Both Trump and the Libertarian Party try and brand themselves as an alternative to the status-quo, in the hopes of attracting dissatisfied voters angry at the growing cost of living, the current war, and the immiseration of everyday life for working-class people.
my hot take on the booing is that it was staged to splash the libertarian brand across all major media sites to scoop up these very votes the article is talking about; at such a crucial time before the election, we’re seeing Biden fail to inspire the masses—and, frankly, his age—and Trump continuously failing as a the successful, antiestablishment businessman he convinced many he was in 2016. isn’t the alt-right’s strategy for this election to sway votes away from Biden; no consideration for where they land, left or right, just as long as Biden doesn’t land them?
The author does not seem to have read Azarov or at least his references to sources leave this impression. If he was doing his research right now, I would recommend him to browse one book for hints about how the RIAU called themselves, and for additional sources of literature. But in general, I think he has the right conclusion. :)
The PDF sadly isn't searchable (it's image, so it's a black hole for most search engines).
My understanding: they called themselves the "Insurgent Army", sometimes the "Insurgent Division" and did not declare a state or claim a territory. When they were popular and widespread, they were more formally known as the "Revolutionary People's Army of Ukraine" and "Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine" (kontrrazvedka was the counterintelligence branch which did dirty deeds like assassinations, espionage, counter-espionage, sabotage, expropriation / grand theft, etc)
A related story:
The first known anarchist state, and perhaps the only one, was to my understanding a republic declared by rebelling sailors and fortress-builders of the Russian fleet on the tiny North Estonian island of Naissaar (Nargen). (source) The "state" was laughably tiny and the population too - but the name was backed by possession of two battleships (Sevastopol and Petropavlovsk), with the ironic twist that the crew far outnumbered island dwellers. The only body to ever recognize the "state" was the Soviet of Tallinn, which existed during a double rule (togehter with the prototype Republic of Estonia) in the power vacuum between the Czarist retreat and the advance of imperial German troops. Evacuating before the German advance, the battleships sailed first to Finland and then Kronstadt, and the anarchists of the short-lived republic became core organizers among the sailors who later rose up in the Kronstadt Rebellion.
I totally agree that "outside" protestors shouldn't be considered any kind of reasoning for dismissing a movement. It does imply the movement is bigger than local or territorial lines and therefore should be taken more seriously than not. In regards to anti-national revolutionists, that's actually a very specific point of pride, and it should be. We are all people regardless of the territorial lines we are forced into. If we can reach outside the scope of the nation, we have in a sense, beaten it. This is why I see internationalism, or as some say, globalism, to be a very important goal for all movements focused on human rights. We are more than just where we are on the Earth. Humanity is a connected species, and in my opinion, that does go beyond just tech and state structures. I feel that reactionary solidarity should not be dismissed, though. Class warfare, for example, has a certain level of necessity for movements against oppression. I do not disagree with oppressing the oppressor. I think it's a tactic we've actually seen too little on the left and perhaps could explain some of the incrementalism we've seen so far. I am, however, an accelerationist. Personally, I feel the more I am fought, the more I can fight back - and I do think that's really important to allow others on the left to utilize too. We must find ways to equal the playing field, and I think literally all forms of solidarity have their roles in that. I think to say we cannot alienate those that alienate us leaves us as the only ones alienated. Those that disregard the use of reactionary solidarity disregard the use of tactics used against us. This is actually a larger philosophical argument of pacifism. I like to call it the batman argument. You're putting yourself on a moral high-ground that only hampers your effectiveness. The "bad guys" keep going and keep coming because they are not actually stopped. They are not, as some of the more intensive left likes to say, "stomped". The right-wing stomps, and they also steal from us constantly. We should stomp and steal back, while also using transformative tactics. Never disregard the importance of diversity, not in anything, but especially not in warfare. Honestly, I see this argument against it as dividing the left up more. There are aggressive leftists. They have their right to be, because of self-defense. The right-wing fucking murders us, to say we should not be angry and that such anger somehow makes us weaker... I just simply disagree.
I generally agree with CrimethInc articles so extensively that I I find it hard to pick at something in them.
This time, however, I find the claim...
Palestinian liberation will only come about as the result of a full-scale political crisis in the United States
...but I don't find the evidence.
