A Key Basis for Bio-Conservativism January 2, 2024
Posted by Summerspeaker in Anarchism, Technology, Transhumanism.add a comment
Many, including radicals, hate & fear technology & transhumanism precisely because of how these threaten current hierarchies & relations of domination.
The idea that low-status folks would be able to go their own ways or turn the tables terrifies oppressors big & small.
I can’t overstate how much present arrangements rely on coercion & inequality at every level. Even if it’s just intuitively, petty punk-scene tyrants & bosses in leftist organizations *know* their power continues *only* because those below them lack options.
The relatively powerful, from dads to trans-activist micro-celebrities who treat their housemates like servants, correctly worry that their subjects would abandon them or seek revenge if technology upended the material & status economies. They don’t want a challenge.
Is she really going to keep on cleaning the house & playing therapist for you & putting up with your bullshit when she can live decently at the off-grid commune or by downloading the latest in-demand skillset or by becoming a cat-eared cyborg virtual dancer? Probably not.
Again, this applies nearly everywhere. Tons of the most vocal & influential people stand to lose big if options & agency expand, & their flock of minions thus diminishes or revolts & devourers them. Increasing freedom constitutes an existential threat to present-day power.
I won’t survive to witness the shift. I hope those who’re part of it will be less vengeful than I feel right now. For better or worse, simply leaving the oppressors (big & small) behind will likely dismay them as much as any well-deserved punishment.
Sakai’s Settlers in 2020: Still Critical May 2, 2020
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Ever since learning about J. Sakai’s Settlers, I’ve always considered its core claim correct: the U.S. white working class as a whole has consistently sided with white supremacy & settler colonialism over revolutionary international solidarity.
Regardless of current controversies & the way some tankie types invoke Settlers as a bludgeon, let’s be on the same page regarding Sakai’s analysis of the USA as fundamentally a white settler society. As Sakai notes, lots of oppressed peoples have of course long recognized this.
Debates/arguments between tankies & anarchists often become confused because tankies accuse anarchists of denying or downplaying the profound power of settler colonialism. White anarchists too frequently provide a basis for this charge.
However, the most compelling versions of anarchism & of MLM hardly disagree in their description of the problem of white supremacy & settler colonialism. They differ on the ideal path forward in this context.
Attempts at generative conversation should keep this in mind.
Anarchists & other radical critics of MLM: If opposition to tankies leads you to hate Sakai & Settlers or at all minimize the central importance of dismantling settler colonialism here on the USA’s stolen land & globally, you’ve gone astray.
Remembering Ricardo Flores Magón November 21, 2019
Posted by Summerspeaker in Anarchism, Decolonization, Uncategorized.add a comment
Ricardo Flores Magón died 97 year ago in Fort Leavenworth Penitentiary while serving time for writing against WWI & for anarchist revolution. Whether directly by a guard’s hands or indirectly by medical neglect, the prison killed him.
Despite various contradictions, RFM’s thought & life continue to inspire me & to shape my convictions. I believe that RFM receives insufficient attention as an anarchist theorist, especially for his insurrectionism & articulation of Mexican Indigenous communal traditions.
RFM adhered resolutely to anarchist principles to the end. In the 1918 manifesto to anarchists & workers worldwide that the US government used to charge him under the Espionage Act of 1917, he & Librado Rivera wrote the following:
In order to ensure that unconscious rebellion doesn’t form with its own arms the new chain that will again enslave the people, it’s necessary that we, those who do not believe in government, those who are convinced that government, whatever its form and wherever it shows its face, is tyranny, because it is not an institution created to protect the week, but rather to protect the strong, place ourselves at the forefront of circumstances and fearlessly proclaim our holy anarchist ideal, the only human, just, and true ideal.
RFM likewise criticized the Bolsheviks in February 1921:
I fully understand your disappointment at seeing so many comrades supporting the Lenin-Trotzky’s government. I am not, of course, in favor of allied intervention in Russia; we must oppose it, but we must refrain from showing Marxian tyranny as means to gain freedom. Tyranny cannot breed but tyranny. It is better to intensify the propaganda of our Ideal to the utmost.
& in June of the same year:
I have been watching day by day the compromising and killing of the revolutionary principles in Russia. It is grievous, of course, to see the wanton assassination of the vague hopes of the peoples, but nothing is lost in the long run. If they believe to-day that Freedom can be gained through Dictatorship, they will be wiser to-morrow, and will conquer Freedom by breaking all shackles. Cheer up!
Born in Oaxaca, RFM developed his ideology from experience in Indigenous & land-based mestizx communities, from facing state repression as a student protester, & from extensive reading of anarchist texts such as Peter Kropotkin’s *The Conquest of Bread*.
