Thread by @rechelon

Non-syndicalists reacted so violently to The Anarchist FAQ, saw it as such an existential threat, that many spent over a decade embracing the defensive response that it's *impossible* to define anarchism and excluding anything (including fascists) from the tradition is tyranny.

I've spent more than my fair share of evenings ranting about the evils of Mckay's FAQ and Black Flame. I fully recognize how horrible the partisan red historians are, but the opposite direction (muddying the historical waters to let literally anything in) was just as bad.

Aragorn repeatedly let national-anarchists into anarchist spaces, refused to expel them, and gave them a platform. From anti-politics to the brkeley study group to anews. This followed directly from his overall strategy to counter the reds by leaning into hyper inclusion.

This wasn't just the project of one notoriously shitty person tho, it was a broadly embraced strategy. For example post-anarchist academics (who A! talked shit on) provided ideological justifications for refusing to draw lines or admit concrete points of unity.

Moreover there was a cornucopia of spurious historiographies of anarchism that tied together or laid claim to very different movements, that rewrote historical perspectives into modern vernaculars and theoretical frames they would have rejected, etc. All defensive widenings.

What's frustrating about the terms of this debate is either you have to be the most inane and ahistorical red who excludes virtually everything from anarchism like incredibly important currents like primitivism and mutualism, OR you let everything in including absolute garbage.

When I was like "I dunno if people who openly identify as enemies of anarchists, tried to bomb an infoshop, and call for murdering billions of people should be called anarchists" folks responded with OUTRAGE and said "pretty cocky for a mutualist to say anyone's not an anarchist"

It's a completely poisonous dichotomy and it encourages the most extreme historical dishonesty, sweepingly writing off huge chapters of our shared history OR just outright lying and saying folks were anarchists when they explicitly rejected that term.

Anyway, in my mind the Anarchist Library is just as bad as the Anarchist FAQ. Both are repulsively centralized projects with core crews with strong ideological axes to grind attempting to construct a canonical movement in often underhanded ways.

If Black Flame and the FAQ's main strategy was exclusion (although Iain cribbed metric tons directly from Kevin Carson), the Library's underhanded maneuvering often comes through inclusion. Overly targeting some circles for inclusion while moving slower on others.

One of A!'s standard games with inclusion was to 1) include the most provocative garbage like ITS to widen the overton window so his shit could sit pretty, but also 2) select the weakest examples from currents he was hostile to in order to serve as punching bags for mockery.

All of this was justified -- and I mean in quite explicit terms directly to me repeatedly -- because of the *existential* threat that are inane syndicalists who believe they can just sneeringly erase all other currents and traditions in anarchism.

"If you're not with us, you're against us" became the watchword of a powerful circle of people in the post-left, who at the very same time decried historical dishonesty and in-group rank-closing. The result was the attempted inclusion of "national anarchism" and "eco-extremism."

I dunno how to best fight off the exclusionists who would reduce anarchism to three historical white guys and nothing else, but I damn well know the opposite direction, letting actual fullblown fucking fascists into our spaces because "definitions are fascist" is not a solution.

And I don't know what the best solution is to centralized infrastructure like the AFAQ and AnarchistLibrary. It's certainly not "just participate and contribute under the power of an entrenched core crew that steadfastly refuse to remove shit like ITS"

For all that the kids probably disagree with me and sometimes gobble up dishonest histories of shit from A!'s broader circles, I think the distroism current is at least more in keeping with our decentralized values instead of One Big Repository.