Anarchist News

It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so—and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths—change in the sense of renewal.

But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

From calling for US imperial intervention in Syria to voting for Bernie, the liberal creep within anarchy in the so-called United States in recent years has been a truly disgraceful phenomenon. The pandemic has exponentially metastasized this cancer with supposed anarchists adopting the talking points of the liberal State wholesale and uncritically, especially with regards to the primacy at all costs of a vague and unspecified “safety.” In this house, however, we believe that science is biopolitical and that there is more to life than the mere fact of biological survival.

Anarchy says that we can have both freedom and solidarity without sacrificing one for the other. Liberalism invokes solidarity to take our freedom and freedom to break our solidarity. The liberal places faith in the social contract, in the transfer of the power over life and death from the monarch to the citizenry, in everyone “playing their part” while abdicating any sense of true agency: the Panoptic policing of each by all, casting one’s ballot, staying at home and letting the non-citizens do all the work, flattening the curve. This system is rapidly collapsing, yet all too many cling to its shattered timbers, complaining indignantly that the State isn’t doing enough to protect us.

If the betrayal of the Spanish Revolution in 1937 by “anarchist” ministers in the government teaches us anything, it is that anarchists are not immune to the logic of the state of exception. There is always a crisis or emergency (the war, the pandemic, etc.) that can be invoked to “temporarily” suspend our liberatory values “for the greater good.” It’s increasingly obvious that climate change will be the next crisis to be used in this way by the authoritarians. The only way to avoid this is to be consistent in our ethics. Antifascism without anti-liberalism—that is to say, thorough and principled anti-statism—is a dead end. Fasces flank the podium in the House of Representatives, representing, as they did in the Roman Republic, the power of the Republic’s elected officials to punish and kill. Liberalism and fascism quite literally come from the same roots.

It is no wonder that the conspiracist right sees “ANTIFA” as the militant wing of the Democratic Party. At first glance, this seems absurd. Then we take a look at what passes for anarchist discourse and practice these days and, unfortunately, it starts to make more sense. The average anarchist household in the United States has been as self-repressed, moralistic, and law-abiding as a Biden/Harris one. Anarchists write articles about how anarchists in other countries have “questioned mandates that do not make sense,” as if not questioning government mandates that supposedly do make sense is in any way a viable anarchist position. We have shamefully ceded the anti-State narrative to the right, without even putting up a fight.

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