Category Archives: Strategy

National-Anarchist Movement Conference 2017: A Summary Reply

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By Keith Preston

Special thanks to Peter Topfer, Adam Ormes, Thom Forester, and Sean Jobst for their assistance in the writing of this summary.

On June 17 and 18, the first ever conference of the National-Anarchist Movement (N-AM) took place in Madrid. The process of arranging this conference was certainly not without its difficulties, and the organizers deserve much praise for their diligence in this regard. Originally, the conference was supposed to be hosted by the Madrid section of N-AM, who dropped out of the project shortly (and out of N-AM altogether) before the conference took place. This led to the irony of a conference being held in Spain where no actual Spanish people were among the attendees. Because National-Anarchists are widely despised by leftists who mistakenly regard N-A as a “fascist” tendency, security was a paramount concern.

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The Lumpenproletariat as Class Vanguard: Why Anarchists Must Attack the Left from the Left 9

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Strategy

The conflicts between myself and the mainstream leftist-anarchist movement are well-known. When I am asked about the source of this conflict by outsiders to the anarchist milieu, my usual response is that what they are observing is a continuation of the historic battle between the anarchists and the Marxists. Fundamental to this conflict is a contending view of the concepts of state and class. For Marxists, the principal target of revolutionary conflict is capital. However, for anarchists it is the state that is the primary enemy. This difference was acknowledged by Friedrich Engels.

“The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletariat revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the state. But after its victory the sole organization which the proletariat finds already in existence is precisely the state. This state may require very considerable alterations before it can fulfill its new functions. But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and in a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris Commune.”

– Frederick Engels, “Engels to Philipp Van Patten in New York,” London, April 18, 1883.

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Anarchism or Vanguardism? Critique of Guerrilla Ideology of the IRPGF Reply

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military, Strategy, Uncategorized

The Free Online

main text  from 

Guerrilla ideology reduces all revolutionary questions to quantitative problems of military force. Nothing could be more disastrous. – James Carr,

Power does not come any more from the barrel of a gun than it comes from a ballot box. No revolution is peaceful, but its “military” dimension is never central. The question is not whether the proles finally decide to break into the armouries, but whether they unleash what they are: commodified beings who no longer can and no longer want to exist as commodities, and whose revolt explodes capitalist logic. Barricades and machine guns flow from this “weapon”.

The greater the change in social life, the less guns will be needed, and the less casualties there will be. A communist revolution will never resemble a slaughter: not from any nonviolent principle, but because revolution subverts more (soldiers included) than it actually destroys.

To imagine a proletarian front facing off a bourgeois front is to conceive the proletariat in bourgeois terms, on the model of a political revolution or a war (seizing someone’s power, occupying their territory). In so doing, one reintroduces everything that the insurrectionary movement had overwhelmed: hierarchy, a respect for specialists, for knowledge that Knows, and for techniques to solve problems — in short for everything that plays down the role of the common man. – Gilles Dauve, When Insurrections Die

 

 

 

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Anarchists, It is Our Duty to Vote in Elections 1

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Electoralism/Democratism, Strategy, Uncategorized

I can’t say I agree with this, but I’m always amazed at the diversity of anarchist thought.

By Paddy Vipond

Trouble and Squeak

As election fever reaches its sweaty, unbearable heights in both the UK with the coming General Election, and in the US as Hilary Clinton officially announces her campaign to run for Presidency, we are faced with the age old anarchist dilemma: To vote or not to vote.

I do not expect this article to answer this question once and for all, but I do expect it to change a few people’s perceptions on the issue. As anarchists it is our duty to question everything, even our own decisions, and as with any set of political beliefs if they remain unchallenged they become dogma.

As I grew up and discovered the principles and key thinkers of anarchism I slowly began to turn my back on mainstream politics and their parties. Once I had read what I had, the seed had been planted, and it was a seed that did not need chemical fertiliser in the form of propaganda in order to develop. It grew naturally because what I had read and discovered made sense. I did not need to be coerced and persuaded, or attacked and threatened. Quite simply, anarchy was logical.

Within this logic, time and again I encountered one moot point. It was a point that every anarchist had written about, and it was a point that was at odds with the logic inherent in anarchism. What frustrated me about it was that rather than question it, as we are told to do with every other belief and system, we must instead accept it. An anarchist has no place voting in an election.

Great writers and thinkers of the past have argued it, posters plastered on the walls of buildings around Brighton were stating it, and fellow anarchists online were writing about it. Anarchists should not vote, and they should be proud of not doing so.

