Make Total Destroy Flaky Anarchism!
Q: Why are the fascists winning?
A: BECAUSE THEY FUCKING SHOW UP!
Q: How many anarchists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Wait, isn't the term "light" bulb offensive to the dark? Can we get a consensus on a new word? Oh wait, couldn't "con" sensus have negative connotations? Maybe we should come up with a more positive term. Let's do a quick go-round and get a temperature check...
I'm sick of showing up on time to meetings and waiting an hour for them to start because everyone's on "anarchist time." I'm sick of people bottomlining shit and then dropping the ball. I'm sick of all the talking, talking, talking that goes on around here with absolutely nothing to back it up. I'm sick of flaky anarchism.
Today there was supposed to be a meeting for a community phone tree, able to rally supporters to respond to state repression, gay bashing, or any instance where immediate assistance is required. More than twenty people signed up for this and agreed it was a good idea. Nobody showed. After a whole weekend of agonizing over how we're going to build community and better support one another, the one concrete proposal that was made couldn't attract a single supporter besides myself. Pathetic.
If this were a single incident, I'd make excuses for you. I'd say to myself, "it's ok, they're probably busy or working or sleeping off their PBR hangovers, maybe they'll show up next time." But this was only the latest in a long string of times I've been burned by this community. This is bigger than one day in the park, this is a long pattern of flake-ism.
I'm sick of it. We really need to get our shit together and start backing up all our rhetoric. If we're serious about building a world based on mutual aid and community support, a world that doesn't need contracts and legally binding agreements to get things done, then we need to start following through on our promises and treating commitments to each other like they actually mean something. We need to stop acting like revolution is a fucking hobby, like we want to change the world just because there's nothing good on tv. We need to do better than this.
OK (deep breath), this was written out of anger. It's criticism and it's very, VERY frustrated, but hopefully it'll be constructive as well. Please don't get me wrong: I love all of you, I really do. We've accomplished some great things together and will continue to do so, I'm sure of it. I wouldn't have bothered writing this if I felt like this community was beyond repair. But right now I feel very let down by my comrades. I feel like you're more interested in shit talking and internet feuds than working for revolution. Please stop it. Stop spending all your energy on petty bullshit, stop gossiping, stop posturing, stop hanging out in your tiny little radical ghetto. There are so many of us with dreams of a better world, we could do some really amazing shit if we wanted to.
Love, Solidarity, and Frustration,
me
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Comments
How dare you...
How dare you violate the Saint Paul Principles and criticize other radicals in public! Don't you know that every time you piss and moan, a baby FBI snitch gets its microphone? (lol, that rhymes, yay.) The revolution is progressing on schedule, everyone is on the same page, solidarity is our watchword, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise!
I expect your story to be promptly and swiftly deleted by the TCIMC staff. Unless they like you and give you special treatment, anyway.
Seriously, though, you know what the problem is? Groupthink. Everyone thinks all these ideas people keep coming up with are sucktastic bullshit, but nobody's willing to say so, for fear of being branded a poser/traitor/anarcho-liberal/agent provocateur/cop. (And WTF is with hating on liberals 24/7, then accepting fucking high-profile Ron Paul organizers with open arms? Those Libertarian fuckwits have nothing in common with us.) When it comes time to *voice* support for the latest stupid endeavor, everyone's too afraid to say anything but "that's absolutely awesome, count me in", even though inside they're thinking "fuck no, I'd rather weed my garden on a hot day in July than get involved with this retarded shit". Hence, twenty people who were all "yeah, awesome, yay us", but obviously had better things to do than actually show up.
If *you* think it's so damned important, plan to do it yourself. The revolution will not be brought about by unenthused persyns who were guilted into "volunteering", but by persyns who actually give a rat's ass.
Pointless collectivism, fake solidarity, and groupthink are killing the radical movement. it's not "flaky anarchism", it's just... anarchism. Trying to pretend otherwise is just delusional.
About the TC IMC and deleting things
Hey Kim,
We tried to moderate a contentious thread as respectfully as possible, but I admit that it got difficult!
We actually ended up hiding identity-revealing stuff and personal attacks on/by folks on both "sides" of the argument. This isn't obvious, of course, because they're, um, deleted. In fact, we ended up leaving up some stuff we weren't super happy with because we felt like we didn't want to moderate too aggressively.
Our rationale was this: if folks have personal disagreements with each other, those need to be handled face-to-face. If folks have strong ideological disagreements--even ones where they insult each other's ideas pretty fiercely--we're going to leave those alone. There was some grey area, yeah, but I don't think it favored any particular position.
We also felt like letting folks identify people who had posted anonymously was a bad idea--a lot of potential for abuse! Just because someone says that an anonymous posting is by Sarah Mae Anarchist doesn't mean that it really is...
