage-labour movement without available alternatives to wage labour? How do you envisage people meeting their needs instead of wage labour?

"Back to the land" was already happening. It didn't need the external pressure of systemic implosion of large-scale resource exploitation (which, aside from a partial agricultural collapse, is still NOT happening).

The problem in Sing Chew's marxist (maoist?) theory lies in the very same old determinist scheme classic marxism. Here's this excerpt from a book review that expresses it well:

Some of the more intricate details of Chew's explanation raise questions, however, such as the parallel drawn between the polis and the medieval manor and monastery. We are to view these as "simplified and self sustaining'' institutions that took shape during periods of system restoration and recovery. Medieval monasteries, Chew notes, appear to have had much in common with late-twentieth-century bioregional communities, "organized around self-sustaining organized principles of living within the contours and limits of the landscape" (p. 165, n. 5). Religion as a shaping force of early medieval monasticism-or alternatively, spirituality or devotion-is not addressed here at all; rather, medieval monks are described as members of communes whose primary concern was to live a sustainable existence in their natural environments. While it is true that early Benedictines sought to avoid secular influences, this had less to do with nature, or a commitment to sustainable living (whether driven by necessity or spiritual inclination) than it did with the belief that worldliness inhibited man from becoming closer to God. In addition, the secular influences Benedictine monks sought to avoid proved unavoidable, and early on.
Donations of land and other items were accepted by monasteries, and labor in various forms was required to manage an expanding monastic economy. To characterize medieval monasteries as "islands surrounded by seas of socioeconomic changes" (p. 165, n. 5) is to disregard some of these critical connections between the monastery and the secular world outside. Thus, while the medieval manor indeed served as an effective unit of local government, the emergence and proliferation of monasteries during this period cannot be adequately explained within confines of this ecological model.

Communities obviously aren't driven by external ecological/economic factors, but their perception of the latter might be a major component of their driving narratives. People are either driven by ideas or in the failure/absence of these narratives, by economic necessities to whatever works out of the box.

I have seen many cults around here that weren't far remote from Medieval monasteries. The thing is that these cults never really evolved into being more than just the "Monastery", and also their politics were more a factor in keeping the "seculars" away than driving them in. In a Mad Max kinda of collapsing world (let's NEVER underestimate the Mad Max films -the first and last one, especially- a cinematic postmodern take on our world!), that would be like Chew's new Dark Age, these cults when still around, would perhaps appear as last resorts for sustaining life, at the high expenses of submitting to their terrible arbitrary rules, especially to their alpha males in charge...

So I can't see these resorts as any good option for those like anarchists who want a better world out of themselves and others. And that's why anarchists should better understand the importance of starting their own "monasteries" that seek autonomy from the dominant system, and trust each other into it. Collapse or not, you don't want actual NeoFeudal barbaric CHUD communes to be your remaining solution.

>that's why anarchists should better understand the importance of starting their own "monasteries" that seek autonomy from the dominant system, and trust each other into it

Yes, exactly. Slow collapse may be happening again now, but what are springing up spontaneously are gangs, Islamist territories, local strongmen , ethnic autochthony movements and so on. Dispersal of power but with shit politics and localised domination. Hence why we need to build our own projects and maybe try to promote post-left approaches.

I need to read Chew more closely I think. But the situation with medieval monasteries is complicated. The expanding church absorbed local pagan traditions as saint-cults, and each time resistance emerged to/within the church, it took the form of a new cult. Many of these were absorbed as monastic orders, others were suppressed as heresies after carving out their own territories for awhile. They cover the whole range from ultra-authoritarian proto-Calvinists like the Jesuits, through to quasi-anarchist antinomians like the Anabaptists, Adamites, Beghards. The Franciscans were pretty radical at first but got recuperated I think. I daresay the church-monastery relation was a patron-client structure, the central power sought loyalty on a few axes in return for supporting otherwise-autonomous groups. Also the medieval church was basically the welfare state of its day, running most of the education, healthcare, poor relief, orphanages, elderly care, proto-psychology, etc, In any case there were multiple stages to this, beginning with the fraying of Roman power, the reliance on recuperated barbarians as border-guards and the ultimate implosion of the empire, growing autonomy of peasants, the rise of clans based on warlords, and then the rise of feudal lords based on the provision of castles to protect from bandits. Nine-tenths of the population were rural into the late Middle Ages and there's evidence of animism, syncretism, local customary polities and other forms of self-determination in the "less developed" areas like Ireland and Andalusia, well into the nineteenth century. It can be debated how much power the kings, lords, priests, merchants and so on actually had; I suspect the Scottian arts of resistance were in full flow and the peasants were much freer in practice than on paper.

