Armchair Terrorism

Hey, you know that guy you vaguely knew at the beginning of last summer? He’s trying to kill you now. Migrants, anarchists, tourists, police, mafias; beefs, boredom, business. What the fuck happened to this place. (no question mark). As I arrived again this summer in what had already become a romanticized haven, I discovered nothing was happening. That’s ok, it’s the end of the summer, I’ve been told. I go to the plateia and notice a distinctive lack of any women, or even hippies for that matter, all I hear is, “mavro, mavro, thelis mavro” (black, black, you want black). Black means weed, because darkness represents everything underground, not let into the market or proper channels, even in Greece. The plateia used to be the place of joyous friction, where everyone would gather, drink, share their stories, escape from riots, etc. Now it is a marketplace and nothing else. I left feeling naseaus and nervous.

I went to Strefi hill to take a good look at the city, as I reached the top of the stairs I was stopped by 20 MAT. I pulled out my friendly American tourist card and after a minute of questions I was allowed to walk into the park. They even took Strefi, once the home of the autonomous parties which lasted until 8 in the morning, where people would run after the big bachala, where attacks were occasionally launched against the mayors house, where the homeless slept and the Georgians had barbeques. Well the Georgians are still there. My collective is small and fracturing under our lightness and our rigorousness. We have no comrades left, no comrades have comrades left, now we just have our squats which we guard. Pride makes too much out of people and leaves them stupid, unwilling to correct themselves, or even do what’s best for them. Self-interest here would be a blessing from the sky, but to act on it requires initiative and bravery, that magical combination which seemed to flow endlessly from the bachalians and anarchists which now seems to have disappeared, like a puddle of piss on the side of the road leaving nothing but its ghostly smell.

If people don’t know how to argue they just won’t. They can swim like a drowning man. So, no one talks to us anymore, or responds to any of our critiques.

I watched a couple troubles, and had trouble with them, they all seem to lean heavily on identity as the main motivator for change, and history and ‘roots’ as things to be preserved, and as a combat to capitalism. I don’t really relate, maybe because I’m a white jew, I have roots, but not ones that I feel I relate to or which have much good in them, and the good I get from them I can just make myself anyways. There is an anarchist identity, but asking people to operate based on it beyond going to a rad concert is ridiculous. This is not the world we live in. We have a struggle born out of necessity, and our means aim to make this necessity non-existent, nothing more.

The dark mist that perpetuates wandering filled me with energy, waking me from the stupor of everyday worries, towards the life worries and the lives passing in every moment just beyond my touch. Beyond my touch still bothers me in that existential way, why is it so hard for me to catch a touch. A woman grabbed my arm and held me tightly and it felt nice, I was surprised by the warmth of her body and the eye contact she graced me. She gave me questions and compliments, and I understood a flirtation. It thawed the ice of my walls, the kind that the sun is supposed to bring to every day, but that just illuminates the next task on the ever growing agenda and list of people to kill. What new hatred will today bring me, and which day will my boot finally meet a head that deserves. Yet today I was sure that I was going to be attacked, and suddenly nervousness filled me, but I still reached for the iron bar which lay on the ground and eyed the man who threatened me who turned out to be just looking for a place to piss. This is the way my life will change. In a moment of fear where the decisions are all made for me, even the ones my body makes, and I drift into action like a drop down a leaf sinking forever into the ground losing all form and nurturing the foundations in an insignificant way.

If the bombs started to rain down on American soil and we all had to ditch our homes, cars, fridges, and book it like hell south of the border what would the migrant squats in Mexico City look like? If the Mexican anarchists established self-organized spaces for the generic American populace. Fascists, liberals, cowboys, hipsters, crammed into the squats, could we expect them to reform, to take an interest in liberatory projects or change their desires? Would we see anti-abortion marches protected by civil society liberals under the banner of anti-xenophobic violence.

Anarchists must hold onto our political theories and models of organizing. We don’t compromise them in the hopes of moving people into our theories. Firstly, because people don’t have to “believe” in anarchism for it to function. Secondly because our goal is not to move people ‘left’, our goal is to promote self-organization and the destruction of capital. Thirdly because the oppressed subject is not a holy heifer to whom we must constantly bow our heads, as if its circumstances give it an enlightenment. An oppressed refugee worker who is a rapist isn’t an ally we should make and compromise our commitment to ending patriarchal domination. Our goal is not to build the organizations which will supersede this society, it is to influence the character of the movements which will, when the circumstances make the questions we have been asking for so long move through the streets like electricity.

