Death to the United States: A Reponse to Dale Carrico November 9, 2012
Posted by Summerspeaker in Anarchism, Occupy Wall Street.trackback
See here for context.
Voting for a President isn’t properly a matter of voting for a God to worship or a daddy to order you around or blame everything on.
Please tell this to your fellow Democrats.
It was going to be either Obama or Romney. Those were the only two options.
Only because people believe this. In describing political reality, you create political reality.
If everything better short of your ideal is going to be identified with a billy club to your skull — even when it literally isn’t, even when fairer and more supportive makes lives better in ways even your own rhetoric entails you would prefer to the alternative — then your theory has lead you profoundly astray, you will never have anything that matters, you will never help anyone in ways that are legible to the stakeholders in question, your life cannot be meaningful or worthwhile.
The state, whether run by Democrats or Republicans, literally is a billy club to the skull. Guess who was mayor of Chicago at the NATO summit back in May. That’s right, Rahm Emanuel, a former Obama White House Chief of Staff. How about in Los Angeles at the eviction of the local Occupy Wall Street group? Antonio Villaraigosa, another Democrat. Oakland? Jean Quan. Along with Obama, the last two indicate the hollowness of diversity and inclusion under the liberal status quo. I recommend this analysis. As mentioned in another post, I don’t particularly care whether folks vote. However, I do fiercely oppose the insistence on voting and the celebration of oppressors like Obama.
If freedom is experiences only in temporary localized episodes your politics is literally indistinguishable from the most uncritical acquiescent consumer who experiences freedom watching tv or exing on a dancefloor. If action is random acts of vandalism and disruption your politics is literally indistinguishable from the most uncritical inefficacious criminality (which after all is also symptomatic of class/race/patriarchal stratifications and normalized abused but hardly activist for that).
I submit that dancing and criminality do more to improve the world than voting ever has. With that foregrounded, I don’t advocate these things alone but as part of a larger transformative strategy. As Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón wrote, “Revolutionary workers: Cultivate disrespect.” Direct action and disobedience get the goods.
You really seem to want to help, you really seem to care about equity-in-diversity, you really seem smart: you need to get over yourself and help out for real and leave this pseudo-radical anarcho-masturbation techno-transcendentalist nonsense behind.
This ain’t gonna happen. I don’t want to help so much as want to live free alongside my comrades. Mutual aid is the kind of help I practice.
Queering the Singularity 
“Please tell this to your fellow Democrats.”
I don’t have to because almost none of them believe what you are attributing to them because it makes you feel superior without doing anything to earn it.
“In describing political reality, you create political reality.”
Wishing makes it so — the usual song of lazy privileged deluded reactionaries who fancy themselves radicals.
“The state, whether run by Democrats or Republicans, literally is a billy club to the skull.”
Like most anarchists you miss most of reality and think it’s an insight rather than a blindness.
“I submit that dancing and criminality do more to improve the world than voting ever has.”
Then you are just another white guy American consumer who thinks he is god’s gift to the world. Sure, you wrap your narcissism up in faux-radical drag, instead of scratching your nuts watching the game and drinking beers out of your fridge, but in political terms there’s not much there there.
“I don’t want to help so much as want to live free alongside my comrades.”
I get it. You’re useless and you like it that way and you think that makes you The Revolution. What a waste.
It’s not a matter of feeling superior, it’s a matter of rejecting the system brutalizes me and my comrades on a daily basis. If wanted to feel superior I could just vote for Obama and make fun Republicans (not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that).
Crude materialism in the fashion of the technocracy movement and some transhumanists has merit in the political area because it disrupts the status quo people like you (re)produce. So many of us seek alternatives and are policed invocations of reality. Enjoy denying the political effects of your description of reality, but don’t expect to convince everyone. You won’t.
I’m glad you get it. There’s a trend among anarchists away from academics and toward so-called criminals (not that the two categories are mutually exclusive). I remember a comment on anarchistsnews.org a little while back that argued we should be reaching out folks who steal cars for fun rather than to liberals/progressives. I say we can do both, but the attempted shift in orientation comes much recommended. Many of my comrades would denounce you with even more vehemence than you denounce me, but I shy away from that approach. As different as our dreams are, I prefer you to, say, Mitt Romney. I can proclaim with near certainty that you’ve got better politics than the vast majority of white-privileged male-bodied folks. Even I am appalled but not surprised that 59% of white male voters opted for Romney. Kill whitey?
“Crude materialism in the fashion of the technocracy movement and some transhumanists has merit in the political area because it disrupts the status quo people like you (re)produce.”
Yeah, the queer democratic socialist is reproducing the status quo, and transhumanist techno-transcendental gizmo-fetishists disrupt the status quo which is thoroughly suffused already with unsustainable techno-triumphalism consumer-acquiescence and gizmo-fetishism. Up is down, blah blah, you probably think this nonsense is revolutionary poetry. Again, what a waste.
“As different as our dreams are, I prefer you to, say, Mitt Romney.”
No shit, Sherlock. Next you’ll expect praise for noticing water is wet.
yo, queer-demo-socialist, you’re reproducing the status quo by trying to extend the protected classes of people acknowledged and made recognizable by the status quo rather than say destroying things (like the status quo, lol). capitalism can co-op pretty much everything. niche markets, ya know? if only us queers had like a billion dollar lobby-ist or some shit, things would really change, lol.
You don’t know me and I don’t know you, and the real proof in the matter of these glib charges we are flinging is in pudding neither of us is likely to taste. You accuse me of assimilation because you fancy I’m an uncritically Obamabotic liberal I suppose (although it is mostly Fox News fulminators who confuse Obama for a socialist like me) and then I accuse you of much the same assimilation because anarcho-radicalism seems to me indistinguishable in practice and substance from complacent consumption and narcississm. This is all very predictable and boring to me tho’ I’m pleased it provides you occasion at any rate for so much laughing out loud. Good luck to you.
The comments make this a very depressing blog to read…
I can agree with that. As rule of thumb, reading online comments leads to unpleasant mental states.
Anarchism is a joke. It’s inherently contradictory. How in the world are you going to have an “anarchist movement”? As soon as you create a movement for anything, you implicitly and inherently plant the seeds for government. This “anarchism” will merely be what you and your buddies wish the world to be, nothing more. Anarchism won’t even reach the phase where all government will have broken down to have people living in peaceful “voluntary” communities. No. Merely a coup will be staged and a new government shall replace the old one. People of diverse backgrounds and interests, especially when the barriers to their will (government), have been eased or dissolved, WILL take advantage. Anarchism at best will lead to a new government, at worst, total war among varied interest groups, vying for dominance and power. This is A BIG mistake anarchists make regarding government and the nature of human beings. Rather than work to better the institutions and structures that exist now, the democracy that took centuries to develop, and has years of merit, influence, and reliability, they would destroy all these things to create some bizarre impossible scenario where by some miracle, people of diverse backgrounds, interests, and needs would no longer need government and live in small isolated villages of “like minded people” (of which NO TWO MINDS ARE ALIKE). How funny.
I imagine most of us anarchists are familiar with this critique. On balance I consider government and hierarchy more dangerous than the the specter of the Hobbesian state of nature. I’m down with anarchism as what my buddies and I wish the world to be, but that only a tiny slice of freedom.