gegen-kapital-und-nation - Tumblr blog

[gegen-kapital-und-nation]

this is nonsense detached from reality on several levels

'we’re the water’ is some higher plane mr miyagi catch phrase

“If the insurgents’ war against the government needs to be asymmetrical, it’s because there is an ontological asymmetry between them, and hence a disagreement about the very definition of war, about it’s methods as well as its objectives. We other revolutionaries are both the focus and the target of the permanent offensive that government has become. We are the ‘hearts and minds’ that must be conquered. We are the environment in which the governmental agents evolve and which they mean to subdue, and not a rival entity in the race for power. We don’t fight in the midst of the people ‘like fish in water’; we’re the water itself, in which our enemies flounder - soluble fish. We don’t hide in ambush among the plebs of this world, because it’s also us that the plebs hide among. The vitality and the plundering, the rage and craftiness, the truth and the subterfuge all spring from deep within us. There is no one to be organized. We are that material which grows from within, which organizes itself and develops itself. The true asymmetry lies there, and our real position of strength is there. Those who make their belief into an article of export, through the terror or performance, instead of dealing with what exists where they, only cut themselves off from themselves and their base. It’s not a matter of snatching the ‘support of the population,’ nor even its indulgent passivity, from the enemy: we must make it so there is no longer a population. The population has never been the object of government without first being its product. It ceases to exist once it ceases to be governable. This is what’s involved in the muffled battle that rages after every uprising: dissolving the power that had formed, focused, and deployed in that event. Governing has never been anything but denying the people all political capacity, that is, preventing insurrection.”

—

Let’s Disappear -The Invisible Committee

 http://bloom0101.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/letsdisappear.pdf

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‘One thing the Americans have and which we lack,’ complained Hitler, ‘is the sense of vast open spaces.’ […] To be sure, there was no place near Germany that was uninhabited or even underpopulated. The crucial thing was to imagine that European 'spaces’ were, in fact, 'open.’ Racism was the idea that turned populated lands into potential colonies, and the source mythologies for racists arose from the recent colonization of North America and Africa. The conquest and exploitation of these continents by Europeans formed the literary imagination of Europeans of Hitler’s generation. Like millions of other children born in the 1880s and 1890s, Hitler played at African wars and read Karl May’s novels of the American West. Hitler said that Mays had opened his 'eyes to the world.’ In the late nineteenth century, Germans tended to see the fate of Native Americans as a natural precedent for the fate of native Africans under their control […] An uprising [in modern day Namibia] in 1904 led the Germans to deny the native Herero and Nama populations access to water until they fell 'victim to the nature of their own country,’ as the official military history put it. The Germans imprisoned survivors in a camp on an island. The Herero population was reduced from some eight thousand to about fifteen thousand; that of the Nama from about twenty thousand to about ten thousand. For the German general who pursued these policies, the historical justice was self-evident. 'The natives must give way,’ he said. 'Look at America.’ The German governor of the region compared Southwest Africa to Nevada, Wyoming, and Colorado. The civilian head of the German colonial office saw matters much the same way: 'The history of the colonization of the United States, clearly the biggest colonial endeavor the world has ever known, had as its first act the complete annihilation of its native peoples.’ He understood the need for an 'annihilation operation.’ The German state geologist called for a 'Final Solution to the native question.’

Timothy Snyder’s “Black Earth”

To think that you can’t be both a White American and a Nazi is the height of historical ignorance, and the above quote doesn’t even get into the wealth of private support the Nazis received from White American Industrialists.

Nazis must be destroyed and America must be decolonized.

(via queerqueerspawn)

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Clearly we cannot take fascist ideas seriously, but we must take fascists themselves seriously, because of all the murders, social violence, and intimidation they are responsible for. So, if fascism is useful, we must ask: to whom is it useful?

