I’m against it!: “What’s Left?” January 2019, MRR #428

I’m against it.

Groucho Marx as Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff
“I’m Against It,” Horse Feathers

I’m against it.

The Ramones, “I’m Against It,” Road to Ruin

I’m against it.

Capitalism that is. I’m against capitalism because it prioritizes profit over human need, exploits workers, engenders economic instability through overproduction and underconsumption, promotes social inequalities, degrades human community, destroys the environment, and encourages short term thinking at the expense of longterm planning. There is a vastly better alternative to capitalism in the form of socialism.

Between nihilism and fascism

The Clash have a song, “Know Your Rights,” which begins “[t]his is a public service announcement.” I consider this a public service announcement about knowing your right wing.

Little Black Cart is the publishing arm of that grand stupidity known as post-left anarchism, a scattershot @ tendency that encompasses everything from John Zerzan’s anarcho-primitivism and Bob Black’s anti-work tirades to Anarchy! A Journal of Desire Armed. LBC published Atassa: Readings in Eco-Extremism covering the writings and actions of Individuals Tending Towards the Wild (ITS) which is not being received very well by the rest of the @ milieu. It seems that most @s consider ITS, its eco-extremism, and its murder of fellow anarchists a kind of eco-fascism. When regular @s confronted post-left LBC @s at the Seattle Bookfair, fisticuffs erupted. The regular @s ripped up the book, so the LBC post-left @s started punching people.

With post-left @ nihilism deliberately dancing on the edge of fascism while thumbing their noses at the rest of the @ milieu, with LBC attempting to emulate their ITS role models in attacking fellow @s, with red/brown crossover politics all the rage these days, it’s time to reconsider whether the post-left is really post-left or just plain old fascist.

Here’s a link to the specific incident.

Here’s a link to the ITS praise of ISIS, neo-Nazis, and its publisher while again threatening @s.

Here’s a link covering eco-fascism.

Here’s a link about the ITS murder of anarchists.

Here’s a link analyzing post-left anarchism’s flirtations with fascism by Alexander Reid Ross.

With a followup article on all things Stirner, post-left, and nihilist by Alexander Reid Ross.

An anti-civ critique of Atassa, ITS, and their @ critics.

MORE DRAMA IN ANARCHYLAND/ANARKISTAN:

(thanks to Shelly Collingwood)

Original notice from LA @ Book Fair to LBC

Paul Z. Simons/São Paulo says boycott LA @ Book Fair

No Platform for ITS!

LA @ Book Fair statement on Saturday’s events

National-Bolshevism, communism of-by-for fools: “What’s Left?” February 2016, MRR #393

Wir tanzen mit Faschismus
Und roter Anarchie
Eins, zwei, drei, vier
Kammerad, komm tanz mit mir

Laibach, “Tanz Mit Laibach”

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Laibach has been accused of glorifying fascism in the past to which their response has been: ‘We are fascists as much as Hitler was a painter.’ Which I assume means they are fascists, they’re just very, very bad at it.

John Oliver. “Laibach goes to North Korea,” Last Week Tonight #45 (7/19/15)

It’s been close to a century since Karl Radek popularized the concept of National Bolshevism. It was June of 1923, after the successful workers’ revolution in Russia and a failed one in Germany which ended the first World War. As the Secretary of the Third International—the Communist International or Comintern—Radek hoped to rally support and solidarity among disaffected German rightwing soldiers, veterans and rank-and-file nationalists for the besieged Soviet Union. The goal was to firm up an alliance between the German Reichswehr and the Russian Red Army, irrespective of the interests of their different working classes, and to this end Radek made an infamous speech in the Executive Committee of the Comintern called “Leo Schlageter: The Wanderer into the Void,” which was endorsed by both Stalin and Zinoviev. Radek praised Schlageter—a conservative WWI veteran who joined the German paramilitary Freikorps to suppress the German workers’ soviet revolution of 1918-19 and who then was executed for sabotage against the French occupation army of the Ruhr—as a national hero and argued that “[t]he insistence on the nation in Germany is a revolutionary act.”

Long before the present-day red-brown alliances in Russian politics, over a decade before the Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact, Radek’s “Schlageter Line” imposed an opportunistic alliance between para-fascist ex-military types and Germany’s revolutionary leftwing working class via the ever-pliant German Communist Party, the KPD. This was a strategy of National Bolshevism for the KDP and the German working class, ultimately to defend the Soviet Union and further that country’s interest in an alliance with Germany. To seal this pact with the devil, KDP Zentrale shut down the insurrectionary Hamburg Uprising by the district KP Wasserkante on October 22, 1923. Radek and Trotsky quickly defended the decision to stop the insurrection by condemning the uprising as premature. What followed was nearly a decade of on again/off again collaboration between the KDP and the NSDAP in the streets and the Reichstag against the SDP-dominated Weimar Republic.

This attraction to National Bolshevism on Radek’s part came as much from his personal experiences in Moabit prison trying to convert reactionary German nationalists to Bolshevism as from his reading of two renegade Hamburg communists, Laufenberg and Wolffheim, who coined the term National Bolshevism. These national communists promoted the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat in the service of German nationalism, the formation of a German Red Army, and a German-Soviet nationalist-socialist alliance in an all-out war against the US and UK. Sound familiar? Radek’s temporary and purely tactical “Schlageter Line” was part of a shameful history of Soviet and KDP intransigence, sectarianism and double-dealing that ultimately delivered the German working class into the hands of the Nazi Party in power, much as the PCE’s (Spanish Communist Party) machinations and red terror finally betrayed the Spanish proletariat to the clutches of Franco. Radek’s contribution to this debacle was to legitimize, for the first time as an official representative of the Comintern, the synthesis of right and left, ultra-nationalism with revolutionary socialism in Germany, that was the prototype for the obsessions of fascism’s leftwing thereafter.

To be fair, there were plenty of left-leaning German fascists in the 1920s and 30s, both inside the Nazi Party (Röhm, Gregor and Otto Strasser) and outside (van den Bruck, Jünger, Niekisch). And had the concept of National Bolshevism not existed in Germany by 1923, circumstance would have contrived something analogous, mirroring a common argument made about Hitler. But the initial willingness on the part of the Bolsheviks to cultivate National Bolshevism in Germany came to bite the Left on its ass. (Victor Serge said of the Schlageter tactic: “It’s playing with fire—all right let’s play with fire!”) The ideal of a red-brown, Soviet-Nazi, Russian-German alliance has been a goal of leftwing fascism ever since. From the NSDAP breakaway Combat League of Revolutionary National Socialists through the ultra-Zionist, anti-imperialist LEHI (Stern Gang) in Mandated Palestine to the left Peronist FAR-Montoneros guerrillas in Argentina’s “Dirty War,” the archetypal synthesis of revolutionary left and right epitomized by National Bolshevism has recurred over and over, much like a periodic, virulent outbreak of herpes. Most recently, the anarcho/ultra milieu has witnessed @ publisher AK Press accuse white South African journalist, writer and AK author Michael Schmidt of being a secret National Anarchist in league with Troy Southgate.

AK Press did its due diligence, thoroughly investigated Schmidt’s background, and determined that the rumors of his involvement in National Anarchism were true despite his outward adherence to an odd-duck anarchist Platformism. So AK stopped publication of his current book, removed his previous books from its inventory, and disseminated its lengthy, damning findings as widely as it could in the anarcho/ultra milieu. Schmidt’s story is that he is an anarchist and a journalist who was engaged in legitimate research of fringe fascist elements, and that every fact dug up by his detractors has another more innocent explanation. I think that the evidence is overwhelming that Michael Schmidt is at present a National Anarchist-identified fascist. Now, I really don’t care whether Schmidt infiltrated anarchism with his authentic NA fascist beliefs intact or simply developed his decentralized, tribal white nationalism “organically” over his time in the anarchist movement. The purported synthesis of revolutionary left and right that is at the core of National Bolshevism, National Syndicalism, National Anarchism, National Autonomism, ad nauseam—what this fascist tendency likes to call metapolitics—is a clear enough political signature for folks on the Left and the left of the Left to help screen against infiltration or “entryism,” or even genuine conversion.