We'll be posting some general stuff about comments and moderation over the next month. We don't want to moderate much and we don't want to moderate for ideological content--almost all of what we remove now anyway is racist and anti-Semitic lunacy, plus spam ads for gold and perfume. But we really feel like we're not helping the movement by creating an environment where folks can throw around personal insults and where there are random, often inaccurate identifications of anonymous posters.
Kim, if you have a concern about a specific comment or if you feel there was a pattern, please say so. We truly are not aiming to moderate for political content or to take sides.
Yeah.
I probably wouldn't have an issue with most of the deletions, and I doubt anyone else would, either. I understand the need to remove messages that are disruptive or serve no purpose, and I accept that nobody is ever going to create a working definition of those terms which meets everybodies approval. That being said, I think some of the moderation was capricious, arbitrary, inconsistent, and above all authoritarian.
If you want to arbitrarily limit what people can say here, and how they can say it, that's your right. But suddenly saying "ohai, we've suddenly decided to enforce the Saint Paul Principle" (which were, or were understood by many to be, exclusive to the RNC protest planning, and so no longer relevant) without any warning seems really authoritarian and contrary to the founding IMC principles. Likewise, the whole "we're suddenly going to be deleting what we deem personally identifying information from posts" thing; if that's what you choose to do, more power to you. But pulling this "policy" out of thin air seems... reactionary, and kind of elitist, to be honest.
If you want to hide hateful speech, hide hateful speech - but do so in a uniform and rational matter, rather than the current model, which seems to be "it's angry and I disagree, thus it's hate speech; it's angry but I agree, so it's all good". If you want to ban or delete personal information, then consense on what that term means, publicize the decision to do so, and carry through with it, evenly and impartially. (As it stands, different rules apply to different people and different subjects, for widely differing reasons, and if that's not elitist classism, I don't know what is.) That way, people can at least make a properly informed decision whether they wish to participate here, and will be explicitly consenting to an actual, codified editorial policy, rather than being - perhaps incorrectly - assumed to implicitly consent to an arbitrary editorial policy that gets, no offense, made up as you go along.
You say you're not aiming to moderate for political content or to take sides, but one of the comments I saw that later got deleted made, I thought, a pretty good point - you'll allow endless personal attacks on people like Ian Wallace and Brandon Darby and Pandy, but are super-quick to delete as "personal attacks" by "cops" anything critical of a well-known local organizer. If that's not "taking sides", I don't know what is. I know TCIMC is not and does not pretend to be impartial, but I really think it's possible to be partisan without being authoritarian.
More on deletions
Thanks for the follow-up!
That specific deletion--we removed it because it read to us as a personal attack on another poster. The basic idea--that some personal attacks are okay but that others are dismissed as provocations--seemed completely appropriate, but it seemed to us like the idea was embedded in a personal attack.
You're right that this got made up as we went along! Part of that was the big-giant-explosion in the comments and its effects among anarchists, so we were acting pretty fast. Part of it was structural--we've become a larger collective very recently and we're working to moderate and de-spam faster and more effectively, but we're still figuring out the finer details. This did catch us completely by surprise, so yeah, it was not an awesome policy. I do emphasize, though, that there was a variety of stuff removed, even though that's a bit difficult to see since things were removed at different times.
Right now we're working up a comments policy which will lay everything out more clearly as well as a moderation policy for how we'll handle specific comments. This will be posted for everyone's reference. It should be pretty light-weight, though. We'd like something which can be applied fairly easily and which doesn't unconsciously favor anyone, and of course it will be subject to revision based on comments from folks.
Personally-and-not-representing-the-IMC, I'm of two minds about moderation--on the one hand, why moderate at all? On the other, pretty much every discussion space I actually like is moderated, some fairly aggressively. The spaces where there's no moderation and no regular commenters seem to degenerate pretty fast into trolling and venom. I've certainly seen radical news sites that get a lot of commentary which is mostly pretty ugly and un-radical. And it seems to me that a site can reach a critical mass of venom and interpersonal stuff which drives away everyone else.
That's all I have time for at the moment...but I'll be glad to talk about this more.
Tin Drums
Anarchism is way overrated, hyper-inflated these days.
Most anarchists these days are too lazy to even make a flaky kind of anarchism possible.
Anarchism takes high levels of organzation.
It takes more and different organzation than captialist structures. It actually takes more discipline as well.
That said, much respect to all you youngers, all you who stood up and got squashed by the state apparatus recently. Much respect to all you youngers who are facing state repression in the court shitstem.
However we can't play by their playbook. We can't assume we are winning just because they are successfully jailing our comrades. We can't assume that somehow just because we are in the news that we are relevent in ordinary peoples' lives. What were the political demands of anarchists and anti-authoritarians during the RNC?...what are they now?...for a world free of governement and bosses? That's pretty lame and more like 1930's sloganism.