Can I continue to respect people who have never had to give up something? Who haven’t made a choice over which life they would live? Could you kill for something? Have you laid awake at night with this thought racing around your memories and feel yourself journeying towards space the endless space of the morning which comes somehow through the darkness of the bedroom? When I walk home tonight will I hear a shout and turn around to see a knife breaking the night as it slices into my back and a pair of eyes watches me as I fall onto the dirty piss stained concrete? I can’t die like this, I can’t tell my mom that I got killed by being stabbed by a weed dealer who didn’t like being kicked out of his squat. If I’m going to die let it be glorious, or at least not embarrassing.

Can you beat a man? Break his knees in backwards and let him scream as the sirens come, leaving him to his fate of a jail cell and a wheelchair? Can you stay up all night over and over again with people you hate to keep a home safe for people who don’t give a shit about their future and use your goodwill to keep things in the stasis of a false peace? Can you watch as your friends betray you over and over again and you return to an empty room? Can you stay friends with people who watch you with apathetic eyes as everything you both supposedly care about dies a slow and painful death?

Sociality has felt like a prison more and more, as if I have returned to my 13-year-old depressed self. Every experience too far away, every person a scared automaton, whose beautiful touches seem to exist in a world that starts when I walk out the door. Where desires are only as real as they can be felt. Dear god, I don’t want to think of myself again as the only one who feels or is looking for someone: chasing a feeling I never had, an idea which couldn’t exist, and that glimmer that escapes everyday life. Riots have none of this anymore. All they bring is a calmness, of knowing your enemy in front of you, of knowing your actions, of trusting your bodily reactions, and of dancing in glee at our sense of self-importance: we are a problem (shouted gleefully)!

All I can do now is talk in a detached way with people, or stay silent. Go to the top of hills and stare while I drift into sleep. I cook food and eat it. I go to meetings where I understand things as much as I can as they slap me in the face or crawl behind my sleeping lids. I get pizza in the square because I’m bored, and stare at all the dealers who are stuck here, peddling their shit to hippies and wasting away, maybe the excitement of a stabbing can wake them from their stupor and dejected detachment from their own lives. Another beer in front of the beer shop, another wasted song coming out of a junkie’s breath, you can hear his personality escaping his body and the awareness of losing oneself in every missed note. The cats outside of the corner store are fed, the beers cost 1.40, and if you pass at 2 you will see the MAT waiting to be hit. Every day feels like another life I have lived but they all have the features of a land without passion a life watched from the window. Our bodies are cages, I need sex so I can reach my arm between the bars.

 

Fascism and the State

Fascism as a movement means nothing without its relationship to the state. Fascism has acted to gain power in a twofold manner: building street strength and infiltrating/inheriting government mechanisms. Historically the State is the main perpetrator of fascism. Grouplets of fascists contribute to propagandizing and committing political violence through street movement and lone-wolf style attacks. Usually this street movement aspect is largely unsuccessfully outside of their densely concentrated areas as their violence alienates them from a public more likely to be their victim than their ally. Its most successful attempts at gaining power have been through state institutions, but the State, despite huge overlaps in their ideology and professed interests, doesn’t have much interest in fascism.

Fascism tends to be a policy enacted or tendency empowered by the State when its own mechanisms are seen as inappropriate to the task at hand. This can be when the legitimacy of bourgeois democracy is threatened and when it can’t risk its own legitimacy in an act of necessary violent repression. This can be seen over and over again with Xrisi Avgi (Golden Dawn) in Greece, state backed Islamists in Syria and Iraq, neo-nazis in Ukraine, cartels in Mexico, all being used to attack various liberatory movements and enact immigration/policing functions inside the states own territory with a brutality that couldn’t be adequately covered if done under its own crest. Oftentimes in protests between anti-fascists and fascists in the US the state decides that it is best to watch the ensuing chaos and not to intervene and dirty its hands in a matter that is mostly irrelevant to it. When it does intervene, it is mostly because of state infiltration (Klan in the police force, police involvement in militias, local politicians’ investment in fascist activity or dependence on militias to discipline migrant labor, etc.). Seen in this way fascism is a useful pet project to the state, something to be nurtured so that if needed it can be used and then disposed of. Fascism also has very little stability as a ruling political apparatus with every fascist state quickly declining, collapsing, or being overthrown.