Well done.

The issue is not jurisprudence or a fair trial or innocent until proven guilty or incarceration. Libertarians forget that, in promoting voluntary association, they automatically authenticate voluntary disassociation; everything from caveat emptor to outright ostracism. The anarcho/ultra milieu is just that—a milieu—and not a community, so its ability to put social pressure to bear is limited. Nevertheless, the option exists and needs to be exercised.

The initial opportunism and sectarianism that marked Bolshevik Russia’s attempt to set up a German National Bolshevik sock puppet does not account for the ongoing opportunism and parasitism of this fascist tendency’s constant attempts to piggy back onto the Left. But neither does it set up some sort of equivalency between socialism and fascism. This is not an argument either from Hanna Arendt’s sophisticated if misguided thesis in The Origins of Totalitarianism or its dumbed down High School version that, if one travels far enough along the extremes of either political Left or Right one circles back around toward its supposed opposite, and thus that all political extremism is essentially the same. There are plenty of credible differences that make a true distinction between extreme Left and Right—libertarian and totalitarian—which I’ve covered in past columns. Unfortunately, this sophomoric understanding of politics persists, as does its flip side, a kneejerk contrarianism. So, when a mendacious former columnist proclaims on Facebook by analogy to the original American revolution that “This time it’s TWO royal families,” the Bushes and the Clintons, from which we must declare our independence by voting for either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, the sheer knuckle-dragging idiocy is breathtaking. He was never the sharpest tool in the shed, particularly when it’s clear there’s no exaggeration, hyperbole or parody intended in his political analysis, such as it is.

What is involved is a sentiment akin to épater la bourgeoisie, the rebellious, indiscriminate desire to stick it to the establishment, which needs to be critiqued. The post-Romantic Decadents of the fin de siècle were fond of skewering the cultural banality, economic regimentation and political conformity of the stodgy middle-class society of their day. In this they prefigured virtually every rebellious Bohemian youth culture that followed, from the wandervogel to punk rock. Michael “Bommi” Baumann expressed this best in How it all Began/Wie Alles Anfing when he wrote: “You still didn’t feel like part of the left; but everything that was in opposition was good, including the neo-Nazis. […] Fascism as such was in opposition though, and you found pure opposition better than this petit-bourgeois mediocrity. You considered everything good that didn’t agree with it.” Or, as Sean Aaberg of Pork Magazine crudely puts it in protesting what he considers our “increasingly uptight society,” his magazine’s rebellion for its own sake and swastika iconography is “not suitable for squares” and a way of “outing closet totalitarians.”

As for Laibach’s sly lampooning of similar left-right political lunacy, return to the postmodern angst which begins their song “Tanz Mit Laibach” and defines the épater les bourgeois motivating much fascist courting of the Left:

Wir alle sind besessen

Wir alle sind verflucht

Wir alle sind gekreuzigt

Und alle sind kaputt
Von Reiztechnologie

Von Zeitökonomie

Von Qualität das Lebens

Und Kriegsphilosophie

Now that’s entertainment!

I’m trying out a new feature for my blog, what with all the entertaining politics of late, mainstream and fringe. So sit back and relax, its popcorn time.

East Bay @ publisher Aragorn of Little Black Cart invited one of his authors, post-left anarcho Bob Black, to speak at the Long Haul in Berkeley on August 7. Aragorn had gotten wind that there might be some disruption at the event due to a few leftist anarcho types objecting to Bob Black as a police snitch as a consequence of his involvement in the 1995 Jim Hogshire kerfuffle. Heated words just before the talk turned into an exchange between Bob Black and one Morgan Le Fay/Elliot Hughes, with Black turning a deft insult and Fay/Elliot then punching Black three times in the head.

That seemed to be the end of the matter. Black was helped up after momentarily losing consciousness. Fay/Elliot was ushered out of the Long Haul and barred from re-entry. And the event continued without further incident. Then, on September 9, persons unknown glued the LBC office door shut in the Long Haul in “solidarity” with Fay/Elliot’s action against Black. Right around that time, Black contacted Aragorn and others through an “open letter” denouncing Aragorn as complicit in the attack: He does not deny that he knew about the danger in advance. He does not denying knowing the assailant, a nut case named Elliot Hughes, who I am told goes to every anarchist and leftist event in the Bay Area. [Aragorn] Moser does not deny recognizing the thug when he entered the Long Haul building; Moser was at a table by the front door. But he calls me a snitch. The previous person who called me a snitch, moments before slugging me, was Elliot Hughes. People who call me a snitch (which I am not) are licensing violent attacks on me. Moser is one of them. This is actually from the Facebook war that followed, with Bob Black here, and Aragorn here. And here’s the ongoing exchange on the incident on anarchynews dot org. Black has since severed all relations with LBC and demanded the destruction of any inventory of his books, and Aragorn has written Black’s obituary, er, eulogy.

Now, isn’t this fun!

Neither Anarchistan nor Anarchyland: “What’s Left?” June 2015, MRR #385

In 35 years in leftist politics, I have met many ex-Stalinists and Maoists who became Trotskyists and council communists; I have never met anyone who went in the opposite direction. Once you have played grand master chess, you rarely go back to checkers.

Loren Goldner, “Didn’t See The Same Movie”

Hooligan Rule #3: The purer the anarchism in theory, the less effective in practice.

Okay, I’ll admit it. I tend to regularly take the piss out of anarchism when I write about it. I spent one column making fun of anarchist goofiness in being simultaneously uncritically inclusive and hypercritically sectarian. Then, after taking on and failing at the Sisyphean task of defining the locus of historical agency, I concluded by proclaiming anarchism a historical failure utterly lacking in agency. And just last column, I made snide comments about the anarcho/ultra milieu’s tendency to push purity over pragmatism with regard to current events in Greece and Kurdistan. Far as I’m concerned, most anarchists are still playing tiddlywinks.

It’s too easy to make fun of anarchism. And while I’m not about to stop, I do want to develop a useful metric for the effectiveness of anarchism. Hence, the above rule of thumb. Here, it’s worth requoting the relevant passages by Max Boot from his book Invisible Armies:

Anarchists did not defeat anyone. By the late 1930s their movements had been all but extinguished. In the more democratic states, better policing allowed terrorists to be arrested while more liberal labor laws made it possible for workers to peacefully redress their grievances through unions. In the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, anarchists were repressed with brute force. The biggest challenge was posed by Nestor Makhno’s fifteen thousand anarchist guerrillas in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War, but they were finally “liquidated” by the Red Army in 1921. In Spain anarchists were targeted both by Franco’s Fascists and by their Marxists “comrades” during the 1936-39 civil war—as brilliantly and bitterly recounted by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. Everywhere anarchists were pushed into irrelevance by Moscow’s successful drive to establish communism as the dominant doctrine of the left. […] Based on their record as of 2012, Islamist groups were considerably more successful in seizing power than the anarchists but considerably less successful than the liberal nationalists of the nineteenth century or the communists of the twentieth century. (“Bomb Throwers: Propaganda by the Deed” and “God’s Killers: Down and Out?”)

To the utter defeat of anarchism in Ukraine (1918-21) and Spain (1936-39) must be added the failure of anarchism in the Mexican revolution (1910-20). Of these three major revolutions explicitly inspired by anarchism, or having substantial anarchist participation, none went beyond the stage of anarchist revolution into creating a long term anarchist society. All three were defeated militarily during the civil wars that followed the start of each revolution, with Ukraine’s Makhnovshchina liquidated by the Bolsheviks, Spanish anarchism undermined by Leninists, socialists and liberals before being eliminated by Franco’s fascists, and Mexico’s original Zapatistas crushed by the socialist/corporatist precursors to the PRI. That’s 0 for 3, out of the three most heavyweight revolutions of the twentieth century. But we’re not keeping sports scores here. We’re talking about history and tens of thousands of lives lost and societies dramatically altered. Again, it’s absurd to prevaricate by contending that anarchism is only a failure to date. That anarchism’s time is still to come. If anarchism cannot manage to establish itself despite having the solid majority of the working classes as well as a popular revolutionary upsurge behind it, it’s time to admit the most severe conclusion of my rule of thumb. Anarchism in its purest, most historically pertinent form has been a complete washout.