As you may have guessed by the title of this article, I disagree. It has taken me a few years to reach this decision, but now that I am here I am wondering why I ever opposed the idea. Voting in elections is not only a duty of anarchists, it is the single easiest weapon at our disposal.

Before I continue discussing why voting is beneficial for anarchists, let’s challenge the arguments as to why we should oppose it.

Trump to Arm Syrian Kurds, Even as Turkey Strongly Objects Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Fourth Generation Warfare, Military, Strategy • Tags:

How ironic that the overlords of the American Empire might be backing the Murray Bookchin-inspired libertarian socialist insurgents of the Kurdish territory. But this is actually in keeping with a strategy that I have long advocated for anarchist, anti-state and anti-imperalist movements around the world, i.e. building on the ground resistance while seeking aid from the official enemy of whatever state they’re fighting. Consequently, the on the ground resistance movements located in the nations of the Anglo-American-Zionist-Wahhabist axis should seek aid from the nations of the BICS-Shia-Global South axis, and vice versa. It is perfectly appropriate for the Kurds to accept aid from the USA just as it would be perfectly appropriate for the EZLN, Calexit or the Republic of Texas to accept aid from the Russians, Iranians, and Chinese.

By Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt

New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump has approved a plan to arm Syrian Kurds so they can participate in the battle to retake Raqqa from the Islamic State, a strategy that has drawn deep opposition from Turkey, a NATO ally.

American military commanders have long argued that arming the Y.P.G., a Kurdish militia fighting alongside Syrian Arab forces against the Islamic State, is the fastest way to seize Raqqa, the capital of the militants’ self-proclaimed caliphate.

And Mr. Trump, who made fighting Islamist militants a priority during his campaign, again showed the high regard he has for Pentagon generals by endorsing their advice when faced with a policy dilemma.

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Funding the Enemy: War and Welfare Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Economics/Class Relations, Immigration, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Religion and Philosophy, Strategy

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From March last year: Ann Sterzinger’s libertarian solution to the Islamist problem.

The welfare state is a gravy train for ISIS.

If the welfare state doesn’t end in Europe, the welfare state will end Europe. And future historians will look back on the way the West ended and think we were all out of our goddamn minds.

As the dust is still clearing in Brussels and Pakistan (killing kids on Easter… stay classy, ISIS) and wherever else the nut jobs hit before this goes to press—as the Left signals their concern that all these dead bodies and raped orificia might feed an irrational fear of suicide bombers and rapists—the press is busy lecturing European security agencies about their incompetence. They could have stopped all these attacks somehow, if only they knew how to do their jobs!

You know what? I feel sorry for the security agencies, bumbling though they may allegedly be. From where I’m sitting, their job looks freakin’ impossible. According to Pew, over a third of French Muslims think suicide bombing is at least on occasion acceptable (and among the 18-30 crowd, it’s an eye-watering 42 percent).

How would you like it to be your job to root out terrorists when a third of the base population—of whose diversity and feelings you must always be respectful—would be happy to house and hide the assholes you’re looking for?

Meanwhile the media have kept stumping for not just bringing more of the terrorist-supporting population in, but feeding and housing them at the expense of the very government budget that must also fund security operations.

I know, only a bad person would ever suggest that you end welfare, and no educated European wants to be a bad person. But what you are accomplishing by being too nice is very bad indeed, Europe. Because if you do not end the welfare state, you’re going to have a violent genocide, one way or another.

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The Democratic Party seems to have no earthly idea why it is so damn unpopular Reply

by • Activism, American Decline, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right, Strategy, Uncategorized

Right now is an ideal time for the promotion and cultivation of ATS ideas. Thanks to the bizarre nature of the US electoral system, a perceived “fascist” party is the ruling party, with control over the entire federal government and most of the states, and in opposition to the centrist to center-left cultural and political majority. Meanwhile, the “liberal” opposition party is increasingly being recognized as a band of incompetent crooks even as the wider culture continues to move leftward. The left continues to become more radical, and alienated from the liberal establishment, while the right is moving further rightward after having kicked the neocons and GOP country clubbers to the curb. Probably the ideal future would be for the GOP to maintain control of the state while the culture continues to move leftward and the left becomes more extreme, thereby creating a polarization between the political majority and the state. Hopefully, Trump will be a disappointed to the radical right as well, having the effect of pushing the right in an even more radical direction as well.