Peter Gelderloos, “Fascists are the Tools of the State” (via carnivalconsciousness)

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so people are talking about the ACLU, and as a resident of skokie, the chicago suburb that ACLU won the rights for the nazis to march in in ‘78, i think it’s important that people know that we are historically a jewish town. at its peak, the jewish population was 58% of the town, and i think it was about 40% when the nazis tried to march, maybe more. the town used to be home to an estimated 8,000 holocaust survivors. i grew up pretty connected to my culture despite being a nonreligious ethnic jew because there are so many synagogues, jewish day schools, a jewish deli, a jewish funeral home nearby– even though our jewish population has lowered, it is still obvious that this town has jewish roots

one of the main reasons for protesting the nazi march on skokie in 1978 were “a huge portion of the town’s population is jewish and thus directly effected by nazis” and “we have a huge population of holocaust survivors here who shouldn’t have to go through the nazis marching through their town”

that’s the town that the ACLU fought for nazis to be able to march in. leaving out the town’s jewish roots when talking about the ACLU defending nazis isn’t right, because it’s important info

here’s a good, short piece on it if anyone’s interested in learning more

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“White allies” be like: my white privilege allows me to stand up to nazis and cops without consequence

No. Fucking no. Protect yourself. Protect your identity. Wear a mask, wear a hood, wear gloves, wear long sleeves. Seriously this isn’t a fucking game. Your “white privilege” does not prevent you from getting monitored by police and doxxed by white supremacists. The best thing you can do to protect people of color (and everyone else) at a demonstration is to keep your identity (including your “whiteness”) concealed the best you can. Please. Be safe. Protect others by protecting yourself.

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This is similar to what the Socialist Workers Party in Britain are like, they have a nasty habit of collaborating with police forces and grassing on anti-fascists that won’t stay in their pen and let the good Vanguard denounce fascism via megaphone, from a kilometer away

Any anarchist who looks at rising neo-nazi violence and doesn’t realize that we absolutely need to work with Leninists/ “authoritarian” communists in order to fight against it is oblivious tbh. We need tactics, we need organization, this threat isn’t going to go away because you’ve liberated yourself by embracing purity of thought or whatever

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i had a discussion today with a friend who was genuinely trying to understand why people are working so hard to ID the charlottesville nazis and contact their employers. “but won’t that just make them more desperate and violent?” they asked. “if they get fired from their jobs or kicked out of school? if they think they have nothing to lose?”

and i said, “i don’t know. maybe. but right now, these motherfuckers think they can be nazis on the weekend.”

like, i somewhat understood my friend’s hesitance re: doxxing, because doxxing is so often a tool of evil. but these motherfuckers think they can show up to a white supremacist rally on saturday where people got fucking murdered by white supremacists, and then on monday they can go back to the IT desk and log into outlook and answer their fucking office phone. they think they can show up to a rally on saturday with a shield and a helmet and beat black teenagers with fucking sticks in a parking garage, and on monday they can be back on campus, taking notes in accounting. these putrid pieces of human garbage think they can be nazis all weekend, and then on thursday they can go to the professional development workshop with the department and enjoy those brownies that diane brought in.

no. no, they fucking cannot.

if you want to be a goddamned weekend nazi, you have to be a nazi every goddamned day. you want to be a weekend nazi? then you face the fucking music on monday, you cowardly piece of shit. you go ahead and live in a world where your hatred of other people means nobody wants to hire you, work with you, live with you, break bread with you; you hateful fuck. you get to suffer the natural consequences of your belief in the lesser humanity of others. you get to live the outcome of your violence, your acts of bigotry. you get to live your ugly truth, alone.

