Cindy Milstein (they) on Nostr: As an anarchist on this sunny autumn Tuesday one week before election day, i’m ...
As an anarchist on this sunny autumn Tuesday one week before election day, i’m worried.
I’m worried that …
* Harris will win
* Trump will win
* neither will win
* the world will lose
* conspiracy theories will spark far-right extraparliamentary pogroms and other vigilante mob-mentality violence across this continent
* things will move faster, stranger, and more unpredictably than we can anticipate or imagine
* we anarchists and like-minded liberatory antistatist rebels aren’t prepared
* we’ve spent too much time instead in despair, denial, diversions (complaining about tankies or bemoaning electoralism), and so on, and too little on critical thinking, contextual strategizing, and prefiguratively building forms of community self-defense and community care that can withstand “the coming fascist insurrection”
* we’ll continue punching (each other) horizontally, including those liberals, Dems, and progressives (and maybe even tankies) who now more clearly see through an anarchistic lens and realize we are indeed in fascism, rather than struggling side by side against the hierarchical and authoritarian powers-that-be
* many, many more people, lifeways, and ecosystems will be lost
* the trauma, losses, and grief will overwhelm us
As a Jewish anarchist, I worry; it’s as much an epigenetic and cultural thing as it is based in the reality of this monstrous “fascism vs. fascism” election.
I know that worry, like my despair, is generative. It places me not at a dead-end but instead a juncture, in which we will still have communal agency, even if perhaps increasingly circumscribed, and for sure our ethical compasses—the juncture of “anarchism or fascism” (and not in name, ideology, or subculture but rather in how we decide for ourselves, together, to resist, to sustain solidarity and mutual aid, to become ungovernable and at once self-governable, to make life in common with others in the here and now even as it feels as if the jackboots are pressing down harder and more cruelly by the day.
Still, I worry.
Maybe you’re worried too. Perhaps by sharing our worries, we’ll better find wormholes out of this mess.
(photo: “fuck MAGA” sticker seen in PGH)
I’m worried that …
* Harris will win
* Trump will win
* neither will win
* the world will lose
* conspiracy theories will spark far-right extraparliamentary pogroms and other vigilante mob-mentality violence across this continent
* things will move faster, stranger, and more unpredictably than we can anticipate or imagine
* we anarchists and like-minded liberatory antistatist rebels aren’t prepared
* we’ve spent too much time instead in despair, denial, diversions (complaining about tankies or bemoaning electoralism), and so on, and too little on critical thinking, contextual strategizing, and prefiguratively building forms of community self-defense and community care that can withstand “the coming fascist insurrection”
* we’ll continue punching (each other) horizontally, including those liberals, Dems, and progressives (and maybe even tankies) who now more clearly see through an anarchistic lens and realize we are indeed in fascism, rather than struggling side by side against the hierarchical and authoritarian powers-that-be
* many, many more people, lifeways, and ecosystems will be lost
* the trauma, losses, and grief will overwhelm us
As a Jewish anarchist, I worry; it’s as much an epigenetic and cultural thing as it is based in the reality of this monstrous “fascism vs. fascism” election.
I know that worry, like my despair, is generative. It places me not at a dead-end but instead a juncture, in which we will still have communal agency, even if perhaps increasingly circumscribed, and for sure our ethical compasses—the juncture of “anarchism or fascism” (and not in name, ideology, or subculture but rather in how we decide for ourselves, together, to resist, to sustain solidarity and mutual aid, to become ungovernable and at once self-governable, to make life in common with others in the here and now even as it feels as if the jackboots are pressing down harder and more cruelly by the day.
Still, I worry.
Maybe you’re worried too. Perhaps by sharing our worries, we’ll better find wormholes out of this mess.
(photo: “fuck MAGA” sticker seen in PGH)