Firstly, Israel is not wholly dependent on US weapons, and according to most measures, it has already secured a military victory - at such cost in civilian lives that it's a diplomatic defeat - everyone who can count the casualties and destruction knows that Israeli politicians gave zero fucks, alienated many supporters (they had great international support when Hamas attacked them) and very likely will receive an invitation to the ICC (hopefully along with Hamas leaders, so they can be tried together - reality may differ as both will try to avoid the court).
Also, if the claim were true, and a full-scale political crisis in the US was required for Palestinian liberation, then sadly, assuming a full political crisis incapacitates the government to some degree - there would be considerable risk that Palestinian liberation and Ukrainian independece sit on opposite plates of the scale. Myself, I don't like the concept that one group's liberation and another group's freedom can be contradictory. However, it seems undeniable that the US war machine is currently supplying weapons for two main causes, one of them reasonably ethical (defending Ukraine) and the other not (bombing Gaza into a previous epoch of history).
Regarding what the US government actually does... I don't read every article and post about diplomacy (so I could be missing a lot) but it appears to me that the US government is at the moment actively dissuading Israel from going into Rafah (the remaining comparatively less damaged settlement) - both by talk and refusal to send heavy air-dropped bombs.
This could be due to international pressure (the US has Arab allies and has to present some facade to them), could be due to protests (Biden surely worries about approaching elections). It could even work - but might not, because Israel has other sources of weapons and might empty its stockpiles of some categories to make the final push. :( Still, as a long-time and reliable donor, the US government has much leverage on Israel. Especially as it recently helped mitigate the Iranian missile and drone attack, downing Iranian munitions above Jordan and Iraq and perhaps elsewhere before they reached Israel. Biden can - overly simplified - send a message of "we assisted and protected you, we have your best interest in mind, and it's in your best interest to stop now". Netanyahu might listen or ignore the message.
In the end, however, a word of caution - whatever happens, whatever the US does - if Hamas returns to power, that will not be Palestinian liberation, because the Hamas guys weren't liberating anyone. In fact, they were beating, imprisoning and killing some of their Palestinian political competitors for the old-fashioned goal of staying in power.
I literally cannot find the word "Hamas" in the article at all. It speaks of everyone except those who started the current war. That's a massive oversight - oversight to the point of blinding oneself to a serious setback right around the corner. I'm not happy to see some of my comrades blinding themselves.
If one seeks a path to liberation, it has to include some recipe of not letting Hamas recover and return to power. And somehow getting lunatics out of Israeli government. The US has a role to play, and it may even be a decisive role, but as long as one side has rulers who prefer shooting civilians, and the other side has rulers who prefer to obliterate urban centers with bombardment... local political leadership must change, and no liberation will come unless it changes.
This is an awesome information resource! Also, free Palestine, and THE STATE CANNOT ERASE THE PEOPLE! THE PEOPLE WILL ERASE THE STATE! THE PEOPLE MUST ERASE THE STATE! YOU WANT WAR? YOU'LL GET WAR, MOTHERFUCKERS! Ahem. This is a very important subject that shouldn't be ignored. The military industrial complex and their relationship to silencing protests has to be dealt with by the people. It's completely unacceptable. The government (the state) won't, because they're fucking weak and greedy. It's been going on for so long now. Always the time for the people to use that second amendment. Equalize American weaponry or the weaponry must be destroyed, and it has to stop being sent to murder people in unrelated countries. The state can't keep doing this to people, It has to be stopped if it won't stop itself.
A mother, angry about state motherfuckers, downvoted on mother's day. Damn.
The second amendment: "WELL REGULATED MILITIA", which is quite specifically a citizen's army. I'm literally just advocating rights we were guaranteed at the beginning of our constitution. This shouldn't actually be controversial. If you can't regulate to an equal playing field, the only way to "well regulate" is by destruction. "Arms" isn't exclusive to guns just as it isn't exclusive to bombs. It is however made exclusive to THE PEOPLE'S RIGHT to "bear arms". The people can find equality in arms that aren't totally insane (such as the arms they had when the constitution was written), and that is an important part of saying "well regulated". They designated the military as not an official part of "the people" (the citizenry), and the military itself technically has no right to bear arms. That is why it is within the purview of the second amendment, and arguably the government's job, to destroy all arms not accessible to the people (and in the case of the military, arms not accessible to ALL PEOPLE). The very point of it is to assure equal weaponry so that the people are not forced from their freedom by the power of the larger societal structures, whether that be a state, a military, or capitalism.
