William Gillis 🏴
Some rando just sent me a furious DM that I would retoot anarchist animal liberation actions, which she characterized as "veganoid jihad robots."
1) A reminder that I am an anarchist, with pretty much all the plumbline anarchist positions minus my three iconoclastic positions on tech, cities, and markets. It's flabbergasting that anyone would be surprised about such a longstanding core anarchist position as militant veganism.
2) VEGANOID JIHAD ROBOTS!!!!! Best band name.
novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️
@rechelon yeah like the thing people have to understand is that one of the core tenants of anarchism is just going out and doing shit — direct action — up to and including actual violence, let alone property damage, in the interests of attacking hierarchies. And some people are gonna have a different understanding of what counts as a hierarchy than you. So rather than whining and complaining that anarchists are anarchisting, just get ready to fight back if you disagree. It is really that simple.
FinalOverdrive
@anarchopunk_girl @rechelon im not looking forward to that personslly.
novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️
@FinalOverdrive @rechelon it is what it is *shrug*
FinalOverdrive
@anarchopunk_girl @rechelon Apart from agreeing to simply treat it as a differing lifeway.
novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️
@FinalOverdrive @rechelon I'm willing to do that for vegans. But vegans who take a moral stance *must* see me as evil, and how could I possible, in good conscience, ask them *not* to act on their moral convictions? That's why I explained it as I did — vegans see nonvegans as aggressors (on animals) and nonvegans will see vegans that act on that as the aggressors.
noBonzo
@rechelon and to think I was never able to get anarcho grave robbing outrage discourse going
novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️
@nobonzo @rechelon grave robbing is cool, I hope someone robs my grave. I'm dead, why the hell should I care lol? And the aesthetic is so cool. Maybe I'll have myself buried with some cool shit just in case :D
novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️
@neonsnake @rechelon yeah, there's a CrimeTheInc article I saw shared here awhile ago arguing that the only true form of anarchism is primitivism, because technology requires specialization / division of labor and long supply chains and those inherently require hierarchy. It's not a convincing argument to me though, because there's no reason for division of labor or specialization to require hierarchy (workers in any specialization can always self-manage, and there's no inherent need for hierarchy or authority between different specializations, a scientist knows as little about a factory worker's job as vice versa) or alienation (to take a page out of Bob Black's book, we don't have to specialize people as much as we do today, so onerous specializations could be combined with other specializations in a rotation or something, and if combined with worker self management, people would have a lot more agency in general, including how they mix things up) and I really really don't see why any stage of a supply chain would have authority over any other or why sheer distance or numerousness or complexity of process requires authority to manage and organize it, that seems like a fundamentally un-anarchist assumption backed up by little more than incredulity, when bottom up Proudhonian federations and such are possible.
William Gillis 🏴
Well the usual argument isn't that tech and cities are products of capitalism, but the reverse: capitalism is the evil fruits of the innately evil system of cities/tech.
The long lens of history and the critique of "leviathan" is really important and anarchism would be impoverished without it, but they're wrong on the way they tie cities/tech to power.
NeonSnake
@rechelon I can see that argument in the case of cities (cities need mega agriculture, that leads to an administrative class etc etc), and even without a state, will inevitably lead to class, hierarchy, oppression and so on - I'm not convinced by the argument, but I can understand it.
Not so sure about technology, though? Unless it's that you need increasingly "large" industry to product it?
William Gillis 🏴
This has turned the red-green split into functionally being viewed as a hierarchy of involvement. The reds are largely just randos who have only glancing contact with anarchism, and the greens are what folks evolve into after sufficient engagement / participation in anarchism. At least, that's the very popular perspective and narrative.
So being highly involved with a long history in the movement, my support for tech and cities is always viewed as wildly out of place.
NeonSnake
@rechelon thanks for that - makes sense, and I can sorta see why too, even if I'm not anti-civ myself, a lot of folk I talk to view tech and cities as products of capitalism first and foremost, rather then potentially liberatory tools
NeonSnake
ok, I might regret asking this, but what's iconoclastic about being pro-city and tech, as an anarchist?