Which is too bad because the daily practice, organizational forms, and valiant struggles displayed in explicit anarchist revolutions have been truly inspiring. What’s more, most of the pivotal revolutionary moments in history have been, at the very least, implicitly anarchist and, together with their explicit siblings, constitute the category of social revolution. Such revolutionary uprisings are broad based, popular, spontaneous, organized from the bottom up, intent on overthrowing existing class and power relations, but invariably short-lived. Social revolutions have been myriad, some flash-in-the-pan and others persistent, but only an abbreviated list can be provided here. (The Paris Commune, 1871; Russia, 1905; Mexico, 1910-19; Russia, 1917-21; Ukraine, 1918-21; Germany, 1918-19, Bavaria, 1918-19; Northern Italy, 1918-21; Kronstadt, 1921; Shanghai, 1927; Spain, 1936-39; Germany, 1953; Hungary 1956; Shanghai, 1967; France, 1968; Czechoslovakia, 1968; Poland, 1970-71; Portugal, 1974; Angola, 1974; Poland, 1980-81; Argentina, 2001-02; etc.) Let’s spend a bit more time further delineating types of revolutions.

The initial February 1917 revolution was nothing less than a spontaneous mass uprising of the majority of workers and peasants across the Russian empire which overthrew the Czarist ancien regime. Inspired by Western European liberalism, the February revolution was not of any single political persuasion. Popular self-activity and self-organization from the base up characterized Russian revolutionary society at that time. This was not just a matter of dual power—where the formal liberal Kerensky government paralleled an antagonistic, informal socialist government of the soviets—but one of a multi-valent revolutionary situation where power resided on numerous levels—like the factory committees—and eventually in various regions—like the Makhnovist controlled Ukraine and the SR-dominated Tambov region. When the Bolshevik organized Red Guard overthrew Kerensky’s government and disbanded the multi-party Constituent Assembly in what has been termed the October Revolution, Russia’s social revolution waned and the civil war began in earnest.

Many considered this vanguard political revolution a Bolshevik coup de etat. The Bolsheviks called it a socialist revolution. And make no mistake, socialist revolutions leading to Leninist states have been rather successful as revolutions go, far more successful than social revolutions. Explicitly anarchist social revolutions have never succeeded, as I keep repeating. Implicitly anarchist social revolutions have enjoyed a little more success as they are several degrees removed from libertarian purity. The German 1918-19 revolution and civil war brought about the liberal democratic Weimar Republic by default. France May-June 1968 changed an entire generation, especially in Europe, leading to political defeat but cultural victory. And the social unrest in Poland from 1980 through 1989 spearheaded by the Solidarity trade union movement arguably helped bring down the Warsaw Pact and paved the way for Western-style liberal democracy in Communist Poland, even as Solidarity itself was sidelined.

Now consider a couple of variations on my Hooligan rule.

What about a practice that tends toward the anarchistic, promulgated from a decidedly Marxist-Leninist theory? Last column I discussed the situation of Rojava in Syrian Kurdistan now, and of Chiapas in Mexico for the past twenty years. In the former, the stridently Leninist PKK/HPG-PYG/YPG have adopted anarchistic communalism and democratic confederalism around which to organize Kurdistan society in liberated territories. In the latter, the post-Maoist EZLN has translated Mayan democratic traditions into “mandar obedeciendo,” the notion of commanding by obeying, which conflates nicely with Mao’s own dictum to “go to the people, learn from the people.” The EZLN further praises Mayan communalism and mutual aid, yet it also fetishizes indigenismo while ignoring capitalist property and social relations and remaining a full-blown, hierarchically organized army. Despite such profound contradictions the EZLN was touted as anti-authoritarian and libertarian by anarchists and left communists the world over when they first emerged from the jungles of Chiapas in 1994. Rojava received a far more critical reception from the left of the Left when it emerged out of the Syrian civil war in 2014. That’s because of the PKK et al’s tortuous authoritarian history and orthodox Leninist party/military structure, which puts the accent on nationalism in national liberation struggles and in no way challenges capitalism, even as it pays lip service to Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism and calls for the decentralized cantonization of any future Kurdistan. Further, the EZLN’s Chiapas is far more media savvy and social democratic, even liberal, as compared to the PKK’s Rojava. Rather than a variation on my rule then, this is the case of a strict Leninist core practice and rigorous hierarchical political/military command structures allowing for some libertarian wiggle room in the greater society in question.

But what about the idea that aboriginal hunter-gatherer societies, if not tacitly anarchist, were plainly anarchic? “According to this myth, prior to the advent of civilization no one ever had to work, people just plucked their food from the trees and popped it into their mouths and spent the rest of their time playing ring-around-the-rosie with the flower children. Men and women were equal, there was no disease, no competition, no racism, sexism or homophobia, people lived in harmony with the animals and all was love, sharing and cooperation.” So writes the so-called unibomber Ted Kaczynski in his essay “The Truth About Primitive Life: A Critique of Anarchoprimitivism.” Kaczynski then cogently demolishes this myth point by point using anarcho-primitivist and classical anthropological sources. Primitive societies were not examples of anarchism so much as they were of anarchy. The radical decentralization and technological simplicity of aboriginal societies allowed the evils of hierarchy, warfare, competition—if and when they arose—to be contained by scaling them down until they did minimal damage. A primitive tribe might very well be peaceful, communal, and egalitarian, but if not, the fact that a warlike, competitive, hierarchical aboriginal tribe was relatively small and confined to a compact territory meant that any harm done by them would be severely limited. The anarchy of paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies was not conscious anarchism by any stretch of the imagination. As such, something as simple as the proliferation of agriculture which ushered in the neolithic age rapidly subverted paleolithic anarchy by allowing agricultural surpluses to accumulate, upon which state structures and class societies were then eventually organized.

Now, a note on left communism. Left communism can be viewed as political accretion based on a progressive sloughing off from the Leninist Left. First there was the contentious political relationship between Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, followed by the disaffection of Trotsky and Bukharin on the left in the Bolshevik party. Various Left fractions in the Bolshevik party attempted reform from within, most significantly Sapronov’s Democratic Centralists, Kollontai’s Workers Opposition, and Miasnikov’s Workers Group. Finally, leftist tendencies congealed against the Bolsheviks in the Third International, on the one hand the council communism of the Dutch and German Left as represented by Pannekoek, Ruhle, and Gorter and on the other hand Bordiga’s ultra-party communism on the Italian Left. Social revolutions are sine qua non for left communists, which laud them in principle while often being highly critical of specific instances. The need to shorten, if not entirely eliminate the transition to true communism, is the objective of much of left communism.

Between the first and second World Wars, mass movements of workers and peasants were dominated primarily by Marxism and Leninism, and secondarily by various types of anarchism. Left communism ran a distant third, without much of a mass base to speak of. Yet anarchists and left communists frequently found themselves allied against social democrats and Leninists, and for unfettered social revolution. The POUM’s alliance on the barricades with the CNT/FAI during the 1937 Barcelona May Days during the Spanish civil war, as well as the anarchist/left communist blend exemplified by the Friends of Durruti, clearly made them political bedfellows. This affiliation continued with the roller coaster fall-and-rise of anarchist and left communist political fortunes from 1945 on, and today I talk about the anarcho/ultra anti-authoritarian milieu as an overarching category. Of course, there are differences. We’ll leave a discussion of that for a future column.

As for Hooligan Rules #1 and #2? Those too require more space than I have at the moment. Did you hear the one about the anarchist, the Marxist, and the rabbi who walk into a bar? The bartender says: “What is this, a joke?”

Of cults and sects: “What’s Left?” November 2014, MRR #378

Does “one divide into two” or “two fuse into one?” This question is a subject of debate in China and now here. This debate is a struggle between two conceptions of the world. One believes in struggle, the other in unity. The two sides have drawn a clear line between them and their arguments are diametrically opposed. Thus, you can see why one divides into two.

Free translation from the Red Flag, Peking, September 21, 1964
as quoted in Anti-Mass: Methods of Organization for Collectives

One man’s cult is another man’s PTA.

