#spiritual anarchist manifestos

[13thpythagoras]

this is me on Christianity, I see it as a gnostic, I see it as something the Romans persecuted, and didn't stop persecuting just because they claimed to have converted. Real true Christians have always been in the vast minority, compared to the fakes wearing the clothes but still planning to sin without apology...and i don't mean "sin" like be gay and rob Walmart (when if you're gay then God made you gay for a reason and Walmart steals from workers every day), I mean sin like truly harming human beings, that is a crime, a sin, and something the ruling class does to us. I am a Christian socialist and I see this as an extension of Christianity, feeding all people, loaves and fishes, tuna melt sandwiches for all / whatever you wanna order. That word "Christian" can mean so many things, and that day-and-night difference in the definition of sin shows you just how deeply invested in darkness the main bible-belt church is, they are the romans to today's Christians...but I don't even adhere to the Nicene Creed, that is the unenlightened oppressive man's work in my view, the Nicene Creed which struck out reincarnation from mention in the bible (and reincarnation plays a huge part of indigenous spiritual traditions worldwide), these fake christian roman-catholic-style oppressors erasing truths so they can better control people, replacing it with mentions of the devil and satan which are just men like themselves, who refuse enlightenment like a vampire refuses the sun because they seek to suck the energy of the living people instead...but me I like vampires because they dress well. Big difference

[kachavashka]

My summary of art for 2024.

2024 has been an amazing year for me. After a long wait, I finally started university (I had to get Australian citizenship first which took 5 years), I composed and recorded a ton of music and explored new musical ideas that I had never done before. I got a lot of reading done, watched some good movies, and I made more art this year than the 2023 and 2022 combined!

I learnt a lot about myself too. I meditated a lot and explored new philosophical and spiritual ideas.

If you want to see a "summary of music", then search my Tumblr under the "my music" tag.

For no reason whatsoever, here's a list of the books I read this year in chronological order with a brief review:

Warriors: Into the Wild - Erin Hunter

A sweet little book. I really loved it, and I loved the whole world within it, but I can't say it enthralled me, it's quite childish and simplistic. But then again, it is just the introduction to the series, not a stand-alone book.

Separation - RoobrickMarine

I loved this story so much.

It's a romance story set in Renaissance Italy and revolves around CanisAlbus's characters, Machete and Vasco. I love them so both so much and CanisAlbus is one of my favourite artists, so this was a really good story to read.

Manifesto of the Communist Party - Karl Marx & Frederick Engels

I have read excerpts from this book here and there for many years, but I never actually got around to reading the entire thing from cover to cover. It's actually remarkably short. Only about 50 pages, I think. It's a great introduction to Marxism and the history of capitalism, but probably not the best. It uses a lot of charged language. I do highly recommend reading it, though.

Musicophilia - Oliver Sacks

A friend recommended this to me. Oliver Sacks explores the neuropsychological aspects of music like how our brains perceive music and where creativity comes from. I learnt a lot from this book, like that most people don't have synesthesia, so they don't associate colours, textures, shapes, and tastes with the music they hear like I do. It was a really interesting read. If you are a musician or interested in music, I highly recommend reading this.

Warriors: Fire and Ice - Erin Hunter

Now the story starts to get heated. At this point I became quite addicted to the series. There was a lot of tension in this book and some rather disturbing scenes, but that's what made it so good.

Concerning the Spiritual in Art - Wassily Kandinsky

This was a really deep book that explores the very essence of what constitutes art. It was quite hard to understand, but it helped see art through a new lens.

Wings of Fire: The Hidden Kingdom - Tui T. Sutherland

I really liked this book, mostly because Glory is one of my favourite characters. It's also the book that introduces Kinkajou, who is also a favourite of mine.

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State - Frederick Engels

This was a really difficult but interesting book to read. Engels claims that societies have various stages of kinship structures that progress predictably from one form to another. Private property and the state emerge when a society goes from having a mother-right kinship (where means of production are collectively owned by clans, and you inherit your clan name from your mother), to a father-right kinship (modern capitalist society, where means of production are privately owned by individuals, and you inherit a family surname from your father). There's a lot more in it than what I've explained. Please read this book, it's very eye-opening.

The Conquest of Bread - Peter Kropotkin

This one is a staple of Anarchist thought. Again, I had only read bits and pieces of this before reading the whole thing. Kropotkin shares some examples of how people can co-operate in a communist society without the need for an oppressive government.

Now, Kropotkin has some amazing ideas and I'm 100% for them, but, thinking realistically, I don't know if they're all entirely possible in our modern society. I don't know. But the world he describes is the world I want to live in.

Warriors: Forest of Secrets - Erin Hunter

My goodness... Wow....

I don't even know where to start with this one. It was an fantastic emotional rollercoaster ride. This book had me sobbing uncontrollably. I must admit, I had low expectations of the Warriors series before I began reading it, and the first book disappointed me a bit for being too simple. But Forest of Secrets makes up for ALL of that! This book touched on so many dark themes, I don't even know how it got away with being a children's book.

I might have forgotten a few here and there, I have a bad memory.

I'm looking forward for 2025 and I hope it will be as productive as 2024

[eleemosynecdoche]

Doing more Touhou OC backdrop stuff:

The specific otherworld here is called Meropis, a parody of Atlantis from a now-lost Greek work, an excellent place for a gang of weirdos to use for their meetings.

This otherworld is "ruled" by a spirit named Merope Delaineo, who exists as a reference to other things, but also as a kind of placeholder entity- Meropis is ruled by Merope. She's perfectly fine with the gang of weirdos who have arrived recently, as they keep her world connected and more alive than it otherwise would be.

The Chaos Discussion Group itself has four major members that I've outlined to various degrees- a fairy queen, a youkai (gremlin), the astrally projected spirit of a human, and a daimon/minor goddess, secretly backed by the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna. It exists to try and subsist on the complex of ideas humans have about this thing called "chaos" in the modern world, attempt to guide those ideas to make chaos develop into a broader means of support, and hypothetically adjust the existing order of the universe to make its members more meaningful, to give them definition. All of them are of very dubious existence, within generally accepted Touhou cosmology rules- elaborations on minor personifications, figures who are just a name in the legendary parts of a medieval history, 20th century youkai halfway overwritten by explicitly fictional interpretations, the consciously ironic and distanced techniques of chaos magick...

But behind them all is Inanna Ninmesharra, who reshaped the world many times as she stole authority and power from other gods. So maybe they have a chance to leave their mark.

In the meantime, they squabble and argue endlessly about what chaos is and what it ought to be.

People:

Tyronoe Lagarde (fairy queen, takes her name from one of Geoffrey of Monmouth's 9 sisters of Avalon and a fairy queen an English mystic in the 17th century believed he had married. Not well-developed yet. Chaos as a principle of nature and the natural world.)

Clytie Harraway (youkai, gremlin/cyborg, takes her name from the Greek words klutos and kluo, which mean several things but most relevant is "to hear"; and from the feminist theoretician Donna Harraway and her Cyborg Manifesto, already posted my scribbled art of her. Ability to understand how to take a machine apart by touching it. Chaos as a factor of machines and how they behave. Takes her existence from both folkloric gremlins and from conspiracy theories about cyborg implantation.)

Una Bryony (human but projects a spiritual body to wander around Meropis, chaos magician. Not fully developed. Takes her name from Michael Moorcock's time-hopping anarchist revolutionary/metafictional Chaos goddess/accidental work of lesbian propaganda Una Persson, and Brion Gysin, a collaborator of William S. Burroughs who contributed a lot to cut-up as a literary technique and thus to early chaos magick. Quintessential Stage 5 Boss woman, but takes some unclaimed space in that domain by being lightly megalomaniacal. Chaos as a source of personal freedom and power.)

Polyphony Xenonomia (just posted about her. Name is pure Greek- "many sounds" and "strange law". Chaos as a principle, chaos as an inevitability, chaos as a liberator.)

[borderepisteme]

“Emma Goldman was one voice amid a chorus of left-wing Whitmanites; the poet was celebrated by agrarian populists in Kansas, industrial socialists from Chicago, and hard-line communists in New York for similar values of freedom and comrade-ship. Mike Gold, an impassioned lover of Whitman and the cultural guru of American communists, anticipated the party’s reconception of the poet in his 1921 manifesto, ��Towards Proletarian Art,’ where he proclaimed the good, gray poet the ‘heroic spiritual grandfather’ of literary communism. Implicit in the language of genealogy is a generational telos culminating in a modern roster of worker-writers. For Gold, Whitman was the proto-proletarian author, a working-class “rough” who produced marvelous verse, but who faltered by envisaging “the grand dream of political democracy” as the ‘completion of all the aspirations of proletarian man.’ By contrast, Goldman and the anarchists read in Whitman a discontinuous yet always rechargeable spirit of rebellion. Before ‘humanity’ can rebel against the ruling class, individuals must struggle against a ruling idea: that human beings are not able to govern themselves.”

[grandhotelabyss]

Bourgeois is associated in the popular consciousness, especially in America, with Marx. But there is also the bourgeois as the enemy of the artists. The capitalist and the philistine bourgeois are supposed to be the same, but Marx presents only the economic side, assuming, without adequate warrant, that it can account for both the moral and esthetic deformities of the bourgeois described by the artists, and for the artists themselves. Doubt that this treatment of the bourgeois and the artist really works is one of the prime motives of those attracted to Nietzsche, whose central theme is the artist. As I have said many times and in many ways, most of the great European novelists and poets of the last two hundred years were men of the Right; and Nietzsche is in that respect merely their complement. For them the problem was in one way or another equality, which has no place for genius. Thus they are the exact opposite of Marx. But somehow he who says he hates the bourgeoisie can be seen to be a friend of the Left. Therefore when the Left got the idea of embracing Nietzsche, it got, along with him, all the authority of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary tradition. Goethe and Flaubert and Yeats hated the bourgeoisie—so Marx was right: these writers simply had not recognized that the bourgeoisie could be overcome by the proletariat. And Nietzsche, taken from the correct angle, can be said to be a proponent of the Revolution. When one reads the early Partisan Review, edited entirely by leftists, one sees its unlimited enthusiasm for Joyce and Proust, whom they were introducing to this country, apparently in the opinion that they represented the art of the socialist future, although these artists thought the future of art lay in the opposite direction.

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

(A quotation I didn’t have room to include and contest in my essay on Bloom’s controversial manifesto. I don’t like to quibble with every little thing when I’m writing a book review, since most nonfiction books have something to criticize in every sentence, and nobody likes a pedant. But this passage is exaggerated, unless his definitions of most and great are extremely restricted.

Keats, Shelley, Byron, Browning, and Wilde were not men of the Right, nor was Dickens, nor was Hardy, nor was George Eliot, who wasn’t even a man. Were Hölderlin and Schiller of the Right? Was Tolstoy? Turgenev, Chekhov, and Ibsen certainly weren’t. Joyce called himself a socialist early on and an anarchist later. Woolf was ostensibly an anarcha-feminist, though in reality more the ancestor of today’s professional-class “radlib”—still not on the Right, though. I’m admittedly a little dim on Proust, but I seem to recall he was a Dreyfusard, as was Zola. Mann went from Right to Left. To Kafka these labels hardly apply. Beckett fought for the Resistance. And Nabokov, who was on the lowercase-r American right [the right wing of liberalism] but not the capital-R European Right, discusses the same ambiguity Bloom observes in his Lectures on Literature, specifically his discussion of Madame Bovary:

Unless it simply means townsman, as it often does in French, the term bourgeois as used by Flaubert means “philistine,” people preoccupied with the material side of life and believing only in conventional values. He never uses the word bourgeois with any politico-economic Marxist connotation. Flaubert's bourgeois is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. [...] Let me add for double clarity that Marx would have called Flaubert a bourgeois in the politico-economic sense and Flaubert would have called Marx a bourgeois in the spiritual sense; and both would have been right, since Flaubert was a well-to-do gentleman in physical life and Marx was a philistine in his attitude towards the arts.

After all that, Bloom is certainly correct about the ambiguity exploited by a late-20th-century far left that could no longer believe in the proletariat as the agent of world-historical transformation, and some of my own aforementioned far-left preceptors said much the same in their own bitter laments over the colonization of Marxism by Nietzsche and Heidegger. This passage from Closing is funny and true—

When one talks to Marxists these days and asks them to explain philosophers or artists in terms of objective economic conditions, they smile contemptuously and respond, “That is vulgar Marxism,” as if to ask, “Where have you been for the last seventy-five years?” No one likes to be considered vulgar, so people tend to fall back into embarrassed silence. Vulgar Marxism is, of course, Marxism. Nonvulgar Marxism is Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Heidegger, as well as the host of later Leftists who drank at their trough—such as Lukacs, Kojeve, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre—and hoped to enroll them in the class struggle. To do this, they had to jettison that embarrassing economic determinism.