RFM rose to prominence in the movement against the de-facto dictator Porfirio Díaz. Persecution forced him into exile in the USA in 1904. The Partido Liberal Mexicano began as broad opposition party but grew steadily more anarchist as time went on.
The PLM included Indigenous members like Fernando Palomares (Mayo) & Primo Tapia de la Cruz (Purépecha). The party focused on solidarity with Indigenous peoples in & the Yaqui in particular. Yaqui leader Luis Espinosa described the Yaqui struggle as aligned with anarchism.
RFM defended the Mexican Revolution against ignorant & racist attacks by European anarchists, including from Luigi Galleani. RFM stressed the communal past & present when making the case that the Mexican people were well-suited for anarchist communism.
Scholars continue to debate RFM & his family’s exact social position; Claudio Lomnitz, for instance, counsels caution about any claims of Indigenous identity. Regardless of the details, there’s no question of his familiarity with & ties to Indigenous communities.
The depth of RFM’s thought defies summary. I encourage folx who’re interested to read his writings, which you can find for free via archivomagon.net. Most of them are in Spanish, but some are in English. *Dreams of Freedom* has English translations of key pieces.
Disclaimer: Like many radicals of the era, RFM was overbearingly ableist, stridently antiqueer, & rather masculinist. He tended to denounce anyone who disagreed with him as a traitor. The PLM was at times anti-Chinese & the 1911 Baja California campaign was a disaster.
I finish for now with the concluding lines from that 1918 PLM manifesto:
Let every man and every woman who loves the anarchist ideal proclaim it with tenacity, with stubbornness, taking no notice of taunts, without fearing dangers, without regard to the consequences. Shoulders to the wheel, comrades, and the future will be the unfolding of our ideal. Land and Liberty.
Are Tankies Fash?: Musings on Values & Trauma November 13, 2019
Posted by Summerspeaker in Anarchism.Tags: anarchism, fascism, Marxism, trauma
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I reject the “tankies are fash” discourse, at least when cast broadly at all state commies/socialists & folx who ever support supposedly socialist or anti-imperialist states.
Obviously *some* tankies do amount to fash, but same holds for some (people who claim to be) anarchists.
Lots of the folx anarchists call tankies hold decent values & support oppression (they’d say imperfection) as a pragmatic measure. From their perspective, they’re being proper consequentialists. Equating this with fascism confuses the issue & stands out as excessively harsh.
Fascists, especially white ones in the U.S. & other western countries, tend to hold profoundly different values. They’re not trying to achieve nice things for all or to fight oppression, but rather to maintain & enhance their ingroup’s dominance.
Many fascists, along with certain tankies & a disturbing number of nihilist anarchists, have a “might makes right” worldview & are cynical abusers. In the abstract, I’m more opposed to this worldview than I am to disagreements about how to achieve shared goals.
Both anarchists & tankies love to cherry-pick, finding the worst of the opposed group to discredit them all. Fascists, racists, rapists, etc. exist under each banner. The overall contours matter, & can’t be easily assessed or conveyed.
Perhaps all conflicts do boil down to anarchism versus fascism in the end. I’m compelled by this claim while simultaneously skeptical of stark binaries & “you’re either with us or against us” bullying.
Even if so, we don’t have to flip ahead to the final page.
Denouncing most everyone as the worst sort of oppressor & trying to fight them suits my traumatized psyche. That’s my go-to response, even with other anarchists. I respect the approach. I feel it in my bones. But it’s not strictly rational or accurate. I doubt it’s optimal.
Eugenics Remains Ascendant September 29, 2019
Posted by Summerspeaker in Anarchism.Tags: ableism, eugenics
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19th-century eugenicists: Radicals, suffragists, & leftists of all stripes are atavistic & degenerate. Their triumph would return us to primordial collectivist savagery.
21st-century radicals: Conservatives & company are mouth-breathing troglodytes destined for extinction.
🤔
The ableist/eugenicist mentality remains ascendant & nearly all political thought & rhetoric operate within it. Eugenics at its height in the first half of the 20th century was but a formalization & intensification of venerable ableist beliefs & practices.
Even eugenics in the narrow sense of centralized & coercive selective breeding stretches back to antiquity or earlier. Plato recommended such a scheme. Various groups winnowed the young via trials of fitness. Masters controlled the reproduction of enslaved folks. Etc.
When most people say they’re against eugenics, they mean “scientific” racism & obviously coercive policies like forced sterilization. They’re fine with decentralized eugenics & with innumerable status-quo ableist selection dynamics such as competition in education & the market.
Folks imagine eugenics lost with the Nazis in WWII, but only that particular brand of eugenics lost & not completely. (The USA practiced forced sterilization into the 1980s.) The liberal, decentralized eugenics of meritocracy won.
