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existential1 wrote

Someone must have been scrolling raddle's recent discourse and thought, "I'll fucking write it."

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celebratedrecluse wrote

I read the whole thing.

The first part cites the right wing armed assembly of the USA legislature as historically similar to the Beer Hall Putsch, and the election of Joe Biden as similar to the moment of the final moments of the Spanish republic before a right-wing coup. There are many other parallels one could have brought up, from outside European history: most importantly for Americans would be the 1973 September coup of Allende by Pinochet in Chile, as well as the repeated attempted and successful coups throughout Latin America by USA (VZ, Bolivia, Brazil). These coups, whether they succeed or fail, put anarchists in a difficult spot, facing either a resurgent "left" liberal state or a foreign-backed right wing disaster, and have often ramped up street level confrontations as well as led to arrests/legal repression against anarchists, regardless of who wins.

While this piece was a bit eurocentric and hastily written, as many pieces on IGD's open platform are inevitably going to be given the permissive editorial style and anonymous interface of the platform, it has a good point. Anarchists in the public eye, especially in the cities, should be alert to the changes in political conditions to tool their activities and lessen the odds of getting incarcerated or killed.

There is also something to be said for strengthening regional and international bonds, as well as bonds within daily life relationships, between anarchists and our fellow travelers and loved ones. While this comes with the risk of infiltration, but especially during the pandemic hypernormalization finding ways for people to meet and sustain each other in mutual friendship as safely as possible has become quite important. You can look at the suicide statistics, the mental unwellness statistics, the fatalities from preventable causes and drug overdoses worldwide, and you'll see that our numbers are not looking good on our side of the scoreboard. Moreover, there is the unquantifiable affectual loss of the death of the commons we have lived through this last year.

However, what follows is a poorly argued, wrongheaded approach to this issue. First, it addresses a "lack of formality", which is ludicrous: not among our problems is a lack of a formalized entity which synedochically centralizes anarchy, if that was even possible. Rather, the aforementioned open question is about the very existence of rhizomatic networks for anarchists to create and make use of. A formalization implies a centralization, which is inherently reductive! We need a generative, not a reductive, process. Something which can be applied and federated as desired by participants, but which is not an easy target for state and reactionary infiltrators by being a single giant fucking vanguard. We need a mode, a way, a processual arsenal, not a static or "formal" "organization" with membership cards like the fucking USA's CPUSA, SA, IWW, or SRA.

To use a less pretentious metaphor, the anarchist struggle is similar to an organism divided into many cells. An affinity group is one cell of the movement. An affinity group that is isolated from the groups around it would be a lone cell. It may do good work in its own right and may replicate itself over time but alone and divided from the rest of the cells it is weak.

This is amusing because the most successful life forms on the planet, by weight, are Monera (bacteria), Protists, and single-celled plantae. This is a metaphor which really just doesn't work for a scientific audience.

If we are to create a society wide revolution we must first organizing a society wide anarchist movement.

Well, the problem is thinking we have a "society". Everyone is an atomized neoliberal drone, most people have very few meaningful relationships, if any, in the fastest growing population centers of the world. And the rural areas are becoming lonelier still. What we need is not a centralizing reductive vessel for anarchy, but a generative process of creating networks and bonds where there are currently none.

Speaking practically, since we are low on time due to ecological collapse imminence, anarchists sociality will grow fastest if it is completely distributed, being easily applied by a wide variety of actors, and tending towards encouraging participation and engagement by an effective reward/feedback loop which invites dynamic cooperation toward shared desires. That is, it should incorporate the most up-to-date on-the-ground lessons from the so-called "insurrectionary anarchists"; I just see them as anarchists, whereas there are many anarchists who claim the label but are actually interested in very different politics, which has nothing to do with creative destruction or generative affinity processes.

For further reading on what I am talking about, I would cite To Our Friends as a seminal work that influenced me a lot.

The Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo was a national organization for a reason and similarly, the Federacion Anarquista Iberica included not just Spain but also Portugal in its organizing.

These are not very good examples in my opinion, because the "anarchist revolution" in spain was ultimately a failure, as it ended with betrayal by the MLs and liberals, and defeat of all at the hands of the military regime. There are many reasons for this, and there are cool things about the Spanish revolts in Catalonia etc, but centering the FAI errs in that the CNT was the materially constitutive body of what provided the opportunity for widespread socioeconomic changes in places like Barcelona, and it was not explicitly anarchist but merely had prominent anarchists involved with it. The FAI, by contrast, was essentially a club, whose purpose was to gain control of the CNT. Using this example doesn't prove the point that an anarchist federation is helpful to anarchist struggle, but rather is a form of what might be called "anarchist entryism", and is important to understand in how it indisputably weakened the CNT prior to the civil war by engaging in bureaucratic purges of other bureaucrats.