—but it’s the Marxists’ own fault if they couldn’t provide any richer account of the human being, and both the liberals’ and the Marxists’ fault if they, in denying the claims of art, also deny the polis art’s gift to modernity: a method for satisfying humanity’s transcendental and infernal drives that does not require the apotheosis of church, state, or ethnos. Allan Bloom didn’t quite understand this either, though the other Bloom—I mean Harold—came a lot closer.)

[iol247]

Flashback: Unabomber Publishes His ‘Manifesto’

Ted Kaczynski was a madman who killed and maimed innocent people – but did some of his worries for the future come true?

By 2017 standards, a bearded man ranting in his manifesto about how “one of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism” might, at best, have a chance ending up name-checked by Alex Jones. Most likely, he’d become the hero of a thousand faceless message board posters. His 35,000-word diatribe against technology titled “Industrial Society and Its Future” might be suitable for a personal blog, but a national newspaper? Surely not.

Of course, more than 20 years ago, when Ted Kaczynski mailed out what would come to be known as the “Unabomber Manifesto,” it was huge news. After over a decade spent living as a recluse without electricity or running water in a cabin in Montana – sending mail bombs to university academics and corporate airline executives – Kaczynski sent letters to the New York Times and the Washington Post demanding they publish his manifesto and agree to print an annual follow-up for three years. If they did, the bombings would cease. If not, the Unabomber hinted at more bombings to come. 

It had started in May of 1978, when a package exploded and injured a Northwestern University security officer. A year later, another bomb was sent to the same college, injuring a graduate student. Also in 1979, Kaczynski snuck a bomb into the cargo hold of an American Airlines flight. It went off mid-flight, causing an emergency landing and afflicting 12 passengers with smoke inhalation. In 1985, he switched things up, and sent a shrapnel-loaded bomb to a computer store in Sacramento, California, claiming the owner as his first victim. By the mid-1980s, the Unabomber had become a real-life American boogeyman. A killer who would strike without warning, and without much reason. Why was he doing what he did – and when would he do it again?

The publication of the manifesto would end up being his undoing. Members of Kaczynski’s family had a slight suspicion Ted could be the person behind the terror campaign. His brother David was one of the thousands of people who called the FBI tip-line after the manifesto was published and a million-dollar reward was offered for information leading to the capture of the Unabomber. After a long search, FBI agents arrested an unkempt Kaczynski in his Lincoln, Montana cabin on April 3rd, 1996. They found bomb making components, over 40,000 journal pages and the manifesto’s original typed manuscript.

There’s no defending the actions of a person who mails bombs with the intent to do serious harm. But Andrew Sodroski, executive producer of the new Discovery mini-series, Manhunt: Unabomber, thinks there is plenty to take away from Kaczynski’s words. As he said in a phone conference with reporters leading up to the show, “What the manifesto has to say about our relationship with technology and with society is more true right now than it was when Ted published it.”

Not many domestic terrorists convicted of murder get called prophetic by television producers – and there are scholars from different sides of the political spectrum who agree that the the Unabomber’s anti-technology stance was ahead of its time. “His work, despite his deeds,” wrote Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team, “deserves a place alongside Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and 1984, by George Orwell.” Ray Kurzweil, noted author, computer scientist and futurist, quoted a passage from the manifesto in his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. Some believe he’s a murderous modern-day Henry David Thoreau, while others say he’s a genius and a prophet. So what, exactly did he get right?

Kaczynski opens his manifesto with, “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” The technology he goes on to rail against, keep in mind, was mid-1990s – before smartphones, before Twitter, before “Likes” on Facebook and algorithms helped pick out things for you to buy and experience. Although the word “dystopia” never shows up throughout the essay, Kaczynski believed (and you have to assume still does so from his prison cell) that the future wasn’t some Philip K. Dick or Handmaid’s Tale scenario; the dystopian future started happening a long time ago. Computer networks, the mass-communication media, the modern health care system, pesticides and chemicals, all products of the Industrial Revolution, are destroying the planet, he writes. As one portion of the manifesto is sub-titled, “The ‘Bad’ Parts of Technology Cannot be Separated From the ‘Good’ Parts.” 

In point number 49 the manifesto, Kaczynski writes, “In the modern world it is human society that dominates nature rather than the other way around, and modern society changes very rapidly owing to technological change.” One of the big problems, he believed while writing his manifesto, was the inevitable growth of artificial intelligence and how humanity will cope with it. “First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them.” As one Wired article explained in 2015, “A manufacturing device from Universal Robots doesn’t just solder, paint, screw, glue, and grasp – it builds new parts for itself on the fly when they wear out or bust.” From checking you out at the grocery store to flipping burgers, robots are being designed to integrate into the labor force and cut costs.

He goes on to write in point number 172, “In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.” When Kaczynski’s thoughts were published, we were still dealing with the Terminator version of the robots overtaking humanity and destroying it – it was a nightmare scenario, fiction. But Kaczynski wasn’t writing speculative fiction; he was stating, from an academically-trained point of view, where he saw technology headed.

Technology overtaking humanity was only one of the scary possibilities. The rise of the “one percent” super rich and corporations controlling everything, was another. “Human freedom mostly will have vanished, because individuals and small groups will be impotent vis-a-vis large organizations armed with supertechnology and an arsenal of advanced psychological and biological tools for manipulating human beings, besides instruments of surveillance and physical coercion,” he wrote. 

Tech companies have untold amounts of data on every person that logs online for everything from shopping for cat litter to ranting on Twitter. How to understand that data – and what to use it for – is an industry in itself. Could it be used to manipulate us? See the 2016 U.S. election and the rise of fake news spread through Facebook. “Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False And Misleading Information At An Alarming Rate,” as one 2016 BuzzFeed article put it, showed up in feeds even if the people didn’t follow those groups. Some of the false news was spread the old-fashioned way, through word of mouth; but, as John Herman of the New York Times explained, misinformation on the social media service thrives or dies, “at least in part, on Facebook’s algorithm.” As Kaczynski believes, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. All of this seemed farfetched when Kaczynski’s words were put in front of a mass audience. In 1994, audiences were being told suave cyberterrorists like the ones in the movie The Net were the ones looking to steal your information online and do whatever they please with it.

After all this, however, calling Kaczynski a prophet might be a stretch. He’s a highly intelligent person who wanted to try and stop where he saw humanity headed by any means necessary – including murdering people. Yet he routinely points out throughout his manifesto that there very well might be no stopping the inevitable. The entire point of his manifesto, as he states, is revolution, anarchy: “Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.” Kaczynski, who has stated admiration for the eco-anarchist movement (“but I think they could do it better,” he also said in an interview in 1999), takes aim at both leftists, including “socialists, collectivists, ‘politically correct’ types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like”). He also writes, “conservatives are fools,” and that they’re, “just taking the average man for a sucker, exploiting his resentment of Big Government to promote the power of Big Business.” Kaczynski even engages in some gaslighting: “Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.”

All of this reiterates the point that Kaczynski is no hero whatsoever. The person who wrote “Industrial Society and Its Future,” is a fanatic. And as is sometimes the case, fanatics can take things to the tragic extreme. Yet there is something to be taken away from his words if you read closely; it’s that we give up a piece of ourselves whenever we adjust to conform to society’s standards. That, and we’re too plugged in. We’re letting technology take over our lives, willingly. It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t take a madman dressed up like a prophet to tell us; it’s all too evident. Kaczynski, to steal a phrase from the tech world, was just an early adopter of these thoughts. Yet his warning will probably forever go unnoticed because of the horrific deeds he carried out to get his message across.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/flashback-unabomber-publishes-his-manifesto-125449/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

[thatshortdudety]

Types of Ravenclaws - Nicholas Black

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usDdoAXxk_c

The Stereotype

Raven Qualifications: love knowledge, kind of witty

- Whenever they are around, people run

- They are insufferable

- They're just annoying in general and constantly act like they're better than you

- At least one or two of them exist

- You may not find them very often but when you do... you know

- They're the type of person that will debate you until one of you dies, so just give up and let them think that they are right, because it's just not worth it. Just fuckin leave

- The assholes in social media comments that start their comments with 'uM aCtuALLy' and like 'sOurCeS'

- Elitism is so thick that they might as well be in Slytherin

- They love knowledge so they are actually pretty smart

- They have some wit, but no wisdom or creativity

- They get really good grades, so teachers have a love-hate relationship with them as they're a know-it-all but make the class look better

- Usually in the library studying

- Makes you feel stupid in .3 seconds

- They probably drink tea and write Shakespearean lit in their own time [like fucking nerds]

- the LEAST RAVENCLAW Ravenclaw in the tower

The Weird One

Raven Qualifications: Intelligent, wise, creative, original, individual, acceptance

- Basically Luna Lovegood

- They're weird and you know it

- Tend to be obsessive over a few particular topics, eg. if they love crocodiles and you ask them a questions about crocodiles they will whip out an encyclopaedia from their pocket [and you wonder how it fit in there in the first place then you remember you're a wizard]

- They have porcupine teeth under their bed and you don't know why. Nobody knows why, all we know is that we live in fear

- They're the person you call when you know you are being haunted. They know about that spiritual shit. They have the sage ready, they know how to relieve you of your demons [basically if you have a ghostie problem, they gotchu bitch]

- They talk very rarely, but when they do, they either sound like a wise monk or a crackhead... or both [and that, my friends, is entertaining]

- They are divination experts [fuck you, Hermione, they know your future, whatchu gonna do about it]

- They have an ongoing "experiment" since like the first day they were at Hogwarts, and everybody knows there is an experiment, but nobody knows what it is [so the Ravenclaw power lives in fear. The Gryffindor tower should also live in fear, but those fucks aren't scared of anything so like honestly fuck 'em]

- They're like Socrates, sometimes, they're basically like "I know that I know nothing," all humbly-wise like that [and you're like "huh that's why you're a ravenclaw hm ok"]

- Despite having no social skills and scaring everyone shitless all the time, these Ravenclaws are the most mindful and spiritual, most open Ravenclaws

- They accept any theory or idea because "fuck it, we know nothing and anything could be real"

- Scary but pretty cool

The Mum

Raven Qualifications: Intelligence, WIT, wisdom, creativity, originality, SHARPNESS, ACCEPTANCE

- Has a first aid kit on hand and knows how to use it. Basically a doctor. Didn't go to med school, but they know their shit.

- Has a remedy for every illness. Pretty sure they're not allowed to have a potions cabinet in their dormitory, but Flitwick allows it, and so they've just got med potions in the dormitory [even though we have... a-uei- even though we have a hospital wing]

- The best advice giver in both complicated and stupid situations. They will give you some fucking common sense, they will spell it out for you

- NUMBER ONE Ravenclaw

- eg. If you have a boyfriend who has cheated on you multiple times and you ask them for advice they will look you straight in the eye and say "BITCH you deserve better, break up with that hoe" and you should probably listen to them because most everything they say is correct

- They will not tolerate stupidity [she will not tolerate your stupidity, richard, get out of the damn tree]

- They read the entire unabridged Lord of the Rings to their children, A.K.A. first year Ravenclaws and all Hufflepuffs

- The voice of reason [please just listen to her it.. it's all i ask.. please she's right, don't... don't question it]

- Knows all the answers to your homework assignment and knows how to effectively teach it to you [but fuck off dan she will not do your homework for you.. not again]

- If you get into some stupid shit, they'll say 'I told you so' and continue to fix your shit like a GODDESS [honestly she needs more love]

- Breaks up fights and sends people to their rooms. They're not having your bullshit.

- Such a smart person! eg. amazing war strategist [she-she knows. She knows all manipulation tactics, sh-she knows how to get her shit done, she is the strategist of the century, i swear]

The Artist

Raven qualifications: Intelligence, WIT, wisdom, CREATIVITY, originality, INDIVIDUALITY, sharpness, acceptance

- They're probably on Tumblr. That's just how it is.

