Left Unity.

 

      Left politics and right politics, where does the right stop and the left begin, how far left is still right, is left unity just another branch of the right, seems an odd way of classifying your political thoughts. Do you stand for no authority over others or just a little, do you think people need to be lead, or do you think that they can handle things by themselves. Do you think the people need some sort of leader to point the way and make sure they don't get it wrong, or do you think that people should be left to shape their own future, based on respect, equality, free association and responsibility, mistakes and all. I stand firmly in with latter.

The following is from Raddle:
Submitted by ziq in Anarchism (edited ) 

          The disturbing trend of anarcho-tankies we've been seeing can be traced back with a straight line to the proliferation of "left-unity" spaces
The biggest one is r/chapotraphouse and its spinoffs, along with r/dankleft, r/breadtube, r/genzanarchist, and probably leftbook and several youtube channels.
         Red fascists infiltrate the mod teams of these spaces and initiate left unity policies that successfully ban all criticism of their backwards conservative views. The more vocal opponents of the new policy are quickly purged for breaking left-unity, leaving a more passive audience who are ripe for indoctrination.
       Then the propaganda starts. Endless authoritarian memes to normalize gulags, guillotines, firing squads, violent struggle sessions and genocide. Tomes of nonsensical ideological "theory" that serves to brainwash young people who are starved for identity and belonging. Almost immediately, any ideas that conflict with the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Xi create desperate cognitive dissonance in their minds and the kids angrily lash out at the unindoctrinated for being "libs" and "imperialists" rather than risk parting with their new-found identity.
        Once the majority in the space are comfortable joking about murdering "kulaks", and quoting Chinese state media to counter "western propaganda", the shaming campaign begins.
        Anyone in the space who breaks with the tankie party line is lambasted and ridiculed into submission. The remaining anarchists in the space now find themselves hopelessly outnumbered by smug middle class white genocide fetishists telling them they're imperialist CIA stooges for thinking the Uighurs maybe shouldn't be put in concentration camps.
        In order to not be shunned by their peers, the anarchists adopt an obscene anarcho-tankie ideology that allows them to favor libertarian writers like Chomsky and Kropotkin, while embracing the authoritarian third positionist dogma enforced from the top down by their chosen community.
       Uncritical support for every nation (and empire) that opposes the "West", the insistance that anarchism and communism are one and the same because "they have the same end goal", the claim that anarchist communes and an ML state can co-exist in harmony, the attempt to whitewash authoritarian concepts like the dictatorship of the proletariat and the vanguard, the nonsensical belief that they can be an anarchist and also a Marxist. Suddenly they're able to take completely contradicting ideas and fuse them together in order to be accepted by the red fash echo chamber they so desperately want the approval of.
       The conflicting ideas grow increasingly out of whack the further down the rabbit hole the left unity space takes them, and the ridicule they get for their remaining libertarian attachments begins to eat at their ego, until finally they post "How I went from an anarkiddie to a principled Marxist-Leninist" and the transition is complete.
       Tldr: Left-unity is a deliberate ploy by disturbing groomers to indoctrinate impressionable young minds into their authoritarian third positionist fascist ideology and force them to abandon any libertarian beliefs they once had in order to be accepted within the collective's rigid hierarchy and not be branded a liberal or an anarkiddie for forming their own thoughts or questioning their leaders narratives in any way.
      "Left unity" is nothing more than tankie doublespeak for "obey us or be purged".

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk  

Poverty and Hunger, The Necessities Of Capitalism.

        To those who need a little explaining as to how capitalism and poverty go hand in hand, and why poverty is necessary for capitalism to function, you could do worse than read the article by Simon Springer, of the Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Canada,  called Property is the mother of famine: On dispossession, wages, and the threat of hunger:

          Poverty is rooted in the accumulation of wealth, a process that plays out through the dispossession of the many so as to secure excess for the few. While this insight is commonly assigned to Karl Marx (1867) and particularly his understanding of primitive accumulation set forth in the first volume of Capital, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1890) had worked out the contradictory underpinning of capitalism several decades earlier with his inquiry into the principle of right and of government, where he declared “property is theft!” Indeed, the very possibility of poverty, and its expression as famine, is rooted in the institution of property itself. If famine requires a combination of political, production and market shocks” as Alex De Waal (2017) argues, then it is a construction of capital-ism, unfurled when and where it is deemed appropriate by state elites holding the reigns of power. For Peter Kropotkin (1906: 220),“ it was poverty that created the first capitalist; because, before accumulating ‘surplus value,’ of which we hear so much, men had to be sufficiently destitute to consent to sell their labour, so as not to die of hunger. It was poverty that that made capitalists.” I don't disagree with the sentiment, but I can't help but want to know what made poverty? Kropotkin (1906: 220) provides a partial answer when he suggests that,“ if the number of poor rapidly increased during the Middle Ages, it was due to the invasions and wars that followed the founding of States” .So we are starting to see a picture where capitalism and the state come together as indeed they always have as a dialectics of violence. Through the process of violent expropriation, people were taught to accept“ the principle of wages, so dear to exploiters, instead of the solidarity they formerly practised” (Kropotkin, 1906, p. 220). The history of capitalism accordingly suggests that poverty is always and only ever the effect of property, for in its historical and ongoing wars of plunder (Le Billon, 2012), capitalism seeks to secure the right of proprietorship. In order to create poverty it was first necessary to establish property. It was in the form of dispossession that deficiency, deprivation, and destitution first became possible. Consequently, in its most rudimentary form, capitalism is a process that ensures the production of hunger. As Kropotkin (1906:178) put it, “the threat of hunger is man's best stimulant for productive work” and to secure the lock on that cage, one must be stripped of all possession and removed from their connection to the soil, where the material basis of life is appropriated by private interest. In de Waal's account of famine I was particularly impressed with his refusal of the general pornography of violence that exists. Famine isn't as direct as mass execution in gas chambers, and so its slow temporal burn (Nixon, 2011; Springer, 2012) and diffuse geographical embers receive far less attention (Springer, 2011). Yet to me this is precisely what makes famine so compelling. If the original definition of genocide advanced by Rafael Lemkin “ dedicates more detail and space to …the use of starvation as an in-strument of extermination, persecution and inhumanity, than to mass killing” as De Waal (2017) argues, then indeed this should tell us something quite profound about famine as an instrument of control. With this being the case, then perhaps capitalism can be understood as the systemic and pervasive spectre of genocide, for privation of the majority is precisely what capitalism procures as a state of permanent being. This condition is produced through the private appropriation of all material needs land, water, housing,food, and tools the result of which is both the institutionalization of property, and a widespread reliance on wages as people are stripped of their ability to subsist off the land. One is enslaved by This system, where refusing it means starvation. The only thing that prevents our genocide is the acceptance of wages, an agreement that secures our political value. Without this exchange our lives are rendered useless to capital.

