Here it is in full living color.
Attack the System
Categories: Anarchism/Anti-State
Editors
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academiccompositionab
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Empowerment Equalizer
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SSaragian
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Antony Sammeroff
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Ann Sterzinger
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Rodney
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RJ
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busterjames
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cainusmaxus
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Craig FitzGerald
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David Heleniak
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Caity & Dan Greene
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keirmartland
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Keith Preston
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Bill the Butcher
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ljp711
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MRDA
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Jack Donovan
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Rachel Haywire
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comrade hermit
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Michael
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Vince
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robertstark2014
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Noonan
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S E Pearson
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Rachel Haywire
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Nexus X Humectress
I’d gladly silence them in the face of MY violence.
You should put a “trigger” warning on this, Keith. I am a survivor of of the Walking Mannequins on the Left ;o)
Why don’t we see this idiocy in say a Glenn Beck rally or a tea party rally? Why is the insanity a dime a dozen for the left? Good questions that should be answered. My view is that most leftist protestors are spoiled and pampered middle and upper middle class white kids that don’t work and have no sense of responsibility. And love them or hate them then Glenn Beck crowd does.
“My view is that most leftist protestors are spoiled and pampered middle and upper middle class white kids that don’t work and have no sense of responsibility.”
Yep. Along with the fact that some of them are very disturbed individuals that collectively form cliques where they can act out their pathologies.
I don’t get it? What’s going on there? It kinda looked like a group of people preventing anyone else from speaking by repeating a phrase claiming they themselves were being silenced? That can’t be right, no-one could possibly be that retarded.
@SE Pearson: It had something do with one of the presenters and a critique he wrote of call-out culture. Critiquing call-out culture is apparently not allowed, as debate is allegedly tantamount to lording one’s “privilege” over others. In other words, if you’re a straight white male, you have to “check your privilege” and concede every imaginable point if you’re having a conversation with someone who’s not a straight white male. So if you critique a political methodology in which one’s “privilege” is called out for saying or doing something politically incorrect, you’re automatically a racist, sexist, and homophobe, and you probably hate kittens, too.
Honestly, there’s something wrong with Portland, or at least the far-far-far leftists who overpopulate that city. Last month a Portland “anti-fascist” group demanded that a speaker be disinvited from another conference at Portland State University. Enjoy the irony of an anti-fascist group demanding that someone be silenced. But then that’s why I’ll never consider myself a leftist. While I support social and economic justice, I can’t associate with people who scream “tolerance” but then practice just the opposite.
These people eat their own. It’s kind of sad to watch.
The “far left” in the UK have attempted to silence all none-approved political dissidence for decades. “No platform”, the official policy of the National Union of Journalists and therefore the BBC, prevented spokespeople from parties who had attracted hundreds of thousands of votes from appearing on TV until very recently. This was at a time when they happily gave air time to groups engaged in armed insurrection all over the world.
The essential authoritarian nature of the far left is so well established as to be trivial to state. In the UK at least antifa simply operated by the pre 1933 SA handbook right up until they ran out of ‘tards in the 90’s.
But if what you say is correct then this video marks some kind of new low for the conventional far left. Not just because the target is completely unjustifiable but because the tactic employed is so counter productive in that it makes those who used it look like wankers of the highest order in every conceivable respect.
That was me they disinvited because of my position as a Senior Editor here at Attack The System. Honestly I wasn’t too upset to be excluded from their ever shrinking circle.
Seriously? So it was generally accepted that ATS is something unacceptable by the Portland U academics?
PSU academics didn’t make the call. I was invited to join a panel at the Bioregional Confluence at PSU kind of last minute to fill in for another panelist who couldn’t make it. A good portion of the radical left here in Portland hates ATS with a passion, so they pressured the conference organizers to disinvite me. They did something very similar to Deep Green Resistance in this area and now they’re doing it to this guy. It doesn’t seem to me that they are a very stable, effective bunch of people if they spend their time bullying people whom they deem ideologically impure.
