Illustration by NoBonzo.com
Friends, comrades, frenemies, fuck-ups, misfits and so on and so forth.
It’s May first again and history is calling. Fuck we love our people who fought and won/lost in the streets of chicago so many years ago.
We remember the beautiful insanity of the Paris commune, not the least of which involves an anarchist geographer in a hot air ballon trying to do reconnaissance from a hot air balloon. Fuck we got Lucy Parsons, we got Geronimo, the Zapatistas. Malatesta, Goldman, Makhno, so many cool people fighting the only fight that really matters. We got a lot to be proud of.
Our history is super fucking bad ass, but, as usual, honies, we got a fucking problem, and that is the labour-movement.
I must say now, that I love my fucking union. SAC, as conservative and filled with moderate center left gubbar as it is, is there when it matters and ready to stand up.
But this organized labour has reached the limits of its revolutionary potential. There are many reasons for this. The most important is probably that the abolition of wage labor, that was an integral demand of the first International, has been put aside in place for control, adjustments and keeping the machine running. After the first international, various state-involved leftists learned that exploitation of workers is just as good for state capitalism as it is for liberal capitalism.
The labour movement has turned on its head and become a movement for labour. With the saltsjöbadsavtalet raised high to the sky and the swedish model of compromise seen as the one, true ‘civilized’ way of a union to follow. Organize, unionize, as long as you never disrupt business as usual. This movement had for a long time, devolved into a laborious way to tweak the dials on capitalism in a way that can keep a certain kind of stability based on a regulation via the state of the tension between classes. But today that power has been diminshed for a very long time.
The left, my friends, is dying and we probably should have buried it long ago like a favorite radical aunt who we’ve mourned and treasured. I mean, people hate the left, fuck the left hates the left! We see that in how much we hate each other.
There is the left of Deleuze, the becoming-minority, but only like a few nerds even care. The
general left apart from that is a golem which has outlived its utility.
The problem of the traditional left runs deep: A eurocentrist colonial attitude, a history of sexism, homophobia, and racism (including strong antisemitism), yes Bakunin we’re fucking looking at you along with the authoritarian leftists.
And we can never forget that the Swedish left and especially Swedish social democracy has always been a national movement. The fact that they were here earlier today to sing The International is just laughable. The rasbiologiska institutet was built by and due to this form of social democracy, the folkhemmet was built for white swedes on the backs of immigran-labour, and until this day these leftists keep fucking over sami in all sorts of diabolical ways.
Even among more modern anarchists there are problems with whiteness: Black Anarchism exists for a reason and many Native American groups are suspicious of the left, yes, even anarchists, for being too Eurocentric in their analysis.
I gotta say, each of us here probably would be fucked over from a unity with this left. Imagine this is as a speech, us asking: who’s antiwork?! who’s too fucking gay?!, Who’s neurodivers?!, who’s too fucking brown ? who hates husmanskost?
We do need to work together along lines of mutual aid and self defence in order to create revolutionary networks to facilitate our attempts of survival. The problem is that left unity will never get us there, because this left does not hold our interests.
Modernism, the philosophical background of Lenin and Trotsky, proposes unified ideas which we should all follow. Modern leftist social movements have inherited this by demanding unification on certain issues. For example being opposed to the right of sex workers to organize as a left party line in order to support entrenched campaigns of many old groups. This also holds the traps of pacifism, non-violence, and moderation in terms of expropriation.
The trouble with all of this is the trade-off between efficiency and the ability to react to complexity in a system. Authoritarian systems, for example, can’t deal with the necessary exception that Grandma needs to a rule because the central committee can’t process that information.
We anarchists shouldn’t have this problem. Our autonomy lets us react to complexity as needed. Our organizing can’t be from a culture of attempted homogeneity via unity. We have to work together when it works for the groups who find mutual benefit in working together without counting on interfaces which can work for everyone at all times. We know that, like in the case of Grandma, we need our autonomy to be able to adapt our tactics and with who we align with depending on the situation. We reject the Leninist notion that there exists a “one true doctrine”. And because of this we need to always reject this unity.
We know this: The only way out, is anarchy. Anarchy means decentralization, and that can only really happen if we reject the discipline of allegiance.
Fuck your flag, fuck your party,
Long live anarchy, unless you don’t want to, then go do something else.