Queer Anarcho Communism
An A-Temporal Approach

In this essay, I hope to put forward a queer anarchist communism for the 21st century and beyond through various lenses, particularly of Fredy Perlman, Walt Whitman, Bæden’s Journal of Queer Heresy, and the authors of the anarchist magazine Mother Earth. A queer anarchism: an event gives rise to multiplicities of duplication that emerge from the singularity of each event. Queer anarchism: like the Tom Vague’s The Boy Scout’s Guide to the Situationist International says, there is no situationism, there are only situationists (3). Queerness is something someone can take up at any time; queerness is analogous to Plato’s instant, which he speaks about in Appendix to Dialogs 1 and 2 of the Parmenides - the moment outside of time, which allows for change. The instant is called a “queer thing” in the Gill and Ryan translation (Plato 163). It is the indestructible chaos of timeless things, as Molloy describes of the moon in Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (41). Queerness is authenticity, in that queerness is the Platonic instant outside of time. This is like immemorial time for Deleuze, which is everything in sense that sense produces in consciousness, which is prior to the time experienced by consciousness phenomenologically. This is why authenticity has an unconscious basis, as it is the unconscious which returns as a geological, unconscious phenomena. It is the instant of the break with the socius. Queerness is escape from capture, and straightness is the capture into the Leviathan, the eternal undead superorganism which is, as Perlman says, a locus of death, in that it is the death which captures our potentiality and makes us stiffen in accordance with its artificial life (68). The Leviathan is contrary to what Hegel describes as the life of the “organism of the state” in the Philosophy of Right (240). Gender is capture into the Leviathan, and queerness is freedom.

Linear time in Against His-Story, Against Leviathan is in time and is Leviathanic (Perlman 241). It captures potentiality through segment breaks, which cut into the flow of temporality and order it based on the artificial time that is produced by machines. On the other hand, cyclical time is “rhythmic” (241) and outside of linear, scientific time, and is where the moment of change not produced by the state occurs. The moments which are internal come from the instant and the creativity which is not in time, while the Leviathanic capturing of our bodies into the flows of mechanical time cut into the flow of cyclical time. It is easiest to think of everything happening in this essay as just two things, broken down into many different forms; the two things actually happening here: in time, and outside of time. Consider a 1 representing a unit of time, and a 0 representing the segmented parts outside of time which do not construct a whole subject.

The instant is everywhere; it is not coterminous with anarchism necessarily. The instant is the governing principle of change, outside of time, the unconscious. It is not necessarily good or bad, while anarchism is an expression of a desire which aims towards a good or a bad at any given time; but the instant, and queerness itself which is outside of time - not in the sense of being another place, but rather being coterminous with everything and allowing it to change - is beyond good and evil. In a sense, queer anarchism asks that we be open not necessarily to changing our minds whenever someone insists, but rather a society in which the state and its boundaries do not capture people like the triangulation of Oedipus in the prohibition that arises whenever someone is going about their day and all of a sudden, they must change their direction in accordance to the state’s invisible lines. These are sorts of things we must do every day, and they are tied directly into things like working in a capitalist system. In a capitalist system we do not have autonomy because we do not organize our own workplaces. We do not have the freedom to develop our individuality unless someone is wealthy; this often comes from inheritance, and much less often comes from “moving up the ladder.” Whenever people do “move up the ladder,” they will angrily spew down hate and bile on the people eagerly trying to climb up behind them, saying that they are asking for too much. In a capitalist society, the principle of change is met with the principle of representation, the micro-fascism which organizes things into a tension dictated by its symbolic code. For instance, going to work, being nice to a boss who has no right to have any power over you, but is merely in his place of power because of the violence that colonized into being things like the teacher, the boss, the cop, etc. Not just a colonization of the past, but an ongoing colonization in which we must put on masks and armors and perform the tensions through our muscles, the labor of the pigs and their paranoiac “master” fantasy.

The offer of freedom which is not a paranoiac fantasy is something which queer communism offers. It is queer because the instant which allows for change is what is focused on. The instant is queerness. Queerness represents change, while temporality represents ossification on an abstract timeline, as all linear time is an abstract machination. The state, likewise, is like a clock or time, in that it works internally, and you are free up until the point at which you act in accordance with it. Perlman describes how monks designed the clock as a mini monastery; springs and wheels of metal, not flesh and blood (155). You pivot on the structure of linear time in the symbolic order, so to speak, in a state, whereas the instant is the moment of the unconscious, coterminous with time but also not in time, as motion and the sense which comes prior to conscious experience, that produces conscious experience in the instant: linear time of the state, which is Leviathanic, is not the instant of immemorial time which produces the conscious experience of time. Because time is always conscious, and operating in according with it requires internal tensions and armors, through which one acts as an automaton, without authenticity in an atomized, as opposed to individualized life. Oscar Wilde says that we develop our individuality the way Jesus wants us to develop our personality; not through materialism and continual acquisition, but one’s internal state:

He said to man, “you have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you. If only you could realize that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to shape your life that external things will not harm you. And try to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders individualism at every step.” (Wilde 390)

Wilde uses the examples of Shakespeare and Shelley as people who have achieved individuality (392-93). Individuality is the motion through which one is relaxed, free. Learning this way is how Francisco Ferrer’s “new school,” in the essay “L’École rénovée,” published in Mother Earth, hopes to develop in students the internal capacities they need to go beyond capitalism; we might interpret the “natural bent” as a Wildean individuality Ferrer is trying to produce in the student:

We can destroy all which in the present school answers to the organization of constraint, the artificial surroundings by which the children are separated from nature and life, the intellectual and moral discipline made use of to impose ready-made ideas upon them, beliefs which deprave and annihilate natural bent. Without fear of deceiving ourselves, we can restore the child to the environment which entices it, the environment of nature in which he will be in contact with all that he loves and in which impressions of life will replace fastidious book learning. If we did no more than that, we should already have prepared in great part the deliverance of the child. (Ferrer 263)

Capitalism, and the state which upholds it, is restrictive. It’s akin to the Leviathan sticking its incorporeal tentacles into your brain, similar to Heidegger’s ready-to-hand - how we grasp the possibilities of our world and connect to things as extensions of our bodies. The tentacles connect to us ready-to-hand, and they push against the not-I. To be yourself in capitalist society, you must continually try not to be yourself, in order to break down the fantasy which capitalism has instilled in you, of what it wants you to be. The representational image of you, given to you by society, is a fixed idea, a representation, an ossification, and a lie in that there is no person except an ever changing multiplicity, through which one connects as machinery, or authentic Dasein incorporating the past and future into the moment of the present, and choosing authentically what one wants to do without pivoting on the moment of choice on the machinery of the state. The world spirit once again hungers for freedom, it yearns to be released from the bubble under the earth, in the geology of the contradictions of the recording surface, which at every moment burst forth at the seams of capitalism. The time has come not to throw away our books and rally in the streets, but to focus on how to build a new queer communism from the rubble of the tyrannical fascist empire, once it begins to fall. One might say that there is always queerness in things which can never be contained in the mere categories of man or woman, or non-binary, or beyond. Queerness is everything which breaks free of the Leviathanic molding through the tentacles which attach, ready-to-hand, through representational impositions. As in, when someone tries to impose representation onto you, they are molding you into something and in a sense everything which we are told is in a way a mold from something that came before. Words themselves connect to a long chain, a ball and chain of world history. But if one cuts the Gordian knot of history – where one cuts into the timeless, which is in between the temporal flow of linear time’s past and future at the instant of change – one realizes that there is no gay or straight, as these are dependent on representational categories which order someone in such a way that they are queer only in the sense that there is a moment of queerness in their acting. A full queerness does not have the ressentiment, or the Nietzschean debt that one pays in The Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche 45), through their expression of man or woman, to the gaze of the big other in the socius. One is good or bad in regard to the socius and its dominion over what is good and evil. To go beyond good and evil is to embrace the indestructible chaos of timeless things.

Full queerness would be living according to how you want without being inhibited by outside forces which order you in such a way that you cannot order yourself. A communist society would therefore be non-hierarchical, although it would not eliminate hierarchy in the sense that everyone would still have some things that they are better at, or more attracted to, or things of this nature; but the institutional forces under queer communism would be such that they do not do something similar to autistic masking, in that it does not make people obey a hierarchical structure in which they do not organize their own lives. Without democracy in the workplace – the place where we spend most of our lives – and the ability to have the resources to live comfortably and do what you want to do, people become merely at the advantage of the wealthy, who control the business. The worker who can merely be fired because they are an insignificant, atomized cog in a machine. We do not need rulers; this means that we do not need people governing our lives. Capitalism is incoherent to a queer anarchist view because it does not allow for queerness. So, being a rich queer anarchist, you are not authentic in just being gay under capitalism, you are actively participating in a system – one which may be maximizing your own individuality, but it is an individuality which is not one in which you have no masters, unless you are the mega rich in America’s two-tiered justice system, as shown with the election of Donald Trump. The Center for American Progress also did a study showing that the United States criminal system punishes the poor, and rewards the rich (Weller). The poor person has a “tyranny of want” (Wilde 384); meanwhile, the rich take the wealth of the poor and order their lives like machinery. Leaving the master’s in place means we do not order our own lives, and instead are ordered. There is no freedom, comfort, and security, when there is a tyrant who orders your life and takes your wealth. In other words, even those who are middle class in America are in a system in which they must abide by the decisions of whoever is in power. The government should not have the right to tell people to do anything; if there’s an institution that does anything other than distribute, such as administrate, then it is not the sort of non-administrative state which Wilde talks about in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (395) .

Having it both ways, with representation and timeless chaos, means carefully aiming one’s intentions, like a bow and arrow, towards the goals that one wants to achieve. Sometimes it is better to be full of motion; sometimes it is better to be silent. You would not want to do things that would get you arrested in front of a police officer if you have a further intention to do something that does not involve being in jail. So, having it both ways means carefully navigating yourself in a world which tells you that you should “be yourself” by going along with what teachers think, and with what the powers that be think, by getting a job, and owning a house, and living under the spectacle which is the guardian of sleep, the dead thing which leeches off of our authenticity which Perlman describes as the Leviathan (37). One is authentic by not being oneself, by continually breaking down the representational image given to one by society and exploring new avenues of interest. Money is not an endless well of happiness; according to Penn

Today, after a certain income, money does not bring more happiness; happiness rises steeply, and then plateaus after a certain level, around a $100,000/yr salary (Berger). Yet certainly, having wealth gives people the opportunity to “be themselves.” This is not a universal authenticity, in the sense that it is queerness that is the instant, as being themselves does not mean plotting their own course in life; it rather means that being in a society where many of the ways in which you are yourself conform to the options which are provided for you by society. This is a society which promotes inauthentic expressions of the capture of psyche to advertisements which entice you to buy things; they stick the tendrils of capital into you, the product to be sold on the market of corpses in the Leviathan’s cities and towns, which are the Leviathan’s entrails, which are the “surplus product” and “material contents, its entrails” (Perlman 29), while the form of capture is the bodily and spiritual condition that people live in under the Leviathan (71).To envision a better future, is to believe that we can be not ourselves, but break down our societal heritage and begin to construct ourselves.

Believing that it is possible to construct a better world is to believe that there is a way in which we could exist in which we do not need to mask against our own nature. Not in the sense of lording ourselves over others, but in having the ability to develop our inner capacities, and the external conditions which enable people to develop their internal capacities. Zoe Baker describes internal capacities in Means and Ends:

A capacity is a person’s real possibility to do and/or to be, such as playing tennis or being physically fit. It is composed of two elements: (a) a set of external conditions which enable a person to do and/or be certain things, and (b) a set of internal abilities which the person requires in order to be able to take advantage of said external conditions. (50)

External conditions as well as internal capacities give people the ability to do things such as play music, or build things, or write beautiful literature, or become knowledgeable in history; there are so many things which one could do which would be embracing the sort of individuality that Oscar Wilde spoke of in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” where people do not simply conform to other people’s thoughts and attitudes, but develop their own individuality (393). Developing a personality is not expressed as an individualism through a molar person which can suddenly emerge as if from a jack in a box to say hello, fully formed, only to be folded back into its own spine like an accordion to pop out again. Individuality is unique, and it comes from having the ability to develop the capacity to live an authentic life. Uniqueness is outside of time, and it is part of the a-signifying semiotics of the recording surface, which determines everything we consciously think. Creativity is not a conscious process; everything that makes an artist like Beckett interesting is certainly not that somehow his works tell us something about him. Creativity is an expression of the chaos which can be recorded miraculously into the recording surface and then duplicated out of the singularity of the event. Sometimes duplications have dead and undead consequences, such as Leviathan, and queerness. The undead consequence of when queerness produces representation can produce more queerness as a consequence, as well as dead consequences. The dead consequences would be representational capture and ready-to-hand connection through machinic tendrils of the Leviathan which order a person against their individualism.

Constructing ourselves does not mean doing whatever you want, whenever you want. It means developing an internal personality which is satisfied with oneself in the cosmic context in which one lives. Just as you would not want to do things all the time which get you in trouble, even in the context of an environment which you disagree with. It is sometimes said that coolness is going far enough that you bend the rules without breaking them. Breaking the rules is uncool, and it shatters the symbolic order. The symbolic order is a comfort which is applied to people’s worldview, which gives people a wholeness that is threatened and can produce aggressiveness; as Lacan says in the Écrits, aggressiveness occurs when the imago is fragmented (85). The imago is the imaginary wholeness which covers up the lack of the symbolic, which, if we remember Shiva, is not the productive dance of Shiva and timeless chaos; the lack of Lacan is produced by capitalism, and the desire to enjoy excessively. Capitalism is continually encouraging people to enjoy themselves excessively. Think of the Big Mac at McDonald’s; think of the constant drive to get rich, as opposed to the drive to help others. So, being yourself does not even mean being yourself in the sense that you are connected to some sort of internal dynamo or centrifuge of command. Being yourself means not being yourself, as taking on numerous connections, in a nomadic manner, is a way to appreciate the art of the world that one would otherwise not discover, like Sun Ra , or anarchism itself. One cannot simply exist in a world and be an anarchist. Like capitalism has pivot points, communism should create pivot points that grow out of the individual. A pivot point is the idea that temporally, you pivot off of the symbolic possibilities which offer themselves to you, and judging on the symbolic possibilities, one can pivot off of the temporality of the state for the purpose of achieving a further down the line goal of not having a state. It is kind of like how you wouldn't want to pick a fight with a police officer if you did not want to go to prison. Pivot points that emerge out of the internal capacity of the individual are less alienating than the atomized labor under a boss of the laborer, because under communism they set their own commands. Communism means having the ability to have time off of your work, which should be fulfilling – not a bullshit job which only exists for the purpose of making more money. There should not be a need to continually produce merely for the sake of producing; rather, if we have the technology to lessen work, then technology should provide comfort by taking away the time which people would otherwise devote to work, giving it to machines, so that people can pursue their own desires.

Life is not a job; doing things for the purpose of a job is not a life. Perlman talks about how Christians came up with the distinction between work and play because they were infuriated with the peasants for being too free (9). It was sinful to let people just run around without any sort of work ethic. There should be no distinction between work and play. In a cosmological context which made sense, we would look at how to maximize what we can give back to nature and minimize our footprint on the earth. This is in both the sense of a carbon footprint, but also in the sense of how Perlman talks about nature playing a role and giving its gifts, and people playing their role and working within the rhythms of nature (178). The earth and its communities produce the parts of the “meaningful context” and when these rhythms are broken, “meaninglessness” is produced (178). It is a symbiotic and harmonious view of the human community which Perlman gives. You cannot help the world before you help yourself, but helping the world is helping yourself. The world being a place which promotes help towards others, is a world in which help towards others, is received back to you. A common proverb says, treat others how you would want to be treated. This does not always work; some people are masochists, or narcissists, so one must adjust accordingly. But, aiming for the mean, doing the thing which each context calls for, is the way to maximize individuality. Doing whatever each situation and context calls for - that is how one aims a bow. One looks at the distance of the target; one shoots down the line. Queerness is what to aim for. It cannot be right-wing ideology, as right-wing ideology is looking toward the past, which means it is representational. Representation means something which came before, and it is arborescent, while queerness is a break in time, the instant, or moment of change, which is always occurring, but what matters in the instant is that it is the moment which is not in the past or the future. Sometimes aiming for queerness even means putting on a mask, speaking in terms of both Perlman’s masks and autistic masking.

Anything which includes machination - that underlying it and allowing it to have its motion is the queerness which gives things their motion. For Deleuze and Guattari there's a thousand tiny sexes, meaning at each moment there is a micro-trans-sexuality (213). Even if we try to conform to something like a gender, it is the indeterminacy which underlies it which gives it its determinacy, just as the death drive is the past experience of the ID repeating as superegoic jouissance, synonymous with the re-territorialization, or when the mind coheres into something coherent as a success of the desiring machines to produce a coherent conscious thought. When we think about the indeterminacy as death drive, we can see that Zarathustra was with us all along. Queerness evaporates linearity and illusions of division by measurement, which is the undivided nature which lies beneath. The geology of the unconscious, which emerges forth in various becomings, through the life which encompasses the history it incurs. We can see that once we cut the Gordian knot of history then there was the indestructible chaos of timeless things all along; it was never separate from the supposedly alien genders and their congealment.

Authenticity, and therefore queerness, is only possible if one understands history. History unfolds on the body without organs, which is the recording surface on which events are recorded - in marks, brains, and books. Each book is a body without organs; each recording device is a body without organs. But the body without organs is also a multiplicity of partial objects, analogous to dialog 2 in the Parmenides, when Parmenides talks about parts of forms where there are no forms themselves (Plato 147). History does not unfold from a Eurocentric spirit, such as

Hegel’s, but from the negative of what Hegel saw as the people with no spirit in the Philosophy of History – Africa:

What Hegel considers Africa proper has no movement or development to exhibit. It is ‘the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History.’ (Adegbindin 99)

Here we can see how Hegel places Africa outside of his linear timeline, much like the instant. This is partially a paper about America, but the world spirit, if there is such a thing, would be unconscious – the indestructible chaos of timeless things. Queerness is the escape from capture, as the capture is the resonance of these historical systems which are left unhealed in their marks and consequences, the historical trauma of a people which lives on through the material consequences of times gone by, inscribed on the socius, which is the excess of history, which is always compartmentalized as the various marks, signs, and symbols, which are issuing forth from the non-signifying semiotics issuing forth from the body without organs which contains the marks of the singularities of the events that unfolded on them, and continue to unfold out of the marks like a record’s grooves. The body without organs is a fertile soil, through which communism can grow, as right now communism is an egg. It merely needs to hatch into a new world, beyond the march of world history. History is a recording surface in which events are caught in the folds of the recording surface. The body without organs is part of regular bodies and regular organs, but it is a lot like a record in the sense of grooves and marks - material patterns which are resonances from previous historical events. The body without organs is part of a geology of the unconscious, which has no memory, and which is composed of partial objects, and issuing forth in its potential at the same time that it is actual. Authenticity, which is a moment of queerness, can only exist in the context of going outside of the prevailing symbolic order in some way. There is a moment of queerness in homosexuality and in transgender identity; they fall under the categories assigned by society which are considered by the fascistic body without organs to be the way one is intended to be by the rulers.

One might say “but I’m gay, or trans, and my gender is authentic.” Under capitalism one is a ward of the state; one has a number and a sex, which the state assigns to you. You are governed because of your gender by the state, such as needing to through all sorts of institutional hoops to get hormone treatment as a trans woman, and in some states not legally being able to use the restroom you identify with, as well as being openly discriminated against in a society which has the police of the gendered system within it. This is even a vigilante police. You can see it online, where almost every comment section on a public forum regarding trans people devolves into hateful spew against trans identity. Elon Musk said, referring to his trans daughter, that his “son” is “not a girl” and figuratively “dead” (Ingram).

Musk is an example of a despot who wants to enforce a sort of mandatory maleness over his daughter. He said that he was unaware that he had signed transition surgery forms for his daughter; now his daughter, in Musk’s eyes, is dead. Perlman talks about how Aristotle sees things through an “inverted lens” (Perlman 89). In the same way, Musk sees the freedom of his daughter to adopt a queer identity as a sort of unfreedom. Under queer communism, gender affirming care should be provided as mutual aid; a society which cannot provide gender affirming care is simply a society which cannot provide a complete healthcare to its people. For trans people, being trans is their authenticity, and for homosexuals, liking the same sex is their authenticity. Under queer communism, there would be no governance determining who can and cannot like someone, or who can dress a certain way; as putting codes on dress, aside from perhaps basic clothing, which even Margaret Grant argues is not a norm in some countries; they have no clothing, and they have higher sexual modesty

H. Crawford Angus, the African Traveler, goes so far as to say this: “it has been my experience that the more naked the people and the more, to us, obscene and shameless their manner and customs, the more moral and strict they are in matters of sexual intercourse.” But who wants to pay such a price for mere morality? (101)

I made up my mind that modesty was a thing of our civilization, and quite artificial it might be, but no less necessary for that reason; so I set about discovering what conduct was modest and what was not. (101)

What queer communism is more about is not instilling mandatory gender in anyone, and allowing people, from birth, to explore their own decision as to what gender they want to be. Yet queerness is not only an unusualness of people, bent as opposed to the dominant straight order, under the patriarchal Leviathan. Nature itself is a vast queerness; there are no lines in nature. But even though there are no lines in nature, people tend to tell others that they conform to a specific way of being, otherwise they are “not straight.” This is a certain “path,” as Sarah Ahmed says in Queer Phenomenology:

The relationship between “following a line” and the condition for the emergence of lines is often ambiguous. Which one comes first? I have always been struck by the phrase “a path well trodden.” A path is made by the repetition of the event of the ground “being trodden” upon. We can see the path as a trace of past journeys. The path is made out of footprints – traces of feet that “tread” and that in “treading” create a line on the ground. When people stop treading the path may disappear. (16)

Everything we think has a history and comes from somewhere. Speech itself is historical. If we did not connect to the past when we talked, we would have no memory and no speech through which to recall the memory. Speech itself is a repetition, a repetition which is new every time; it emerges from the past, a sublation of what came before, which takes it up into its conscious form, which is only the conscious part of what is happening. The unconscious part is everything that you do not see. Every event which unfolded in real time, in real life, that we only know about through books or screens, once they are recorded. People force identification on you all the time; they say “sir,” or “that man,” assuming what gender you are, or that you even claim a gender identity. If you are not a preconceived gender? That simply never crossed the mind of those who gender you when you do not use pronouns, which is interpolation into the symbolic law and order of the societal mask and armors which arrange themselves over the representational notion of gender. In studies of autism there is a term which might make Perlman smirk called “masking.” When an autistic person feels constrained by society to express themselves how they want to express themselves, and they have to put on a regular face - this is indistinguishable from Perlman’s notion of a mask and an armor. Someone who is armored against their true nature; as Perlman’s wife Lorraine points out in his biography Having Little Being Much, this concept comes from Wilhelm Reich (3). So, if someone has a gender, and they want to express this, it dictates what comes next from what comes before. This is a representational construct.

Representation is something which tries to copy what comes before, when ontologically speaking there is really only the flux of the immemorial time. Corporeal time is merely a constriction of the muscles, a contraction through which we pivot. Unlike jazz music, which might mix corporeal time with rhythmic time – the individual expressing themselves in a semi chaotic manner – one improvises the notes in which they play, as opposed to playing only what was written and came before. Jazz music is a perfect example of rhizomatic music that emphasizes queerness. Queer anarchism does not mean a wacky wavy arm-flailing inflatable tube person. It is taking the temporal and linear, and mechanical and cyclical time, steadying to aim the bow in the mean of the two to accomplish what one wants. There is never a need to gender someone if they do not identify with gender, but there is not a need to see linear time as completely good or bad, as good or bad only become a thing in linear time through which they can be measured as events which have a positive or negative outcome. In the immemorial time there is no good or evil, but consciousness produces values such as positive and negative ones. One experiences the conscious evil of linear time phenomenologically. Stress, anxiety, fear, anger, frustration, and high blood pressure are all qualities which can arise under a capitalist environment, and it continues to rise. “In 2024, 43% of adults say they feel more anxious than they did the previous year, up from 37% in 2023 and 32% in 2022” (National Alliance on Mental Illness). No one should be policed as to what they express themselves as, but insofar as one is copying something which came before, they are adopting a representation, which can, socially speaking, become a state apparatus in which people are controlled; or the representation becomes a merely social one in which people police and dictate to each other what it “means to be a man” or “means to be a woman.” Queer anarchism is not non-binary, as that implies being on a spectrum between man or woman. Man or woman is a representational ossification of the past which is not part of the Platonic instant in immemorial time.

There are moments of queerness - the state of nature, as nature is queerness itself in that it goes every which way and cannot be confined by perfect symmetry - in society, but they can only be momentary escapes and then a re-capture into the prevailing order without queer communism. Queerness, in part, is recognizing one's historic position in the context of a colonial society - the queerness, which tried to escape forth from the dam of Oedipus, the queerness which white power tried to destroy in the founding of America. This essay hopes to critique Whitman from within Whitman, by analyzing Leaves of Grass through the lens of Bæden’s Journal of Queer Heresy, and showing not only the problem, but the path forward through what a queer communism would look like. Now that a theoretical foundation for queer anarchism has been established, it is time to turn to Whitman. This section will establish a moral foundation for queer anarchism by showing that even someone who seems as inclusive like Walt Whitman can harbor a colonial indifference.

How Whitman goes beyond Heidegger, and Perlman goes beyond Whitman

Before Heidegger, there was a transcendentalist philosopher poet named Walt Whitman. I will interpret what Whitman is saying as a new philosophy, for the purpose of combining philosophy and poetry. Part of being a philosopher is recognizing that you are the book – you are not radically different, partially separated, or even somewhat separated. You are the book; Whitman spoke great truth when he said that he was all these things that he writes about. When you read a book, the thoughts become your own in how you interpreted them. In a way, you are the architect of reality. There are certain shapes and building blocks through which these architectural thoughts conform, but Whitman has the right idea: you are what you write, you are what you read, and you should experience your thoughts through yourself rather than the eyes of the dead. Whitman spoke in a language which was at once passive, in that things passed through him but were not him:

My dinner, dress, associates, looks, business, compliments, dues,

The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love,

The sickness of one of my folks – or of myself ... or ill-doing…

Or loss or lack of money… or depressions or exaltations,

They come to me days and nights and go from me again,

But they are not the Me myself, (23)

But his language was also active, in that he encompassed all things. In a time during the colonization of the United States and the genocide of the native Americans, there were ongoing wars between the factions of the United States who wanted to ban slavery and those who wanted to keep it. Whitman wrote the first copy of Leaves of Grass in 1855, just several years before the Civil War over slavery. Whitman wrote what is in my edition of Leaves of Grass a 20-page introduction. In it he says America was “discovered” as though there were not already people here (Whitman 4). Twice, once when he walks past native Americans, “the tribes of red aborigines” (5), and another when he mentions slavery, he says there’s those who are trying to protect it, and those who are trying to oppose it – Whitman does not take a side (5), he does not say anything as he passes about what injustices have been done. He also talks about how he does not judge the people who he passes: “He is no arguer, he is judgement. He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing” (Whitman 6). This sets the tone for the work, and it marks a stark contrast with Fredy Perlman.

Compare Whitman’s attitude, walking through the American countryside, emptied of its native Americans, talking about how his spirit encompasses the spirit of the world. Fredy Perlman begins Against His-Story, Against Leviathan with Yeats’ rough beast, with a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, slouching towards Bethlehem (Perlman 1-4). It is a story which is mythopoetic. It begins in the first civilization, Ur, in Mesopotamia. This is where the first Lugals, or male rulers, took over and began to write their his-stories (Perlman 24). Bæden, in the Journal of Queer Heresy, critiques Perlman from within Perlman for his use of the earth mother as the primal femininity that battles against the primal masculinity - which is phallus-shaped, like warheads and swords (Perlman 173). Bæden in the Journal of Queer Heresy says Perlman is being too essentialist (Bæden 34), while maintaining Perlman’s critique of the Leviathan. The Leviathan is undead – it is everything artificial, everything abstract. The Leviathan is excreted from rulers and people; it is the entrails of the mode of production. One can think of it as always deteriorating, in the sense that the Leviathan starts to crumble when people have not tended to it in a long enough time. The Leviathan is machinic organization, dominating the body without organs, which is the partial objects which the socius is caught up in. The most direct example of the body without organs is a book. Whitman does not show much interest in critiquing the world, but there is a sense in which Whitman is more Heideggerian than Heidegger.

Whitman goes beyond Heidegger in not detaching the authenticity of Dasein from the world; but, in Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology, he says that being is unconcealed in the artwork and not that the artwork is an expression of the artist (Heidegger 339). For Whitman, you become the world, you become porous; things pass through you; you are not them, but at the same time you “contain multitudes:”

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then… I contradict myself;

I am large… I contain multitudes.” (Whitman 67)

And you are the grass, you are man and woman, all in the shape of becoming. Meanwhile, Perlman starts his book with an invocation against the beast, as explained above. This represents the difference in attitude towards colonialism between the two authors. Whitman seems to want to become one with the world. which is why Harold Bloom, someone who protected white supremacy in literature by his constant attacks on the “school of resentment” as he called them (4). Harold Bloom would probably call this healing literature. In How To Read and Why, he talks about the healing quality of literature:

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends. Imaginative literature is otherness and as such, alleviates loneliness. (Bloom 19)

He thinks that it is among the best literature on the continent of America. Whitman is enjoyable to read, but he can be frustrating. His indifference is something which we can see in the “objective” liberal scholar, who is indifferent towards the world; instead, hiding the history of white supremacy and patriarchy under a mask. This mask covers both the violence which they do to themselves, and that which people do to others through the perpetuation of internal and external violence. Bæden says taking off the masks and armors requires “almost superhuman strength” (127). Masks and armors for Perlman mean tensions which build up inside of people, and taking off the mask takes them close to the “state of nature.” He says that when you talk about the state of nature, “cadavers peer out” (7). People get defensive about their situation under capitalism; they tense up, they protect the system through perverse jouissance – the enjoyment of doing everything for the other – the big other of capitalism. There is a jouissance built into every action of capitalism, like in the cheap, momentary, and fading joy of buying something. It gives way to the sense of impending societal doom, each of us living in countries which might otherwise escape world trade and use their land and labor for the benefit of the needs of the people. It is not demanding too much for an author who boasts about freedom to espouse an anarchist ethic, like Perlman. Here we might say Whitman is doing something courageous in being openly bisexual in a time before civil rights for homosexuals had even begun. So, in a way Whitman does have a tremendous amount of authenticity, which we can learn from.

It is not that we understand Whitman’s true intent. We can never understand the intent of the author, or anyone else’s minds. The mind is silent; it is only words that speak, and words are already half dead. They contain the artificial notion of the fantasy of the other person’s mind, through which the machinations of your own impose the sorts of frameworks and phenomenological boxes that one cannot understand without having a one-to-one relation between the language, and importantly, the context in which the thought arose. Thoughts are contextual in memory, and phenomenologically speaking they are one with what we are saying and speaking. Whitman’s connection with the world around him is an expression of the multiplicity of the univocity of being, in which the hierarchy of being closer and further away from being breaks down, and everything is coterminous with being. Everything we read is inscribed onto the recording surface of our mind in traces, and in a sense, all of the world around us is just the order of the trace, the memory which composes the world. So, when Whitman says he is under your boot, and he is the pillow under a hunter in the woods, and he is man and woman:

I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,

And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man.

And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men. (38)

He is saying that these things are not in books, they are not separate from you. They are you. When you realize the ready-to-hand possibilities of the world and the way in which you can relate to the world, there is no reason to take an alienated perspective: that the world is something different from you as an alienated monster, somehow separate and impersonally governing your life like a Kafka-esque nightmare. Instead of a shadowy bureaucracy, the Leviathan sticks its tentacles directly into your mind. It covers your very being in masks and armors which are coterminous with the movement of life underneath the Leviathan, which is so anxiety producing.