Oh yeah, and all the great analysis on this here indymedia recently about Italy, and discussion of Central and South American models...guess what, where do we live?
We live here. Somewhere between Linden Hills and Mac Groveland (most of us) across the river way. This is our soil, this is our reality. We have the political forces and people around us that we have to RESPECT...that doesn't mean agree with, it means RESPECT. You have to give to get.
Anarchism can only be acheived if the majority of people can be convinced that it is the only way for us all to get what we want and that organizationally it's the only way that we can get there. Most people aren't intellectuals studying, reading about Italy in the 1970's. Most people are trying to get by, most people are busy with their kids and working and taking care of their parents/grandparents and heading out to MOA to get some.
And the only way to convince people is to engage them where they are at, fighting the real every day struggles that we fight. It is in those struggles that you walk with people at the back, and with every defeat and every (rare) victory demonstrating that collectivism, decentralized laterally- based decision making structures are the only ones that can survive the attacks of the state, the ones that build community based struggles that can sustain themselves over time.
Everything else is ego and baloney and smoke and mirrors, and most importantly irrelevant.
No macho, no lingo, no slogo.
Much respect.
Shoulda been there
Yep, I signed up for that phone tree/meeting, and I should have been there. In my defense, I was working on a different radical project, but I did space this meeting out. Sorry. I agree that people need to get it together and show up for the things they say they support. All that being said, perhaps we need to think about re-forming a public, above-ground anarchist umbrella group here in Mpls/STP to make ideas like this one independent of people coming to a single meeting. Alternately, a new public @ist space might be a good idea. We've had both in the past, they're not impossible to maintain, and they led (in my opinion at least) to a lot of positive action.
Agreed
Agreed. An above-ground organization would support projects like this and allow new people to easily plug into the radical community. It would also give "regular" folks a chance to interact with anarchists in their everyday lives and see that we're not the feces-throwing maniacs the cops and the media make us out to be.
breaking news [from the IMC collective]
CONTENT OF ORIGINAL COMMENT TOTES REMOVED, FOLKS.
We will not tolerate "so-and-so is a cop" comments. We do not care who posts them or what that person's political position is. This is not a space for bad-jacketing....and in my dreams it wouldn't a space for "post inflammatory comments to pester the mods" either, but that's just not how it goes on the internet.
If one of these comments escapes our fiendish moderating skills, please get in touch.
i like my little @ "ghetto"
and i'm sick of being ordered to step outside of it. would you tell an immigrant or persyn of color that they really should assimilate a little if they want to be relevant? this is where i feel safe and respected.
last time i checked anarchy was about free association, not some kind of fake-ass guilt based need to network and federate with others that have vague connections to me.
i desire more friendships and less tepid work-relationships and comradeships.
last time i checked anarchy
last time i checked anarchy was about bringing down the capitalist system and that ain't gonna happen if we're just going to be a little subculture.
its the totality
well i don't know about you,commie, but i think that a whole lot more than capitalism needs to go.
and i would hardly call our subculture "little". its just not one homogonized "mass movement" like so many of you would like to see.
Capital is a totality. That's
Capital is a totality. That's what it means to say, "it's the totality". As a totalizing system that has subsumed all human relations, it is "a lot more than capitalism."
"Our" subculture is nothing if it isn't conflictual.
subculture = culture = capitalism
It's what they call the commodity form.
Can we stop reducing all of
Can we stop reducing all of our political thoughts to easily consumed slogans that are then coopted by crimethinc kids that spout them off in poorly written communiques about how smashing a window is the apex of the revolution against the totality?...k, thx
Sorry, but the people who
Sorry, but the people who smash windows certainly don't think it's the apex of revolution. Ironically it's only people like you who claim they do.
Enough of this flacid ass shit.
You're affraid of what you call slogans and jargon because you have no substantive analysis or understanding of how the world even works beyond the activist graveyard.
Commie? What a farce. If you
Commie? What a farce.
If you don't think the anarchist subculture is little, you've got your head up your ass. Enjoy the smell.
friends vs comrades
It's not "assimilation." No one is telling you to abandon your friends or relinquish your right to free association. The point is that if you want to be an effective revolutionary, you need contacts outside of your immediate circle of friends. I'm sure you and your friends are awesome, but unless you can broaden your perspective and work with people other than your super besties, then you will be limiting yourself and your potential. Learn to seperate friendships from alliances. Yes, they can and should overlap, but please stop confusing the two.
Wait, isn't the term "light"
Wait, isn't the term "light" bulb offensive to the dark? Can we get a consensus on a new word? Oh wait, couldn't "con" sensus have negative connotations? Maybe we should come up with a more positive term. Let's do a quick go-round and get a temperature check...
<a href=http://www.mpcoc.com/>mpcoc</a>
That was so fucking
That was so fucking offensive.
These dilemmas are more than
These dilemmas are more than familiar to us.
<3 NYC
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