Anarchist & Radical Book Club discussion

"Rare is the professor who, like Mircea Eliade, frees himself of the armored vision and sees through the iron curtain of inversion and falsification. And even Eliade fogs what he sees by claiming to find analogies and vestiges in our world. The strait that separates us from the other shore has been widening for three hundred generations, and whatever was cannibalized from the other shore is no longer a vestige of their activity but an excretion of ours: it’s shit." - Fredy Perlman, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!

Many of us experience life as lived in the wasteland, in a crater of a disaster that's already occurred. We all know the ways that dominant society seeks to fill and sate that void in people, and we have many who've devoted their lives to critiquing those techniques. But what of the other side? What of something that might be called culture?

Anarchist culture has taken many forms throughout its history: picnics, marches, punk shows, critical masses, book-fairs. These are places where Anarchists came together, shared time, space and ideas with one another; connected, bonded, parted ways.

We're living in a time when, even pre-covid, many of these forms of Anarchist culture, of Anarchist community for lack of a better term, feel dead, dying, or pushed so far outside of peoples' lives as to only qualify as a hobby. But many of us want more.

So I'm interested in what ways people have felt like they could connect with other Anarchists in a meaningful, long-term way. Places, times, spaces when you felt that you really stood on ground with others firmer than the ever shifting landscape of the protest, the riot, the show.

Also, how do we make more space for these kinds of things in the current Anarchist space? I've heard several Anarchists argue that something like religion, or something like spirituality, something almost like church is what's needed to stop Anarchy from being a youth culture which chews people up and spits them out. Do you agree? Disagree? How so?

"something almost like a church" is some dangerous language in public... but I'll bite.

To the extent that church means a) people of multiple generations, b) with a culture of taking care of each other, and c) specific roles that people understand and that make sense within the tradition, and d) rituals that feed people (emotionally and physically), and e) a way to understand both the world and their lives/relationships... it's hard to argue that anarchy folks couldn't use some of that.

The question that raises for me is how much do these things have to be something you're born into before they really work. The principle of free association is crucial to anarchists, but these days that mostly means that folks bail on anything as soon as it gets hard or complicated, and it's hard to argue that that's wrong, given it's so prevalent. Why stick around for difficult things if you're probably the only one in your social circle who will?

Anyway, this is a rabbit hole of a topic. And it's only part of the question raised... but, something more to start with, anyway.

Dot wrote: ""something almost like a church" is some dangerous language in public... but I'll bite.

To the extent that church means a) people of multiple generations, b) with a culture of taking care of each..."

For sure, the idea that something like that grows in one generation, although really appealing for me at least, is sadly just not how things work it would seem.

The idea of land comes immediately to mind when I think about how things become multi-generational, but the stories of land projects I've heard always end in people not having enough to keep them there, or coming in with strange expectations. Makes me wonder what an urban equivalent would be like.

I imagine it would require 1. Cheap rent 2. Sparse population 3. Maybe not a lot of radical history and thus less bad-milieu-blood. Dreamtime village comes to mind, but of course that place ran its course too.

Littleblackcart wrote: ""Rare is the professor who, like Mircea Eliade, frees himself of the armored vision and sees through the iron curtain of inversion and falsification. And even Eliade fogs what he sees by claiming t..."

I think this conversation about what's needed is struggling for a language to describe a pre-imagined solution. To that point, I think the words "church" and "spirituality," when divested from oppressive philosophies and practices, are referencing a collectivist orientation that transcends some degree of materiality. This quality makes it durable across generations, periodic lulls, and necessary adjustments to encounters with difference (through incorporation, assimilation, rejection, etc.). I tend to interpret anarchism as already providing each of the qualities of church that Dot listed. I wonder if the challenge is being geographically diffuse, an obstacle that anarchist spaces like book fairs and infoshops worked to solve.

I feel like, at the heart of the question's framing and some of the responses, is the issue of contact, the dearth of contact, contact as ephemeral, contact as supremely challenging for anyone struggling under oppression and capitalism with few resources. Collectivism, community, and subsequently shared resources, is necessary for survival under contemporary conditions, both materially and spiritually/psychically. I don't think of free association as an issue; seeing yourself as part of a larger freedom struggle precludes isolationism.