So, there is no way to say that something has a greater or lesser extent of distance from oneself; in that same way, there is no meta-language or meta-narrative from beyond one’s own perspective through which they can step outside of their own perspective and see Whitman’s. In that sense, Whitman has the right idea when he becomes one with the things he writes about. We can become one with Whitman, just as we can become one with a world in which the inner capacity to realize our individuality is matched by an outer world which is designed to develop individuality. Some people may feel as though, when reading a book, the book is separate from them, the knowledge somewhere else, and they can access it correctly or incorrectly. But the event, described earlier, is a singularity through which duplication occurs; it can be sometimes contradictory and oppositional. In the contradiction of the event is the authenticity of taking the mask off and operating as an individual, and the anxious, tension producing mask, of putting the armor on and operating according to ghosts. Here we might see also a Stirnerian parallel - the spook for Stirner being akin to a wheel in the head (40-43), making them essentially automatons, operating according to a fixed idea as opposed to having ownness. Ownness is likewise unique and not connected to world history, because it is outside of time, like the instant. For Stirner in The Ego and Its Own, this uniqueness is outside of world history:

To the Christian the world's history is the higher thing, because it is the history of Christ or 'man'; to the egoist only his history has value, because he wants to develop only himself not the mankind-idea, not God's plan, not the purposes of Providence, not liberty, and the like. (323)

Martin Heidegger wrote Being and Time, which does not chart the path of Dasein like Hegel’s world spirit, but rather shows a Dasein which is opposed to a they of the socius, the generalized other. The big other of Lacan is a good analogy - the generalized otherness of a society or group which is beyond your control and for Lacan composes the unconscious structure of language, which is the discourse of the other (Evans 133). Hegel’s world spirit operates on what Perlman would call linear time, which operates in accordance with a dialectic towards freedom in some interpretations of Hegel. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel says spirit is not non-rational “blind destiny,” spirit is reason “in and for itself” which is developing out of the “concept of freedom” (316). This implies that spirit has a teleology and a correct path. States and individuals only judge imperfectly; world history falls outside of contingent judgments for Hegel (317). Whitman, like Heidegger, sees the past, present, and future as simultaneous. Heidegger has an indifference towards ethics. For Whitman, he has something which Heidegger does not have. He has authenticity through more than just Dasein. For Heidegger, only Dasein has authenticity, or being towards death. Whitman says to see through your own eyes, as opposed to the eyes of the dead:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,

You shall possess the good of the earth and sun… there are millions of suns left,

You shall no longer take things second or third hand… nor look through the eyes of the dead… nor feed on the spectres in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself. (Whitman 22)

This is an authentic act: seeing not through the machinations of someone else, but through your own interpretation, your own radical subjectivity. In the film The Battle for Algiers, based on and using actors from the revolution, the guerilla factions and federations were initially unsuccessful, but it was finally the uprising of each Algerian person that threw off the French colonists. It was their radical subjectivity breaking free from the inauthentic regime. Things are not simply unconcealed to Whitman; he sees things through his own eyes and calls upon us to see through them as well. Whitman as well, as he encompasses everything, contains multitudes. Whitman was a medic in the Civil War, so he cared enough about people to try to save their lives. This is a contrast to when he walked through his fictional landscape past oppressed minorities and said he does not judge. Price and Folsom in Re-Scripting Walt Whitman explain how he was a was a nurse for both sides.

As if to underscore his own attempts to hold the Union together, to reconcile rather than punish, to help love triumph over revenge, he found himself particularly attracted to a 19- year-old Confederate soldier from Mississippi, who had had a leg amputated. Whitman visited him regularly in the battlefield hospital and then continued to visit him when the soldier was transferred to a Washington hospital. (82)

Whitman furthermore spoke about nursing a slave. Whitman would be willing to help someone fighting to protect slavery, and therefor intentionally or not, Whitman helped a racist, as well helping a slave. He was showing the universality of humanity in that he was trying to care for everyone, instead of caring for only the moral high ground. Whitman speaks about treating a runaway slave:

The runaway slave came to my house and stopped outside,

I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,

Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsey and weak, And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him, And brought water and filled a tub for his sweated body and bruised feet, And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes, And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness, And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;

He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and passed north,

I had him sit next me at table … my fire-lock leaned in the corner. (Whitman 27)

But how effective is his affection, when he does not openly espouse that he disagrees with slavery? The Leviathan seems to have caught his tongue. He speaks of how the waves are like poems; he becomes the world itself. Embracing the world, for Whitman, means embracing a relationship with yourself and the world which is pantheistic; but that only goes so far. Later in Leaves of Grass, in the poem “Says,” Whitman will make a very short condemnation of slavery, but not an actionable theory, when he says, “I SAY where liberty draws not the blood out of, slavery, there slavery draws the blood out of liberty” (Leaves of Grass 1860 418). Whitman does not openly speak about having a political goal; but this paper has one. For all of Aristotle and Plato’s problems, they spoke of a mean in the Nichomachean Ethics and the Republic. It is like a bow and arrow that you pull and aim towards your goal. It involves a sort of teleology for both of them, a sort of view that the ends have forms, and that the forms conform to some sort of eternal pattern.

Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right? (Aristotle 3)

Plato does not explicitly talk about the mean, but he does talk about moderation and selfcontrol as being between the extremes of passion and rationality. We can see how Plato reverses the Perlmanian theme of rationality being like a phallic force which operates in accordance with domination and the controlling of the body through machinery. Rather, it is not that either of them are dominant over the other, but rather what you’ll find is there are people who balance between the “appetitive” and “rational” soul:

Take a look at our city, and you’ll find one of these in it [the self-controlled or master of himself]. You’ll say that it is rightly called self-controlled, if indeed something in which the better rules the worse is properly called moderate and self-controlled. (Plato 106)

Does that which forbids in such cases come into play at all – as a result of rational calculation, while what drives and drags them to drink is a result of feelings and diseases. (…)

Hence it isn’t unreasonable for us to claim that they are two, and different from one another. We’ll call the part of the soul with which it calculates the rational part and the part which lusts, hungers, thirsts, and gets excited by other appetites the irrational appetitive part, companion of certain indulgences and pleasures. (115)

Plato had a hierarchy in his Republic. For him, the city is a mirror of the soul. Plato’s Republic upheld the “noble lie”: that there was gold, silver, and iron in people’s blood depending on what class they were in, like a caste system (91). Yet beyond rulers and hierarchy is anarchism, the idea that our rulers took power through brutal force and were never qualified to take power in the first place. So, we should organize society without rulers. One might liken queerness to the god Shiva the destroyer, a god that represents chaos – a productive quality which is not merely a vacuum, but a real which is productive and simultaneous with something akin to Brahma the creator. Shiva is a god of artists, – a productive force not representing any sort of male or female, but rather, as Bæden says, a single system (39), which operates simultaneously as territorializing and reterritorializing forces, as well as preserving forces, which miraculate into existence on the surface of the body without organs into coherent structures through the miraculating machine. This is also partial objects and flux, in general, and opposes the paranoiac machine, and miraculating machine, which make things appear as whole on the body without organs.

The body without organs is not God, quite the contrary. But the energy that sweeps through it is divine, when it attracts to itself the entire process of production and server as its miraculate, enchanted surface, inscribing it in each and everyone of its disjunctions. (Deleuze and Guattari 13)

We are of the opinion that what is ordinarily referred to as "primary repression" means precisely that: it is not a "countercathexis," but rather this repulsion of desiring- machines by the body without organs. This is the real meaning of the paranoiac machine: the desiring-machines attempt to break into the body without organs, and the body without organs repels them, since it experiences them as an over-all persecution apparatus. (9)

But the miraculating machine attracts the body without organs, and the paranoiac machine repels the body without organs in that the miraculating machine decodes the inscription on the body without organs, and synthesizes it into consciousness, and the paranoiac machine is based on paranoia and therefore is more conspiratorial.

Let us borrow the term "celibate machine" to designate this machine that succeeds the paranoiac machine and the miraculating machine, forming a new alliance between the desiring-machines and the body without organs so as to give birth to a new humanity or a glorious organism. (Deleuze and Guattari 17)

The subject spreads itself out along the entire circumference of the circle, the center of which has been abandoned by the ego. At the center is the desiring-machine, the celibate machine of the Eternal Return. (21)

A miraculating machine is akin to the Heideggerian present-to-hand in that an object is present and in your sight and you perceive it as a whole and made of a specific substance. In other words, beyond the language of religion, there is a productive, a destructive, and a preserving force in the world, as represented through the Hindu gods. Brahma represents a sort of universal consciousness, of which everything is a shape. But for Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, sense produces consciousness and its representations; consciousness and representations do not produce sense (145). This is the infinite multiplicity of the partial objects, a thousand tiny sexes for Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (213), and, as Plato says in the Parmenides, the instant which is outside of time -

“And whenever being in motion, it comes to a rest, and whenever, being at rest, it changes to moving, it must itself presumably, be in no time at all?” – “Just so.” (163)

“So when does it change? For it does not change while it is at rest or in motion, or while it is in time.” – “Yes, you’re quite right.” (163)

- and allows for change to occur, or immemorial time, which is everything sense is, and produces, which is outside of time. This sense, outside of time is what Deleuze is describing as an “enmity” which does a violence on thought, which is what is conscious and in linear time, and thought responds in a violent way by producing identification in conscious experience:

An original violence inflicted upon thought, the claws of a strangeness or an enmity which alone would awaken thought from its natural stupor or eternal possibility: there is only involuntary thought, aroused but constrained within thought, and all the more absolutely necessary for being born, illegitimately or fortuitously into the world. (Deleuze 139)

This infinite multiplicity is more akin to the chaos and destruction of Shiva. The timeless chaos, which is everything that has already happened, happening again in the virtual, gives rise to the conscious; it is the machinic unconscious which Deleuze speaks about in Anti-Oedipus, and sense which Deleuze speaks about in Difference and Repetition is a sort of time immemorial (144); but for Deleuze nothing at all has a predecessor. Everything happening is infinitely different, and new every time. But this is not supposed to represent a sort of “progress” in a Hegelian or Perlmanian sense.

We can see how Perlman and Whitman both see a connection between the world and our own lives. This is a ready-to-hand connection in which the possibilities of the world are grasped and ordered by us, or in which we are ordered as technology and grasped as potentiality for another – you are the product being sold, in other words, when you go to the store. Your potentiality is to fuel money into the system as not only the customer, but as the transaction through which you pay for your subsistence in the system. Perlman looks at this system, and he feels repelled by it, and feels as though the correct response is to reject the system. But Whitman feels as though everything is just fine; he does not want to upset his careful peace brought to him by his belief in pantheism. Both Whitman and Perlman can offer us perspectives on how to be connected to the world and how to be authentic; for example, in sexuality in the sense of Whitman, and in living one’s life authentically outside of the machinery of the state for Perlman.

Perlman simply goes a step further than Whitman, in that Perlman takes an explicit stance against the thing that is causing the problem which Whitman does not name in his poetry. Whitman mentions the freedom of not being governed by officials, but he does not explicitly name the problem and talk about it as the point of what he is writing. Whitman might be exciting to liberal queer people, who do not care about emancipation for anyone but themselves, as well as people like Mother Earth’s writers (Internationalist 363), because he is emancipatory, but the emancipation that he offers is not actually a motivated one, or a directional one. Perlman points to the culprit and gives a detailed philosophical explanation for why you are controlled inauthentically, as machinery, by the Leviathan. Whitman can still be used as a refuge for fascism, capitalism, and colonialism; this is why Perlman goes beyond Whitman.

Perlman departs from Whitman in his critique of progress. Whitman is firmly rooted to his context in “Song of Myself;” along his walk through the landscape of frontier America, he describes lists of things which he becomes, like how he is with the man sleeping alone in the woods under his beard. “My face rubs to the hunter’s face when he lies down alone in his blanket” (1855 Edition 65). Progress for Fredy Perlman means uprooting from one’s context and moving forward towards an ever-further destination, eventually moving toward the speed of light and turning into a ball of smoke with no more mass, echoing Einstein’s relativity (Perlman 292). Whitman does not seem interested in uprooting his own context, although he says we should see through our own eyes, and not the eyes of the dead (22). Whitman cannot be seen as an anticolonialist or someone critical of technology such as Perlman. Whitman in his own time cannot speak to the time of Perlman, Heidegger, and Bæden. Perlman, unlike Whitman, has a negative view of technology. He views technology as a sort of phallic design (Perlman 173). Interestingly enough, he has a lot in common with Heidegger, who similarly felt that technology has the potential to be used to control people, and that people can be ordered as technology. There is a danger that everything is looked at as technology; but Heidegger says in “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, that people can never entirely become standing reserve:

The essential unfolding of technology threatens revealing, threatens it with the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in ordering and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealment of standing reserve. (339)

But enframing does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is. As destining, it banishes man into the kind of revealing that is an ordering. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every possibility of revealing. Above all, enframing conceals that revealing which, in the sense of poeisis lets presence come forward into appearance. (333)

Yet precisely because man is challenged more originally than are the energies of nature, i.e., into the process of ordering, he is never transformed into mere standing reserve. (332)

Since people can never be completely transformed into standing reserve because they are challenged more originally than the energy of nature, Heidegger is saying, as he has been since Being and Time, that we can push back against the they and have authenticity. When one is caught up in the entanglement of oneself as Dasein with the inauthentic otherness of the they, one is closed off from the possibilities which one can project into the future. The times are not settled; facticity is the movement and turbulence in the they that mostly determines you: “Dasein’s facticity is such that as long as it is what it is, Dasein remains in the throw, and is sucked into the turbulence of the “they’s” inauthenticity” (223). Making a determination through one’s self, which is the instant of facticity and Dasein making determinations, as Dasein, and the circumspection of one’s possibilities with the past, present and future, projected onto the various possibilities that are presented to one based on their mood. Dasein projects outward ahead of itself its possibilities in Being and Time:

Being, ontologically. Being towards one’s ownmost potentiality-for-being means that in each case Dasein is already ahead of itself in its being. Dasein is already always ‘beyond itself’, not as a way of behaving towards other entities which it is not, but as Being towards the potentiality-for-Being which it is itself. This structure of Being, which belongs to the essential ‘is an issue’, we shall denote as Dasein’s “Being-ahead-of-itself.” (236)

The formally existential totality of Dasein’s ontological structural whole must therefore be grasped in the following structure: the Being of Dasein means ahead-of- itself-Being-already-in-(the-world) as Being-alongside (entities encountered in the world). This being fills in the signification of the term care, which is used in a purely ontologico-existential manner. From this signification every tendency of Being which one might have in mind ontically speaking such as worry or carefreeness, is ruled out. (237) This is the structure of care in Dasein; meaning you care about something and take an interest in grasping its possibilities. This is the structure in which being is an issue. Subjects are not welded together with objects like Hegel’s subject is substance. Dasein as primordially ahead of itself is whole - implying it is whole temporally, but not in a ready-to-hand way. One’s past and future are connected in facticity and projection.

The fact that this referential totality of the manifold relations of the “in-order-to’ has been bound up with that which is an issue for Dasein, does not signify that a ‘world’ of objects which is present-at-hand has been welded together with a subject. It is rather the phenomenal expression of the fact that the constitution of Dasein, whose totality is now brought out explicitly as ahead-of-itself-in-Being-already-in… is primordially a whole.” (Heidegger 236)

For example: you are hungry; the possibility of eating food becomes ready-to-hand as a possibility, phenomenologically. In other words, in order to be authentic, you need to make a determination which breaks with the they, as I might describe authenticity as the moment of the break with the socius; this break with the socius is outside of time in the aforementioned Platonic instant. One who is a child at play in a garden, like Shakespeare or Shelley, as Wilde describes those with individuality, lives with original thoughts, as he says most people:

Go through their lives in a sort of course comfort, like petted animals, without realizing they are probably thinking other people’s thoughts, living by other people’s standards, wearing practically what one might call secondhand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment. (339)

Nonetheless, being authentic under the Leviathan is difficult when the flows of the machinery of the state intersect with the flows of your pivot points on the machinic and oppressive symbolic order. Heidegger’s aforementioned view of technology is as an ordering of the standing reserve (Heidegger 339). These are the bowels of the earth that are rended asunder by empire and capital, as Perlman describes.

The secret is out. Birds are free until people cage them. The Biosphere, Mother Earth herself, is free when she moistens herself, when she sprawls in the sun and lets her skin erupt with varicolored hair teeming with crawlers and fliers. She is not determined by anything beyond her own nature or being until another sphere of equal magnitude crashes into her, or until a cadaverous beast cuts into her skin and rends her bowels. (7)

As we possibly move towards our extinction, humanity has a choice. It can realize its radical subjectivity, its freedom, and it can throw off the fossil fuel industries, throw off the rapacious ruling class – the capitalist class. The billionaires, the landlords, the banks which let the rich hoard their money, the bosses. Let the workers be free, because we do not need rulers. Let the workers operate their own life. Queerness means rejecting masks and armors, rebelling openly against the colonizing forces that have afflicted our society within this patriarchal, white supremacist, fascist state, founded on colonialism and slavery. This state is known as the United States.

Whitman allows slave owners, before the Civil War began, to enjoy his poems uninhibited by a critique of whiteness, which means that his poems act in some way as a refuge of white supremacy. Whitman lets the Nazi come in and sit at the table with you, whereas the Nazi is not welcome at my table. Anarchism is not possible under a situation of anonymous Internet users, like every little private, depersonalized tyranny acting its force over you in an unregulated way; anarchism is about respecting personal autonomy and giving the maximum amount of autonomy to each person. Before talking about the United States, I will begin with the Nietzschean dilemma of how if you try to maximize autonomy, it creates a problem of a recurrence of hierarchy and violence. With going beyond anything, in the sense of a will to power overcoming the will to truth, there is always a sort of failure of the overman, the one who transcends values and goes beyond, is one is always resituated into a value schema. This is Nietzsche’s critique of the skeptic: they hold onto the will to truth just like the atheist in The Genealogy of Morals (108-9). But this is not about religion; this is about the concrete, material world, and the subsequent emancipation of queerness which is brought about by queerness. A queerness which Whitman in Leaves of Grass has when he says that he contains multitudes and contradictions (1855 Edition 67). The lighthouse in the distance is queer communism, the world spirit shining brightly.

The Nietzschean trouble with going beyond anything in terms of power dynamics.

The constructivist perspective is one which Deleuze and Heidegger differ on. As for Deleuze, he is a post-modernist, and in Difference and Repetition he views reality as a form of fiction writing (XX) - which is also real because he collapses fiction and reality - whereas Heidegger sees being as unconcealed and thinks that being produces our experiences. In Being and Time, Heidegger explains that being is not a particular being (194). The post-modernist interjection is a critical one, emerging from a Nietzschean perspective. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche subverts the scientific, foundation-based metaphysics and replaces it with the first post-modern ethics as such, an ethics which appears on the surface to be one of violence and war, but beneath it is one which subverts systematic thinking for one in which being is an empty fiction. The Will to Power comes at the heels of truth, as Nietzsche says about the opposition between the king and the one who wants to live in his castle, assumedly meaning that the will to power of the king contrasts with the emaciated and starving person who wishes to live on the king, as Nietzsche would put (226). Nietzsche seemed to put forward a master morality over a slave morality. So, the will to truth - slave morality in this case - would be what Nietzsche is critiquing. Nietzsche’s anti-systematic bodily underpinnings are similar to Freud's unconscious, and would be the basis of, ironically, the Zoroastrian religion as well, if we take the Zarathustra imagery as far back as Perlman does. And what does the will to power uphold if we go that far? The light of Ahura Mazda, which is the creation god in Zoroastrianism, and the even earlier primordial worship of the earth mother (Perlman 104-6). This life, which is free from mechanical capture, is the life which I see as the basis of a post-modern worldview.

The only question is to what extent are we already machines, and to what extent can we escape the machinic capture and pursue life. A machine is the cutting off of a flow; eating is machining. The social and mechanical are never separate from fantasy production. The social, historical, and mechanical collapse the possible and actual in the virtual, which is everything that has already happened happening again. This collapse of the social and mechanical in the virtual, and on the recording surface, means that the social world impacts people as the categories and roles that people adopt through a process which Deleuze and Guattari would call “reterritorialization.” The Deleuze and Guattari dictionary describes re-territorialization:

D (Special Combination): Absolute deterritorialization: Movements of destratification on the plane of consistency (or a re-territorialization on the plane), which emerge through relative deterritorializations (and result in reterritorializations on the plane through the inevitable new concepts, conceptual personae, people, or earth which populate it); an a- signifying semiotics which, due to its subjectivity, cannot be incorporated into a semiotic system. (Young, Genosko, Watson 310)

This is a word, for instance, but it is also a reflection on one’s own thoughts, and on enjoyment itself. One experiences social things at the same time as they experience capture. The capture into a social machine happens similarly to how Nietzsche describes in the Genealogy of Morals; one creates a painful memory, and this is like a debt that one pays to a creditor (45). Guilt and personal obligation have their origin in the relation between buyer and seller. In this relation, people “measured” themselves by another person. The creditor and debtor dialectic moves into the sphere of personal rights. Nietzsche describes how guilt before god becomes an instrument of torture, and the idees fixes (fixed idea) which is the painful memory god created (63).

Machinic capture is, simply put, a form of ressentiment. It is the belief, through the will to truth, in these systematic thoughts, and in being arranged by the masks and armors of tensions, by the flows of capitalism and societal expectations; it is a form of inauthenticity, the capture from the escape of immemorial time. Max Stirner goes beyond Nietzsche’s overman, which was an elitist thing, and made going beyond nihilism a matter of making something one’s property, and consuming it, producing it, or destroying it, through one’s might. Stirner, like Nietzsche, believed that there is a sort of continual war; for Stirner, might is the dominant force in the struggle in the end, as it is through one’s might that one continues to maintain their property:

Might is a fine thing, and useful for many purposes; for 'one goes further with a handful of might than with a bagful of right'. (Stirner 151)

He who has might has right; if you have not the former, neither have you the latter. Is this wisdom so hard to attain? Just look at the mighty and their doings! (172)

Only that which I cannot overpower still limits my might; and I of limited might am temporarily a limited I, not limited by the might outside me, but limited by my own still deficient might, by my own impotence. (189)

But ownness is something which everyone has who has the ability to grasp onto possibilities and express those desires as future outcomes in the world. This, the ability to consume, produce, destroy, or leave be, should not only be afforded to those who are strong, as one might interpret Nietzsche as saying. It should rather be afforded to everyone, giving to each according to their needs, taking from each according to their abilities. This individuality, this uniqueness, is something which is a direct expression of the will to power, an authentic expression of life.

In the univocity of multiplicity, desiring production produces lack, it produces consciousness, or the experience of psychoanalytic lack:

On the one hand, it [anti-production, the body without organs, which produces lack] alone is capable of realizing capitalism's supreme goal, which is to produce lack in the large aggregates, to introduce lack where there is always too much, by effecting the absorption of overabundant resources. (Deleuze and Guattari 235)

It is more of a matter of becoming captured for Deleuze: how the schizophrenic becomes tormented by Oedipus and the I which is imposed on them from society. We can see the life of Nietzsche here expressing itself in the bodily expression of Deleuze and Guattari. For them, philosophy is a bodily expression, one which is material and one in which one can become more or less captured in the triangulation of Oedipus, the family, the state, etc.

Partial objects unquestionably have a sufficient charge in and of themselves to blow up all of Oedipus and totally demolish its ridiculous claim to represent the unconscious, to triangulate the unconscious, to encompass the entire production of desire. (Deleuze and Guattari 44)

Partial objects are not representations of parental figures or of the basic patterns of family relations; they are parts of desiring-machines, having to do with a process and with relations of production that are both irreducible and prior to anything that may be made to conform to the Oedipal figure. (46)

Freedom in a Deleuzian sense is never abstract, and free from world historical events, but rather it sees all of these things as real, and a construct of desire which is produced by an infinite multiplicity: “The real is not impossible; on the contrary, within the real everything is possible, everything becomes possible” (Deleuze and Guattari 27). Perlman talks of the Leviathan speaking through people who are basically asleep, living attached to the corpse of civilization; Gnostics say that Archons encase the spirit in armor and put the people to sleep; Gnostics try to wake people from this sleep, if they can remember the primordial events that gave rise to the monster (Perlman 116). Deleuze is more subtle and doesn't give an example of what authenticity might entail. Rather, he shows us what being captured entails, and lines of flight from this capture. These ever more difficult lines of flight become trapped in a subjectum in “The Age of The World Picture,” in The Question of Technology and Other Essays: “the world becomes picture,” synonymous with representational scientific worldviews, at the same time “man’s becoming subjectum” (Heidegger 132) which, if it conforms to a world without any mythological significance, is one in which these escapes from machinic capture become only a machinic exercise in themselves. Here we can see a parallel between Heidegger and Perlman, in that both saw science and technology as something which was threatening to the authenticity of the person. But, as Heidegger points out, even those trapped in the subjectum are surrounded by the shadow of incalculability (135).

One might say that since machining is eating, your body is simply a machine, and one cannot escape the machines. The machines can be territorialized or deterritorialized, and they can be more or less fascistic. This is where something like micro-fascism can be compared to Perlman’s notion of masks and armors. A mask and armor are defined as a “stiffness” (Perlman 272). If you feel tension in your life, ever, to greater or lesser degrees, this validates the notion that we hold tension in our bodies, and this is in itself a sort of machinic tightening of the muscles. But to say we are only machines is to have a sort of Cartesian view of the body. That we are just machines, and the mind is either just an illusion, or somewhere else entirely, negates the lived experienced of what it feels like to live in a fascist country. In more micro-fascistic environments, like schools, office buildings, or anywhere else where the symbolic order requires you to organize yourself in a specific way, something like code switching is one of the primary ways in which masks and armors present themselves to us in our day to day lives. It is a universal problem, the chaos met with representation, an organizing force of emergent properties like conscious organization of bodies. If we believe in Perlman or Bæden at all, we believe that we can escape these forces, and so does Deleuze. Deleuze never says that eating is machining, and that therefore we are trapped and can never move, like some sort of Parmenidean nightmare where everything is one; the arrow never reaches its target because it would require dividing in half infinitely the closer you get to the target, so nothing ever moves. There is something of the Parmenidean in the denial of freedom. The Platonic instant is the moment outside of time which allows for change, and cyclical time for Perlman is coterminous with the allowance of the natural rhythms - the circadian rhythm for example, which corresponds to the moon and the sun:

An important event was a cosmic event, and like other cosmic events, like the rising of the sun or the eclipse of the moon or the journey of a comet, it was rhythmic, cyclical, infinitely repeatable. (250)

Perlman’s point about natural rhythms is they do not control you. Heidegger said in his “The Question Concerning Technology” essay that people can be controlled as technology (Heidegger 333). Remember the mean, which ties to the bow and arrow metaphor. You aim for the middle ground between rationality and passions to hit the target. You can think of it like the balance of Brahma the creator and the bringing things into existence simultaneously with their destruction in Shiva. Vishnu is the preserver, or can be thought of as preservation itself: the thing which holds together things as global units of partial objects, gravity, in subjectum terms. Here the subjectum is the Heideggerian term for the image of thought which reduces everything to itself. So, when we think about the ways in which preservation of matter can move, it can move in a constricted sense, being governed by the coding of someone else’s programming; this is what anyone must do to be authentic. Authenticity is coterminous with mutual recognition and being for another, because without the knowledge of other minds we would not know our own mind, and therefore there would be no reflection. The preserving force can bind and constrict, or it can relax and become looser. One can become restricted in their life, like the Leviathan wraps its tentacles around you, the fibers of the muscles coming undone simultaneously as the rational force dances with the destructive force, repairing the muscle as the old fiber unbinds apart from the wear of exercise. It is proven by science that stress causes health problems (Mariotti); having someone restrict you in your life leaves people without the autonomy to express themselves.

Put more succinctly, the indeterminate will to power, which put simply is the ability to overpower something – like a Foucauldian regime of truth which Daniele Lorenzini describes: “a regime of truth is thus the strategic field within which truth is produced and becomes a tactical element in the functioning of a certain number of power relations,” (Lorenzini) – is timeless; it is in a continual struggle with representation and what Nietzsche would somewhat problematically call "slave morality" in the Genealogy of Morals, nonetheless, it represents the questioning of life (21). Slave morality is resentment towards the master morality. The powerful have the will to power because they have the ability to overpower things. That is why for Nietzsche good health is considered part of the will to power, because one does not resent their health if they are in good health. For instance, Nietzsche says the belief in sin is nihilistic and ruins health, like alcohol and syphilis (104). This is because it creates the injury to oneself through which one resents and pays the debt to the creditor as mentioned previously. The will to truth is the imposition of artifice itself; that is why for Nietzsche, as he expresses in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra’s philosophy is best expressed through the dancer (406-7). This is because the dancer is in a state of becoming, not thinking through fixed ideas. Communism is the belief that somehow there can be a reconciliation between the will to power and the will to truth - the will to express life, and the will to express its machinic capture. The will to truth expresses itself when we critique from the standpoint of desire and lack, as Deleuze and Guattari critique in Lacan, and which Nietzsche would probably also critique. Desire is not lack, but production. For Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, the will to power produces the will to truth, and the two do a continual violence on each other (139). This is why from a Foucauldian, or Nietzschean, or Deleuzian perspective, they themselves are not communists as such. They believe the violence of this contrast between regimes of truth can never be resolved. There is a paradox that the more you invest psychologically into something, the more machinery you build around it. The mind creates big others, like states, but the state is a capture into machinic flows of capitalism. So, in other words, without hierarchy and its machinic capture, we can be more or less free between the mean of linear, machinic capture, and timeless queerness and the rhythms through which one’s life has meaning in a context through which one is not atomized and can develop one’s individuality, rather than one in which one is controlled and ordered as a machine. Even in Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, there is crowned anarchy, a lack of hierarchy in being itself. Crowned anarchy is an “overturned hierarchy” which “subordinates identity to difference” (Deleuze 41).

Crowned anarchy is the idea that you crown being with anarchy, an ironic twist on the idea that being has hierarchy. It is about univocity – if there is anything which crowns being, or gives being its character, it is anarchy. Being is not hierarchical; there is no being which you can be more or less of, which makes you less than a being in a sense. The crown of being is anarchy, and if there is a lack of hierarchy in being itself, then there is no justification for explaining a hierarchy in a fascist body without organs, one which is constricted or destroyed by molar and micro-fascism. Instead of having things or people who are closer or further to being, everything has being, and there is no reason to question whether someone’s very being is greater or lesser than someone else’s. There can be beings who want to control others, and beings who are less desirable to be around than others, but there is no hierarchy in terms of being closer or further from being – everything is connected to being. Being is anarchistic precisely in the fact that it has no hierarchy and no order. The sort of order that the fascist imposes on the world through representation, can only order the world in a stiff, sort of Procrustean way, the myth about the man who chopped people up so they would fit in his bed. In other words, order is dependent on the indeterminate flux which produces everything. The very thing that it wants to get away from is the very thing which produces it. Authority is always fighting a battle against its own internality, and the internality of those external – authority is internally indeterminate, based on indeterminacy, and indeterminacy can always undermine the determinacy of the ossified, representational, masked world of fascism.

Even though there is always a violence of the socius, there is more or less of an escape from the dam of Oedipus: the repressions which society places on us via its representationalist institutions. Oedipus is bursting at the seams as in Anti-Oedipus: “The terms of Oedipus do not form a triangle, but exist shattered into all corners of the social field” (Deleuze and Guattari 62). So, in that sense, there is hope for escape, as it has already begun in the rhizomaticity which is sped up by capitalism and its flow of information, and in its products which it spreads through commodity production. Capitalism itself is control by a rapacious mafia of leeching plutocrats who collect wealth for themselves that was made by the hard work of the working class, then force everyone to believe that the only way to have value and succeed is by obeying their values. The wealth of the ruling class only grew over the pandemic, and corporations have been making record profits due to what has been uncovered as price gouging (Palazzo). According to CNN, Elon Musk has now become the world’s richest man and is estimated to become the world’s first trillionaire (Egan). The wages which people make compared to the profits of corporations has grown largely in favor of corporations over the last several decades, while worker wages have remained stagnant (Mishel). We have tied people’s lives to a hocus pocus rigged against the working class, and the billionaire class is largely to blame. Many today live paycheck to paycheck and have to work several jobs in order to get by. Federal Reserve data indicates that in the United States as of Q1 2022, the top 1% own 31% and the top 10% own 69% of the wealth. The top 50% own 97.4%, while the bottom 50% own just 2.6% of the total available capital in this economic system (“FRED Economic Data”). To escape is to transvaluate all values, and as Nietzsche says in Twilight of the Idols, to tap on old idols to see if they are hollow (466); this is how Nietzsche philosophizes with a hammer. To overcome the morality of one who is subservient to a master takes organizing without leaders. Our rulers were never qualified to take power in the first place, and they took power by brutal force. This is why we should organize without rulers. But that leads to the problem of the United States of America, which has been a hub of fascism, white supremacy, and patriarchy since its conception. Before we understand how to go beyond the problem of capitalism, we must first talk about how capitalism got here, and why it is still a problem today.