William Gillis 🏴
While the majority of anarchists by mere self-identification are red (syndicalist, communist, bookchinite, etc), for decades now the functional core of anarchism has been green.
That is to say that those most active in struggle or prefiguration, most engaged in anarchist discourse, and most situated at the center of the milieu in terms of institutions and social capital are all variations of anticiv or very close to it.
novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️
@neonsnake @rechelon Honestly it seems like people with this critique just still have statist (and classist) brainworms about authority being necessary to do anything big or complex and some professions inherently being better or naturally in authority over others (when, in actuality, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS UNSKILLED LABOR) and didn't do anything to dig up those fundamental assumptions when they became anarchist, and so agree with all the misconceptions statists have about how anarchy would be and thus decided they had to fully throw the baby out with the bathwater when they became anarchist. And despite having less truly anarchist thinking about thinks, they still get the badge of being the "most anarchist" because of the sheer commitment that their willingness to get rid of modern tech indicates.
NeonSnake
I wouldn't mind reading that, if you come across it again.
The times I've interacted with people who lean in that direction, I've got frustrated extremely quickly, as I don't really understand their motivations/approach (eg. bow and arrow vs wifi router), given how different they are to me, and I've always been left with a - possibly unfair - unease about how they'd treat people who are less abled.
(That's more a view on anti-tech types, rather than anti-city types, to be fair)
novatorine 🏴🏳️⚧️
@neonsnake @rechelon I can go find the article for you, but I guarantee you it wasn't worth reading. It was about five paragraphs, and made its points with entirely no argumentation beyond merely stating that long supply chains require hierarchy and so on.
Also, I agree that being anti-tech to the degree that anti-civ and primitivist anarchists are is kind of inherently ableist — and anti-trans as well. I've actually tried to confront some primitivist anarchists on it, and their response to the trans angle was that I should just "learn to love my natural body" and that gender dysphoria isn't real. As for ableism especially regarding people with depression and ADHD who need advanced medication to make them even functional and massively improve their quality of life, I got told that ADHD is only a problem because of capitalism's requirement to work for a living and adhere to certain schedules and so without capitalism there wouldn't be any need for ADHD meds (which is complete and utter bullshit because executive function problems can stop ADHD people from even doing stuff that they desperately want to do and that would apply without capitalism), and they said similar things about depression and antidepressants too.
NeonSnake
Long supply chain do NOT necessarily require hierarchy. (They may not be *ideal* for absolutely everything, eg. we in the UK maybe can do without asparagus from Peru in September, but that's a different issue)
As for the rest of your post - my experience was much less, uh, pointedly close to home (for want of a *much* better phrase), but the sense of "well, you'll just have to learn to live without X*, which might suck for you, but will be better for society at large" is eerily similar.
*X being certain tech that makes my life more liveable/dignified, especially with my arthritis/long covid, albeit I *can* function without it.
Fuck that noise.
Ciggy Bringer of Smoke
@anarchopunk_girl @neonsnake @rechelon this taps on something that aggrivates me to no end that is kind of an aside but I hate the aspirational idealism of 'True Anarchism'.
Like, im kinda shy about calling myself an Anarchist and would much prefer others point at me and say it is so, and a huge part of that is refusing to believe in ideal forms at all - which would absolutely lead to arguments and spats with those who would get in a real huff about my ass disputing a huge part of their belief basis. I dont wanna play that game of possesiveness over it and feel much more at liberty to speak my piece without it.
However, despite all the dancing around simply not getting a whole hell of a lot of attendant beliefs that self styled True Anarchists hold, Anarchism still has a hold on me as a starting point and an applicative set of values and beliefs, primarily the importance of agency and the necroticism of social heirarchies and all being in this shit together.
This is all to say that from my odd Anarchobaby POV, theres a whole lot of extra fluff that seems impediment to realizing any of the idealism that sets basis of belief.
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