Monasticism creates insular views and perpetuates the binary mindset. To hide from the land is to invite attack and surveillance from the Other. Unless you mean monasticism without walls, a focused inner metaphysics replacing the siege mentality by spreading outwards with a diplomatic methodology and exchange of creatice capital.

I'll have to use the Preview function more often, as the quotation code didn't work here, from "Some..." to "...model".

Text block is also relevant to this TOTW, imo.

the discussion of this topic is impoverished by neglecting to discuss extractivism and the industrial production and mass culture that fuels it. the legacy of colonialism is which "developed" countries (militarily/economically mighty geopolitical superpowers and their allies) benefit from the offshored extraction and industrial production. decoloniality current privileges the cultural and epistemic aspect of colonialism, it's place in academia keeps it within acceptable discourse, defaulting to nation-state's democratic institutions and grassroots organizations working within the framework of what's permissible. only full stop extractivism (mainly mining and agrobusiness activities) and the global economy as we know it is a real inroad towards decolonization. decoloniality scholars are westernized academics (regardless of their ethnicities) that recuperate the traditions of indigenous cultures in order to produce a body of knowledge in which they're better positioned in the social hierarchy it produces and legitimizes. they retrofit the academic postmodern discourse around democracy with signifiers derived from folklore to make it sound exotic and obscure and unapproachable by a former cohort with tenure, allowing for a new cohort to participate in the production of knowledge due to a perceive novelty, legitimacy, justice, incentivized by state's tokenization multi-culty inclusivity efforts. meanwhile, all the post-docs and fellowships in the world will not stop the mining of metals, the extraction of fossil fuels, or even minerals to produce make-up. this destruction of the land base of cultures, of the displacement and murder of people who live in places of interest due to their resources, is the main destructive force in which one can perceive coloniality of power. reviving dead indigenous languages, narrative traditions, spiritual and philosophical wisdom in the hopes it coincides in a poignant way with western scientific ecological knowledge (that's employed to greenwash everything) in a way that moves westernized liberal hearts into changing the status quo into a deeper more organic or interconnected way that differs from the modern vision of progress is perhaps less of a far stretch than trying to acquire enough dynamite to explode the different machines and infrastructure that make the world economy work. after all, the world works less than an action movie, and more like a disney movie with a happy ending, maybe pocahontas or avatar, but with less fighting and more publish or perish and organizing. all this is irrelevant to academic discourse since drastically changing the status quo in a way that dismantles absolutely everything as we know it (including governement, academia, industry) is not an option and everyone, even most dumb people, know that it isn't possible to bring about through concerted efforts, but might happen as a result of various overlapping catastrophes, and the emerging situation would not be a utopia, but life as Earth has beared for aeons. or something other that makes more sense, another shitpost for the pile.

