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celebratedrecluse wrote

Reparations aren't anticapitalist, for similar reason that elections are not anarchist.

It is a way to justify what already exists, nothing more. And if you don't change the system it takes place in, it is reabsorbed more quickly than it can change anything.

Justice for these problems, is not inverting the hierarchy, but rather, flattening it out.

There is no necessity to create the anarchist reparations bureau to means-test who has what amount of privilege and how to quantify it. Trying to do so is just an example of the institutionality which produced the problem in the first place.

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[deleted] wrote

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celebratedrecluse wrote

Reparations can be reinterpreted, away from individual cash payments, and towards the decommodification of the means of existence. The framing and rhetoric is less important, than what is actually done.

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Tonic wrote (edited )

Disagreed with most of what you had to say so will just provide a different way to look at it.

Considering reparations to be limited to just cash transfers is similar to how people ask for handouts and call it mutual aid.

Relative amounts of cash isn't the only thing that needs repair. This is a highly limited approach that is in some ways often more close to charity than repair.

There are two directions I want to take this, but I can only do the first now and touch on the second. The first is about how reparations for anarchists is the same as everything for anarchists - based in affinity, and the second is about how the process of reparations is a returning of humanness and property to a state of being in-common.

Like all things anarchists do, their work grows from affinity with others. They will also sometimes do broad-based work that aims to change the atmosphere of a space, but our core work is with those we are in affinity with.

To refer to the classic text, accomplices not allies, those people we have affinity with across hierarchical identity lines can be called our accomplices.

If you're white, you may not have access to most of the political spaces that your accomplices are in, but they recognise your sincerity an built affinity with you over time.

Reparations goes first and foremost to those people, no strings attached. Money to the people you have affinity with is the same as money for your collective vision of liberation. Helping a regular person eat is helping a regular person eat, and maybe you can call it reparations, but reparations is more of a radical attempt to repair.

What does it look like? It looks like removing the relations of property between yourself and those you have affinity with, putting them in-common. It is prefiguring anarchy fully in the relationships you have with those you share affinity with.

It's not just property that has been stolen from the commons though, but also humanness, as a dogmatic idea of humanness, built conflated with whiteness (and other positionalities like cis, man, bourgie, there are many), has created sets of relations that hierarchize all of our societies by measuring people against that dogmatic idea of the human.

So the sets of relationships we are trying to build are revolutionary affinity groups that cross boundaries of positionality and seek to destroy the enclosure of property and humanness from the commons, for a world totally in common.

Somebody I know just recently finished a dissertation about this stuff that I got to proof-read, I'll get them to put it on the anarchist library as soon as I can.

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kaj wrote (edited )

Like all things anarchists do, their work grows from affinity with others. They will also sometimes do broad-based work that aims to change the atmosphere of a space, but our core work is with those we are in affinity with.

That means that if they have shitty politics, we don't invest much on them or prioritize working with others who won't backstab us (I'm sure there are black poor Trump-voters), and try to bring them to our side. Where would you set your boundaries? I tend not to be very flexible on that. I can't stand liberals. I cannot stand some communists who support repression against anarchy carried out by "communist regimes" and are more worried about writing their manifestos and shitty texts only Marxists understand than actually doing something.

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Tonic wrote

Where would you set your boundaries?

The specifics of context decide everything.

It wasn't clear to me what you were saying you are inflexible about.

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[deleted] wrote

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Tonic wrote

I've read a lot about reparations but I've never read anything about people desiring to share all their possessions in common.

You don't share freely with people you love and build your life together with?

Of anarchism is abolishing private property in the marxists sense I'm anti anarchism.

Did you mean if? if you meant if, anarchism definitely at minimum abolishes private property. Some anarchists will make a distinction between private and personal property. I think about possession in purely pragmatic terms including relations of various kinds of emotional/spiritual attachment in the considerations.

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ruin wrote

Some anarchists will make a distinction between private and personal property.

Most do. Personal property would be your socks, toothbrush, and perhaps your personal space/dwelling.

Private property is productive property. Something that generates value beyond your personal usage and so would be communal or at least beyond the reach of a framework of ownership rights.

Even marxists recognize that while the dictatorship of the proletariat owns the means of production, your underwear are yours and yours alone.

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Tonic wrote

I don't understand why people are attached to this personal/private category set, it seems rigid and impractical.

To continue your example, my partners and I interchangeably use each other's underwear just depending on what's around and what's easiest. We know 'whose' is whose but there is nothing preventing any of us from using the others'. Who bought it or 'owns' it isn't a particularly relevant category for their use, only practical/pragmatic considerations.

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ruin wrote

I’m not sure it’s a matter of attachment, nor an attempt to be absolutist.

I see it as a starting point for a practical evaluation and discussion.

Was really just pointing out that comparing a single toothbrush to land ownership or a privately held toothbrush factory is rather absurd but is an often employed (especially online) anarchist rhetorical tactic.

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Tonic wrote

Cool, I'm basically on board with that.

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[deleted] wrote

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Tonic wrote

Reparations and abolishing property are related but not the same

Yes, I have said as much.

If that was true, major arguments from leftists wanting reparations would say they want to abolish property as reparations.

Dissolving property and humanness into the commons is reparations, both including in them a healing process. This is the same as making anarchy, which is the same as decentralising power.

So, it seems odd to say my thoughts on popular reparations strategies are wrong when u have a completely different idea of what reparations should be and disagree with most people who advocate for reparations.

Why would it be odd that I disagree with most people, given that I am an anarchist? There are many types of authoritarians who believe in their own forms of reparation, anarchists will be in the minority, and overtly anarchist ideas on reparation are not so easy to come by.

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kaj wrote

that I am an anarchist?

No, I don't think so. I think you're a communist (anarcho-communist?), which is fine as long as you don't blindly support terrible things that Trotsky, Stalin... did for the "greater good" (like killing the anarchists in Ukraine, Kronstadt, etc.).

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kin wrote

I will revisit your t xt soon and I wanna see how other veteran raddlers respond to this.

But, like I commented once, bietan jarrai for me is a motto, to keep up with both, meaning that any reparation, reform or overall improvement in the society is not detrimental with my current postleft/pessimistic instance. You can keep up with both. Maybe is my try of a synthesis between individual and social current, even if I fall for traps like "progress" and improvement , since I m marching towards a i(a)moral instance.

Now, in the context you mentioned, slavery reparations, is the kind of thing we vaguely ( the metaphorically "we") theorize, but never speak out clearly how would be done; how a affirmative reparation will look like?

I remember HakimBey in "against legalization":

In this situation, it would seem “reform” has also become an impossibility, since all partial ameliorizations of society will be transformed (by the same paradox that determines the global Image) into means of sustaining and enhancing the power of the commodity.

This is my first point, how this "reformism" really transform this issue? There is a point in it?

My second point, maybe your post is focused on African disapora countries (mainly US). But Africa as a continent, and as a Collective are in the line too, Asia, Latin America, Oceania, MiddleEast too.

Not sure what my point is tho

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[deleted] wrote

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kin wrote

I agree, but reparations between different nations would be a different matter, because would be at a collective level I think.

Nevertheless is a trick matter, if you imagine from an anarchist frame there won't be any reparations outside the one we "take by force" - and I will leave it here bc this could be flammable material.

One my problems though, is to assess how a reform action or any improvement is detrimental to the seek of the complete freedom (if such is real and attainable). or of they are even desirable in the first place, because Imagine Biden issuing reparation, how this would look like? Sure not enough....

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