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amaditalks
https://amaditalks.tumblr.com/post/737870269629267968/theres-nothing-radical-leftist-or-anarchist
:
thefloralmenace
https://www.tumblr.com/thefloralmenace/737296490498768896/somewhat-on-the-vibe-of-your-glorious-revolution
:
Somewhat on the vibe of “your glorious revolution doesn’t exist,” I want to
talk to you all, especially the young folks, about effective anarchism.
Spoiler alert, it’s not blowing stuff up or arson.
I am considered the most anarchical person of all among my friends.
Granted, most of my experience has been wreaking anarchy against the
systems present in my high school and college, but the principles are the
same.
Practical anarchy is not the big, flashy, romanticizable thing people
online make it out to be. It’s more about the long haul - digging in your
teeth and just being a menace that no one can really get rid of.
Everyone’s “Why vote when you can firebomb a Walmart” posts (that they
don’t follow through on) are just not pratical because this is a
surveillance society. With CCTV and DNA testing and cell phone cameras and
GPS tracking, if you do something big like that, you are GOING to be
caught; then that is the end of your anarchical career. And, keep in mind
that you might get caught while you’re setting up this big event - it’s a
crime to blow up a Walmart and also a crime to conspire to blow up a
Walmart, so your career in anarchy might end before it begins, and then you
are permanently out of the game. No matter what causes you were working for
that inspired you to do something big and violent that you thought would
get someone’s attention, you now can’t help at all ever again in your
entire life. What you did will be a passing headline on the news, and then
everything will go back to exactly what it was because big, acute actions
can’t compare in effectiveness to small, constant actions (just being a
thorn in the side of the system, poking and poking, but unable to be
dislodged).
This is just the practical side of it too: think about the risk of hurting
innocents if you really advocate for doing things like that. You think
blowing up a Walmart would really make a dent in that big of a corporation?
But if you intentionally or unintentionally kill a bunch of Walmart
shoppers, that’s going to devastate families that had nothing to do with
whatever your cause is.
So all that big talk about violence and destruction: not practical, not
effective, not ethical.
The only way I’ve started to change oppressive systems around me is by
justing chipping away from within the confines of the rules of these
systems, and/or only stepping just outside them (never breaking rules in a
big way that could have allowed said system to easily and “justifiably” get
rid of me).
So if you’re going to be an anarchist, you need to consider:
- Having the longest career in anarchism possible (i.e. being careful
enough and judicious with your actions so that you don’t get expelled from
the system you wish to fight).
And then for any given anarchical plan:
Potential consequences.
Insurance.
I’ll give you an example. I had serious beef with the culture of my
college’s science department. Students were constantly overworked, and if
they expressed their misery outloud or reached out to any of their
professors about their struggles, they got apathetic responses if not
direct insults to their abilities or dedication. I had too many similar
disparaging interactions with professors in one week, and I realized a lot
of the responses I was getting were just the result of professors not
really knowing how they sounded when they said certain things to students
(ex: If someone says they’re struggling with a course, don’t IMMEDIATELY
respond with “change your major,” - you can give that as an option, but if
you make it your first suggestion, the implication to the student is that
if they’re having any trouble with the course, they’re not good enough for
the program).
So I wrote up a flier of examples of good and bad ways to respond to
students having anxiety with explanations and distributed it to every
professor in the department. Everyone who knew about this perceived it as a
great personal risk - that I would get in some kind of unspecified trouble
or piss off an important professor, so before embarking on this project, I
considered…
Potential consequences: I couldn’t really think of any specific college or
department rules I could be violating. People postered and handed out
fliers in the department all the time. What I was doing fell pretty clearly
under freedom of speech. I just shoved the fliers under professors’ doors,
so I didn’t trespass in anyone’s office. Worst I could think is that
individual professors would get mad at me and make my life difficult, or
I’d simply be told to stop fliering in the department.
Insurance: Just in case there were any consequences that I didn’t think of
and to insure me against the ones I had thought of, I didn’t put my name on
the flier. It was typed in Word, something everyone had access to. I came
in to do it after professors had all left for the day but before I needed
to use my ID to get into the building (no electronic record of me being
there). I took the elevator to the first floor offices because the stairs
require ID swipe after 5pm, but the elevators do not. I found out the
building had no cameras by asking about it on the grounds that something of
mine had been stolen a few weeks prior. I shoved the flier under the doors
of dark offices and left it outside offices with lights on (so that no one
would come out and spot me). And here’s one of the most important pieces of
insurance: I put up a few of the fliers on public bulletin boards in the
building. This was important so that if I slipped up and said something
that conveyed that I had knowledge of the content of the flier, I would
have an excuse for that, i.e., I read it on the bulletin board before class
this morning.
And then I did the thing. And surprisingly, it was incredibly well-received
by professors. A few who knew that the flier must have been mine (because
of previous, similar anarchical actions rumored to be associated with me)
told me that everyone was RELIEVED that they finally had an instruction
manual from the student perspective on what the hell they’re supposed to
say when one of their students is panicking. It sparked a real change in
the vibe of the department and student experience. Had it instead pissed
people off, I would have simply said I could not claim authorship of the
flier but had read it and thought it contained good ideas then gone on
creating more anarchy while angry people grasped at the zero straws I had
left them to pin the action on me.
That’s an example of a single action I took that was part of a much longer
(~3 years) campaign of mine to change the culture of my department.
Everytime I did something in that campaign, I made that consequences vs.
insurance calculation to make sure they couldn’t expell me from the
program, the department, or the school before I succeeded.
There’s nothing radical, leftist, or anarchist about tearing things down
and destroying things and being nihilistic.
The motto is: stay low and build. Do things that help people organize and
create a better life, even in small ways, and stay inconspicuous while you
do. Don’t look for glory, don’t look for fireworks, look for impact.
Results. Change.
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