💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › bob-black-imputationism.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 07:54:51. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Imputationism Author: Bob Black Date: 1993 Language: en Topics: AJODA, AJODA #38, class struggle, critique, indigenous, John Zerzan, Lawrence Jarach, marxism, Max Anger, nationalism, race, religion, self-determination, situationist international, the State, Ward Churchill Source: Retrieved on July 24, 2009 from http://www.spunk.org/texts/pubs/ajoda/38/sp000782.txt Notes: Originally published in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #38 — Fall 1993, Letters section, part five
Dear Politically Challenged,
Getting three issues at once, as I just did, impresses on me the
enormity of your output — that anthology you’ve considered will have to
be huge to be at all representative. I am not going to try to make up
for lost time, just lash out a little here and there. Imagine my delight
at a Russian anarchist invoking my name as the epitome of
intra-anarchist critique! “I seem to be a verb,” as the futurist idiot
Buckminster Fuller once senascently mused.
Max Anger is up to the same old scam the situationists and many others
(myself included) have too often pulled, it needs a name: imputationism.
Imputationism is wishful thinking dressed up as critical theory, an
esoteric variant on what the psychoanalysts call “projection.” Max
Anger, like the S.I. before him, wants the Los Angeles riots (1965,
1992, same difference) to be revolutionary, therefore, inspection
discloses they were exactly that.
Of course, this calls for some serious spin control. There is, for
instance, the targeting of Korean-owned shops by black looters and
arsonists. Class war was “subsumed, unfortunately, under the rubric of
race.” Evidently the rubric of race trumped the imputation of class war
since, as Anger sorrowfully acknowledges, many businesses owned by or
employing blacks were spared. Like many white men before him, Anger
knows what black folk are up to better than they do themselves. Words —
his words — speak louder than actions — their actions.
“Fifty years of totalitarian disinformation” is to blame for this
unfortunate misunderstanding on the part of rioters who just “happened”
to be black regarding small businessmen who just “happened” to be
Korean. Now maybe I don’t watch enough TV or something but I am entirely
unaware of any media efforts in my less than 50 years (and Anger is
younger still) to incite blacks to hate Koreans. Indeed the only media
treatment of black/Korean relations I’ve ever seen, pre-riot, was Do the
Right Thing by black filmmaker Spike Lee which I didn’t understand to be
at all anti-Korean, and if it were, a black would be to blame. Anger is
just making this stuff up. Too many blacks figured out how to hate
Koreans all by themselves. Give them that much credit; if their anger
was misdirected it was, at least, theirs. Anger’s anger is abstract and
bookish.
Anger also has to explain away the brutal beating of white truck driver
Reginald Denney by black thugs. Denney had nothing to do with the
acquittal of Rodney King’s police assailants. Anger opines this episode
was not “typical,” but first repeats an unconfirmed and self-serving
allegation by the accused that Denney “taunted” them about the verdict
in the King case. This is blatantly improbable — a white guy drives into
a black ghetto to taunt the locals about the King verdict? — but even if
it happened, does this justify beating him half to death? Whatever
happened to free speech?
When Anger says “typical,” what does he refer to? Black-on-white street
crime is much more “typical” than white-on-black street crime. Maybe he
wasn’t thinking along these lines. Maybe he wasn’t doing much thinking
at all. Rodney King wasn’t beaten by a random sample of whites. He was
beaten by police. In this he has a lot of white, black, Asian and
Hispanic company. Anger says we should “support” the black goons. Why?
Why not support the white goons who beat up Rodney King? They’re not
“typical” either.
What else? Why is everybody freaking out over Molly Gill’s white
nationalist infiltration of anarchdom, although she has never concealed
her opinions or claimed to be an anarchist, whereas nobody but Lawrence
and I have noticed the red nationalist infiltration of anarchdom by
Professor Ward Churchill and his partner Dr. M. Annette Jaimes? This
pair is to indigenism what Dworkin and MacKinnon are to feminism.
Churchill, formerly of Weatherman SDS, is that only too ubiquitous
figure, the Marxist-turned-nationalist. He and his girl friend play good
cop/bad cop, Churchill serving his racism straight up, Jaimes watering
her drinks.
Jaimes’ article was, in Anarchy, a waste of space, although it might
have been enlightening for its original leftist readership. It said
nothing that has not been as well or better said in publications like
Anarchy and the Fifth Estate for ten to twenty years now. Even some of
her phraseology sounded like it was taken from people like John Zerzan
and myself, both conspicuous by our absence from her footnotes. I’m not
affronted by these omissions — the more this information gets around,
the better I like it — but I wonder what they mean.
Zerzan was too gentle with Dr. Jaimes, intimidated, perhaps, by her
privileged position as a woman and a Native American. She openly
celebrates Amerindian civilizations like the Aztecs and Incas for their
independent invention of the state, imperialism, slavery, priestly
religion, human sacrifice and other Old World accomplishments. Euro- and
Afro-Americans need no lessons from Indians in these activities, we need
lessons in living in entirely different ways. What matters is not, as
for Jaimes and Churchill, who, what matters is how. The thousands of
Europeans who went native (“gone to Croatan”) in colonial America
learned such lessons from their Indian hosts. So should Churchill and
Jaimes. What they’re teaching we already know only too well.
(Wish I Were)
Gone to Croatan,
Bob Black
POB 3142
Albany, NY. 12203–0142