By Shaun King

New York Daily News

A troubling new poll was just released showing that the Democratic Party is significantly less popular than both Donald Trump and Mike Pence. My gut tells me that Democrats will ignore this poll, or blame it on bad polling, and continue down the same course they are currently on: being funded by lobbyists and the 1%, straddling the fence or outright ignoring many of most inspirational issues of the time, and blaming Bernie Sanders for why they aren’t in power right now.

As a general rule the Democratic Party doesn’t listen well and struggles to hear the truth about itself.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Republicans now control the House, the Senate, the presidency, and the overwhelming majority of state legislatures and governorships. This new poll from Suffolk University illustrates just how that’s possible. Here are the base results of the poll with favorable/unfavorable ratings.

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Is the Left Moving Towards the ATS Position? 3

by • Activism, Left and Right, Secession, Strategy, Uncategorized

My long range vision for ARV-ATS has always been to develop an anarchist-led revolutionary Left that works with the radical Right for the purpose of dismantling the American empire (Rome on the Potomac). Now that Donald Trump has taken the throne as the latest clown-emperor, it would appear that substantial sectors of the Left are starting to realize the merits of the ARV-ATS position. This latest article in The New Republic is one of multiple articles of this kind that has appeared in era of Trump, not to mention the emergence of Calexit. See here, here, here, and here. And influential figures on the radical Right appear to be prepared to embrace the ATS position in at least a moderate form. I was hoping Trump would have this effect on the Left.

By Kevin Baker

The New Republic

Dear Red-State Trump Voter,

Let’s face it, guys: We’re done.

For more than 80 years now, we—the residents of what some people like to call Blue America, but which I prefer to think of as the United States of We Pay Our Own Damn Way—have shelled out far more in federal tax monies than we took in. We have funded massive infrastructure projects in your rural counties, subsidized your schools and your power plants and your nursing homes, sent you entire industries, and simultaneously absorbed the most destitute, unskilled, and oppressed portions of your populations, white and black alike.

All of which, it turns out, only left you more bitter, white, and alt-right than ever.

Some folks here in self-supporting America like to believe that there must be a way to bring you back to your senses and to restore rational government, if not liberal ideals, sometime in the foreseeable future. Everyone seems to have an answer for how to do this. Every day another earnest little homily finds its way to me over my internet transom: “Think locally, act globally,” or “Make art and fight the power,” or the old Joe Hill standby—“Don’t mourn. Organize.”

To which I say: Don’t organize. Pack.

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Trump Rally turns into Berkeley Battle Reply

by • Left and Right, Strategy

At least 10 people were arrested in the aftermath of violent clashes between Trump supporters and counter protesters at a pro-Trump rally in Berkeley, California over the weekend. Confiscated by police were a dagger, metal pipes, bats, pieces of lumber and bricks. 7 people were injured.

The video below captures one of the more intense sequences of the violent clashes. Are we seeing the beginnings of a low intensity civil war between the right and left in America? Previous clashes in California include a riot in Berkeley this past February that forced the cancellation of a talk to be given by Milo Yiannopoulos, a controversial conservative author and public speaker as well as clashes in Sacremento in June of 2016 between white nationalists and leftists that left 10 wounded.

In the video of the chaos a number of factions and flags are present. A man wielding a gold and black flag is dragged off by black clad counter protestors and apparently beaten while a man with a shield and stick beats counter protesters. Pepper spray appears to be deployed on both sides. Who are these people and what do their flags represent?

Anarcho-Capitalist Flag

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Picture Rocket000 – Anarcho-capitalist flag (yellow-black or gold-black bisected flag)

Anarcho-capitalism is a political philosophy that advocates the elimination of the state in favor of individual sovereignty, private property, and free markets. Anarcho-capitalists believe that, in the absence of statute (law by decree or legislation), society would improve itself through the discipline of the free market (or what its proponents describe as a “voluntary society”).

At least two Anarcho-Capitalist flags were present in the skirmish, being held by people fighting counter protesters. One person holding an Anarcho-Capitalist flag is dragged off and beaten by counter protesters under a black flag while another uses his flag staff to hit counter protesters.
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An Unexpected Path to Liberal Revival Reply

by • Activism, Strategy, Uncategorized

By Stephen Yearwood

I saw two maps shown by John King on CNN when he was analyzing the 2012 election. They illustrated with striking clarity the political divide in this nation. Those maps pointed towards a possible path liberals could take to reasert their importance in the political system.