- They don't give two shits about grades. The school system is rIgGeD............. okAy maybe they do care a little bit, but they'd DIE before they'd admit it

- They're an ex Emo and an activist

- They like politics

- They are the second debater in the house. For the love of god, don't put them in the same room as the Stereotype. Do you wanna fucking die? [i mean i do too, carol, but not now. It is unstoppable force vs immovable object, do you want to explode? didn't think so]

- They're either a music, theatre or art nerd... or possible poetry if you're.. that bitch. [but um if you don't know the difference between a play and a musical, we're judging you- WE'RE JUDGING YOU SEVERELY it's not that difficult i know what a fucking touch-down is]

- They're probably a communist, socialist, anarchist because fUCK CAPITALISM HELL

- Music and art is subJECTIVE YOU CANNOT TEACH IT, KAREN [and that's when the Stereotype walks in and starts a debate on that]

- They're pretty depressed

- They like musicals

- They have an aesthetic Instagram but all the captions are like 'aha lmao i wanna fucking die' and 'i crave death'

- Not gonna lie they cry after a debate even though they started it

- They have high standards that they don't meet themselves

The Bookworm

Raven Qualifications: INTELLIGENCE, wit, wisdom, CREATIVITY, originality, individuality, ACCEPTANCE

- They're kind of like a stereotype too, but they're the good stereotype

- They're like, the chill

- They're only passionate about like books and shit, so if you wanna have a 24 hour conversation with them, just bring up their favourite book series and they won't let you go

- They have a very popular fanfiction account. They are a veteran stan that wrote a 300k word fanfiction that is a STAPLE in the community. They are the fandom's mum

- They have like 30 books to read but for some reason they just read Junie B. Jones again. For the 5th time.

- They're very kind, usually patient, the most empathetic [other than maybe the Mum in the house]

- They do tend to be alone most of the time

- They have an internal debate on whether or not they should focus on their grades or read the 30 books they have to read [they.. somehow... do it both. um... i hate you]

- They're usually friends with the Mum Ravenclaw, they're like the parents of the house. Without them somebody might mysteriously disappear, or like, die [the weird one hasn't come back for three weeks send help]

The Junkie

Raven Characteristics: Wit, creativity, ORIGINALITY, individuality, acceptance

- [i know what you're thinking: 'come on nick, ravenclaws are smart, they wouldn't do drugs!'..... that's where you're wrong, bitch. they would do drugs.. but only the smart drugs. only the safe drugs]

- They only do marijuana. They don't even do any other drugs, and when they DO marijuana, they eat it in a pot brownie so that they don't get cancer from smoking it [like, they're pussies basically, i'm sorrty but]

- Okay, I take it back, they might do LSD once because the Weird One told them that they'd "see god" on LSD, but they'll never do it again cos it was a bad trip and probably killed some of their braincells, so they're a little overce

- They're anti-capitalist, but they never specify what their political and economic beliefs are, so they just kinda say 'fuck capitalism' then they go to bed high as Snoop Dog

- Usually friends with the Weird One [...i'm scared all the time]

- They're high all the time, but they never get caught because they're a Ravenclaw, and Ravenclaws don't get caught [take notes, Slytherin]

- They once woke up with a surrealist painting in one hand and the communist manifesto in the other... they don't know what happened the night before, but they got rid of the evidence real fuckin quick because you can't be too safe

- They claim to be Buddhist and trying to find the real meaning of life, but like they don't practice Buddhism really well.. they-aie- I think they're just doing it for the aesthetic, they know a lot about Buddhism they just don't practice it very well

- They're trying to open their third eye. [none of us want them to. their two eyes are problematic enough, we don't need them to have a third

[forbidden-sorcery]

We are supporters of the abolition of private property, of the State and of religion, and of the total suppression of every form and institution of constraint and violence. We reject every teaching and every social, political and economic movement aimed at maintaining the State, private property, the church, and constraint and violence in social relations. We repudiate fascism, which is a historic attempt to restore absolutism, autocracy and the strength of the political form of power with the aim of defending the economic and spiritual dominance of the privileged classes. We reject political democracy, as it does not foresee the disappearance of the principle of power, and drives the masses to bewilderment by leading them, through lies and illusions, into fights that are against their interests, and corrupts them through the exercise of power and the maintaining of the appetite for domination. Political democracy, furthermore, shows that it is totally incapable of solving the great social problems and that it fosters chaos, contradictions and crime as a result of its social foundations based on the centralized State and capitalism. We repudiate State Socialism as it leads to State Capitalism— the most monstrous form of economic exploitation and oppression, and of total domination of social and individual freedom. We are for anarchist communism, or free communism.

excerpt from the Bulgarian Anarchist Manifesto of the Bulgarian Anarchist Communist Federation

[redcurrents]

Social Anarchism, Individualism and Lifestyle Politics

This is a talk I gave around 2016. As such the writing style is the same as speaking rather than aiming to sound academic. Since this talk was given if I have any reflection I think I was far too fair on individualist and lifestyle politics. But that reflected my attempts to engage the broader ‘anarchist movement’ in Australia at the time, which I now think was basically a waste of time. I should have argued more directly for a platformist/especifist & syndicalist forms of organisation.

Lets start here;

It’s the symbol associated with anarchism... We see it everywhere from actual anarchist propaganda, to graffiti, to printed on t-shirts at kmart. Most here probably know this, but it’s not an A in a circle, it’s actually an A in an O. It means, 'Anarchy is Order', which is one of those wonderful juxtaposing quotes Proudhon used. What he meant is that anarchism will be a highly sophisticated, highly organised and well developed social order. A social order based on the maximum of human freedom, federalism, socialism, equality and development.

Proudhon was the first person to ever use the label anarchist, back in the 1800's France. It’s with him that the confusion between social and individualist anarchism immediately starts. See, he was certainly a type of socialist, he was totally against the exploitation of labour, and he developed an economic system called mutualism based on free contracts between producers, meaning both collectives of workers and small craftsmen would have equal freedom in the economy. This is a bit divorced from the anarchist communism that has become the main tendency since then, but it certainly laid many of foundations. He was anti-state and anti-authority, though sadly he never extended this to women. His ideas on economics and social reconstruction were so popular its said some people in the Paris Commune had little copies of 'What is Property' they used to carry around in their pocket (don’t quote me on this actually happening!), and his economic theories some influence on even Marx. Some people like to argue that he was more of a precursor to anarchism, theres some truth in this – in that his politics where not totally coherent or developed to what is specifically anarchism today. But he did, and was the first, to use the label.

Before him we had William Godwin and Max Stirner, both libertarians certainly, both anti-state, but neither used the term anarchist, and this is important, because alot of individualists certainly like to base their ideas on Stirner. I'm not going to talk about Godwin, but i'd like to point out that Stirner really was more like an early existentialist, his radical 'freedom' was entirely about the ego and the mind, and was anti-everything. There wasn't a trace of positive content in his ideas (besides affirmation of the ego, and this extremely undeveloped ‘Union of Egoists’), which were also pretty racist if you take the time to read The Ego and His Own. About the best thing he had to offer was a critique of state-socialism, and that’s not saying alot.

Anyway after these three “Anarchism” definitely had a name and existed in the world as a political ideology.

Since the birth of Anarchism people have often found it quite hard to define a coherent theory of anarchism; Chomsky always uses that quote 'Anarchism has a broad back, like paper is can endure anything.' And Rudolph Rocker believed that anarchism was something of a tendency in human nature towards egalitarian non-hierachical forms of social organisation. He also believed it was the inheritor of the best parts of both Liberalism and Socialism, the ‘descendants’ of the Enlightenment. Emile Armands Individualist manifesto entirely bases its definition of anarchism around freedom from any social constraint. While from people like Bakunin and Malatesta we see that anarchism is a very specific political philosophy based around class struggle, with the realisation of libertarian socialism as the goal. They use examples like the Paris Commune to point to future potentials, but recognise that anarchism is a modern political philosophy that started with Proudhon and the French workers movement. In modern attempts to look back at anarchism we see both these kinds of definitions in action. Authors like Peter Marshall in his 'Demanding the Impossible' takes the opposition to state as the only requirement to anarchism - and often Marxists who like to have a crack at anarchism use this weak definition too. Modern authors like Van Der Walt and Wayne Price will however often present more coherent and consistent understandings of anarchism.

So basically we kind of have two fields; Social anarchism and Individualist anarchism. Social anarchism sometimes gets referred to as organisational anarchism, and individualist anarchism kind of leads on to what often gets called lifestyle anarchism today. Within both fields we can find a whole range of ideas on both strategy and economics. Still we can somewhat represent where the ideas and who represents them sit.

Obviously we could add hundreds more authors into these fields, but it’s a basic illustration.

So, lets kind of compare the two and I think it will lead us to a better understanding of how anarchism manifests in the world today.

I realise here I am presenting these fields as something of strawmen. But this is not an academic essay and there is only so much time.

As you can well imagine by its name, individualist anarchism starts, and ends, with the demand of maximum liberty for the individual. There are to be no fetters on the development of the so called natural qualities of the individual, and while they think everyone should be free, it really begins with personal struggle and ends with the individual. The only freedom you have is what you can take. Society is also as much a crushing source of authority as the state. There are to be no programmes set for what anarchism might look like, because everyone has different wants and needs. Rebellion is emphasised over revolution – revolution will either lead to a new state or to a new social tyranny. Despite rhetoric against capitalism, market economics are permissible provided there is no boss-worker relationship (although sometimes that’s ok too!.) It is this retreat into the self that actually shares a lot of parallels with new age spirituality, with existentialism and most importantly with neo-liberal capitalism. It’s this abstract opposition to 'the state' and 'society' that allows authors like Peter Marshall to give the nod towards people like Thatcher and Friedman as being somehow libertarian.

Individualism did not have much influence during the emerging the working class, nor did it do much to shape collective politics of rebellion. Individualists often expressed their 'anarchism' and 'freedom' through forms of dress, individual acts of insurrection, and living in small communities of other radicals only. While today we use the word ‘insurrection’ to mean something like when a community/class violently attacks a regime/authority, the connection between the term insurrection and anarchism actually comes from Stirner, who believed revolution was impossible, and that individual 'insurrection' was the only tactic that would keep authority at bay, however temporarily. It was during times of severe social repression, when little other avenue for struggle existed, that individualist anarchism did come to attention - usually with assassinations and bombings - this image of the anarchist bomb thrower still exists. Terrorism became, and to a large degree remains, the peak form of struggle for this tendency. I don't want to say much on it, but I believe that the terrorist and guerilla war is a Leninist strategy, not an anarchist one, despite the flowery rhetoric.

This still happens today. Not long ago some group let off a bomb in Chile at a church, and a year or two ago some insurrectionists kneecapped the CEO of a Nuclear Power company. The targeting of the Nuclear CEO has obvious reasons - the church not so. They issued a massively irrelevant manifestos crapping on about religious feeding the people bullshit. Not exactly a material analysis of religion. The most famous example of this strategy today would be Conspiracy of Fire Cells in Greece. They’re a group known for robbing banks, having shoot outs with police, and bringing ‘left wing terrorism’ back to Europe. They’re all arrested now, and have been involved in struggles for prisoners’ rights and hunger strikes over the last few years.

If you're interested in the terror question, and the rather bold statement that terrorism is a Leninist strategy, i'd highly suggest grabbing a copy of "You Can't Blow Up A Social Relationship," quite a famous essay written by an Australian libertarian socialist group.

So then, what’s social anarchism?

Taking the concept of freedom as the basis of anarchism, I want to start with a quote from Bakunin, he says;

"The individual, their freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not vice versa; society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the greater their freedom - and the more they are the product of society, the more do they receive from society, and the greater their debt to it.

Here we find a definition of freedom based entirely on social bonds - what Bakunin is saying is that we are all products of social development – it is through relationships and education we find the ideas, motivations and influences that will make us free. Without the development of all, without equality, we will never know real freedom. The more free the person beside you is, the more free you are. Social anarchism is therefore inherently committed to collective methods of organisation - be it through things as various as unions, affinity groups, syndicates, communes, or whatever. Social anarchism also collectivist in economics. We have had Proudhon, and the Spanish economist De Santillian. But ultimately social anarchists owe a great debt to Marx for their understanding of economics - it's over questions of political organisation that we divide.

It’s this freedom through solidarity that found such fertile ground in the workers movement. The ideas of social anarchists, particularly Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta flourished in many parts of the world, namely Spain, Italy, Argentina and China, and had profound influence on the mass anarchist organisations that were to develop. We often sell ourselves short as anarchists today, because much of our history is lost, and because our movement is so small and insular we often feel like a subculture. But when it comes to history, remember we are talking about a movement that affected the lives of millions of people. These were no small propaganda groups or insurrectional cells. These were mass organisations that had obvious anarchist politics. Maybe not all 2 million members of the CNT or the FORA were anarchist – but anarchism had an influence on their lives.

So in comparison, while social anarchism first found its roots in the federalist sections of the international, in the Paris commune, and in the emerging union movements, it is fair to say that Individualism came to prominence when anarchism lost its connection with the working class, and interestingly has largely been a phenomenon tied to the USA and Europe, and Russia. While also in places like Korea, South America, and parts of Africa where anarchism has had periods of significance, individualism has been for the most part irrelevant (feel free to correct me if you’ve come across individualist literature from these parts of the world!) Perhaps the tactic of insurrection by small groups and individuals had some grounding, but its irrelevance seems to be the broader rule. This loss of social influence for anarchism in most countries has never been recovered. The withdrawl of self-styled anarchists from social movements for activities that don't require long-term commitment, thinking, responsibility or coherence is a serious problem if we ever want anarchism to be a philosophy that can change the world again.