Well, if we take the attitude that the only use for the “radical progressive left” is as a type of propaganda amplification mechanism (and I don’t really see any other use for them) then that would be a result. Well done Vince.
>That can’t be right, no-one could possibly be that retarded.
You don’t live in PDX, bro.
Wow, that is loony as all fuck. I mean, now Scott Crow is persona non grata in the anarchist community? What planet are these people on?
Seems like Kristian Williams was the target of the protest, and he’s responsible for this outstanding essay I posted on ATS a while back. Since his approach is so similar to mine, it is impressed upon me all the more that the possibility of dialogue with folks like this is rather remote at present.
But we are going to have to find a way to deal with these people. Their tactics are not unassailable. It might be as simple as starting to show up at their events and disrupting. Or it might need a great deal of finesse, identifying open minded members who can be dialogued with. Or perhaps we should start an all out campaign against anti-free-speech leftists (we could lump in a lot of folks in there).
Anarchists who have more to gain by disrupting other peaceful people than by organizing their own actions and initiatives, more to gain by eating their own, as an earlier commenter said, than by building a diverse movement, have got to be called out (ironically). Those who criminalize conscience can no longer be allowed to wave the black flag without any opposition.
I read Kristian’s essay and she made some excellent points but within the context of a totally unreal culture. If I understand correctly she (I assume Kristian is a woman, as given the nature of his/her politics I have no idea whether I should apologize for that assumption, or for suggesting that an apology might be necessary) is discussing the attempt to exclude “patriarchal assumptions” from discourse itself. Kristian seems to be suggesting that is neither possible or desirable. Which, unless I’m missing something here, is fucking obvious.
The argument about the false dichotomy between “survivors” and “abusers” is again very insightful. However I don’t think the idea is fully worked out. Everyone, under any system, is going to either be a victim or an abuser. “Victims” are not saintly figures suffering because of the inherent evil of their oppressors, their problem is a lack of power to make them capable of effective abuse. As Keith pointed out in a recent podcast, the Left’s assumption that homosexual liberation would result in equality proved to be sadly mistaken. Rather with the positions now reversed massive segments of the homosexual community are successfully demanding the aggressive persecution of homophobes. That’s nature for you.
That’s pretty much the fundamental misconception which sinks the Left from the get go.
As for the possibility of salvaging anything from the far left milieu. I would say that the attempt is unlikely to produce results worth the effort. These guys are down a real deep rabbit hole and they don’t want to come out; much like my former comrades on the radical right. As I have argued before the only real hope is to convince the bourgeoisie, you know the people who have the skills and/or privilege to be actually able to do anything, to act in their own interest. The result would not be universal equality, but at least it would be a meritocratic inequality under a decentralized political system.
Here’s a bit more background to make it clearer what led up to this confrontation:
http://brushwork.us/posts/Dangerous_Questions/
I’m dismayed that anyone would think the kind of demonization we see at that conference is in any way constructive, or that the black-and-white thinking that informs it is any way to build alliances and grow a movement. It’s divisive and chills free expression, to say the very least, and leaves no room for human error when somebody fails to live up to expectations. At the same time, I suspect that a good deal of this behavior can be put down to hyper-radical feminism, in which case it’s not necessarily a case of anarchists vs. anarchists, but yet another failure of identity politics.
Thanks for sharing that essay, it was very instructive.
Which is not to let leftist politics as a whole off the hook, as it is by its nature highly authoritarian, as has already been pointed out, and thus highly susceptible to this type of nonsense.
LOL. Kristian Williams is a man. And from what I can tell, an actual man…not just someone who “self-identifies” as a man. 🙂
http://www.kristianwilliams.com/about/
You can’t possibly be suggesting there is a distinction Keith? (lol)
The struggle ahead is going to be a long one, but we don’t need to make it any more complicated than it needs to be. Two readily available movements to draw on are marijuana legalization and gay marriage. Both of these would have been considered an abomination a few decades ago. Now both have majority support. That’s what we need to do with all of our ideas: Promote all forms of anarchism, libertarianism, anti-statism, decentralism, anti-authoritarianism, etc, along with all forms of dissent, left and right, and the overarching concepts of pan-secession, anarcho-pluralism, etc until these have majority support.