"everyone, even most dumb people, know that it isn't possible to bring about through concerted efforts"
Wow, so unlike you, the orator for the common person. What is a "dumb" person? Maybe the invisible consumerist plebes have an emotional weakness which could be viewed through barbaric eyes as pitiful stupidity but by the empath as intelligent? My vernacular may not be talking on the same page, good conversation can create a bridge, but our relationships even to our pets, their pets, they consider almost worthy to die for. Social power and even thinking about it becomes like an annoying inferior triviality to some, ----who is going to feed the goldfish or the kids---how will I pay the rent---I wish I was indigenous before the colonizers came---wow, I can live on cats until my next government food voucher etc etc.
Everything has been tried, and new stuff is just old stuff in digital clothes, books mostly have screens, but the human relationships have remained the same for thousands of years. The individual who finds the autonomous zone within their own semantic reality destroys ideology and Disney in one blow. Just like if 1 million chimps beat on typewriters for 100 years non-stop maybe in one thousand years the complete works of Shakespeare will be produced. Like wise 1 million humans thinking about improving their living conditions for 100 years they will build stuff, as colonialists, for themselves and the indigenous to use, to make life better. Out of all this "better life" comes economy and greed people. Are greedy people dumb? Yes. So what do China do they take them to re-educate out of dumbness and into collectivist obedience and service. Social credit by face recognition cameras set up all over the city is no different to a moral code indoctrinated into a Western mind. All civilization is Auschwitz, like BB said, or Le Guins "The Ones That Walked Away from Omelas".
All the chimps typing and ideas talking will always in a civilization produce the victim, somewhere in a dark hidden unknown crevice of the city or even the tribal forest there is the sacrificed child or maiden or youth.
It seems that only the autonomous individualist can live a blameless silent contented life with their own esoteric knowledge and emotional psyche to guide them flawlessly through life.

"the discussion of this topic is impoverished by neglecting to discuss extractivism and the industrial production and mass culture that fuels it."

For real, there are some inspiring struggles here in North America, specifically land defense struggles in Canada.

" it's place in academia keeps it within acceptable discourse, defaulting to nation-state's democratic institutions and grassroots organizations working within the framework of what's permissible."

Happens all the time. Sucks to see people's energy/passion swindled away into what many would say are dead-ends.

" decoloniality scholars are westernized academics (regardless of their ethnicities) that recuperate the traditions of indigenous cultures in order to produce a body of knowledge in which they're better positioned in the social hierarchy it produces and legitimizes. they retrofit the academic postmodern discourse around democracy with signifiers derived from folklore to make it sound exotic and obscure and unapproachable by a former cohort with tenure, allowing for a new cohort to participate in the production of knowledge due to a perceive novelty, legitimacy, justice, incentivized by state's tokenization multi-culty inclusivity efforts"

The academy will get ya every time.

"reviving dead indigenous languages, narrative traditions, spiritual and philosophical wisdom in the hopes it coincides in a poignant way with western scientific ecological knowledge (that's employed to greenwash everything) in a way that moves westernized liberal hearts into changing the status quo into a deeper more organic or interconnected way that differs from the modern vision of progress is perhaps less of a far stretch than trying to acquire enough dynamite to explode the different machines and infrastructure that make the world economy work. "

To be fair, have you tried acquiring that stuff to do that stuff? It might work : )

"but might happen as a result of various overlapping catastrophes"

I think it's okay not to know how it will happen, people who make a run for the prize look more and more ridiculous to me, these days anyways.

To be fair the neocolonialism some of us talked about before is pretty much the same as what you're calling extractivism. Obviously a neo-subsistence land movement in the South is directed against monoculture cash-crop production. Though, we also need to target the regions which aren't being actively plundered at a given time, but just neglected. 50s/60s decolonisation was considered a threat because it might stop extraction by western powers (even if just by moving it to the Soviet bloc); it was tamed by allowing political independence but with western control over "resources" left intact. The struggle against dispossession is one of the things which could draw marginal regions into a post-left/autonomous politics. Destroying the whole system might not be viable now but it becomes so if autonomous zones spread virally. It's happened in incomplete forms before, Bougainville, Chiapas, the Niger Delta, Azawad, various Maoist and nationalist insurgencies, the affected regions become useless for global profiteering and the extractive operations are either shut down entirely or downscaled to a petty commodity level. So far, the problem has been that new politicians, entrepreneurs, gangsters etc take over and the areas which become autonomous slip back inside the system - that's why there needs to be a strong post-left/eco-anarchist anti-politics for these zones to remain resistant. Subsistence, DIY living, local survival networks with or without a petty commodity element are completely normal in most of the peripheral regions but my impression is that very few people embrace a subsistence politics, a lot of them aspire to "modernise" or redistribute power to themselves, and they get easily tricked and misdirected by bosses seeking power.

