Beyond the Typhos of Liberation

Typhos, as defined by William Desmond in Cynics, is the Cynic concept of describing “the delirium of popular ideas and conventions.” Below are some collected articles that criticize popularized frameworks of liberation in ideological and organizational traditions.

Against Canons and Canonization

“It is ironic that we can recall as Marx said, 'the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,' as if the Marxism of all dead generations weighs so heavily on our living minds. But ultimately, I would think the classics and interpretive-exegetical Marxism have their place. Readings and re-readings can still provide new insights and commentary. We still learn new things about the Bible and we will continue to learn new things from Marx. However, there has to be a point when we venture forth, use the well-charted territories of theory as a base of operations by which to chart and build new base camps climbing towards unknown peaks. As in climbing mountains with a large party, sometimes we do have to abandon the lowermost camps to reach the top, but ultimately we know the paths going back there should we need to return. The 'poetry of the past' and its reinterpretation, then, are the base of operations, well-worn paths that we must know so we can return to them, but not a place to stay if we are to reach new heights, to take new poetry from the future.”

—“The Question of a Stagnant Marxism: Is Marxism Exegetical or Scientific?” by Simoun Magsalin

While focused primarily on the the limits of anarchism as an ideology to liberate Indigenous people from colonialism, the analysis in the following article by Klee Benally can also be applied to other radlib attempts to “diversify” the radical or revolutionary canon with essentialist calls to only read anarchist or communist theory by PoC and not white people. Rather than seek to integrate (re: assimilate) marginalized perspectives into ideologies created by oppressors, the goal should be to understand the limits of affiliating yourself with those ideologies and to break with those ideologies when solidarity demands it.

“The anarchist position is one that locates the fundamental oppression and power in society in the very structure and operations of the State. Although autonomy and anti-authoritarianism didn’t originate in Europe, as a political idea, Anarchy was named through hundreds of years of resistance to domination by the State, monarchs, capitalists, and the Christian church. For those who assert themselves as anarchists, any form of State power is an imposition of force. They fundamentally reject and critique political authority in all its forms. In its early expressions, those now considered 'classical' anarchists such as Bakunin & Kropotkin, found anarchism in what they observed as a 'natural law' of freedom and sought harmony in its order. Though there is some interesting ancestry with Lewis Henry Morgan (who fetishized the Haudenosaunee) and William Godwin, and the influences of the products of their fascinations with Indigenous Peoples in the so-called Americas, we’re not interested in the pedigree of anarchism. They drew from our blood and we kept bleeding. In their distillation they separated out our matriarchy, our queerness, and that which made us whole, so what would they have to offer except a vague essentialization?

When anarchism speaks we locate an affinity in our hostility towards those who have imposed themselves upon us.

But we resist to be reduced to political artifacts, so this has also made us hostile towards anarchist identity, though not entirely to anarchism.

When it is asked, 'how can we locate an Indigenous Anarchism' and 'how can we heal and live our lives free from colonial constraint?' Our first response is an extension of our hostility; there is no Indigenous anarchist theory and perhaps there never should be.”

—“Unknowable: Against an Indigenous Anarchist Theory” by Klee Benally, Ya’iishjááshch’ilí

Against Ultraindividualism

If Benally presents an anticolonial argument against “decolonizing” anarchism through Indigenous identity, Montréal Counter-info presents another anticolonial argument against going towards the other extreme of abolishing settler identity when the material conditions of settler colonialism have not yet been abolished. When settlers create their autonomy in the form of communes and autonomous zones on land stolen from Indigenous people, when they think that having expanding their “autonomous” ownership over this land is what Benally means by “mutuality with the Earth and all beings,” they're not just continuing colonialism but also mirroring classical liberalism's definition of liberty in the form of property rights.

Though Montréal Counter-info primarily focuses on critiquing communes and autonomous zones as theorized by a particular strand of ultraleftism, communes and autonomous zones are generally popular utopian concepts among the left and its splinters, which is why I include this article in this compilation.

