Thread by @rechelon

lol @ foucauldians getting mad when they find out that "abolish power" and "there is no poison more deadly than power" are venerable anarchist slogans.

The whole point of anarchism is that you CAN escape the games of power through empathy and positive-sum interactions.

Power isn't any mere causation or influence, power is domination and control. The central premise of authoritarians (in fascist, marxist, or liberal strains) is that There Is No Alternative to power, that it's everywhere, and only a matter of *who* has it. Anarchism dissents.

One of the things I hate about Foucauldian frameworks is that they do exactly what so many abusers do: expand the definition of social power so that everything is by definition power. Foucault is left merely talking in terms of "dangerousness" and worshiping diversity/variation.

I'm sympathetic to "everything is dangerous" -- because the potentiality of power dynamics do creep in everything -- but anarchists have long had better analytic tools (& rhetorical / linguistic schemas) here. We can break with the very game of power, to emphasize what's outside.

This is far closer to how normal people actually think about power. When I was a kid in the projects in the 90s everyone there talked about "the game" -- a kind of admission that *everything* was power -- to say "naw, there's an outside of power games" was revolutionary.

Further -- this is something completely lost in much of the continental phil Left after Adorno etc pushed the shitty "totalitarianism" analysis of fascism -- fascism, as a nationalism, was actually centrally about diversity. Diversity isn't actually good or bad, desirable or not.

The idea that the problem is uniformity rather than constraint of possibility leads folks repeatedly to endorse micro-fascism, a patchwork of diverse prisons, and each person or micronation in their own epistemic "world" -- nevermind the necessity of *accurate* models to freedom.