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Why will most people never be ‘suitable’ for reading the news? A guide to the workings of the grammar police. Careful what you say, the language police are just around the corner. Don’t let them catch you saying that. You’ll be in trouble, that’s not proper English. OK, you won’t get a fine or sent to jail, but they’ll try to stop you passing GO and collecting your 200 pounds. It’s done very subtly, by making people feel self-conscious and inadequate about their language. And then they start to mumble, and are seen but not heard. - Games Grammar Police Play    Can I have another biscuit?    You’ve got hands, so it’s physically possible.    Uh?    I didn’t do nothing.    Ah, so you mean you did do something?    No! What’s odd about these cases is not the language of the first speaker, but the reaction of the second. The message was understood perfectly well. What sort of language user is deliberately awkward, slows down the whole business, and makes the other person feel uneasy or embarrassed? Someone who hasn’t grasped what language is for. Not a linguist, certainly, but a pedantic parent or columnist for The Mail, or someone aspiring to these groups. If we wanted to be pedantic (and it’s a good laugh to take them on at their own game) we could direct them to the philosopher of language, JL. Austin and his Speech Act Theory. Like all the best theories, it was a brilliant flash of common sense. Although we can often work out the sense of words in isolation; as a social act, language can often have a different force once it’s used in context. ‘That’s right, just dump your dirty clothes all over the floor.’ On the surface, this looks like a congratulation plus a command. But even a child can work out what the speaker actually means. So why does this co-operative principle break down, once a child is speaking to an adult? Power and status. It’s a bit like turning clothing from a practical and personal issue into a power game, dictating who must wear a tie round their neck, where and when. (Only men, with suits, but not in bed as a sexual aid, that’s the advice.) - The Nonsense of Language Laws ‘You can’t begin a sentence with ‘but”. But, I just have! There’s a bit of nonsense for you, saying ‘You can’t’ when you clearly can. Challenge the language pedants, and they rely on two authorities: Latin and Maths. ‘To boldly go where no man has been before.’ Don’t split an infinitive. You couldn’t in Latin, because it was a single word with an ending. But in English it’s two words ‘to go’, so there is clearly an option of putting another word in the middle. (There was a more pressing complaint about the Star Trek slogan — Women went there too). Two negatives make a positive. That’s how it works in Maths. So, all languages work in exactly the same way and they work like Maths? Plenty of languages use double negatives: ‘No hace? nada’ — I didn’t do nothing. We all know that repetition is a way of emphasising a point. - Who Gets Picked up on Suspicion? Repetition is a no no — when it suits them. ‘I can’t stand it, me.’ is ignorant repetition; ‘I, myself, think...’ is right posh. ‘More nicer’ and ‘most biggest’ are wrong, but Shakespeare was the greatest English writer, so inventive and expressive in quoted lines like ‘More nearer’ (Hamlet) ‘This was the most unkindest cut of all’ (Julius Caesar). Whether something is right or wrong depends on the status of the person, and it helps if they’ve been dead for sometime. - Top-down or Bottom-up? The fallacy is to have a ‘top-down’ view of language. Language was not devised by one person, like a game, and it doesn’t have rules like a game. The inventor of Snakes and Ladders thought it up and dictates the rules — it only works if everyone accepts that you go up ladders and down snakes. There isn’t even an elected governing body for language, like FIFA for football. Language is not a game, with a Great Inventor in the Sky. Try a ‘bottom-up’ view instead. Languages evolve gradually through contact between groups of people, who need to find a way of communicating. There can only be communication if