 

Liberalism

The rise in publicity of fascism and fascist violence along with the increase in “identity politics” has given rise to a new ideology, liberal in character, which pervades the left, radical spaces, and much of the public media. This ideology I will term oppressionism. The general ideology has this as its creed: marginalized and attacked groupings are evaluated based on severity of oppression/repression, deemed important as such, and must be remedied. On its own this ideology isn’t bad, it makes sense, people are getting hurt, they shouldn’t be getting hurt, let’s help the worst off first and then the best off. Nothing is radical about this ideology, it exists within nearly every major religion (especially Christianity) in some form through charity and is also a general premise of the need for governance in classical liberal ideology (protecting the endangered and oppressed minority from the majority). So, helping people is good and we should do it, but what does it have to do with anarchist politics specifically?

In its popular incarnation in the US, several liberal premises are built into this ideology’s foundation. One is that the relevance of the struggles of the oppressed has nothing to do with a totalizing change or a rapturous possibility outside of those of reform. Some examples: we can destroy racism through community policing, making safe spaces where we cloister those in danger (those with ‘revolutionary’ potential), put pressure on city councils, abolish prisons (without sieges somehow?). Anti-fascists can support the ideas behind these slogans (destroying racism, abolishing prisons), but the method of implementation, which is the part they should be critical of, is the part which receives the material support. Most anarchists don’t think that these reforms could be successful and think in fact that they bolster the enemy and anarchists don’t seem to have an interest in creating the groupings which could implement their own idea.

The other is that this politic is almost entirely limited to the field of spectacle even when there are real people dying. Oppressionism has an obsession with language and symbols as opposed to systems. Almost all actions are aimed at attempts to reform media, representation, statues, speeches, etc. At best, it aims at balancing privilege which means reducing exceptional and particular oppressions and generalizing or leveling them. Participation in these movements as well is almost only done on the spectacular level of social media platitudes / arguments with no consequences, marches targeting monumental places which only have the appearance of containing power, and excluding those associated with the movement in an endless cycle of purification (which doesn’t really target its enemies who don’t care if they are included in this ‘movement’). Being stuck in spectacle is no suprise because oppressionism has its origins in academia, and academia’s sole terrain, both battleground and product, is language (how problems can be represented).

The main power that the position of academic grants is to influence public discourse and develop the techniques of administrative institutions. This administrative assistance function contains the same logic as no platforming, mainly, that the masses can be easily swayed by information and the best way to influence them is to withhold it.[1] Students on the other hand, more and more understand their education as training for technical and managerial duties. The media attention allotted to them also gives them a sense of self-importance which amplifies the influence and intensity of their guilt-ridden moralism. These combine with the new participatory and democratic form of celebrity culture, improved and widely distributed by social media, which demands that everyone be pure and camera ready in all waking moments of life, into a game of social capital and hierarchies which is ravenously cannibalistic.[2] This social cannibalism makes it even harder for students to take independent initiative which has contributed to their activism functioning almost entirely as appeals to the institution. All of these tendencies have contributed to the authoritarian nature of the politics in academia, and the anti-fascist and oppressionist politic which has come out of it.

The limits of academia are also the ones adopted by the movement as a whole:

1. Harshly enforced requirement for moral purity demonstrated through the correct use of language.
2. Methods of change limited to appeals to institutional power (pleadingly or forcefully in the radical case) or extending and enforcing rule 1 to the general public.
3. The ideology of no-platforming and its patronizing attitude towards ‘the masses’: the view that people are easily influenced, and controlled and defined through their viewership. The only way the masses can participate is through yelling at the screen, which in our day and age of focus groups and yelp, can influence the ‘real’ stage setters.

These problems symbolize the fundamental weakness of this ideology and its ‘praxis’ where those targeted only get targeted on the basis of their language and access to institutional benefits, and those excluded are those who didn’t care about it anyways or those who couldn’t adhere strictly enough to the codes or are critical of shibboleths. Liberal ideology here gains a radical edge by becoming enforced with harsher restrictions and more violence.