Members of the Korean Peoples Assosciation in Manchuria. From 1929-31 Manchuria ‘was Anarchist’, a little remembered period of history.

It’s pretty clear that the irrelevance of a coherent and social anarchist philosophy is also tied to the reactionary and conservative societies we live in. Despite efforts to break out of the leftist ghetto, much like our socialist mates, today we remain largely irrelevant. The anarchist principles of federalism, direct action, anti-parliament politics, and mutual aid are barely connected to a class struggle that is largely institutionalised. With no solid, commited organisations to use our tactics, we don’t feed back into the movements, we don’t test our ideas and fresh activists are few and far between. It’s a two way street. The end result of this isolation can often be liberalism dressed in radical clothing, and the dominance of ‘lifestyle anarchism’ is basically the black flag version of the socialist politics that believes in the revolutionary potential of Bernie Sanders, SYRIZA and Jeremy Corbyn.

Anarchists today are finding our way back to relevance in struggle; in a number of places around the world anarchist organisations and movements are beginning to flourish again. Greece, Ireland, Brazil are a few examples.

I found it illuminating that in this Workers Solidarity Movement talk about the growth of anarchism in Ireland, Andrew Flood says that as anarchists have regained their social relevance over the last two decades, they went from the stereotype of 'punks and people dressed in black' to 'looking like your everyday person', and that about that time the media began to have to acknowledge that anarchism was actually a factor in Irish political life. The Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation in the USA is another wonderful example.

I want to give a historical example of anarchism finding its feet in a concrete situation. It is an example of anarchism feeding into a movement, and developing as a result. Actually, it’s the worlds first example of specifically anarchist organisations doing just such – for all its many limits, there are many lessons to be learnt; I just finished reading Makhno’s account of the revolution in the Ukraine, and during some of the most intense periods of social upheaval he expresses extreme frustration with the revolutionaries in Russia. He points out that the combination of armchair intellectualism and obsession with aspects of theory – like the proletariat over the peasantry means that they're entirely ignorant of the revolutionary and of the practical means these anarchists can take to expand the revolution. This isn't just frustration with individualists either, this is with anarcho-syndicalists, communist and whatnot. He points out the inflexibility of anarchist theory at this time can't deal with practical situations. For example when he was elected leader of his particular battalion he had to give orders right- and he recognises that most anarchists don't believe in giving orders or leaders or whatever. And he expresses that he felt quite uncomfortable with the role he was given. But they were fighting a war. An actual revolution. Not having accountable roles or rules is crap, and I think this is a frustration because of the individualist influence. Just because anarchists didn’t believe they should ever be told what to do, doesn’t mean they can’t develop structures of collective responsibility.

Nestor Mahkno, (elected) leader of the Insurrectional Army of the Ukraine

Anarchists have leaders. This is something that modern anarchism really struggles to acknowledge. Just because we refuse to put a label on power doesn't mean that it doesn't exists. Let’s consider this quote from Bakunin;

“Nothing is more dangerous for a man’s private morality than the habit of command. Two sentiments inherent in power never fail to produce this demoralisation; they are: contempt for the masses and the overestimation of one’s own merits.”

So what makes anarchist 'leadership' special is that what we are actually wanting to achieve is to create structures that limit the concentration of power. Informality does not do this. This is a serious danger that exists in individualist and lifestyle anarchism. Rather we should look to have strict mandates given by the collective to their delegates, when assemblies are not practical. That’s why we try to rotate roles - to assure one person doesn't end up with too much power, and to assure that everyone develops skills keeping the field more even if you will. Individualism doesn’t address this. Actually egoist individualism like Stirners ends up justifying power over other people – hardly an anti-authoritarian philosophy. If you ever get a chance I recommend reading 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness'by Jo Freeman.

As I said, this delegate-mandate-rotate structure is actually infinitely more anti-authoritarian than not having any kind of accountability. Bakunin talked about this, the CNT knew this, the anarchist army in the Ukraine knew this (though it wasn’t great at it.) But it's quite lost these days. Obviously, how we structure this leadership isn't the same as socialist groups - there are practical things that differentiate us here. At any rate - that is a topic for another time.

So I want to skip back to individualism, I want to explain why I believe often the result of individualist philosophies put into practice can be damaging to social movements, how they often become anti-social rather than anti-capitalist. I think this confusion that starts from the concept of imminent rebellion against authority, meaning that things that aren't actually anti-authoritarian can end up with tacit anarchist support.

Groups like Crimethinc tend to border this line, advocating and fetishing sub-cultural practices as anti-capitalist in and of themselves with little conceptualisation of how they assist in the struggle against capital and the state, if at all. Squatting, sabotage, petty-crime, theft, arson, and assassinations all register in the arsenal of insurrectional-individualist tactics. Actually, I think this is the definitions of the vague term we throw around; ‘lifestylism.’ Precisely this fetishisation. A comrade has raised with me that it is perhaps not only that, but it’s the result of despair at the failures of long-term organising that leads to believing only immediate actions and ‘living politics’ can be revolutionary.

Crimethinc, elevating great ways to get arrested to a lifestyle.

It’s not that say social anarchists don’t use tactics like insurrection, sabotage etc too. But what is to be considered is if the action is beneficial or negative, collectively empowering or just alienating and anti-social.

For example, tactics like sabotage have often been used during union campaigns, the IWW was pretty famous for this. When used as an individual tactic, workers often risk alienation from others, punishment from the state, a waste of comrades resources who bail them out or organise legals. Individuals may get a small benefit from stealing, squatting, living on the dole as a ideological choice etc, but there are always consequences. So when sabotage is done collectively, it can be a powerful tool against the boss, especially so because everyone has each others backs, and the decision to take action has been made together. It’s the small sums of collective actions that become a movement.

Consider;

"Shoplifting, dumpster diving, quitting work are all put forward as revolutionary ways to live outside the system, but amount to nothing more than a parasitic way of life which depends on capitalism without providing any real challenge."

Obviously with this quote we don't want to conflate what it takes to ensure survival under capitalism, or to demonise people who are unemployed or anything ridiculous like that. Rather whats being said is that if you have the option to make these choices, if you can always move back in with your folks or whatever, you're not actually contributing to anti-capitalism - you're just living out some kind of radical liberalism.

The rich, politicians, anyone in a position of power surely has plenty of time for people who become 'non-participants' in the system. They do not actually challenge power, they do not help organise collectivelly, they may create small concessions and 'spaces' of existing without the yoke of capitalist burden, but the ability of this to both spread and become empowering has to be considered. The truth is, you cannot, ever, completely drop out of capitalism or get saway from the state. People in power are afraid of the Assata Shakurs, the Malcom X’s, the union organisers, the organisations that demand and fight for collective rights. Not hippie communes.

I'm not saying everyone who's doing some kind of activism has to rush out and form an anarcho communist collective, join an organisation or start towing a political line – I’m not here to say 'hey, you should join X because we have the best politics ever! Actually what’s more important as anarchists is that hopefully you go away with some ideas about organising yourself- what i'm saying that there are differences in ideas and hence organisational methods that have very real impacts on the effectiveness of our activism.

It's been pointed out plenty of times that activists who have no 'home team' will often find they've put incredible amounts of energy into a single campaign, sometimes for years, but when it ends - those lessons are lost, there is no where to keep moving, there is no collective development of knowledge that comes from critical reflection on what you've been doing. Unlike individualists would believe everyone is an island, we are all socially formed, and it’s through society we find our freedom. Anyone who thinks they can come to the perfect answers alone, that they can live outside and beyond society is a joker. Here’s an anecdote; did you know its not common for anarchists in the Uruguayan Anarchist federation to talk in first person? They're so adamant that every individual’s personality is a product of collective development that to talk in third person shows humility and acknowledgement of each’s contribution to one another. I'm not suggesting that we stop talking in first person but I think that such humility is quite an inspirational revolutionary value.  

I think what individual libertarian/anarchist activists who aren't in organisations do though is help the development of libertarian values. By participating in social struggles as anarchists we hope to help build a culture that empowers from the bottom up. And developing an anarchist culture is really important. We want to have our own morals, different to those advocated by a capitalist and statist society - we want a world without patriarchy or racism, and conscious cultural reconstruction is important if we understand that there are forms of exploitation and repression that are reinforced by more than just capitalism.

I think the strength of actions by anarchist individuals is more like a reproduction of ethics, rather than any programmatic revolutionary strategy. Because we recognize that there are two levers of power in society right - the state and the point of production, you could maybe say that the third is the social reproduction of capitalist relations - and that’s where community organising is important. We can't and don’t just fetishise the workplace. We are not marxists and we don't agree that societies problems are limited strictly to the superstructure of production (not that they all do! It’s hard to avoid strawmen in such a broad piece of writing.) Anarchists know power exists in all social relations, we have talked often about the centre and the periphery of power. And knowing that centralisation creates power we acknowledge that we can't ‘take the state’ – that’s completely against anarchist strategy and understanding of how society works - what we do want to do is build counter-power to where capital and oppression are created. That’s absolutely key to overthrowing this society. And that’s not done by throwing a bomb into a bank, it’s done by organising workers and communities.

Many people today are drawn towards anarchism because it offers space to individuals who feel marginalised by predominant social constructions. When you identify as an anarchist its okay to be totally yourself. But we have to acknowledge the whole idea of the individual against society is absurd - anarchism IS the single most social political philosophy - we believe in a world of completely free and equal individuals - how can we be anti-social, unless you're you think society and the state are the same?

What I think is useful from here is to talk a little about how there are differences in tactics, politics and strategy. Now this is pretty key and will lead us onto a bit of discussion about particular things anarchists today are into. To be honest, the useful terminology for this distinction was only just brought to my attention by another comrade.

Firstly; we have politics. This is the level at which we identify the philosophy we believe in - which is anarchism. So starting from the vision of building a world without states, capitalism or authority we have to decide on the appropriate strategies for making that happen.

So, strategy. Here’s where we do maybe the most reflection - what does our society look like? What kind of changes do we need? How could we start making them happen? Are we insurrectionists, are we syndicalist, are we into community organising, should we be concentrating on propaganda? There is alot to be figured out.

Finally; tactics. The tactics we employ are the specific details of the strategy we decide upon, as in, what particular actions we undertake to implement the strategy. For example if you did believe you needed an insurrection, you might form a cell that wants to annihilate capitalists and cops or something, I dont know. If you chose syndicalism you might look at what industries are most important to organise in right now, and if you want to start a specifically anarchist union or if you want to radicalise existing ones by building shop stewards networks and advocating wildcats. Within social anarchism there are a variety of ideas about strategies, these are just two, very different and broad examples.

The problem in Australia seems to be that our movement is so confused, so unsophisiticated that we don't take the time to work our way through these considerations. We as the collective that is anarchism in Australia tend to fetishise one or the other, or completely muddle them up. Remember here i'm not just talking about individualists; most anarchist groups in Australia are completely guilty of this too. But at the same time, I think what we like to call 'lifestyle' can be traced back to the early individualism, where personal rebellion and individual, violent insurrection are considered as the total strategy against the state.

All the same, I want to look at a few places where we see the confusion at work. Firstly i'm going to talk about squatting.

So squatting is a tactic, yea? But if you believe that it’s inherently political, you're going to get stuck repeating it over and over when it's not the right strategy, or when you can't do it, where are your politics? This kind of thing happens all the time. It's a really big problem in the environmental movement. I'm not really involved in that anymore but it's kinda where I started back in Newcastle, and I saw a fair bit of this confusion.

Squatting is not really a huge thing in Australia, though I do know a number of squatters and there are a few in Melbourne - it's a much bigger thing in Europe. Many anarchists seem to consider squatting as a lifestyle choice (though there are some, i'm sure, who do it because they haven't any other option - I know at least one person who fits this category.) There’s a difference between a choice and survival here. Living in a squat would appear to give people the space to exist outside typical property relations, maximising personal freedoms and somehow 'propagate' the idea that squatting is an option to the broader community. There is an element of truth in this, but it's actually extremely limited.

Creating 'liberty' for oneself doesn't necessarily mean it creates it for others, sometimes it can even limit the freedoms of others. Squatting isn't necessarily one of those times, but it's not as helpful a tactic as other options. There is a difference between punks who want to live in a squat cause its free and they can have parties, and a squat that’s used as an accessible social center that, for example, that helps house refugees. The first is fine; it doesn't really matter to anyone except the landlord. But the second has collective and social power. I'd argue that as anarchists this is exactly our task. We don't just want revolution for ourselves, we want it for everyone.  