It’s no more radical an idea than promoting church/state separation in the 18th century, or slavery abolition in the 19th, or basic rights for workers and racial minorities in the 20th.
How did marijuana legalizers do it? By staying in the trenches for decades in the face of all kinds of adversity until public opinion started to change and they started seeing victories. How did the gays do it? By getting out there and getting militant and making themselves heard.
That’s how we’re going to do it.
My point being that these freaks are merely an amusing sideshow to what we really need to be focused on.
Yeah but legalizing Regicide is going to resisted a little bit more than weed or gay marriage, or even slavery, segregation or workers rights. If we work a rough formula for the timescale required to overcome a state/elite policy based on its potential disruption to the operation of the system. So semi-permitting people to smoke dope took sixty years, gay marriage about twenty, abolition about one hundred fifty etc then I estimate the required time to convince the elites to allow their own overthrow to be about, approximately, and this a very rough estimate you understand, eternity squared.
I don’t know that regicide is a good example. The classical anarchists made a name for themselves in part by bumping off monarchs. They were somewhat ahead of their time. But they won (at least on the anti-monarchist issue) a short time later). How many monarchs (of any significance) do we have in the West today (or anywhere outside the Middle Eastern autocracies)?
What about the overthrow of traditional aristocracies, monarchies, and theocracies in the Western world by the liberal republican, democratic, and socialist movements in the 19th and 20th centuries?
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/that-old-romanov-feeling/
“If the Washington Establishment had the slightest comprehension of grand strategy it would realize that the rise of Fourth Generation war demands an alliance of all states against non-state forces, just as in 1914 the rise of democracy and socialism demanded an alliance of all the European monarchies, especially the three strongest, Germany, Austria, and Russia. By fighting each other, they destroyed themselves. Today, when states fight other states the winners are non-state elements. As monarchy was at stake then, so the state system is at stake now. Everyone can see it, except the people in the capital cities.”
I do get your point. If fact, I’ve pointed out to the Left before that their ideas are not particularly revolutionary. The system can survive with or without legalized abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action, the welfare state, anti discrimination laws, environmental regulation, etc. The system has conceded all of those things to the Left over the past half century and the system still survives.
I used the term regicide as a poetic allusion to general replacement of a governmental system and its associated elites. With hindsight it doesn’t seem half as clever as it did at the time.
Some propositions on this subject:
I. The political/social/economic situation in the West demands a paradigm shift of the order that last took place at the outset of the Modern/industrial Age.
II. It may be that the dysfunctionality of Western society as a result of the deleterious effects of modernity itself make such an intellectual shift impossible. (We will not be silenced in the face of your violence)
III. If such a shift is possible then it can not be achieved with conventional or traditional methods of radicalism given their historic ineffectiveness, particularly in the post war West.
IV. It is therefore essential that new effective methods of enacting rapid intellectual, social and political transformation at a societal scale are devised.
V. Forth generation warfare, in its conventional form, is not particularly effective against Western states on their own territory.
VI. If a viable technique of resistance could be found, one which delivered results at an acceptable (i.e. extremely low) cost, it would be attractive to a significant proportion of the population even at this point.
VII. In intellectual, and all other, terms it is not so much the strength of the elites which keep them in place, as the weakness of their opponents.
VIII. Pan secessionism is a viable strategic and tactical model of resistance. However without an ideological component it can not challenge the establishment domination of the intelligentsia, who (as any good Marxist will tell you) are essential to any revolutionary movement.
IX If the development of an ideological justification for pan secessionism conflicts with pre-established alternatives, given the historical effectiveness and capability of the adherents of those alternatives (We will not be silenced in the face of your violence), that would not necessarily be a disadvantage.