Okay, so the aphorism needs a little work. What I often call “The Left” is littered with examples of cults, beginning with Lyndon LaRouche’s Trotskyist National Caucus of Labor Committees in the 1960s and 70s which went on a rampage, called “Operation Mop-Up,” of physically attacking fellow left individuals and organizations after the NCLC itself was attacked by Mark Rudd’s and Bernadine Dohrn’s Revolutionary Youth Movement. LaRouche would quickly veer right into Fascism, and then into a lunacy of conspiracy theories involving the Rockefellers, London bankers, the queen of England, the ADL, the KGB, and the Heritage Foundation. Then there is the Provisional Communist Party, or CPUSA (Provisional Wing), a super-secret organization founded by Gino Perente with a cell structure and even a “Military Fraction” that made the news for hoarding a stockpile of weapons in its Brooklyn headquarters. Its clandestine operations have eased only slightly with the ascendancy of Margaret Ribar to chairmanship, because the Provisional Communist Party operates primarily through front organizations—like the Physicians Organizing Committee, California Homemakers Association and the National Labor Federation—which never acknowledge the existence, let alone the leadership of the CPUSA (Provisional Wing).

Finally, we come to the Revolutionary Communist Party. A Maoist relic of the battles both ideological and physical of the 1970s New Communist Movement, the RCP is proud of its personality cult around heir apparent to Mao and self-exiled chairman Bob Avakian, but not so open about its violent anti-homosexual history. Until 1988, the RCP defined homosexuality as counterrevolutionary, bourgeois and a product of capitalist decadence, after which date being gay was simply considered oppressive to women and narcissistic. Homosexuality was regarded by the RCP as acceptable only after 2001/02. Boastful of its participation in the 1992 LA Rodney King riots, the RCP runs the minuscule Revolution Books chain and wields control behind a series of front groups, from the now defunct punk-oriented No Business As Usual to Refuse and Resist, the October 22 Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression, and the Criminalization of a Generation, La Résistencia, Not in Our Name, and the World Can’t Wait. Its youth wing, the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, is no more, replaced by youth-oriented Revolution Clubs.

Prior to 1975 and the RCP’s founding, when it was known as the Bay Area Revolutionary Union headquartered in Berkeley, these folks would beat down local Trotskyists with their steel-toed boots while loudly denouncing their victims as degenerates and fascists. With their youth auxiliary of the day, the Revolutionary Student Brigade, the RU initiated a campaign beginning in 1971 to take over several targeted mass organizations on the Left, the most notable being one I was involved in, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War/Winter Soldiers Organization (VVAW/WSO). The RU first initiated a joint study group with the National Office of the VVAW/WSO and then infiltrated RU/RSB cadre into the steering committee and VVAW/WSO chapters. VVAW/WSO had a healthy mix of liberals, socialists, Marxists, Leninists and anarchists at the time. My chapter in Santa Cruz actually had a preponderance of anarchists by the time of the organization’s annual convention in 1975. At the general plenary meeting, RU/RSB delegates denounced their opponents as “Trotskyite fascist scum” and “cocksucking faggot scum,” initiated fistfights before, during and after the convention, and took over the organization by force and rigged election. The RU declared itself the Revolutionary Communist Party in September of 1975 with the endorsement of the decimated remnants of the VVAW, along with other supporting organizations such as the RSB, Unemployed Workers Organizing Committee, National United Workers Organization and Wei Min She. VVAW eventually legally won back its name and organization, and the RCP formed VVAW/Anti-Imperialist.

These efforts to form a so-called mass-based revolutionary vanguard party, far from producing the desired effect, actually brought about a narrowing of the RU/RCP’s base and membership. A sizable minority faction calling itself the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters split off in opposition to the RCP’s support for the Gang of Four in China by 1977. After years of aging and attrition within the RCP, and despite its recommitment to militant activism, another more informal split occurred in 2008 critical of Bob Avakian’s overt cult of personality. A thinning of its ranks no doubt was interpreted as a “purification” of the RCP’s ideology, even as it marked a waning of this Maoist organization’s influence.

Such cultish behavior aside, the Left has always suffered from infighting and sectarianism, beginning with the battle between Marx and Bakunin over the First International Workingman’s Association and reaching a peak during the Spanish 1936-39 civil war. Liberals, socialists, Communists and anarchists allied together under the Spanish Republican government, only to suffer from mutual mistrust and recrimination, backstabbing and civil war within the civil war, all of which resulted in Franco’s defeat of the Republic. Marxism-Leninism under Stalin denounced Trotskyist Marxism-Leninism as “social fascism,” the Soviet Union repudiated Tito’s version of Communism in Yugoslavia, and Mao’s version of Marxism-Leninism excoriated the Soviet Union as revisionist and “social imperialist” while the Soviet Union accused Mao of being “a nationalist, an adventurist, and a deviationist.” Trotskyists are known to split at the drop of a hat, attacking each other more vociferously then they do other, non-Trotskyist Leninists, whose regimes they charitably call “deformed workers states.”

The Situationist International in western Europe from 1957 to 1972 was known for many things, most notoriously their ultra-sectarianism. The SI split and split again, its members having broken with each other repeatedly until only two individuals remained in the SI by 1972. This divisive practice reached its absurd extreme in the “chain break,” in which Situationists denounced anyone who didn’t join them in denouncing their enemies. Thus they inverted Mao’s famous axiom into: “To be my friend, you must be an enemy of my enemy.”

This tendency to hate the people you’re closest to, that you share the most similarities with, is frequently the rule. Witness a history of world religions where the term sectarian originated. A much less prominent tendency is to unite divergent groups under a wider front alliance, if not a “big tent” organization. The Marxist-Leninist left has witnessed attempts at socialist regroupment (as when various Trotskyist groups such as Solidarity, Fourth Internationalist Tendency and Activists for Independent Socialist Politics fused, but then failed at broader unity attempts) or left refoundation (as when the post-Maoist Freedom Road Socialist Organization negotiated with and subsumed Fire By Night Organizing Committee, a split from the defunct Love and Rage Anarchist Federation). Left communists and anarchists cross-pollinated and contended by turns, ever since the POUM and the CNT/FAI joined forces for the 1937 Barcelona May Days uprising. Most recently, small circles of neo-Leninists, para-anarchists and post left communists are discussing and debating how to move past the wreckage that the Left has become by 1990.

In the late 1980s/early 1990s a number of continental anarchist gatherings were held around North America (Chicago 1986, Minneapolis 1987, Toronto 1988). I attended the Without Borders gathering in 1989 in San Francisco, where the whole panoply of anarchist groups, tendencies, currents and schools convened. The attitude here was not simply “can’t we all just get along,” but a quite aggressive, all-inclusive, catch-all, free-wheeling invocation. In addition to the classic anarchism of European origin (collectivism, mutualism, communism, syndicalism, individualism), there was green, primitivist, nihilist, pacifist, feminist, queer, and post-left anarchism, even Hakim Bey’s blend of mysticism, man-boy love, and temporary autonomous zones. Especially Hakim Bey’s loopy anarchy in 1989. The Black Bloc was a year or two from being introduced onto the American scene, so insurrectionary anarchism was still a ways away, but otherwise, the whole zoo was present and celebrated at these gatherings. I ran into a couple of actual anarchist capitalists at the Without Borders gathering, but no one explicitly distributed literature, put up a table, did a workshop, or presented a speaker advocating capitalism. Nothing was forbidden and all was permitted in this modern American anarchist milieu, except for explicit endorsement of capitalism.

