💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › venona-q-scandalous-thoughts.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 14:37:29. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Scandalous thoughts
Author: Venona Q.
Date: 2012
Language: en
Topics: anarchist federation, insurrectionist, armed struggle,
Source: Retrieved on May 28, 2009 from [[http://325.nostate.net/?p=5371]]
Notes: Posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2012 on [[http://325.nostate.net/?p=5371]]

Venona Q.

Scandalous thoughts

Every so often, cyclically, collective or social anarchism becomes

restrictive to some anarchists and an anarchist individualism reasserts

itself. It happened at the turn of the twentieth century when some of

the great anarchist thinkers began to question some of the more

communistic dogmas. It is happening once more, and once more we witness

some of the social anarchists writhe in panic as their comfortable dream

is disturbed and they wittingly or unwittingly reinforce the

stranglehold of the State by condemning their unruly sisters and

brothers who appear to threaten the pursuit of what one comrade has

aptly described as ‘civil anarchism’.

It is a horrible creature, this civil anarchism. A slathering, craven

and despotic monster with eyes in the back of its head which tries to be

what anarchism will probably never be – palatable to the modern consumer

masses.

One of the major qualities that those engaged in making attacks seek is

to recover knowledge of themselves and each other, to recover personal

power, to enact a radical and dramatic break from Society, with its

intolerable cage of the social norm and the consequent deadening of

individual sensibility. Some communiqués from this tendency are flowery

and poetic in the extreme, and are not to everyone’s taste, but reading

an Anarchist Federation statement is deadening. It is the materialist

death-march of politics against life, the patriarchal voice of

‘political reason’ against the wild rebel spirit, of the political

against me.

The combatants seek to recover volition and dispel the inauthentic. This

can only start from your experience, not from the experience or dogmas

of others, although it involves your relationship with a few comrades

within “the mass” or the “working classes”. Until it is active, on the

street, there is little genuine struggle to be found in some abstract

crowd of people you have no relationship with. It seems incredible to

read the thoughts of those that identify as (Formal) Federation

anarchists and even more pointless to have to critique it. It is a bit

like critiquing the performance of a clown by the standards applied to a

serious drama. The issue for me here is the same denial of individuality

that the State imposes – some herding of unique human beings into some

utilitarian category by pedagogues and masters who find the individual

unwieldy and dangerous, but find an abstract ideological cage immensely

comfortable.

This lack of authenticity and the somewhat anachronistic politics of

their “revolutionary organisation” as a whole, is reflected in the

Federation’s outrage at the shooting of Italian nuclear boss, Roberto

Adinolfi[1] and the letter bomb sent to the Chief of the Italian tax

office Marco Cuccagna[2]. The Federation disingenuously manipulate the

facts with regard to the latter in order to prostitute their particular

ideology by describing the boss of the tax department as a ‘worker’. Not

only is this insulting to anyone’s intelligence, who can see quite

clearly that the target was one of the bosses who rob them every day of

their hard-earned wages, but it is puzzling because they pretend to

‘care’ about the suffering of these targets and to state categorically

that ‘the working class’ care too. If I am being authentic to myself,

then I can say I do not care a bit if this bureaucratic robber is

attacked, injured, killed. Actually, I am happy about it. I imagine many

people would also not care and may even feel some satisfaction and even

joy at the news.

Some basic questions of the Federation which do not really require

answers: who are these “working class” people you speak of; how many

individuals who make up the “working class” do you personally know; how

do you know that all these people disagree with attacks on capitalist

infrastructure, bosses and tax collectors; what gives you the right to

speak for anyone but yourself; what do you say about the “working class”

people who rioted in London in August 2011 (and throughout history)? To

even ask these questions seems ludicrous, but a quick look at Federation

discourse seems to necessitate them since they seem so sure of

themselves.

The Federation/Libcom mindset continues with its psychometric assessment

of supposed “terrorist tactics”. They borrow another meaningless spook

from the hostile media and the State – the mindless, indiscriminate

anarcho-insurrectionalist-“terrorist”. Again, how many of these

individuals does the Federation know, and how does the Federation know

that such acts are not part of a rich and more complex life.

Furthermore, to state the obvious, insurrectionist methods are

widespread amongst the disaffected of the world, as widespread as

‘organising’, and sometimes have more in common with “working class”

rebellion than anything the Federation comes up with. The Federation is

tellingly silent on this reality in the main, preferring only some

parental nod to “working class” anger that could be so much more

constructive if only the unruly would acknowledge the wisdom of

Federation physicians and swallow their prescriptions.

Here the Federation again reveals itself to be incapable of liberating

itself from the shackles of ideology: that denial again of the complex

human being and its shunting into some useful abstract category. But as

we look at the Federation’s reactions to other anarchists, it actually

becomes more sinister, in that they are frequently almost

indistinguishable from our enemies. It’s choice of forum is the

internet. A brief review not only of critiques of technology, but also

experience of it, reveals how destructive this form of faceless, mass

interaction is. Furthermore, the language used by the Federations is

akin to experiencing the fist of repression coming down on the human

face of anarchism. The Federation reinforces the State, by adopting the

rhetoric of the industrial-military-technological system, such as its

aforementioned recent condemnation of anarchist “terrorist tactics”.