I know some left-anarchists who are so disgusted with this shit they’re saying there should be bouncers at anarchist events to keep these kinds of assholes out.
I suppose if ARV-ATS were holding public events of this kind, my preference would be to hire motorcycle clubs, militiamen, and street gangs to be the security force. That way, these pretentious little turds could be afforded the opportunity to experience what being “silenced with violence” really means.
I don’t think they know what violence is.
In the face of actual violence they would have all been silenced.
I don’t know if that’s right, anarchists aren’t generally pacifists; ask McKinley. And Leftists in general are positively enthusiastic about the use of force except in a few specific instances; like wife beating or gay bashing. Antifa is the obvious example (I’ve often wondered why Stauffenberg isn’t their all time hero…….).
I’ve been fascinated by this episode for about three days now. Last night I came up with an alternative interpretation of the whole thing, these guys aren’t talking about “patriarchal privilege” in the sense of super leftist bullshit; they have actually been raping the fuck out of each other. Hence the talk about “survivors” within their own groups. Is this the subtext to this totally fucked up situation I’ve been missing?
Well, I do know that accusations of rape and sexual assault are extremely frequent in that milieu. Someone is always accusing someone of sexually accosting someone. I don’t know how much of that is genuine in any rational sense, how much is defining sexual assault so loosely that it can have any particular meaning, and how much of it is just tall tales being invented out of petty jealousy, personal rivalries, the prevalence of hysterical feminism, pathetic loser male attempts at white knighting, etc.
The Portland “radical left” is an idiotic recreational subculture for bobo liberals, political cranks, and people who act out mental illness through politics. As a pool of human potential it could hardly be more useless.
The problem with hating it or trying to debate it or take it over is that you are fighting with a bunch of necrophiliacs for your turn with a corpse. Let them have the new left. It is not any accident that it ended up where it is.
I tend to suspect ATS of merely being another recreational subculture for the people who hate the people in a mirror recreational subculture. Your butt-hurt over their opinions of you looks suspiciously like a mirror image of the imaginary victim-hood complex of upper class recreational leftists.
You keep making a fundamental category mistake that conflates the retarded vegetarian environmentalists and drama class losers who pose as “anarchists” for the actual social forces that constituted the dangerous part of the anarcho-socialist project. This is crippling at both the analytical and the practical level. It does not exactly suggest seriousness about your supposedly revolutionary project.
Anyone who is serious about subversion will have to get off of Facebook and into the trench with the slaves and the barbarians. Anyone who does this will discover an entire subterranean world that is rich with dangerous possibilities. There has never been a revolutionary class as dangerous as the American criminal working class. It has never been crazier or better armed. By all accounts it has been winning the drug war against the state for thirty years. It practices a form of black market capitalism that makes libertarian “brutalism” look like a kindergarten game.
Anyone in ATS interested in an alliance with real revolutionary forces in PDX needs to check out the people who work at the North Portland Labor Ready. Or the small armies of dangerous, violent hobos and convicts that assemble daily at the many free feedings. Or the huge population of illegal Mexicans. These are the actual enemies of the state in PDX.
(Notice that they have nothing to do with animal liberation idiots, castrated vegan hippies, liberal academics, or crybaby anarchist hipsters.)
If the old west coast IWW coalition of the revolutionary era of the union could be resurrected, it would include all of the important factions of the criminal working class and everyone else in the working class willing to fight. All the people you (and I) hate in the current “left” are in fact the bitterly hated class enemies of such a formation.
Speaking in purely theoretical terms, of course:
Community Self-Defense Forces prepared for direct action are set up. The fourth political theory is synthesized with fourth generation political warfare. A systematic program of covert mass organization on the Vietnamese revolutionary model is launched. This happens in the real world, and not on the internet.
Some asshole who doesn’t pay his jornaleros finds an army of Mexicans with hockey masks and machetes at his home in an upper class liberal white neighborhood . Massive direct action is unleashed. It gets all over the news and causes waves of hysterical racist panic among Obama yuppies.