The government owes the people respect, not the other way around. They put food on their table with our money, our work, whether we agree or not. The government's money isn't the government's money, it's the people's money, distributed. If they're going to take our money with or WITHOUT CONSENT and put it towards something else, especially something like murdering innocent people for what mostly seems to be a religious cause, we have to be allowed to complain. We have to be able to shut them down if they won't change, as the people. The founding fathers intended for our system to change, or we wouldn't even be able to make amendments. The constitution itself was an intended change from the static religious monarchy of Britain, which required civil war because it was static (it refused to equitably change).
The state, especially the federal government, technically only exists to regulate currency (and resulting industry) as the people need for maximum well-being. So the state needs to get their heads out of their ass and do it instead of trying to silence protestors during national crisis and every war or they'll be, in a sense, fired. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. Then again, if they were actually doing their fucking job, none of this shit would be happening. The constitution isn't an unreasonable structure. The biggest problem is that we have let capitalism completely overwrite it, which is quite literally the opposite of what the constitution intended. Once again, "WELL REGULATED".
If you are aware of them, why don't you join an existing cooperative like Motion Twin? I would recommend go to one first before trying to make your own
In gamedev like in many other endeavor, I would not start a coop or a regular company without some experience or without at least a clear project in mind.
Like you said, there is no big capital investment in gamedev but there is still one: time. In a coop you are asking people to invest their own time in the hope that a few months down the line, a video game will be able to make a profit in a very competitive market. You have to give people reason to do it and to do it with you instead of going solo. That's how FOSS projects work.
You can lead the way: work a month on a project you would love and show people the result. It will be a WIP but as recruitment goes "help me finish that game" is easier to sell than "let's get together discuss what you want but I promise there will be profit down the line, but I haven't figured a business model yet"
That's okay as your perspective, I would like you to consider that Motion Twin is not remote so those are different project ideas. I would say it depends on how you approach those types of projects. Realistically the scope of what I can accomplish solo is different to the one even in a small team, and the vision that I create solo certainly will not be the same as the vision that would get created from a collaborative process utilizing methods like Sociocracy. I already got some interest from 2 other people, in practice from my experience even between 2 persons team and a solo team there is an enormous difference, that's why I am searching for some hypothetical collaborators. I agree that this is a very competetive market, I think that in practice almost everywhere there is some competition and I would rather work on things that interest me. I think every moment that I don't murder myself I risk that I will die of more painful death than what I could give myself through picking the most appropriate form of suicide, so I am personally fine with risk and if someone is not then that's fine.
Kind of. I'll have to check out their shredder designs. I bought a filistruder for a local makerspace awhile back, because I wanted to be able to reuse my bad 3d prints and supports etc, but wanted it to be available to a wider community since I wouldn't use it enough to justify the cost. Unfortunately, at the time, solutions for shredding/granulating solid prints were few and far between (and expensive to make or buy). And if you can't get the plastic small enough, the extruder on its own isn't terribly useful. I'd very much like to find a decent solution so I can get this going again.
Decentralizing the system of some plastic waste with these machines is really interesting. The price for obtaining a good machine is not very affordable and seems to require a demanding installation.
1 and 2 make sense, but 3 is just commie propaganda (and I'm OK with striving for the idealistic version). Normies do NOT like magically suddenly not having personal posessions. You will never, ever, EVER convince a normie communism is good by taking their stuff.
And communists and anarchists do not necessarily a problem with personal possessions. The idea is to seize the means of production aka companies and to use those for the public good by transferring them into public or collective ownership. However for consumer goods like clothes, furniture, food, bicycles and so forth would in most cases remain private property, within reasonable levels(no mansions).
So most people would actually gain property in this case, as they have a share in public and collective property.
If applied at a country level maybe they'd "gain" posessions, but think about how 3 would apply at a campus protest. There isn't a means of production to own so long as the current state exists (what, the campus itself? yea cops aren't going to be OK with that), and that's not happening soon.
This concept of free association is interesting to me as I’m not very familiar with it. How does it not devolve into warring gangs of people seeking to undo each other’s work?
For example, a group of builders perceives a need for more housing, so they want to build an apartment building at the edge of town. Another group who gardens there is opposed. Clearly there is a need for some process that mediates between these groups. But if not through consensus or democracy, how is this done? Free association seems great for things that are not controversial, but almost any large project is going to be controversial, and there will be a nearly constant need to resolve such disputes. How to do so efficiently and without hierarchical relations is one of the biggest challenges to anarchy, and I don’t see how free association solves this issue.