To turn a squat into a viable social center it seems obvious that it needs resources, organisation, community outreach, and importantly the backing of other social groups willing to defend it when eviction time comes. I believe this is a task for anarchist organisations. Lets look at WSM in Ireland for a second, they're an anarchist group who doesn't operate, control or dominate any squats. What they do however, is help initiate them, have activists involved in their on going upkeep and daily activity (one squat in Ireland that has a few WSM members used the workshops to build heaters to send to refugees in Calais), and defend them and their autonomy against repression from the state. They also organise forums and do the important task of political propaganda helping legitimate squatting as a strategy against capitalism. I use WSM as an example of this because they're particularly successful - they have an anarchist publication reaches thousands of people monthly, and they have public attention for being at the forefront of several social movements. Imagine what such a powerful anarchist organisation can bring to the defence of autonomy?

On the other hand - it doesn't take an anarchist organisation to make squatting a valid social project - im just pointing out what I think tasks of anarchist are.

EDIT: Since this was written the totally super awesome squat project in Bendigo St, Collingwood has popped up! This occupation was organised by the Homeless Persons Union of Victoria, and is drawing attention to the rate of homelessness in Melbourne compared to the enormous number of empty homes. This is a fantastic example of the social value of a squatting project.

Lets look at Social Log Bologna in Italy for a moment. This was a squat that is now quite a large social center. The site itself used to be a postal facility. The people who set it up were autonomist marxists, and you know what - they didn’t just use it for themselves -now it’s entirely self-run by refugees! It had enormous social potential and outreach. A while back the cops tried to shut it down - look at how many people turned out to protect it!

This wasn't just a venue for gigs - this actually demonstrated that when we get rid of fucking capitalism - there going to be so many creative things we can do with the economy to make sure everyone has everything they need. It was also the result of serious planning and looking at the specific things the working class of a particular area needed at a particular point in time.

Some of the local community coming to defend Social Log from eviction.

So then I’d like to ask; “what is a squat compared to a rent strike?”

This I believe is where we begin to see real collective action forming. Rent strikes aren't a thing here anymore, but Australia does have some history with them. Actually, I almost never hear people talk about them! If you don't know what a rent strike is, it's basically like this; the community in a particular area organises against inflated rents and evictions, you hold some mass meetings, do some propaganda and whatever, maybe you target on the basis of community, maybe you target a particular landlord, but you get to a point where collective power is established and people stop paying rent. When the cops turn up, you picket in defense of whoever they try and evict, maybe you go hassle the state department or the rental agents or something. Not really something we're in a position to do now - but worthy of remembering this exists for when struggle around housing intensifies even more. If you want to look at historical examples, i'd suggest Scotland during the 30s' and Italy in the 70s'. There is a pretty good article on libcom.org about the Italian rent strikes - which were significantly influenced by the autonomia movement. For those that don’t know, Autonomia was/is a branch of marxism that started to question the significance of the party, started including feminism and talking about 'social reproduction' and all that. It reproduced a lot of the problems of Leninism, and some of the problems of unorganised Anarchism, but has some very valuable lessons to draw from.

What makes rent strikes so much more powerful is that, unlike squatting, they're a viable tactic to a huge portion of the population. Squatting is unavailable to so many people, for so many reasons. There are only so many places, its unsuitable for families, for people who need to keep stuff secure for work or whatever, for people with disabilities, for people who want to be guaranteed a hot shower. For those who require stability and security, things we all deserve, squatting is not a real option. Even for many of Australia’s homeless squatting wouldn't be viable - what’s deserved is secure housing. Wouldn't it be better if we could organise a mass renters and housing movement committed to direct action and direct democracy, with total autonomy from political parties and the upper classes? Social movements provide the space to lay the real foundations of a society built from the bottom up.

Let’s look really quickly at another places the anarchist movement finds itself sometimes fetishising tactics rather than politics. Sections of the anarchist left often have an idea that they can provide social services purely because it seems ideologically sound. Services that have often been won by the left are now provided by the state and far better than what we can do. Why would anyone want to go to a dodgy anarchist day care in a squat if there’s a nice clean one run by professionals and provided by the state?

I think a relevant example can be Food Not Bombs. I’m not here to have a go at people doing FNB. I’m just raising it as an example we can relate to! FNB is a sweet idea, you get the food that Woolies or Coles or whatever were going to throw away - cause you know, capitalism is extremely fucking wasteful. Or you take what you've grown at your co-op or whatever, and you turn it into a feed and put it on for free in a park or down a street in the city and give it out to whoever needs it. You produce some propaganda around it that points out that capitalism is fucked. Rad, this is actually a great idea. Practical things like this is the way we make our politics seen, the way we prove we can do things differently, the way we prove we have something to offer, and we have a way to talk to people that can be way less alienating than shoving a newspaper in someones face. (Note; Anarchists need a newspaper. I’m pointing out that there are ways of doing things that are less alienating, and that we believe in ‘propaganda of the deed.’)

But you know, taking into account the politics, strategy, tactic formula... is this the best thing to do in Australia? There are loads of charities and even state institutions that feed the homeless. Sometimes you're competing with mega churches and the state! In a society where *most* people have what they need to eat, then maybe resources are better put into something else? That’s where you go back to your politics, look at the concrete situation, start talking about a strategy to build anarchism and then figure out what tactics are going to be effective. If we were in say, Greece, where the soup-kitchen idea is really important, then fuck yes anarchist should be setting up Food Not Bombs or whatever name you wanna give it. That’s exactly our territory and the perfect place for demonstrating alternatives. There’s a Marx quote I like, "every real movement is worth a dozen programmes." Anarchism is meant to be connected to the real needs of the people - actually anarchist organisation exists to support the real struggle, not to establish socialism by decrees. The principle of mutual aid comes from was the early workers movement, not Kropotkin. It wasn't some ethic dreamed up by intellectuals. Early anarchist movements were dealing with the lack of social services, they were dealing with real social needs.

So what I’m saying is that now when we establish these mutual aid groups, filling these 'holes' in social needs isn’t a great idea if they have been filled by capitalism and the state, because until anarchism becomes a large and organised social force, we can’t really compete with capitalist or state facilities without wasting a large amount of our own time and resources. We’re far better off organising workers to struggle in those sites and to take them over.

So at the current state, I think we need to stop and reflect where anarchism needs to go. What are our politics? What strategies have we got to make anarchism relevant? Do they reflect how Australian society looks today? We can't just take the CNT model from 36 Spain and make it happen here, we're sure as fuck are not going to the hills to start a peasant Insurrectional Army.

To summarising a few points, let’s start with this contradiction between individual and social anarchism.

Anarchism is really the most completely social philosophy - we seek a world based on solidarity, mutual aid and co-operation. How these values could go hand in hand with anti-social elements is beyond me. We are anti-capitalist, because capitalism is toxic for a healthy social system, not because we're angsty teenagers.

To consider how we want to see a future influenced by anarchism, we need only take a moment to look at the past. There have been times anarchism has been a fruitful social ideal, and during those times it’s only ever been the social and well-developed anarchist organisations and movements that have made an impact; the CNT/FAI in Spain, the Insurrectional Army of the Ukraine, the FORA in Argentina, FAU in Uraguay. There has never been a 'Union of Egoists', armed terror groups like Conspiracy of Fire haven't started a revolution, assassinations by individualists have only brought down the states wrath on broader society. Individualist anarchism cannot achieve what collective organisation can. Individualism is the result of bourgeoise and liberal tendencies, it is the dreams of intellectuals trying to mix itself with workers struggles. In contrast, social anarchism comes from the real social struggles of the lower classes.

We certainly believe in building the new society in the shell of the old, and this involves individual action and development, but its always connected to the realisation of a real communal society. Small organisations that fulfill immediate needs, like Co-operatives, affinity groups, etc, have been important parts of working class culture, and their general demise has come hand in hand with repression and co-option of working class movements. Models and examples help point the way, they demonstrate that another world is possible, but again these are models of communal action - we are not led to the revolution by the image if the anarchist bombthrower, by Stirners unlimited Ego, or by this terrible 'temporary autonomous zone' idea. We're led by images of the Paris commune, the Russian Soviets, the Spanish syndicates, the Hungarian workers councils, even today glimmers of hope exist in the new communal structures in Chiapas, the grassroots councils of Syria and the TEV-DEM in Rojava, not for the political forces that defend them, but the practical institutions of counter-power that are building a new social life.

The considered undertaking of practical activity, connecting it to a broader political programme, and the building of dedicated anarchist organisations will only strengthen our ability to make a difference and increase the scope of human freedom both in the here and now, and to lay the preperation for a revolutionary situation. I'd urge any who believe anarchism is achieved by autonomous, atomised and unorganised individuals to seriously reconsider how they believe revolution is possible, and if it is, what it will take to get there. But for anarchists in dedicated organisations, it is worth a reminder that actions undertaken by the working class will not come with a perfectly worked anarchist line or program, that developing ideas takes time, that the revolution is messy and slow, that patronising or dismissing peoples genuine individual needs and concerns is not a helpful attitude. But if we stick to our guns, to our morals of solidarity, co-operation, equality, and autonomy that we will sow the seeds of freedom today, so that tomorrow we may have truly free society. I don’t know about you, but I want to take this really seriously, I want to live to see anarchy. If we refuse to acknowledge the lessons of the past, if we don’t take on the lessons of the past we will just let the state continue to exist, either in its capitalist or socialist form.

[keramalusundeep]

THE SUICIDE OF HELL

He sets out with a prayer on his lips. Wired and beefed with bombs from head to the bone on his hips. There is no going back. The clock ticks on. He doesn’t need his specs on. Because by five, from one, two, three, and four, he’d be gone along with you in the vacation of your yawn.

He is not crippled by disease, society, upbringing, or education. He is just him. Sacked and hacked under a radical whim. Time is precious. The last moments are vicious. Biologically his ticker is alive. Spiritually he is dead. Because, only the dead can kill. And only the killed can be dead.

He is happy. The heaven is mapped in his favour. With the odour of the most beautiful untouched, virgin angels.

He has reached the destination. The nation from where he officially departs. The reaction in which his victims are casually censored in the aftermath graphic footage clip arts. Bodies are assembled in a scramble like broken eggs in a challenging scrabble. The curse is blessed.

THE LEGACY OF SUICIDE BOMBING

War is poetry for geopolitics. Most often it is a mystery who the poet is. It is always “poets”. War encourages the most collaborative commerce.

People are always unhappy with the existing government. Change becomes the staple food of the bourgeois. Their manifesto is smeared with the throbbing young blood of promise. Vibrant and striking. One that appears and feels better than that is today. It has to be. But if you just unwrap their juicy roll of delicious hope, all you’d see is an old fry dipped in new oil. Revolutions are baptised as the ‘Morning Sun’. Martyrs are autopsied as the ‘Memorial Sons’.

In 1869, the famous anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, and Sergi Nechayev, both Russians, published a book called ‘Catechism of a Revolutionist’. A passage from the book reads, “The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion – the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose – to destroy it.”

The book had a great impact around its epicentre. From the aftershocks, seven years later, in 1876, a group was created. It was called Land and Liberty. In this group, a considerable chunk voted for the system of state to go to the dogs. Then, hand over the land of Russia to its peasants. A reality that Mikhail Bakunin had been counting his beads for.

Three years from the inception of Land and Liberty, the group broke into two factions. One that had a sweet tooth for terror. The other that was diabetic to terror. The terror group went on to become The People’s Will, the Russian left-wing revolutionary organisation.

So the group built some muscle. And in 1881, Ignacy Hryniewiecki from The People’s Will was appointed to assassinate Alexander II. Not just in any manner. But with a human touch. When Hryniewiecki flung the bomb at the Tsar, he was too close to the explosion himself. The effect of the bomb along with tearing the Tsar apart, injures, wounds, and kills Hryniewiecki. Right this moment, the bomb conceives a new testosterone. It scribbles a ripple in the mystical ocean of its renaissance, spelling an endless and relentless wave of suicide bombing in an orgy of trance.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DEATH

Before World War 2 was born, the Chinese and the Japanese had a warm up in 1938, with their Battle of Taierzhuang. Here, the Chinese soldiers strapped with grenades and explosives, dove under the Japanese tanks and blew what they could with the girth of their bombs.

When it was time for the Japanese to exploit the suicide hashtag, they soared high and cornered the market. Literally. During World War 2, Kamikaze pilots were engineered to fly planes into the navel of the Allied Forces’ naval fleet. Their planes were not built to deploy bombs as they were “the bombs”. From torpedoes to missiles to bubbling fuel tanks to aircraft, the Kamikaze pilots had only one role. To use the instrument they were in or on and take it straight to the flesh of the enemy’s ships, making them bleed hard, to grief.