In the quest for liberation, the individual must be allowed to express

itself, to follow itself. The individual is not always at odds with the

collective, but to try to squash individual drives into some

collectivity or society against its will is totally useless. The

individual will sooner or later rebel because a mass collectivity forged

at the expense of the free individual will entail rules and regulations

(albeit informal or even unspoken) which are against liberty of life,

feeling and thought. These tendencies have been at war before, and it is

worth reading the essays of Voltairine de Cleyre on this matter with her

suggestion that the individual anarchist be free to express their

rebellion in their own way. Violent attacks against the bosses and the

State will alienate some people, but not all. Pacifist action will

alienate some people but not all. Even if we could once and for all

identify every “working class” person and also get them to agree that

they are “working class”, do the Federations really think that this mass

of people will hold one homogenous view on social change, on the causes

of misery and on the best way to liberation (if all agree that

liberation is their goal). The civil anarchists are searching for a

purposefully driven conscious proletarian class which no longer really

exists in the manner they describe as a revolutionary subject in the

West. They have embarked on a hollow search which ends in sterility at

the level of the actual uncontrollable mass social clash, and anyway

largely failed to follow their own politics through to their

conclusions.

The separation of people into classes is in some ways a nonsense when it

is not based on their individual opinions or actions. A brief look at

Native American history, as one example, shows us how banal and

inaccurate it is to speak of ‘the Native American people’ in one

homogenous outpouring of bad breath: there were indigenous warriors

fighting genocide and assimilation and there were also indigenous folks

who colluded with the American State and turned on their own people to

accumulate money and power.

Those of us who might be allotted the label of insurrectionist,

individualist, and/or nihilists do not make perfected claims to knowing

how revolution will come about. There is a great humility in the words

of the emerging rebels and armed struggle groups. I would say that at

this point in history, when so much has been tried and so much has

failed, let us admit that we do not know what is right, what will

‘work’. People are far more complex than that and the world is huge.

The Federation’s distillation of everything down to “working class

struggle” is problematic. The working class as it used to be has all but

gone and anyway, like democracy, it was originally rooted in horror and

lies for many. Democracy was invented on the backs of a Greek slave

class and the Industrial Revolution first imposed the destruction of the

individual and introduced ‘the dispossessed herd’ as it ushered in this

age we hate. Focusing on the “working class” in this way is like

shuffling between different forms of oppression, saying that we prefer

that form of oppression over this one: people fought tooth and nail

against becoming subsumed into a “working class” at the beginning of the

Industrial Revolution. The assimilation of artisans and rural peoples

into the industrial working class was bloody, so why some anarchists are

attempting to reify it now, especially now that the machine has moved on

and is now subsuming the traditional working class into the

post-industrial consumer class, is not just questionable, it is bizarre.

They are all simply stages in the grinding progress of the machine and

we would do well to abandon all of these chimeras. This is not to deny

that a class struggle has always and continues to be fought, but I

prefer the term “social war” to “working class struggle” largely because

it includes more individuals and their choices, including those who

consider themselves traditionally working class. Class as a concept and

as a social binder has become increasingly muddy over the years. People

can be more crudely divided – if we must – into the rich and the poor,

the included and the excluded, the critical and the uncritical regarding

the State and civilisation.

To be denied individual autonomy, recognition and relationships causes

alienation and disempowerment. The authority of a ghostly mass over the

individual does nothing except assist the project of the State and

capitalism by agreeing that the individual human being is nothing more

than an economic unit or a vast and faceless aggregation of economic

units. Is this really how we wish to define human beings and do

anarchists really think that such a perspective is liberating? To negate

the role of individual action in favour of a vague conception of the

“class-struggle” of yesteryear is a dangerous fiction. Certainly, since

it is also the project of the State to destroy the volition and value of

the individual; it cannot be called revolutionary, except in the

autocratic uber-political sense of being ruled by statist apparatus –

none of which desire empowered individuals or like-minded groups of

individuals who want freedom. It is not the role of anarchists to

replace one tyranny, be it “democratic”, monarchist, collectivist or any

other kind of rule, with another.

What is this ‘issuing of statements’ condemning the acts and opinions of

others who consider themselves anarchists? It is to play the political

game of ‘good anarchist’ and ‘bad anarchist’ for the media and the

repressive machine of the police. It is to undermine the very meaning of

the term ‘anarchy’; a complicated and shifting web of principles, praxis

and relationship with the goal of liberation which is not a singular

state of being, no more than it is a State.

Moreover, the fact that the Federation feels the need to make statements

against acts of other anarchists must surely show them that their

project is doomed. At the end of the day, I say to the Anarchist

Federation and their fellow travellers: I do not agree with you, I do

not desire the world you envision. I say I am not alone in finding your

statements and perspectives antithetical to my own rebellion and my

personal concept of liberation which is based on my understanding and

experience of State oppression. And since your project depends on the

absolute agreement of the mass of which I am a part, and since it

appears from the debates and statements of the Federation that what is

envisioned is a mass anarchist society, I declare that I want freedom

not only from the State but from Society and you. I ask then: what are

you going to do about me?

I began this article by essentially wishing to encourage those of us who

call ourselves anarchists to cease mutual condemnation and to assert

that actually not one of us has the “answer”. However, I end by sensing

that some of “us” know so little of what it means to be liberated in

heart, thought and action, and so little of what class solidarity and

struggle really means, that I can only imagine an anarchist society such

as appears to be the aim of the Anarchist Federation, would be as

fraught with repressions and various prisons as this one. That is,

unless those who would impose their faceless societies on the rest of us

realise their futility.

Venona Q.

[1]

http://325.nostate.net/?p=5259

[2]

http://325.nostate.net/?p=3668