The fascist nation from its conception - the USA - and resistance from within, via Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth

The United States has been fascist to its core since its conception. It was founded on a genocide, and the systematic movement of slaves from Africa to America. As Voltairine de Cleyre says in Mother Earth in the “Anarchism and American Tradition” essay, it enshrined private property into the constitution; when discussing education, the “writer of the constitution” said he was not with any “view to take its ordinary branches out of the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better the concerns to which it is equal,” and “let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage the better the more they are left free to manage for themselves, and the general government may be reduced to a simple organization, and an inexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants” (32). Chomsky similarly points this out in Requiem for the American Dream. He quotes James Madison at the Constitutional Convention, saying that “the major concern of the society- any decent society- has to be to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”” (Chomsky 2). After emptying the continent of the native Americans, the United States went on to spread its Leviathanic tentacles around the world with their wars over control of world trade, in countries such as Guatemala, Chile, and Vietnam, to name a few. Perlman talks about how empires spread octopus-like tentacles overseas and worm-like ones over land (71). The system of world trade gouges out the earth’s resources and redistributes it around the world. It plunders the ecosystem. Bernie Sanders declared “the fight against climate change will be finished if Trump gets elected.” (Sanders) This shows how Bernie Sanders places his hope in electoral politics, and not a worker revolution; this is because Bernie is a social democrat, not an anarchist. Social democracy upholds the colonial system of capitalism. For Bernie Sanders, it will be too late for anything in electoral politics. Trump has been elected, and that means in Sander’s view that it’s too late to save the world. But Mother Earth, a journal run by Emma Goldman from 1906 to 1917, speaks about how workers can take control of their own life - like someone who knows the law, so they don’t need a lawyer (Baginski 305). In prisons the IWW would sing organizational songs, so they released the prisoners because they were too organized to be contained:

We arrested 300 of those IWW outlaws, and we had every jail in the country full of them, and they wouldn’t work while they were in jail. They sang songs, and they broke up the jail; so we ain’t going to arrest anybody else; we’re just going to club the hell out of all who come here to take part in this free speech and we’ll brand them. (Reitman 271)

Baginski speaks about striking, and not telling your boss when you’re going to strike.

Nowadays these sorts of strikes might be called “wildcat strikes,” and you will often see anarchists, specifically anarcho-syndicalists, using the black cat as a symbol of their particular ideology. Baginski describes why you should not let the enemy know when you are going to strike, because then they will have time to prepare in advance and organize against you:

Pity for and indignation against the workers fill one’s soul at the spectacle of the ridiculous strike methods so often employed and that as often frustrate the possible success of every large labor war. Or is it not laughable if it were not so deadly serious, that the producers publicly discuss for months in advance where and when they might strike, and therewith give the enemy a chance to prepare his means of combat. (Baginski 301)

As I said before, the unions negotiate strikes for days and weeks and months beforehand, even allowing their men to work overtime in order to reproduce all the commodities to continue business while the strike is going on. (301)

Anarchism arose from labor unions and became federations like the CNT, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labor), in the Spanish Revolution. A federation is a free organization of units of workers, without centralization; an organization of workers can be organized, but not technically be considered a state by anarchists, depending on how one defines anarchism. A federation is an organizational aspect of anarchism. The working-class struggle under capitalism takes the form of the anarchist international. Writing about the Paris Commune, Kropotkin declares that an anarchist international is without borders:

“This group must not merely be national,” answered the International Working Men’s Association, “ it must extend across all artificial boundary lines.” (Kropotkin 334)

But when this vast idea of International Association had been struck out, it still remained to discover what should be the component parts of the federation of the world. (334)

An-archy, i.e. the total abolition of the state, and social organization from the simple to the complex by means of the free federation of popular groups of producers and consumers. (335)

The free federation of producers and consumers encompasses a world working class which is united against capitalism, and forms without a state. The Paris commune made an organizational error by maintaining electoral politics, and it was an organizational failure because it did not know how to allocate its resources or defend itself. One of the justifications of the anarchist international Mother Earth gives is that, without states, smaller states don’t get consumed by larger states (Internationalist 361) The state is the police, government, and protection of private property in a word. It is the private interests of the rich over the working people, who, as Karl Marx says in Capital, produce the product, and the history of their labor is in the product – this is called the labor theory of value (61-2). The extraction of fossil fuels is a suicidal path for the planet; it could lead to methane trapped under the sea to release, and possibly lead to a runaway greenhouse effect (Hedges). Capitalism, then, is suicidal, and it is also fascist - fascist in that it operates through militarism, corporatism, and hierarchical control. At the time of writing, capitalism continues its suicidal path of destruction through the policies of the Biden administration letting Israel continue the genocide on Gaza. I fear for the nuclear annihilation of the world and the potential destruction of the climate. If we are dead, there can be no queer communism.

These social contradictions in the government relate directly to queer communism, as they are the opposition which queer communism must overcome in order to achieve its goal. Queerness comes with a world which is not dominated by empire. The military industrial complex all around the world, with its over 100 military bases, is responsible for keeping the machinic order of capitalism in place to snuff out the individualistic order of cyclical time and mutual aid. Capitalism, and largely the military, is one of the factors keeping queerness from appearing around the world. It appeared briefly with Patrice Lumumba, with his technologically advanced socialism; but the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat shows how America helped kill him (Soundtrack). Patrice Lumumba was going to bring a mixed socialist capitalist economy to Africa, but the US government colluded with other governments to kill him. The same thing happened with Salvador Allende in Chile. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr, both people with socialist visions in our country, were killed. The CNT was stopped when they were taken into prison by the thousands, but they formed the federation again in the prison. The world spirit, queerness, is stateless people, and the spirit of stateless people never dies. Palestine’s freedom is a prime example of where queerness could emerge, were imperialist powers not trying to suppress it.

Mother Earth is from a time in which nuclear and climate fears were not yet known by humankind. In it are explications of various topics, such as Kropotkin’s mutual aid. Mutual aid is an important factor in evolution of species, and biologists now accept this. There is exterior war and inner war: the struggle of the whole in large divisions of species, and the struggle in between individuals in the same species. We can find mutual aid in the animal kingdom, and for Kropotkin there is no need to look to supernatural morality to find ethics in nature. In fact, for Kropotkin in his book Mutual Aid, every animal species, especially the more sapient ones, practice mutual aid:

The first thing which strikes us as soon as we begin studying the struggle for existence under both its aspects – direct and metaphorical – is the abundance of facts of mutual aid, not only for rearing progeny, as recognized by most evolutionists, but also for the safety of the individual, and for providing it with the necessary food. With many large divisions of the animal kingdom, mutual aid is the rule. Mutual aid is met with even amidst the lowest animals, and we must be prepared to learn some day, from the students of microscopical pond life, facts of unconscious mutual support, even from the life of micro-organisms. (Kropotkin 33)

“All classes of animals,” he continued, “and especially the higher ones, practice mutual aid,” and he illustrated his idea by examples borrowed from the life of burying beetles and the social life of birds and some Mammalia.” (34)

Mutual aid, or simply put “mutual support,” is a “higher instinct” in animals that ensures their survival. To Darwin’s dismay, his capitalist and religious followers appropriated his “survival of the fittest,” as social Darwinism. Yet Darwin himself put emphasis on the importance of external conditions for survival (Kropotkin 73). With mutual aid in mind, and the necessity of external factors, we can progress morally beyond the system of slavery and exploitation we find ourselves in under capitalism. One of the things which mutual aid entails is an attitude of helping others; not as charity, but as a society not based on artificial scarcity, which is scarcity which does not need to be; making sure that food does not go to waste, and allowing people to receive the direct product of their labor. We waste 30-40% of the food which we produce (USDA), because capitalists must create an artificial scarcity so that they can continue to make profits.

The “Mexican Revolution” essay by Voltairine de Cleyre shows how the rapacious Diaz government came into Mexico and emptied the land of the natives, much like America did:

But for the Yaquis, there was worse than this. Not only were their lands seized, but they were ordered, a few years since, to be deported to the Yucatán. Now Sonora, as I said, is a norther state, and Yucatán one of the southernmost. Yucatán hemp is famous, and so is Yucatán fever, and Yucatán slavery on the hemp plantations. It was to that fever and that slavery that the Yaquis were deported, in droves of hundreds at a time, men, women, and children – droves like cattle droves, driven and beaten like cattle. Sonora was desolated of her rebellious people, and the land became “pacific” in the hands of the new landowners. Too pacific in spots. They had not left enough people to reap the harvest. (324)

The brave, just, and heroic Zapatistas, a guerilla anarchist group in Mexico in the 1910s, rose up under General Zapata. They seized strategic points along railroads, broke into a federal district, and sacked a town. Military camps of the Zapatistas were cropping up. Guerilla bands were operating in the mountains, were difficult to capture, and often did more damage than they received even in defeat (de Cleyre 325). The Zapatistas took back some of their land from the colonists who would sometimes act as absentee landlords in California. Many of the landed leech millionaires moved to Los Angeles, so they could collect without risk of residence. They knew their own government could not quell the uprising. Capitalists kept the north ignorant of these affairs, through which the manufacture of consent through the media, which was given $10 million by the government so that the capitalists could keep their property intact by pacifying the people.

That the papers pursue this course is partly due to the generally acting causes that produce our northern indifference, which I shall presently try to explain, and partly to the settled policy of capitalized interest and controlling its mouthpieces in such a manner as to give their present henchmen, the Maderists, a chance to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. They invested some $10,000,000 in this bunch, in the hope that they may be able to accomplish the double feet of keeping capitalist possessions intact and at the same time pacifying the people with specious promises. They want to lend them all the countenance they can, til the experiment is well tried; so they deliberately suppress revolutionary news. (de Cleyre 327)

Among the later items of interest reported by the Los Angelos Times are those which announce an influx of ex-officials and many-millioned land-lords of Mexico, who are hereafter to be residents of Los Angelos. What is the meaning of it? Simply that life in Mexico is not such a safe and comfortable proposition as it was and that for the present they prefer to get such income as their agents can collect without themselves running the risk of actual residence. (327)

These colonists were making money off the land without facing the threat of living near the Zapata, the people who wanted to use their land and their labor for their own purposes, instead of for the needs of the colonists. In American history, there have been movements which have attempted to organize workers, like the IWW and its iconic leader Big Bill Haywood. Mother Earth talks about how some of their members would be beaten up by the “Respectable Mob” businessmen of the city and be told that they just want to protect their property.

When I lay naked on the ground, my tormentors kicked and beat me until I was almost insensible. With a lit cigar they burned IWW on my buttox; then they poured a can of tar over my head and body, and, in the absence of feathers, they rubbed handfuls of sagebrush on my body. One very gentle businessman, who is active in church work, deliberately attempted to push my cane into my rectum. (Reitman 272)

Many lessons can be drawn from our San Diego experience, but none more important than this: the businessmen and the property owners will fight for their rights. The historian who analyzes the cause of the San Diego trouble will have to record that it was property, and the fear that it may be taken from them, that roused the savagery of the San Diego vigilantes. (273)

Just as people in Mexico experienced a rapacious capitalist empire, so did we in America. Genocide is genocide; there is no greater or lesser body count to qualify for genocide. America, just as Mexico, is a genocidal colonial state of capitalism, and these genocides uphold capitalism. Frantz Fanon talks about how colonized people will attach themselves to the colonizer’s values hoping for salvation, and the sharing between the colonizers and the colonized, but the colonizer does not plan to co-exist:

The intellectual who, for his part, has adopted the abstract, universal values of the colonizer is prepared to fight so that colonist and colonized can live in peace in a new world. But what he does not see, because precisely colonialism and all its modes of thought have seeped into him, is that the colonist is no longer interested in staying on and coexisting once the colonial context has disappeared. (Fanon 9)

Capitalism is the colonist’s values in America, and in the context of America, and in the context of any Leviathan, you are colonizing your very mind with the ready-to-hand tendrils of the Leviathan’s inauthentic corpse machine that is the undead superorganism that collects your potentiality and feeds it into the flows of capital. Capitalism has a way of cheapening life. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s book Dialectic of Enlightenment, they say that the culture industry produces cheap garbage so that it can make the most profit:

The view is still held by the captains of the film industry, we accept only more or less phenomenal box-office success as evidence and prudently ignore the counterevidence, truth. Their ideology is business. (108)

In the trash of the culture industry, amusement is elevated and inwardness perverted:

Amusement itself becomes an ideal, taking the place of the higher values it eradicates from the masses by repeating them in an even more stereotyped form than the advertising slogans paid for by private interests. Inwardness, the subjectivity restricted form of truth, was always more beholden to the outward rulers than it imagined. (115)

Industry elevates humans as products to be manipulated:

So much are the masses mere material that those in control can raise one of them up to their heaven, and cast him or her out again: let him go hang with their justice and their labor. Industry is interested in human beings only as its customers and employees and has in fact reduced humanity as a whole like each of its elements, to this exhaustive formula. (118)

Capitalism and inauthenticity have a way of colonizing life and making everything awkward, uncomfortable, post-ironic in the sense that you witness things which you’d think people would only joke about ironically, like voting for Donald Trump - a convicted rapist, con artist, and insurrectionary fascist - in a country which used to fight fascism. In a way, we have reached what Hegel might call “the inverted world” of Hegel’s “Force and the Understanding” chapter in the Phenomenology of Spirit:

Looked at superficially, this inverted world is the opposite of the first in the sense that it has the latter outside of it and repels that world from itself as an inverted actual world… (97)

One of the ways in which people are controlled as slaves in America besides wage slavery is the repeal of Roe v. Wade. Contraception and abortions are becoming inaccessible to women, which rather means, safe abortions are inaccessible. Emma Goldman explains in “The Social Aspects of Birth Control” how taking contraception away from women is the worst crime ever committed upon women, and how women are being turned into baby factories.

Thousands of women are sacrificed as a result of abortions, because they are undertaken by quack doctors, ignorant midwives in secrecy and in haste. Yet the poets and politicians sing of motherhood. A greater crime was never perpetrated upon women. (138)

I may be arrested, I may be tried and thrown into jail, but I never will be silent; I will never acquiesce or submit to authority, nor will I make peace with a system which degrades women to a mere incubator and which fattens on her innocent victims. (140)

That is still happening now, after the repeal of Roe v. Wade. Bernie Sanders’ aforementioned comment about the climate change fight is accompanied by a sort of capitalist realism, the idea that people do not have the internal capacities to go beyond capitalism. He’s likely right, but Zoe Baker makes the point in Means and Ends that going beyond capitalism requires teaching people how to go beyond the systems which are in place right now, hence the aforementioned talked about developing capacities (50). Mother Earth as well has a section on schools and teaching: the Francisco Ferrer school, a school based on teaching students how to think for themselves – provoking a sort of rhizomaticity to “the awakening, in the depths of men’s consciousness, of a will towards emancipation” (Ferrer 259). Ferrer describes something very similar to the ability to develop internal capacities (Baker 50), and external conditions, through which people can thrive, and how the education of the future will be “of an entirely spontaneous nature” (Ferrer 263). Schools for Ferrer under empires and capitalism are “the most powerful means of enslavement:”

It is because the organization of the school, far from spreading the ideal which we imagined, has made education a powerful means of enslavement in the hands of governing powers today. Their teachers are conscious or unconscious instruments of this power, modeled moreover according to their principles; they have from their youth up,

and more than anyone else, been subjected to the discipline of their authority; few indeed are those who have escaped the influence of this domination; and these remain powerless because the school organization constrains them so strongly that they cannot but obey it” (261)

Ferrer talks about a school where there is a “triumph of new ideas” (263). Lesson plans would be replaced with impressions of life, as he said, and the student would be able to pursue what interests them (263). The Ferrer school is a sort of anarchistic style of teaching, and Baker talks about how it would be necessary to have community centers at which people can come together and talk about how to organize their own lives, such as the ateneos. To quote Zoe Baker talking about these social centers in the “Evolution and Revolution” section of Means and Ends:

For decades in Spain, workers came into contact with anarchist ideas via cultural and social centers known as ateneos (athenaeums), which were interconnected with the anarchist trade union movement. These ateneos typically featured a café, library, reading rooms, meeting rooms for anarchist and neighborhood groups, and an auditorium for formal debates, public talks, and artistic performances. During periods of state repression when trade unions were forced underground, ateneos were generally able to remain open and thereby ensure the ongoing existence of an anarchist presence within working-class communities. The workers who participated in ateneos organized a wide range of educational and leisure activities in their spare time. This included day schools for working-class children, evening classes for adult workers, theater clubs that would perform radical plays, singing and musical groups, and hiking clubs that allowed poor urban workers to experience the beauty of nature in the countryside and along the coast. Through engaging in these activities, workers developed themselves in multiple directions, such as gaining the confidence to speak before a crowd, learning to read and write, and acquiring an in-depth understanding of why capitalism and the state should be abolished. (116)

Community centers, and getting involved with trade unions, are some of the ways that people can develop the internal capacities to go beyond capitalism, which means recognizing that people do have the power to organize their own lives. We already see it happening under capitalism in groups like worker co-ops, and in labor unions striking to receive more benefits from the ruling class. But this is not all that aiming the strong arm of the united working class would achieve.

The goal of anarchism is to live without private property - to live without the ruling class owning the means of production. Examples of these would be land, and privately owned machinery, through which you can enslave people through a wage, through which the master extracts surplus value for themselves. People turn to this system not because it is the best system that there could possibly be, but rather because in capitalism, one is threatened with homelessness if they do not conform to the game of making profit for a rapacious capitalist leech master. Workers turn to these means because they are told to; as Fanon says of the colonized, they believe their salvation lies in the values of the colonist (9). Workers and colonized people turn to these means because there are usually no other choices. The abolition of private property, and the end of wage slavery, is something which is ubiquitous throughout practically all anarchist writings - an idea that we shouldn’t be beholden to a ruling class who owns the means of production. What differs between anarchists and Marxists is that anarchists want a more orderly society than the state can provide. Marxists are unable to envision organization without a state, so the state is supposed to be a transitionary phase between socialism and communism, as

Saul Newman explains in the beginning of Bakunin to Lacan (Newman 21). In order to achieve anarchism, or an anarchist international, there would need to be mass organization on the part of the working people. But then the problem of patriarchy and white supremacy still remains. People have not embraced a sort of universalism when it comes to race, as Internationalist in Mother Earth proposes in “National Atavism” as a criticism of the Zionism which was occurring in their day, a problem which still is with us to this day as we experience the genocide of Gazans at the hands of Israel:

The spirit of our ancestor, Abraham, has come to life again. Like Abraham, when Jehovah commanded him to go in quest of the promised land, the Jewish Nationalists make themselves and others believe that they long for the moment, when with wife and child and all possessions, they will migrate to that spot on earth, which will represent the Jewish State, where Jewish traits will have a chance to develop in idyllic peace.

Natural science calls retrogression of species, which shows signs of a former state already overcome, atavism. The same term may be applied to the advanced section of the Jewish population which has listened to the call of the Nationalists. They have retrogressed from a universal view of things to a philosophy fenced in by boundary lines; from the glorious conception that “the world is my country” to the conception of exclusiveness. They have abridged their wide vision and made it narrow and superficial. (360)

There, they talk about Zionism, and how working-class Jewish people wouldn’t have as much in common with a Jewish banker (362), and that in the Jewish population there are still class differences, and that Jewish people were being killed by the Russian government at the time it was written (363). The purpose of the essay was to show solidarity among workers, because in order to be an anarchist, we have to recognize that there is poverty in the world, because poverty upholds capitalism. The threat of destitution is part of capitalism’s stick which it uses to keep people in line, serving the powers that be. Baginski talks about how capital is like an older brother who beats his younger sister, and his younger sister asks the older brother to stop beating her (300). This is akin to what it is to ask the oppressors to stop oppressing you. It is no wonder that a deep white supremacy still prevails in a nation which was founded on white supremacy. A disproportionately black population fills the prisons today with black prison labor “Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly 5 times the rate of white Americans,” (Nellis) and more black men are under correctional control than in the time of slavery: “1.68 million black men are under correctional control in the US, not counting jails. That’s over three times as many black men as were enslaved in 1850” (Lind). We still have black slavery in the United States, we still have things like throwing out thousands of black votes for Al Gore in rigged elections because of Florida (Lichtman).

We do not live in a post racial world. Kamala Harris is someone who made many strategic errors in her campaign. She campaigned with Liz Cheney, a right-winger who voted mostly with Trump, the daughter of Dick Cheney, an architect of the Iraq war. If we lived in a post-racial world, then Kamala Harris would not have lost to a convicted rapist, 30+ count felon with dozens more charges, an insurrectionary fascist fraudster who doesn’t believe in climate change and said that we have rapists and criminals coming into our country from Mexico. Immigrants actually commit crimes at lower rates than US citizens (National Institute of Justice). He said that Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs, a lie started by a Neo Nazi hate group (Yousef). To say that someone can elect a racist to office against a black woman and then say that we live in a post-racial world is tacitly false. We live in a white supremacist nation. The Democrats abandoned their leftist base, and they hid Tim Waltz and did not have him campaign for much of the presidential race. Kamala also did not distance herself from Biden on his policy of funding Israel, which in Michigan was a big part of why people did not vote for Kamala shown by the uncommitted vote (Bose). Race is a representational idea in consciousness, but racism is a material consequence of hateful words, discriminate housing, discriminatory policing, physical abuse etc. that cannot be disconnected from the material conditions in which the representational belief started to make imprints on the body without organs, which continue to produce events through the singularity of the moment of the event. Each inscription on the recording surface resonates, as the masks and armors that people of color must feel around police, because of the institutional disadvantage which the identity produces. The way to eliminate institutional disadvantages is to recognize the historic damage that they cause, as many poor communities, even though they are not still on red lined districts anymore, are still very poor. Red lining and the areas the poor live overlap to this day, in areas like Baltimore. There can be no true reparations that are anything but partial until full communism is achieved. Like how Mother Earth in their “National Atavism” essay saw race as universal (Internationalist 360), the universality of the problem of immemorial time is what produces the conscious representational experience of race, which is a paranoiac machine which orders the miraculating machine to produce racialized bodies without organs. This is how micro-aggressions can occur. People are told racist stories, and they internalize the fear and aggression which society instills in people towards other races, not just black people. Racism is purely representational, as is the belief in race, but the belief in race has material consequences, as representation puts masks and armors on people, and makes them conform; like an authority says jump, and the interpolated say how high.

Yet anarchism, as Zoe Baker points out, is not about electoral politics because campaigners can just end up not actually carrying through with their promises, instead of putting efforts into developing ways to go beyond capitalism (146). This is because people shouldn’t put their capacities into someone who may or may not uphold the system as it is, someone who doesn’t have any obligation to serve the people. In Max Baginski’s “Aims and Tactics of the Trade Union Movement” essay, he talks about how we send our “honest men and clear heads” to the government to try to change it from the inside, and nothing ever happens except they end up promoting their own personality to prominence (301). Anarchism is not about electoral politics, but there still can be chains of representation which are not based on anything but direct democracy. The CNT had a federation where there could be positions like a secretary or a treasurer, and these tasks could be partitioned out to people, but it was not organized hierarchically. Malatesta talks in his essay on the necessity of organization that you wouldn’t want to mail your own letters; it’s better to assign tasks to people who can carry out these things more efficiently. The “higher” you go in the organization was simply a broader territory, which was co-operatively organized like cells in an organism without any single governing head, with no president. Presidents of the United States uphold vicious foreign policy which keeps the systems of world trade in place. Militarism and capitalism go hand in hand; the policies which keep a rapacious world eating system like capitalism in place, are cooperative with the toothand-claw system which upholds it by force.

Perlman talks about how the beast cannot speak its own name without losing the confidence of its constituents (Perlman 285). People speak instead of freedom and liberty, something which no one has under the Leviathan. Speaking about these things in the name of the Leviathan is, as Perlman puts, the Leviathan speaking through you and taking control of you; the

Leviathan speaks “commands and punishments:” the superegoic injunction to enjoy, as well as the superegoic sadism of Oedipal melancholia; it does not speak “paths of being” but “laws and closed gates” (Perlman 57). Operating in accordance with queerness - Bæden describes queerness as escape from capture (Bæden 40) - cannot be entirely upheld in a colonialist capitalist system, except by everyday insurrections. I spoke about these insurrections in greater detail in my papers on Molloy in terms of the indeterminacy of immemorial time, and on Ulysses as insurrections against the prevailing order which mostly took place in an imaginary space and were usually not outwardly performed by the characters. Artificiality in itself is enshrined in the dollar: the capture and enshrinement of Lugalzaggizi, Optimus Maximus, the lord of lords, king of kings, and god of warring civilizations, which is what God represents in this dying empire (Perlman 278)

Why anarchism would be more stable than capitalism

The American police have only been around for about 200 years and were implemented to catch run-away slaves (Power). The police do not stop crime; they usually arrive when a crime has already been committed. They protect private property. Anarchists usually do not like to think of things in terms of crime; but there are ways that anarchists differ from capitalists, who want a permanent army. Fredy Perlman shows that the native Americans were one of the only people through history who avoided the Leviathan by forming into a temporary army to fight off the invading Europeans. The federated tribes said, “Yea to life and No to the Leviathan by disbanding rather than becoming comparable killing machines” (297). De Cleyre similarly talks about the Minutemen and how she admires that type of formation: people organizing for a purpose, such as fighting off the British Empire, and then dissolving itself. Anarchists do not want a permanent army, but recognize that forming one may be necessary:

Our fathers thought they had guarded against a standing army by providing for the “voluntary militia.” In our day we have lived to see the militia declare part of the regular military force of the government, and subject to the same demands as the regulars.

Since any embodiment of the fighting spirit, any military organization, inevitably follows the same line of centralization, the logic of Anarchism is that the least objectionable form of armed force is that which springs up voluntarily, like the minutemen of Massachusetts, and disbands as soon as the occasion which called it into existence is past.

All peaceful persons should withdraw their support from the army and require that all who make war shall do so at their own cost and risk; that neither pay nor pension are to be provided for those who choose to make man-killing a trade. (de Cleyre 40)

The tactics of anarchists have always been, from the very beginning, to create a more orderly world. Zoe Baker points out in Means and Ends that anarchists have always wanted a more orderly world.

He defined “Anarchy” as “the absence of a master” and argued that the “highest perfection of society is found in the union of order and anarchy. (20-1)

For example, in France the journalist Anselm Bellegarrigue wrote and published a short lived journal called Anarchy, a Journal of Order in 1850. In the first issue of the journal he wrote “I am an anarchist” and insisted that “anarchy is order, whereas government is civil war.”

Elisee Reclus wrote “The absence of government … anarchy, the highest expression of order.” (Baker 22)

Zoe Baker also makes an argument that if human nature is bad, then we do not need masters: “if human beings are not inherently good, then no person is good enough to be a ruler” (35), which adds to the idea that government does not bring order. Aside from war, anarchists recognize, as Alexander Berkman does in “The Source of Violence,” that capitalism is the “archcrime,” and is responsible for all other crimes.

And the sooner we gain the courage to face the situation honestly, the speedier will come the day when the archcrime of the centuries – capitalism – the source and breeder of all other crime and violence, will be abolished and the way cleared for a society based on solidarity of interests, where brotherhood of humanity will become a reality and violence will disappear, because it is unnecessary. (317)

Capitalism causes poverty and artificial scarcity. It takes away people’s cosmic connection to nature and creates an artificial significance. Berkman points out how prisons are retributive; they do not operate on the idea of rehabilitating prisoners, at least in his time. That is still true of American prisons today. Prison is a place where prisoners learn to be better criminals, as he describes:

It is no better with the reformative phase of penal institutions. The penal character of all prisons – workhouses, penitentiaries, state prisons – excludes all possibility of a reformative nature. The promiscuous mingling of prisoners in the same institution, without regard to the relative criminality of the inmates, converts prisons into veritable schools of crime and immorality. (240)

Intersectionality is a practice. One has to continually unlearn the stories they have been told from an American exceptionalist society: a society that believes that America is the exceptional nation, and that we are exempt from judgment when it comes to negative things being said about the nation. Intersectionality requires not believing in the lies that the founding fathers were somehow simply, as in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the corporation that made the androids. To say that they were the corporation producing the androids, creating complex ethical dilemmas in the process, giving the excuse that was given for working for the corporation - if I did not, someone else would - is to look too kindly on the founding fathers. One does not need to hate the people who they disagree with in order to view the goal of what for which to strive; what makes sense when you look at the facts and see how it intersects with what is good - then you can aim the strong arm of the working class towards a federation. Intersectionality means looking at the historical consequences of capitalism, such as slavery, racism, and the unequal distribution of incarceration and poverty among black people, instead of believing the lie that we live in an exceptional nation which does not have a history of racial, sex, and gender inequality. It is rather a nation in which race has played a historical role in disadvantaging people who are black, such as giving benefits to people coming home from WWII and focusing on white people in the New Deal. Intersectionality means continually unlearning ways of thinking which involve looking at the United States as some sort of good guy or a sympathetic entity in history, is akin to not having an intersectional view, because if one thinks we are an exceptional nation, then one overlooks the ongoing racism, which continues with Trump and his lies about immigrants.

There are multiple examples of federations. Some things which are already in the United States are worker co-ops. The CNT formed a federation, which has local, national, and hopefully someday international sections based on these unionized work forces (Baker 220). Autonomous individuals could produce specialty items which are designed not to be destroyed due to planned obsolescence. It could be a society based on artisans, so to speak. Fredy Perlman spoke kindly of the artisans in Against His-Story, Against Leviathan, saying that they maintained part of the human community in that they worked not for profit but for the purpose of the temple (227). Federated unions could go on a strike against the ruling class; they could then form an international federation of horizontal, direct democratic structures without bosses. This has been the classic technique and aspiration of syndicalist anarchism: the general strike. In terms of our modern day, we could eliminate prison labor, empty the prisons of the cheap labor for capital. Erase artificial scarcity, which means scarcity which does not need to be. Allow nations to develop their own means of subsistence, instead of placing embargos on them and going in and slaughtering them in like the Banana Wars, or in Chile with Salvador Allende’s government, or in Vietnam when the Vietnamese people were attacked. Enough is enough. We don't need governments with bureaucracies, and rulers who have ownership and control of private property (if not directly in charge, then controlled by those who are through their money), in order to have re-habilitative forces at work in society, because anarchism starts at home. Kropotkin emphasizes that it's not just individuals at work in Darwin's work, but society as well, the necessity of mutual aid:

We see at once what a powerful weapon it represents even for the feeblest species in their struggle against adverse natural conditions, the longevity it secures to the individuals, the accumulation of experience, and the development of higher instincts and intelligence that it renders possible within the species” (Kropotkin 73).

The idea of inner struggle within the species has been grossly exaggerated by Darwin’s followers. He merely summed up the result of the immense researches he made into the cause of variation after he had published in 1859 his first epoch-making work, The Origin of Species… he gave more and more importance to the action of external conditions in determining the lines of evolution of all living beings – he did not make “a concession” to his opponents, as we were told by some of his English followers. (73)

Instead of using prison labor, companies could focus on paying their employees, instead of paying CEOs; getting rid of the CEOs, and letting the workers govern the company. It should be broken up and de-monopolized by the federation through a de-centralized process of worker co-operatives forming local unions, national organization for things such as mutual aid and the avenues through which goods could be delivered, and so that communication and supplies can be sent to various parts of the federation’s local municipalities. This would all be bottom-up, as in, the workers themselves would be the only ones making the decisions. Instead of having a system of punishment, there would be a system of problem solving. Someone could work on figuring out how to solve poverty, by figuring out how to distribute a house to everyone; this should not be hard, as there are over 15.1 million vacant American homes and only 650,000 homeless people (Medium). Instead of prison labor, people could simply be housed, and released for deeds other than rape, murder, assault, etc. People such as should have rehabilitative care. Instead of having a militarized police force which grows with every presidency, yet does not seem to reduce crime, we could simply have a non-violent alternative. This would be a society in which someone who is desperate is offered a helping hand and is allowed to develop their personality, as opposed to becoming completely institutionalized inside of a concrete wall, being made to labor for the state as a slave for less than the minimum wage.