people share agreed ways of expressing meaning. The notion of a private language is so odd — if a person has their own unique expression that no-one else recognises, it can’t be a ‘language’. Children have no status. When they say ‘Don’t giggle me.’ it’s a mistake — you can’t use a noun as a verb. Oh, unless you’re a businessman and want to ‘table a motion’ or ‘chair a meeting’. Advertising copywriters are a bit naughty about the rules of language too: ‘You’ve been Tangoed’ but, well, they’re making loads of money, so we’ll put up with their funny ways. And it might be useful to have a few of their catchy political slogans. Poets? ‘a grief ago’. A bit mad, some of them on drugs, but we’ll make an exception for culture. And we could turn it into exam fodder. Humour? Again, it’s probably best to stick with the death test. ‘Fox hunting is the pursuit of the inedible by the unspeakable.’ Oscar Wilde has been dead so long now, we can even overlook his sexual preferences. Foreign speakers saying things like ‘I burst myself into tears’? Come on, it’s not their language! The cliche is ‘burst into tears’. Interesting, though, how the new phrasing adds power to the image. - Pushing Together or Pulling Apart? The way that languages develop is a delicate balance between two powerful tendencies. Pushing in one direction is the need to conform with existing conventions. The most obvious is the way infants absorb the language they hear and experiment with those sounds to find ways to communicate. Anyone plunged into another language environment has to try to pick up a different set of ways to express themselves. (Up to now, we have demanded that other peoples pick up our English language — a sort of invasion and colonisation by language.) But this need to adapt happens for adult speakers in our home environment — apart from all the different languages spoken in England, there are so many varieties of English. Yes, they are referred to, in a derogatory way, as dialects — the dialects of different regions and classes and ages — but they survive because they work. The fact that they have little status needs to be challenged. ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.’ All languages adapt and change because of contact between people. The more contact, the more pressure to change. That doesn’t mean that we immediately take on every style of language we come across. Language is a badge of identity. Some people want to maintain an identity that is distinct and make very little shift in their style of speech; others want to be taken as part of that group. We balance a need to fit in, with a need to remain individual. Every person’s language is as unique as their fingerprints. You cannot pin a language down in a dictionary or grammar book and say ‘That is the English language.’ Such books are a snapshot of the language, out of date from the moment they are written. Pulling in the other direction is the need to stretch the language, so that new things can be expressed in different ways. Each new generation learns the habits of the old and moves on. Nothing stays exactly the same and it’s the emerging generation that makes the changes: hairstyles, architecture, music. And of course some people tut — is it nostalgia, need for stability, weariness? Whatever, it’s the conservatism of age. Pre-fabricated chunks of language, cliches — we need them for practical reasons, like lack of time; we can’t re-invent the wheel every time we open our mouths. But someone has got to start adapting the wheel or inventing new ways of travel. Those who resist changes in a living language should have better reasons than: ‘That’s not the way I was taught when I was a child.’ What about good reasons like: ‘It’s dishonest to use euphemisms to mask the realities of warfare.’ ‘That’s so longwinded and pompous, you’re not getting your point across.’ If there is a law of language, it is that it should be used as a skilful tool for communication. Only complain if it doesn’t work. People who invent other laws are using language as a loaded weapon and they are pointing it at people who have already had their voices stifled.

