Tag: anarchism

Hey so other lefties

I have a comrade who has dyslexia, and they’re interested in learning more about leftist theory and stuff, do you guys have reccomendations for people who have a tough time with books?  Cause like my normal political education course is “HERE HAVE A FUCKTON OF STUFF TO READ” and I’m kind of at sea here.

Today I got to visit a gigantic anarchist library.

It was awesome.  I got:

White Trash: Race and Class in America

Black Skin, White Masks

and Red Flag Black Flag: French Revolution 1968

I have so much reading to do, I have a bunch of PDFs on gender performance and class and gender stuff and all these books and I want to read the Society Of The Spectacle and Gramsci and Foucault and I also have to get through the BRRN curriculum and I’m working on like three pieces about femininity and about how we need to reject masculinity if we want the revolution to succeed 

Working Class People Are Smart Enough To Read Theory

And I hate people who are like “oh you don’t need to read theory!” (translation: “Theory isn’t for the likes of you, peasant”) to working class folks.  

That said, we’re often too busy to read super long super dense super dry theory (or at least I am) and it’s often not easy for us to even get our hands on theory to read, plus a lot of stuff we’re told is “foundational” is super abstract, written in historical excessively wordy style and has very little human element and is basically not easy to apply to our own lives.  I tend to prefer pamphlets that are well edited and get their theoretical point across without excess verbiage, and ethnographic stuff with interviews with actual people (especially stuff on issues that relate to me, like intersections of class and gender) because the human element makes it interesting and relatable.

Like I’ve gotten through like 5 big books on gender performance and class and more than a few grad school theses in two weeks, but I’m still struggling to get through Capital, because Capital is wordy, and abstract and doesn’t have the emotional resonance that stuff with interviews with working class women does for me.  That said once you’ve read some of the stuff that has more emotional resonance it’s a lot easier to go back and read Marx and so on, because now there are examples of how the theory is applied to real life and people.

Like don’t get me wrong dense economic and philosophical texts are great and I’m not telling you not to read them, read Marx and Gramsci and Foucault and all those titans of leftist thought if you want, but remember that they’re not the only theory game in town, and that you’re not a failure if it’s hard or you don’t finish, our lives are busy and exhausting, and not being able to get through a famously dense and for most people boring economic text from the 19th century doesn’t mean you’re not smart enough to understand this stuff (also no one understands the Frankfurt school, not even the Frankfurt school)

Some places to read stuff for free:

Libcom

Marxists Internet Archive (Has an audiobook section which is awesome)

Jurn free academic article search

The Conquest of Bread on project gutenberg 

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

Sojourner Truth Organization Archive

google books

Please feel free to add more.

Things That Anarchists Say to Me in Private But Never Repeat Publicly

I’m not sure if this article’s point is that “anarchists say shitty stuff in private” or “These grievances are ones people feel scared to bring up” it’s interesting either way.

1) “Call-out culture was developed to allow activist groups to confront leaders who abused their privilege, but now it is being used to settle petty scores on the level of interpersonal politics. I now have a hard time believing some people when they make call-outs because I have seen too many that were based on nothing. Call-outs have become a way to acceptably inflict social violence and rarely are followed up in any way resembling transformative justice because people are not interested in doing the hard work of working with those who are called out.”

I’ve seen this one happen, often to deflect criticism from the accuser by misdirection.  It’s a mess.

2) “As a white person, if I don’t automatically agree with whichever person of color is directly in front of me, I run the risk of being labelled a racist. This is a result of good intentions where we want to center people of color and their experiences, but it makes no sense because people of color are not a monolithic block who all agree or share the same experiences. I am basically forced to perform a kind of double-think where I am expected to be able to agree with multiple conflicting viewpoints at the same time – or at least pretend to.”

I feel like this one is often a thing that sort of signals “hey this isn’t really my issue” or at least is more about not talking over people

5) “Calling people out for using the wrong language, for example saying ‘biological female’ instead of ‘person assigned female at birth’, is harmful and makes no sense because not everyone has access to the same information, they’ll never learn if they’re excluded, and the ‘correct’ languages changes every couple of years anyway. People don’t want to be associated with us because they see how punishing we are to each other and it turns them off.”

and like making people feel safe and respected is a balancing act, like saying something misogynistic to a woman because you’re uneducated and don’t have the privilege of being educated on that subject means that like on the one hand the woman feels unsafe because misogyny, and the person without education on that issue feels unsafe because they’re being jumped on for a lack of education they didn’t have access to, and like ultimately there isn’t an easy answer to this stuff, it’s a balancing act.

8) “Who cares about who you personally fuck when we’re talking about a broad political movement? Get off the ego trip. What we want is health care, affordable housing, jobs, prison abolition, immigration rights, sex workers rights, and the end of capitalism. ‘Queer’ has become so fashionable that it’s being confused with ‘radical’.”

This one just feels uncomfortable to me, it seems like there’s a failure to acknowledge violence done against LGBTQETC people

10) “We’ve completely failed to build frameworks for accountability and transformative justice, and instead rely on callouts and social exclusion that replicate the prison system without the benefit of having trials.”

Like this overstate the case a wee bit, like I see your point, but like the prison system is really really horrible, but like the witch hunt atmosphere of a lot of spaces is really gross.

Things That Anarchists Say to Me in Private But Never Repeat Publicly