A hated manager at a local big box store is subject to direct action by his workers. The regional managers conference is assaulted by a shock detachment. The events are videotaped and go viral on YouTube. Copy cat events begin nationwide. The bloody hockey mask becomes a national symbol of working class vengeance.
Insane homeless trolls begin hijacking beer trucks. A downtown crack hotel revolts and declares itself an armed commune. The hipster bar next door is expropriated for supplies. It takes three days and the use of chemical weapons for the police to clear it out. A mad hobo Messiah is said to be preaching apocalypse and slave revolt among the forest camps. Outreach teams of liberal social workers are met with open violence. All the cardboard homeless signs now say things like “WE WILL LEAVE NO ONE ALIVE” and “JESUS TOLD ME TO KILL YOU”.
Older neighborhoods being devoured by rich white assholes from California begin to go into revolt. Looting riots are organized against against Hipster microbreweries. High price construction projects are systematically sabotaged. Ghetto assault forces are organized to get mad drunk at bobo liberal cultural events to pick fights and break shit. The black gangs in nopo announce a peace deal and the “Kill whitey” alliance. MS-13 declares a “snitch free” zone in east Portland and begins Black Panther style patrols. Every attempt by the liberals to negotiate is met by a sinister silence. “YOU ARE THE ENEMY” is tagged all over everything downtown.
The housing market begins to collapse as businesses and white liberals flee the city. This triggers mass mortgage defaults and a wave of foreclosures. The now empty homes are expropriated by armed hobos, who flood into the city from all over the west coast. The city finances are crippled by the loss of tax revenue and the entire political economy of the liberal nanny-police state disintegrates as various factions begin a desperate battle over the shrinking feeding trough. The time bomb of underfunded pension programs detonates under the stress. Government unions faced with pay cuts and layoffs start going on strike, but nobody cares that the parasites are gone. Portland begins a descent into true anarchy as the pipe dream of white liberal utopia turns into a hobbesian nightmare of brutal slave revolt.
The local prison gangs form an alliance that announces a total plea deal strike and declare that anyone taking a deal is a snitch. With the system forced to actually try cases, 90% of charges are dropped. A total parole strike is organized among convicts, forcing them to completely release people instead of keeping them on paper. Everyone under “correctional” ownership refuses all cooperation of any kind with parole officers, social workers and courts. The pigs cannot actually arrest and house that many more people than they usually do, and thus are powerless before the mass defiance of the rest. The police respond with a wave of torture, murder and ruthless brutality within the prison system that baptizes a whole generation of revolutionaries and draws a circle in blood around a new convict warrior elite. The old world of racist prison gangs collapses before a new ethos of total resistance.
The purpose of all this is would be to create, in heroic and spectacular action, a myth of revolutionary violence, and to begin the construction of the revolutionary forms that will enact this myth. It would only be a beginning, but it would be real.
Or you can build a Facebook-coalition out of psychotic ZOG assholes, jew conspiracy idiots, DMT smoking holocaust deniers, mentally disabled neo-fascist SSI recipients, libertarded bitcoin enthusiasts, and lard ass paultard bedwetters. You can have your very own lobotomized protest subculture for the socially retarded failures and marginal political cranks of the far right. It will be a mirror image of that which you so despise, and as a pool of human potential it will be just as useless. As a political project it will actually serve the interests of your enemies. But you will get the attention you desperately crave and have so much fun on Facebook as you create for yourself the illusion of having dangerous politics.
Sounds good. There are a ton of lower class elements that need to be reached. Like you said, that’s not going to happen on facebook, and it probably won’t happen by organizing right wing libertarians or left wing anarchists. You rightly point out that we spend a lot of time bashing the left. I think it is our hope that right and leftwing radicals will wake up and get out of this incestuous, marginal, self-perpetuating failure of a subculture we’ve all been stuck in.