The non-european examples are of organizations that are explicitly not anarchist and have a distinct national/regional character (Chiapas and Rojava). Although they are much closer aligned to anarchist values than the average nation-state, i think it is disingenous and little presumptious to regard these efforts as anarchist, because it erases their non-anarchist character and traits.

national federation of anarchists

Why not international? Also, the IWW already exists, and already has problems with it. No need to reinvent the broken wheel.

Such an organization would strive to connect the various nodes and pockets of resistance into a continuous network of revolt.

It is more likely it would connect anarchists into a continous network of surveillance, ending in occasional stays in mental and carceral institutions, at the state's discretion. This is the important difference between spain 1937 and USA 2021; the USA is the primary center of the world police force and surveillance industry. The same tactics from 85 years ago are not going to work for you over there.

The guiding principle should be the autonomy of the various collectives and groups. Groups would only ratify decisions that they agree with and still retain their local autonomy. Another element that would be in this federation is the use of delegates that represent affinity groups but have no executive power and can be subject to recall at any time. Security will also be important. The FAI’s membership is secret and that is one of the reasons why they have survived a century of repression. If meeting in conferences is too much of a risk, the federation could merely be a communication network that can help to organize nation wide actions. Regardless of the security measures or rules the idea should that affinity groups can easily link with other affinity groups to achieve a common struggle.

The FAI has "survived" because it hardened itself down into irrelevance. In its heyday, it gained influence and power due to piggybacking on a larger labor movement. In a deindustrialized USA, this makes no sense to approach the problem of "how do anarchists find and live with and create and destroy together safely" through a completely outdated contextual lens. The idea that membership rolls of an anarchist federation could even be kept secret, is ludicrous in this day and age. The only way to ensure data safety, as /u/ziq has related from experience running Raddle, is to "keep as little info as possible, as little as necessary to run the service". Why do we...need a list? We should be trying to stay off the lists, everyone.

As far as assembling for mass actions, alternatives to the fedbook/tw$tter/etc of american social media are definitely needed, for safety and efficacy reasons both, when it comes to mass actions, events, and general networking for our daily life efforts. A platform like Element.io offers a lot of advantages for safely spreading information and digital community among people who already know each other, and I am part of a lot of these type of groups on a number of different profiles. What I am interested in, is how do we safely integrate new people into networks? But the author seems more interested in, how do we make a list of everyone who is an anarchist, that only a few anarchists can access? I don't see why this is desirable, or helpful, to anything I want to do.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

The ground work for such an organization has largely already been built. Many of us already have connections that transcended state and national boundaries. The next step is to better formalize these connections.

No, the next step is still the first step, which is to actually generate these connections and rhizomes when they are actively dying off and receding. That this essay was released in 2021 is utterly anachronous; it would be still off-base in my opinion, but a little more understandable, if it had emerged in 2017-2019, when the conditions for such a platformist tendency were actually on the rise in USA. However, even then, such an approach is wrongheaded and idealistically ignores the material conditions of the social situation people are in right now, at this time in history.

So, unlike some other esteemed posters on here, I do think there is a problem with anarchy today. That is, there is room for greater structure. However, it will come as a distributed process, not a centralized reduction or entryism.

If you ask me, I want to abandon tradition. What I think is needed is a matrix of processes that will help us fulfill our wants and needs insofar as our social relationships, not a popular front to subsume ourselves to a higher Rousseauean Will. The latter, was arguably a huge part of why anarchist aspirations failed, because it essentially tried to out-fascism fascism, instituting its own somewhat incoherent authoritarian universalism as a substitute for a tragically much more ideologically coherent and compelling authoritarian universalism of Francoism, and defended the liberal state to its own detriment and downfall.

Stop talking about Spain from 85 years ago. It's a terrible argument and illustrates the inexperienced nature of the American anarchists, that they exoticize such a internally contradicted and unsuccessful historical example.

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kin wrote

Let the platformists organize, no prob with that. But when they came with "federationism"

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

My exactly reaction

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celebratedrecluse wrote

They are explicitly framing this as a "universally applicable" structure.

They want to make a state. Zombie anarchy is at it again.

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