Treason to the State Is Loyalty to the Species January 24, 2013
Posted by Summerspeaker in Anarchism, Anti-imperialism, Decolonization, Transhumanism.trackback
Once you walk through the wall with me, then as I see it you are one of us. We are responsible to you and you to us; you become an Anarresti, with the same options as all the others. But they are not safe options. Freedom is never very safe. – Shevek
Returning to Dale Carrico’s blog after an extended break has convinced me to address the issue of arms control. As a transhumanist anarchist concerned with reaching a free and egalitarian future, contemplating how to negotiate risk constitutes a key area of inquiry for me. I advocate a decentralized approach that both challenges actually existing gun culture and rejects government regulation. Authority kills – if not the body, then the mind and spirit. I would rather face physical danger than live securely in a dungeon. Dale’s promotion of bureaucratized coercion demonstrates how fundamentally statists and anarchists disagree. Patriotic dissent won’t do the trick here, folks. Our times call for treason.
Dale recently declared that the “private possession” of a “military-style weapon” is reprehensible and “literally treasonable” if combined with the wrong attitude. Ey later elaborated on eir desire to imprison “literal armed insurrectionists” and eir opposition to the “anarchist and secessionist conceits” involved. While I loathe the politics of many if not most so-called gun nuts, I find Dale’s celebration of the U.S. government’s monopoly on force and assertion of legitimately at least as troubling.
Although Dale invokes the rightfully despised figure of the white-supremacist militiaman, eir denigration of secession and insurrection reminds me of how the white-supremacist establishment talked and talk about revolutionary autonomist and separatist movements. Defending the U.S. state’s integrity means supporting settler colonialism. As numerous Native scholars and radicals argue, the United States is a settler state based on the dispossession of Indigenous people and decolonization means its transformation if not utter elimination. This understanding of the country stands irreconcilable with Dale’s repeated assertion that the United States is an “accountable and democratic state.”
Historically, arms control has functioned to keep the masses from threatening the bosses; in the United States, the Black Panthers terrified white folks and so inadvertly made gun regulation a reality in California. During the Plan de San Diego uprisings in South Texas, Anglo officials confiscated guns from ethnic Mexicans while performing summary executions that left hundreds dead. If toting weapons and yearning for autonomy makes a person crazy, it ain’t just racist white folks who’re crazy. The list includes countless revolutionaries of color.
Dale and company claim assaults rifles are useless against the mighty of the U.S. military – and this has considerable validity – but I’ve also heard from an acquaintance with personal experience that AK-47 fire scatters FBI agents quite effectively. Your millage may vary.
Despite what the above looks like, I’m hardly a firearm enthusiast. I respect my warrior comrades but tend toward viewing guns as a liability. I’d prefer a world without them, but if some shooting’s got to happen as counter-violence, better autonomously from the people than from the war machine. If you want to stop firearm deaths, struggle for a free and just society. Prohibition only enhances the power of the elite.
Queering the Singularity 
A supposed transhumanist advocating for anarchism toward the end of attaining a free and just society in today’s dizzyingly complex and accelerating technosphere? Surely you jest.
You’ve been around long enough to know I ain’t joking. Your complaint assumes the incompatibility of anarchism with complexity. To the contrary, I suspect the two fit together pleasantly.
Maybe for worker self-management at the factory level, but the judicial system?
Dale Carrico rebuts your piece on his blog. It’s called
Anarcho-Transhumanoid Condemns My Rejection of Paramilitary Gun-Nuttery
I think you should read it. I can see where you are coming from on the issue of guns. In fact I quite agree with many of your points, sometimes violence is necessary and even instrumental to liberation movements. DESPITE THIS, violence almost always releases the demon genies of our nature out of their bottles, so to speak. Also, by and large, the movement to acquire, utilize and threaten people with guns is often a tactic employed by the reactionary white supremacist demographic of the United States.
I think it’s a violence-saturated and domination-saturated culture (at all levels, fractally, nation to family) that causes gun culture to take the form it does – the public face of resisting domination, the private face of applying domination (cf Trayvon Martin), or resisting by turning the tables and becoming temporarily the one dominating (most mass shootings). A very different culture might, with guns freely available, regard them as a sport and hunting tool, for which a bolt action will quite suffice. Gun control as seen by liberals, then, is more in the way of an incremental marginal improvement that permits the rest of the status quo to stand unchallenged. Not useless, but not really addressing the problem.
I tend to agree. Even though I’ve recently broken with nonviolence because of how it’s practiced in the United States, I’m thoroughly against hurting people and skeptical of bloody insurrection. I’m not advocating shooting anybody. In fact, you could say I’m against state gun control because of I’m against violence. As Dale obfuscates but so many analysts recognizes, violence is foundational and definitional to the state.
The U.S. government would be an especially salient example.
Dale and I continue the argument over at eir blog. You can almost taste the condescension:
I’d call this a form of mutual understanding.