“If we focus on the material realities of settler colonialism and the real ways in which it continues to structure our lives, options, and resources, we can develop more effective strategies by asking what our differing social positions allow and disallow, and how we might put these differences to work for common goals. Mike Gouldhawke explains that 'people think of settler as a personal identity but it’s more about a categorical relation between a social subject and settler states'. As La Paperson says, the term settler (and native, and slave) describe 'relations of power with respect to land. They sound like identities, but they are not identities per se.' Instead of an attempt to flee these labels, we should put our time to better use and focus on changing the conditions producing those relations of power.”

—“Another Word for Settle: A Response to Rattachements and Inhabit” from Montréal Counter-info

“Lifestyle, like individualist, anarchism bears a disdain for theory, with mystical, and primitivistic filiations that are generally too vague, intuitional, and even antirational to analyze directly. They are more properly symptoms than causes of the general drift toward a sanctification of the self as a refuge from the existing social malaise. Nonetheless, largely personalistic anarchisms still have certain muddy theoretical premises that lend themselves to critical examination.

Their ideological pedigree is basically liberal, grounded in the myth of the fully autonomous individual whose claims to self-sovereignty are validated by axiomatic ‘natural rights,’ ‘intrinsic worth,’ or, on a more sophisticated level, an intuited Kantian transcendental ego that is generative of all knowable reality. These traditional views surface in Max Stirner’s ‘I’ or ego, which shares with existentialism a tendency to absorb all of reality into itself, as if the universe turned on the choices of the self-oriented individual.”

—Social Anarchism Or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm by Murray Bookchin

(CW: sanist language, quotes from sources with anti-Roma and anti-Indigenous slurs)

(Note: I do not entirely agree with this critique, and having learned more about egoism and anti-civ anarchism since first finding it I've wondered if Bookchin gave either enough credit for what they're trying to do. In any case, I do think that his general criticisms against hyperindividualistic lifestyle anarchism's unconcern with or even opposition towards collective or revolutionary organizing are good warnings for those looking to get away from radliberalism without falling back into liberal or neoliberal views on society (or, in the neoliberal case, the lack of society's existence.))

Against Crass Consciousness

“By ‘an activist mentality’ what I mean is that people think of themselves primarily as activists and as belonging to some wider community of activists. The activist identifies with what they do and thinks of it as their role in life, like a job or career. In the same way some people will identify with their job as a doctor or a teacher, and instead of it being something they just happen to be doing, it becomes an essential part of their self-image. The activist is a specialist or an expert in social change.

To think of yourself as being an activist means to think of yourself as being somehow privileged or more advanced than others in your appreciation of the need for social change, in the knowledge of how to achieve it and as leading or being in the forefront of the practical struggle to create this change.”

—“Give Up Activism” by Andrew X

“In common discussion, the phrase 'identity politics' loosely refers back to its original formulation of marginalized groups organizing around a shared identity. It often is held up as the opposite of the Marxist-derived class reductionist idea that the focus of liberatory struggle should be that of the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie and that anything else is bickering or a distraction from Real True Revolution. Identity politics in the intersectional sense are certainly necessary for all liberatory struggles, so to differentiate this meaning from the pop-left radlib usage of phrase meaning the deference to the marginalized in alignment with a hierarchical inversion, 'deference politics' is what we’ll call the latter.

Deference politics is uniquely susceptible to affinity fraud because it places identity above the concrete analysis of a given situation. Someone is right because of their marginalized identity, not because of some lived experience that was analyzed through a coherent ideological lens. The position or actions of a deference politiker are held as unassailable not just from criticisms by someone who has fewer or less pronounced axes of marginalization, but also from criticism by others who share their marginalization. Even when a critic of the deference politiker shares all the identities that are relevant to the topic at hand, the critic is labeled as a defender of whiteness or other forms of dominance.”

—“Affinity Fraud and Exploitable Empathy” by Håkan Geijer

"Do you listen to the anxious BIPOC radical telling people to not act autonomously, or to the Black rioters smashing cars and shooting fireworks at the police? Do you listen to the middle class diasporic protest organizers whose solidarity is restrained by their own class position and anxieties? Do you listen to the anti-colonial militants who may not be in the room who have advocated more insurgent strategies—including those in the global south calling for escalating, militant solidarity? Do you notice when there actually isn’t a unified BIPOC voice, a BIPOC leadership, in the room you’re in? Who is in most need of your solidarity? How will you choose?"

—“Follow the Fires: Insurgency Against Identity” by Haraami

(CW: sanist language)