What "leverage" does the proletariat still have?

Leverage in our world is situational and highly particularized. And leverage to what end? Certainly a homeless hacker can disrupt the function of the existing order, increase costs until some structures become unsustainable.

https://twitter.com/EcoTechBro/status/2056788183120028020

Leftists and organizationalists are so captured in the thrall of massification precisely because their power fantasy of a mobilized army of the proletariat coarse-grains over all the messy complexity that requires intellectual labor. A nice narrative, not a blueprint for attack.

Anarchism is unavoidably a "totalizing" ideology because we're not pluralistic "panarchists" who would happily accept there being a patriarchal state in the next town over.

Core to the Beautiful Idea is the notion that our freedom is entangled with EVERYONE's freedom. The entire anarchist movement had a decade long fight over the 00s about "national anarchism" and whether we were perfect pluralists who would tolerate any contortion and redefinition of anarchism, any local tyranny, or whether there were limits and thus universals we defend.

hilariously sloppy and cartoonish reduction of the complex actual intellectual lineage at play, but also amusingly kinda right despite the wildness of grabbing Weil to represent left ascetism

anyway to understand the crossover, begin w german ecology: theanarchistlibrary.org/library/janet-… x.com/maiamindel/sta… after ww2, with the bomb and technocracy, the humanities and sciences reversed political associations, and this led to the aristocratic values of the classics department getting hybridized with young leftist students into a mutual hostility to modernity

> because the average anarchist was so well read

Okay, look team. We can't be out here just making shit up. Yes, anarchists are smart, but it was decentralization and informality that made us hard to infiltrate. The AVERAGE anarchist in 06 was an activist who didn't read theory.

https://twitter.com/specifism/status/2037207662878744627

I'm not saying the *average* anarchist was a crustie oogle busy breaking beer bottles, but like, "average" over ANY very large movement has never been the intellectual book club nerds. It's activists who go to documentary nights and talk with people, but are like ehhh about books

Much of my youth revolved around the website ZineLibrary. It went down around Occupy in a massive loss for a movement whose ideas and knowledge mostly doesn't circulate online but in person.

Anyway I've put it back online with a *thousand* zines:
zinelibrary.org There's tons I've no doubt missed but, while I've tried to make it representative of every branch, I did have some broad limiting filters:

1) PDFs must be imposed.
2) PDFs must not be ugly.

Which largely excludes bad scans and lazy layouts. But some exceptions were made.

This is the most productive public debate between an ancom and an ancap in all of human history so far.

But of course I have to interject that I already solved property a decade ago, and they're both clearly just groping towards my evaluation.

I dunk on Huemer a lot but he gets points for turning to rule utilitarianism (and endorsement of theft in extreme cases), yet it's a pretty severe backdoor for egalitarian considerations... including my insane "there are no objective titles, disagreement is necessary" stuff.

Borders were basically invented in the late 1800s as an imperial managerial tool -- polities had previously desired and competed for in-migration, but empires wanted to control internal labor flows. The whole idea of passports/visas was wildly denounced as insane authoritarianism The US then bought into this new scheme by the British, Spanish, etc empires, in part because of authoritarian progressivism where low-skilled racist white workers backed vast expansions of state power and the police state here to expel and deport chinese-americans.

It's weird to be decades into libertarians discovering left market anarchists and still fielding these kinds of critiques. Anarchism isn't "remove the state and whatever might come is good" it's a deep critique of power and thus *obliges* cultural and institutional changes.

https://twitter.com/NathanPGoodman/status/1948880533578285334

Yes, we frequently highlight the systematic and dispersed impact of sustained state violence on shaping our present capitalist world and its economic and social norms. But we are not "come what may" advocates. As Charles emphasized endlessly: *we* are the market. We get choices.

"Lifestyle anarchism" continues to signify whatever one personally finds frustratingly illegible about a *movement* rather than a *Party.*

You don't know the local prison support crew? Then they're lifestylists. You don't get why some friends are brewing kombucha? Lifestylists! Movements are fluid ecosystems. They grow projects & networks that defy easy mapping. They accrue tacit knowledge from praxis & argumentation that can't be codified into a single FAQ or onboarding document.

This is frustrating to newbies and infuriating to would-be bureaucrats.

Love the inane "trump voters are just a product of material conditions" re-tread of 2016's "it's just economic anxiety." Same sort of reactionaries saying it, but they've swapped from identifying as libs to marxists. People love Trump because 1) our epistemic ecosystems are toxic sludge, 2) many people have intense investments in the (often non-material) benefits of patriarchy and racism, 3) fear of ratcheting cancelation has scared every type of amoral bastard into mobilizing together...