The first map showed the states, colored red or blue, depending on which presidential candidate won a majority in each one. In that election they were pretty evenly divided.

Then he showed a map of each of the individual counties in the nation colored red or blue. On the second map the country was a sea of red, with tiny islands of blue—atolls, really—scattered here and there.

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Preventing Civil War in the United States Reply

by • Activism, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Fourth Generation Warfare, Left and Right, Secession, Strategy, Uncategorized • Tags:

Bill Lind has a proposal that is very similar to certain ATS positions.

By William S. Lind

Traditional Right

Low-level Fourth Generation war has been underway in the U.S. for some time, largely in the form of gang activities. That is likely to continue, as will occasional terrorist incidents. This low-level warfare is a problem, but it does not threaten the state.

However, the Left’s reaction to the election of Donald Trump as president points to a far more dangerous kind of 4GW on our own soil. Trump’s election signified, among other things, a direct rejection of the Left’s ideology of cultural Marxism, which condemns Whites, men, family-oriented women, conservative blacks, straights, etc. as inherently evil. Not surprisingly, those people finally rebelled against political correctness and elected someone who represents them.

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Trump’s Border Patrol Defies Judge, U.S. Senator at Dulles Airport as His First Constitutional Crisis Unfolds Reply

by • Left and Right, Strategy, Uncategorized

Is the state fracturing within itself? I always thought the end of the empire might come when some total nutcase got elected president and essentially ran the system into the ground. Meanwhile, C4SS director and ATS uber-critic Goofy Gillis is going totally off his meds over Trump (although I actually agree with much of what he is proposing).

By Betsy Woodruff

The Daily Beast

Late Saturday night, in the jam-packed baggage terminal for international arrivals at Washington Dulles International Airport, dozens of lawyers and hundreds of protesters watched as the first major Constitutional crisis of the Trump presidency played out. 

The day before, Trump signed an executive order barring people from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. But many people traveling to the U.S. from those countries—including legal permanent residents of the U.S.—were already in the air and couldn’t turn around. As a result, airports across the country turned into lawfare zones, with cadres of volunteer lawyers squaring off against bureaucrats in the Customs and Border Protection agency. Late-night rulings from federal judges made a legally unprecedented situation even more dramatic, with all three branches of the federal government—congressional, executive, and judicial—warring with each other. At stake: the lives and safety of people trying to legally enter the U.S.

At about 7:30 p.m., a boisterous crowd of several hundred pro-refugee protesters had circled around the “International Arrivals” baggage claim at Dulles—flanked by police who cleared a passageway so people getting off planes could get through. Protesters waved signs saying refugees were welcome (some signs read “Welcome” in Arabic), denouncing President Trump, and calling for Christians to show Christlike love to people fleeing terrorism. They carried “Welcome Home” balloons and they sang songs. 

And there were chants, including “Let them see their lawyers now!” 

There were dozens of lawyers, brought together by the International Refugee Assistance Project. A handful actually practiced immigration law, and dozens more with non-immigration backgrounds—bankruptcy, litigation, you name it—showed up to try to help. 

Early in the evening, a huge piece of news broke: Two federal judges, Ann Donnelly of the Eastern District of New York and Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia, had made rulings that would stall the implementation of Trump’s anti-refugee executive order. 

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Responding to the Fascist Creep 2

by • Activism, Left and Right, Strategy, Uncategorized

An interesting interview with an “anti-fascist” that references the concept of pan-secessionism. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

Without understanding the way that those ambiguous ideas are applied in different milieus, like with national anarchism and autonomous nationalism and those sorts of things, radicals can fall for easy platitudes. Pan-secessionism is another great example. When radicals start talking about the need for separatism without a clear, cosmopolitan follow-up strategy, they leave ourselves wide open to their influence and the insinuation of fascism and the ability for fascist ideas and movements to gain ground in the radical milieu and also in the broader subcultures and in mainstream cultures. When they start talking about ethnic separatism—particularly white separatism, whether de jure or de facto—they’ve basically given up the field.

I think that people in the radical milieu are very disconnected from the impact and effect that they have and their ideas actually have on the mainstream. People often look to radicals to get a sense of direction, particularly vis-a-vis subcultures, so if fascists are given a pass to influence subcultures then the mainstream is far more likely to accept them piecemeal on the basis of accepted ideas and attitudes which are very deleterious. For example, you’ve probably heard of people who you might have thought of as a left wing or a radical saying things like “I don’t believe in equality” or “equality is nonsense” or “I don’t believe in freedom,” or that kind of thing. These kinds of statements seem geared to impress people or shock them or both, but does all that really work for us?