Twenty-five years later, the anarchist milieu is much the same, if the Annual San Francisco Anarchist Book Fair is any indication. Anarchist capitalism still isn’t welcome. Despite the entrepreneurial nature of the event, free market anarchists have no license to set up shop there. And when members of the Bay Area National Anarchists showed up in 2009, they kept a low profile, for fear of being attacked. National anarchist groups have been openly refused access by anarchist bookfairs in other cities, and national anarchism has been roundly castigated by much of anarchism as crypto-fascist. In 2007, the one-day Saturday SF bookfair expanded to an entire weekend, and was promptly criticized for not being flexible in accommodating the concurrent 8-day BASTARD conference in East Bay. Push came to shove, and the BASTARD folks started sponsoring their own book fair in the Berkeley/Oakland area. There are two anarchist book fairs in the San Francisco Bay Area every year, camaraderie be damned. The reason that in 2014 the SF Anarchist Book Fair and the East Bay BASTARD conference were reduced to a day each and no longer overlapped had little to do with rapprochement so much as it did with their respective lack of time, energy and resources to carry out fuller agendas. To make my point, a series of confrontations between leftist, identity/decolonize anarchists and post-left anarchists occurred between the end of 2013 and April, 2014. These incidents culminated when members of the Qilombo Social Center surrounded, harassed and ultimately drove out members of Anarchy: a Journal of Desire Armed from the March 22, 2014 SF Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair. The purge of post-left AJODA members by decolonize QSC members was an internet controversy for a bit longer than its allotted 15-minutes-of-shame. No doubt, the split in anarchist ranks that this idiocy highlights is forever.

Thus, we can see why one divides into two.

Marketing 101: “What’s Left?” March 2014, MRR #370

Now, that’s marketing.

My wife and I recently went to see a movie at The Kabuki, a local cinema that’s now part of the Sundance independent movie theatre chain. The Kabuki is a multiplex in San Francisco’s Japantown, with a couple of big auditoriums and several smaller theaters, reserved seating, and food service that includes alcohol in certain over-21 areas. We were there to see The Book Thief. Hard to imagine someone making a bit of sentimental smarm out of an anti-Nazi subject, but there you are. Anyway, the building was thronged due to two near-simultaneous showings of the The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the second part to the trilogy that tracks with the young adult novel series of the same name. The place was jam-packed with adolescents, mainly teenaged girls, with some of their parental chaperones. I hear that this movie does have appeal to older people. When I was maneuvering through the crowds, headed to and from the bathrooms, I noticed a couple of teen clusters giving each other the film’s distinctive assignation, a three-fingered salute touched to the lips and then held out that comes to represent a sign of resistance against the ruling regime in the movie. Along with the four-note tune called “Rue’s Whistle Song,” and the mockingjay symbol worn by the lead protagonist Katniss Everdeen, these have become symbols in the movie of the failed rebellion against the government. “The odds are never in our favor” is the graffiti summing up the film’s theme. Talk about the clever marketing of rebellion to an adolescent demographic.

Produced by the studio Color Force and distributed by Lionsgate, they should have taken a page from the folks who market those Guy Fawkes masks. Based on a stylized representation of that English terrorist and folk hero who tried to blow up Parliament in 1605 and was executed for his temerity, Guy Fawkes also became associated with the celebratory bonfires set on November 5 to commemorate what was called the “Gunpowder Plot.” Guy Fawkes Night featured grotesque effigies of the man, and soon children used similarly masked effigies to beg for money around Britain. Eventually, cheap cardboard masks of Guy Fawkes were sold for Guy Fawkes Night festivities.

Then came V for Vendetta, the graphic novel and the film based on same. The main character in both wears the mask, which is manufactured by Time-Warner as a movie-related product. The initial sightings of the mask’s use seem to be somewhat random, beginning with its appearance in a YouTube video connected with “Epic Fail Guy,” a stick figure that fails at everything he/she does. But it soon became associated with protestors hoping to hide their identities, or to make a point. When the hacker group Anonymous adopted it, things took off. Anonymous started using it in their public events and PR releases, and the hacktivist community at large became associated with it. The mask appeared in graffiti and was worn at protests and demonstrations around the world, from Poland and Ukraine to Brazil and Turkey, from various countries involved in the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street actions. V for Vendetta novel writer and anarchist Alan Moore has said that he was “quite heartened” by the mask’s uses and impact in popular protest, almost like “a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped the realm of fiction.” Illustrator and co-creator David Lloyd is quoted on BBC News (10-20-12):
The Guy Fawkes mask has now become a common brand and a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny – and I’m happy with people using it, it seems quite unique, an icon of popular culture being used this way. My feeling is the Anonymous group needed an all-purpose image to hide their identity and also symbolise that they stand for individualism – V for Vendetta is a story about one person against the system. We knew that V was going to be an escapee from a concentration camp where he had been subjected to medical experiments but then I had the idea that in his craziness he would decide to adopt the persona and mission of Guy Fawkes – our great historical revolutionary.

All the while, the Guy Fawkes mask as marketed by Time-Warner has become a top selling product on Amazon.com. “It’s quite ironic, actually. In their attempts to take down large corporations, Anonymous actually pads the pockets of one of them.” So reports Time Magazine on 8-29-11 (“How Time Warner Profits from the ‘Anonymous’ Hackers,” Nick Carbone). “But there’s one unintentional consequence – their disguise is earning big bucks for a major media conglomerate. Warner Brothers, the Time Warner subsidiary who produced the movie, owns the rights to the Guy Fawkes mask – and they earn royalties on every sale.” The original New York Times article (“Masked Protesters Aid Time Warner’s Bottom Line,” Nick Bilton, 8-28-11) concurs: “What few people seem to know, though, is that Time Warner, one of the largest media companies in the world and parent of Warner Brothers, owns the rights to the image and is paid a licensing fee with the sale of each mask. […] Indeed, with the help of Anonymous, the mask has become one of the most popular disguises and — in a small way — has added to the $28 billion in revenue Time Warner accumulated last year. It is the top-selling mask on Amazon.com, beating out masks of Batman, Harry Potter and Darth Vader.”

Imagine itching to join your favorite protest wearing your trendy Guy Fawkes mask, only to learn that your local costume shop is back ordered until Monday. Stores can’t keep it in stock. Balking at lining the corporate coffers of Time-Warner, some activists are even having faux Guy Fawkes masks mass produced in Asia, according to CNN (“Guy Fawkes mask inspires Occupy protests around the world,” Nick Thompson, 11-5-11). But are these replica masks sweatshop free?

I’m sure glad some enterprising group of anarchists hadn’t managed to copyright, trademark and then market the anarchy symbol.

Thomas Pynchon wrote about a conflict between two secret, underground mail services in his uncharacteristically slim novel The Crying of Lot 49. Thurn and Taxis, once an actual 18th century postal system, is at war with the fictitious Trystero/Tristero, which is symbolized by a muted post horn that surfaces at odd moments and locations throughout the work. Every time the Trystero post horn appears, the book’s main character, and indeed the reader, senses that something conspiratorially mysterious, and perhaps entirely wonderful is about to be revealed.

That’s akin to how I felt, growing up, when I saw the circle A symbol. An anarchist myself, I felt a part of some covert movement, some exotic liberation struggle, whenever I encountered the circle A scrawled as graffiti in public. It was extremely rare in the 1960s and 70s and, as such, highly provocative. Your average citizen had no idea what it meant and thought anarchism to be synonymous with chaos and destruction. Most folks versed in politics didn’t have a clue either, with the exception of a few highly cognizant individuals―left, right and center―who almost universally denounced anarchism as hopelessly idealistic, if not outright dangerous. The Left back in the day, specifically hardcore Marxist-Leninists, utterly disdained the politics and people behind the symbol. I felt smug, an insider, someone in the know, part of a conscious elect out to change the world whenever I came upon the circle A symbol.

Today, of course, the circle A is ubiquitous. There are literally scores of businesses and consumer products sporting the circle A as part of their logos or marketing strategies. Elements of the ML Left, discredited by the practice of “real existing socialism” throughout the 20th century, now take anarchism seriously, if only for the purpose of recruiting, but often ideologically in formulating a “leaderless Leninism.” People versed in mainstream politics are also familiar with what the circle A symbol means, with certain libertarians even describing themselves as anarchist capitalists (see my last column). And the general public is also well aware of the circle A―spray painted as it is on virtually every wall, building and sidewalk in most urban areas―if not the symbol’s implications. Thanks to the bullshit perpetrated by certain tendencies of anarchism in the Occupy movement, most people consider anarchists to be anything from childish idiots to inept wanna-be terrorists. Me, I now cringe whenever I see a circle A.