The massive wealth inequality could be reappropriated from the billionaire class whose wealth has grown by the trillions over the pandemic, inflating prices of goods and claiming that it was due to inflation, receiving record profits (Palazzo). It is not difficult to figure out where the wealth comes from; it comes from rich white men. We do not even necessarily need the money, as switching to capitalism would likely require abandoning the machinery of Wall Street and the stock market, which is only a reflection of the wealth of a small percentage of America. Getting rid of the stock market and switching to an economy based on need and demand, such as giving food to people who are hungry, allowing people to always have access to a house and food, only working for it through the necessity of society. Bertrand Russell in Proposed Roads to Freedom speculates that most people want to live with more than just the basic necessities, when he suggests that this would be highly beneficial:

There would of course be a certain portion of the population who would prefer idleness. Provided the proportion were small, this need not matter. And among those who would classed as idlers might be included artists, writers of books, men devoted to abstract intellectual pursuits - in short all those whom society despises while they are alive and honors while they are dead. To such men, that possibility of pursuing their work regardless of any public recognition of its utility would be invaluable. Whoever will observe how many of our poets have been men of private means will realize how much poetic capacity must have remained under-developed through poverty; for it would be absurd to suppose that the rich are better endowed by nature with the capacity for poetry. Freedom for such men, few as they are, must be set against the waste of mere idlers. (103-4)

You can give people what they need to survive, and not luxury, as that can only be afforded to a few; we do not want to reproduce the bourgeoise class under communism, as that would be definitionally not communism. There would be great wealth under communism, but it would be a sensible wealth. Capitalism is the foolish idea that one can consume endlessly, and that the environment and those around you can somehow live sustainably at the same time. Food should be distributed around the world to the places which most need it, such as the starving people in Gaza. Stopping the Gaza war is coterminous with stopping imperialism and allowing communism to exist. As long as we exist in a world in which Gaza is not free, the forces at work that keep the Gaza genocide ongoing will continue their campaigns into other parts of the world, such as the United States did in its war against communism in Vietnam, its protection of the United Fruit company, and its protection of trade in Chile, where the United States showed that communism is not infeasible or impossible; it is rather able to be killed, and we know who the killer is.

The question of governance is often thought of in terms of having politicians who “represent” us. In a country like America, which is one of the most corrupted by capital in the entire world; we pay the most for our healthcare in the world and get lower quality of care than several of the top nations combined (Our World In Data). We pay the most for our military in the world, and neglect social safety net programs at home (Peterson Foundation). This is because of corrupt influences like the Citizens United decision, but this is only the beginning of the problem. Having representatives in the first place makes it so that they may or may not carry out the demands of the people which are given to them, as Zoe Baker points out in Means and Ends in the “Parliamentarism” section:

Instead of taking direct action within prefigurative organizations, workers would engage in such activities as voting in elections, campaigning for politicians, and listening to them make various promises. Such forms of activity would produce workers who look to politicians to achieve their own emancipation and who respond to injustices by putting their hopes in the next election, rather than taking direct action themselves. (146)

In 1912, de Cleyre claimed that the “main evil” of Parliamentary politics was “that it destroys initiative, quenches the individual rebellious spirit, teaches people to rely on someone else to do for them what they should do for themselves, what they alone can do for themselves.” (146)

Many of these claims are proven by how the DNC and news outlets rig elections in favor of maintaining the system. They will systematically disadvantage people like Bernie Sanders. The DNC leaked questions to Hillary in the primary against Bernie (Politico), and in the 2024 election, the primary was entirely shut down to anoint Joe Biden, who then withdrew, while his arbitrarily decided replacement, Kamala Harris, lost. Parliamentary politics acts as a microfascism that spreads and takes over every movement, overtaking direct action for Malatesta (Baker 146). In Parliamentary politics instead of forming internal capacities that would help with direct action, they instead pour their energy, hope, and support behind politicians who simply turn on the worker. Since the goal of anarchism is decentralization of power from below in federations, a government based on taking over the government with revolutionary politics would create oppression. It's not even as though anarchists enter politics and are useful, they are either superfluous or accomplices. The ultimate goal is abolition of private property and decentralizing the state with a federation like the one outlined in Means and Ends:

The single unions in a particular area combined to form a local federation. The local federations combined to form a regional federation and the regional federations together formed the national federation. The local, regional, and national federations were all self managed by their own respective administrative committees. In order to prevent the rise of bureaucracy within the CNT, the only paid delegates within the trade union were the general secretary of the national federation and the secretaries of the regional federations.

Every other delegate was expected to earn a living working in a trade. The administrative committees of the local, regional, and national federations lacked the ability to impose decisions on shop stewards, who were only subject to the instructions of their single union. (Baker 220)

The federation is one type of anarchism which can exist alongside other types of anarchism like insurrectionary anarchism, syndicalism, and the dualist, or platform approach. Anarchism is not one thing, but there are still things which are and are not anarchist. One could guarantee the smooth governance of this system based on mutual aid through a local, national, and international level of communistic communication. A federation communicates through direct democracy, with inconsequential representatives who do not have legislative power, except to carry out the direct democratic will of the people. This is a bottom-up organization, which is important in terms of how governance would work. Governance from above is prone to fall into the hands of the rapacious mafia class of polluting plutocrats.

Anarchism is just a society based directly on mutual aid, without a ruling class. That just sounds scary because we think that our rulers somehow are qualified to extract our surplus value and tell us what to do; but look at Trump. Workers create wealth. A society based on receiving the direct benefit of the product of your labor, guaranteed certain rights which should be afforded to anyone, is how a federation would work, one which operates on the basis of co-operative style communities based on mutual support, rather than a competition which enforces poverty through artificial scarcity. Raising consciousness requires developing "internal capacities," as Zoe Baker calls them (50).

This could be done in social centers for people to get together and discuss organizational tactics and how to go beyond capitalism. Ferrer’s school, for instance, is a different style, supposed to teach people how to develop their own capacities to think, outside of the propaganda of the government. Instead of letting children develop spontaneously "seconding" their spontaneity, the traditional school instead imposes ready-made ideas upon it and prevents it from ever thinking otherwise (Ferrer 262). The purpose of education for the governing powers is not to uplift the individual, but slavery. The elites use education for their own advantage so that inevitably, all innovations will be turned to their profit. Zoe Baker talks about these social centers when she references the ateneos (116).

Queer anarchism does not mean that gender is somehow shameful, but rather that society inflicts its meaning on people and does not allow people to express their ownness, which is recognizing themselves as the source through their uniqueness. For Stirner as well, this uniqueness is outside of world history in The Ego and its Own (323). One can also draw a parallel to the Parmenidean instant, which is outside of time, and compare it to Deleuze’s notion of sense (Plato 163). Like the clock and its machinic capture, gender enforcement puts people into roles. The Leviathan is not an exclusively male force; as Bæden says, it would be silly to assume that men are solely responsible for the Leviathan: “The state, media, and feminist left endlessly insist that the violence belongs to men alone; this insistence forms another apparatus to capture and engender” (Bæden 132). Whatever tricks the ruling classes try to pull to keep capitalism in place, it is good to remember that the goal is not to create another state, but rather to create a zone in which people continually unlearn white supremacy, patriarchy, and other norms which enforce anyone into a specific box. Gender may be a form of capture into a role and its tensions and armors, but if someone wants to do that then there is no reason to say that what they are doing is shameful or wrong. The goal is to unlearn the whole notion of expression of oneself as caught up in a web of hierarchal thinking where people are judged for their expression in things such as who they love or how they dress.

In order to unlearn these tensions, one way to do so is by not interpolating people into the norms which you yourself hold, as though they are norms for everyone else pertaining to gender. It comes largely through creating the conditions in which people can be themselves, unchallenged by authority which wants to suppress who they are, or institutional symbolic pivot points on which you turn in your everyday life, which trap you into the confined category of gender, state, and capitalism. We will see now under the Trump administration how we will be unable to unlearn these tensions, how to live without them, because we have not yet learned how to get rid of them. Learning to live without a tension comes with the institutional body without organs not having marks on it such as laws which the bureaucracy produces which do not allow you to develop your individuality, the motion through which you exercise, and learn the capacities through which you can explore and push your limits of skill and understanding in whatever craft you pursue. Learning to live without the machinery of the state could mean realizing your potentiality without the pressure of institutions that want to challenge your very right to exist, with the threat of homelessness if you do not comply to wage slavery, or becoming a master through which you become an oppressor. This is why anyone rich who is a land owner of private property owned for the purpose of people selling their labor under wage slavery is not welcome in a queer communist society. If you are rich off the labor of others, or even if you gathered up so many resources that you were like the king of your own little island, it would not be appropriate for a situation in which mutual aid has to occur so that everyone is taken care of. You would need to forfeit the narcissistic power trip in believing that anyone deserves to be ordered under someone else. A society should be judged by the way it treats the weakest among it. No one should be considered a mere externality for capital. The system as it is does not nurture life; it destroys life and sucks out its potentiality in inauthentic hierarchical institutions. Queerness cannot take place in a society in which your pivot points are coming from the institutional ticking of the clock, as you march along with the step of the institution, as opposed to the cyclical times like the circadian rhythm, which produces natural sleep patterns that are upset by things like stress. Going to bed without feeling like I need to finish the homework that the institution told me I need to do would be one way in which society could take away the machinic aspect of the institution for students. Yet the machinery under the state is infinite, and it only keeps growing as technology grows more advanced and bureaucracy and police governance becomes more entrenched. Individuality cannot occur in a corporate fascist police state.

Thinking in terms of desire as production in a queer anarchist way, means being capable of connecting with new flows, which do not accumulate and territorialize via surplus value, but rather reterritorialize through the joys of a sustainable and peaceful international anarchist communism. Anarchy does not mean disorder; anarchy means order, anarchy means the autonomy to live one’s life without hierarchical coercion from bosses, or landlords, or tax collectors, to let people enjoy their land and labor for their own benefit, rather than for foreign investors and the colonial empire that is capitalism. All defenses of capitalism are coterminous with defenses of the ongoing project of colonialism. Until the people are made free and can organize without masters, without hierarchy, in a federation operating under the collective intention of de-growth communism; until then, we race towards the precipice, toward a world where the potentiality to exist is destroyed by the biosphere laid to waste. This is also an opportunity to recognize, so that we may organize so that we may experience more of cyclical time, the time of the earth and its rotations and repeated phenomena rather than the continual march of linear time in which we are, as Oscar Wilde says, atomized, as opposed to individualized:

Upon the other hand there are a great many people who, having no private property of their own, and being always on the brink of sheer starvation, are compelled to do the work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading, Tyranny of want. These are the poor, and amongst them there is no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or civilization, or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life. From their collective force humanity gains much in material prosperity. But it is only the material result that it gains, and the man who is poor is in himself absolutely of no importance. He is merely the infinitesimal atom of a force that, so far as regarding him, crushes him: indeed, prefers him crushed as in that case he is far more obedient. (Wilde 384)

Having time to do what you want to do means that you can develop your individuality. Darwin emphasized forces outside of the individual as an important factor in evolution (Kropotkin 73). We do not need to be social Darwinists, but eminently anti-ableist – recognizing that people can live their own lives without the excess of the ruling class whose extraction of surplus value is also an extraction of time.

An anti-ableist world means one in which people are taken care of according to their needs and give according to their abilities. It is a world where everyone has healthcare, everyone can eat, sidewalks have ramps on them instead of steps , and there are places to go to get food without needing to pay for it. Housing is taken care of, so students which come from families which are poorer and don’t have time to do things like hire a tutor could have people who work on their own terms and are taken care of so they can determine their own life and do things like take care of their children so their children can develop the internal capacities to not only succeed as a worker – that should be the last thing that anyone thinks is important in society, other than for the purpose of survival. Work is a horrible burden which should always be lessened. The ability for individualistic pursuits to embrace something like Bertrand Russell’s artist wage, except on a larger scale, should be guaranteed human rights and basic necessities. If someone is less able or less willing than someone else to do a job, then they should not be forced to. Jobs which people do not want to do regularly can be shared, and the reward for such jobs should be handsome in order to encourage people to do jobs that someone might not want to do, like work in a sewer. Charity cannot get us there. Not only do the rich not care, Oscar Wilde in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” in the Libertarian Reader talks about why charity does not achieve individualism:

The Remedies do not cure the disease. (393)

They try to solve the problem of poverty by keeping the poor alive, or in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor... The proper aim is to try to reconstruct a society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic values have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave owners were those who were kind to their slaves and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who try to do the most good; and at least we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the enos to restrain the altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. (393)

Altruism and charity are not the solution; they preserve private property, just as, for

Wilde, the worst slave owners were the ones who were nice to their slaves, because altruism and charity hide the horror of the system. They should rather have a seat at the table as an equal, having no masters, instead of receiving crumbs.

We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannize over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. (Wilde 385)

What would a queer communism look like?

Queerness is escape. How does one balance the vision that Perlman had of the state of nature with the Paris Commune, which was a failure of organization, and would have, as Perlman said, driven us to catastrophe in terms of our climate equally as fast with its “anticapitalist mode of production” (1-4)? Workers owning the means of production, as Mother Earth said, would have been appalling to English workers, who felt that the technology enslaved them (Baginski 298). Mother Earth, as well as Oscar Wilde, talks about using machinery to minimize work:

In England, for instance, the workingmen considered machinery their deadly foe, to be gotten rid of by all means. The simple axiom that machinery factories, mines, land, together with every means of production, if only in the hands of the entire community, would serve for the comfort and happiness of all, instead of being a curse, was a book of seven seals for the people in those days. (Baginski 298)

Man is made for better things than disturbing dirt. Work of that kind should be done by a machine. (Wilde 395)

Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future world depends. (394)

Wilde especially talks about developing a personality, like Shelley or Shakespeare (39293). Wilde had somewhat of an aristocratic soul, in the sense that he embodied much of the aristocratic attitude, but he held this attitude for everyone. He said the best among the poor are ungrateful for crumbs (385), and that there should be a non-administrative state which distributes but does not govern:

Now as the state is not to govern, it may be asked what the state is to do. The state is to be a voluntary association that will organize labor, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities. The state is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful. (395)

A de-centralized state of mutual aid is something akin to this. Zoe Baker talks about how anarchists from their conception have wanted a more orderly society (20-2). The idea that anarchism is necessarily more disorderly is a propaganda technique, albeit not entirely unfounded due to the tendency of anarchists to want no organization. Malatesta talks about the necessity of organizational anarchism in the Libertarian Reader vol. 2, saying you wouldn’t want to have to mail your own letters (Malatesta 13), and that a lot of times people just conflate their own tasks, like assigning someone to take care of “funds” in their group, with something that is not actually different, such as having a “treasurer” of the union (9). It would actually save a lot of time and money if we eliminated the despotic category of the owner class, and their despotic control of private property and extraction of surplus labor value, and distributed according to need, and only produced according to what was necessary. This will likely be necessary in a time of global ecological crisis. It is foolish to think that infinite economic growth can take place forever on a finite planet. The contradiction between capitalism and the planet has taken a heavy toll on the planet. According to the World Wildlife Fund, we are in the middle of the 6th mass extinction on the planet, and the first due to human causes. But Bæden does not want to call the earth a sort of mother, as that is essentialist. Instead, avoiding capture for Bæden seems to imply that there cannot be any civilization at all. Bæden describes in the Journal of Queer Heresy how escape from gender is escape from civilization itself (5). That leads to a deeply intersectional problem.

Intersectionality refers to the idea that people who experience a certain axis of oppression can understand their oppression from their own point of view (Baker 356-59). So, if someone is labeled Black or a woman or male, these do have consequences in a social context even if they are representational and merely represent language games. So, in a sense, Bæden is not saying that there's nothing to do with the problems of the socius and the categories it produces, but it's saying that we should be aware of the categories and try to go beyond them. Once you see the limit, you can go beyond that limit. Going beyond the limit of confinement and congealment, out of the fixed idea of representational, Leviathanic tentacles, of the socius and all the trauma it has incurred through the centuries, and cutting the Gordian knot, saying that I will not impose this way of thinking on anyone, and that anyone who does is indoctrinating their child into the state, and the Leviathan, and a machinic system of inauthenticity. The intergenerational trauma of colonial inauthenticity can be broken, just like the cycle of intergenerational trauma and abuse can be broken. The knot represents the symbolic chain of the past, which supposedly weighs so heavily on the future and determines that it cannot change. To cut the Gordian knot is to cause a rupture in the symbolic order, but for the rupture to restore an even greater order. Cutting the knot represents introducing the imposition of the real – which is the immemorial instant – and severing the ties that bind us as machinery, ready-to-hand, to the institution which operates through linear time; time that captures and ossifies people to pivot around the symbolic points of the state.

But to be a Deleuzian means being nomadic, having the ability to change and embrace a philosophy of becoming and indeterminacy. This is instead of embracing the historic violences of gender, such as trafficking in females through marriage, anti-queer bullying, and parents who govern what their children can express themselves as. Communism should be willing to change its ways, to accommodate the new, as the new generation will always creatively reinterpret the old as they take up the history of the previous generation which was given to them into their memory. Hence a representation of what queerness would look like would be allowing a child to develop the capacity to tell whether or not the child knows if they are genderless or one of the many numerous genders which have emerged over the years; gender may be representational, but it has been deterritorialized through many numerous multiplicities of categories. This is a contrary approach to me, as everyone is queer differently; but it would not be anti-Deleuzian, as Deleuze recommends a minoritarian approach to politics in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 291). This would break things down into microscopic categories, which would in turn change gender into something unrecognizable from the traditional two gendered hierarchy of man over woman. Such categories could survive under queer communism, but the point would be that queerness is allowing oneself to determine one’s own life, it’s about an internal capacity. If one does not impose the categories, perhaps the categories will eventually go away. But queerness cannot come through imposition, as queerness comes through being not-I, queerness comes through breaking down oneself through multiplicity to recognize the many facets of the self that take an enormous amount of exploration to cultivate.

This is why I would not advocate raising children as though they are one gender or another, instead letting them decide. Telling any child what they are is representational tyranny. It captures the child as a product of a representational and outdated system, which is always undermined by the indeterminacy of queerness. Queer anarchism is a way of looking at the instant and trying to figure out how to organize our lives in such a way that we do not constrict people as machines which are merely extensions of ourselves, ready-to-hand, but allow people to have the capacity to develop their own personality. By maintaining a mean between machinic organization and queerness - the not-I that one continually strives towards - one can achieve authenticity in a society. A society which does not constrict the uniqueness of an individual and try to warp it into a spectacle of the state – propaganda of the guardian of sleep, the Leviathan, or a vacuous capital-accumulating automaton - for which so many people go to college. To change a person into someone that accumulates the most money that they possibly can. If we lived in a society in which people valued having the master’s wealth, sharing it among themselves so that people can live a peaceful, and sustainable existence, then people could live lives in which they are not masked against their true nature, having to mask what they truly feel or how they want to truly act because they are stuck for most of their lives in an undemocratic hell of a capitalist workplace. There is a difference between being treated as a machine and being treated as a human being. An institution operates more on linear time, and the more trapped you are in linear time, the more stressful it becomes. One feels the stress of the institution leaving their body when going home, feeling the machinic connections and flows of the social machines leaving the body. One believes that the machine has, in a sense, taken over, and that there is no hope for escape from the machine. But insurrections against the daily norms of the symbolic order, and its law, happen every day, and maintaining autonomous zones and social networks outside of capitalist power relations is one way in which one can maintain some authenticity until they are forced to strain themselves like a mule again against the yoke of capitalism, and its wage slavery.

In Hegel there is the master/slave dialectic, which shows that the master becomes in his own way, a slave to the slave, who becomes the master by working on the object and developing their own world through the object. The master is dependent on the servant, and the slave develops into stoicism on the long journey to absolute knowing in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The master does not have mutual recognition (Hegel 116); the slave’s relation to the master is one of dependency of the master; the master is unreflective, and inauthentic, a slave to itself, its being-for-self is in the object, whereas the slave develops a personality which is developed in working on the object “in fashioning the thing, he becomes aware that being-for- self belongs to him” (Hegel 118). Similarly, under capitalism, a capitalist requires the labor of the worker to produce the wealth that the capitalist has. The laborer is the capitalist’s insecurity. This is literally, in the sense that the capitalist has a position not of friend, or comrade over the worker, but also figurative, in the sense of an antagonistic authority figure. The boss is an unnecessary leech who orders the people under them as machines. In order for the master to not be dependent on the slave, and for the slave to develop into the next phase of consciousness, which is queer communism, there are many changes that could be made. Queer communism looks at the way in which people are constricted and forced to put on masks against the things which they would rather be doing to operate their own lives. Straight or cisgendered people could be allowed in a queer communist federation, but they would have to recognize that being an anarchist communist means not thinking in terms of authority and hierarchy. Freedom of speech should be the right of everyone; everyone should have the right to voice what they mean. This does not mean that there are no consequences for what one says in some cases; if one is going to attack someone, then that person might use self-defense, or the federation could try to step in and help the person.

Zoe Baker defines intersectionalism in Means and Ends as a way that each group understands their own oppression best from their own perspective. So, a Black person understands the institutional disadvantages against them and should have the right to speak about their problems, not have others speak for them. While intersectionalism looks at racial disadvantages, it also looks at class ones. Bæden says that they do not believe that we can undo patriarchy merely by undoing the mode of production. Bæden, in the Journal of Queer Heresy, quotes Gonzalez saying gender is part of the daily reproduction of capitalism (Bæden 113). In order to have a revolution, we must destroy gender so that individuals can be defined by their singularity. Bæden critiques Gonzalez for not giving this course shape. In fact, there is a difficulty in that when one is in the context of an empire which continually reproduces patriarchy and hierarchy, people think of these hierarchies as natural. They do not question the philosophical assumptions which go into reproducing these sorts of things which intersectionalism does not take for granted. Bæden is taking an intersectional view and trying to go beyond gender as a molar category – the opposite of molecular, meaning dealing with global persons (which are contrasted to partial objects), and instead looking toward the “ungendered unknown” (123). Bæden says we cannot rely on scientific understandings of the past to assume that somehow there was a time before gender, but we can assume that gender is at the start of civilization (40). Queerness is outside of time, Bæden mentions in the section “Against The Gendered Nightmare” (129). Gender is a division of labor, which has been held together by the continual domination of the female sex. This is not to say being a female is bad or shameful; rather that the entire designation of women represents, historically, an oppression which runs deeply parallel to the patriarchal values of colonialism, which runs parallel to white supremacy. Understanding queerness, then, ultimately means understanding how colonialism runs parallel to all of these axes of oppression, and how they all intersect as one overall struggle, which cannot be overcome without understanding that queerness, or the radical instant in which change occurs, is something of which everyone has the capacity. If there is something which remains from Perlman’s writings, it is everything he said. The more we are caught up in the socius, like the Nietzschean problem, the more we build machines on top of machines. But to envision a queer anarchism is one in which we are free from the shackles of a colonialist society.

Queerness, or the radical subjectivity and capacity to organize one’s own life without rulers, cannot be achieved without recognizing how to develop this capacity. Disability is a social construct, in that we can build a society that is accessible to everyone; just as capitalism is inherently ableist, in that it is constantly fighting for that aforementioned poverty which it perpetuates by keeping people off benefits. Oscar Wilde talks against charity. Charity is not what he wants from the masters; he wants not to eat crumbs from them, but to have a seat at the table where they sit; the best among the poor are ungrateful for crumbs, says Wilde (385). The master’s phenomenology is always from the table seat; this is why it is so easy for capitalists to sit around and accuse the communist of not being realistic, and not thinking about how to actually change the world, while the world in which they live is unsustainable and cannot go on without a realistic and major change to the structure of the system which we live under. It takes direct action of massive numbers of people, people recognizing their power, recognizing the world spirit which the colonialist thinker Hegel denied the people of Africa, saying they have no history because they were “undeveloped” in a “condition of mere nature” (Adegbindin 59). They are outside of Hegel’s linear time. The world spirit does not progress to absolute knowing; absolute knowing is not absolute, and it is indeterminate, and ongoing – das ding, indeterminacy, the indestructible chaos of timeless things, is stateless people, people without the subjectum which traps them into the representational image of thought, the big other of the state, the internal police that makes you pivot on the points of someone else’s will. The history of these stateless people never dies, it is inscribed on the socius in the history of the domination of the oppressor. I envision an autonomous zone called America, with no hierarchy, undoing the continual micro-fascisms nascent on the body without organs. In its recording surface we undo the past history of colonialism, which remains via the masks and armors that resonate through us in a patriarchal, white supremacist, colonialist, capitalist society.

One can pragmatically implement queer communism through labor union tactics, such as a general strike, and putting non-capitalist organizations into the cracks of a capitalist infrastructure; like an invasive species, have the crack expand, until capitalism is simply phased out. Labor needs to unify, all people under an anti-fascist banner of communism and take their rights from the ruling class, because the ruling class will never give up its power by simply asking politely. The colonized do not need to learn how to share with their oppressors; colonizers need to learn to stop taking land and forcing people into a system of master and slave wage relations. Pragmatic education can come through the education centers such as the ateneos, and pamphlet and literature distribution as has always been a preferred method of anarchist distribution. The federation could appeal to people who like the facilities which the state provides, like trains, mail offices, public meeting centers, libraries, even artisans who could live off of the state and simply produce art. There could be well stocked community gardens, with greenhouses and outdoor lots. There is no reason that queer communism has to go without essentials, like food, water, and shelter. Perlman says that sharing “melts” the Leviathan and that sharing is “the heart of the lost community” (106), and in such a way, the cracks of capitalism could be filled with non-capitalist enterprises. Numerous, relentless general strikes could take place, until those in power concede to the demands of a working class united. Workers should, ideally, disengage from capitalist owned workplaces, and join collectively owned businesses. Those who are still in these businesses like Starbucks or Amazon should organize a large-scale general strike in order to take the union for themselves. With the destruction of the perverse and wasteful incentives of capitalism, there would emerge a culture, as we see in parts of the world with the highest labor union membership, with the highest level of rights and happiness. The final step is taking the workplace from the boss and organizing society in such a way that people abandon the capitalist mode of production. It seemed like the divine right of kings would last forever, but it was undone.

Stateless people are queer in that they are not governed by the machinery of the state. Their history is inscribed in the socius, and the outcomes of actions we engage in today, temporally, are connected to that past via the a-signifying semiotics of the recording surface, which are not yet emergent properties like consciousness. The a-signifying semiotics is a history, but not a memory. The history of these people is found around us, the colonization of their land, the bones of their bodies under the dirt. It is all still there; nothing just disappears in this universe, there is still the geology of the recording surface which emanates the shining points that consciousness perceives as historical marks. Take carbon dating, for instance, or reading the rings on a tree; this is another example of the body without organs. The body without organs can best be thought of as a book, or in a bureaucracy it would be the books and records. It can also be intergenerational trauma, transmitted to people like in Israel, after the Holocaust, making them ethnic supremacists in their oppression of Palestine like Nazi Germany was to them. So stateless people and their queerness are timeless; but their history is inscribed both in consciousness, as a signifying semiotics, on the a-signifying semiotics of the recording surface of the unconscious. The tensions and masks carried over are resonances from the imperialist empires who developed the societies that we live in. The masks and armors and tensions of colonialism live on in things like capitalism, which is the inheritance of colonialism. It brings with it the masks and armors that make people inauthentic, stressed, and disconnected from a context in which their life has meaning.

The queerness comes from recognizing that each person has, more or less, the potential to recognize themselves as free. Contrary to Hegel in the Philosophy of Right who thinks right comes through the state, ““[S]elf-consciousness in virtue of its disposition finds in the state, as its essence and the end and product of its activity, its substantial freedom” (257), this potential does not come through the state, but it does come through personal property, as Proudhon, one of the original anarchists, and Mutualists such as those in Belgium in the 1800s such as Ernest Lesigne in “Socialist Letters” from The Libertarian Reader, wanted property:

To have provisions, garments, and a house of one’s own us to have the liberty, power, and certainty of eating, dressing, and lodging.

To have raw material of one’s own, a tool of one’s own to transform the raw material into consumable product, and, if the raw transform stock and the tool a machine, workshop, or factor, to hold as property one’s share of this stock, of these implements, of this factory, worship, or machine, is to have the liberty, power, and certainty of labouring, of disposing of the fruit of one’s labor, of consuming or buying one’s product.

Property, - that is a firm, solid, palpable, concrete basis for abstract rights (Lesigne 323). The Anarchist Faq by Ian McKay describes how private property is distinguished from personal property:

But the difference is that personal property is different from private property.

Anarchists define “private property” (or just “property,” for short) as state protected monopolies of certain objects or privileges which are used to control and exploit others. “Possession,” on the other hand, is ownership of things that are not used to exploit others (e.g. a car, a refrigerator, a toothbrush, etc.) Thus many things can be considered either property or possession depending on how they are used. (McKay 159)

Others prefer to use the term “personal property” rather than “possession” or “capital” rather than “private property.” Some, like many individualist anarchists, use the term “property” in a general sense and qualify it with “occupancy and use” in the case of land, housing and workplaces. However, no matter the specific words used, the key idea is the same. (160)

Private property is property through which to exploit people: the ownership of land, or the enslaving of someone to a wage, through which you extract the surplus value. In order for capitalism to exist, it needs the territorialization of surplus value to be extracted into the excess, like a pus buildup inside of the leeching capitalism. They call this selfishness “moral.” The humans are part of the entrails, and the beast cannot speak its own name without the entrails losing confidence in it (Perlman 285). This accumulation is not moral; it is in fact a rapacious European attitude which is destroying the earth. In order for communism to work, there would need to be mutual aid, in the sense that Kropotkin talked about, so that we can develop our individuality (73) - our personal history of learning which builds up inside of us and creates our own individual body without organs when we choose our own educational path. It might seem strange to those who live in our society. An inverted society, in which people care about each other for the purpose of helping each other, for the purpose of having fun with their fellows, not because of some sort of despotic signifier which forces them through drudgery and subservience under a ruling class. It involves, rather, what Bæden in The Journal of Queer Heresy would call cyclical time (7).

The death of cyclical time, and cosmic meaninglessness

For Perlman, we have lost touch with practices that put us in touch with the natural cycles of the earth called cyclical time, such as the rising and setting of the sun, as a result of the Leviathan, which is the artificial structure of civilization (264). People who begin to sing the songs and do the dances of the natives begin to recover at least something of “dream time,” the time after the slaughter of the native Americans, when some natives escaped to the mountains and kept on their traditions (272). The fragments are not a totem, people will forget the tales and the fragmented existence will even reflect a sort of discordant quality in the music (273). But the traditions were fragmented and discordant. Living according to dream time means living in accordance with some of the natural rhythms and cycles of nature. This is opposed to living in accordance with the clock, which is a small monastery that has springs and wheels in it as well as in the humans that it controls. Deleuze and Guattari in Anti Oedipus describe in the “Machines” section of Chapter 1 how machines cut into a flow and disrupt it (36). Cyclical time is disrupted by the discordance of linear time, which became imposed on the native populations by the colonists. We act as though our rigid schedules that we work with today are natural. The Jesuits would send over people to encourage that women in native tribes be attacked by the men, and as Bæden says in The Journal of Queer Heresy, “threaten to beat and imprison them for their disobedience” if they tried to escape their imposed sexist hierarchical order (44). The church could not stand to see men and women equal. At one point, the colonists left; cyclical time was not entirely disrupted and went back to its rhythms, but the coming and going of the beast became part of cyclical time; music gave way to the march of time (Perlman 251). But now, cyclical time has been overwhelmed, over the globe, by a linear time - synonymous with the marching of boots, with the ticking of a clock cutting into the flow of a person’s day. How are we to live fulfilling lives, if it seems by Perlman’s account, as long as the Leviathan lives on, if one can only live in spite of it The condition under the Leviathan is one in which no one can relate to the world in the way it once was in the human community, a world which “will refer to no lived experiences accessible to any human being trapped in His-Story” (264). Perlman describes how the coming and going of the Leviathan disturbs cyclical time. Is conterminous with dream time, which is imaginary, and unreal time – the time of the Leviathan and its artificial corpse marching to the doom of the biosphere:

The communities who remember the entire trajectory since the Beginning are irretrievably gone. Their time is henceforth Dream Time, unreal time, imaginary time. Even words we will use to describe what was lost, words like music, myth, ceremony and community, will be as empty as the continent becomes, because they will refer to no lived experiences accessible to any human beings trapped in His-story. What is lost is of much greater human import than the things Economists will include in their ledgers. (264)

He goes on to describe the way memory is colonized by the Leviathan’s artificial memory. This artificial memory cheapens the quality of the words which are spoken, because they contain the artificiality of the Leviathan:

The quality of the songs has been declining ever since the written words began replacing living voices, ever since Leviathanic records began replacing human memories. The story I’ve been telling is not from the heyday but from the decline, yet I’ll go on singing it because at least some of its cadences disrupt and even wreak havoc on the stupefying, passively-accepted official tunes. (245)

Dream time makes things feel discordant; it is a phenomenological mood, which is accompanied by having your ways and customs destroyed by the colonization of the artifice which makes language itself dead.