While pan-secessionism is a tactical concept, not an ideology, and has nothing to do with either fascism or anarchism or even national-anarchism per se, it is interesting to observe how these “anti-fascism” hysterics actually help to build the wider ARV-ATS program, largely by serving as the de facto promotional division for our tendency. We’re easily ten times more “famous” because of these people than we would be without them and, as they say in the entertainment business, “there ain’t no such thing as bad publicity.” These guys are the satanic rock protestors of the present era.

These folks are mostly oriented towards the jihad against “straight white cisgendered Christian male” hegemony, or whatever the latest rendition of this perspective includes while ATS is oriented towards the actual overthrow of states, ruling classes, and empires. However, I am for the building and expansion of all forms of anarchism, and oppositional subcultures generally, including the ones that are non-ATS affiliated and which may even be vehemently anti-ATS. To the degree that these guys are contributing to the delegitimization and fracturing of the system generally, they are contributing to our cause.

An “Open Source Insurgency” Against Trump? Reply

by • Activism, Left and Right, Strategy, Uncategorized

I can’t say I have any problem with any of this either. Much of this article is predictable anti-Trump hysteria. Last night, I asked a long time friend of mine, a lifelong Communist from France in his 60s, what he makes of the US Left’s “Trump is a fascist” hysteria. His response was, “They don’t know what their talking about.” Pretty much. But notion of “Trump as a fascist” may be a useful Sorelian myth or Platonic “noble lie” if it motivates the liberal-Left coalition to go into full oppositional mode on the liberal end and create chaos in the streets on the far left end. Fracture, fracture, fracture…

By Kevin Carson

Center for a Stateless Society

In movements like the struggle for economic justice or against the authoritarian state (Occupy, Black Lives Matter, etc.), we usually see arguments for “diversity of tactics” made by radicals against liberal criticism of black block tactics like smashing windows and things of that sort. There’s still a lot of that kind of criticism, obviously — for example liberal reactions to the smashing of Bank of America windows, torching of limosines and whaling the almighty tar out of neo-Nazi celebrity Richard Spencer. But lately, since Trump’s election, I think there’s been at least as much criticism — much of it quite contemptuous — from Leftists dismissing liberal tactics like peaceful marches, factual corrections of Trump’s lies, denials of legitimacy, etc., as ineffectual (“This is not how you beat fascism”). And I think appeals to diversity of tactics apply just as much to the latter case as to the former.

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How to Fix the Left 1

by • Activism, Law/Justice, Strategy • Tags:

By Alden Braddock

Peoples Post Modernist

Reject liberal(isms). Embrace your will to power.

The Left (even in radical circles)in many respects has failed as a movement. Race baiting, class politics, compromise on top of compromise and a clumsy at best praxis to achieving the ends we strive for are what we have now and accepting this reality is the only what we can now move past it. The old God is dead and we shall lay the groundwork of our stronghold on His grave. In order to do this we must be willing to embrace some new ideas;

1. We must stop pandering to identity politics. Treating people as collectives or even worse as sociological concepts trips individual action of any meaning and obfuscates our shared goal of fostering a world of self sufficiency, unshackled creative expression and freedom from imposed conditions. Yes, we can see the grave injustices levied against minorities by the state but recent events have made it clear that our cure is far worse than the disease. Arguing over who oppresses who, supporting language policing in an effort to hide from open dialogue and stick to our safe spaces have done us all a great disservice. Revolution never happens within a person’ comfort zone.

2. We must be willing to do what the right has done; collaborate with a wide variety of anti-state affinity groups (hard greens, third world nationalists, agorists, gender-nihilist/queer organizations, ext.) in order to crush our opposition and while we’re at it crush everybody’s enemy the neo-liberal/globalist.

3. We must be ruthless but use violence with tact and be willing to organize. Providing aid, organization/mobilization to and radicalizing groups like BLM and focusing on the core idea which motivate dissent (opposition to police brutality)instead of race and gender baiting will take us much further in achieving our long term goals

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Commentary: Is America still worth it? Reply

by • Secession, Strategy

By Will Rahn

CBSNews.Com

Something people will increasingly ask down the road: In a wildly diverse nation of over 300 million people, would it not make more sense to have, say, three countries with a 100 million people each? Or how about 300 countries with a million people?