Breaking the Laws of Language - Solidarity Federation

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Gonna give learning esperanto a go, started studying the grammar today! Will see how much I can get done tonight, seems amazingly simple so far

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Theoretically ‘democracy’ means popular government; government by all for everybody by the efforts of all. In a democracy the people must be able to say what they want, to nominate the executors of their wishes, to monitor their performance and remove them when they see fit. Naturally this presumes that all the individuals that make up a people are able to form an opinion and express it on all the subjects that interest them. It implies that everyone is politically and economically independent and therefore no-one, to live, would be obliged to submit to the will of others. If classes and individuals exist that are deprived of the means of production and therefore dependent on others with a monopoly over those means, the so-called democratic system can only be a lie, and one which serves to deceive the mass of the people and keep them docile with an outward show of sovereignty, while the rule of the privileged and dominant class is in fact salvaged and consolidated. Such is democracy and such it always has been in a capitalist structure, whatever form it takes, from constitutional monarchy to so-called direct rule. There could be no such thing as a democracy, a government of the people, other than in a socialistic regime, when the means of production and of living are socialised and the right of all to intervene in the running of public affairs is based on and guaranteed by the economic independence of every person. In this case it would seem that the democratic system was the one best able to guarantee justice and to harmonise individual independence with the necessities of life in society. And so it seemed, more or less clearly, to those who, in the era of the absolute monarchs, fought, suffered and died for freedom. But for the fact that, looking at things as they really are, the government of all the people turns out to be an impossibility, owing to the fact that the individuals who make up the people have differing opinions and desires and it never, or almost never happens, that on any one question or problem all can be in agreement. Therefore the ‘government of all the people’, if we have to have government, can at best be only the government of the majority. And the democrats, whether socialists or not, are willing to agree. They add, it is true, that one must respect minority rights; but since it is the majority that decides what these rights are, as a result minorities only have the right to do what the majority wants and allows. The only limit to the will of the majority would be the resistance which the minorities know and can put up. This means that there would always be a social struggle, in which a part of the members, albeit the majority, has the right to impose its own will on the others, yoking the efforts of all to their own ends. And here I would make an aside to show how, based on reasoning backed by the evidence of past and present events, it is not even true that where there is government, namely authority, that authority resides in the majority and how in reality every ‘democracy’ has been, is and must be nothing short of an ‘oligarchy’ — a government of the few, a dictatorship. But, for the purposes of this article, I prefer to err on the side of the democrats and assume that there can really be a true and sincere majority government. Government means the right to make the law and to impose it on everyone by force: without a police force there is no government. Now, can a society live and progress peacefully for the greater good of all, can it gradually adapt to ever-changing circumstances if the majority has the right and the means to impose its will by force on the recalcitrant minorities? The majority is, by definition, backward, conservative, enemy of the new, sluggish in thought and deed and at the same time impulsive, immoderate, suggestible, facile in its enthusiasms and irrational fears. Every new idea stems from one or a few individuals, is accepted, if viable, by a more or less sizeable minority and wins over the majority, if ever, only after it has been superseded by new ideas and new needs and has already become outdated and rather an obstacle, rather than a spur to progress. But do we, then, want a minority government? Certainly not. If it is unjust and harmful for a majority to oppress minorities and obstruct progress, it is even more unjust and harmful for a minority to oppress the whole population or impose its own ideas by force which even if they are good ones would excite repugnance and opposition because of the very fact of being imposed. And then, one must not forget that there are all kinds of different minorities. There are minorities of egoists and villains as there are of fanatics who believe themselves to be possessed of absolute truth and, in perfectly good faith, seek to impose on others what they hold to be the only way to salvation, even if it is simple silliness. There are minorities of reactionaries who seek to turn back the clock and are divided as to the paths and limits of reaction. And there are revolutionary minorities, also divided on the means and ends of revolution and on the direction that social progress should take. Which minority should take over? This is a matter of brute force and capacity for intrigue, and the odds that success would fall to the most sincere and most devoted to the general good are not favourable. To conquer power one needs qualities that are not exactly those that are needed to ensure that justice and well-being will triumph in the world. But I shall here continue to give others the benefit of the doubt and assume that a minority came to power which, among those who aspire to government, I considered the best for its ideas and proposals. I want to assume that the socialists came to power and would add, also the anarchists, if I am not prevented by a contradiction in terms. This would be the worst of all? Yes, to win power, whether legally or illegally, one needs to have left by the roadside a large part of one’s ideological baggage and to have got rid of all one’s moral scruples. And then, once in power, the big problem is how to stay there. One needs to create a joint interest in the new state of affairs and attach to those in government a new privileged class, and suppressing any kind of opposition by all possible means. Perhaps in the national interest, but always with freedom-destructive results. An established government, founded on the passive consensus of the majority and strong in numbers, in tradition and in the sentiment — sometimes sincere — of being in the right, can leave some space to liberty, at least so long as the privileged classes do not feel threatened. A new government, which relies for support only on an often slender minority, is obliged through necessity to be tyrannical. One need only think what the socialists and communists did when they came to power, either betraying their principles and comrades or by flying colours in the name of socialism and communism. This is why we are neither for a majority nor for a minority government; neither for democracy not for dictatorship. We are for the abolition of the gendarme. We are for the freedom of all and for free agreement, which will be there for all when no one has the means to force others, and all are involved in the good running of society. We are for anarchy.

Neither Democracts Nor Dictators: Anarchists - Malatesta

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“I myself am an absolute abyss.”

- Antonin Artaud, as quoted in The Diary of Anais Nin

“I myself am war.”

- Georges Bataille, Acéphale

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Anarchists can be pretty fucking obnoxious themselves, I’d prefer someone calling themself a marxist that’s compassionate, understands what living on the shit side of life is like and doesn’t think the sun shines out their arse than some prick that holds in the abstract the same principles, or rather the same political label as me yet doesn’t have a fucking clue how harsh trying to survive is like and/or has the privilege of self-sacrificing themself for X exotic cause while having the uncanny ability to ignore the suffering around them, except perhaps in a charitable capacity. And there’s a few of that type

*sigh* I just… don’t like Marxists, y’all.

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I hate posts blowing up, even on such miniscule scales. As much as I like to interact and discuss with people, tumblr is created so it feels like im shouting at people