To the Japanese, the philosophy of death was far more supreme and coveted than defeat. According to the principles laid out in their Samurai and Bushido code, everything else came second to loyalty and honour.

The Land of the Morning Sun, South Korea, who, cradled by the U.S.A, after the split of Korea in World War 2 was not all sunshine and rainbows when it came to the roster on suicide poll. Among the developed nations, South Korea ranks #1 in suicide rate. 14,160 people committed suicide in 2012.

As South Korea was still licking its wounds from World War 2 and the Korean bifurcation, North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950. As part of a strategic military tactic, South Korean soldiers wrapped bombs around their bodies and attacked North Korean tanks.

North Korea was not shy either. Using satchel charges, North Korean suicide squads attacked American tanks in the same Korean War.

When the suicide bombing ball rolled over to Asia, LTTE grappled it hard with its jaw like a mastiff on cocaine.

LTTE didn’t spare the government, civilians, Prime Minister or their own President. They were Tigers. Wild. All they knew was to hunt and eat. In their case, detonate and inspire for a cause. Between 1980 and 2000, LTTE rocked the stage of the suicide bombing concerts.

Once the middle east understood that it was beyond just snaking exotic bellies for the connoisseurs and cheering ships of oils with the west and the rest of the velvet states, it knew it could roll the dice on its golden plate of religion.

“Jihad” becomes the dictator. Everyone else obliged to press the Quran against their foreheads out of proclaimed duty and acclaimed piety, does as the Jihad commands. As we have come to see, with so many organisations and diverse mottos – LeT, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, and of course, ISIS, Jihad is just one person. But he comes with many tongues. Or could it be said, Jihad has many flavours, but the main ingredient remains the same?

It used to be a man’s game. But as the world is hell-bent on giving its word to extending the quality of equality, the men behind the keffiyeh, the convenient and fashionable facial burka for the man, he started inviting women. And children. To take part in the exploding arguments for their bereaved cause.

A 2011 intelligence analyst report in the U.S. army said, “Although women make up roughly 15% of the suicide bombers within groups which utilize females, they were responsible for 65% of assassinations; 20% of women who committed a suicide attack did so with the purpose of assassinating a specific individual, compared with 4% of male attackers.” The report also maintained that most of the women suicide bombers were, “grieving the loss of family members [and] seeking revenge against those they feel are responsible for the loss, unable to produce children, [and/or] dishonoured through sexual indiscretion.”

With the children it is easier. Unlike their older counterparts who are to be lured with vengeance that is turbo-charged with the tartness of political, regional, religious, and sectarian propaganda, and the promise of relentless whoring in the afterlife, all that the juvenile needs to be told is that “they” are the bad men.”

A child suicide bomber is like the icing on the cake. They are agile, effortless, and very smooth.

Invasions take up our personal space. Demanding us to change our face and base. Our surrender will include both the genders, including the one that is tender. In agreement, you are an ally to one. In disagreement, you become an enemy to another. In neutrality, you are “a threat” to world peace.

There is no such thing as the world’s most famous suicide bomber. A suicide bomber’s kid won’t come out and scream on the edge of rooftops, “I want to be like my father.” The world is not going to sing songs for suicide bombers. No successful suicide bomber will go on to tell his tale. There won’t be any fodder from the “horse’s mouth”. Just a handful who were able to target the renowned are worshipped. In their own circuits. However, they are just messengers who are impotent to issue commandments, as they are not sure what it means to be right, and what it means to be left out.

Photo by Christopher Farrugia

[queerasart-blog]

LGBT RIGHTS IN THE 60/70s (Part 1/3) | Issue 2

LGBT RIGHTS  by Émilie Parent and L.D

The common expression of “the Sixties” and “the Seventies” is widely used to refer to the times succeeding the reconstruction of Europe after the Second world war. They do not refer to a specific cultural or intellectual movement, but rather merely to chronological points, from 1960 to 1979. Nevertheless, the context of this time offers room for the apparition of a specific culture and counterculture, based on social changes and liberation of the voice of minorities, that have retrospectively been raised as emblematic of the period.

In 1960, the reconstruction of the damages of the war has ended and the economy has gone back from the predominance of war industries to more regular activities. The arms race and the huge increase in transports and technologies, however, has left the world with an important amount of infrastructures that can now be used for other purposes. This allows for a general increasing of living standards for the population and a renewal of cultural and social norms.

But this is not the only consequence of the war. In the United States, during the years following the Nuremberg trials, emphasis is put on upholding traditional values against the forces of change, as a reaction against the idea of civil disobedience, which has come out stronger of the revelations brought by the trials. The national paranoia raises after the second world war against communists, anarchists and soon extended to any community seen as “subversive”, such as LGBT people. This movement is known as the Lavender Scare, in reference to the Second Red Scare targeting communists. Police and FBI keep lists of known homosexuals and their relatives, friends, as well as the places they meet up. This leads to the closing of a large number of gay bars, arrestations, and public exposure of people in newspapers, further leading to employment and housing discrimination. Meanwhile, in Europe, fascist governments had heavily repressed homosexuality, and the laws they put in place were not always repealed after 1945 - the french law against homosexuality, written in 1942, stayed in place, and homosexuals were often kept in concentration camps even after the liberation of Jews. In the 50s and the 60s, the opposition between the East and the West blocks creates a climate of unnatural tensions between opposed political stances, and social questions often become symbolic banners to raise whenever one wants to make a point.

AMERICA

The position in the Sixties slowly changes compared to the previous decade. The Vietnam war, started in 1954, comes with a rise of protesting movements. In the United States, the Beat Generation is the first cultural movement showing of the emergence of a counter culture rooted in anti capitalism, rejecting materialism in favour of spiritual quest (through the use of psychedelic drugs), personal exploration and sexual liberation. The “Beatniks” are poets and some of them write about homosexual experiences. Although this movement is very male-centered, because girl rebellion is faced with violent backlash, it brings homosexuality to the table for the first time in a positive light.

A few gay activist groups have started to appear in the 1950s. The Mattachine Society is one of them, heavily linked to the Communist Party and often focusing on the actions of police against gay people, which shows again how anticapitalist politics and lgbt activism go hand in hand. Five years later, in 1955, the group of the Daughters of Bilitis is formed, as an alternative to lesbian bars who were harassed more and more often by the police. This social group is asking for a better education about LGBT issues, as well as civil and political rights for LGBT people.

These are the two axes that start developing in the 60s. More and more groups appear, such as the East Coast Homophile Organization (ECHO) in 1963, and the National Transsexual’s Counseling Unit in 1965, the world’s first transgender organization; and these organizations reclaim and obtain civil rights, such as the decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults (1962 in Illinois, 1969 in Canada). The same year, Franck Kameny, teacher in the Astronomy Department of Georgetown University, is fired because of his perceived sexual orientation and enters a judicial procedure against the US government. He creates the Washington, D.C. branch of the Mattachine Society and sides with the Daughters of Bilitis in a number of protests and picket lines in front of the White House, the Pentagon, the United Nations, and the United States Civil Service Commission. In 1966, endocrinologist and sexologist Harry Benjamin publishes The Transsexual Phenomenon; a Scientific Report on Transsexualism and Sex Conversion in the Human Male and Female, opening the door to the idea of sexual transition and advocating for a humane treatment of transsexual people. This is also the year of the founding of the National Transsexual Counseling Unit in San Francisco, which is the world’s first transgender organization.

picket lines in front of the White House, 1965. Kay Tobin Lahusen - New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division

Meanwhile, the cultural background evolves too. In 1961, the Motion Picture Code allows movies to talk about homosexuality and the same year, the first documentary on homosexuality, The Rejected, airs on TV. In 1962, James Baldwin writes Another Country, a novel set in Greenwich Village and deals with bisexuality of both men and women, interracial couples, extramarital affairs, and it becomes a best-seller.

But these attempts stay mild, essentially coming from people of higher social background, and focus mostly on appeasing the tensions by painting the lgbt community as respectable and acceptable for the rest of the population. They tend to ignore gender nonconforming people and transsexual people, who risk appearing too threatening for the status-quo. Vanguard, an organization founded in 1965, insisted on “peaceful co-existence”.

This changes when the decade culminates in the events of Stonewall, on June 29th, 1969. What was a police raid into a gay bar turns into a rebellion from the clients, led by trans women of colour, and leads the way towards a more inclusive and more radical activism. Directly resulting from the riots, the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance are formed, the first being more radical and the second more reformist. These two groups help spreading LGBT activism and serve as an anchor for the whole LGBT community. Newspapers become a new way to share ideas, events and LGBT culture - Gay, Come Out!, and Gay Power, gathered between 20,000 and 25,000 readers. People are then encouraged to come out en masse, by the revolutionary article of reporter Leo Laurence, “HOMO REVOLT: DON’T HIDE IT” published in the leftist magazine Berkeley Barb. The Red Butterfly published Carl Wittman’s Gay Manifesto in 1970, where the LGBT activist encourages all gay people to find refuge in San Francisco. Also In 1970, the commemoration of the Stonewall riots, organized by bisexual activist Brenda Howard, becomes the first Gay Pride, with marches happening in New-York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Brenda Howard is then called the “Mother of Pride”. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, who were both leaders to the riots, found the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. 

Berkeley Barb,1969, Volume 8, Issue 13(189)

And things change slowly from there. In 1972 the movie That Certain Summer is the first gay-themed movie to win an Emmy and in 1973, The Rocky Horror Picture Show meets a huge success, becoming a pop-culture phenomenon for decades to come. 1972 is also the year of the first gay synagogue and of the first gay person to be ordained by a major Christian denomination. Politics also move, even more than culture. Canada is faster at decriminalizing homosexual acts between consenting adults - in 1969. In the United States, it’s in 1973 that homosexuality is removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders by the American Psychiatric Association, under the combined pressure of activism, social changes and empirical evidence. 

One year prior to that was founded the Lesbian Feminist Liberation, by Jean O’Leary, as the first lesbian activist group to counterbalance the domination of gay men in the activist movements and the exclusion of lesbians from most feminist groups, and this group is the first one to organize a meeting of gay activists in the White House, in 1977. The same year, Harvey Milk becomes the first openly gay person to be elected in public office, in San Francisco. In 1978, he encourages the activist Gilbert Baker to create a symbol for the LGBT Community. Since the US flag has become a symbol for people to gather around during hard times, Baker creates the rainbow flag, made of eight lines stacked together representing people stitched together as one community. The colours also have each a meaning: pink for sexuality, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for magic, indigo for serenity, violet for spirit - pink and turquoise have later been removed for technical reasons (pink couldn’t be properly rendered) and balance reasons (a pair numer seemed better). The flag becomes extremely popular after the murder of Harvey Milk in November 1978. As the decade closes, the first case of AIDS appears in the US, yet not registered as such. 

(Part 1/3)

[the-real-spiritualanarchist]

The Spiritual Anarchist Manifesto

“No, his mind is not for rent

To any god or government.

Always hopeful, yet discontent

He knows changes aren’t permanent –

But change is

What you say about his company

Is what you say about society”

Rush Tom Sawyer

“A manifesto is a published declaration of the intentions, motives, or views of the issuer, be it an individual, group, political party or government.[1][2][3][4]

A manifesto usually* accepts a previously published opinion or public consensus or promotes a new idea with prescriptive notions for carrying out changes the author believes should be made. *

It often is political or artistic in nature, but may present an individual's life stance.”

Wikipedia (*Emphasis mine)

My world view is that we are in a simulation but Reality does exist.

Also that Reality has several levels all of them Physical but not all of them are Time And Space as we know it. Therefore Materialism is a very limiting understanding of Metaphysics.

In my view most levels of Reality that involve Consciousness also involve Delusion.

Also that subtlest form of Consciousness is awareness and the subtlest form of Awareness is the source of all Reality.

Since Awareness is in EVERY Living Being it follows that every living being is capable of pain and suffering. From this it naturally follows that we as human beings who to my knowledge have the most Awareness should take a vow to create the least amount of suffering possible for all living beings.

By using the word “create” I am acknowledging that with great awareness comes great responsibility.

And all human beings need to acknowledge this in order to take this vow of the least amount of suffering possible.

I have no higher power or deity.

My soul as well as the soul of all living beings is part of The Source which is the Ultimate Nature of Reality or The Source of creation which is Awareness itself.

It is only this source, The Source or Ultimate Nature of Reality that I will call God.

And what I am describing or trying to communicate to you is not a “Deity” or personal god. But a Transpersonal God that transcends all ideas and concepts of God.

I submit to no Authority.

My Highest Authority is my soul.