Read the full article HERE:
    Please cite this article in press as: Springer, S., Property is the mother of famine: On dispossession, wages, and the threat of hunger,

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk 

One Of Our Anniversaries.

     May 30 1814 saw the birth of Michail Alexandrovich Bakunin, one of  anarchism's giant thinkers. Among his writings are such works as Stateless Socialism: Anarchism,  The Immorality of The State,  What is Authority? and many others. After meeting Marx he is quoted as saying: 

     "As far as learning was concerned, Marx was, and still is, incomparably more advanced than I. I knew nothing at that time of political economy, I had not yet rid myself of my metaphysical observations... He called me a sentimental idealist and he was right; I called him a vain man, perfidious and crafty, and I also was right"

Quote from Brian Morris's: Bakunin, The Philosophy of Freedom, 1993, p14.

ann arky's home.

WHY WORK?

       It is practically universal, almost all of those who have to do it, hate it, if not at first, in time they begin to hate it, as it eventually grinds them down. Usually those who don't have to do it, the rich and privileged of this society, will praise it, and denigrate those among the poor who don't do it, whether it is by their own desire or otherwise. I am of course talking about work.

      It was Paul Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law, and author of  "The right to be lazy" who wrote:

        ...not to demand the Right to Work which is but the right to misery, but to forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day, the earth, the old earth, trembling with joy would feel a new universe leaping within her.

         Why do we do it? An interesting article from Void Mirror:

     All must work! Declares the cabinet of millionaires. 'Workers not shirkers!, they implore. 'Strivers not skivers!' The divide and rule rhetoric trying to pit those in work against those without is as relentless as it is transparent. But what's so good about work anyway?  

      Junge Linke's short piece skewers how attempts to mobilise resentment of claimants and the unemployed undermine even those in work who aren't claiming benefits. What I'd like to focus on is two perspectives on what an explicitly anti-work politics might look like.

Read the full article HERE:

ann arky's home.

           

   

IS CAPITALISM DYING OUT?

     I received the new edition of Ephemera, (on the net) and found it a very interesting magazine. I found one article in particular "Is capitalism dying out?"  by Steen Nepper Larsen, extremely thought provoking and recommend it as well worth a read. The entire magazine is packed full of thought provoking articles and well worth a visit.

     The following is just a very short quote from near the end of the above mentioned article:

Exit

Where Gorz envisages a capitalism dying out and negating itself in a fertile virtual sphere of communication that contains real political potentialities for radical social transformation, I see what Marx called ‘the civilizing influence of capital’ giving breath to ever newer forms of contradiction. Gorz is right in claiming that knowledge is not reducible to a commodity. He is also right to emphasize that neither the Marxist theory of value nor the dominant ‘liberal’ theory of economic value can grasp the process of transforming knowledge into value. But unfortunately he is mistaken in claiming that capitalism will soon disappear. Maybe it is capitalism’s ability to produce powerful conflicting and contradicting patterns of social life that keeps it alive and kicking. Capitalism manages to integrate major parts of human creativity, our innovative skills, desires and communicative utterances to foster and maintain its own logic of accumulation, and until now we have not been able to conquer its destructive aspects or find a way to live without its seemingly magnetic power.

490

ephemera 12(3): 486-491

reviews

Is capitalism dying out?

Steen Nepper Larsen

You can read the full article HERE:

ann arky's home.

WHERE TO NOW, WHERE, TODAY?

      From The Anarchist International:

Thesis:

The majority of the Anarchist International does not reside in the country, in the small town, or on the periphery of capitalism. The majority of us inhabit the centers of global capital and spend our lives close to our enemies heart. One side effect of living in such close proximity to these glowing cores of money and power is a confusion as to what reality is like for those who live far away and near the edge. Military suppression, famines, civil war, and urban guerrilla warfare are commonplace in nation states such as India, China, the Philippines, and Afghanistan. Those inhabiting the interior sometimes trick themselves into thinking they understand what living in these situations is like, but obviously they do not.

 Continue READING:

 ann arky's home.

CIRCLED A ON ALBERT CAMUS.

Circled A put out some very interesting talks on their radio slot This latest one was on
Albert Camus, worth a wee listen.

ann arky's home.