How can the indigenous relationship to land be adopted by the West to replace land ownership with custodianship? Let's disregard the tokenization and Idpol ritualization of cultural artifacts and delve deeper beyond the colorful display to the core values of free land without fences and the free food which can be grown on it.

I also like Aragorn!'s Indigenous Anarchism piece, and have also been trying to track down another piece I read ages ago, before idpol got like it is today, with an ecological vision of radical indigenism. I think it was this:
https://sanfrangraypanthers.wordpress.com/2007/11/24/ward-churchill-i-am...
Churchill is for land restoration but not dispossessing small landowners or sending people back to Europe, he's talking about basically a big mainly-Native American eco-territory on "a huge territory lying east of Denver, west of Lawrence, Kansas, and extending from the Canadian border to southern Texas, all of it “outside the loop” of U.S. business as usual", in areas which are either government land, existing reservations or economically insolvent, with a right to total secession which communities can choose to exercise completely, partially or not at all, bioregionalism, various kinds of compromises and pacted governance, and freedom to do as one likes aside from a fundamental rule of not displacing other lifeforms. Limited population and restrictions on consumption of scarce resources, which would probably lead to outflows of white suburbanites. The Plains get rewilded in the process. All rather interesting and much better than anything I've seen from recent idpols, not least because it's a definite proposal and it's workable if it got enough support. Certainly looks like decolonisation to me, without the guilt-tripping and compatible with most of the rest of anarchist and progressive politics, and getting around a lot of the reasons for defensiveness among white Americans; mostly it's the corporations and government losing stuff.

There's interesting stuff in Taiaiake Alfred as well, which I read awhile back. I think the Indigenous Studies literature only went to shit after about 2005. There's also interesting stuff coming out of Latin America on buen vivir and suchlike. Cusicanqui is an anarchist apparently.

I think there would have to be a dispossession of the land used by large corporate or family dynastic empires which are mostly industrial scale agricultural enterprises unless they forfeit a large portion of food for free. Imagine a Wall St along the lines of a national Potlatch Exchange Hub.
There are some small business models which include free meals at the end of the day out of surplus perishable foods. There's a growing connected holistic empathy system of social awareness emerging.

Churchill claims the Great Plains agriculture is not economically viable and is propped up by subsidies. Take away the subsidies and most of it will collapse. The way he says it... doesn't really mention the fight these Republican-voting petty-bourgeoisie will put up about it. The same issue (subsistence small-scale production versus latifundia, corporate agribusiness, massive ranches) is playing out pretty violently in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, etc.

I wish you were right about the emerging holistic empathy system but it seems more like an emerging moralistic pranoiac hivemind which holds up harm/risk to arbitrarily singled-out "victims" as a baton with which to beat the wider field of social concerns, as in the covid crisis: like, we're all commanded to be holistically empathetic towards the abstract mediatised at-risk grannies to the point of not giving a fuck about the misery of stay-at-home, the starving poor, the suicides or domestic violence or ruined lives etc. We started to get holistic consciousness with the 2015 refugee wave but it a couple of little bangs later and the same holistic dynamic gets flipped.

you know @critic, this thread really seems to suggest you love railing at oversimplifications while complaining that that's what people are doing to you. I mean, some of what's being said to you is just lazy identity based hot takes, it's true but setting aside the VALID TENSION between colonialism and needed land to exist on... for a second ...

my personal favorite is "poor people get by without rules" or they "prefer no rules". you're supposed to be a smart person, right? when somebody challenges something you said, you just talk even more but you never stop and honestly ask yourself if this is ... a really stupid, lazy, sweeping generalization you just made about millions of people? while busily complaining about how identity is the problem with other people's analysis but not yours? hmmm?