Curious about other people's thoughts. I feel like it's a useful rabbit hole. When I read the question, what I hear is, "What are we even doing here? What does what we want to be doing look like?"

i think those last two questions are always valuable, can be asked to good effect every single day, at least (probably only) to ourselves, to remind us that we make choices (especially when it seems like we're not making choices, probably).

but i also think free association is always an issue, and i'm not sure about the dichotomy you're setting up between "larger freedom struggle" and "isolationism." i associate free association with the capacity to say "i don't want to spend time with you, fellow anarchist" without needing the fellow anarchist to acknowledge that they understand (much less agree with) my reason. i mean, that's a specific example. there are others, of course too.
but probably that's not what you mean by "isolationism." at any rate, "larger freedom struggles" are notorious for taking over or trying to take over people's lives, with agendas and definitions that either never worked, or only sometimes worked, or rarely worked for any given individual. Manual for Revolutionary Leaders in particular is fantastic (and funny) for how it points this out.
but perhaps i should ask you more questions.
what did you mean? :)

Hi! Points taken. I didn't mean Larger Freedom Struggle in that formal and historical sense. I meant it colloquially, like the problem of life for anyone trying to get free and the effort on any level to assist in the freedom of others.

In your specific example, I think I would describe that as compulsory association, which, you're correct, is bullshit and not remotely anarchistic. I misread your point of emphasis when you initially mentioned free association. I tend to think of that phrase as being intergroup, which sometimes results in isolationism or separatism; I see now that you were clearly making an intragroup reference, which makes way more sense in your context.

Ok!
Just to continue fleshing things out, what space is there between compulsory association and free association? Compulsory sounds more actively coercive to me than the mesh of assumption/habit/expectation that acts on us (and we act on) day-to-day.

Language, so subjective!

Dot wrote: ""The principle of free association is crucial to anarchists, but these days that mostly means that folks bail on anything as soon as it gets hard or complicated, and it's hard to argue that that's wrong, given it's so prevalent. Why stick around for difficult things if you're probably the only one in your social circle who will?

This is also an essential weakness to an anarchism defined this way. If one bails on anything difficult how do we ever do anything meaningful, anything other than what comes naturally, and most things really don't. Like we take years just to learn to walk, to talk, read, etc etc. To demand the impossible seems a strange demand if one abandons the merely hard. But if the secret is really to begin and begin again over and over, then it being an anarchist often means being the one who does the difficult things even when no one else will, not only in principle but because it could make our lives better and more interesting.

I agree with you that doing hard things, sometimes alone, is part of being an anarchist.

But I have also watched people choose being/acting alone as a marker of anarchist thought/behavior, which sometimes I agree with and sometimes seems misguided, right? Choosing the hard thing only because it's hard has worked for me sometimes to make myself stronger, or to challenge myself personally, but it also can make me self righteous and insular. (And just to be thoroughly complicated--sometimes being self righteous and insular is not the worst thing either.)

And people like Aragorn! have pointed out that we can't have the world we want without other people, who by definition will disagree with us about important things. That never means catering (my own tendency is towards being a purist asshole, definitely), but it can mean being gentle when people choose different areas for drawing lines and taking stands. Put another way, none of us is demanding the impossible in every area of our lives: we all make choices about places to push and places to rest.

I have no idea if I'm making sense outside of my own head, at this point. Fingers crossed, lol.

Being alone doesn't sound very fun or powerful though, even if one is correct or doing very difficult things. Part of what pushes me away from a certain conception of anarchy is the individual being the center of gravity. What if we were talking, instead, about doing difficult things together (necessarily including the problem of being singular plural)? If it is true that we are more free to act as individuals via the expansive freedom of others then why do we keep talking so much about the individual rather than what forms collective being takes that gives us the greatest ability to experiment and act?

Perhaps demanding the impossible is not something we concretely demand ideologically of others, but something we do together, something we point to.

I apologize for jumping into this at the end and not really interacting from the start...

"Also, how do we make more space for these kinds of things in the current Anarchist space? I've heard several Anarchists argue that something like religion, or something like spirituality, something almost like church is what's needed to stop Anarchy from being a youth culture which chews people up and spits them out. Do you agree? Disagree? How so?"

I think for me, it's a question of what would make "being an anarchist" inhabitable, able to be lived in for the long term, far deeper and sustaining. There's a kind of internal cannibalism that can take place among scenes of a certain size and even in small groups as if always having drama is what makes them real. People are constantly pushed away by the toxicity of these scenes and their implicit and explicit moralism. The church already exists there.

Instead there should be an ecstatic joy of being together, allowing us to act in ways that no other space does.

There are certainly times that I've felt this. I do everything I can do make those moments, whether as friendships, relationships, networks, etc last as long as they can and give them strength. And when those fall away, when the riot is over, when friendships and scenes fall apart, the occupation ends, everyone stops coming to the reading group, what is it that propels us to the next? I don't think it's spirituality, but a taste for living that remains as a residue even after it seems to have evaporated and gives us a glimpse into a life worth of living.