So how do we reach out to all of these criminal and lumpenproletariat elements? For minorities I know that kind of work is best done through ethnic/cultural liberation movements: Black Panthers, AIM, etc. My path has been primarily through indigenous liberation through the revival of our clan system and a cultural reawakening. Those sort of movements attract young people on the lower end of the socio-economic ladder; people who are genuine victims of the system (as opposed to all these cry baby radicals.) These sort of people have nothing to lose and everything to gain by opposing the system.
How do we reach the Surenos east of 82nd Avenue? The bums and hobos in the central east side and on skidrow on west Burnside? White, working class criminals? Dude…. I don’t know. I have ideas, but no one can be everywhere at once. All I know is everything you said gave me a hard on, and I can’t wait to get started.
I’m sold. So how do we get this going?
The main obstacle here is that radical groups that attempt to colonize these genuinely lumpenproletarian classes never get anywhere. I’ve seen radical leftists try to do that and they always end up making asses of themselves. It would be pretty stupid for a guy like me to go out and try to preach some revolutionary message to the populations you named. I might as well be some dude from some hokey cult knocking on people’s doors trying to convert them to my guru. Struggles of the kind you describe have to come directly from those involved, not by outside do-gooders agitating them. The role of folks like us is to offer support when these kinds of upheavals come, and perhaps construct a bridge between different kinds of insurgencies. But to be able to do that, we have to first build some kind of organizational base in those communities we’re actually capable of organizing in.
I agree with Vince that there needs to be some kind of bridge between political radicals and rebels from the lumpen demographics, and that liberation movements organized by captive nationalities are the key. I would envision groups modeled on AIM, BPP, etc as being part of the wider pan-secessionist alliance, and the bridge directly to the sectors of the lumpenproletariat you mention.
Beyond that, we have to organize on all fronts and at all levels. The insurgency you described would be wiped out as soon as it started if it didn’t get support from a broad cross section of political, socioeconomic, and demographic sectors. The state would at the very least attempt to impose martial law in order to put down a rebellion of that kind. If fact, the appearance of an uprising like you’re describing might well have middle America shrieking in favor of totalitarianism.
The big picture here is to delegitimize the system to the point where no one cares when it is attacked. One of the things that brought down Soviet and Eastern European communism is that no one believed in it anymore, and the army would simply refuse to suppress rebellions because even they didn’t believe in the system. Meanwhile, we have to offer constructive and workable alternatives.
The purpose of criticizing the Left is not to win their acceptance, but to offer an alternative, particularly to newer, younger activists who are open to fresh ideas, and dissidents within the left-wing milieu. The message is basically, “Okay, these left-wing folks do what they do. But here’s a different way that we’re offering.”
That’s a great story X. But here is the problem. Even in your account the revolution fails because you recognize that even some grand coalition of losers is not going to win a stand up fight with the system on its home ground. What would the effects of such a scenario playing out be?
Firstly everyone not in that coalition of the doomed now understands that they better be ready to fight to the death to defend the system because that’s the only possibility they have of not having their corpse fucked by a hobo gang. It’s not like those guys would need a lot of persuading because half of the American middle class would love to make the class war a real war. I guess we would be amazed at how quickly the whole NRA militia movement got over its problems with Obama when the possibility of mowing down hoards of the lumpen proletariat with their AR-15s became real. Better yet, have that shit made legal, get a nice medal for their efforts and be able to be modest about how they saved civilization from the zombie hoards that time for the rest of their lives.
Because the smoking ruins of Portland would not stand as a heroic monument to the revolution, they would stand as a warning to most about what happens when you don’t back your government.
That is exactly what happened here in the UK during the “London riots” a couple of years ago.