Fuck off, IDpol!
Personally I don't think it's very useful to use colonialism and decolonization as a root-metaphor for everything. It makes a lot more sense to me, to think in terms of different ways of life. Indigenous ways of life are/were alternatives to capitalism with non-capitalist economies - subsistence, petty commodity, gift economy, mutual aid, resilience not efficiency - and more immediate social relations and relations to nature which aren't necessarily extractivist or dominating. How do you expect to have an anti-wage-labour movement without available alternatives to wage labour? How do you envisage people meeting their needs instead of wage labour? The expanding church absorbed local pagan traditions as saint-cults, and each time resistance emerged to/within the church, it took the form of a new cult. Many of these were absorbed as monastic orders, others were suppressed as heresies after carving out their own territories for awhile. They cover the whole range from ultra-authoritarian proto-Calvinists like the Jesuits, through to quasi-anarchist antinomians like the Anabaptists, Adamites, Beghards. I'm not sure TBH. I don't think people arrive at post-left anarchy mainly by reading stuff, it comes from desire. But the ideas need to be around for the desire to have the hooks to attach to. I've mentioned a few times that Latin American movements manage to politicise communities, and they use stuff inspired by Freire, but other that this I've struggled to find details. Generally they're encouraging Marxism but the same thing would work with post-left anarchy, eco-anarchy, egoism etc. I think it kinda starts with: what's the problems round here, followed by: what can you/we do to solve the problems round here (done as discussion groups not propaganda), used as a lever to show that things are fucked because capitalism and that they can be unfucked to some degree by autonomous action plus people feel more empowered. Like, OK, suppose it's a Brazilian shanty-town and there's problems with police violence, the response might be organise to confront the police or it might be organise an early-warning system when they show up. The problem might be food shortages, the solution might be guerrilla gardening or making a rural co-op in the surrounding area. The organising could be very similar to how the Marxists do it, but with better politics. I think there's two big differences between post-left anarchy and Marxism which are relevant to politicising communities: the rejection of compulsory collectivism and the politic. The Franciscans were pretty radical at first but got recuperated I think. I daresay the church-monastery relation was a patron-client structure, the central power sought loyalty on a few axes in return for supporting otherwise-autonomous groups. Also the medieval church was basically the welfare state of its day, running most of the education, healthcare, poor relief, orphanages, elderly care, proto-psychology, etc, In any case there were multiple stages to this, beginning with the fraying of Roman power, the reliance on recuperated barbarians as border-guards and the ultimate implosion of the empire, growing autonomy of peasants, the rise of clans based on warlords, and then the rise of feudal lords based on the provision of castles to protect from bandits. Rebuilding these kinds of relations, or reinventing new kinds of systems which aren't capitalist or ecologically or socially alienated, is and always was an important part of anarchism. I don't think race has any particular place in this, besides the fact that anarchist communities shouldn't be proactively racist (& in the same way shouldn't be discriminating based on any other spook). Anti-capitalism has a major place because capitalism is today the main way the elites of the North plunder the South, as well as being one of the biggest forms of alienation. But it's also absolutely essential to keep the focus on desire, agency and fighting the system.