I have no problem with Capitalism as an Economic System by itself but pure Capitalism doesn’t exist.

Until human beings are completely free of the dependence on Institutions we need more that just a Free Market System.

We need a political system that takes pure Capitalism and protects it from the vulnerabilities that allows it to be exploited by those in power.

[apostateangela]

A Bell’s not a Bell Until You Ring It

There is a specific Mormon myth/fable/scripture story that is prevalent and used as an allegory for life. It is the story of Lehi’s dream. It is found in the first book of the book of Mormon,

1 Nephi chapter 8.

This is the Mormon’s version of the Tree of Life myth. Throughout all religious mythology, the Tree of Life bears magical fruit that is white and brilliant and gives everything from pleasure to everlasting life to those that eat of it.

In Lehi’s dream it is a fruit filled tree, shining with light at the end of a dark path next to a river. There is a treacherous mist on both sides of the path. There is a “large and spacious” building off to the side, full of people. And all along the path to the tree there is an iron rod, not unlike a railing, to hold on to as you brave the deep and dark and dangerous misty swamp.

This allegory has been explained in Mormon terms and taught to members of the church from the time you are very young. Each piece of the dream is explained in symbology as well as scripture. There are hymns and primary songs written about it.

Here is one hymn:

1. To Nephi, seer of olden time,

A vision came from God,

Wherein the holy word sublime

Was shown an iron rod.

[Chorus]

Hold to the rod, the iron rod;

'Tis strong, and bright, and true.

The iron rod is the word of God;

'Twill safely guide us through.

2. While on our journey here below,

Beneath temptation's pow'r,

Through mists of darkness we must go,

In peril ev'ry hour.

3. And when temptation's pow'r is nigh,

Our pathway clouded o'er,

Upon the rod we can rely,

And heaven's aid implore.

4. And, hand o'er hand, the rod along,

Through each succeeding day,

With earnest prayer and hopeful song,

We'll still pursue our way.

5. Afar we see the golden rest

To which the rod will guide,

Where, with the angels bright and blest,

Forever we'll abide.

And here is the symbol breakdown:

The Tree: Love of God or Everlasting Life with God

The Fruit: Happiness or the Blessings of Christ’s Atonement

The Mist= The Temptations of the Devil

The Iron Rod= The Word of God or Sacred Scripture

The Spacious Building= The World filled with Wicked People who mock the Righteous

The River= Spiritual Death

As young members of the church continuing into old members of the church, you are commanded through this vision written in scripture to ‘hold fast to the iron rod’ and not depart from the path of righteousness that leads you to everlasting life and eternal happiness with God. Holding to the Word of God means that you obey all the commandments and rules contained within the Mormon books of scripture (Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price). Letting go of the rod means you deviate from the path, tempted by the world (other people from the building) and Satan (the mist) and risk falling into the river or into spiritual death—which in case you didn’t know is worse than real death.

The purpose of my explaining Lehi’s Dream here is to provide you with the context that surrounds the depth of obedience programmed into members of the Mormon Church.

This is only one angle. But it is far reaching and prevalent.

It is designed almost perfectly:

An ancient prophet (Lehi) has a vision from God about his own family, which consists of various children; some of whom are righteous and obedient and some who are rebellious and wicked (examples of humans we can all relate to).

This God bestowed lesson/allegory is then written into scripture that is then revealed to future generations and translated by modern prophets. Then, given to the current people of the church with a charge to do everything they can to bring it into every corner of their lives: the Iron Rod story has been adapted into art, music, literature, spoken sermons, and even film.

I can almost feel my metaphysical hand grasping…

The Iron Rod story is all about what God wants you to do.

And what I find interesting is that it is a structure wrapped in God’s love and perceived safety that creates division between those that follow and those that do not.

One group is righteous, those that hold the rod and follow God step by step never deviating. The other group is labeled as wicked and mocking because they challenge those holding onto the rod. They are even put into a building, segregated from God’s followers.

Two of the basic building blocks of Christian belief are first, love thy neighbor or love everyone, to which this dream decimates. And the second, more obscure is about a counsel in Heaven. Before this life there was a counsel where God deliberated on how he wanted His children to live here on this earth. He himself wanted His children to have choice; choosing their own path and learning from this life and their experiences—saved from their sin by the sacrifice or atonement of God’s beloved son Jesus Christ.

Instances of this doctrine are in Job and Isaiah as well as Luke and the book of Revelations

(King James Version).

In the Mormon translation of this counsel in Heaven, there was actually a war where Lucifer wanted to force everyone to do what was ‘right’ so that God wouldn’t lose a single soul. And as God chose Christ’s plan of choice and redemption, fighting ensued causing Lucifer to be cast out of Heaven with 1/3 of the Hosts of Heaven (which became the Devil and his demons).

I add this bit of lore to show the strangeness of the Iron Rod piece.

If one of the main purposes of this life—something that God wants--is to explore and discover, to learn from experience, then iron-clad rules of the Mormon church prevent this very thing from happening. It traps people in a place of prescriptive living that limits not only the exploring of the outward but also of the inward and alienates those who do not obey.

There are many things that holding to the blistering iron of this rod prevented me from discovering about myself, as well as the world I lived in.

I’ve already written about sex.

It seems that journey is not over.

But before I get to the new piece I have discovered I think it is time I shared with you my journey to understanding love and relationships.

One of the most well-worn spots on the path of the Iron Rod is that of Mormon Temple Marriage. I have written about this structure as well as documented somewhat the harsh 25 years I spent there. After my divorce, and months of therapy and self-reflection I found that while I didn’t exactly know what I wanted in terms of love and relationships,

I definitely knew what I DID NOT WANT!

I did not want marriage.

Of course I did not want the psychologically abusive, Mormon version of marriage I had lived. But I also knew that I didn’t want the patriarchal oppressive structure marriage is both culturally and legally in the United States either.

From my 8-month foray into single womanhood and divorcee I quickly came to the realization that the church AND the world are not fair or kind.

As I set out to explore sex, I also was moving, albeit more slowly, towards examining different kinds of love and relationships.

I virtually stumbled upon a philosophical pot of gold in the form of a man who made a claim on his online dating profile.

He said he was a Relationship Anarchist.

He explained a little bit about it in his profile,

enough that his words set off a deep bell within me.

It reverberated, resonated like something unending—a bell that couldn’t be un-rung.

I asked him questions both about what it was and what it meant to him.

And then, I started researching.

As a teacher, student, writer, and curious intellect, I know how to research.

I read articles and blogs, and manifestos. I watched vlogs and personal testimonials and informational videos. I joined chat groups and made friends and found a very patient guru that I plagued with questions and scenarios.

With each bit of information, I asked myself, “Is this even possible? Would this actually work for you?” And more often than not the answers sent electricity into the original reverberation and resounded with either a ‘YES!’ or a ‘I can’t wait to find out!’

Then I tested it with actual experience, as any loving God intended I should.

The answers and experiences have both challenged and amazed me.

I cannot thank that golden man enough.

Before I go further, here is the barebones definition:

Relationship anarchy (sometimes abbreviated RA) is the belief that relationships should not be bound by rules aside from what the people involved mutually agree upon. If a relationship anarchist has multiple intimate partners, it might be considered as a form of polyamory, but distinguishes itself by postulating that there need not be a formal distinction between sexual, romantic, or platonic relationships.

Relationship anarchists look at each relationship (romantic, platonic or otherwise) individually, as opposed to categorizing them according to societal norms such as 'just friends', 'in a relationship', or 'in an open relationship'.

That’s Wikipedia and I’m okay with their definition.

Here’s a few more extensions that I like:

“A relationship anarchist begins from a place of assuming total freedom and flexibility as the one in charge of their personal relationships and decides on a case by case basis what they want each relationship to look like.”

“Relational anarchists are often highly critical of conventional cultural standards that prioritize romantic and sex-based relationships over non-sexual or non-romantic relationships. Instead, RA seeks to eliminate specific distinctions between or hierarchical valuations of friendships versus love-based relationships, so that love-based relationships are no more valuable than are platonic friendships...another important theme within RA is the resistance to placing demands or expectations on the people involved in a relationship.”

Here are the bits that matter to me:

Full autonomy= I want to be in charge of myself and what I want as well as filling my own needs. After all, anarchy does not mean ‘no rules’ but rather ‘NO RULERS!’

No expectations= In line with the previous piece, I don’t want to have or have placed on me expectations that are often unreasonable or unreachable. If there are no expectations, things happen based on what someone has to OFFER-their hand is extended full of what they can share-instead of what I THINK SHOULD HAPPEN-my hand open and empty begging for something I expect them to give me.

No hierarchy=No one is more important than anyone else.

This is how I love. I always have. I have deep intimate friendships as much as I have romantic ones. I want to have my heart touch their heart. I don’t have large groups of people in my life.

I have a handful of people that mean everything to me.

Evolution=Step by step the relationship creates its own life that evolves with time and investment into something incredibly beautiful. And because every step must be looked at and communicated about before the next step, and there are no prescriptive stairs to climb, the relationship is a journey instead of a destination.

If you’re asking the question about polyamory because it stuck to you from the Wikipedia definition, the answer is yes, of course polyamory--the love of multiple people--would be part of this. If you love all your people, all your partners regardless of a label, you are potentially going to have more than one person you have sex with as well as more than one person you don’t. It’s called ethical non-monogamy and it is brilliant.

It is such an incredible thing to be freed of the idea that one person has to be everything to me. It provides perspective.

I have many needs, but I can present any portion of those as something I want from a person based on what they have to offer.

It’s the best kind of authentic gift giving.

Also, I don’t go hungry as often as I used to.

I was starved for love and attention.

And while it is true, that many people stuck in amatonormativity—the widespread assumption that everyone is better off in an exclusive, romantic, long-term coupled relationship—cannot break free of this societal norm, there are many people searching for the answer to the wrongness they feel in such relationships.

These people are enlightened and on their way to self-actualization and are

WHO I WANT IN MY LIFE!

We feed each other, loving as we want and as we can.

You may be thinking, “She’s just having a knee jerk reaction to leaving the church and her divorce, pushing herself to the other side of the spectrum. It’s a stage that will eventually end.”

I believe you are wrong.

I have been practicing RA for over two years now and do not see an end.

I have had many partners, some who have passed through my life.

The inevitable transience of this lifestyle is a hard thing, because sometimes what someone can give me doesn’t last a long time. But even in the heartbreak of their leaving there is peace knowing that what I had with that individual was more honest, more real than most of my marriage.

And

some stay.

Our evolution is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.

I am learning what love is in an organic way as it becomes what both partners want it to be.

It is glorious and beautiful (to steal a phrase God says from the temple representation of the creation of the earth).

I find it fitting,

I’m CREATING love!

Now you might be asking, “What about jealousy?”

And you are right, there is jealousy. But jealousy wears many faces and when you stop trying to control others jealousy’s biggest face disappears. And what you discover is what your own jealousy is based on at its roots. Mine is about self-worth. I am not sure I’m worthy or worth as much as another. After some reassurance from my partner—that I’ve asked for because it is my job to advocate for myself—I find instead of jealousy I feel kinship with those people that love my people.

We have good taste after all!

And with every successful step my inner bell’s reverberation is renewed and deepened.

It is this ‘ringing true’ within oneself that I believe to be the best guide for my life--and in my opinion--for yours as well.

Shakespeare wrote, “This above all, to thine own self be true.”

What rings true for you?

You can’t hear it, but rather you must feel it.

It is inside yourself and not an exterior envisioned cold rod of iron, but rather a living bell that’s sound enters your every cell on every plane.

When something resonates

do not ignore it

especially just because someone outside tells you God wants differently.

Understand that I do not put aside basic human morality.

Some people find pleasure in the pain of others.

I am not talking about just doing everything that feels good to everyone no matter the cost.

I am talking about listening to your own heart—once you free it from what others say it should feel.

Here is what I know:

I have lived by a thousand rules.

And now I live by only two.

They answer two questions:

Will it hurt someone?

Is it good for me?

If the answers are respectively ‘no’ then ‘yes’ I do it.

True, there are more implications within those two questions and answers, but they are my personal compass that works only for me, pointing me in a thousand directions instead on only a single iron one.

The diversity of this journey has brought me to such beauty and joy.

The newest being the discovery of my own bisexuality.

RA has also broken the heteronormative shackles my Mormon prescripted marriage bound me with. I finally understand the love I had for a girl long ago during high school and the intimacy I find in the touch and company of other women.

I am reveling in exploring where that intimacy can go and my bell rings as I find and partake of the fruit of the Tree of Life--growing in more places than one.

Turns out it is your inner bell that leads you to that Tree and its pleasurable fruit, not some cold, harsh rod of iron.

And through this journey I have found that my bell leads me to not just that Tree,

but an entire Grove.