Others flee towards the sunset, toward the endless Plains beyond the Mississippi, even toward the great mountains. Many join villages of equally displaced and disoriented survivors, gatherings of fragments of communities. United Fragments do not constitute a whole. The beat of the drum is arhythmic. The music is discordant. Continuities preserved since the Beginning are broken off, and the few remembered myths no longer speak of any shared beginning because the gathered fragments are not a Totem, and share no common beginning. (263)

This shows the relation between cyclical time and the rhythms of a community which forms without a Leviathan controlling its potentiality. For a while cyclical time did not give way to linear time. The coming and going of the Leviathan was merely a disturbance in the rhythms of nature and the biosphere. Here Perlman tells of the time before the native American continent was emptied of its natives.

But across the great water, living communities were not destroyed. On the contrary, the few Leviathans that emerged here seem to have been swallowed by the communities, Leviathanic time was submerged in cyclical time. The coming and going of the beast

became part of the rhythm of life. The coming and going of the beast became part of the rhythm of life. The Leviathanic excrescence, like other excrescences, remains no more than manure. Music did not give way to the March of Time. Life did not give way to His- story. (251)

However, eventually this disturbance would give way to the destruction of cyclical time; it will be something that “will refer to no lived experiences accessible to any human being trapped in His-Story” (264). This implies that for Perlman, cyclical time has been subsumed by the march of linear time, but the Leviathan is not necessarily inevitable:

I cannot tell all, either there or here, because the struggle against His-story, against Leviathan is synonymous with life; it is a part of the biosphere; it is part of the Biosphere’s self-defense against the monster rending her asunder. (Perlman 266)

In the brief span of a few generations, all of earth falls into the entrails of a single artificial beast. But by encasing all of Earth within a Leviathan, the Europeans do Civilization a disfavor, for they put a term on its further existence. (266)

People who say the Leviathan is inevitable are trained to see “the decomposition that accompanies every functioning Leviathan” (249). Simply put, queer communism is the ability to live one’s life according to natural rhythms, in harmony with patterns like the sun rising and setting, and the seasons, and one’s own desire to pursue what they want to desire and develop their individuality. One does not follow in queer communism anyone but themselves. under queer communism it would be just to allow people who do not want to be disturbed to be allowed to live on the basic benefit of having shelter and food. There would be things like a massive database, except there would be no copyright, so there could be another library of Alexandria, of not only books but of music, and all forms of media, and no scholarship would be behind a pay wall. The flow of information could be accessible to anyone who wants to become a researcher. Under queer communism, the birth of a world in which people are treated as people because they deserve happiness, respect, love, comfort, and care, as human rights because these mutually beneficial things help everyone. When everyone is in a society in which they feel as though they are not being controlled, and they can comfortably sleep at night knowing that they are not desperate and hungry and can develop the sort of internal personality which Wilde says people like Shakespeare and Shelley develop. Perhaps there may even be a rebirth of something like the jazz movement, the way it was with Pharaoh Sanders, Miles Davis, or Charles Mingus, when there was a substantial interest and patronage of jazz artists. Jazz is not simply songs that came before; each jazz song is an expression of the individual.

Jazz requires you to know the theory behind the notes and play off the harmony, spontaneously, knowing which notes in a scale work in whatever key is being played. Like jazz, queer communism is dynamic; it involves the aforementioned mean between linear time which is machinic in its organization, such as music theory, which operates on a temporal pattern of scales and notes, and cyclical time, which is the rhythms and flows through which communities come together and appreciate the sounds of territorialization of note structure, combined with deterritorialization of note pattern. Music and art would see improvement under queer communism, as people would have more time to cultivate better art; communal projects could come together and produce things which are based on the intensity of the devotion of the community to the project, as opposed to a pathetic cash grab designed to rake in as much money as possible, therefore unable to take risks or do anything experimental. Capitalism does not encourage innovation in terms of art; it encourages mediocre art which appeals to a tired population that wants to veg out on the couch and not examine their own life.

Capitalism does not produce innovation; capitalism produces hierarchy, the extraction of surplus labor value, and exploitation. Capitalism allows the wealthy to keep producing junk art for a culture industry which, as Horkheimer and Adorno describe in “The Culture Industry” in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, raises junk to the top (108). The culture industry rewards the richest people and makes challenging or experimental art something which one must struggle to create. Capitalism is a great destroyer of artistic creativity. Many of the people working in capitalist sweatshops could have realized their individual potentiality, but for many people that creativity and potentiality is wasted on a system which destroys creativity.

If people did not have their potentiality captured by an undead corpse, they would not be stressed and anxious under the masks and armors which produce the tensions. Their potentiality is captured by the Leviathan because in the moment in which they pivot on the symbolic linear time of the state, they have conformed to the state. There are times in which if you do not conform to the linear, temporal actions which the state tries to situate you in, you may be killed, such as when a cop yells “get down on your knees now!” A command with a temporal deadline, through which if you do not tense your muscles, and conform to the linear temporal history in which the officer wants to situate you in, the officer could literally kill you. The violence of the United States and its law enforcement was never justified; the state took power by violent means and upholds the state through violence. Having community and love has been shown to make people live longer as well; loneliness has been shown to be something which leads to poor health. Queer communism should lead to a better, and healthier life, and not merely some sort of abstract freedom. Queer anarchism is also not a self-help manual; queerness is a dynamic concept which can be applied in situations in which one feels as though they are armored against themselves or made to put on a mask. Through examining the masks and armors of society, which are developed through the ressentiment of linear time, and the ossification of representation, one can help develop a view of the world in which people are free, and what freedom requires. Individuality requires a collective effort, as Kropotkin and Darwin both point out in their talk of “external conditions” which are necessary for survival.” (Kropotkin 73)

Learning how to see queerness in everyday life requires breaking down societal masks and armors, fed to one through society, which armor people against themselves. It means moving closer and closer to the eventual goal of queer communism. Anonymous internet abuse is not an anarchistic environment, because anarchism requires that people are not being controlled as automatons under an indifferent machine which orients their life in accordance with its whims, as opposed to one’s own. Calling someone the F word or N word is an example of how people lord over others, and try to dominate them with representational fixity, such as ideas of higher or lower sexual self-worth, where people measure themselves against each other and produce a competition where the loser is a loser because they are too gay, or too communist, or too trans, or too colored, or too Jewish, etc. This continual reimposition of hierarchy in itself can never be communist, and it takes unlearning the tendencies of the recording surface, which has the resonances of the history of past violences on it. Even though the holocaust in Germany was not this generation, there is still intergenerational trauma in Israel, which leads to things like mass rape of prisoners and the tens of thousands of civilians killed in the disproportionate response of Israel to the Hamas attack. You do not kill this many children by accident. The marks of every abusive hierarchical structure of bigotry, the categories weighed against people, are still there in a society in which a large part of the homeless population are LGBT. One cannot experience a full queerness if they, like in Waiting for Godot, have nowhere to go and wish that they did. The existential question of where to go and what to do become a lot less dependent on developing individual interests as opposed to merely surviving in a brutal and uncaring world.

Although it seems like the end is near, and the future looks bleak and immensely bloody, there is at least this to say. The cosmos is young, and if the world spirit does not awaken in this century, on this planet, maybe it will awaken somewhere else, on a planet where there is not this building of rapacious Leviathans, consumers of the world, gougers of the bowels of the earth. Maybe it will come again on this planet, several million years down the line, if the planet ever recovers from this sixth mass extinction. It has recovered from such events before; it has only taken a few million years. Bæden, in The Journal of Queer Nihilism, speaks about the fascism of the baby’s face, how doing things for the sake of children is also how fascists uphold the 14 words, about preserving a future for the white race (26). Regardless, if you care about children, then having a planet which is sustainable is what matters for the children. On What’s Going On, on the song “Save The Children,” Marvin Gaye sings about saving all the children. The only way to save the children from certain annihilation is through communism, and anti-colonialism, which is coterminous with intersectional critique. Anarchism is anti-colonialism. Anarchism is queerness: a critique of white power, nationalism, the state, and the way in which we cannot exist in an organized manner without eliminating hierarchy if we hope to allow others to exist at the same level and quality of life as everyone else. This is making sure that everyone has the means to exist, not forcing starvation and poverty, as in the way of capitalism and slavery to a ruling class. Queer anarchism is about trying to undo the masks and armors, which are the buildup of history on the body without organs, left unhealed when people do not examine what is beneath the mask: a history of white supremacy, slavery, colonialism, and patriarchy. There is no way to idealistically escape from the material history and consequences of Oedipal suppression on queerness in general, but queerness is the problem which is universal – the chaos of timeless things. In order to preserve the living dance of Zarathustra against the Leviathanic machinic and fascistic forces of the world, workers of the world must unite to allow queerness and the world spirit to be free.

Works Cited

Queer anarchy journal

Against His-Story, Against Leviathan

1 -4 The beast slouches towards Bethlehem with a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun.

Community gives way to a fogged image out of “spiritus mundi” the world spirit referencing Yeats. Earth is committing suicide, and we are murdering her. While Marxists point towards the mode of production, sometimes only the capitalist class; anarchists point towards the state; “Camatte” points to capital” and “new ranters” point toward technology or civilization or both. Marxists want to replace the capitalist mode of production with an anti capitalist mode of production which is equally in a race to destroy the biosphere.

5 He seems to compare workers in an anarchist union, or a network factories and mines and computer centers controlled “by the workers themselves” as another form of state which they wouldn’t call a state in anarchism, to exorcise the leviathan from it. The monster’s body destroys the bodies of human communities and mother earth. The Leviathan’s body is more powerful than the biosphere.

7 Perlman likes the term “state of nature” because it makes “cadavers peer out” in other words, it makes people think about their armors and masks, which are the tensions that keep people living under the stress of the leviathan. The “tame” and “domesticated” are terms which co-opt the word freedom for civilization.

Nature is not determined by anything until a “sphere of equal nature” crashes into it, and “rends” mother nature’s “bowels” in a gruesome manner, which reminds us of just how graphic the destruction of the eco system actually is. Perlman captures the feeling of what is happening to our dying planet beautifully.

The state of nature is a “community of freedoms” in which one species freedom ties into the freedom of another’s.

8 Perlman says ancient peoples made no distinction between work and play. A bear feels no distinction between work and play, it simply feels joy of eating berries.

9 When Christians realized that people did no work, it irritated them, and caused “cadavers to peep out.” Christians were repelled by people who “pretended the curse of labor had not fallen on them,” it was Christians who developed the distinction between work and play.

10 Perlman wouldn’t use the word primitive to describe people with a richness of life, he would use it to describe his own life, and its progressive poverty, in civilization. Possession is central to the modern aim, it was not central to our ancestors.

11 There was a time when there was a matriarchy, when women were seen as the conceivers, the creators of life, and the first beings. Arche means government, artificial as opposed to natural order, the “arche” in “anarchy.” Perlman says Men are not creator of life and they preen themselves around sexually to attract women, contrary to the popular conception of women as whores.

12 The forest is not standing reserve, a “meat coral” or a “lumber” yard, technology in order to be arranged. Ancient people would bring back stories about how the sky mated with the earth, and this is more awe inspiring than bringing back some meat, of an animal which has been butchered by leviathanic conquest of nature. People in a human community remember not a possession of things, but a possession of being. They call the age of the forgotten thing by the name of something they know in their own time, they call it “the age of gold,” although they cannot remember the human community.

14 A racist made an order of civilization – top rung, civilization – childhood, barbarism – infancy, savagery. Engels got rid of “the great white race” and put capitalist class higher than barbarism and savagery, while putting the founders of Marxism on the top rung, keeping the racist hierarchical structure.

15 The passage from savagery to barbarism is a “gadget” called “material conditions.” One of the things that supposedly raises people out of savagery is “surplus product, a margin.” This is made possible by things like metallurgy, the wheel, and agriculture. People (Perlman says man) has always wanted slavery, division of labor, etc. but the material conditions weren’t ripe.

16 People thought of themselves as the cousins of animals. So they would often behave like animals, even storing nuts like squirrels in the winter.

17 Perlman describes how people would build shelters and use metals without turning things into “impersonal institutions.” Communities with many implements, or communities with few, in harsh environments or lush environments, one thing was common through early communities and that was abundance. People didn’t hoard more than they need because they didn’t feel a need to.

18 -19 Drawing on ancient Sumerian texts, the scribes would exclude the actions of women, who were the heads of councils, and they tried to erase the time before lugals, or “strong men” who were supposedly chosen by councils to look at beavers so they could solve technical issues pertaining to water and irrigation in the village, and eventually solved the villages water problems, but was murdered by someone who is friends with a grandma that was told where to plant her seeds. Again, a made-up story, simply to erase women from history, and try to make us forget the time of the first lugal.

22-23 Sumer undergoes a revolution, but it is not called one. Sumerians are not yet Zeks. “They’re still possessed.” Women are not yet birthing “machines” for the “production of workers and soldiers.” Perhaps the revolution in the city is the first inkling of the Hegelian idea, Optimus Maximus, the head of Lugalzaggizi, Yahweh. The town does not yet have their own Lugalzaggizi, but they have a precursor to it, in the Lugals. The lugals build shrines to gods, but they are “haughty” as they don’t truly know what the gods think. “This is a type of revolution.” All that is left from Sumer will have shrunk from the “state of nature” to “what we will call religion.”

24 The wilderness Perlman speculates “could it be” that the wilderness surrounding Sumer, was created by the violence of the Lugals. The first male authority figure to appear in this his-story. An “excrecence” of the temple has grown into a city. There is a market, work projects and labor gangs, generals and soldiers, a school for scribes; it all runs like “clockwork.” For Perlman, clocks are an instrument of social control.

25 Foreigners are mistreated, despised, and over worked. They are not free or whole. The ensi isn’t free or whole, but nor are his Zeks. Perlman says that except when the zeks rise up against the ensi, are not determined by their own nature or being; here we see a very Heideggerian element. People can be ordered as technology, and that is precisely what has happened to the zek. The zek has been ordered as an instrument, a tool, a machine of the ruling class, throughout history but in different contexts and contents of each era.

The zeks will and the ensi’s will are the Lugal’s and the Zek’s only have their own will it is “the will to break out.”

26 Hobbes artificial man has artificial life, an automata. It is an artificial animal, not an animal like the graceful and limber lion. Hobbes insists on a man’s head. The leviathan is a worm, not living, but a carcass. Pimpled with spears and wheels and other technological implements. It is brought to life by the motion of human beings, who operate the springs and wheels, and the cadaverous head operator is just a mere Zek.

29 The first leviathan revolutionizes the existence of human beings and nature. It creates ”surplus product” which is another name for “material contents, it’s entrails.” It “can hardly by itself,” it needs the “beastly carcass to form around it.”

30 After the rise of Ur trade becomes extensive, and virtually everyone is now everyone’s enemy. When you expect to get a gift, you keep a record on a tablet, perhaps referring to the ancient Sumerian tablet that is an angry note about bad copper.

31 The leviathan seems to develop independently of other leviathans. Egypt, Persia, and India, all developed “permanent war machines” Perlman suggests that people do not step out of the state of nature into an artificial worm carcass for no reason, they do so because they are forced to, it is “neither plausible nor kind” to suggest that they were not forced. It takes a genius to keep the monster away.

The leviathan expands, clearing everything in its path.

32 Leviathans become enormous, as large as continents.

33 Communities in Ur try to kill the first leviathan in its layer, people in the Zagros mountains, and the Persian plains try, and they fail. People keep “projecting institutions” into the “state of nature.” Institutions are “impersonal and immortal.” Institutions are not living beings, and immortality belongs to no living being under the sun. They are not living beings, they are segments of a carcass. Institutions are not a part of life, but death, and “death cannot die.”

34 As technology progresses, death expands.

35 Ways are living ways, laws are not living, they are the leviathan’s ways. The complete leviathan is “excreted by the Pharaoh’s household.” The Pharaoh takes after the Lugal with his scribes. The Pharoah has an “artificial memory,” a “databank.”

36 In Egypt there were great killings for the sake of life, to prevent the Leviathan (ironic). Egyptians built the temples, but “life cannot be contained in a sealed jar.” And so it withered and died. Gods are among the cadaver’s first victims, and gods cannot support leviathans any more than people support plagues; “the beast is deicidal” meaning empire (the Leviathan) kills gods.

37 Art, music, dance, will become a “moribund spiritual activity” abstracted from its “once living source.” It reminds me of the situationists, except instead of everything receding into sleep, and images, everything recedes into death. Potential human beings who uphold the leviathan excrete the life of the unliving parasite. Labor is always forced labor, but something else happens that supplements the physical constraint.

38 The longer you are in civilization, the harder it is to leave. The armor that once was outside, turns inside, and “the mask becomes an individuals face” and “constraint is internalized.” In other words, one is Oedipalized through the leviathan; one is Oedipalized through death and its machine.

39 The business man’s axiom, long before Adam Smith published it, is every man for himself, and the gods against all. Greedy profit seekers are a section of the whole, yet they distort the coherence of the Leviathan, and its ability to move, by “eating up all its entrails.”

40 Lugalzaggizi is lord of lords, king of kings, lugal of lugals, the lugal of Umma, whose scribes describe him as Lugalzaggizi. The leviathan has a phallus head, which Sargon knows is for all leviathans.

41 Perlman says that his-story is an “exclusively masculine affair.” His-story means a story that is about men, and for men. Women only appear with phallic shapes to Perlman, in a masculine form. Here we can see the beginnings of the leviathan in Perlman’s mind as something which is based on resemblance to the male member, in a literal phallic shape which women who appear in his-story hold. The phallus shape is “pointed to penetrate and kill.” With the rise of the leviathans, women are debased, abused, domesticated. Scribes try to erase the memory that women were ever important.

42 Perlman sees the woman as mother earth, this is where I think Baeden would depart from Perlman, as I think Baeden wants to say that all of gender is a construct of civilization, which arises from things like the division of labor, and language. Baeden seems to take the similar view to the “Uncivilized” green anarchy compilation, that words are part of civilization’s technologies of control. I think John Zerzan may be a theorist of this, but Max Stirner also said that language is an “army of fixed ideas.” This is where I would place gender, not purely in material forces, but also in linguistic forces. The goal is to deterritorialize gender even more, so that the pathways people express are less restricted by masks and armors, or constraints and tensions (tensions is a word Perlman uses to describe the masks and armors elsewhere). Man no longer feels inferior to mother earth, he has immersed himself in the leviathan. The leviathan gives birth to no life, but it doesn’t need to give birth, because it’s immortal. “empowered by leviathanic armor, the males hit back.”

His-story chronicles the deeds of the men at the phallus helm. It is the biography of the artificial man. “There are as many his-stories as there are leviathans.” The leviathan doesn’t love of a plurality of leviathans, nor does it love earth. “Its enemy is everything outside itself.” Free individuals do not have a his-story, “they were not encompassed by the immortal carcass which is the subject of his-story.”

43 World his-story implies a single leviathan that “holds all earth in its entrails.” Segments of the decomposed worm are scattered along the countryside, and the segments re-form into complete worms.

44 Segments of the leviathan are like machines. If they are well taken care of, they can be put back together again. But human communities, once dead, stay dead.

45 Death is always on the side of machines, communities of living beings are “inferior in this respect.” And I assume Perlman would also admit that that’s just about the only respect that they are superior.

46 Since death is to life as night is to day, when death’s realm expands, life’s realm contracts.

47 It was sumerians who launched the first leviathan.

51 Perlman talks about how ancient people probably felt “pain in their joints” looking at the monuments of their masters. They remember Eden vaguely, but they cannot imagine Eden in a lugal’s garden.

52 Modernizers of Egypt, conservative priests loyal to the ousted gods, squadrons of them, rose up against the usurpers against their god Aten.

55 Moses is tasked with leading people out of the leviathan. To moses’s followers, the primitivists among them, canaan means common language, and common home, the Eden they wanted to return to. The so called “promised land” of a war torn Levantine province.

56 Moses of the book is not a modernizer, he doesn’t believe in “lubricating and streamlining of the leviathan can have any human meaning.” He in the book is repelled by Ur, and Ashur, Khatti. Moses is not a modernist or primitivist, he is an armored man like Lenin. The only voice inside of him is the voice of Lugalzaggizi. King of kings, lord of lords, male of males. The voice of the almighty. Moses will hear the voice of “Electrification.” Moses hates kings of kings, just as Lenin hates capitalists. Moses abstracts the king and makes it god, Lenin will abstract electrification and make it communist. Moses projects his armor, his emptiness, his dead spirit, onto the cosmos.

An abstraction stirs inside of Moses, bodiless, sexless, neuter, immortal. Here we can see again how perhaps Perlman sees the reduction of things to sexless, genderless things as a reduction of people to nothingness, and a dehumanization. This seems to fit into mythology more than any sort of biological assumption, but still we can see how woman is still somewhat essentialized as nature although that is a historical perspective to take on nature, that it represents the feminine, and it is nonetheless somewhat factual in being a variation which the empty signifier of gender can take on, which has none of its own except depending on the content of the generation. One can see that Baeden departs from Perlman here, in that Perlman still takes a somewhat representationalist view of gender.

57 Moses’s followers, children of Zeks, their insides haven’t gone dead yet. They still imagine throwing off the armor.

The leviathan speaks “commands and punishments” (the superegoic injunction to enjoy, as well as the superegoic sadism of Oedipal melancholia. It does not speak “paths of being” but “laws and closed gates.” It does not say “thou canst, and thou shall be,” it says “thou shall not.” Here Perlman uses being as a noun, like Heidegger does somewhat, although I believe Heidegger is very much against the notion of the humanism which Sartre was for, and which Sartre misinterpreted in Heidegger. Perhaps this is Perlman showing how being has pathways which one can choose, like Sarah Ahmed’s lines, and there at one point may have seemed to be lines of escape. But the question is, how does one shed the lines which society continuously tries to inscribe in the skin? In a nature in which there are no lines? Perlman here is saying that life under the Leviathan is inherently inauthentic.

The leviathan has police to torture and execute, not people, but nature itself. Storms, floods, punish people because of Moses. Moses becomes the forerunner to lenin “thou shall have no other gods before me.”

58 Pharaoh’s officials know that the free people have been turned into Zeks, “they have been forced to eat their freedom.” There was then a holocaust perpetrated in the name of Yahweh. This “anti human, anti nature” face, will later be called “totalitarianism.” Death is the sole goal of the Leviathan, unmitigated, unjustified, unexplained.

59 Women don’t exist for Moses, they are merely child bearing machines. Emma Goldman’s essay on Birth Control, in Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth anthology may be a good comparison, where Goldman also says that women are turned into baby factories for capitalism. This aspect of birth being controlled by the state to maximize productivity for the state is clearly nothing new.

The leviathan has no kin, whoever stands outside of it is its enemy. All things not “encased in its entrails” are its enemy, animals, plants, people, etc. Moses says that people should have “dominion” over fish, foul, and every living thing that moveth upon the earth. The declaration against the wilderness, is the leviathan’s war against all life.

Moses dies, but the leviathan he sets in motion is immortal. If in time the Leviathan is swallowed, then one day its “concept” will regenerate into “monstrosities undreamed of by lugalzaggizi and Moses.

61 The leviathan’s gaze is the law of the big other, the immortal abstraction’s eyes; these are laws given by the abstraction Yahweh. One might say here that particularity, that of artifice, naming, as opposed to the universal which for Deleuze is associated with the problem, and for Hegel is associated with god and life and is non contradictory in its absolute form for Hegel, whereas the dialectic is driven by contradiction, such as the difference between boss and worker, and these connections and associations become apparent for Marx, whereas consciousness is not material but subjective and objective phenomena for Hegel combined and Hegel doesn’t seem to think that modes of production are the primary driver of forces in history, whereas Perlman seems to take on the place where Marx was notoriously sparce on, which is writing about how the biosphere is destroyed now by capitalism, but before by the conquest of empires run by strong men lugals, and has always been a war against all life and incompatible with the biosphere.

63 Immortals die when they’re swallowed by larger leviathans. The immortals also die when their human contents withdraw and let the carcasses rot.

65 Moving animals and species to different places in the biosphere where they cannot survive is one of the ways that the Phonecean empire was a “greater rapist of the leviathan than all the earlier leviathans combined.”

71 There is an artificial octopus attached abstractly by (ideology?). The tentacles stretch out and are part of a worm based sort of leviathan; unlike the sea based one, this one resides on land. Leviathans are forms of Hobbes artificial men, machine like, and mechanical in nature. The leviathan’s nature does not lie in the way the tentacles move, nor the medium through which they move, nor the size of the leviathan’s head, but rather the way the two automata, the leviathan and the artificial man, live off of the surplus product of the Zek’s labor.

72 The leviathan takes natural resources and turns them into standing reserve, nature set aside in a usable form to be arranged any which way.

74 The Akkadian namesakes would increase substantially the “death technologies.”

75 It is not known if Zarathustra was a man or a community, or if he lived on the steps or the outskirts of the neo-Babylonian community.

76 Zarathustra reduced Hesiod’s five generations to two, those inside, and those outside the leviathan. The outside is light, Ahura Mazda the elements of the earth, the inside, Ahriman, is darkness, the lie. Zarathustra declares war of Ahura Mazda against Ahriman. Ahriman is in the world and “in the individual.” It is a struggle “against leviathan, and against the armor.”

78 In distant China, people are saying the masks and armors of the leviathan are not the way. They experience joy from “the rising sun” and “the gushing of brooks from a source.” Not from “the fall of an enemy and the gushing of blood from a wound.” They think “the human being who was so much, is becoming very little.” In India people say the Leviathan with its artificial distinctions, and hierarchies, is not the ultimate reality, but no reality at all. They are “burning the armor that has wrapped itself around their innards.” You can see how Perlman really extrapolates the spectacle, in its pre-media based form, had a hold on people in the way of masks and armors, which is another term for Oedipus, which has been the commanding, law making impetus of the superego long before Freud. The difference is that I believe the spectacle is the consuming of everything into a sort of meta-reality, a simulacra, as opposed to the natural and mythological.

There was a dance around all Eurasia, which was in general about the rejection of civilization and its armors. We cannot call the dance “religion” the way of free human beings. “The way of free human beings is all, there is nothing above it.” Religion is part of the leviathan, it may have started as a way, but no longer is one. It has been mangled and turned into a part of Leviathan armor.

81 The Persian Leviathan has eaten every other leviathan in the world. Persians and their armored men cannot imagine how the raiders can live in the woods, without labor gangs.

84 The Greeks are connoisseurs of art, they’ve performed the feet of transferring the temples activities to the agora. What was the sole reality, loses its reality under the greeks. In other words, like with the spectacle, that which was once directly lived has moved into images and representations. Great enactments give way to >drama, shrines > architecture, externalization of visions > art, internal probings > philosophy, sharing > rhetoric. What is sharing the way it’s being used here?

Temples are inverted to a place where dead gods are ornaments on the leviathan who they feed. The dead gods are fragments of the disemboweled temple. Aristotle thinks these ornaments purge people of their armor, but he sees things that other people see visibly through “lenses that invert.”

86 For Merchants the earth is not mother, the world is an “object of plunder.” “She’s a swirl of moving atoms, just like the polis.”

87 The leviathan uses partial objects, fragments of churches, bits of armor, they serve a purpose only when used. Like Heidegger’s standing reserve, they are only ordered, instead of let shine forth from themselves, and “like arrows, they only serve a purpose when they are used.” Periclean freedom is the freedom of the claws and tentacles to grab whatever they can reach.

88 Armor is the internal repression of desire and potentiality which is concealed under the ornaments. The ornaments, I guess, are wealth like grapes and olives. Even back then people ornamented their lives with commodities to cover up the fact that under the leviathan they are nothing in their potentiality. The ornaments are grapes and olives.

After making land a marketable commodity, the merchants impoverish the peasants and drive them into debt.

89 The purpose of the machine is the enlarge itself by perpetual war and preparation for war. Demosthenes is an Athenian and an orator, he speaks rhetoric, the ornamented language that conceals instead of revealing. Here Perlman seems to use Heideggerian terminology, although strangely Perlman doesn’t mention Heidegger in his list of sources towards the front of the book. What the rhetoric conceals, is I would assume the artificiality, the decaying corpse of the leviathan, and the masks and armors that cover it up. Aristotle’s inverted lenses make people see the leviathan and its ornaments, the circulation of its “commodities” is that without which merchants would “become as poor as their slaves.”

90 Syracuse is no longer a pretty polis, it is situated between the Greek polis, and the future of killing machines, and labor gangs, whose visionaries will say things like “eureka!” and “it works!”

91 Zeno is not patriotic like Aristotle and Plato, for him everything leviathanic is evil. Epicurus says “hell is right here.” Cynics say there is nothing at all human about the leviathan. The only alternative is to disregard the polity and live by one’s conscience.

94 The latins and their confederates are not lured by the “ripeness of productive forces.” They are repelled by these forces and federate to destroy them. But then something happens to them, after four generations of federation, the peasants who feed the army becomes permanent. This is something which Perlman will call later on sublimated violence, as they became leviathanic through fighting the leviathan.

95 The war god is optimus maximus, a deified Etruscan merchant. He is expected to give offerings and military victories. The Romans set out to destroy every tribe and federation in the Italian Peninsula.

96 Roman soldiers die in battle, but the “Public thing” marches to victory. It does not and cannot die because it is a leviathan.

98 There are pages of technological ingenuity of Rome’s war engines. “Why not praise death itself? Death is an even greater killer than Rome.” The ornamentation of Greek palaces make it seem as though to win praise for brutality, one only need hire Greek artists. Showing how arbitrary the brutality is, and merely making it ornamented does not subtract from the fact that only someone with inverted lenses, and internal armors, would see the brutality for anything other than what it is; the exhortation of death. Those at the head are few, the nobility and land owners, politicians, generals, etc. Brutality and plundering no longer become offerings to the gods, these people are what one might call “sadists.” People who seem to take on the sublimated violence of Rome, who love Rome and its ways.

99 Perlman inverts Hobbes and says life in the leviathan is nasty, brutish, and short. People are reduced to their Heideggerian standing reserve, which is where people are ordered like technology.

100 In the days of Pontifex Maximus Octavian, there is a movement called a “crisis cult.” Perlman doesn’t explain in great detail what this is. But there is one which will “father the western spirit” and takes root in a dark corner where light is expected to shine forth from Optimus Maximus, “the lightless abstraction of the leviathan itself.” The crisis cult starts off as a “living way” but it becomes re-encased in the artifice’s integument.

The Tao Te Ching recognizes the leviathan as nothing but an obstacle to wellbeing, and inspires people to drop out of “highly organized activities offered by the state.”

101 There is a passage from Daniel which describes 4 leviathans, a Zarathustrian sequence of ages, the last of which has “dominion” - clearly the Moses reference - and it is the final leviathan. This seems to be an inversion of Zarathustrian light, and instead describes Octavian, whose reign is darker than Darius becoming Ahura Mazda.

102 The fourth beast that is Rome comes to announce the end of his-story. We can see, ironically, that Hegel will see things in terms of his-story’s end, and Hegel was what Perlman will call in later chapters a “progress worshipper.”

103 The monster’s fire comes from those who have come to burn the monster. Lives and fire come not from the leviathan itself, but from people who have fallen into it as if in a trap. The people who want to find their way out plan to burn their way out.

104 Emperor Octavian Agustus was the first emperor of Rome, but it was a time not of dawn, but of dusk. The fourth beast had already devoured the whole earth.

The Anatolians believed that earth was the mother of all life. But then war with Rome came, and the people began to look towards the grandchildren of Cibele , the earth mother, and the previous god they worshipped along with Sibele , earth’s daughter Demeter, the grain of the mother’s womb. They turn instead, in the first instance of what Perlman will later call sublimated violence, away from the earth mother who they try to forget, to the grandchildren the spear throwing son and the huntress daughter, who the people make shrines to.

Monuments to the victories of Rome’s legions start to appear, a celebration of monumental human sacrifice.

105 The emaciated beggars dance around the dead gods of the earth mother, which have been dead for a hundred and twenty generations.

106 The Israelites danced around, and Moses chained them with his law. Rome extinguished Azura Mazda’s light, a god of Zoroastrianism which I suppose represents the light of nature, over the

Leviathan. Soldiers were throwing off their armor and worshipping Mithra, one of the minor gods of Zoroastrianism, who was reborn as a carrier of light. This was a minor light in Zarathustrianism. Those who celebrate Mithra hope to bring a new dawn.