(Continued)
It's happened in incomplete forms before, Bougainville, Chiapas, the Niger Delta, Azawad, various Maoist and nationalist insurgencies, the affected regions become useless for global profiteering and the extractive operations are either shut down entirely or downscaled to a petty commodity level. So far, the problem has been that new politicians, entrepreneurs, gangsters etc take over and the areas which become autonomous slip back inside the system - that's why there needs to be a strong post-left/eco-anarchist anti-politics for these zones to remain resistant. Subsistence, DIY living, local survival networks with or without a petty commodity element are completely normal in most of the peripheral regions but my impression is that very few people embrace a subsistence politics, a lot of them aspire to "modernise" or redistribute power to themselves, and they get easily tricked and misdirected by bosses seeking power. Implying every rural/wilderness/land project is colonial (since I hadn't specified any particular zone). Implying autonomous zones as such are colonial. Completely indefensible claims hidden behind a vicious little comment which added nothing to the discussion. Which LOGICALLY means anarchists should stay in cities under ever-increasing surveillance so as not to offend idpols. Logical deductions of assumptions and implications are NOT "falsely imagined" in someone's "butthurt brain". You now try to gaslight us that the comment didn't imply any of these things and we're crazy to think it did. Logic = madness. Seriously, you belong in an Orwell novel. (Incidentally, the far right do *the exact same thing* with logical criticisms). Safe space policies are based on behaviorist psychology which is a WHITE AMERICAN ideology based on separation of mind from body and the illusion of perfect rational self-control, plus the misreading of emotion/affect as strategic choice. They have the effect of requiring perfect self-control and ideological conformity in a manner which excludes most of the working-class, the abuse-traumatised and others with psychological problems. In practice they are "unsafe" and manipulated by a minority of rhetorically-skilled wannabe dictators who keep everyone else in a state of fear lest they be called-out, viciously abused, then banned. These mini-tyrants will of course feel "safer" from the existential threat they feel when anyone challenges their power. Yeah, I'm awful. I'm Hitler. Look at the multiplication of conduct codes and safe space policies in social centers and online anarchist groups for example. The trick is: not only are they authoritarians disguised as anarchists, they are also adherents of a puritanical ideology which has all its origins in Europe and Euro-America (American behaviorism and cybernetics, German-American puritan anti-body morality, Euro/American/Australian Third Way and Eurocommunism, French poststructuralism, Maoism based on European Marxism). But they spray around the signifiers "Black", "Indigenous", "decolonize", "racist", "white supremacist" until everyone imagines they are actually derived from colonized peoples and that Twitter deplatforming is an ancient Native American custom and the idea that people are just effects of positionalities is some ancient wisdom that everyone except Europeans already knows. I've met idpols who literally think that huge numbers of African workers and peasants are sitting around worrying about white Americans checking their privilege. This kind of ventriloquism!

yeah ok, so move on to the zona remota then? fuck dude, quit telling me and show me.

expect that whoever might have some semi-legit claim to having been there longer might at the least, shit talk you, at the worst, shoot at you or burn down your hut or whatever.

I'm unclear on why you'd expect the hateful shit talking to ever stop? Some of it has some validity... I just expect everything I do to involve at least one angry windbag screeching at me and some of them have a point when they're doing it. Also, I'm an anarchist so everything I do comes down to - try to stop me. anyway, best of luck with your land project! lol

LMAO. Academics and pseudo-academics don't actually do these projects. Getting the mass to agree with them and tell them how smart they are is all they secretly desire.

Is that @critics' deal? I don't know who anybody is and that's the way I likes it.

does. not. seem. fun. at. parties.

I support and agree with the critic. But at some point the time comes to make it happen.

Just do it.

Leave the city behind, there is no freedom to be had in concrete and steel.

And like, the thing is... there’s nothing saying that you necessarily have to associate with the idpol-left IRL. By all means, have a connection to your local scene, if you want, but just stay at a comfortable arms length away from their shitty dramas?

Don’t you figure that all the time and energy that gets spent on stressing over their bullshit would be better spent on researching ghost towns to relocate to, start a landproject, build a homestead, learn a trade to sustain it, start a side hustle to keep it funded, etc? Be honest, how much time are you wasting trying to argue with people who hold an opinion opposite to yours backed by towering levels of emotion? No one gets convinced this way. They’re not going to budge, and the whole thing is just a massive time-suck.

@critic, why don’t you start a podcast or an online distribution project? You’re a smart person. Why not organize your ideas into a more stable format like a blog or a zine, instead of casting your pearls to the swine in, of all godforsaken places, the comments section at @news? I mean, talk about a WASTE of potential! Why not contact an already existing publication like No More City and get your shit out there?

You can do better than this...

I think @critic is referring to the metaphysical departure from the city, a deconstruction of order and fixed traditions.Sure, it helps to get out into the boondocks, but an abandoned urban environment could still function as an TAZ.

It’s all about RAZ (roving autonomous zones, i.e: gypsy-style vanlife convoys) or PAZ (permanent autonomous zone, i.e: a mountaintop homestead).

Umm, but inbetween RAZ and PAZ there has to be a TAZ, so folk can rest.

or PIZZAZ
Permanent Interstitial Zapatista Zombification Autonomous Zoo

Right.. why have it Permanent when you just can go Semi? Liberals still kickin!

Add new comment