anarcha adventures

Hmm, I didn’t go. But I was wrong about Forbes - its wasn’t a dsp stunt at all. It was an actual anarchist organised and anarchist executed protest. I’m totally glad.

Affinity groups managed to shut down ANZ banks in the city for the day.

An image of a clown being puched over from moz’s pictures of the actions.

This kind of sums it up for me … clowns pushing down clowns. The new world order is here.

A friend of mine likes to characterise Lenin as a pirate sporting a parrot on one shoulder. “Build the revolutionary party! Arrk!” Trotsky The Parrot squawks. But how many of us actuall take a step back from this false ideology of mass?

Its almost self-explainatory when you think about how a violent overthrow of the state and social order should be achieved: first you get the guns, then you get the power, then you get the women (or in lenist-speak: fist you get the marxist theory, then you get the mass party, then you get to be Lenin). It’s so obvious, that I’d never thought about it being wrong before today.

What point is there in mass? A mass objectifies its participants, it makes them into faceless “things” - spectators of their own lives. A mass is defined by its number of participants. If it becomes massive enough, it develops a gravity of its own - like the Communist Party of Australia did for a while (people knew it was fucked, but it was the best way for them to struggle). The real problem of a mass isn’t that its large and globular, but that it nurtures hierarchy. Mass makes hierarchy necessary to shape and control itself, to present a front to the outside world (and create that gravitational effect that draws in other participants). Those on top of the hierarchy become disconnected from (while speaking for) those in the mass. They’re visible and responsible. In taking responsibility, they take agency away from those in the mass. The mass might grow, but as less is required from those in the mass (directed from on high) it grows sluggish and unresponsive. Those in the mass expect those leading it to protect them because the’ve given their agency and ownership over to be controlled.

How can an organisation like this claim to be revolutionary? It can’t challenge society because it apes society in its very structure.

The revolution will happen only when a large number of people truly feel able to own their own lives, and their own actions and decide to use their actions to create a better world for all. It sounds like idealism, but its not. Everyone must truly feel a part (or that they are open to become a part) of the lives of others in a more meaningful way than is now possible. And they’ve got to know (that is, come to their own understanding of) how its gotta be achieved. Otherwise they’re just a mass, disconnected from their ‘leaders’, and prone to be sold out on the first wave of treachery.

I don’t think that building this kind of universal working-class consciousness is going to be possible by turning up to rallies, forcing pamphlets out of every orifice, and shouting at people.

Over heard as I sat at the desk in Jura books: “This is such a trashy area”. Spoken by a man walking past with a woman. I tend to agree. I come home from the bookshop covered in grime from the cars passing on Parramatta Road.

Sydney is such a trashy place.

AWOL doesn’t apologise.

Automous Anarchist Womens Liberation: an attempt at a founding document.

1 Foundation

• The AWOL perspective is anarchist and feminist.
• The AWOL perspective is relevant to a class perspective. We are opposed to all hierarchy, and our comrades should join us in this actively, joyfully, as equals in struggle. We do not wish to be relegated to minority status, or elevated as ’specially disadvataged’ heroes. We think our struggle is vital and relevent to all struggles against oppression (of capital, racism, homophbia, poverty, knowlege, privilege, &tc). Our struggle is broader than ourselves but it must be expressed through our means within our own situations.
• We think that we are deserving of recognition and equality from others also immersed in struggle and yet this is not often forthcoming.
• The purpose of AWOL is to emplower women (and others disempowered) in a patriarchal society and to ultimately transform this society until it is no longer oppressive of any class of person or individual.
• Our purpose is not merely to promote the interests of one class of women within a society that is fundamentally flawed. It is not to express ourselves within the rigid character roles that patriarchal capitalism allows to dissenting women (jaded lesbian, suicide doll, downtrodden community worker, neurotic housewife), but to break free of these roles and express ourselves freely without fear or guilt.
• AWOL has purpose, it has direction, and is not afraid to organise and structure to achieve our purposes.

• AWOL sometimes desires equality and recognition from our male anarchist comrades. We desire peaceful co-existence and we offer peace in exchange. Too often women come under attack from male anarchist comrades who:

  • refuse to look at their own role in promoting patriarchy
  • bully us because, on a deep level, they do not like assertive women
  • believe in a feminist conspiracy
  • see gender oppression as none of their concern
  • do not see that the actual oppression of us as women by our comrades is a political issue, and refuse to stand by us when it is revealed to them
  • belong to an informal boys club
  • take credit, speak for us, and decide for us (when these actions are against their politics)
  • deny their emotions and expect us to deny our own. They accuse us us of being hysterical when we’re upset, passionate, or speak from personal experience
  • treat us as sexual objects
  • treat us violently or roughly
  • ascribe ‘feminine’ traits to us - they assume we don’t like computers and machines, but that we won’t mind doing their washing up and cleaning the communal space
  • deny there is a gender-based and economically motivated oppression of women as women

  (more…)

The time is nigh for organised anarchy. Not merely the anarchy that leaves us squabbling about who’ll be eaten first by the wolves of 4th wave industrial reform. We need organisation, but how do we get it? How do we get a mass of members, how do we put politics across?

Slogans are passe. Cute, tricky actions that make people think twice are passe. There’s no longer any time to think twice. Australian workers are being overridden by a squat cowboy and his tall deputy sheriffs.

What are we doing? What can we do? What can we possibly do at this stage to stop IR reform? To work within the unions is to work in a corrupt oligarchy that depends of keeping workers down and preventing them from striking. To work outside the unions is to work without resources and be labelled a sectarian loony leftist. To criticise the unions is to create a wedge between possible allies. (Are the unions my allies? Not really, but perhaps they masquerade as the enemy of my enemy well enough at this time.)