107 The kingdom of heaven is not death; it is not the leviathan. Sharing is “the heart of the lost community.” We might say that mutual aid is the duplication of words and meaning into regeneration and the allowance of people to develop their own personality and individuality through having the assistance from others that is necessary for survival; whereas the singular, as opposed to singularity of meaning of law and leviathan, is synonymous with death, and for Perlman, maleness. Instrumentalization can be looked at as something which occurs regardless of whether or not we look at it as male; the phallus, which is the signifier for power, and in some ways is the death drive and so always behind every drive, as the phallus relates to jouissance which is the libidinal cathexis from past sublimated experiences. Sharing melts the beast from within its entrails where the sharing takes place.

This would be an example of how we could take down the Leviathan from within, by simply allowing more mutual aid organizations, or allowing socialized centers such as those for food, or clothing, or other necessary commodities, as well as housing, which could be produced by people whose sole purpose is to help each other. Perlman offers some solutions in this book on how to address the Leviathan, and among maintaining a small and not overpopulated size, a focus on mutual aid, as well as peace, and equilibrium with nature as it plays its part, and you play yours.

109 Talking about collectivity leads to talking about leviathanic traits. The Leviathan has traits that the individual lacks. I would suppose this would involve being the impersonal thing that goes on without you, and which people die for the cause of. Generality, likewise, is a sort of representationalism for Deleuze. Here we can see a beautifully Deleuzian critique, which fits just as well in Deleuze’s critique of Hegel and Freud.

110 Mary is treated like the earth mother. Her followers go underground and then rise up like vegetation. Moses called for sacrifices of the living to the artificial man. Dominion over fish and fowl gives way to celebrations of life and the earth mother. Egypt remains while Rome falls from captives within it. The innards of the mode of production “become detached from their shell and acquire a life of their own.”

111 Caligula believes that the head of the Leviathan should be detached from everything else. It is not bonded to nature, humans, or “the rest of its machine.” The head of the Leviathan has an “artificial freedom” not available to other beings. Perlman differs from the historian Gibbon in believing that a certain part of Rome’s history was the most happy and prosperous time in human history.

112 Meanwhile during the same period resisters were trying to topple Rome, and struggles within and outside of Rome helped end the Roman empire.

113 Machines “have a perverse ability” which people do not, to do the same thing as long as they are functioning. The Leviathan places people in rare conditions which were not found except in Sumer, such as weather drying up fields and washing them away over and over again.

114 The Leviathan builds clockwork and machinery as it forces people into desperate situations where they must constantly defend themselves of rapists, procurers, cheaters, tribute collectors, and cheaters who beat people into submission and force them to be unable to think about their own way of life. They become the “mirror image” of what they resist, later Perlman would use the word “sublimate” to say their way of life becomes sublimated into the violence of the Leviathan and people forget the natural rhythm Perlman will talk about later, which is the eternal return, opposed to the ressentiment of instrumentation, death, Oedipus, and phallic enjoyment insofar as the phallus is the signifier for power.

Making ties to the leviathan are not links formed, and grown out of love, which maybe what Perlman contrasts to nooses and the corpse of the Leviathan.

What started off as life affirming strains, under Mithra, Moses, Isis, Osiris, and Serapis. First they turn away from life affirming groups, then they turn away from life.

115 The abstraction Lugalzaggizi represents nothing of life or nature, it is an abstraction. Churches are starting to look like provinces of Rome without an emperor. The resisters back away from the mirror image of the leviathan.

116 Gnostics say that Archons encase the spirit in armor and put the people to sleep. Gnostics try to wake people from this sleep, if they can remember the primordial events that gave rise to the monster. Cyclical time, as opposed to linear, Leviathanic time. This is perhaps a reference to the spectacle as the guardian of sleep, for situationist Guy Debord, in the book Perlman translated, The Society of the Spectacle. The kingdom of god is within you means ever person is a potential visionary. The gnostics are later liquidated by the church for their “failure to repress the humanity of women.”

118 Federated tribes take place on the steps of the decomposing Rome.

119 At the council of Nicea, the father, the son, and the holy spirit are declared to be one in the same. The son is no longer Osirus, Serapis reborn. Optimus Maximus is converted into Yahweh, a jealous god who will have no other gods before him. Yahweh declares and unprecedented war against all other gods.

120 The spears, daggers, and war engines of Rome’s army are now directed towards visionaries and dreamers. Bars and fetters that imprisoned bodies are now within minds. Gnostics never leave their studies, Manicheans flee for their lives, Anatolians have the visions of the Bishops forced in their free visions. The Anatolians lock themselves inside their churches and set the churches on fire. This is when Christianity ceases to be a way, and becomes a religion, a cult. Here we can see that Perlman is not against all Christianity, but feels that it was once a mythological way, which became slowly captured by leviathanic ways in no small part because of the influence of Rome.

People are told that the inhuman leviathan does not reside in the monster, but in its victims. They call this sin, and they “lodge sin in the individual who suffers its ravages.” Roman woman haters join forces with followers of Moses, with the old Testament, to say that women was the cause of sin, not the Leviathan, not the king of kings who causes the corruption. Here we can see that Perlman feels that Christianity has lost its way, and become a leviathanic sort of drive towards imbalance, and death. It began with the dusk of Octavian, and then the gradual envelopment of the globe by the Leviathan’s corpse, and its abstractions which turn people against each other.

121 What Christianity contributes to the legacy of Rome is “thou shall have no other gods before me.” Similar to the imperialist Gleichschaltung, the reduction of all festivals to one, the reduction of humans marching in step to an official tune. This is also a way of reducing people to technology later on, and I would argue at its time as well it reduced people to technology.

123 Julian tries to restore the Paegan god, which leads to a brief war between Christians and Pagans, and this leads to Julian having his ships burned behind him before they reach Persia. It is speculation to say that a victory would have bolstered the popularity of the Paegan gods, but we know that Julias’s defeat seals their fate. Non Christian establishments are banned following the rule of Julias.

124 Manicheans and Zarathustraisn rise up in Persia to redistribute land and establish classless communities where sharing replaces hoarding.

127 The liquidation of Paganism and heresy does nothing to stop the fall of the empire. The Bogomili are convinced that oppression of peasants is sinful, not the peasants. They consider Byzantium Christians priests agents of Ahirman, who they call Satan. The evil ones are not the poor and miserable, but the landlords and tax collectors who make people poor and miserable.

130 Muhammed and his people are some of the few who don’t know a Leviathan. Arabs, mercinaries and victims of two warring Leviathans, know “about all there is to know about Leviathans.” Hence, the Leviathan is synonymous with war, and an artificial lifestyle which is cut off from the repetition, and eternal return of the rhythms of the cosmos in nature. These people consider their “paymasters” gods. Muhammed knows that these are not gods, but “heirlings of the rich.” For Muhammed, god is merciful and loving, and he is baffled by the jews, who claim the god of the old testament is “more jealous than the Shaw and Emperor combined.”

Arabia becomes leviathanized. The rich gouge the poor, rich and poor cheat each other, and there are permanent hereditary underlings. Muhammed knows that Eden was a real place, and what has become of it is no longer what it was in Abyssinia or Yemin. His followers don’t neglect the poor, and some are indecently rich, but they don’t lord it over people as they know they can lose their wealth.

131 Muhammed’s caravan comes under attack, and it has a motto which people must abide by to join the caravan – there is no other god but god. Perlman would not call Ummah a polity, but the Greeks would; Perlman would call it an organization. The organization is not yet a Leviathan, and Muhammed not yet a king; but he is already a judge, something quite different from a family elder. Their god may even be a relative of Optimus Maximus, maybe even the same entity.

132 Now it appears as though god is “fighting alongside the Muslims” and the “loot” is “god’s reward for Islam, submission.” Muslim warriors have a lot of help from peasants, who have been looking to overthrow the Christians for generations. To the few who resist the Muslim armies, they have the same character of Lugalzaggizi, and Optimus Maximus.

133 The third caliph, a great grandson of Muhammed, gives up egalitarianism, and embraces spoils of war. He proclaims that all other visions of the Koran must be destroyed. Uthman will try to reconcile the Leviathan’s ways with the prophet’s teachings, but the Shiites won’t reconcile themselves to the power of the Quraysh and Umayyah who warred against the prophet and now appropriated its religion. Only a few see themselves in the ways of the camel nomads and their egalitarianism.

The original days of the prophet Muhammed were egalitarian and anti-Leviathan, but since the leviathan is eternal, it can always just pick back up and reinstate itself, even under the banner of the same religion which sought to overthrow it.

134 The leviathan is an “excrescence” that grows out of human communities and then liquidates them. Islam became a religion that only took on other religions if they had a Leviathanic cult-like form. Christians inherit Roman antipathy towards octopus Leviathans, but they have embraced the claws, by the grace of Optimus Maximus. They still do not like octopus-shaped leviathans.

135 Women are enslaved, peasants are turned into agricultural zeks.

136 The prophets of the Koran were minimally followed in matters of trade; outsiders were considered fair game for exploitation of people as well as things.

Sophisticated technologies inevitably come from the plunder of the biosphere, which turns everything into Heidegger’s standing reserve: the ordering of resources, human or non-human, into technology.

137 Productive forces are produced by the social form. Technology does not give rise to silver mines or water wheels; standing reserve ordered as technology, the social form, and the eternal corpse of the dead Leviathan gave rise to it. It depends on the type of Leviathan, not the state of “global production forces.” Perhaps here he is taking issue with Marx, who believes that it is the type of Leviathan that gives rise to the mode of production, not the mode of production gives rise to technology. It is kind of like saying that the Leviathan is its own thing, and technology doesn’t give rise to it, it gives rise to technology.

The Greeks reduced women to slaves and moved speculative activities out of the temple and into the marketplace. The shrines were just ornaments which covered commercial tentacles. Under the leviathan there is back and forth exploitation; merchants and courtiers, etc. they bring the leviathan with their mutual exploitation.

138 Military and mercantile establishments all exploit the proletariat.

139 Franks and Mongols gather outside of the Islamic stronghold and plan to “destroy every trace of civilization.”

140 Church officials name themselves vicars of Christ, and the largest Zek colony in human history will call itself “the free world.” Everything in the west and about “the western spirit” is a lie. People become so dehumanized by the Roman empire that “they have forgotten their initial intentions.” All that remains of their “former serves” is the “violence of their struggle” which requires masks on top of masks, “then more masks over the initial masks, because the violence keeps showing through.” So you can think of it like the arms, tentacles or worm ligaments; stick their tendrils into your psyche, and there is a violence from without that becomes a violence from within. For Hegel, you are in and for yourself when you are aware of yourself and the history of the world around you – you treat others as you would like to be treated because the world is you, you are what you put in the world, and the world puts back into you what is put into it through the resonances it produces.

The Western Spirit is against truth, beauty, humanity, and nature. It puts exceptions in showcases and in real life represses the exceptions. The story of the Western Spirit begins when Rome defeats the Gauls and Celts.

142 A world off limits to living things is repulsive to free people. Northerners attack Roman border guards; the northerners lose. The Romans are fearless fighters, they “fight like unreal things.” They walk directly into an enemy and don’t retreat when half their men have fallen. It is because the “column” operates as a whole, independently of the individual men, who may show fear on their individual faces. Here is an example of how Perlman looks at what Hegel considered Spirit, which is also ironically the justification for why science works – the idea that science is not based on any particular person, but rather goes on without any particular representative who “is science.” That is how a Leviathan works, that is how supposed scientific progress works. But as Kuhn will show, there isn’t really scientific progress, just as there isn’t really progress in the Leviathan. For Kuhn, scientific paradigms shift, and they leave their constituents needing to replace the old paradigm with a new one that solves more problems; but the Leviathan is eternal, it is the representationalism which defies all contingency - which represents the individual workers, as opposed to the abstraction of the whole of society.

The Franks and Goths are not even fighting to destroy the Leviathan anymore, they are fighting just to destroy Rome with a vague idea of the freedom of their people.

143 The Franks and goths take on the leviathanic violence of the Romans and perpetuate it through forgetting the past, and perpetuating the violence carried out by the Leviathan. A Christian official declares himself Pontifex Maximus, and a descendent of the disciple Peter. He is Christ’s vicar, higher than the Emperor; he is Optimus Maximus.

144 After such a long time, the violence of the leviathan becomes sublimated into the Franks. They don’t enjoy the lands for their beauty, they enjoy them to rape, pillage, and expropriate.

145 Roman civilization is a colossal ruin, and it will remain that way “forever.” The wilderness caused by the leviathan is artificial, filled with disorderly violence, as opposed to the orderly violence of the leviathan. People play with the artifices of the decomposing segments called “technologies.” People dance around the technologies, but it is not a dance of nature, it is a death rattle of a decomposing leviathan.

146 The resistance against Rome has become the last repository of Rome. Pontifex Maximus is patiently awaiting the rise of the fourth kingdom. The popes are loyal to the Roman emperor Octavian.

148 The franks think that the earth is mother, but the Romans fought to turn earth into a “private reserve” which the franks thought nature couldn’t be.

So instead of working with the people who helped defeat the Romans, the turn on people for being impure and non Christian and simply continue the ways of the leviathan in war, which is all that is known by the franks after 20 generations of fighting Rome.

149 Roman’s Celts, Latins, and Franks were all intermarried at one point, but the mysterious priests, whose language the peasants couldn’t understand, had alternative plans for everyone, while earth is common to all. The priests are keepers of Roman law. Inhabitants don’t have boundaries on their land, but they don’t venture far out of fear of marauders. The priests speak of boundaries, domains, god’s kingdom and the earth’s kingdom. Here we can see how the familiar part of the uncanny, which grows same, similar, analogous, and opposed in terms of Deleuzian representation when it is cut up into familiar lines and labels, which would be represented by a 1 – wholeness, leviathan, and for Perlman, the power signifier of the phallus, which represents male domination. The 0, the uncut, unboundaried mother, the 0 of the void of the supposedly feminine nature, which without people is without lines and cuts distinguishing parts from wholes.

The knights bind each other by freely take oaths of vassalage. Pastoralists and planters swear fealty to the marauders, who agree through mutual aid not to attack each other. Fealty does not prevent violence, it makes it more predictable.

Western civilization had a leviathan with the Roman empire, and it was destroyed, but the priests lament that there is order and law in heaven and it is not represented on earth.

150 All of the tradition the goths and franks fought to preserve were lost in the generation of war which have been replaced with “celebrations of deeds of violence.” Perlman mentions “unsublimated violence” which becomes unstable. Here he seems to suggest that the violence of the leviathan is a sort of sublimation.

When violence is the norm, it becomes custom to submit to the powerful.

Knights leech off of the peasants and priests follow the peasants around and instill the “hierarchy imbedded in his brain.” Like the Platonic hierarchy, god on the top, the passions, or demons on the bottom. Not a demon for Plato but the worker drone was a bee that leeched off of the hive, in Plato’s Republic, and this would be at the bottom of Plato’s hierarchy as tyranny below democracy, oligarchy, timocrat, and king. Plato’s king soul was the contemplative, rational soul, as opposed to the passions (which are acquisitive and material and is the cause of suffering in Greek and Eastern philosophy). who would lead a quiet and contemplative life if they followed the path of reason, in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, if I remember correctly. A very similar story appears in Plato. But the priests and knights don’t lead quiet, contemplative lives, they live a lot like the worker drone of Plato’s Republic, leeching off the life, and freedom of the peasants. This is the nature of kings, to embody a material role, and take up instrumentation as though it were freedom. A reversal has taken place, an abstraction which has taken on a deadly power. The mean, or equilibrium is not any one of these things; neither the abstraction of kinghood, or the false pleasure of the material world; it is both at once, a balance between them, as one aims and arrows and shoots for a target, which is the controlling of one’s muscles, rationality, with passions, the tensing of the muscle itself and its material consequences working in harmony. There is no mean in this Christian society which hopes to instill ontological hierarchy.

151 Chaos is seen as resistance towards the social order, Satan.

Instead of the conditions of the leviathan being the problem, priests say sin is the cause of misery.

While the villagers are not persuaded by Plato’s noble lie that some people have gold in their blood and the people with gold in their blood are the rulers, or parlor trick miracles. But the people feel guilty for their generations of slaughter. So they buy into the idea that some people are knights and some people serve the knights “bear the misery.” Now the peasants believe the priests lies and began to make earth Roman Catholic heaven.

Historically speaking the priests have been the greatest allies of the strongmen oppressors, because they think hierarchically and reinforce values of Rome (as opposed to Christianity). The priests are responsible for brainwashing people and turning them into Zeks, or the workers under the leviathan. The leviathan at this point has reformed.

152 Frankish knights have become kings and administrative chores are taken over by a mayor they appointed.

153 The pope is in Italy apparently because the scum bag scribes falsifying documents saying that Emperor Constantine said that a portion of Italy was granted to the pope. And thus, we get this stupid fucking homophobic, transphobic pieces of shit organization that just fucks over queer and “irregular” people for hundreds of years. Fuck off and die, Catholicism, and fuck off and die Pope Francis, and your comment that queer people are a demon that re-arranges people’s face.

People who retreated from Rome into forests and river banks are still there, from the last time they fled from an empire and its “dehumanization.”

154 Charlemagne is massacring Saxons. The leviathan is revived by the Roman Catholic Church. “Massacres and deportations convert the majority of northern Europe to Christianity.” Pieces of forests are given to the most loyal killers, bishops, kings, and earls. People become peasants on a lord’s manor – surfs. The fealty which was voluntary becomes the relation of surfs and vassals and the payments are now forced by the leviathanic order. Mother earth is a “preserve of the most lethal strong men.

155 To divert the revolt, priests say you are unhappy because you are sinful. They blame the misery of the oppression from the leviathan on internal instead of external factors of misery. The monastery is a training camp and prison for the people it immiserates.

In the training camp of the church, people train to become beasts of burden for the ruling class. This makes developed artificial practices, routines, became springs and wheels with no relation to human desire or natural cycles; in other words, Oedipus and phallus instead of eternal return, rhythm, and repetition. The clock is a mini monastery; springs and wheels of metal, not flesh and blood.

Monks may or may not have had a lot of “sodomy” during their “night life” but they attribute it to those who are inferior, “infidels unfamiliar to them.”

Judaism and Catholicism have something in common in that they want to take over the biosphere, and turn all peasants into surfs to match the mechanism of detached monastic life and the gears of the leviathan.

156 The artificial and unnatural violence of the leviathan is turned towards the urges of the resistance; people repress their urges and blame their misery on sin. The gears and wheels of the leviathan are a mode of repression that diverts violence from the leviathan into the psyche. The violent ways of the leviathan are sublimated into the minds of the Franks. The death which engulfs them in the death god lugalzaggizi Optimus maximus. So people go for so long battling Rome that they perform all sorts of sublimated violence. They flog themselves, rack themselves on wheels, burn themselves in ovens, hang in gallows, lick up vomit or blood of the diseased patients.

157 This uprising of the church does not represent a 5th leviathan, or a reconstituted 4th, it will burst into flames in a fleeting instant, “among the cinders of a burnt out fire.”

158 Roman Catholics see unity where there is none. There is no leviathanic unity, only dismemberment and decomposition. Church scribes are obsessed with the Roman empire and cannot accept its fall. They see the project of the empire’s revival as bigger than themselves. Every opportunity to uphold power is servile and they back stab their former allies. Charlemagne is worse than the roman emperor Otto in this regard. The church sees itself as the empire’s soul. It was a vast bureaucracy producing a world embracing leviathan when there was none in the west. The beast is “ephemeral but also illusory,” “it is not a functioning machine.”

159 The Frankish empire is “not a functioning machine.” It is like combined clock springs, that don’t make a clock, or a nervous system existing apart from the body. The “colossal beurocracy dangles in the void.” These trained Catholics have the ability to serve Rome, but they aren’t really a leviathan. Frankish lords are only familiar with “the personal relations of their vanished community” and “church men” are trained to think that the hierarchal relations of Rome are the only possible relations.

160 The lord is grateful for the priest for “pacifying the cultivators of land.” The lord is fed by the cultivators of land. Now the peasants, regardless of their descendance, whether it be from Africa, former Franks, are now the liege-lord’s property. They try to escape but the liege-lords gang up on them and claim them as booty. Since people are “equal” under Rome, they are all equally expected to pay 1/10th of their produce as a tax to feed the rich as a “tithe.” The lord wants to control the peasants and the priests, he doesn’t want anything coming in between him and the peasant’s “surplus product.” The lords view the pope as parasitic, and wants to control the religious men. When phallus and technology rule, the instrumentation of people and the death of their potentiality, and sometimes the primitive accumulation of killing people so that the necessary profits to be made are not undercut – this is the violence of linear time, as opposed to the rhythmic time of the death drive and the eternal return.

The leviathanic mode of production takes off when “productive forces ripen” quoting an unnamed scholarly book, where the religious men are midwives to the lords and their “territorial mercantile states.”

161 The lords inherited the corpse of the Roman leviathan and let it rot. They wanted Rome, not territorial commercial capitalism.” They had the bureaucracy and not the army. Instead of being able to continually subject peasants the franks expand too violently and run into several leviathans which overpower the franks who have another leviathan built on its ashes. Muslims, Danes, slaves, and Huns rebel against the Franks.

162 Northerners undertake a vast operation to wipe out the Franks. Vikings invade Frankish strongholds. Vikings are speculated to have wanted to avoid leviathans as they did not appear in the records until then. But the Vikings come in and wipe out the liege lords, and impose themselves as rulers, launching a “revamped Roman Frankdom” into plundering expeditions. Here we can see the sublimation occurring again.

163 Vikings launch their own commercial fleet from Kiev and Novgorod. They avoid Christian scribes and bypass Rome in their trade with Muslims, and in doing so they appear not as Byzantium, but a “third Rome.” The Rus become leaders of a “water-borne commercial empire, an octopus.”

164 The Vikings tried to enslave the Moravians to make them food suppliers, but the Moravians defended themselves from “such a reduction” to rallying behind a strongman. It is funny how absurd interactions between people are. They are so directionless, stupid, and pointless, and they express themselves by making other people’s lives miserable in every single era of humanity. There is no guide, there is no compass, there is no map, and whatever seemed to be a compass and map, cannot survive the death of rhythmic ways, gets reduced to a sort of artificiality, and linearity. It’s just a sort of accumulation of violent tendencies, and there never seemed to really be a chance for people to stop being horrible, even though Perlman insists that the leviathan isn’t inevitable, which of course it’s not. But it is immortal.

165 The church has victories like Pyrrus, every victory brings them closer to their doom. The Franks keep attacking as their empire falls, and Moravians expose the lies of the priests by actually reading their books.

166 Empires such as Scandinavia and hungary built leviathans simply to fight Rome and the Franks. They recognize the Pope, who trains beurocrats loyal to the national rulers and supporters of genocidal campaigns.

167 The pope’s dream will be revived by two megalomaniacs who have taken up the mantle of Optimus Maximus (Hitler and Napoleon, I assume, as it’s Berlin and Paris), without acknowledging Optimus Maximus. Thus, that dream dies with the Franks. “Charlamagne’s empire is not a beginning, but an end.”

168 The Franks fate is sealed, they “disintegrate” in the face of Islam.

169 Muslims retaliate by conquering Sicily. The leviathan is decapitated, it is plunged into civil war by Charlamagne’s grandsons, and the leviathan has “lost its ability to respond.” The Pontifex walls himself into the Leonine City, which will later be called the Vatican. It’s amazing to think how the Catholic church is this abomination which arose out of imperial conquest and megalomania, and it still stands in all it’s hypocrisy today, because it felt the sanctimonious effluvium of desire to make the entire world into its image. If only the death of Catholicism could be eternal. Christ is an inverted caregiver, an ID which has turned into a superego so sadistic, so filled with lies and deception, that it is like the ultimate sadistic melancholia of the superego.

Franks and popes pretend the empire didn’t disappear. They are as “inflexibly devoted to the past” as the Pontifex of Rome. Perlman talks about how the Franks were “inflexibly devoted to phantoms of past forms.” A ghost could imply something of Derrida’s hauntology. We can see that it is a repetition of death, as it is a ghost which re-appears, and is not instantiated anywhere in the world, but yet still comes to occupy the psyche. It seems that the two polarities of psychotic and neurotic also fit in with the idea of neurotic being the side of death, artificiality, stiffness of armors and masks, instrumentalization, being ordered as technology; and the psychotic pole, which might be said to take directly from the psychoanalytic real, associated with the thing in itself of Kant, and absence, as well as the lost object; the psychoanalytic real is in association with difference, as this is what das ding implies. The ghost, therefor, are a matter of the superego, and its linear time, which occupies people in a past, which is not present, and a future which is not present, and a present where people are immersed in the past.

It is this attempt to extract desire itself, the lost object, from its sphere of equalibrium, it creates competing equalibriums. The equalibrium is thrown off also by the sublimation of violence. The ghosts are from a linear past, as opposed to a rhythmic past that people live, sing, dance, and express cosmologically significant stories through which the world is not ruled by leviathans and the artificial Eden, but by worship of the productive forces of the world, which can be similarly seen to be a Deleuzian turn. The productive mother earth, is opposed to the deconstructive chaos of difference, which also has a creative potential in duplication of meaning from singularities formed out of past events; that is the productive rhythmic time of the eternal return, and the sublimation from a sort of world historical primal scene; the caregiver is all of earth, and its wellbeing has taken on the affronted position of the caretaker, one which we violate out of the pure absurdity which rings out from the various rings of what Heidegger calls the earth, that which has instantiation and a bodily recording surface on which it takes on its history in Deleuzian terms, and the sky which might alternatively be called the background, and context through which things get their form. The immortal in Heidegger’s fourfold would clearly be the leviathan, and the mortals would be rhythm and life.

170 The popes crown any adventurer who allies with the Pontifex. The Saxons carry out more sublimated violence committed by the Franks. The pope crowns Otto, and the genocidal Saxons are all that remains of the Catholic empire of the pope and Pontifex. The Vikings make an empire somewhat like the Franks, they adopt the language, but their way of life is exotic and it’s not the Catholic abomination which was the Charlamagne empire.

171 Eric the Red transports Islamic luxuries to “Vinland” what would later be known as North America, which was not found by the genocidal Christopher Columbus.

Perlman says “Christians ousted Muslims from Italy.” But Christians know that Muslim merchants “refuse to bow before the merciful god.” The holy roman empire and Byzantium team up to try to defeat the Normans but the pope is captured, and the “rare alliance” is defeated.

172 The Venecians succeed where the Franks failed. They launch an octopus, and the Muslims are busy fighting the Turkish leviathan, which being land oriented, “represses the free movement of Muslim commercial tentacles.”

173 Arabic commodities start to flow into Europe, but this does not make people bow to Islam. Europeans are committed to the god of Roman legions, Optimus Maximus. They become Islamicized only in the sense that they worship Optimus Maximus as Muslim silver. Once Europe disregards its Roman antipathy for trade, and its Catholic antipathy for financial transactions, Frankish Europeans look to Islam for the “armor that goes with its commercial ways.” Western and Middle Eastern philosophy will mix, Islamic countries will read Aristotle and Plato, Europe will read the philosophy of Ibn-Sina and the mathematics of al-Biruni.

174 The crusade was internal violence that was turned outward; jews were no longer needed because Franks and Catholics no longer had restrictions on who could handle money.

Part of the lie of the crusade was that you had to kill infidels and that this would restore what they no longer are or never were in their internal violence turned external.

175 The regeneration of the western leviathan comes from fields of corpses that start with the massacre of Jews. The purpose of these massacres was so that Europe could become something it no longer is, or never was, and to hide what it has become. The “human face” is “extinguished” by the “leviathanic mask” which is a “veil which is itself hidden” over the human face. An archbishop, who goes unnamed, reports seeing victors dropping with blood from head to toe. So there’s a sort of double concealing which occurs through the leviathanic mask, which in Heideggerian terms, unconceals the human face – the human face which is part of the life which is inconsistent with the leviathan. The second concealment comes from the fact that we cannot even be sure that there is such a concept as a “leviathanic mask” until that context synonymous with the sky of the fourfold, through which to give the content form, arrives to us from its facticity.

176 In the process of trying to rescue Byzantium from the Turks, the crusaders ransack it. The Northmen remain faithful to Lugalzaggizi, the god of aggressive leviathans, and Optimus Maximus, god of crusading legions. At first the serfs reserve an aspect of their humanity; their crops, animals, are set by custom, not markets. But then the lords get greedy and demand absorbent dues.

177 Concentrated urban weavers are no longer surfs. They are Zeks, labor-camp inmates, “instruments” or in other words, they are being ordered as standing reserve, which is the essence of technology for Heidegger. Neither their activity nor their product is their own. Modest forms of distributing and creating fabric give way to every kind of fabric creation.

Former franks start burrowing into silver mines in mountain caves, which earlier Franks would have abhorred, because in spite of them being one of the most vile empires humanity has ever known, they didn’t even handle money, ironically, which doesn’t subtract at all from their immortal infamy of Charlamagne and Pope based Catholicism.

178 The leviathan only needs to maintain a veneer of palatability in the masks and ornamentations. Fangs of the leviathan come from China, Persia, and Arabia.

Here Perlman talks about population growth, he says this phenomena only exists amongst leviathanized human beings. Animals in nature do not proliferate to the point of pushing out all other kinds of nature.

“Mythologies” used to give “cosmic context” to people, the communities and the earth reproduce their own special meaning. But Zeks have no context in a rural setting, so their life is meaningless. Zeks are divorced from context in a factory, they are “despoiled of every last trace of community.” “Zeks do not reproduce a meaningful context.” Working communities, labor gangs, are as “artificial as the leviathan.” The labor gangs are as artificial as the leviathan; they are its “springs and wheels,” they same as they were in the Sumerian Ur.

Worshippers of a son of Optimus Maximus has a son called progress, which is a story about “a steady ascent from a hellish dark age to an electrically illuminated heaven. The Roman empire seems like the spark of the end of the world. Progress worshippers will say the dark ages lacked any coherent his-story, any coherent leviathanic development. The earth is turned to standing reserve, the earth’s fruits are viewed as waste, and everything that could be said was animals and people. The church will call itself an enemy of progress and a proponent of “natural economy.” The church will always tell lies, and some people will always believe them.

179 The crusading church and its Optimus Maximus figure head, wanted to see the entire world turned into a commodity.

+++ Additional comments have been added further down on pages 41, and 20-25, 44-45 can be found under their respective page numbers in this journal.

180 Monks drive peasants off the land to sell their items on the market. The rapacity of the priests is hidden by the “robes of saints and apostles.” The crusading west will become the most formidable world eater to come out of Spiritus Mundi, the world spirit.

181 Muslims gouge silver out of the earth “out of her body,” it is earth’s skeleton, but now it is a dead thing. They use earth’s skeleton to have dominion over it. Lugalzaggizi, Optimus, call for dominion. Land is a commodity and the Frankish “lust for land” is “democratized.” Silver coins are now equal to a parcel of land. Earth is liquified, reduced to the value of a stone made of silver. The burghers heirs will try to destroy earth irreversibly with nuclear fusion of Uranium.

183 Sin was created to divert the violence of the people away from the masters and in on themselves. The crusades were this sort of deflection.

Ranters tell history from the perspective that rebels and scholars tell history from the perspective of the powers that be. Here Perlman differentiates himself from the supposed scholarly crowd. He was briefly a teacher who tried to have classes where people do their own research and present their own projects, and give their own grades. Perlman also spoke vociferously about his rejection of the war in Vietnam to students, using explanations for why he thinks what he thinks, as opposed to teaching from authority. Perlman, ironically, is not as much of a ranting extremist as he extols in the book, although he also was in France in May 68 with a megaphone, talking to workers about subjects Perlman’s wife didn’t bother to mention. Perlman the scholar is somewhat different from Perlman the writer. Perlman had a long and complicated history with the university, where he had friends, and people he did not get along with.

A ranter does not see things as “we”, perhaps referring to Hegel’s I that is we, which is spirit; a ranter does not see themselves as part of the despotic wholeness of society. Perlman differentiates himself from a scholar named Cohn, who thinks that “every rebel is Hitler.”

184 Perlman further differentiates himself from Cohn, by saying that the “resistance” is the “only human component of all of his-story.” All the rest is leviathanic progress.

Perlman takes for granted that “resistance is a natural human response to dehumanization” and does not, therefore, have to be “explained or justified.” Sometimes resistance is original, but it’s usually “inspired by earlier forms.”

185 The repressive apparatus of the church comes in the form of confessions and pardons, excommunications, and market solutions. The Albigensians thought the fall was not caused by Adam, but the rapacity of the “commercializing lords, priests and monks, whom they call evil.” Albigensians borrow from Zarathustra’s philosophy with their notion of good Ahura Mazda and evil. Good is light, evil is dark, and Christian domination is the era of darkness.