A world of joy and life my idea of a loving God could get behind.

An expanse open for you and I to experience all that we can.

Once more I urge you to just let go.

Find the fruit once forbidden and eat.

And then, eat more.

Be greedy my friends.

I deserve it

And so do you.

-Angela

[jaynearmesillustration]

Ways Of Sensing

Understanding the senses in society

David Howes and Constance Classen, 2013

Mixed Messages

Engaging the Senses in Art

Viewing Art (pp. 17-20)

Art is visually dominated as stated by Howes and Classen, (2013, pp. 17) “As soon as something is classified as art, its non-visual qualities are suppressed.” Art is not to touch, and people that try and break this rule are frowned upon when at a museum or exhibition. However Howes and Classen, (2013 pp. 17) suggest that it hasn't always been this way. Single-sensed art is a recent fruition, although sight has always been deep-rooted in western thought, it is really the modern period that has pushed back the idea of hands on sensory exploration.  When looking back at the art of the Middle Ages wood carvings and craftwork show the value of tacitly. Art at the time was painted on objects, they were made to be handled, as without the aspect of touch the art became useless. Colour also aided to the tacitly of the Medieval period, as it was thought to hold healing properties enticing people to touch paintings. “Rich colouring of paintings had strong tactile appeal. People wanted to hands-on contact with luxurious and powerful hues” (Howes and Classen, 2013, pp.18). It is this hands on approach that gives people better understanding of the materials, and surface. Robert Hooke (Cited in Arnold 2003 pp.76) states that “ocular inspection” must be accompanied by the “manual handling... of the very things themselves.” Many people pre-industry had this same ideology with touch and knowledge, as objects within museums in the eighteenth century were available to touch for this very reason. The ability of only viewing museum artefacts would of been seen as insufficient means of gathering information and knowledge about the object. Sensory investigation was encouraged, up until the nineteenth century when museums made a shift of consideration to conserving collections for their longevity.

Kant (1911) dismissed taste and smell as senses suited to the contemplation of art. As he thought they only provided sensations of pleasure or disgust, offering little to the mind. He goes on to then state that sight is the noblest of senses, and is the only to offer the purest of judgements. This statement has been contradicted by many artists who explore tactility. Jan Swankmajer (2014 pp1) has stated that sight is the most corrupt sense, and is now subject to consumerist culture thus making me believe the statement of Kant is outdated. With the decline of the other senses in museums and exhibitions, sight became the means of proper perception of art in the nineteenth century. Artist then followed suit, producing work only for the eyes and neglect to explore sensory investigation. The connection between craftwork and artwork became divided, and saw the decline of materiality and the ‘down to earth’ values of touch in western culture. The romantic movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth century also promotes this ideal, as artists were seen as visionaries producing extraordinary paintings to be admired from afar, beholding little for audiences to relate to. Art has become distant from everyday reality and lacks the connection that the other senses provide.

Beyond Visual Art in the West (pp. 25- 29)

Although mainstream art in the west was becoming visually dominant, there were artists who aimed to create paintings that portray what art was missing, and explored multi sensory experiences. As suggested by Howes and Classen, (2013, pp. 25) “The counterculture of the day encouraged artists to experiment with sensory multiplicity.” These artists achieved this quite simply, through the subject matter of their paintings. Although still aesthetic artworks, they aimed to suggest non-visual sensations through depicting actions, or objects that mentally stimulated the senses. An example being in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century the interest in olfactory art, the act of smelling portrayed in paintings such as, The Soul of the Rose (John William Waterhouse, 1908). Women were often associated with the senses smell, touch and taste, as also stated by Classen in Worlds of Sense (1997 pp.1-37). 

Figure 1: The Soul of the Rose, John William Waterhouse, 1908, Oil on canvas.

More Adventurous artist aimed to visually communicate the senses, trying to make sound, taste and smell a visual experience. An example being in the Futurist manifesto of 1913, The painting of sounds, noises and smells (Carrà 1973) This can be seen in many futurist work with sound ringing and vibrating out of the subjects and a hazy aesthetic. Howe and Classen, (2013) suggest that “such experiments in transposing non-visual sensations or sensibilities onto a visual plane were inspired by the contemporary doctrine of sensory correspondences.” The suggestion that senses are connected, where one sense can suggest or stimulate another. This idea can also be seen in Wassily Kandinsky’s work visualising compositions of music in a painterly style, and is something I have previously researched. 

Figure 2: Carlo Carrà, Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, 1910-11

In the 1920′s, futurists explored tactility as an art form, they created tactile tables, multi-sensory objects made for touch. It was their aim to stop catering for visuals, to explore tactilism without the possibly of sight corrupting their work. As stated by Howe and Classen (2013, pp. 27) “F.T. Marinetti, the founder of the futurists, made the point that visual artists should not be the ones to develop tactile art, as they were too eye-minded.” F. T. Marinetti and Fillìa also produced and published a multi-sensory cookbook, The Futurist Cookbook (1932). It wasn't produced to be a traditional cookbook but rather aimed to raise the nations artistic consciousness. Suggested by Chamberlain (1989 pp.1) it was “a provocative work of art disguised as a easy-to-read cookbook”. The futurists had the notion that experiences are empowered by art in everyday life. Food was the raw material and method of revolutionising art and culture. The aim stated by F.T. Marinetti (1932) was “changing radically the eating habits of our race, strengthening it, dynamizing it and spiritualizing it with brand-new food combinations in which experiment, intelligence and imagination will economically take the place of quantity, banality, repetition and expense.”

The Multimedia Museum (pp. 29-32)

Howe and Classen (2013 pp. 29) asks the question, where do the senses stand in art museums today? It appears not much has changed in the sense of what is being exhibited. The idea of multi-sensory installations paired with the visuals of artefacts for a immersive experience is rejected by many modern museums. For fear of the introduction of sound, smell and touch causing the object to no longer be a stand alone ‘museum piece’. Less dominant senses being beneath the dignity of the artefact, causing the viewers gaze to be disturbed. 

However museum spaces themselves posses sense, with the constant movement of people “conversations overheard and participated in, even the smell of the galleries, attach themselves to our experiences of the visual surfaces on display” (Howe and Classen, 2013, pp. 29). New modes of understanding art are being introduced by media technology, films and audio to create a connection that previously was non-existent in exhibitions. With processes and half finished pieces being exposed to the audience, it takes away the ‘shine’ and brings back the idea of art as part of everyday life. In a way art seems still visual, however the way its perceived has changed as suggested by Howe and Classen (2013, pp.29) “art became a little less of a ‘thing’ and a little more of a ‘process’.” 

My Project 

Overall I think the direction my project follows the idea of the futurists, in attempts to thin the line between art and the everyday. Connecting people with their senses in processes that are common to us, smell and taste through the act of cooking being the area I want to experiment with and explore.  This reading has reinforced the idea of creating a cookbook. I want to show the differences in value of taste and smell throughout history, including old western beliefs, medicinal recipes in contrast of fast food of today. Howe and Classen (2013) have highlighted how senses can be portrayed in art. Throughout the chapter using artists that have tried to counteract the modern visual culture and reinforce multi-sensory experiences. I already had a good understanding of senses throughout history regarding the western rise to visualism, from reading Worlds of sense, (Classen, 1993). But this reading has educated me on the importance of sensory artists and their rebellion on a visually dominant culture that only allows sight-minded artists into gallery spaces. Cracks are being revealed in modern art museums suggesting the idea that sense is apart of the art process, and more knowledge is to be gained from multi-sensory museums. 

A big part of my project is to gain the back relatability and knowledge of a hands-on approach that appears lost in many art pieces. The untouchable visual surfaces cause a disconnect and I want people to be able to experience a part of art in the everyday. 

References:

- Howes, D. and Classen, C., 2013. Ways of sensing: Understanding the senses in society. Routledge. pp. 17-32.

- Kant, I., 1911 Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. trans. J.C. Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon Press

- Arnold, K., 2003. Skulls, Mummies and Unicorns’ Horns: Medicinal Chemistry in Early English Museums; in Anderson, R.G.W. ed., 2003. Enlightening the British: knowledge, discovery and the museum in the eighteenth century. British Museum Publications Limited.

- Classen, C., 1993. Worlds of Sense: exploring the senses in history and across cultures. Routledge. 

- Carrà, C., 1910-11. Funeral of the Anarchist Galli. [Oil on canvas]. 

- Waterhouse, J.W., 1908. The Soul of the Rose. [Oil on canvas].

- Marinetti, F.T., 1989. The futurist cookbook. Bedford Arts.

[floralaural]

Exercise #2

While Luigi Russolo’s Futurist approach to noise-sound in L’Arte dei Rumori (1913) reciprocates Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s previously established ideals of the glorification of violence, energy, and war, George Antheil’s My Ballet Mécanique (1925) seems much more abstract and socialist in comparison. Marinetti himself states in the Futurist manifesto: “[w]e want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman” (Marinetti, 3). In a modern context, this is not very far off to me from the kind of manifesto a self-proclaimed “incel” would use in order to justify shooting up his school. I believe this language is dangerous because it is obscuring itself in the name of art, but as Marinetti’s future political activities show, dangerous ideas never remain ideas-- they evolve into real-life praxis. 

While I do agree with Russolo’s sentiments about “break[ing] at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer[ing] the infinite variety of noise-sounds” (Russolo, 6) as a way to evolve into the future, the ideas that bolster his are problematic. I haven’t even touched on his usage of the word “primitive,” in which colonization definitely serves as an influence. What Russolo is asking for is something that has already been happening in these “primitive” societies, most particularly speaking about West Africa. Many popular styles of music that developed there involve vocal techniques, such as call-and-response, and ways of playing that Russolo probably would not understand due to his approach to noise-sound as related to the machinery working alongside human bodies throughout industrialization. 

In regards to modern electronic music culture, it’s very easy to make connections between Russolo’s romantic noise-sound theories and modern artists. Look at Sophie, for example. Utilizing heavily processed noise and industrially-influenced sounds, she is creating a trans future for noise-sound in the modern world, all the while rejecting Marinetti’s violent spirit through embodying her music with her identity as a trans woman (something Marinetti definitely wouldn’t have liked).

While Russolo seemed more focus on the overlapping and combination of sounds from the industrial hum of a cityscape including sounds of cars, factories, or the din of a pub, I saw in Antheil’s writing a larger focus on the sound as form itself, not where it comes from. With a focus on atonality and only considering form in terms of length, he proposes “the first physical realization of the fourth dimension” (2). Where Russolo’s Futurist ideas include energy, fast-paced violence, and charging ahead with no plans, Antheil’s are in drawing out sounds for hours, days, weeks at a time, in order to slow it down in both process and final outcome to consider it something outside of music and noise, but allowing it to become a pathway into a fourth dimension of being. This reminds me of the Sufi practice of chanting phrases and sounds for long periods of time in order to connect with Allah. While Antheil’s writing is more spiritual, Russolo’s is more mechanical, industrial-- much like the dichotomy Europeans set up against African colonies in order to prove themselves as more “civilized” through rejecting spiritual ideas for the practices of math and science instead. 

[valiumvenus]

“W.I.T.C.H. is an all-women Everything. It’s theater, revolution, magic, terror, joy, garlic flowers, spells. It’s an awareness that witches and gypsies were the original guerrillas and resistance fighters against oppression — particularly the oppression of women — down through the ages. Witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary (This possibly explains why nine million of them have been burned.) Witches were the first Friendly Heads and Dealers, the first birth-control practitioners and abortionists, the first alchemists. They bowed to no man, being the living remnants of the oldest culture of all — one in which men and women were equal sharers in a truly cooperative society, before the death-dealing sexual, economic, and spiritual repression of the Imperialist Phallic Society took over and began to destroy nature and human society.”

– Excerpt from the W.I.T.C.H.* manifesto written in 1968

[...]

* Brazenly anarchist, anti-hierarchal, and wildly playful, W.I.T.C.H. was a female-led collective, including members of all genders, that engaged in political and surrealist protest actions in the late 1960s – 70s. Although poorly documented and understudied, the group was principally associated with the Women’s Liberation Movement and its acronym would change according to the group’s needs. It was also one of the first collectives to link the international history of witchcraft (worldwide traditions include Vodun of West Africa, Vodou of the Caribbean, Santería of Cuba, Santa Muerte of Mexico, Hoodoo of the Southern U.S., Shamanism of Asia, Stregheria of Italy, Wicca of England and much more) to political activism and the relentless fight for civil rights. This history, powered by female leadership, craft, and medicine, can be traced as far back as 2nd Century writings on Hecate: the Hellenic goddess of light, entrance-ways, knowledge of herbs and poisonous plants, magic and moons.”

“Hecate” at Various Small Fires