I’m no intellectual. I can’t sit and watch the world crumble while I write about it with a knowing whimsy. C’est laVie.

Is there a “we” who will do something? I doubt it. Organisation is difficult, and those who have it tend to have ulterior motives so entrenched that they aren’t capable of moving swiftly enough to call it spontaneity. But those who don’t have it aren’t capable of moving decisively or in large enough numbers to make themselves felt (even to themselves).

Solidarity is passe these days. There are those who write the line, those who tow the line, and those who defy lines in an ever-striving movement toward clarity. Clarity mean criticism, and criticism is rejection. Solidarity might mean standin by someone even though you are critical of them. It might also mean forming convenient alliances and betraying them when the joint threat gets too near.

How can National anarchism exist? How can people reject hierarchy, rules, authority and endeavour to live peaceully as equals with one qualifier: race.

This is as badly though-out and insane as “anarcho capitalism” - a bizarre ideology that promulgates a myth of employer freedoms. Like, hello, open your fucking eyes! Employers already enjoy so many freedoms that as a working class anarchist, I’m thankful to have a state to protect my last shreds of dignity (even though I’d love to be smashing that state into pieces).

This is even worse than middle-class class warriors who believe that bourgeois ideology is somehow “not ideology”. To descend into ideology is, for them, left wing, subversive, political and wrong. To challenge, to think critically, to deabte is wrong. Fucking sanctimonious morons.

Speaking of sanctimonious morons, someone from wikipedia emailed me privately about some edits to the article on Darlington (NSW) which neighbours Redfern and may or may not include The Block. Hence the controversy. He emailed me with from on high, telling me that I might need to “grow as a person” because I “might not understand the aborignal connection to land”. “Maybe someday” I would come to understand him, but “until that day” I should “please practice tolerance as best you can. ” Of course his email ends with “Peace”.

Like all sanctimonious assholes, he wants to have the last word and leave everybody smiling, in awe.

I bet he didn’t see me coming.

This is what they think of us. Really, it is the whittling away of the rigid, stupid power structures that define their reality that they fear.

We will win.

I want to start a talking point group. Here are my unrules that I hope would facilitate discussion.

1. There is a topic.
   The topic might be decided in advance (for advertising), or democratically on the day.
   Everyone should reference the topic in some way.
   The topic isn’t an advertising ploy that is forgotten about as soon as the discussion starts.
2. There is a moderator to facilitate discussion.
   The moderator can take reasonable action to facilitate discussion such as timing comments, speaking lists, and requesting that some people refrain for a period.
   If the moderator is always the same person, there will be a natural bias develop. Mix it up. Gain skills, have fun.
3. No minutes are taken.
   If someone wants to write notes they are welcome to, but it is not done as a matter of course.
   The point of conversation is the process of learning and discovery, not the enshrinement of our special product.
   Making more work for someone (the minute-taker) creates a hierarchy of exploitation.
4. Anyone who calls for “less talk more action” is an agent provocatuer and should be asked to leave.
   Action grows from theory, theory grows from honest analysis of the world. More action traps us in a cycle of powerlessness and frenetic energy that we don’t understand.
5. Rules mean nothing if they’re not agreed to willingly.
   Rules should be flexible.
   Rules should be reasonable.
   Rules should have purpose.

They seek him here, They seek him there,
Those yankees seek him everywhere!
Is he in Heaven? Is he in Hell?
Only CNN will tell!

Osama, it seems has been hiding in plain sight all this time. The current wave of bombings in London make this plain.

He is not one man, but many. He can fly, he speaks many languages and resonates in many cultures, but as a man of the people he still catches the London Tube.

I take some reports from The Australian.

• An almost eye witness, 61-year-old project manager Richard Jones, blames a man who “looked foreign” and “kept bending over into this bag”. Though he got off the bus before the explosion and has no real idea who planted the bomb. A foreign-looking youth with a backpack is racist, its a smear, its fear-mongering and iths without basis.
• Now there’s an imaginatively named “Al-Qaida in Europe” who’ve taken responsibility for the bombings.
• But they were previously unknown! Imagine that. Maybe its because they didn’t exist?
• Security analysts seem to all have the same opinion on who could’ve caused the bombings. Yet their opinions aren’t based in any evidence at all.
• The smartest man in Europe, Sebestyab Gorka (a security analyst) says: “The first thing that’s very obvious is the synchronised nature of the attacks, and that’s pretty classic for al-Qa’ida or al-Qa’ida-related organisations,”. I’m no genius like Gorka, but every man and dog have access to knowledge of the kind ‘8 bombs are better than one’, and the ‘classic’ signatures might not be as simple as ’simulataneous bombings’. Also note that he claims that an “al-Qa’ida-related organisation” is responsible - it appears he is using al-Qaida as a shorthand for ‘”terrorist”.
• The second smartest man in Europe, Rolf Tophoven, said “There are lots of parallels with the Madrid blast … We have to assume it’s a terrorist attack,”. He did decline to expand upon what the parallels were. I guess its above our heads.

Protesting at Forbes 500 on August 30

What, me, manipulated? It seems to me that protesting at the Forbes 500 conference will make me into another notch on the DSP belt. They will be able to boast that they got me to come to ‘their’ event. They can report to their hierarchical superiors that another unit of Green Left Weekly was sold and another unit of radicalisation has been achieved. (more…)