 

Anarchism

            Where has our politic gone? Our terminology has been popularized and also completely misinterpreted. Direct action, doing what needs to be done ourselves without asking, has come to mean doing pressure based civil disobedience. We target empty symbols militantly: taking down statues, doxing degenerates, collectively de-platforming from Facebook (seriously?), and finally black bloc demos which usually demonstrate the aesthetic of dangerousness and the reality of impotence. It doesn’t feel good to shit on something for being weak, but why are we weak? Part of it is assuredly not our fault. We are face to face with one of the most sophisticated police states in the world, whose police forces are the size of armies and whose equipment is the armies.

Anti-fascism has come to dominate anarchist discourse. If one looks at anarchist actions in the US, news roundups, and articles (of which this will be another wreck in the crash) one would assume that anarchism and antifascism were synonymous. I like to frame anti-fascism’s relationship with transformative politic through the derisive character of “Antifa Hero!”. Antifa Hero rescues the day from the evil fascists who are tearing through the urban cityscape after emerging from the sewers like CHUDs[3]. After defeating the fascists, Antifa Hero pats themself on the back and, ignoring the deep evil and toxic sludge which created these mutants, says, “My job is done, the day has been won!”. The hero has no way of addressing the architecture of this nightmare beyond impressive slogans, and is capable only of filling the potholes as they appear.  Antifascism is related to our politic only in that the world we want is not a fascist one. Why is the logic of anti-fascist politics only applied to fascists? Why not capitalists, the state? One reason is because the politic almost exclusively functions as the targeting of specific individuals and not as an address to systemic issues. The other is that our real enemies, the powerful ones standing in the way of the world we want, are either too powerful for us to come in contact with (let alone attack) or they are just normal people who view our politic as insane and have too much to lose. What does anti-fascism have to say about either of these major roadblocks to our experimentation? Very little. In fact, it tends to marginalize those who dismiss an anti-fascist politic. Critics end up either agreeing to its shallow politic with a caveat so as to remain relevant, or totally alienated from an anarchism which through their exclusion becomes even more synonymous with anti-fascism.

Anarchism has also become synonymous with “militant” activism. Affinity groups are now the titles of civil disobedience working groups and direct action means every action which isn’t directly parliamentary. How did this happen? How did anarchist struggles just become the militant edge of NGO politics? One reason is that anarchists have allowed themselves to be cloaked by and wholeheartedly endorse anti-fascism and its roots to the point where the two have become inseparable or worse yet synonymous. Anarchists adopted this new (not really) and exciting politic mainly because ‘militancy’ re-emerged on the scene in a way that was risky but not really risky which meant that our opportunity had come for publicity. The major reason why anarchists have become so entrenched in oppressionism and its liberal routes is partly because anarchists have made themselves into excellent pawns. Anarchists are ok with violence, breaking the law and disobedience. The anarchist utopia and ethic is one of helping people out. The anarchist in our own imaginations is the protagonist and hero with all the spirit of self-sacrifice implied. This image of self-sacrifice is reinforced by a misrepresentation of the history of the American left. All of these combine to make anarchists excellent stooges in the larger social struggle milieu because they both strengthen the movement through intimidation and violence and legitimize the reformist non-violent elements through comparison. Even when anarchists are self-conscious of all these flaws, oppressionism and privilege politics both make this sacrifice worth it because it helps out people who need help. But helping out people is not just what our politics is about. It is about a total break with the present order, not just the fascist order, or the racist order, but against the way capitalism has organized our lives in their entirety. This is the dilemma at the heart of our involvement in this politic: are we going to sacrifice ourselves just for the elimination of some bad or are we going to fight and live for something beyond all of this?

 

Insurrection

Open a space, then take it. Is this Leninism or is this realism? The truth is, the void is the status quo, all of our conditioning, all of the muck we were born into. The vacuum of space is sterile, and the vacuum cleaner is dirty. The difference between a revolutionary politic, anarchist or otherwise, and the anti-fascist politic is the difference between clearing the space of this ‘new’ contaminant and filling the space with a new way of life. The body is capitalism, let’s not just destroy one of its carefully tended antibodies but rupture from the body.

