It's admittedly an uphill battle, but I think it is this way now to some extent because anarchists have let it become this way by avoiding these conflicts. When I became an anarchist, Marxist-Leninists and Maoists had maxed-out their impact in a few washed-up formal organizations that were mostly ignored by a much larger, ambiguously anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist movement. The Marxists were making appeals to that attitude, developing anti-State Marxist and autonomist tendencies. The trend seemed to be that Marxists were quickly becoming university dinosaurs who could only exist by apologizing for their authoritarian past.

That clearly isn't the case anymore. Marxism is ascendent again. There's a bunch of causes, but one glaring one to me is that anarchists often choose to create their own spaces instead of fighting for ground in more public spaces. That applies to meat-space and the internet. We need our own spaces, yes. But I think conflict is important too. I don't want to hide and I'm not content to watch Marxists blowhards spread their spineless bullshit. I'd much rather take a shot at them than criticize other anarchists who aren't my favorite flavor. And to be honest, I enjoy the challenge. I wish more anarchists would confront Marxists and present counter-narratives in the same spaces that Marxists are presenting their narratives.

That said, yeah at the end of the day I'd rather be collaborating with other anarchists on creative projects that directly benefit us.

I don’t want to salvage socialism. I consider myself post-Left, after all. However, every post-Left author I admire is well versed in socialist history and can speak to why they have moved beyond it. I’m sure it’s possible to skip the whole stage of wrestling with that history, but why argue for ignorance? And in another sense, why argue for conflict avoidance? You said it draws more attention to the thing to acknowledge it and criticize it. People say that about negative feelings. I’ve always thought of that as a cop out.

Besides all that, which, whatever we all deal with these assholes in our own ways… Proudhon’s System of Economic Contradictions is a critique of the socialists of his time as much as it is a critique of the bourgeois political economists. It presents a fascinating social theory. It is something I think anarchists should still read.

Regarding the color coding (and other stylistic issues), that will all come eventually. These are actually just my notes from a study group I'm engaged in where we are comparing the two texts. Since I'm already spending my time on this, I might as well put out the results.

In my opinion, the Marx and Proudhon controversy, its resulting controversies in the First International, and how those have continued throughout the history of socialism make the relevant works significant for any student of socialism. There is little hope for sworn Marxists, but most budding socialists aren't sworn Marxists. The ambivalent "anti-authoritarian" outlook that so many have is more important to me. I think that a thorough critique of this book highlights just how shitty Marx was. I also think that it encourages a more sympathetic reading of Proudhon. It isn't only Marxists who have dismissed Proudhon's writings because of the way that Marx depicts them in his book on the subject. Anarchists are also poisoned against Proudhon by this ...among other, totally valid things. Since there isn't a lot of "classical anarchist" writing that deals with political economy in such detail, I think it's a shame that this has been a consequence.

I've found it useful to understand just how much of Marx's ideas can be found in anarchist writing, especially Proudhon's. Minimizing the supposed contributions of Marx and Engles to socialist theory opens us up to all of these other thinkers whose ideas are often ignored or understood only through Marx and Engles' critiques. What seems to remain after cancelling out Marx and Engles with these other thinkers are some fairly vague and authoritarian ideas. They aren't difficult to contradict when it is understood that anarchists have had very similar analyses of political economy.

pix will come later when I am done with the reading

I think a lot of things about it…

Here’s some:

https://cyberdandy.org/featured/herbert-reads-forward-to-albert-camus-the-rebel/

https://cyberdandy.org/featured/albert-camus-anarchist-conclusion/

https://cyberdandy.org/featured/the-rebel-by-albert-camus-reviewed-by-squee/

Albert Camus and his Uncomfortable Absurdity with Julian Langer https://youtu.be/RgJkUfL3bSc

I didn’t write the comment you are responding to.

That said, I don’t consider Duane a sellout.

I’m also fine with having people living in squats or whatever on my show, if they wanted to be. It’s on them to contact me since when they do write stuff or put out content in some way it’s usually anonymously.

Usually how selling out works in music scenes is that a major label will offer an underground band to sign. That label then promotes the band side-by-side with other bands that have an audience of people who aren’t part of the scene. The process eventually removes bands and genres outside of the context they were created within.

Underground scenes are usually composed of people who all contribute more than their consumption and fandom. Everyone does something: zines, photography or videography, collects records and makes mix tapes, finds venues for shows, are themselves in bands, etc. The tragedy of selling out is that it replaces these spaces of active participation and creativity with a stars/fans dynamic.

I think it works the same way for most arts (considering music an art here) and how they relate to established, commercial institutions.

“ I can't make this one a snappy quote but talking about something way different than nationalism but what it means to fight for and take care for ur subcultural group. I think this concept is one of theost helpful but I can't do it justice without writing a long time. But mainly the ideas of subcultural groups sticking together and bolo bolo”

I think the idea of “peoplehood” is a good alternative model than nationalism

Selling Out vs Selling Your Soul

I think it's fair to call someone a sellout if they like... start making money off of something that used to be underground and DIY, then never contribute back to the people who made the stuff they are selling. They are even more of a sellout if they change what they were saying/doing so that it is less offensive or more commercially viable. Like if a hardcore anarcho-punk band stops writing political songs after signing a contract with a major label - THAT's selling out.

But even with my definition, I think that there has been a normalization of that kind of selling out too. It's fucking pathetic.

I don't really care if someone becomes some kind of professional to make money. That isn't really selling out to me. I consider it a compromise of one's values, but not selling out. Like if someone from a hardcore anarcho-punk band became a doctor or something and stopped participating in the hardcore scene ...well, whatever. They didn't sell out hardcore, or anarchism, or anything like that. They sold themselves, yeah. But that doesn't fuck over the scene.