I no longer call myself an anarchist, or left communist, as readers of this column are well aware, and for reasons other than current events. But the sheer amentia of anarchism’s insurrectionary vanguard, responsible for the smashy smashy excesses of Occupy Oakland, would have gone a long way toward driving me out of anti-authoritarian politics. The so-called strategy of these insurrectionists amounts to fucking shit up 24/7, a pathetic excuse for politics, or in this case, anti-politics. Symptomatic of the ideological exhaustion and decay of our time, a consequence of multinational capitalism’s global triumph, anarchism’s insurrectionary dead end now can’t give away ice cream in hell, let alone convince radicals that the anarchy symbol amounts to shit.

Now, that’s anti-marketing.

The RCP is all wet: “What’s Left?” May 2009, MRR #312

I hadn’t planned to write a column this month.

I like to lie low in March. This is anarchy time in the Bay Area, with the Anarchist Book Fair and BASTARD Conference both happening in the middle of the month. I’ve called the latter masturbatory self-indulgence, and the former an ineffectual lifestyle zoo. Other remarks I’ve made in conjunction with these criticisms have elicited long-winded letters from the circle A pro-snitch brigade that took up way too much space in this magazine awhile back. These days, I feel it’s the better part of valor not to stir things up.

That said, I must wholeheartedly praise the actions of the Modesto Anarcho Crew who physically drove out the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party from the March 14-15, 2009 Anarchist Book Fair. They’ve also laid down a class-based challenge to the anarchist movement that’s simply brilliant. To quote Crudo of MAC:

I also fail to see how calling ourselves a crew is alienating to other people. Realistically at this point, many of us have no interest in trying to justify our actions to a movement that continues to disappoint and alienate us from it. Our homes become foreclosed on and you fix bikes. We lose hours and jobs and you try and get us to read zines about steampunk. We try and articulate our ideas and break out of activism and are called out for “alienating” people. We take action and are scolded.

It seems that the unwanted children of capital just can’t win under anarchism’s rules. That’s fine, we play by our own.

“the left has labeled us hooligans – we intend to be much worse.”

It’s column deadline, too late for my usual lengthy exposition, so I might have more to say about these things in the future. For now, let me just tell MAC, the next time you all are in San Francisco (and provided you aren’t straightedge), I’ll buy your drinks at the bar. I suggest the Toronado for the brews, but it’s your choice.

Now, if only local anarchists would step it up with regard to Bay Area’s National Anarchists…

Anarchism of Fools: “What’s Left?” April 2008, MRR #299

Part One: Anarchism of-by-for Fools

We Fascists are the only true anarchists. Once we’ve become masters of the state, true anarchy is that of power.

The Duke in
Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
Pier Paolo Pasolini

Today, both communism and fascism, ideologies that the French fascist Robert Brasillach once called “the two poetries” of the 20th century, seem exhausted given the triumph of multinational capitalism. Yet periods of ideological decay often breed strange new variants, such as the “Red-Brown alliance” in the former Soviet Union, which do not easily fit into conventional political-science categories of “left” and “right.”

Dreamer of the Day
Francis Parker Yockey and the
Postwar Fascist International (1999)
Kevin Coogan

It was the December, 1993 annual general meeting, at the old MRR Clipper Street house. The one with the spacious, downstairs record library slash radio-recording studio. It was the night of the Great Purge.

I’d been doing shitwork at MRR for almost two and a half years, ever since I moved to the Bay Area in July, 1991. I’d also written a couple of guest columns under the pseudonym “Lefty” Hooligan. Tim Yohannan liked them enough that he proposed I do a “three dot” Herb Caen-style news column for the magazine’s recently revived news section. “All The News That Fits” was a regular feature of the news section by the time of the general meeting, though no one outside of Tim and I knew I was “Lefty” Hooligan.

Downstairs was jammed with volunteers, on rumors that something big was in the works. It was Tim Yo’s show that night, and he did a pretty fair impersonation of Mao, the Great Helmsman, unleashing the Cultural Revolution. First, he axed two-thirds of the music the magazine covered, claiming that what he was excluding just wasn’t punk rock. Then, he canned MRR co-founder and conservative columnist Jeff Bale, arguing that he didn’t want political opinions expressed in the magazine that could be read in the mainstream media. Tim proposed that individual columnists could cover the kinds of music-pop punk, crossover metal, emo, oi, etc.-that were now outside MRR‘s official purview. He also offered to let Jeff continue to do record reviews, an offer Jeff refused. The compromises were choreographed, as was combining Jeff Bale’s firing with the music purge, in a heavy-handed Stalinist minuet.

Tim sought to play off the right-Jeff Bale who wholeheartedly supported the music purge-against the left-those volunteers who liked what Tim considered to be non-punk music but who also didn’t like Bale’s increasingly conservative political bent. There was a lot of protest and grumbling but, for the most part, the strategy seemed to work. The only time Tim got worried, he later confided, was when Larry Livermore tried to rally the opposition to Tim’s actions. Larry pointed out that, without the magazine’s dedicated shitworkers, Tim couldn’t publish MRR, then went on to argue that since “we all” had recently turned out the Republicans from the White House by voting for Bill Clinton, MRR‘s volunteers should vote down Tim’s proposed changes to the magazine.

I was a drinking man in those days. I was on my third bottle of Red Hook, and feeling little pain. I don’t remember if I actually interrupted Larry’s ersatz Joe Hill speech, or simply waited for a pause in his diatribe to interject my little jab.

“I kinda remember the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency,” I said, gesturing with my nearly empty beer bottle. “But I don’t remember the election of Tim Yohannan to run Maximum Rocknroll.”

That broke Larry’s momentum. Within minutes, a dozen folks were voicing versions of “yeah, this is Tim’s zine, and he has the right to do what he wants with it.” The debate shifted from Bale’s firing and the music purge, to whether Tim had the authority to do what he was planning. And even though Larry excoriated the rest of us as sheep in his next column, when it came down to it, most of the volunteers sided with Tim’s right to run the magazine as he saw fit.

I still have great affection for Tim Yo’s memory. To call him a Stalinist would not have insulted him in the least. He was a hard assed bastard, often puritanical, who prided himself on being an outright asshole, when necessary. He ran Maximum like a well-oiled machine, and he never lacked for conviction in pursuing what he felt was right. The man had balls, and while his decisions in 1993 eventually spawned HeartattaCk and Punk Planet zines in response, they also helped revitalize punk rock yet one more time by insisting on a return to musical basics. Most of us shitworkers at the time thought Tim was too dogmatic in his political opinions, and too rigid in his musical tastes. Yet we respected the man, and worked for him, not merely because he was willing to stand up and fight for what he believed. When Tim decided to take on an issue or an individual, he gave no quarter, took no prisoners and fought to the bitter end.

I was reminded of the Great Purge recently when a locally administered anarchist internet board had one hell of a time ejecting a lone, locally based national anarchist who joined up to propagandize the anarchist milieu. The contrast couldn’t be more striking. I trust that anybody with access to Google can search out the parties in question, so I don’t have to name any names here. Frankly, I don’t want to give the national anarchists any more publicity. As for the anarchist board, they’re a bit of an embarrassment. It took them over a week of some of the most spineless debate imaginable to agree to ban the anarcho-fascist, and then only after it was pretty convincingly revealed that the NA was pursuing a strategy of political entryism. With all that, the administrator only reluctantly decided to shitcan the NA because he didn’t “have the (emotional) time to be arguing about this with strangers right now.” Is it any wonder anarchists keep losing revolutions?

The emergence in the Bay Area of self-declared national anarchists that regular anarchists now have to contend with is one more turn in the syncretistic politics on the far right. There are already national revolutionaries, autonomist nationalists, and National Bolsheviks. Rather than waste column space detailing the convoluted and arcane evolution, say, of national anarchism from the pro-Catholic International Third Position and the pro-Qadddafy National Revolutionary Faction, I’d like to make some broad comments on political syncretism, left and right.

Syncretistic tendencies seeking to combine seemingly opposing political ideologies can be found across the political spectrum, of course. But anarchism has proven to be wildly, almost indiscriminately syncretistic, hence the anarcho hyphenation that virtually every anarchist employs. One is an anarcho-pacifist, -individualist, -capitalist, -mutualist, -feminist, -syndicalist, -communist, -primitivist, or some combination thereof. Why not anarcho-fascist? That fascism enters the house of anarchism through the door of nationalism should not come as a surprise. For all of modern anarchism’s vehement opposition to the nation-state, nationalism and patriotism, there are several points at which anarchism is vulnerable to the siren song of nationalism.