Anarchism Has Never Taken Ableism Seriously March 22, 2019
Posted by Summerspeaker in Anarchism, Despair, Transhumanism.Tags: ableism, anarchism, anarchy, disability, eugenics
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Woman no longer wants to be a party to the production of a race of sickly, feeble, decrepit, wretched human beings, who have neither the strength nor moral courage to throw off the yoke of poverty and slavery. (Emma Goldman, “Marriage and Love”)
Facts Don’t Care about Your Feelings! December 10, 2018
Posted by Summerspeaker in Anarchism, Epistemology, Transhumanism.Tags: ableism, eugenics, genes, genetics, privilege
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Success in current society comes from DNA, structural advantage, & sheer chance. The same for failure by dominant norms.
Fascists, open eugenicists, many centrists, many liberals, etc. embrace this because they support the existing cistem of genetic sorting (even if some want to tweak it to be even more nightmarish).
Other centrists & liberals as well as most radicals prefer to mystify this reality, whether because they’re part of the genetic elite & defending their position or because they wish the world operated differently.
I recommend accepting the truth & striving to maximize freedom & pleasure as well as to minimize suffering for all sentient beings. We can create ever more accessible & enabling physical & social environments.
Anarchism, Anticolonialism, Immigration March 18, 2018
Posted by Summerspeaker in Anarchism, Anti-imperialism, Decolonization, Transhumanism.Tags: anarchism, anticolonialism, Irish, national liberation, Saint Patrick's Day
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During a one-on-one conversation the other day after talking about New Zealand’s immigration policy, I said I hoped we could all agree that at least Europe has no claim whatsoever to excluding immigrants on the ground of nationalism or self-determination. I extended this to colonized European groups like the Irish and Basques.
Yesterday, I went to a Saint Patrick’s Day event on the Irish national-liberation struggle and international anticolonialism/anti-imperialism.
While I consider purist anarchist arguments against oppressed nationalisms overblown, sometimes I can’t help but feel disturbed at how similar national-liberation rhetoric sounds to alt-right rhetoric. “Ireland for the Irish” can be anticolonial if targeted against British occupation, but “Sweden for the Swedes” serves as a fascist rallying cry. That’s goddamn confusing.
I support oppressed nationalisms in the current historical context so long as as they don’t mirror dominant nationalisms with their militarized borders and aggressive contempt for outsiders. I don’t have or want a homeland myself. If I went “back” to the lands my ancestors come from in Wales, England, Scotland, and France, I’d agitate for abolishing nations and borders there. I’d have no sympathy for using violence/coercion to preserve Welsh/English/Scottish/French culture.
According to prevalent left norms, it’s not my place to tell colonized peoples how to organize, what to do in their lands, and so on. This presumably includes colonized European groups. After all, I’m not Irish (except maybe a tiny bit ancestrally), Basque, etc.
In addition to present solidarity/alliance against common enemies, I’m curious about the possibilities for future coexistence between anarchists who don’t believe in homelands and Indigenous nationalists. Some of my dissertation looks at the Partido Liberal Mexican and its support of Yaqui self-determination for insight and inspiration on the subject. I plan to write a longer blog piece on this theme at some point.
I don’t know how it’s all going to work out. Perhaps we transhumanist anarchists will have to take to the seas and/or stars. For the moment, I’m happy to be fighting colonialism/imperialism with so many fabulous comrades.
Death to Borders January 14, 2018
Posted by Summerspeaker in Anarchism.add a comment
The whole idea of borders and detention centers confounds and angers me.
Why does anyone want to pay people (ICE, etc.) to kidnap and torture others (undocumented immigrants) solely because they happen to have been born on the wrong side of an arbitrary line in the sand?
⚔️🔫And in the United States, at least, it’s a line imposed by ongoing colonialism against Native peoples. Historically, other than might making right, what possible basis does an illegitimate settler government largely run by the descendants of European invaders have to restrict the movement of largely mestizx immigrants from Mexico & Central America? In some cases the latter traverse trails that predate European invasion. Additionally, U.S. military intervention and economic policy fuels much migration. At a minimum, this context adds insult to the injury that contemporary U.S. borders cause by the minute.🔫⚔️
Even if you fundamentally like and/or believe in nation states and borders, is aggressive enforcement really worth all the negative externalities involved? Mainstream economics indicates considerable advantages from immigration. Deportations tear apart the iconic family structure and the principle of individual liberty that so many within the United States profess to value.
💢The logic of nation-state borders stands out as antithetical to freedom under the best circumstances. In the United States specifically, immigration policy constitutes white-supremacist and colonial violence.💢
🚫I hope we soon get to the point of eliminating detention centers and deportations via [nonviolent] direct action.🚫
#ShutDownICE #WyoSayNO #NoRaids #NoBorders
💗💗💗I send revolutionary love to everyone struggling against the nightmarish border monster.💗💗 💗
Queering the Singularity 