Well I think part of the answer comes from having a society that is more interconnected than we currently have.
If there were people that were both part of the gardening group and part of the builder's group then those people would have the necessary common knowledge to be able to satisfy the needs of both groups.
That is part of why I think a society of anarchists necessarily needs people to be educated in ways that make them a lot more generalist than we are now (hence the emphasis most anarchists have with the idea of self-sufficiency).
Edit: Also in the cases where there isn't significant overlap between the two groups having a third group that does have knowledge of both of them participate in the decision making would also serve the same function.
Yeah I mean there are lots of possible mediation strategies but my experience is that having a formal process of who should be consulted and how disputes get settled does avoid a lot of conflicts and bad feelings. Of course, this does add complexity, places where hierarchies can creep in, and inefficiencies in solving community problems. So there is probably no one perfect system but we may need to experiment with lots of structures to see which has the best balance of features for each specific circumstance.
Maybe I misunderstood but Andrew seems to be indicating that there isn’t a need for formal groups to manage shared resources, and that such groups will naturally arise and disappear based on common interests. But I think there will naturally be factions with different priorities in terms of how common resources should be utilized, just as there are today. Perhaps as you say with a more developed sense of solidarity these problems will lessen but I have a hard time thinking they will disappear.
I am not sure I can envision how this free association concept would work in practice for these controversial issues, but I certainly am interested to see this principle in action on a small scale to find out.
Now I'm not 100% sure of this because I'm working from memory, but I think Kropotkin gave examples for this in "Mutual aid".
For Eskimos he mentions that anything an individual catches or gathers belongs to the clan as a whole, and then it is redistributed. People living in tribes (with no concept of a separate family) generally live 'each for all'.
Village communities, on the other hand, recognized only movable property as privately owned, while land belonged to the community, and everything had to be done with the consent of the community.
When disputes did arise, they were treated as communal affairs and mediators were found to pass a resolution. If the resolution was not agreeable to one party, the case would go before the folkmoot and the decision reached was final. The party that had to provide some reparation could either accept, or leave the village and go somewhere else, but there were no law enforcers.
A little less rosy than Kropotkin, and not really anarchist, but Icelanders lived without a state until the late 13th century. They had a (bi)yearly gathering (the "Thing") where all grievences could be brought forth before the judges and people. When a sentance was passed, it was up to the family of the 'winner' to see that the other side accepted it, there was no state figure to force them.
Right? I mean, it all sounds great in theory except we know that people are opportunists and eventually will see a situation they can exploit that undermines the system.
It's the basic problem that as soon as someone starts a gang that is willing to violate the social contracts that motivate good behavior in an anarchy system the anarchy system doesn't have any mechanism ready to defend itself and has to rely on people being spontaneously able to band together and violate the tenants they are trying to uphold by organizing into a violent hierarchical organization capable of fighting back.
I think you have a point and a decentralized system will only stay decentralized if it has practices and norms that actively combat the natural development of hierarchies. This is generally what we see in non-hierarchical forager societies which are generally the most successful examples we know of at putting these principles into practice. But at least historically, these societies have not been as successful at combatting hierarchical violence by outsiders. For this reason I think a larger real world anarchistic society cannot necessarily pursue maximum human freedom without considering economic efficiency, organized self-defense, etc. How to develop such institutions and practices without hierarchy is a largely unsolved question, and it may be necessary to learn by trial and error.
During the Ukrainian Revolution, there were all sorts of gangs that emerged that killed Jews and stuff. What did anarchists do? They killed those pogromists in turn. Under conditions of anarchy, there is no state that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence to punish those who break the "social contract." Rather, there is a plurality of violence that various groups can inflict on offenders. If you fuck around, you will find out.
Is this a violent sort of life? Not really. It's not as if Indigenous or pre-state peoples live in violence all the time. Sure, violence did happen, so what?, violence happens all the time under state societies too. The difference is that without a state, people cannot call on a higher power to coerce so they have to rely on each other to keep each other safe. Besides, the people doing the raping, stealing, and killing in state societies are precisely the people protected by privilege and the state. Under conditions of anarchy, such privileges mean very little.
I'm very tired and should not be up right now, so sorry if this isn't super coherent or very well explained, but bear with me.
the people doing the raping, stealing, and killing
I do lean very libertarian/anarchist, but possibly my biggest issue with the concept is that you are now assuming that the people who would be targets of the violence would be the ones doing all that.