One part of why an “insurrectionary” politic seems to lend to the oppressionist anti-fascism which has come to dominate anarchism is that it is an ideology in search of a new oppressed category besides proletarian, because, “the oppressed are what make revolutionaries”. What does this mean for a revolutionary anti-fascism? If repression equals more revolutionaries then anti-fascism turns from reformism to a racist accelerationism where the more POC are repressed the better. This is a semi-unconscious part of the mindset, and explains the near ecstatic outrage radicals often get from watching the trauma porn that passes for political content on social media platforms. Trauma doesn’t make revolutionaries, if it did then we would be trapped in sadism (maybe we are). Oppression doesn’t necessarily lead to insight, and insight doesn’t usually lead to action. Then how do we have any revolutionary model at all? The problem is also that anarchism attracts broken and dysfunctional people and encourages it in order to retain its outraged and virulent character. We should be outraged, and we should make organs which can effectively make use of it, but our job isn’t to agitate people only so they can do some ineffective action which ultimately supports the status quo, if we are ineffective at least let it be our way and for what we actually want.

Propaganda can be separated from spectacle, by being invitational. This invitation can’t be to become a spectator and replicator of the trained and initiated affinities (cliques) and to use the right language. It requires an invitation into the project of anarchy as a whole and an invitation for people to make it their own. Right now, the only bodies we have which are invitational and explicitly anarchist are either publishing projects, solidarity projects, or antifascism (this one mostly as an idea). Adding combative and experimental anarchist organizations into this mix could seriously alter our movement, because attack is a positive element and one which perpetuates itself. Once people learn that they can fight, they can learn how to fight for themselves, because freedom doesn’t just mean not being chained, but something much larger. The fight that one learns from anti-fascism is that people who are ‘bad’ can be punched by us. Learning how to fight our larger enemies and the ones that dominate the majority of our lives (laws and work (and their enforcers), actually opens up possibilities for a future that is determined by us not a perpetuation of the volatile stasis of the statis quo.  What does a life of our own choosing look like? Are those fantasies and unknowns exciting enough for us to fight for? If our only light is the losing fight, then we have already won.

[1] Academia, more often than not, hordes information by limiting access to it and by encrypting it in terminology.

[2] This social competition also prepares them for the managerial piranha market.

[3] A good metaphor. At first the CHUDs (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller) are seen as the real threat because they are on the streets terrorizing people, but *spoiler alert* the acronym actually turns out to be Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal, the name of a government dumping project which is the systemic source of this threat.

This story is about an inexperienced wandering I who is thrown into a present which sends the past into complete disarray. Futures and pasts conflicting and loving each other. The environmental collapse swirls around us, it is past the apocalypse (that grew slowly) and a time which resembles our own. It is a futile attempt in the scheme.

Moving Forward

 

I woke up walking. An orange sun burning over my head and an endless field of dust surrounding us, the whole world a shade of brown. I was on an urgent mission to the top of a mountain. As I looked around, our tour group and guide seemed to have been left behind, only her companion was still leading our small party. It was a skinny wolf, with the colorings of a coyote, and eyes that would never touch you. After a long time of walking up this mountain, one incline, I turned to the others who had decided to keep pace with the dog and leave the others behind. I asked them, “Where are you from?”, and turning to them I realized they were lovers from a time past, when I was a thief, living off the meat inside the broken shell of law. We three had made love in a squat as best we could, loving each other in turns, kissing our anxieties into the pillows, rolling in our own heat and our limits undoing. Now in front of me they were like strangers again.

They told me, “We came from another planet, the skies and their children began to change, everything died, and we had to leave. We received no solidarity, the air was empty.”

“It’s like what’s going on here. The climate is changing and it feels like we’re all being buried alive.” After uttering this sentence I realized that I had no idea if I was still on Earth or not, what its state was. Were people still going to the bodega and buying lottery tickets and scavenging from dumpsters like they always were, or are all the towns empty now, but the movie theaters keep their projectors glowing.

In Another life, these two were guides on the refugee trail that led into fortress heaven. Now we were all tourists on a mission. At the top of this mountain surrounded by bushes and dust, there was a train, this train led to an airport, the plane inside this airport led to another place. We returned to the silence of our thoughts and footsteps, slowly approaching the top.