On the far-right, there are already those who pine for a breakup of the United States akin to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. On the far-left, we’re hearing some secession talk too, particularly when it comes to the possibility of CalExit or a Second Vermont Republic.

And it’s not just the far-left, mind you: the Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel, one of the country’s more powerful if eccentric business leaders, recently said he thought the secession of California would be a good thing.

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Reinventing Politics via Local Political Parties Reply

by • Activism, Electoralism/Democratism, Strategy

These ideas might be particularly relevant to the United States where the two-party duopoly is particularly difficult to crack.

By David Bollier

P2P Foundation

It’s an open secret that political parties and “democratic” governments around the world have become entrenched insider clubs, dedicated to protecting powerful elites and neutralizing popular demands for system change.  How refreshing to learn about Ahora Madrid and other local political parties in Spain!  Could they be a new archetype for the reinvention of politics and government itself?

Instead of trying to use the hierarchical structures of parties and government in the usual ways to “represent” the people, the new local parties in Spain are trying to transform government itself and political norms. Inspired by Occupy-style movements working from the bottom up, local municipal parties want to make all governance more transparent, horizontal, and accessible to newcomers. They want to make politics less closed and proprietary, and more of an enactment of open source principles. It’s all about keeping it real.

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America Needs A Network Of Rebel Cities To Stand Up To Trump Reply

by • Activism, Strategy

Popular Resistance

With Trump in the White House and GOP majorities in the House and Senate, we must look to cities to protect civil liberties and build progressive alternatives from the bottom up.

“I want New Yorkers to know: we have a lot of tools at our disposal; we’re going to use them. And we’re not going to take anything lying down.” On the morning after Donald Trump was declared the victor in the US presidential election, Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, wasted no time in signaling his intention to use the city government as a bulwark against the policy agenda of the President-Elect. The move made one thing very clear; with the Republican Party holding the House and Senate, and at least one Supreme Court nomination in the pipeline, it will fall to America’s cities and local leaders to act as the institutional frontline of resistance against the Trump administration.

However, cities can be more than just a last line of defense against the worst excesses of an authoritarian central government; they have huge, positive potential as spaces from which to radicalize democracy and build alternatives to the neoliberal economic model. The urgent questions that progressive activists in the States are now asking themselves are, not just how to fight back against Trump, but also how to harness the momentum of Bernie Sanders’ primary run to fight for the change he promised. As we consider potential strategies going forward, a look at the global context suggests that local politics may be the best place to start.

The election of Trump has not occurred in a vacuum. Across the West, we are witnessing a wholesale breakdown of the existing political order; the neoliberal project is broken, the center-left is vanishing, and the old left is at a loss for what to do. In many countries, it is the far right that is most successful in harnessing people’s desire to regain a sense of control over their lives. Where progressives have tried to beat the right at its own game by competing on the battleground of the nation state, they have fared extremely poorly, as recent elections and referenda across Europe have shown. Even where a progressive force has managed to win national office, as happened in Greece in 2015, the limits of this strategy have become abundantly clear, with global markets and transnational institutions quickly bullying the Syriza government into compliance.

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Calexit: Is Secession the Answer? Reply

by • Activism, Secession, Strategy, Uncategorized

By Keith Preston

American Renaissance

American political culture has come to be defined by enormous divisions. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes that present day political polarization is wider than at any time since the Civil War. Social science research finds that more Americans would oppose their son or daughter marrying someone of the other political party than would oppose marriage outside of their race, religion, or social class.

The Right and Left are coming to regard one another not merely as competitors, but as threats to the nation or even as personal enemies. Polarization has been sharpened by the election of Donald Trump. Indeed, the reaction of the Left has often been one of panic, hysteria, or terror. One leftist blogger professed to be as terrified on the night of Mr. Trump’s election as he had been when he was once arrested and put in jail. Intense polarization of this kind inevitably leads to talk of secession.

I have a fair amount of personal experience with this question. For nearly 20 years, I have advocated dissolving the US federal system through regional and local secession movements from across the political spectrum. Although I am a left-wing anarchist, I have also tried to build bridges between those opposed to, or under attack by, the US power elite from across the political and cultural spectrum–including racial nationalists.

The Trump victory has been a particular stimulus in California, where progressives have suggested that much of the rest of the nation is so out of touch with the values of their state that California should consider seceding. A group called “Yes California” has formed for the purpose of placing an initiative on the state ballot in 2019 approving California’s exit from the United States. This project has come to be known as “Calexit” as a nod to the “Brexit” referendum.

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