Terminally online tankies trying to understand an actual living breathing movement, having no experience with such:

"hrmmm, getting a lot of [list of dead white guys from a century ago] vibes from this"

https://twitter.com/Khadijahaynes1/status/1852828434377887853

Like don't get me wrong, I have my critiques and deviances from some of the movement's tendencies, but for better or worse modern anarchism is a mixture of radical feminism, quaker consensus, fourth generation warfare theory, 70s anthropology, and some of the autonomists.

"The Revolution will never come."

Well yeah, obviously. *Specific* revolutions will be won. Insurgencies will erode the ability of power everywhere to function. Prefigurative experimentation will spread more liberatory norms. Technologies will be contested and shifted. Our forever walk towards anarchy -- as Malatesta described it -- is not a single hop on a single day. It's a gradual process of erosion and catalyzing strength.

Such evolution can be violent and punctuated, but there is no magical day after which we finish and rest.

An underexamined problem is that the most noxious reactionary shit emerges in radical spaces during the downturn.

2008-20010 was horrible. 2015-2018 was likewise the worst. Say what you will about the grifters and monsters flooding in during the peaks, the lean years are nasty. t.co/WKGmJQ8aeu When the tide comes in there's a feeding frenzy, everyone eats well but new monsters arrive. Then the new monsters are slowly and painfully eliminated and the children spawned mature. Then there's no resources, contests feel zero-sum, and power floods into non-radical lefty shit.

There are distinct questions debated:
* whether slavery was profitable for a slaveowner in comparison to having no workers whatsoever, or in comparison to having wage workers
* whether slavery was profitable at the national level in aggregate wellbeing or national capital Teasing out the distinctness of these questions around "whether profitable" is important because different answers to them reveal differences in power structures and the functions of the chattel slavery, as well as the hierarchies of capitalism.

Since none of us are voting and your votes won't swing any election, there's really not much of a point in litigating the distribution of probabilities, since the results will be upon us soon enough anyway. But for the hell of it, some thoughts on the timelines where Trump wins: The most important data point for me is that at the start of the Muslim ban, lawyers and sitting congressmen would take court orders to the cops, and the cops would say "lol, who cares, I only take orders from the president."

FOX insulated Trump from learning he had this power.

If you critically respond to someone mischaracterizing atheism or rationality, you'll get a whole bunch of white christians and pagans in your mentions screaming about how this means you're siding with the conquistadors and boarding schools. Just tankie-level bad faith. For the record, I have ZERO problem with some distant post somewhere on this site pointing out that settlers bulldozed burial grounds and hurricanes followed. I make similar snarks with friends all the time. That's irrelevant to the anti-atheist absurdities being pushed.

Calling anarchism "totalitarian" is not new.

Claude Lefort, a French state-communist thinker who helped popularize the originally liberal “totalitarianism” critique, decried the classic anarchist aspiration of the “abolition of power” as “totalitarian” and "despotic thought.” Arendt popularized the analysis by continuing the Nazi project by framing truth itself as totalitarian and “despotic” because of the way that it obliges us, and dishonesty as necessary for democracy (which she takes to be a good thing and somehow at odds with fascism).

This is so utterly silly. Anarchists oppose people holding all kinds of mistaken beliefs about the world -- like for example "whites are smarter" or "police keep us safe" -- opposing beliefs doesn't violate autonomy.

There is no mistaken belief that doesn't grow in consequences. t.co/yI9FZBtVdL Anarchism is about increasing everyone's agency. Core to having agency is modeling of reality. Insofar as you deliberately fail to inform someone of a fact relevant to their decision making (like STI status), you hinder their agency.

https://x.com/uncivilizeddes/status/1845329808613622268

Bad epistemics are everyone's business, sorry.

I don't care if "it makes you feel better" to not look while driving into oncoming traffic. I don't care if telling your kid not to drink bleach like you would "break a family tradition" or "is cultural imperialism." It's totally absurd to think that someone can have bad epistemics in isolation. If you choose to believe there are woodsprites in the bathroom that's not a cute affectation, that's an ontological claim that has serious impactful ethical consequences and will change your actions.

Social media will always reflect preferences that do not match those on-the-ground.

This became starkly apparent in Occupy in 2011 when folks using the hashtags on twitter thought they could dictate policy to those in the camps, much less those in the actual anarchist movement. But one HUGE way that social media does not represent a tendency (anarchism, activism, leftism, etc) is that the audience and participation on social media is overwhelmingly skewed to those relatively isolated, inexperienced and not tapped in. None of those make one bad! But...

At the beginning of my forthcoming book on the Science Wars I lay out the standard sneers re Sokal's hoax that have become "common sense" echoed among certain pomo & STS academics. This video is a paint-by-numbers recounting of them. It's thoroughly wrong:
It's almost *boring* how rote it is. But there's a common incentive by both pomo academics and IDW grifters to turn the hoax into something to do with "peer review" when it was never about that. It was about demonstrating that Social Text would platform the starkest antirealism.