Early anarchist writers like Proudhon and Bakunin distinguished between nationality and the nation-state, championing self-determination for the former and abolition of the latter. In turn, early anarchist movements in Russia, China, and Mexico had a decidedly grassroots nationalist caste. It was only in response to the persistent internationalism and class analysis of Marxism, which came to dominate workers movements after the Russian Revolution, that anarchism became more critical of nationalism, and more internationalist in perspective. This populist (some call it völkisch) form of nationalism reemerged in the anarchist milieu via the British Alternative Socialist Movement and the Black Ram Group in the 1970s and 80s, which attempted to reclaim various pre-Marxist utopian and socialist concepts from the far right. Finally, a number of former Black Panther Party members, and other individuals associated with the black liberation struggles of the 1960s, rejected their previous authoritarian politics for anarchism, all the while retaining their commitment to revolutionary black nationalism.

Mention of the Black Panthers points up that Marxism’s fervid internationalism has frequently been blunted, syncretized time and again with nationalism. The social democratic parties of the Second International voted to support the war efforts of their respective national governments during WWI, and Leninism has allowed Marxism to be hyphenated, until we come to Mao who wrote: “in wars of national liberation, patriotism is applied internationalism.” Needless to say, Lenin’s own support for national self-determination and his theory of imperialism greased the slide into an almost indiscriminate support for wars of national liberation, socialist or otherwise. And let’s not forget the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran, which has managed to meld its Marxism-Leninism with orthodox Islam.

Perhaps the most syncretistic kind of politics comes from the right in the form of fascism. Historians of fascism are still at a loss to come up with a minimum definition of fascism that the field can agree upon, precisely because of its capacity to incorporate apparently unrelated, even outright contradictory political ideas. The clerical fascism of Portugal’s Salazar, the justicialismo of Peron’s Argentina, the European empire of Yockey and Evola, the electoral fascism of the British National Party, the thousand European flags of de Benoist, the faux-socialism of Mussolini’s Salo Republic; fascism is all over the place. There are even those historians, like Zeev Sternhell, who reject that fascism is a creature of the right at all, and contend that it expresses a synthesis of ultra-right and ultra-left desires for a post-bourgeois social order that essentially goes beyond right and left.

Indeed, it is possible to cite a number of individuals, such as Mussolini and Sorel, who started as socialists but who became fascists. Small sections of the syndicalist and anarcho-syndicalist labor movements in France, Spain and Italy came to embrace kinds of national syndicalism in sync with fascist corporatism. Yet Robert O. Paxton’s observation in his The Anatomy of Fascism holds true. While fascists often talked a strident anti-capitalist polemic, they never walked the walk by attempting to abolish private property, liquidate the bourgeoisie, give power to the working class, radically restructure the state apparatus, or the like. At most, fascists strictly regulated the capitalist economy within the national territory they controlled, subjecting the native bourgeoisie, sometimes harshly, to what they perceived as the interests of the nation.

For it is in the exaltation of the nation through extreme nationalism that we find what is essential to fascism. Despite its bewildering diversity, there hasn’t been a type of fascism independent of virulent nationalism. Yockey’s European-wide imperium and de Benoist’s tribal ethnes are merely variations on this theme, quite easily reconciled through an updated feudalism that, like Charlemagne’s mythic empire, would continentally unite a thousand autonomous European ethnicities. National distinctions may often account for fascism’s syncretistic idiosyncrasies. Certainly, the fact that fascism’s foundation stone is nationalism defines it as of the right.

A former professor of mine likened politics to farting into a whirlwind-you never know where the smell winds up. Political syncretism can sometimes present one with the choice of working with some rather odious people who claim to be on the same side. The National Anarchist who caused such paroxysms on the above-noted anarchist board did argue that his being against the state and nation-state were what defined his politics, that his type of tribal nationalism (read, decentralized racial separatism) was incidental to his fundamental anarchism, and that anarchists of all persuasions should be able to connect, communicate, and perhaps cooperate in opposing their common enemy, the state.

Keith Preston, an individualist anarchist, has also argued on his American Revolutionary Vanguard website that left and right anarchists, separatists and secessionists should all work together to overthrow the government. It is no coincidence that these calls for left-right collaboration, like the original call to go “beyond left and right,” invariably originate on the right. The right seems to actively syncretize with the left along the axis of revolutionary opposition to the state, a characteristic not limited to fascism. In the late 1960s, a significant segment of William F. Buckley’s conservative, college-based Young Americans for Freedom split off as anti-war, anti-state, right-wing libertarians and anarcho-capitalists. Under the influence of folks like Murray Rothbard, who published Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought with Karl Hess from 1965 to 1968, these right-wingers veered decidedly to the left and energetically courted left-libertarian elements on the moribund New Left of the day.

Jerome Tuccille describes all of this, rather humorously in his books It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand and Radical Libertarianism, from the perspective of one of those right-libertarian rebels. I was a left-wing anarchist at the time, and I’m here to confess that I was suckered into believing that some sort of left-right libertarian cooperation was possible. I participated in a couple of dismal efforts at seeking out some sort of common ground between left and right libertarians. I came to the realization, during a so-called left-right study group in which all the right libertarians were extolling the joys of hording gold and silver, that it was a waste of time trying to work with anarcho-capitalists.

Our supposedly minor differences-cooperative vs. competitive economics, social property vs. private property, collectivism vs. individualism-far outweighed our single, prominent commonality-our shared desire to abolish the state. We seldom attended the same events, we rarely took the same actions, and we hardly spoke the same language. What’s more, it wasn’t as if left leaning anarchists had all managed to get along, much less work together. And the shibboleth of unity on the Left was as much a pipedream, then as now. There was no good reason for left-wing libertarians to try and form an alliance with right-wing libertarians.

Just as there is no good reason today for the rest of the anarchist milieu to have anything to do with the joke that calls itself national anarchism. That won’t stop addled anarchos from paraphrasing Rodney King and pontificating that all anti-statists should try and get along. A couple of regular posters did just that on the anarchist board in question in response to calls to ban the national anarchist. At least King had the excuse that he was beaten senseless by the LAPD.

That nationalism proved instrumental in the process of syncretism in all but one of the historical examples described in this column is what’s particularly telling. As a stone internationalist of the Marxist persuasion, I’m aware of how much Marx underrated nationalism as a social force, and of how little the ultraleft has done to correct this deficiency. The same could be said for race and racism. And while these inadequacies are part of the reason I no longer call myself a left communist, this column has gone on far too long to discuss them here and now.

Next month, predictions gone awry.

Josh Wolf: “What’s Left?” June 2007, MRR #289

But to live outside the law, you must be honest.

-Bob Dylan, “Absolutely Sweet Marie”

I recently viewed Josh Wolf’s controversial, unedited video of an anti-G8 anarchist riot in San Francisco posted on his website. My first thought was, Josh spent 226 days in jail in civil contempt of a federal grand jury for this piece of crap? What a waste.

I’ll briefly recap what this is all about, for those of you who have been living in a cave for the past couple of years.

In solidarity with worldwide protests against the G8 summit held in St. Petersburg, Russia, Anarchist Action called for an anti-G8 demonstration in San Francisco’s Mission district on July 8, 2005. Around 200 anarchists, most of them wearing masks, started marching down both lanes of Mission Street from the 16th Street BART station a little before 9 pm. The SFPD responded with fully equipped riot police, fleets of cop cars and paddy wagons, and repeated announcements that the demo was illegal.

All hell broke loose when the cops attempted to force the demonstrators onto the sidewalks. The crowd, which had swelled to nearly 300, broke into smaller groups that ran in every direction. The anarchists dragged newspaper boxes into the street to block traffic, trashed the KFC, BofA, Wells Fargo, Skechers, Shoe Biz, and a Shell gas station, burned flags, set off smoke bombs and firecrackers, lit garbage cans on fire, and played cat-and-mouse with the cops by regrouping and splitting up in different parts of the Mission well into the night. In turn, the police confiscated the demo’s sound equipment, made numerous attempts to force people onto the sidewalks, arrested several people, tackled, beat up and clubbed down several more people, fired teargas, and repeatedly drove their police cars at demonstrators and into the crowd.