I have a theory that what most would be revolutionaries consider to be the most difficult aspect of overthrowing the system isn’t actually that hard. Most radicals think that instigating the revolution is the tough part but there are regular events which could, under the right circumstances, go critical. Here in the UK the London riots was one example, the “fuel protest” in 2000 was another, the Miners strike of ’84 and the Poll tax riots later that decade, hell even Occupy had some traction. I estimate that on average a “proto-revolution” is initiated in the UK about once a decade. However those are events in which the detonation sequence has actually advanced almost to the point of explosion. There are constantly “sparks” flying about any one of which could go as far as those “once in a decade events” or further,
A look at the historical record shows that the great revolutions are always instigated by some trivial routine event. Someone gets arrested or shot by the police, a small strike somewhere catches the imagination, a company of soldiers goes rogue; whatever. 99% of the time these events go no-where, 99% of the time deliberate attempts to initiate a revolution go no-where. Take the Levellers in the English civil war; text book attempt to lead by example results in the execution of a few people and nothing else.
Sometimes actually full scale revolutions are ignited by accident which actually do overthrow the system but which then fail because there is nothing positive to replace it with. 1848 being the classic example but the Arab Spring and Colour Revolutions are also instances of the same thing.
Which is why, tedious and frustrating as it is, it is essential to have some kind of viable radical doctrine which can fill the vacuum in place before the revolution starts. Marx never stormed a barricade, but if it hadn’t been for his pen then though 1917 might have happened the result would have been nothing more than a routine change of staff and a few cosmetic adjustments to the system.
It isn’t essential for us to convert the fucktards of Portland’s hipster radical scene into effective serious revolutionaries. Which is just as well because those guys are, apparently, more of a very specific form of sexual sub-culture (revolving around talking about gender equality all day and then raping up the comrades all night). But nor is it necessary to transform the (almost always seriously troubled) homeless community into Hezbollah.
What we do need to do is contribute to the effort to work out some kind of viable alternative to the current system and then help insert that concept into the intelligentsia’s collective consciousness so it can filter into the rest of the population. If we can do that the next time LA goes nuclear or the next Ruby Ridge goes down or whatever something positive might come of it. Elsewise all that will happen is that when the dust settles the system will just role right back in and right back on.
ATS is, I believe, doing its part pretty well. What motivates these kinds of conversations about twatfests such as the Portland incident is not the possibility of enlisting these toss stains into any kind of unified movement. Rather it is about critiquing “conventional radicalism” with a view to replacing it with something less retarded. This is a worthwhile objective because if that could be achieved then you have a viable replacement for the system waiting in the wings. Disaffected intelligent people looking for solutions would no longer be confronted by some freak talking about how sorry he is for spit roasting a stoned freshman in order to liberate her from bourgeois sexual repression. Instead they would find people talking about how the system might be taken down and replaced by something better.
That might not be glamorous, but it has to be done or we lose they win.
Right. As I’ve written before:
“The standard pattern in the history of the advancement of radical movements is that a new revolutionary outlook first captures the imagination of the intellectual elite, who become dissenters, and this new outlook then advances into the ranks of those who are most likely to opt for radicalism, or who have the least to lose by doing so. So, in turn, the intellectual dissidents are joined by student radicals and rebellious youth, bohemians and counterculturalists, members of the lumpenproletariat and the underclass, and marginalized or outcast social groups. Eventually, radical ideas begin working their way into the ranks of the conventional proletariat, and then into the middle class, and, finally, the establishment, with social reactionaries reluctantly being dragged along. At this point, the revolution is complete.”
This is what ARV-ATS is all about.
The “decentralist” paradigm is actually making progress along that path. The radical right is rapidly moving away from its traditional statist solutions. However I think it is increasingly clear that the left, in the widest sense of the term, are irrevocably committed to statism since the state is the only mechanism which is, maybe, capable on enacting their central agenda. Yeah decentralism would allow capitalism to be challenged but if that means abandoning the project of universal indoctrination and enforcement of PC, well then fuck that. (one reason Occupy appeared to be so crippled, and the reason Chompsky can’t advocate anarchism)
It’s also gonna be impossible to get the “official” intellectual elite to abandon the progressive orthodoxy, and its implicit statist assumptions. The cost of heresy today is higher than it has been since the High Medieval.
Might be interesting to find out if decentralist ideas are present in the “Dark Enlightenment” milieu “student radicals and rebellious youth, bohemians and counterculturalists”.