Like when a band sells out, that has consequences like flooding the scene with a bunch of posers and making something that had a lot of meaning for people superficial and trendy. One person buying shit from corporations and working for the system isn't doing anything to the scene. Especially if they use that money to start a label for underground bands or a publishing company for outsider authors or whatever.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but something I’m really glad you brought up is the concept of selling out. How do you think about selling out?

To me, selling out is so offensive because the sell out uses something an entire subculture created together to benefit only themselves.

I think what has happened to make selling out lose its significance as a concept is two main things:

1. There have been a lot of critiques of “authenticity” that I think people just gobble the fuck up.

2. I don’t think people collaborate on shit as much as they used to.

Comrades, I do not think you will find one among us who is a thoroughgoing calendar proponent. Likely, very few are even clock proponents. Like the history of language, the history of calendars and other systems of measure track the subjugation of many diverse peoples to the empires of the world.

But let’s not lose sight of the specific perversity that is the inclusion of months in a solar calendar!

Yes, the abolition of the months system would be but a mere reform compared with the revolution in our understanding of time that we ultimately strive for. However, fighting for this immediate aim will educate us in struggle and prepare us for the revolution ahead!

the months of a solar calendar don’t actually count the lunar cycles

I wouldn’t mind some lunar calendar love

Oh my how I do see the arbitrariness of the proposed half-measure!

Perhaps as a gesture of our courage and levity above these systems, we can keep only months and nothing more! This will emphasize the profound mistake we had once made in cluttering our spirit with calendar systems!

So are you saying that even the post-left anarchists wound up incorporating too much Marxist shit in their thinking?

I can see that more with the post-structuralist anarchists (post-anarchists) than the Hakim Bey types.

I don’t know how post-left anarchy can help “construct a powerful leftism capable of reaching into all corners of anarchism” if you don’t tell me what leftism is.

Maybe you said this and I'm not getting it, but how are you defining "leftist"?

Ok, thanks - but I'm using myself as an example for how this becomes complicated... not just to express that I have a personal stake in the matter.

As an anarchist, that is, someone with a complicated theory about why I want anarchy and how to achieve anarchy, I'm opposed to all forms of nationalism. That includes the nationalism that created the United States, the nationalism that created the State of Israel, etc. but it also includes the other nationalisms in the Middle-East and Islamism. So as an anarchist, Jewish or not, that means I don't give nationalism a free pass just because it is the nationalism of an oppressed group of people. Palestinian nationalism doesn't get a free pass. Nor does Islamist nationalism. Not Zionism, not ISIS, not Fatah, not the PLO, not Hamas. So who exactly, as an anarchist, am I in solidarity with? Who am I an ally to, or an accomplice with? It isn't any generic ethnic, religious, racial, tribal, or national group. It is with others who are anarchists or at least whose goals aren't fundamentally against my own goals.

Now, as someone against colonization, that also means I aim at some kind of decolonization. That seems to be the logical conclusion. But what does decolonization look like if you are a diaspora Jew? Well, if the Left, anti-Zionists, etc. start calling you "white" and they deny that you are actually from a people indigenous to the place you're from, then what are you left to do? There is some ways that Jews have become white, but the way that this is used in anti-Zionist discourse is to deny that Ashkenazim are also indigenous to Palestine/Eretz Yisrael. Accepting the status of whiteness in the United States and in some European countries, to whatever extent that has happened, doesn't disqualify Jews from their claim to descend from people in Israel. So anyway, it's a real question what relationship with colonization is. Are American Jews participating in settler-colonialism more than Israeli Jews? That's the question. American Jews have no claim to indigenous ancestry in America, but they do in Israel. That's a big problem for how this discourse is framed. If Jews in America are participating in colonization more than Jews in Israel are, then a big piece of the story is missing from the anti-Zionist discourse.

I also think that anarchists in the United States should be paying at least as much attention to what the United States is doing to indigenous people here as it does to what Israel does to Palestinians. Here is one place news can be found about that:

https://www.indigenousaction.org/news/

So oddly enough, as an anarchist this is less infuriating for me than it would be if like most people in the entire world, I was a nationalist. Then I'd have to get into even more weeds when it comes to Israel policy, I'd have to look at international law, I'd have to compare Israel with other nation-states and their practices of colonization/ethnic cleansing/assimilation/etc.

I think that as anarchists, our fundamentals should apply to the United States, to Israel and Palestine, and to other places. Two especially relevant and related situations are Russian and Ukraine, and Turkey, Syria, Rojava. Anarchists should be able to take coherent positions related to all of these situations. Example...

https://www.autistici.org/tridnivalka/whats-new-in-anarchism-national-self-determination-and-the-coincidence-of-interests-with-capital/

This logic should also apply to Zionism, to Islamism, to Palestinian nationalism.

It should also reflect our solidarity with Rojava against Turkey, against ISIS, and against other nationalists opposed to Rojava.

What do you mean the task is simple?

It isn't simple for me!

I'm a Jew that lives in the United States, the 2nd largest population of Jews in the world after Israel. The United States is absolutely a colonial state, based on white supremacy, that still persecutes the remaining indigenous population. I also live in Arizona, where a lot of that persecution happens. One of the things that makes it easier to be an anarchist here is that there is a sizable indigenous anarchist community. I don't know what Palestinian anarchists there are and I have asked numerous people.

Anyway, if I want to "decolonize" then what exactly does that look like? What would be the basis of my non-colonial existence if it isn't in Israel? See the problem? It isn't splitting hairs to argue about whether or not Jews are colonizers of Palestine, are white, etc. It's fundamental to how we think about who has a claim to live in a region and what way of living there is right.

Does the voting even impact how a post is displayed?

I'm not really against the voting mechanic itself, but I'd hope that there would be some commentary that indicates why something is getting the votes it is getting.