Having a monopoly on violence is bad, but on the other hand, the alternative sounds like vigilantism, which often leads to witch hunts. I'll bring up a practical example to explain myself better:
There's a streamer on Kick, whose name I won't mention, who streams himself going after (alleged) child abusers. Recently (yesterday I think) he and other people were confronting a supposed child abuser (they just called him a pedo, but I assume they meant child abuser; otherwise how would they know he's a pedo?) but they never showed any evidence of it. He was an old man. At one point a random stranger approached them to figure out what was going on, and they told him the old man was a child abuser. As a response, the stranger punched the old man, who fell backwards and hit the back of his head on pavement. He ended up laying unconscious in a large pool of blood. Rumours say he's probably dead, which doesn't seem far-fetched given the details.
In a lot of ways, having a monopoly on violence that is subject to hierarchies is quite bad, but the upside is that there is generally a due process where evidence needs to be presented, which will lead someone to be put in prison and not murdered - in most societies I know of. This can also be adjusted through laws and regulations. If someone practices vigilantism and murders someone like that, they themselves are subject to that law and might be put in prison. The vast majority of situations don't end up with police killing someone; but knocking someone out (or just down) can very easily end up with someone dying from hitting their head on a hard surface.
Basically, what I fear that a completely anarchical society would fall into a spiral of vigilantism, where people kill each other because someone somewhere said they are guilty of something and most people are incapable of evaluating the situation properly and conducting a proper investigation, and will immediately resort to violence. This becomes even more worrying when you consider that me saying that about the old man situation will make some feel justified in using violence against me, because in their head: "that guy was a pedo, and he's defending him, so he must be a pedo, so he also deserves to die".
Hope that made some sense, and sorry I'm replying to this 4 days later.
I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding that social relationships to harm are fundamentally changed under conditions of anarchy. I apologize for the misunderstanding as writing on obscure forums doesn't exactly encourage me to write with vigor.
Of course there would be a plurality of violence under conditions of anarchy, but this does not fundamentally mean the rule of vigilantism. Right now, people have been dealing with harm without the state for generations. These are found in criminalized communities like Black and Indigenous people, people who use drugs, people who engage in sex work, etc. These people develop mechanisms by which to deal with harm without the state and oftentimes without engaging in vigilantism. For these people, vigilantism is not a court of first resort but a last resort. Vigilantism puts a target on their back from the state. Instead, they talk it out, develop safety plans, plan boycotts and bans, etc.
Rather than thinking of justice in anarchic terms as vigilantism, think of it in terms of people dealing with harm and conflict in healthy ways.
Anthropology has a lot to teach us on how people dealt with such large-scale endeavors without the state. If there's conflict, they find a mediator or perhaps hold a meeting between the two groups to hash these things out. Sometimes, two groups would go to war. But anarchy is not merely statelessness, it means a society of consent and collaboration without hierarchy. Previous forms of statelessness may see peoples going to war or exert hierarchy with one another over any sort of disagreement or conflict, but anarchy means means a commitment to figuring out how to settle conflict and disagreements without hierarchy. So yes, anthropology has a lot to teach us on how people dealt with conflict in healthy ways. Sometimes they'd settle conflict in violent ways, but our purpose is to learn from these and do better.
tl;d: how is this done? talk to each other and learn from how people mediated conflict without states.
Would love to see resources on conflict resolution from anarchic societies if anyone has them.
My MIL is a community mediator using nonviolent communication which I highly recommend people read up on if they are interested. It’s interesting and useful stuff.
Challenge the assumption: By other means but to a great extent, violence IS being done by our current housing system. Unless you are born into wealth: We're fucked 6 ways from sunday. There is no middle class, never was.
We have working class, and then we have elites. If you're not a C-level executive, you are no more secure...in tech I see many of my peers learning this the hard way with wave after wave of layoffs.
So don't ignore the deaths of, evictions of, destabilization of lives and mental well-being, for all of those working 2 jobs and still not able to make rent. Living in their cars, while exectutives call them lazy and entitled. Dehumanization: check.
In fact, We dont devolve into Anarchism -- we advance towards it. It is checks and balances turned up to 11, gardening the weeds against any heirarchy of oppresion that might attempt to emerge.
If any devolving is happening: "Fasicism is capitalism in decay" about describes it.
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