Recently I’ve found myself in conflict with a whole lot of people. Or to be more specific, I’ve found myself in a lot of situations where people are perpetrating particular hierarchies of white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism and stomping on the dignity of me and my homies, and since we are not ones to suffer in silence we find ourselves in conflict with a lot of people – the apologists of those who spread these hierarchies and those who are simply upset that we’ve upset the social peace.
I do not believe in compromise, and I do not believe in silence. As it has always been, when nazis rear their ugly heads we move to beat them back into the shadows. When the state strikes, we strike back and strike first. But when white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism are spread unchecked in our communities we expect people to just shut up and take it and write it off as simply ‘drama’. people speak up or act in any way to strike against these hierarchies they are shouted down in a chorus of calls for unity, dismissal, and active hostility.
What the detractors fail to understand is that more so than cracking nazi skulls or fighting with the police the most direct confrontations with these hierarchies happen within our communities and interpersonally. “Radical” spaces are set up in a way that values social peace over uncompromising struggle against hierarchy, exploitation, and oppression. These issues are everyone’s business but we continually individualize collective problems and leave people do deal with it themselves then talk mad shit on the ways they choose to handle it after weve all washed our hands of the situation.
If many radical spaces are largely white, male, and abled its not due to a lack of anarchists who are not these, its because in defense of the ‘social peace’ of these spaces, these people are silenced, dismissed, mocked, left to deal with these issues by themselves, and ultimately pushed out.
Any ‘community’, clique, crew, social scene, space, or whatever that engages in this should be dismantled. There should be no space, no community, no ‘social peace’ that is valued over the dignity of exploited & oppressed people or over the antiauthoritarian, antiheirarchial struggle.
If ‘the force of insurrection is social’, then we must bring into our homes and into our friendships the same seething hatred of authority and oppression, the same ethic of care and spirit of joyful revolt that we have in the streets. Those who are anarchists in the streets then return home to their class and racially segregated neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces and go on to be patriarchs, white chauvinists, join in in the world built to kill disabled people are just as much my enemy.
It is critical that in our relations between each other we keep a seething hatred for every mouth that spews the language of domination, and we have enough love for each other that we are willing to shatter the social peace and destroy our reputations for each other. This is where one gains the right to be called comrade, or friend.
So we must understand, from the gravest threat to the most “minor” slight (because no word or action that perpetrates hierarchy and domination is ever actually minor), that it all of our business and all of our fight and we must all deal with it, peace and reputation to be damned.
This is the bare minimum of what it means to call ones self an anarchist.
NO COMPROMISE IN STRUGGLE // NO COMPROMISE IN THE TOTAL RECLAMATION OF OUR LIVES