During this melee, two significant incidents occurred. A demonstrator bashed a cop’s head in with a skateboard, fracturing his skull. And, by accident or intent, a cop car was briefly set on fire. Or, at least, an attempt was made, which was all the excuse the Federal government needed. Called in when the SFPD contacted the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the FBI to investigate the assault on the cop, the Feds used the fact that the SFPD gets Federal funds to help pay for its vehicles to supercede the local DA’s Office and empanel a Federal grand jury to investigate the attempted arson, thus federalizing the case. This being the proverbial elephant’s nose in the tent, it was assumed that the grand jury would go on to investigate who might have perpetrated the assault on a police officer, and who might have instigated the riot.

Josh Wolf attended the anti-G8 demo both as an anarchist and a frequent local IndyMedia news contributor. Needless to say, he knew many of the other demonstrators. Josh recorded some twenty minutes of that night’s donnybrook. He posted a short clip on IndyBay right after the event, followed by a longer, edited clip. He also sold a clip of the demo to local KRON TV news, which broadcast it. The grand jury subpoenaed Josh to testify and to hand over the outtakes, thinking that he might have recorded either the downing of the cop or the cop car’s ignition, and seeking to use Josh’s testimony to identify participants. Josh refused and was cited and jailed for civil contempt on August 1, 2006.

Wolf was defended by the National Lawyers Guild, which contended that, as a journalist, freedom of the press protected Josh from testifying against the people he was reporting on, as well as from having to hand over the unpublished segments of his digital video recording to the government. Josh always insisted that there was nothing incriminating on the rest of the dvr, and offered to have it reviewed in the privacy of a judge’s chambers. US District Judge William Alsup didn’t buy the NLG’s arguments, nor did he accept Josh’s offer, and thus began Wolf’s jailhouse saga, which ended only when a deal was struck. Josh agreed to make his recording of the demo available in its entirety, which he did first by posting it on his website and then by turning it over to the court. The Feds in turn agreed not to demand that Josh testify before the grand jury and name names.

The video recording is grainy, jerky, and murky after dark. Neither the downed cop, nor the alleged attempted arson on the cop car is depicted. Lesser crimes-marking up a city bus advertisement with graffiti, damaging property and obstructing traffic by dragging those chained-together news racks into the streets, setting off pyrotechnics-are shown, though it’s next to impossible to determine who’s doing the minor mayhem. Identifiable, unmasked folks are in attendance at the staging area, when the demo gets under way, and after the demo turns to riot, but this dvr couldn’t be used to indict anyone for anything.

My initial negative reaction to seeing the video however wasn’t because it is unremarkable, poorly shot footage of people either just standing around or endlessly marching around. I wondered why the fuck Josh Wolf was willing to spend so much time in jail defending a bunch of yahoo anarchist dilettantes whose idea of class struggle and class solidarity was to trash one of San Francisco’s solidly working class, ethnically diverse neighborhoods. When tens of thousands of demonstrators shut down San Francisco’s financial district at the start of the 2003 Iraq war-now that was an appropriate target and a righteous action. Anarchist rioting in the Mission was merely a Mickey Mouse stunt.

I say this having called myself an anarchist for fifteen years from 1969 to 1984, having participated in my first riot in 1971, and having donned the street fighting uniform of the black bloc for anti-Columbus Day protests in San Francisco in 1992. Longtime readers of this column know I took part in shutting down the financial district on March 20, 2003, with a small group of friends, without wearing a mask. Earlier in the day the rampaging Black Bloc had been lead by the nose into an SFPD trap that resulted in some 200 arrests. I’d realized long before then to be leery of the whole breakaway/black block/anarcho scatter mob approach as it often proved too reactive, easily manipulated, not very creative, and lacking in strategic intelligence.

Young anarchos in this country have appropriated the tactics of the black bloc from Europe’s autonomen without grasping the strategy behind them. This is typical, as when anarchism embraces Situationism’s libertarian forms (detournement, constructed situation, derive) without any understanding of Situationism’s Marxist content. It’s the reason why anarchists can claim to be in solidarity with working people while trashing their working class neighborhood.

I don’t really want this to turn into yet another anti-anarchist screed. In returning the focus to Josh Wolf though, I’m not at all concerned with the question of whether or not he qualifies as a bono fide journalist. I’m a bit more interested in efforts to challenge the Federal government’s dubious claim of standing in the case. Ultimately, the legal niceties of Josh Wolf’s predicament bore me.

I think what’s important in all of this is the deal Josh struck to release the full, unedited recording of the demonstration in exchange for a promise by the Feds not to call him to testify before the grand jury and identify demonstration participants. I have a facility for identifying human voices by their pitch, cadence and timbre, and I can often recognize a singer within a few notes of a song I’ve never heard. Even though I haven’t been around the Bay Area anarcho scene in years, as I watched the tinny video on Josh’s website, I was able to pick out three people I knew immediately based on their voices. All three wore masks throughout the recording. Josh, as an active participant in the local anarchist milieu, could have easily fingered scores of people who were involved in the riot in testimony before the grand jury, or spent several more months in jail on contempt charges for refusing to do so.

Yet releasing the dvr wasn’t risk free. Clearly, the Feds were on a fishing expedition here. Given the time, a zealous prosecutor, or a Federal government truly bent on a witch-hunt, could have given the recording the full CSI treatment. No doubt, others would have been subpoenaed. Obviously, Josh Wolf was between a rock and a hard place on this one.

The US Attorney’s Office spun the deal Josh made by falsely claiming that Wolf had complied with the original subpoena, a gross distortion picked up by the SF Chronicle when it reported on 4-4-07 that Josh had been freed only after giving up and turning over the video. Finally, a Chronicle op-ed piece on 4-9-07 by Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, claimed that the Feds made a mistake in going after Josh for evidence he never had, that Josh made a mistake in going to jail over material that was not evidence, that indeed the whole thing was a “huge misunderstanding.”

Contrary to the US Attorney’s Office and the Chronicle, Josh didn’t comply with the original subpoena, nor did he give up. He did manage to force the government to back off from making him name names, essentially running out the clock on the investigation. The Federal grand jury is set to expire next month, in July, without having accomplished much other than keep Josh Wolf in jail. Josh made about as principled a decision as was possible, given the circumstances.

Notice I’m not discussing whether Josh “did the right thing.” In 1968, when everybody was carrying around that godawful tome Atlas Shrugged by second-rate writer Ayn Rand, I was reading Nietzsche’s snazzy, slim volume Beyond Good and Evil. I agree with the critique of morality, though I don’t use it to justify a sophomoric nihilism that Nietzsche himself rejected. As any good Marxist well knows, activity precedes consciousness, but once consciousness arises, it influences activity. It is possible to derive and practice principled behaviors from a theoretical understanding of reality. It is then possible to learn from the successes and failures of those behaviors to modify one’s original understanding of the world.

It’s called praxis.

A couple of years ago, the BASTARD conference presented self-admitted police snitch Bob Black conducting a workshop. A number of folks had principled objections to Bob Black’s presence-from concerns about personal and collective security to the argument that, if the state is the enemy, than a police informant is a state collaborator. These protestations were dismissed as moralistic by the conference organizers. The puerile nihilism of the BASTARDs aside, I would contend that anarchism in general fails to grasp the importance of principled praxis. Along with failing to see the forest for the trees, this flaw also contributed to anarchists wreaking havoc in a working class neighborhood in the name of working class solidarity.

It’s nice to know that at least one anarchist is capable of principled behavior.

There I go again, disrespecting anarchism. Not so long ago, I was praising to high heaven the role of anarchism in Seattle 1999 and the subsequent anti-globalization movement. This column’s header is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to that historical moment. Anarchism has a very long history of losing it at the moment of greatest influence, of self-destructing with success at hand, of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. I guess I’m pissed that I witnessed yet another episode in that sad tradition.