186 There is a comment here on page 186 that really sticks with me. I despise the so called “objective liberal scholar” and their mask of neutrality that hides the incredible violence of the first world, both imperially, and just in the very mode of production. 60000 people die every year because they cannot afford healthcare, we have a genocide here in the United States happening every single year, when other developed nations do not have this problem, and yet somehow we are supposed to act like it is neutral and objective to have no fucking values? I am the enemy of your system, objective liberal scholar, I will always be there to undermine you, in whatever way I can. The “extremists” turn towards the “progressive labor camps.” Labor camps are not the way of free people.

Provincial Cathars reject the church hierarchy, sin, purgation, the apparatus of pardons and indulgences. None of them accept the dispossessed of Europe’s once free peasantry as god ordained or natural.

A cistern monk has a revelation among his anti catholic contemporaries. He revives the “crisis cult.” The first age was fear and servitude to the father, the age of the son is the second age, submission to the church defines this age, and then the age of Spirit, defined by joy love and freedom, is the age the monk thinks they live in. The signs of crusading Europe is not a sign of the first days, but the last.

187 Perlman gets Sartrean, showing his background in Sartre and Camus, using the plural “she” as in they, showing an everyperson having to make a choice between the resisters and the authorities and their rapacity. The decision to disobey authority “disrupts a person’s whole life.” One needs a good reason, and the reasons are expressed in the language of the time, not some future time. I can only speculate that this is because one should have a reason to be against the conditions they are under at the moment, if they have a reason to be against them at all, as opposed to conditions which are merely “utopian.” I reject utopianism, under the pretense that Zoe Baker, a leading anarchist scholar of our day, says that anarchism is not utopian, it arose from the real material conditions of past experience in radical labor unions. As we will see in Mother Earth, there are several sources from there which talk about trade union tactics. These thinkers, like Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Voltarine De Clayre, etc. are focused mostly on modern time, whereas Perlman is talking about world history.

Perlman doesn’t seem to give solutions to these sorts of problems, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan is not supposed to be some sort of guide book on how to blow up oil pipelines or something, it’s basically just saying “we’re fucked.” He says just about as much later in the book, he says that this is the end, with the “world eater.” Perlman has said in this book, that he feels that resistance doesn’t even need justification. Revelations provide “good reasons” those who are blind to the leviathan before the revelation, can now see it because of the relevations. The disruption of individual lives, is a disruption of leviathanic existence. After such an experience, Perlman will call the ”meaningless intervals of leviathanic time” a sort of “linear time.” Some of the “rhythms” of the communities of the state of nature are recovered. Norman Cohn was pathological enough to be repulsed by people driven by their own “dreams and visions.” Contempt and ridicule will be a favorite tool of supposed “unbiased” scholars. These people consider “duly constituted authorities” as the “only saviors of mankind” and the leviathan “the only possible messiah.”

188 Cohn doesn’t do any of the killing, jailing, torturing, burning that’s the church’s doing, with its “long secular arms.”

Francis speaks of harmony with earth and animals, he would have been a resister if he was not a tool of the church. Land is becoming private property, and rapacity is rewarded with wealth and power, and Francis extols “poverty, community, and generosity.”

The Cathars repress the Zarathustrians by wearing the mantle of Ahura Mazda. Pontifex invites the nature worshipper and sponsors him. Maybe Francis is deluded into thinking he has converted the pope, he allows himself to be used. The former “partisans of universal kinship” are turned into heresy police.

189 Francis is subsumed by the leviathan, and his followers turned into policemen trained to police heresy. The church adds a “scarlet ornament” to its cloak. The inquisition developed a clockwork social life and its members use instruments of torture on nature, in the holy war called the inquisition. All the towns of the . This is a perfect example of how the leviathan can use religions which aren’t necessarily harming the planet or its occupants, and how they can literally be taken up into the leviathan and used as pawns in religious games to control people.

The Albigensians are destroyed, from the mountains to the Mediterranean, “Frankish speaking Manicheans and their sympathizers are hunted like animals.” A whole population is exterminated.

This is only a taste of what is to come from “duly constituted authorities” against “domestic unbelievers” Perlman says extremely sarcastically, in the forerunners of the Nazis exterminating the jews. Everything that is coming is more of the same “reason and science,” and “more of the same armor, which will later be called technology.”

190 Empires expand my massacring indigenous populations, and the Vikings discovered Vinland Columbus discovered America.

Empires expand wiping out people and their cultures, returning to the “old world” (Rome?) and wiping out the wilderness. The current army in the book, the inquisition, is a repetition of Rome. Rome would before also “exterminate and deport” populations alien to them.

192 So called good Christians extend “peter’s domain” with spears for knights, commodities for burghers who were the merchants who ruled Europe in the middle ages, and words with priests. Burghers team up with professional killers, and their military is treated exactly as the crusades were, as a way to reap massive windfall profits.

There is a centralization of desire in the form of happiness within the purse of the burghers. It is the capture by death, living emotion is not experienced.

The papal see in Rome wants to be an “all embracing empire.” But behaves exactly like a “rapacious mercantile octopus.”

193 Worm like and octopus like leviathans were able to be distinguished up to this point. Now the leviathan of the west is not distinguishable as one beast or another. The previously composite elements, the Church which wanted to be a leviathan but was merely disjointed springs that made a non functional clock, now there is a “composite of previously incompatible and mutually alien elements.” The previous composite was not a functioning machine, the Crusading west becomes precisely that.

The King of Parisians, who killed all the Manicheans and Albigensians, is enlarged to king of France, a strongman of limited territory and common speech. This ruler has so little use for religion, he tries to reduce the ecumenical ecclesia to “French spiritual police.”

194 The fourth king Philip installs a pope of his own, which reduces Catholicism to a “national department of ideology and propaganda, anticipating the later Reformation by eight or nine generations. Entering of France into “an empire of commodity exchange” makes it dependent on the “cost of production” which “produces cyclical commercial crises.”

The pope once recruited Normans and Muslims against the emperor, pope and emperor are more often mortal enemies than allies. Ever since “Barbarossa” emperors have tried to reduce church men to “spiritual overseers of imperial estates.”

195 As the Christian empire expands, the capture of the other territories and their communities for Christendom is written in the bible and perceived as destined that people would have dominion over earth and fowl. The capture of land as standing reserve is the liquid assets of the burghers becoming exchangeable as commodities and being exchangeable for estates called private property, which is a way that each person has a sort of dominion over their small territory.

People’s desire has become metaphysically located in their stuff, they are maimed, domesticated, and armored. [Perlman gets this notion of an individual armored against himself from Wilhelm Reich, and he applies this notion to his dad, according to Mrs. Perlman. Although according to Mrs. Perlman, this was not a motivating factor in how he behaved in general. What this implies, I can only speculate, but I assume it means he didn’t generally talk about being against his dad, if I understand what she means correctly. Perlman’s dad was someone he disagreed with, but his dad is also someone who escaped Czechoslovakia. I’d imagine that Perlman’s resentment lies more with society, than with his father.] The Christian has dominion over their particular real estate, so “a good Christian is henceforth, and by definition, and world eater.”

196 The world eater is the destroyer of the biosphere, and it is already an apt name in the time of the crusades against infidels.

197 Ecclesiastics relegate their dominion to the hereafter. In the here and now, they hurl themselves into the rush for spoils.

198 This western leviathan will encase the entire biosphere. It will turn the earth to an archipelago of labor camps, filled with slaves, Zeks, Ensis, Lugals, and scribes. The only element that can be called the Westerner’s own, is lying. Westerners lie about the fact that they are making a leviathan, trained by the church to do so, and the owners of liquid capital believe we are getting to the state of nature. In their own eyes, oligarchs and clients are drawing closer to heaven, to god’s kingdom, to Eden, the forgotten community in the state of nature. But really they are just bringing about the dusk which Octavian, and the first Lugal brought about. The westerners see no leviathan where there is one.

199 Western Europeans echo the Sumerians in thinking that their artificial world is something it’s not. The Sumerians turned their former world into a wilderness, but they carried parts of the disrupted world into their temple garden. Inside the garden they can think they never left the state of nature. The later worm worshippers will have to break the church to institute their novelty. This is because the church cannot rid itself from the baggage of the anti Roman crisis cult. These vestiges give the church an aura of being something other than what it is, vestiges of the ancient human community in the state of nature. Sumerians thought of it temporally as a golden age, Christians think of it spatially, as a place called Eden. The church induces in believes, the “sheep” a condition contemporaries will call “schizophrenia” out of a reactionary interpretation of the people who thought that destroying the leviathan “the beast’s fall” would bring the kingdom of heaven, or Eden.

200 The church took the female part of god, the earth mother, and made Adam the mother. The story of Eve disobeying god and her affair with the snake is played up to deprecate and insult women. The betrayal of Eve to god is like how the church founders went against their anti leviathanic ways and started leviathanic ventures.

The original sin myth is an “instrument of blackmail.” They tell you that you have sin so the church can purge you of your sin, and take your property.

201 Nuns and priests create “artificial Edens” in monestaries and convents “lifeless replicas of the state of nature.” The church sunk its claws into the mind of the person it infected with the artificial belief in its sin. Christianity is a treadmill on which if you move “fast enough” you get to paradise, only in the afterlife. “Death is the real birth” in Christianity. “Decomposition is the life that matters.” Ironic and stupid as always with leviathanic religions.

The church carries with it the memory of Eden to people who have never been outside of the entrails of the Leviathan. It maintains this artificial Eden through the inquisitory witch hunts and heresy hunts, to keep opposing views out.

202 The Bogomil message by Gnostics is a “powerful acid” on the doctrine of original sin, and “therefor, the entire repressive apparatus of the church.” The burgers consolidate their power into the head of the leviathan and use the inquisition as a method of state power to join in union with priests and knights to channel the Bogomil resistance into early easily manageable place. All non conformists are heretics to the centralized power of the leviathan. Burghers channel resistance into a cul-de-sac, which is a sort of pocket of houses on a single street that all the people get funneled into. Bogomilism picks up steam. Many of them escaped the inquisition and spread around the globe. Hysterical churchmen call all non-conformists heretics.

203 Albigensian Bogomilism picks up steam. Many of them escaped the inquisition and spread around the globe. Resisters gather at hostels where they talk about the heresy police and minor insurrections against the ruling class.

204 Perlman talks about how businessmen historians write about the radical travelers dedicated to “apostolic poverty” they “expect readers to smile condescendingly.” The radicals are “explicitly committed to freedom and community.” If Christian religion is Rome and the Old Testament, then these radicals are not Christian at all, because that is precisely what they oppose. The Albigensians are an-archists, meaning they are against arche or governance, as well as the doctrine of original sin.

205 Radicals invert the churches sin, and instead of “fear, submission and obedience” there is “love, respect, and admiration.” Radicals know they don’t need the church. They are pantheists who say nature is a deity.

Like Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a life, or light that wakes individuals from the stoney sleep of life denial. The pantheist has kinship with all that is and does not feel shame in sex, as sin is the priests doctrine. The sinless community of ancient times is facing “artificial obstacles.” Sin is part of the abstraction of the leviathan and death that has been internalized.

207 The Church wants to keep Europe Christian, if need be by depopulating it. This “reign of terror” is not propagated by the “radicals, extremists, and revolutionaries” but by the “doctors of theology, the bishops, the royal councilors and mayors.” It is an “ongoing process of institutional murder.”

208 Europeans are pushing for any part of the world which has not been destroyed by the inquisition. Europe has no culture, civilization is not culture. Their “imposed masks” are “not the ways of free beings.” In free communities people do not rush away from themselves. The goal in a community is to realize your true self in a cosmic context.

208-209 The European trade of Muslim silver and Senegalese gold brings back foreign rats to Europe, and the bubonic plague. The plague is a democratic killer. Some thing this is the end times, others think that this is mother earth’s revenge for “the leviathan claws and tentacles tearing her hair, and rending her bowels.”

210 Perlman calls people living in the leviathan “mirror images of their disaster.” One might think about how in Plato’s Republic, the city was supposed to be a mirror of the soul, but here we can see that if that were true, which whatever anyone says that’s a representationalist belief in the sense that it represents a sort of determinacy. But if we’re playing along, mythologically, without the need for scrutinizing things “objectively” then yes, the lack of good in the city mirrors the lack of good in the soul. If Platonists view the good as the wellbeing, and flourishing of life, then the leviathan is the opposite of that. Perlman talks about how the losses of life drive out competition and make the markets more vicious due to monopolization.

The “doctrine of progress” turns every present place into a vehicle flying through time which to reach a future place. This could be an example of the ordering of the earth like technology, and the diversion of enjoyment from the present, into a future time through which our society manufactures places through which to arrive at in which we have “progressed.” Progress is merely lifting the standing reserve out of the earth, and carried through time, to the destination of the commodity which arrives at its “place” after being extracted from mother earth. Like when they took earth’s skeleton of silver and put it outside of earth.

211 Anyone who defends the leviathan is just “the leviathan simulating a human voice.” Here again we might think how Perlman said that people who live in the Leviathan don’t have a will of their own, because they are ordered as technology. When you think about it, what is all the garbage people say defending the catastrophe of civilization except a bunch of abstractions that they come up with in order to justify the machines that have invariably ordered their lives?

There are several things we need to do. One is to end the rule of capitalists, by any means necessary. Another is to end the rule of oligarchy, or the rich, or anyone who has inordinate power over anyone else, both in the workplace and in the government, and replace it with an order of freed zeks who live peacefully and at one with nature. Finally, we need to end war, as these are not the people’s wars, but the wars of the masters; and even if it were the people’s war, what need would a free people, who have their needs taken care of by mutual aid, have to attack one another? It is capitalism, as we will see in the Mother Earth magazine, that produces crime. One of the key things we learn in anarchist scholarship and history is that to this very day, it is viewed, correctly, that crimes are often out of desperation. It is perfectly justified for a zek to rob an entire bank, or an entire corporation of its products, by theft or by direct action through strikes, because anyone who takes up the position of a merchant, boss, capitalist, king, etc. is by their very nature exploitative. They rob from the zek, and order people to make their will not their own, with catastrophic consequences.

Capitalists are a scourge on this planet; they are mindless drones of capital, whose only purpose is to immiserate and exploit. The capitalist is a loathsome creature, stupid in its blithe disregard for life and the world. It is someone who consumes death and spreads it as a microfascism to others. The owner class deserves to have their things, obtained by exploitation, taken from them and redistributed; I will not go as far as to say killed, as this would likely not be focused exclusively on the leaders. We have seen throughout history that the anarchists of the deed did not garner the popular support that they thought that they would, and in fact tarnished the name of anarchism for ages to come because of their aimless tactics. Yet the owner class would sooner kill us all in a battle for their greed and satiation on what I will call the pus of capital, which is synonymous with all its various dead objects, greed, and wealth accumulation - and they have the power of the military and the police. We might contrast 1. the pus on which the capitalist feeds to 2. the earth’s fruit, mutual aid, communism or the earth’s produce; the blood and dirt (similar to the abstraction of the “blood and soil” of the Nazi in that it is a similarly wicked abstraction, mechanization, and murder process) which has been siphoned into a pocket, a nest for the discharge, which the capitalist greedily explodes into their hungry mouth like popping an extremely large zit, which they purchase with their money, as they feast on the injured biosphere’s discharge. They do it because they think it is good for themselves and the world sometimes, but mostly they don’t kid themselves and they do it out of pure jouissance. That is the capitalist way, to consume like mad, to the point of excess and discomfort. They are obsessed by the taste of excess. It is still an association with a living body, the earth, but this is only available for as long as the biosphere holds, who degrowth communist theorist Kohei Saito says that capitalists hate. They hate the biosphere; they cannot imagine why a matter of pure profit would not take precedence over all life. This is the stupidity and wickedness of the capitalist.

People try to run, or even fly out of the “rubble of amenities burying them alive.” You cannot expect a system like capitalism which is based on infinite growth, to contain itself within a planet with a biosphere it must continually rape in order to obtain it’s a botchling (an undead demon baby that appears in the video game Witcher 3) the commodity.

There is even a dignitary at Oxford University named Wycliff, who thinks the entire apparatus of the church since Constantine is a vast hoax, even though he is not a radical; the hierarchy of the bishops and the machinery of salvation and absolution.

Weavers rebel against their owners, priests, merchants, master craftsman. The seize the places of power.

212 Wycliff anticipates the reformation, says there shouldn’t be one universal church, but many tiny churches in a nation state. Radicals take up his writings. The English are more radical than the Oxford lecturer. They rebels don’t want civilization, which they call usurpation.

213 I don’t understand this couplet “when Adam delved and eve span who was then the gentleman?” There is another one which says that until England gets rid of villein (funny enough this might be where the word villain came from but ironically the word originates as “low born,” or “rustic” so unsurprisingly the world doesn’t make sense lol “”in medieval England a feudal tenant entirely subject to a lord or manor to whom he paid dues and services in return for land.”) or noble, and all of us are of one condition, things cannot go well. They want not universal villeinage, but universal freedom. One of them invites the king to take off his mask, but it does not come off. The agents of the king murder Watt Tyler, who brought the message to the king.

214 Perlman uses the example of Hal and Falstaff From Hamlet’s play King Henry the 4th, to show how foreign wars were used to quell rebellions. This reference is somewhat over my head, but I think the main message is supposed to be that foreign wars are used to quell rebellions.

Bogomilism arrives in France, and it reminds bohemians and Moravians that they have not always lived in the entrails of an imperial leviathan, and shared all things in common, in a community without thieves of poor people.

215 Church nor empire no commerce are held in high regard to the country and townspeople, they sing “rhythmed chronicles” which contrast the ancient community with the commercial imperial institutions, who applaud Jan Milic of Kromiriz when he speaks of the church as an Antichrist, and who agree with Jan of Brno when he says “private property is the original sin.” The church stirs up bogus relics, like Jesus’s diapers, nails from the cross, and “a supply of Virgin’s milk,” and allows them to be sold. The rector Hus tries to condemn the sale of relics, and calls the pope a Simoniac, or basically a religious pimp.

Some students are killed and this sparks an event to where Hus tells people to pay no attention to the Simoniacs, and to “seize the property of the church.” Burghers and nobles hear this threat, and appropriate tracts of church land.

216 Hus is still loyal to the power that condemns him, the emperor. They see that the emperor’s conduct is upheld, they cannot see the Simionacs, and they have Hus burned. Hus’s burning starts as a theological dispute that will turn into a revolution that makes France’s and Russia’s look conservative, if not bloody.

People gather together in the hills, countryside, and leave the leviathan, to start a new community without bosses or workers, nobles or surfs, and where all things are held in common, and agents of the church cannot enter. The Bohemians and Moravians still think of themselves as other than what they are, and elsewhere. Perhaps going back to this diversion of space metaphor, the standing reserve moving through time, for a future place. The feeling of having taken oneself up from something, and not having a connection to it, like the totem was connected to the native

American’s history. They consider themselves Hebrew counterparts to the apostles, and some believe Jesus will re-appear. But the Taborites are not expecting Jesus to re-appear, they are their own saviors. Waldensians hate all religious orders, they think kings, bourgeois magistrates, dukes etc. are usurpers. The Taborites reject “authority in all its forms,” as well as “oppression in all its forms.” Particularly “dehumanizing labor.”

218 The Pikarti, also called Adamites, find the state of nature again. Adamites expect civilization to collapse when people withdraw from cities, and when that day comes none will need to work. Here private property or money would not be a burden, and people could peacefully wait for society to collapse. Adamites hasten the free community in the state of nature by plundering raids on the rich. Perlman alludes to how Marx is immersed in the ruling language, and calls the revolutionary tactics “scientific.” These revolutionaries are not wishful thinkers, they cast themselves as the beast’s beheaders.

219 When the Taborites learn of Hus’s killing at the hands of Emperor Sigismund, they overthrow the empire in Prague. The empire has few followers, heads of state and church are thrown out of the windows of their offices. The emperor cries to his bitch, the pope, who declares a crusade against infidels. Five imperial armies attack the poor Taborites, who only wanted to live away from their abusers, captors, and abusers, and they are killed because they dared believe that they deserve something more than slavery. That is all that living under capitalism is, is slavery; you’re either someone’s bitch, or you’re the bitch master. You can choose to be the oppressor, or the oppressed under capitalism; these are your only two options. Estate owners are relics of another age, who cannot stand up to a popular uprising, who dream of a “beautiful tomorrow.” The crusades of the god believing pus gorgers leads to many Catholic defeats.

220 The fate of the Taborites is the fate of most civilizations in this book who are at war for more than a single generation. Central European nobles will actually be the ones to expropriate the church from its land and wealth. The most violent of the Taborites is the Adamites, who believe that anything is justified for the sake of the earthly Eden. The Adamites don’t have a military apparatus, as they reject “all institutions” including the institutions that create a “functioning war machine.” Here we might think of Deleuze’s war machine, which is a slippery surface which refuses to take on any territorialized connections, and is synonymous with a nomadic lifestyle, and may be adopted by a military of an empire, but may also be taken on personally as a sort of direction, or way of life – refusing to take on the representational connections, and identities which the unfree society imposes on you, to order you as technology and take away your will.

221 Taborites will expel the violent atomites from their ranks, as they are Hussites who do not believe in violence. When self abandon is given up for self defense, armors and masks appear, and exotic visionaries are expelled from the ranks. There are two opposing tendencies going in “opposite directions,” withdraw from the entrails of the leviathan, and defense against the monster’s attacks. The taborites don’t make generals, they have a people’s army.

222 The leviathan is “nothing but a machine for grinding out armies.” Echoing something Perlman said earlier in the book, that people who experience the war of the leviathan know just about all there is to know about the leviathan. The taborites become “the mirror image of what they are fighting” another sublimation of the violence of the leviathan occurs. Adamites plunder Hussites as well as Catholic nobles. Adamites maintain their freedom from forced labor.

223 Adamites disrupt the Taborites defensive apparatus. So the Hussites elect an elder who is in practice a Bishop to judge the “views of the erring Taborites.” They begin to take on the armor that the sought to defend against. Adamites go into the forest to escape the forced labor, permanent armies, and bishops. Huska of the Adamites allows himself to be taken back by his abusers, who he thinks are decent people. The Adamites have feasts with sex, love, and play, because they reject the doctrine of original sin. The Taborites wipe out the Adamites and all that remains of them is their names.

224 Now the Taborites have more in common with the leviathan than the free communities. It is a nation state with an army driven by patriotism and fealty, and is no longer a beacon of freedom. With the “slow suicide” of the Taborites, we see the birth of the reformation of Christianity. Not sure if he’s talking about the historical event known as “the reformation” unless he’s just saying Christianity reformed in its leviathanic form. I think he might mean both.

Taborites took their rebellion to Germany, where a lot of the anti Taborite armies were formed. And a new popular uprising is formed, between people who see people as equal, and share things in common. Insurrections shake Europe once again.

225 Perlman says “withdraw is the human response to progress” and the leviathan’s keepers know it. Every form of immersion in the leviathan’s entrails will wear a human face, and simulate withdraw. This was like in Sumer, where they brought the world into their gardens, and pretended like it was nature. People try to make themselves feel as though they have brought the state of nature into the entrails of the leviathan, and they will wear this tension with them as long as they are not allowed the freedom of a community in “the state of nature” as he put it earlier.

Catholic pus eaters devour every last remaining freedom, kinship, and community on the planet. The last remaining Taborites organize themselves into a Union of Organized Brethren, and carry out the last love feasts in the sickly memory of the Adamites.

226 The doctrine of sin is passively adopted by Europe, and those who don’t live in sin will be killed. Anyone who calls Christianity a religion of peace is a fucking liar, or just doesn’t know their own religion’s history. It is a religion that represents internal and external strife, and that is the only thing that sin represents. If you believe in sin, you are a fool trapped in the technology of the church and your will is not your own. You’re not only a fool, you’re a perpetuator of microfascism, which is cancerous representationalist beliefs, despotic signifiers and Oedipalizations which ravage the psyche, and therefore a type of fascist. A racker of minds, a minion of pus.

227 Perlman believes that the leviathan produces self-annihilating servitude of a ruler; a human community is one where a person seeks self-realization. Self-annihilation as in Perlman explained earlier that the purpose of the cosmological context of the state of nature and history, is to realize your “true self.” Having rulers is self-annihilating. Here we might see Perlman expressing a belief in a sort of humanistic authenticity, as opposed to Heideggerian authenticity. Heidegger’s authenticity is an a-moral, “objective” view of being, otherwise known as Dasein, or the being in the world which circumspectively weighs their ready to hand options, and makes them either in regard to the-they, or the generalized otherness of the world, which I associate with the generalized otherness of the superego, which is the desire of the ID from its past form, sublimated into particular Oedipalizations and sadisms against the ego, which constitutes the conscious surface of experience. The ego decides between having their will organized by polymorphous perversity, and a regression in regard to a superego which supposedly plots the “correct developmental path” for a person. Perlman talks earlier how psychoanalysts will talk about civilization and its discontents only to make people feel normal under the leviathan. You have a choice under the leviathan, to be organize the standing reserve of your own body into machinery, or to be free and realize your true self.

Here Perlman is also entirely at odds with Lacan, who believes there is never a true self, and that one is always striving, and never satisfied. In order for Perlman’s view to work, you have to believe in something. Belief, maybe even a type of faith in the existence of a personal self, which can be organized outside of the leviathan. Perhaps to reconcile this, we can look towards Deleuze. Being is a fabrication, philosophy is the history of science fiction writing, but Perlman doesn’t seem to say that being, humanity, etc. are anything but the opposite of abstractions, but they are mythological. Perlman talks about the mythological as a sort of rhythmic time, in touch with the past, and leviathanic time as linear, and disconnected, continually picking up and moving, as opposed to having arrived at the destination which is not further off in a future place after progress occurs, but what we have right now. This is what causes the death of potentiality, otherwise known as circumspection for ready to hand opportunities, for people to experience their true selves outside of being ordered by abstractions. Perlman makes a very interesting reversal between what is considered an abstraction – science, arche, are abstractions, while freedom, humanity, and mythology, overtake the arbitrary displacement of knowledge by these existentially bankrupt, formalistic abstractions of science and technology.

The human tools of the renaissance give way to the “genius” and the “expert.” These people are “animate instruments” who have no predecessors. The artisans of Sumer and Egypt were different from the human tools of Europe. They do things for the temple and gods as opposed to merely serving power. There were still vestiges of the human community that exerted a moral force. Here we can see that Perlman is not one of these modern people who are against morality, as I once was, and perhaps in a more nuanced way still am. For me, morality has to do with the Deleuzian moral image of thought. Every thought we have is moral in some way, in the sense that it is a value that we hold about how we think we should interpret the world. So in the sense that someone denies that there’s morality, they deny the values that they hold behind everything they think – and people who believe that there is no purpose for morality, and that science has replaced morality, have internalized the abstractions of the leviathan and care nothing about a human community in which people can realize their true selves and not be ordered as technology. The bro-dude tech stem field is filled with such pus eaters and sycophants eager to serve wealth, power, and war. Fuck analytic philosophy, fuck scientism, which is the belief that science has replaced every other way of thinking, including (I won’t say religion, as religious people are not free, but Perlman’s “ways”) ways of life considered foolish, and simply unscientific and unprofitable by the modern day, historically detached scientists, who see themselves as merely observing the cosmos as it’s “supposed to be.” This mindset is an appendage of the “objective liberal scholar” monster, who are all the little pus eating secretaries of the leviathans.

228 The renaissance man is “perfectly immoral.” They “retain no vestige of the human community” and there is no limit to what use they can be put. Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, all were eager to sell secrets to rulers, but Shang Yang, Machiavelli, and Archimedes are responsible for the “it works!” implying it does what it was intended to do as a machine. This is another way we can see the way that assuming authorship is a sort of way of ordering a person as machinery; rather than looking at the ways in which people can be free, and the biosphere intact, where nature and its occupants can order themselves authentically, they look at ways in which people can be ordered as machines. Aristotle and Plato “valued detachment more than employment.” What does employment mean in this context? The two uses of the word employment means to find a job, or to be paid to do something, or giving work to someone.

The saints were “acrobats of self torture” and they “evacuated themselves” in front of Optimus Maximus, I assume meaning eliminated their true selves. Shamans would sometimes “concoct secrets to killing” instead of “healing their own kin.” Here we see that Perlman is not against medicine, and in fact he says that doctors of the medieval ignored many known herbal remedies of the time, and in fact had worse practices like bloodletting.

Perlman himself had a heart condition when he was in his early teens caused by the flu, which damaged the heart valve which would eventually kill him when he was 50 plus years old, and after undergoing surgery the first time for it, he said that he wouldn’t undergo it again, but he did and died on the operating table as his heart became inoperable on a 20% chance of fatality given by the doctors. An ironic end to the beginning where his doctors said he would never walk, or run, or leave his bed ever again. But he did, and he travelled the world, not running, but biking, skiing, spending his last 25 cents on coffee and cigarettes as he arrived alone in California, after escaping from Czechoslovakia and going to the United States, where he briefly became a teacher. The point is Perlman is not against people living healthy lives, I think he understood that medicine has the power to heal people, and he extols people who heal others, although he commented that he felt that the particular doctors he was under were sort of looking at him as a cash cow, as his wife comments in Perlman’s biography.

229 The church launches a murderous persecution of women healers, and calls this the witch hunts. Experts and executives have no more use for the church than Adamite radicals. Muslim merchants had limits on their trade much like the artisans, but the Europeans took the trade without the Islam, and this conversion will be “felt by the whole biosphere.”

230 There is no limit to what a European will do for profit. Muslim merchants still have their share of unrestrained plunderers. In Islamic countries, these sorts of men would do their dirty work under hoods, but in Europe, the corruption is out in the open.

231 We get from Adam Smith what sounds like what Chomsky would call “the vile maxim” do unto others whatever brings you profit. Nietzsche says “dehumanize yourself in order to be exalted” in Perlman’s words. He’s referring to “Christian self torturers” and their ressentiment; they eradicate their human qualities to be exalted by Optimus Maximus, referring to the Christians known as the Anchorites. Their “humanly revolting feats” will be featured on church walls. Bankers and investors will replace the pictures of the Anchorites in the pictures of the exalted. Profit seekers and power servers see nothing human or natural as sacred. “The human community is as distant as the most distant star, and nature is a treasure house for plunder.”

232 Burghers reduce people to sellable commodities, and scientists will “reduce both atoms manipulable by power artists” referring to the makers of the atomic bomb ironically as artists of power.

Before the renaissance, things were reasonable if they suited the human and nature in its natural context. Irrational, unnatural, and inhuman were synonyms. The irrational masked as rational will reach it’s pinnacle in Hiroshima in this “next to last invention of irrational ‘reason.’”

233 The seekers of the human community are burned at the stake. The exalted are servants of the devil, they are servants of the “fourth beast of the book of Daniel” the leviathan. The beast has a human head, a sham human head and reduces humanity and nature to things and objects; obstacles or potential instruments

They once mythologized “contextual, symbolic, and literal meaning” is scrutinized as a potential obstacle or instrument, showing Heidegger’s essence of technology. Reason a power for comprehending meaning, becomes a power for dissolving meaning and “isolating phenomena from any context.

233 Once the community is no longer present, the temple becomes filled with lifeless relics. The gods of the people are dead because people don’t take the gods seriously anymore. The renaissance is the Leviathan’s coming out party, its first appearance in the beast’s own clothes. The Leviathan is Europe’s god; now naked power is god. Lugalzaggizi and Optimus Maximus fall into the “artificial beast’s shadow.” Now naked power is god. The ancient greeks create facades which hide the power of the Polis and commodities of wine and olives behind the communities dead gods. Here Perlman looks at Nietzsche’s comment that god is dead and we have killed him as something which was already happening during the Greeks. The idea is that these things become artificial and divorced from their natural context. Dead gods become ornaments that once went on the façade, which now go directly on the claws and fangs.

234 This reminds me of the reverse of Plontinus’s essay on beauty. Instead of constructing a beautiful image of oneself, there is nothing left of the beauty of nature and not-for-profit mythology. Instead it recedes into the background, replaced by the temporary occupant of the beast’s head.

Davinci designed war machines for those in power. The renaissance artists mastered self abandon, that they seem to reach the limit of what is humanly possible. The devotees of leviathanic power will devolve into “artistic morons we will know as advertisers and propagandists, the self-styled “commercial artists.” People who are incapable of leviathan worship are the leviathan’s good people, and they are called degenerates and “bohemians.” In Rembrant’s time some of the artists turn their back on “leviathanic subjects, I assume meaning the patrons.” Consummate ornamentors will keep their offices, and so called savants will be bureaucrats and scientists.