 

I have been dreaming recently of being a guerilla. I thought that once not too long ago. Now I am sticking a metal tool into the holes of a Lamborghini, opening it up under the wheel. The car comes to life and me and one of the lovers get in. We don’t have guns although we should’ve brought them. We had a conversation beforehand about how strange it is that people do assassinations mostly with guns, but never with cars, even though in reality they are a far more common means of destruction, assimilating thousands of bodies per day into the pavement to the rhythms of work. Our target was some energy CEO, a face we had memorized. The place was at party in a gated community where he was to make one of his few appearances. The only people there are leaders, CEO’s, grand mages, their families, and their body guards who swarm the place with black suits. We raced up a small twisting road surrounded by big oak trees that leads to the top of the hill where the party is. Cars are parked on either side, I gently twist the wheel to make it dance around the curves. As we move farther and faster up the hill the trees begin to disappear and turn slowly into concrete, our dance becomes tighter and smoother. Eventually we reach the top. Our headlights pointed into the middle of a party, everything is normal. Servants serve drinks, people laugh and smoke, and suddenly I see him right in front of the hood. I never noticed before, but our target really resembles my father’s old boss, he was a kind old man, with deep set eyes that bulged out from their caves, a hawk’s nose, and a talent for respecting the young. Do all bosses look the same? I only noticed their similarity as my mind rested on the gas pedal and I consider it all again. His brief look through the windshield at us, having no idea that his death is coming, just a car, just people, just a final moment.

I hit the gas, he continued walking slowly away from the car. We race towards him and he makes a small step out of the way, or maybe I swerved at the last moment I don’t know. Now we are about to plunge off the hill that he is walking down, we ditch the car and fall and the car takes off. The car flies over his head, he doesn’t seem to notice, and lands in front of him and continues rolling down the hill into the middle of a fancy suburban Beverly hills road. None of this has made him blink or even look around, he strolls towards his home. We run after him, as he looks back at us we hide behind a minivan. He has seen us though. What can we do? We don’t have a gun, we don’t have anything, only our hands. We look at each other, she looks away first and walks straight after him. I try to find the car, but can’t, its turned into a Prius. She meets him and immediately gets hit in the face, she falls on the ground each kick hitting her ribs, she stops moving and I can feel her slowly becoming a memory. I rush to turn the car around and suddenly I’m on the main boulevard. Stuck behind lines of traffic, red lights, a thousand wheels stopped, the whole world saying wait. I wait at every light except the last one, and when I return to the scene, they are both gone.

A deadly distraction latched its mouth to my eye

its body is translucent

it flies at 30000

its a cramped chair of innovation

its every face forward

its a like illuminated on a wet road

its an apology for smell (of indian food)

its a carousel spinning into a CGI galaxy

its the ultrasound of an aborted audience

its a field goal of suicide

its collectively tagged to a sneakers image

its the rubber accusation of makeuplessness

its waiting longer because you already waited so long

its the echo of endless checking

 

entertrainment anexiety

 

Our points of departure are our imagined walls. Our society functions in a collective manner through the coordination of exploitation and the distribution of the things we ‘need’. ‘Need’ means every piece of the world that we experience (or look over), especially in the urban centers (rain and sky included). Every chunk of rubble, every averted gaze as you walk through the park at three in the morning, every chocolate bar at the checkout line which no one seems to pick up, they all pay their part. Every-thing is a commodity, art helped turned the gentle unpronounceable nuances of touch, one of the hardest things to quantify, into another precious moment which makes that romantic comedy worth going to see in its three-thousandth variation. Artists are dangerous soldiers of perception, their craft is ‘problem solving’, and making wanderings productive. Art has also played an integral role in creating the big tribe, ‘the nation’, and is our only way of understanding capitalism or even strawberries in our present stage of civilization. To look at fruit in the supermarket shelf, is to imagine the poor brown hand somewhere hot picking, the boat crossing invisible lines in waves, the ‘far-east’ plastic stickers slapped on the skin, the fridge truck, then your world, where one worker passing put its shiny body under the fluorescent lights. But where it comes from is the same place the white bare feet in the grass come from in an ad for antidepressants. To imagine the line where it became ours is to imagine a place where ‘our people’ exist, which means a similar reference we can all conjure individually.

Is there a tribe which isn’t mostly conjured/mediated? Is it always about scale? Sadly human beings have a certain size and we have to deal with these limits until our bodies are transcended (uh-oh). Our imaginary communities are becoming larger as our real ones decline. Not only that, but the imagined community because of American cultural imperialism has started to become universal (if malls are our embassies, is Spongebob our Esperanto?). Our real tribes include everyone we interact with on a regular basis. It isn’t chosen, it isn’t based on love, what makes our people “ours” is as based on resentment as it is on respect. Love comes from and with the little annoyances. This essay is about destroying our walls, the primary one being identity.