I would put it this way: doing things alone can be super powerful, but there are different kinds of power, and many of them are not available to a lone actor.
But it's extremely hard to act with other people over long periods of time, whereas we always have ourselves (though our selves change also).

So the metaphor of the church wasn't (to me) about spirituality at all--in fact it's loudly and explicitly against the ideas of all the churches I can think of--it was about the things I listed above already, how people meet their own and each other's needs over time, and in and beyond times of low energy, sadness, etc.

What is it more precisely that makes it extremely difficult to act with other people? I don't disagree, but I think pin pointing what stands against and in the way of living a life we'd want to live together is essential.

Re the church, there's an enormous difference between early Christianity and THE CHURCH. One is a way of life and another is a form persisting against everything else, increasingly emptied of its origins and content. Giorgio Agamben has a great short essay on this called The Church and the Kingdom.

“what is it that propels us to the next? I don't think it's spirituality, but a taste for living that remains as a residue even after it seems to have evaporated and gives us a glimpse into a life worth of living.“

I think for many that would be a definition of a kind of spirituality. But I’m curious what that taste has looked like for you and how you’ve carried it forward.

I'm not opposed to the spiritual, but what I meant is more of a feeling of having shared a kind of power with others, and dynamics and relationships that go through peaks and lulls, and refining a disposition/inclination/taste in the process. As each peak goes bigger the going back to normal feels even more lull. Last summer, for example, felt hard to return from, but for many who felt a form of collective being in those moments that was monstrous and joyful this presents a truth that refracts a new light onto future experiences even in their lull.

In my own life, I've had many experiences that have shaped me, obviously, from falling into love to extreme sharing and social upheaval. I try to remain faithful to these experiences and give strength to new ones as they come. In the lull of back to normal in capitalist hell, this means retaining a shared sense of this taste and building towards it together even if this sometimes just means being together. For me, this is often doing reading groups, socializing around a fire, learning skills together, etc. The pandemic, despite all the mutual aid that popped up, seemed to have stripped many collective formations of their power in a way that we haven't really found a real answer to. Sorry if that isn't super specific.

fascinating discussion so far! my contribution comes partly from outside of the Christian church specifically. for example, for a good couple of years (pre COVID) i was part of a jewish community that celebrated Shabbat every week; I'm not Jewish by faith or cultural background, but i had a friend who was invited me to join a few times and i was hooked pretty quick. unlike christian mass, eating has been pretty central to the Shabbat. i loved learning how to bake challah and get to catch up with the same people every week. it was very much about the processes involved, not confessional, and very horizontally organized. likewise, before COVID most of my best social connections occurred during pretty informal communally prepared dinners among friends, often organized around a film screening or something like that i really would love to be part of something like that again, though I'm worried it will be hard to find spaces like that outside of college life.

"What is it more precisely that makes it extremely difficult to act with other people? "

Presumably, aside from the things that always make it challenging (conflicting agendas, styles, aesthetics), what makes it particularly hard these days in this world is alienation: all the ways we learn that we don't need other people, don't know other people, that other people don't exist, etc. (tl/dr: what the Sits said). Right?

But yeah Zach... food=the best of religion! (i know that's not what you said, but I like it :) )

Zach wrote: "fascinating discussion so far! my contribution comes partly from outside of the Christian church specifically. for example, for a good couple of years (pre COVID) i was part of a jewish community t..."

I love the Jewish traditions around food. I think that form of the communal aspect of food sharing is there within the Christian Church as well, but what was at it's core a common experience of sharing became more empty gesture (I'm sure some would argue with me about that) of communion. Omnia sunt communia is a proto-communist slogan of the peasant revolts and protestant revolution, which means "all things held in common", meaning expropriation, extreme sharing, the end of debts, etc.

I think these traditions around food and being together through them are essential for maintaining relationships, and have at their core a different way of imagining relating to others that we should really learn to practice as an art and take pleasure in.

Re: finding these experiences outside of college. They're out there, but you might either have to look harder or make them happen yourself, starting small with a group of friends and building from there.

Dot wrote: ""What is it more precisely that makes it extremely difficult to act with other people? "

Presumably, aside from the things that always make it challenging (conflicting agendas, styles, aesthetics)..."

I guess alienation is there and always has been to a degree. What specifically is different about it now that makes it so challenging? Being deprived of the idea of needing other people, which in the US is turned into an ontological truth and an idea of power is an extreme form of impoverishment. We should need other people like we need water to live. I mean people in the most general sense possible. We need to be connected to other beings in the world to fully be in the world. And yet, we are perhaps more alone than ever, surrounded by images of people and even when we're near another body we're often not trying to be present. We're alone because we don't see life everywhere around us and we're taught to not need it.