Let's add 2 + 2, shall we? We have a site largely organized around white
subjectivity and visuality that plays footsie with fascist aesthetics.
But that's supposed to be OK because the authors' attraction to "the
passions of war" — what a turn of phrase — is unconscious,
sexualized, or somehow symbolic. Anyone who buys that might want to
brush up on their Klaus Theweleit.
Oh, sorry, I have to be much more explicit here. My point was that the pamphlet we are discussing has a clear ideological orientation, toward a specific kind of anarchy, and one should beware the consequences.
I think that in the US, the fascination with Tiqqun, especially "Civil War," plus the whole Invisible Committee trend, has become flat-out dangerous. The main reason is that the American followers of those French and Italian writers are naive about the consequences of insurrection. They think, like Sorel long ago, that if you light the spark, the world will explode into leftist revolution. Whereas it seems obvious to me that today, any kind of urban-scale violence runs a strong risk of legitimating vigilante-type actions by far-right militias, which are numerous, well-armed and pumped up to high levels of fury by the fact that for eight years we had a black president. In the worst case, these far-right militias could receive overt support from Trump, who already encourages them in vague terms. They would also get a lot of overt support from racist elements in the police. Then you would have a situation even worse than the horrific murders that just happened in Pittsburg, because it could be supported by up to forty percent of the population, as well as the executive branch of the government. This is a worst-case scenario, for sure: but don't dismiss it before you read the recent New York Times article, "US Law Enforcement Failed to See the Threat of White Nationalism. Now They Don't Know How To Stop It." The Intercept has a more pointed article on this, "The FBI Has Quietly Investigated White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement," which they published over a year ago.
The idea that violent leftist protest can backfire is not new to me: under much less tense conditions, around 2011 or maybe a bit earlier, I argued the same thing against Joshua Clover, whose line at the time was "the riots are coming," and who likes to have himself photographed in a very cool Walter Benjamin pose from the 1930s. Which brings us to aesthetics.
I think the followers of this kind of anarchy are more or less unconsciously attracted to the sexualized passions of war, which is insane given the rising level of armed violence inside the US, plus the rising likelihood of full-on wars internationally. The attraction works through a certain kind of aesthetics which is on full display in the pamphlet. It feeds on a heroic myth that goes back through history to the origins of anarchy; but the most readily available source is the imagery and narrative of the 1930s. The fantasmatic element of this passion allows for right and left elements to be blurred; probably it's something like the blurring of subject-positions that Freud describes in "A Child Is Being Beaten." Anyway, I think that blurring is quite likely the source of the weird neogothic typeface used in the pamphlet. That particular detail is so strange that it has led Ted to think the whole thing has been carefully crafted to draw people into the alt-right, an idea that does make sense in the context of alt-right rhetorical strategies. But I wanted to point out that you don't need to go to the alt-right to explain this stuff. It has been in the left-anarchist street-fighting culture for a long time. That kind of anarchy already inhabits a shared space with the extreme right, and it is time for everybody, especially other anarchists, to understand this.
I am not against every kind of anarchy, not by any means. The variety in question goes back to Italy in the Seventies, during the so-called Years of Lead, which inaugurated modern street-fighting in Europe. I know about this from working with Toni Negri and the journal Multitudes in Paris: we were always viciously criticized by rival Italians and die-hard Situationists who thought we were reformist! Which we were, we actually wanted to change laws and social norms on the basis of the new productive possibilities inherent in networked society. If you read "Civil War," published in English by MIT Press, you will discover something quite different: a very Nietzschean philosophical orientation that exalts violent conflict as the only way to break free from the all-pervasive norms of the imperial order. (You'll also see a more sophisticated version of the pamphlet aesthetic in the pages of Tiqqun, by the way.)
This nihilist philosophy has informed the current cycle of violent street conflicts that began in the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens way back in 2008. I started to catch a hint of similar positions among anarchists in California, during the movements against student debt around that same time. That's when I began to question the positions of people like Clover. Since then, the followers of the Invisible Committee in the US have grown tremendously.
You all know I was part of the counter-globalization movements that began in 1999. I also went through the big strikes in Paris in 1995. These experiences convinced me of the transformative power that massive street protests can have in democratic societies. Strikes, demos and occupations are all very good at activating civil society, it's obvious if you look at the political consequences of Occupy and of Ferguson. Compared to that, the nihilism of people who just want to fight, coupled with the naivete of those who think it will all culminate in a liberating commune, appeared to me to be a detail. Well, looking back I'd say I was also complacent and a bit naive about these things for a time myself, but that time is long over. In the long wake of 2008 we have experienced a dramatic shift, and this is what needs to be debated and understood. Critique, protest and resistance against frankly suicidal social norms is more urgent than ever, which is why Tiqqun has such prestige. But as the democratic order decays, which it is clearly doing, the naives and the nihilists could easily spark, not a civil war, but a massive repression that would swiftly get rid of them and at the same time, justify a hard-right shift going far beyond what we already experience.
How to press for social change without increasing dangerous polarization? The question is not going to go away, and that's what I was curious to exchange about with Ian.
Once again, sorry I was so unclear in my first post, Brian