Everyone knows about walls: they are constructed lines of perception and feeling. A house is nice because you don’t have to see your neighbors and they don’t have to see you, the cold doesn’t come inside and you don’t go in the cold. Our fiefdoms, our domains, are not without regulation however. We have housing catalogs for our design, we have appliances we must posses, we have building codes which determine its body, and we have to keep money in order or else a paper will be signed and our little fortress will be under siege. The dialectic of walls and of homes are identical in our popular discourse. The walls of a prison aren’t the same as the walls of a home in terms of perception only because the whole outside of the prison is our home. And for those inside walls mark the atmosphere.

The struggle against prisons necessitates the destroying of prisons and of the category of ‘prisoner’ (hopefully ‘criminal’ as well). Making a friend means opening up, making yourself vulnerable, and in doing so, materializing yourself by breaking through your own image. What was perceived of you, what suit society has chosen for you, and which you personalize with pins, tattoos and experiences becomes transcended in destroying that suit or through recontextualization: you can try and throw away your TV memories or connect Homer to your father. Fantasy is true in as much as we all dream, when we dream ourselves is it based on words or feelings?

We organize in our tribes based in real lies which cannot be underestimated: racism, sexism, transphobia, etc. have material consequences, you get hit with this law, or this baton, or with this noose, or this gas, based on what the imagined baggage is. Organizing on the basis of shared oppression, we both get hit by this bullet at around the same time so lets get together and grab the gun, makes sense in this context, but it doesn’t change the fact that you are being defined by being shot, and by the historical legacy of being shot for a long ass time. Our enemies shouldn’t be able to pull our smiles with hooks, and we shouldn’t appreciate it just because now we can see each others teeth.

I am proposing that we make identity what some make of revolution. In communisation discourse, there is a critique of the 20^th century movements for liberation which goes something like this: the workers never succeeded in building communism because instead of trying to destroy themselves (the category of workers), they wanted that category to rule. (This can be seen in a similar way with some decolonial movements as well). They wanted to take the wretched position of making things for the market and being defined by how you sell your time, and have themselves take over the formal management of that position, to make a society of masterless slaves. To succeed they had to take the thing that made their movements so enormous (their shared condition), and unite in order to destroy their unity of oppression. Lets go to the root, organize, and build with what we love so that we can destroy everything. Why does youth still get the burden of praise, of hope? Not just because they embody the cherished aesthetic (of being far from death), but because they have the ability to get a desperate breath of air above the water of norms and boundaries which floods our society, they can taste the air beyond our fetid walls. Their definitions are constantly in flux, and encouraged to be so (cause it could save us all, or make us an extra gold brick). They are the identity which is encouraged to break the others, until a certain hard limit when the tanks get brought in.

Our identities have to be fractured as well, or reimagined with such careful destruction that they resemble their old selves only in their choices. We want a careful adulthood, past the rebellious teendom which caricaturizes so much of anarchism (plain negative), taking our ancestors to task and not being afraid of that symbol of friendship: criticism. Our movement in the US is small and fledgling, it has the self-aggrandizement of a toddler who views all of the world and its objects as its extension, but we can start to make it ours and in doing so destroy the categories which hamper us. We also have to carefully examine our traditions and not idolize them so that we don’t end up playing dress up as ourselves.

To overcome our own identities we need bravery, we need spaces of random encounter, we need the active resetting of environments (so that their implications are in flux and so that they can compare to normality), we need to understand friendship as an organizational structure not in the activist way because it can ‘get things done’, but because it puts you in a state of vulnerability in which you can view yourself honestly and adapt, because we have to fight the false commonality of our perception, we have to fight the generalization of life as mundane and identity as historical and bounded. Identity has never been owned until an idea could be sold. Unity is a falsehood and one which attacks our integrity and disrupts our ability, we are not looking to love everyone, we are looking to be free. What is in need most is sold to us poisoned, we have gotten self-creation only along the rules of the commodity (social media, gig economy, networking, avatars, etc.). What we need is the reskilling of sociality, the deep steps of self-creation. What we want doesn’t exist inside of us, but between us.