235 The power servers will reduce all human and natural subjects to “manipulable leviathanic objects. The church is burdened with relics of human freedom, whereas the beurocrats adopt humanism to award the relics of freedom. The artificial beast decomposes all seeds of Eden. The leader of the leviathan is the tabula rosa on which the pseudo thoughts of the leviathan are written.

236 Martin Luther, a wicked, stupid pus eater just like every other Christian “ruler” in this story, learns from the mistakes of the Hussites and starts a war against pro and anti church peasants who want to rekindle the natural human community. Here can see that throughout the ages, wicked, stupid men have subjugated others just so that the pus can continue to flow into the mouths of the entitled ones. Rulers rush to Lutheranism out of a desire for booty.

The Lutherans are power servers first, they are not interested in the artistry and learning of the renaissance, but the blind devotion to the leviathan. Fucking disgusting. Luther, in his sick, depraved way, destroyed the unified hatred that peasants and lords shared of the hierarchy of the church and its tithe gathering of Catholicism; but now the hierarchy of Rome replaces Catholicism, and people are only Lutherans in Sunday. This is accomplished by the slashing, burning, and hanging of peasants.

237 The successors of the taborites are hunted and exterminated by protestant national armies. With Protestantism, we get the rise of factories of beurocrats who are not connected with the state. The monopoly the church had over life, had been passed on to naked, unadorned power of the leviathan. Renaissance church men are similar to merchants in their hate nature and community; they rush to be the solve venders of every conceivable service. In their rush, they “complete the rape of the human populations.” Everything humans did for themselves is taken over by state licensed monopoly.

238 The church launches and inquisition against Jews, Muslims, and women who are healers, who the church seeks as a scapegoat instead of the humanists. State licensed doctors ignorant of the history of medicine begin to police the sick. They will eventually appropriate the knowledge of the witches, but healing will always be incidental to policing. Everything, not just medicine, becomes subject of policing of humans and the biosphere. Doctors, philosophers, metaphysicians, “send their tentacles probing” into people’s memory for traces of the human community.

239 The so called golden age, is an age of the private property of men of letters, and dominion over beast and foul. Like preachers turn on the sinful with instruments of torture, the state licensed savants turn free communities into leviathanic claws and fangs, which I assume means recruitment for military or police forces. The first anthropologists are the eyes and ears of the leviathan, their goal is not to live in human communities, but live off of them.

The discovery of AmeriKKKa is a leviathanic discovery for world eaters, witch burners, and head hunters are now face to face with a vast new field.

240 Perlman talks about the native American myth of Wiske, the character who was a gift giving miscreant who brought technology and arche to the native Americans. Although banishment was unheard of, they banished Wiske and his gift giving because they were happy without Archon. This is anarchist, as the an in anarchy means without, and arche means rulers – so the native Americans were without rulers and therefor anarchistic.

241 Rhythmic time is the antithesis of linear time. Linear time is Leviathanic, and rhythmic time represents life, is the subject of dance, and expresses rhythms of the cosmos. Examples are a hearts beat, the sun’s rising, and vegetation’s rebirth, and these rhythms are grasped in symbols. This is a sign that Perlman is not one of those primitivists who think that we would be better off without language, although it is a common and correct primitivist view, that language is an instrument of control and each little word, for Max Stirner, is a fixed idea. Rhythmic events are the subject of songs, dances, and frequent ceremonies and festivals. Leviathanic time is linearly engraved in tablets, stone, paper, and eventually machines. I wonder whether or not Perlman read Heidegger, as Heidegger also rejected the linear time of Hegel. Archon got no further than a funny story in native American society. Like the Jazz artist Sun Ra, music is the rhythms that constitute the cosmos, as Sun Ra explains in his movie.

242 Perlman raises the question of why people would reject civilized life of law, order, and amenities. Here, before Perlman says anything, I want to point out that the conditions that people live under in the leviathan do not constitute conditions which are helpful in and of themselves, and in fact exacerbate the conditions of inequality which produce desperation, and crime. The Mother Earth answer, and the anarchist answer in general, is that the rulers are the abusers, and they are the ones who make the laws. What would be preferable, is not some ruler who is quartered off from you, making commands of you from afar, but rather a community who intersubjectively determines their ways, where freedom is bolstered by mutual aid, which is necessary for the survival of people.

Native Americans had totems, with names which would only be attached to living things, and they would become uneasy if the names were attached to non-living things. The Potawatomi did not experience population growth. Naming expressed a “missing rhythm” and says something about the expectations of the music that might be heard, but the specific name cannot predict the rhythm that will emerge. There were no schools, children were left free to emulate their aunts and uncles, or animals, or anything under the sun, not excluding the sun.

243 Children would go to a dream lodge, where some of them would fast, until a totem spirit visited them. Their own spirited helped them determine whether or not they wanted to live up to their ancestors whose names they carried.

244 Going back to the question of why Native Americans rejected archon, the examples just given provide the explanation. Why would someone want to encase themselves in a meaningless, linear, visionless order? Perlman tells the story of one of the Patowami children who married his sister, his sister who tried to expel Wiske, and her brother who became a peacemaker. The sister exposes the stunted ways of the leviathan, and the full development of the person in the state of nature as the Native Americans were in.

245 The quality of songs has declined since written language, but some of the rhythms still disrupt those of our time in the songs which were made in the time of the decline.

If the leviathan is as natural to humans as hives are to bees then such a conclusion cannot be allowed into the song of free people, because doing so would predict the world’s.

246 Perlman raises the question of how stories of the leviathan reached the native Americans, from Atlantas or Mu, but this raises more questions than answers, and the news could have blown in from any of the four directions.

247 We don’t know enough to say whether the trickster lore originated with leviathanic travelers. Wendats who told of leviathanic people were not interested in “his-story” but “their own cosmic context.”

248 The native Americans had their own burial rituals around common burial grounds. They would meet the people who were related to their ancestors at these meetings. They had genuine solidarity which would not have been improved by leviathanic “peace keeping institutions.” There were leviathanic breezes long before the French Jesuits.

Perlman speculates that perhaps the “southern leviathan” (which one is that?) would have gotten to the natives first if it had not been for the European one. But if we look at the European leviathan as a freak, and his-story as an aberration, then we can imagine a world where the leviathan never occurred in native America.

249 People who say the leviathan is inevitable are trained to see “the decomposition that accompanies every functioning leviathan.” While its inevitability is an illusion, its spread over the length of the continent is not. Up to this point the leviathan has failed to swallow the human community of the double continent, and confront the biosphere; it has been explained before that the leviathan, with its commerce and unfree people, is the enemy of the biosphere and the human community, which is what Perlman contrasts with leviathans and their capture of people’s potentiality and circumspection.

250 The Patowami are not the only ones with their stories of possible leviathan. There’s also stories of stone giants from Wendats. Guarani spoke in horror of “the one.” Hopi told of gods destroying human beings, who turned away from the ways of living beings. Winnebago told of a trickster. David Graeber goes into great detail on the brilliance of a Wendat Statesman around the same period of time that Perlman writes about, who once settles arrived, would take stories from the native Americans and influenced greatly the European culture through the traveler’s tales of the native Americans, and their rejection of arche).

Quetzalcoatl or feathered serpent, which may have been a feather on an explorers hat, or a statue on the bow of a ship, arrived and the tribes people gave gifts to them, but they soon tired of giving gifts, but Quetzalcoatl left and vowed to return. An important event was a cosmic event, cyclical, like the rising and falling of the sun, an eclipse of a moon, the journey of a comet. They are cyclical, like cycles of life.

251 For a brief period stone cities cropped up, from people enamored with the visitors. But they fell to ruin, and people went back to the forest, the leviathanic man was expelled for now. But Quetzalcoatl re-emerges from the sea. Anthropologists will explain the demise of these cities with every term except human resistance. Perlman “differentiates himself from other scholars” which is such a hilarious thing to even think about in terms of Perlman, as though scholars in a school department aren’t overwhelmingly more likely to be the enemy of the human community and rhythmic cosmic context, than someone who is writing purely out of a desire for the rejection of this death of potentiality, and capture of life. Who gives a fuck what scholars without a will of their own controlled by the leviathan think, unless they are against the leviathan? What is needed is not more nuance, and disputes with the scholarly stooges of death, what is needed is direct action! One mustn’t justify themselves to their abusers, all that is needed is rebellion, let them simper for a “good reason” while we dismantle their system, as all they deserve is to have their death machine dismantled. Does anyone ever need a “justification” to tell someone to stop raping them? Hell fucking no! Let’s end leviathanic ways and implement de-growth communism.

Degrowth communism operates on the idea that we cannot have unlimited growth on a finite planet. The goal would be to create things in a sustainable way, which does not include profit in the equation. The main factor I would use to explain the implementation of degrowth communism would be the subtraction of the profit motive, which arises from the extraction of surplus labor value. When surplus is extracted, this means that production must be kept at a high rate, while the pay is as low as it can be, as this maximizes the extraction of surplus labor value. But in a de-growth communist society, by the very nature of the system being inefficient, hemorrhaging resources to the greedy, maniacal, undeserving, psychopathic rich, who control our lives, and care nothing for freedom, we would not have the sort of gouging of the environment, and rapacious hoarding that we see in communities where people are allowed to take on these sorts of infinitely acquisitive roles.

It is true that de-growth communism is not the state of nature, and the human community, but with billions of people, who need to be taken care of, the biggest thing that would need to happen is for a system which can take care of them to emerge. Theoretically speaking it would be able to take care of more people than the previous systems, because like for profit insurance mafias who simply get between you and your doctor and make you pay more, we would not have the rapacious rich to hoard the wealth which could go to help everyone. Somewhere around 2/3rds of food is wasted in our country, because we simply let it go to waste if it cannot be sold. This is another inefficiency of capital, products must be destroyed if they cannot be sold, and this contributes to the tens of thousands of deaths of lack of healthcare and poverty in the united states. It is a primitive accumulation, which is the genocide that is necessary to keep the inefficient beast of capitalism running smoothly.

Theoretically speaking, this would drastically cut down on the amount of work that people have to do, because they are not so busy serving the rich. They could work shorter hours, share the jobs that they have with more people because there’s less hours needed, be paid more in terms of simply being given directly the things they need to survive, which are shared communally, as well as personal property like house, toothbrush, etc. and people would have time to pursue their hobbies. Right now time is one of the biggest things which is consumed by this system of slavery and rape, rape in terms of taking away our will, taking away what Perlman considers our “humanity” which seems to me to be our dignity and our self respect of self governance, which the leviathan consumes as our will becomes its will.

251 Linear his-story replaces the rhythmic cycles of life. Music gave way to the march of time. At first leviathans were swallowed by communities. But the coming and going of the beast became part of cyclical time. Leviathans were like any other excrescence, they remained manure. Music did not give way to the march of time.

252 Leviathanic adventurers would become part of the rituals, the rhythmic time of the community subsumed the leviathanic time. But playing with the lethal toy of the leviathan would have consequences. Europeans would ally themselves against the pure, the beautiful, and the new.

253 Central Africa, America, and Australia are the sites of mass genocides, and monstrous leviathanic colonies. Written words cannot convey dream time, every meaning has been “inverted.” He goes onto elaborate that all life is an aberration to death. Taking perhaps a Thomas Kuhn view of paradigms, there is the paradigm of the leviathan, and the paradigm of free human communities in rhythmic time and Perlman says they are “untranslatable.” The main argument that I have heard against Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm idea is that a paradigm is translatable. But this paradigm is not, the terms are mutually exclusive, one simply cannot see one in terms of the other. The leviathan’s world is wilderness to living beings, and freedom of living beings is wilderness to leviathans, they share a different “horizon.” Here we might see how Perlman might be pulling directly from Heidegger, who for Heidegger in Being and Time, time is the horizon of being.

254 Perlman talks about renegades of civilization. They shed their masks and whole armors. They throw off their commodities and shed an “insupportable burden.” Contact with the free community gives one insights no scribe could have provided. Nurturing contact stimulates dreams and even visions. Here Perlman mentions Freud’s civilization and its discontents. How they are “psyche manipulators.” Their most vaunted successes will be miserable failures, as the leviathan does not nurture humanity. The leviathan discovers unrepressed humanity and consumes it, free beings are the leviathan’s greatest enemy.

The word colonizer comes from the Spanish name Colon, who will reap horrific genocides on the native populations. He is more catholic than the pope and thinks he is leading the Israelites out of Egypt. He cannot loosen his armor and see communities with lives and thoughts far more rich and complex than his own.

255 Here can see how the colonizers deny people their own individuality, and personality, and expect everyone to deny their own vision, and follow the vision the expect others to see. Here we can see a reverse of Oscar Wilde’s development of personality which anarcho communism allows for, we see the inverting of personality into tools to be used and manipulated as a sort of hive mind, which operates as a unity and denies all humanity and life. We can see a very Nietzschean theme here, in that Perlman sees the native Americans as far less filled with ressentiment than the insidious, dark, and morally decrepit Catholics.

The analytic minded precursors of natural scientists, economists, and anthroplogists, the christ-bearer and his accomplices, find things and objects which they categorize as obstacles or potential instruments. Heirs of the crusades and witch hunts name the Arawak’s “savages.” Las Casa takes off his armor, sees the humanity in the people being exterminated, and calls for an end to the extermination of Arawaks. Perlman comments “what is conversion to Christianity other than “enslavement and bestialization?” What is the god that calls for such monstrous sacrifice?

256 Under the leviathan people are ordered as technology, they become “leavers and drills” appendages, without the human it is just “inert” and “wilderness.” This is the function of captain and technology. Tribes during the Spanish genocide of native Americans would simply die and did not survive captivity. The king does not cry for the loss of human life, but for the loss of what is later called “capital and technology.” Capital and technology are the mere relation of objects, not leavers and drills, but human beings reduced to leavers and drills. Without the human operators, the leavers and drills are inert, and they revert to wilderness. This is how in Heideggerian terms, circumspection and the ready to hand appear to you different ways depending on your mood. One might say, in Heideggerian terms, the type of time which you see in your lens, can either be a human lens, or an inverted lens that sees everything in terms of death. This is Perlmanian circumspection, which opposes the eternal return and life affirmation, to the ressentiment of life denial, and ordering of people as machines of Heidegger. Time and technology become one and the same in death, linearity; and freedom and having a will of one’s own, become one in the same with rhythmic time and the free community. Ponty talks about how cars are like extensions of us. Here I think Perlman sees something very similar, in how the world is an extension of us, and when it is taken as not to be, it becomes inert and meaningless, and this actually has a real effect on the biosphere as this worldview requires treating the world differently than someone who believes that nature has some sort of significance; for Perlman the significance is cosmic and rhythmic.

Everything Midas touched turned to gold, everything the king of Spain touches dies.

257 America is an object that glistens and then disappears when it is touched; gold is the object petit a for the Spanish king. He tries to grasp it and as soon as he thinks he has it, it disappears. Death is the conquistador, “death is the unspoken name of superior technology.” Death is the “superior culture of the community-less invader.

258 Resistance is interminable because it has no term. It has no cycle, it is not part of the rhythm of life. Azteks think resistance is in spears, but it is in drums, not spears; it is in music, rhythms that nurture and sustain a community.

259 Perlman talks about how scholars will view the “attractiveness of civilization” as that which destroys ancient civilizations. Historians paint “Alexander-like heroes storming the walls of cannibalistic monsters.” Rather than face that their technology implements unprecedented biological and chemical warfare on living beings, people find a different profession, or glorify the genocide with the Alexander-like heroes.

260 By the time people return to the area of the Azteks, death has taken over the life of the sacred places, the music, the rhythm of the eternal return is usurped by supply and demand, the exception of the mode of production through the technification of earth, the ordering of standing reserve.

By this time, rhythmic time cannot subsume the disruptions coming from the leviathan. Laws of supply and demand replace rhythms of communities. Marauders have appropriated lodges and fields and burrowed into sacred places. The myths and music will be forgotten.

Aguirre was a megalomaniacal representation of imperialism, he kills, enslaves, threatens, and instrumentalizes people. Such a person is “beyond good and evil, above humanity.”

261 Aguirre’s letter to the king of Spain represents the first revolution, as opposed to the American one against Britain.

262 News emerges from all three directions of “inconceivable deaths” from foreigners across the ocean. The Patowami recognize it as Wiske the trickster. They tell a story of how Wiske raped several women on the other side of a pond by sending his member across to rape the women. The phallic significance of the invasion is clear; it is a his-story unfolding, a genocide.

The Patowami prepare an expulsion ceremony, but during the ceremony there are cries of pain, as the rats brought from over seas carry the plague.

263 Apologists who refer to the invaders as “we” will deny the plagues, will say they want to count the dead bodies, and they will say that there was no one there on the continent; that they turned an empty lot into a Disney Land. Of many few live, few remember the names of the vanished totems, but the music is entirely forgotten. Tales die untold.

Refugees of the westerners leviathanic apocalypse gathered not in a community but a melting pot. It was a fragmented existence with no common history, or beginning. The fragments are not a totem, people will forget the tales and the fragmented existence will even reflect a sort of discordant quality in the music.

264 Time disconnected from the past is dream time, imaginary time, unreal time. Disconnected from the rhythm of the eternal return, which as the virtual is everything that has already happened, happening again as new. The leviathan is ressentiment, the familiarity of the uncanny and its unfamiliarity. The music, myth, and ceremony of the community “will refer to no lived experience accessible to any people trapped in the leviathan.” What is lost, is immeasurably more important than what economists will write in their ledgers, Perlman comments.

America’s invaders eliminate potential obstacles, “civilize the potential instruments,” and transform American into a labor camp.

265 These stories do not show the leviathan to be a natural phenomena like bee hives, the people who live under the leviathan are forced to live under it, and the native Americans never had a choice because America was founded on a Christian fascist genocide; such a system cannot be imposed on people with a communal way of life, or even a small connection to “dream time.”

266 Perlman talks about himself for once, he says he’s eager to end the story of the leviathan. At this point he would have been near 50, and his heart would have been giving him trouble at this point. The struggle Against His-Story, Against Leviathan, is the struggle of life itself, “the resistance of the earth mother against the monster tearing her asunder.” Perlman will conclude his-story by telling the “events leading to its end.” For Perlman this is it, we are doomed; the biosphere will be destroyed. Here Perlman seems to be somewhat of a Nostradamus, forecasting and predicting the future. For Hegel, we cannot predict what a future system will hold, or make judgements on how the next system should be. Fuck Hegel. We need degrowth communism, to save the earth, and free the zeks from their labor camps, and masters. Perlman’s prediction, if we need call it that, may be true – it seems likely. But Perlman also says the leviathan is not inevitable, so he is not entirely a forecaster. To not resist, is ressentiment against the question of whether life is worth living.

All of the earth will fall into a single artificial beast. The Europeans do civilization a disservice, they put a term on its existence.

267 Quoting Macbeth he says that when the leviathan is one, the tale told by an idiot signifying nothing is almost at an end.

Perlman quotes Jesus without mentioning Jesus, referring to the leviathan’s patrons “they know not what they do” referencing Jesus’s forgiveness for the Roman soldiers who crucified him. Now the Europeans are Zeks. They cannot remember a life where they were not in labor camps, and they may feel that something inside of themselves is dead and missing, and the suggestion that others may have what they lack triggers them. Zeks are “great equalizers” they want to democratize their position in the world. In this sense “they are not ignorant and they know perfectly well what they do and why.” In other words, fuck forgiving the Europeans.

268 The bonds of servitude are rendered invisible by the pioneering Zeks. Tithes and dues no longer become the arrangement of odious agents of the parish manor. It becomes costs exchanged at markets. What counts in the market is not a buyer’s blood or station, but only his money. Zeks volunteer to move land. If the Zek is in debt, they are in no different situation than the king, and they can always go over seas to the newly emptied continent. The Zek hates slaves who labor without conviction, but they hate more the renegade who allies with the human communities, and dispense with the amenities that the leviathan with its inverted lens says make it human. He hates most bitterly the decimated communities within which the renegade finds refuge. The zek is doing gods calling, sweating and laboring, frustrated by the stubborn earth, beset by lenders.

269 If the pioneer were to admit their humanity, even briefly, “his innards would explode, his armor melt, his mask fall, for he would in that flash of light see himself as a zek, his freedom as selfenslavement, his market civilization as a forced-labor camp. The devil would try to tempt him to

become a renegade and irony of ironies, he would fall, unlike eve, out of blessed labor into cursed Eden.” Here Perlman speaks in the second quoted sentence ironically, sarcastically using the inverted lens of the leviathan to say how ironic that the state of nature synonymous with Eden, is seen as a curse.

270 French treasure seekers search the new land for gold, but they find “animal gold” in the form the lasof pelts, for fur coat171 The priests say to the natives that they have come to “raise them out of their misery and turn them into subjects of King Louis’s realm.” The Patawami recognize Wiske but the children become French Catholics. The native Americans which were being ordered like technology no longer have the will of the leviathan controlling their body. So called “savages” as French Jesuits return to the forest and no savages become civilized.

272 Dream time was native Americans who fled the genocide perpetuated by Europeans, now even in fragments of dream time’s remains, they still have a wealth of freedom in kinship and community which the leviathan cannot provide.

Perlman remarks how a single individual is free of the “censorious pressures that repress a member of a group” the pressure to keep the armor tight. Consequently, this person is able to respond to hospitality, friendship and love. And if he responds, “his stiffness starts to dissolve” within such interactions. Here Perlman might be talking about the stiffness synonymous with the sort of literal phallus which he seems to see as the phallic signifier. In psychoanalysis today, people do not usually take the phallus literally, but Perlman says that the pyramids, the rockets, etc. are all phallus shaped, and the stiffness could be the stiffness of male sexuality. It would be consistent, but stiffness could also simply be the up tight feeling you get when you are living under a system of control.

Armies of the native Americans probably had planned to reconstitute communities in dream time, with the help of “plague immune bearded kinsmen” (the aforementioned renegades?), but we will never know what they encompass.

273 Here we can see the fascism of the early American Christians, who “branded, stigmatized, and classified people in terms of their heredity and “so called blood.” There are no lines in nature through which to divide it by means of imaginary blood relationships. In fact, there are no dividing lines in nature at all. Nothing we see in the world has any sort of fixed identity, in the sense that it is an eternal and cosmic significance. These significances are synonymous with the environment that produces them, and those who live under the leviathan cannot simply pretend like they are not controlled by the leviathan anymore. Perlman says that people living under it are even incapable of realizing life outside of it. When you live in a society where your will is not your own, but being ordered by the technology of someone else’s will, you do not have a life of your own, you are simply a puppet of the powers that be. That is why it is so disgusting that people serve the leviathan so sycophantically, like the STEM geniuses and savants, and their “Eurika” and “it works.”

Non purists establish themselves at Merry Mount. The “non purists” are possessed by their hosts, and they let their masks and armors fall. They laugh at the “small minded, stiff necked Zeks” who escaped one labor camp to put themselves into another.

274 The puritans raise Merry Mount to the ground. Puritans and successors will see themselves in terms of “fate and predestination.” Their fascist belief that they should have dominion over beast and foul. The puritans are spiritual heirs to the crusade’s victims. Their rage is not of “ahriman’s fire, the fire that consumes light in order to plunge the world into darkness, but from Ahura Mazda’s fire, the fire that expels darkness.

Burghers recognized that they had lost paradise, in this world and the next. They suspect they are Satan’s tools. They reach nothing but money.

275 The rich devise ways of interpreting their religion as a sort of prosperity gospel. People used to get into heaven for free if they are poor, but for Calvinism the rich go to heaven and the poor are damned. This was due to the literalist interpretation of the teachers of Calvin.

276 Drunk on manifest destiny, barbarian Europeans came to Native Americans, followers of the stupid, fucked up prophet Moses and the legacy of the leviathan, taking the king of kings of Lugalzaggizi, making it into an abstraction of a god, and affixing it to the head of the leviathan. Whatever the consequence of Moses’s actual actions as a person, what he did was lead the world to its annihilation; he was a doom bringer, by bringing a type of Christianity that brings with it manifest destiny, and generations of pus slurping monsters known as Catholics. He is also responsible for introducing arche, as Perlman doesn’t mention, but he brought the 10 commandments, several of which have rules about God’s insecurity, and few of the rules are actually about not harming others.

The puritan Christian fascists take from the native Americans which gave us the fur trade from native gifts. The scum believe to be emptying the promised land of its Amorites, Canaanites, Hittites, etc.

277 The European barbarians need to invent a pretext for genocide, to fit their holy delusions. They see an aversion to labor of the Natives as “Satan’s tools.” Having consumed so much pus, the Catholics are become pus, like Vishnu taking on their multi armed form, that they are become pus. The pus people burst open like a zit on the native communities, and pour the sublimated scum of their violence onto the brave natives who die fighting.

The scum and their river of pus bursting forth from Lugalzaggizi claim to have sufficient word from the abstraction that they could kill the women and children. This is the true America.

278 Soldiers are cowards who need the guns and powder of lugalzaggizi, shooting people as they ran. The invaders will take the term warrior from the “continent’s woodlands” (assuming he means the native Americans). Raids like these will later be called genocide.

In the story of David and Goliath, Goliath is the “puritan himself, Optimus Maximus.” Optimus Maximus receives his “final incarceration” as the dollar. The puritans are not done, they will continue killing. Tribes is a word made by bible readers, who consider the natives not as human beings, but things, “obstacles in the way of American progress.”

279 Nazis will later take ideas from the genocidal pioneers and only then will the books begin to reflect and sympathize with the plight of the natives. There are radicals in AmeriKKKa, but they hang non-conformists, jail and deport radicals, and sell dissidents into slavery. When do the saved do their saving? When they save to invest their savings in fleets of ships.

England has an advantage with its octopus leviathan, and soon embraces the entire world.

280 People who escape England only discovered freedom in America who joined the remaining native communities on the continent.

Renegades are not silent, they tell their stories, but the silence of the renegades is imposed on them by armored/civilized people.

The quakers were anti hierarchy, anti law and privilege. Peasant gentry claim their “common wealth,” and they “promptly silence” “peasants, clowns, and base people.”

281 The quakers survived the repression, they longed for an “earthly Eden” so they become extremely patient while rejecting armed resistance. They reject wealth and privilege, but their rebellion becomes limited. This mild practice makes them a bane to the puritans, who are pus, and can only see things in terms of death.

Due to the conditions the taborites face in the endless persecution of the leviathan, they are intent on showing the world they are not fanatics and they reduce the fire of the revolutionary to the light of the educator.

282 The Taborites are hounded even as educators. The Taborites found a Moravian church. They can dimly remember the Adamites. They ally themselves with the Mahicans, Lenni Lenapes, and Shawamnos, which are native American tribes that remain after the genocide. They take a risk in racist America by doing this. They have an Adamite love feast which is disfigured and looks like a Christian mass. The Moravians respect and admire their Native American hosts, in spite of their unremovable pedagogical masks and armors. They describe in numerous books their sympathy and understanding for their hosts, which constitutes a meager type of literature in history (perhaps having little, being much, as Perlman’s biography is titled, as in the literature is meager but important).

Seeing the Moravians live in harmony with the “savage injins” dements the pioneers and they start lunch mobs.

283 There is not a single warrior among the villagers, and the true savages, the white Europeans, cut them to pieces. “America means the extinction of freedom, kinship, and community, and also their memory.

284 The English speaking Aguirres, heirs of the Spanish conquistadors, spread death, slavery, and bleak misery across the continent, and speak eloquently of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The desolation is carried to an unaccountable Jerusalem, the city which Moses led his people to.

285 This life, liberty and pursuit of happiness is not that; it is “Wiske gone totally mad.” The declaration of independence is design to align Zeks with their keepers. The freedom is not the freedom from labor camps, but the freedom to kill without restraint. “The active patriot is a mass murderer,” the passive patriot is an enthusiastic onlooker of their team’s killing. Life, liberty, and happiness is the beast’s greatest enemy. The humans are part of the entrails, and the beast cannot speak its own name without the entrails losing confidence in it.

286 There is a leviathanic, imperialist fight to either enlarge the area of capture, or make the communities and forests a reserve for the rulers. The fur trade moves the springs and leavers of the world eating machine called the leviathan. The relation between human and tool is inverted, the human becomes an appendage of the machine, as Hobbes described. So maybe he’s using this in a Hobbsian way after all, but it still fits with Heidegger’s essence of technology.

Crazed buyers give all their money for titles of land, because each owner is an emperor of a “real domain, with absolute dominion over the walkers and crawlers, trees and the streams.”

287 They buy out the land that once was shared by natives with nature freely, and this yields enormous profits, which are used to buy ships to go to Africa and import slaves. The land pimps expropriate land and sell it, and their life, liberty, and happiness comes from the expropriated land which they sell. The land and fur trade are “not persons” as opposed to the greedy capitalist pus eaters who call corporations people in the citizens united bill in our country that allows unlimited campaign donations and is legalized bribery in our day and age. But Perlman makes the obvious even more obvious, corporations are not fucking people. It is not human beings who are threatened and harmed, it is the savings that are threatened and harmed. To this day AmeriKKKa is still that way.

Zeks remain zeks no matter which interest wins, which is still the same story today in electoral politics. They want to be taken in by their rulers because they long to be something they’re not.

288 They do not want to see themselves as Zeks, but business men, buyers and sellers, even if they only sell their labor power, and buy nothing but food with which to reproduce their labor power. His savings may be no more than the shit they produce in the outhouse. Outsiders, such as the Potawami, Outagami, and Miami think the Zeks are demented, mentally feeble, and made so by the grind that constitutes their pathetic, sycophantic, brainwashed existence. For the Zeks, there is no outside – the whole universe is a labor camp, and anyone who denies this is a ranter, a lunatic. These are “mutually exclusive” madnesses.

It's important for the last leviathan to deny the existence of an outside. The voices of the beast project leviathanic traits into humanities pre-leviathanic past, nature, and the universe. There is no perpetual motion machine, the beast will break down, decompose, or even destroy itself; in its frantic search for permanence, it projects itself onto realms and beings which are not machines.

289 Christians believe in progress that leads to a collapse, and this is not leviathanic, but a Christian commitment to the absurd. Showing that our lives as we live them for the Christian are just pointless, absurd tests, which makes sense if life is a veil of tears. So the Christians project this foul dominion over all realms, when it’s really just their own insecurity at their own inability for the phallic figure to be immortal in its power. But for the leviathan, it’s an “imminently logical entity” it sees this notion as contradictory, that life under it could be absurd, and merely a painful test. Either way, the two hideous, stupid notions exist simultaneously, and contradictorily, within the leviathanic Christian.

The enlightenment, illuminism, Masonry, Marxism, plus a few others represent leviathanic self consciousness.

Expropriation and usury are the capital gains which are the basis of progress. :”Rousseau says that the leviathan is an artifice imposed on human beings by force and fraud” but for enlightened merchants, all is artifice, they answer, nature as well as human beings, as well as the very universe.

290 Churchmen don’t realize that creation and machine mean the same thing, that presupposes maker and artificer. The universe is a great artifice, a vast machine, made by a great artificer, a mathematician. Demented pus guzzlers will say god intelligently designed the universe. The great artificer is Lugalzaggizi, Optimus Maximus, the god of armored legions.

Some poets among the businessmen identify the leviathan with Satan, or Mammon, but Catholics will fall into the beast’s shadow, as opposed to its bright cockpit, meaning that they will simply live beneath the beast instead of at the head of the beast? And some of what Perlman calls the illuminati of the free masons, will align themselves with the fire of darkness of Ahriman, against the fire of light of Ahura Mazda. They also needn’t worry that remnants of their ideas will fall into the hands of radicals. Ahriman and Mammon cannot be of service to radicals.

291 There is a certain dualism of the leviathan, which the monism betrays. It must deny the outside, and kill outsiders. There is nothing but things waiting to be turned into “leviathanic excrement.” The monism is not a description, but a prescription, a military strategy. In order to make materials for the leviathan, you have to separate them from their contexts, which is the task of the leviathan’s armies. The united states indeed has military bases around the world to protect its world trade. To quote the band Choking Victim “fuck world trade.” The progress of the machine is an unrelenting war against everyone and everything that is not a machine. The boundless confidence in the leviathan is epitomized by supply and demand diagrams of the leviathan’s economists. These seesaws, flashing lights, and buzzing indicators, are a moron’s paradise. So long as they see a decrease in supply, and an increase in demand, they are sure to see a growth in their savings. The gadget does what it was made to do, I assume meaning the market or the commodity being sold on the market?

The march of progress is not a war figuratively, but in fact, the march of progress is the name for the leviathan’s war against resisting humanity and nature, not a figurative war, but a factual war. It’s not waged with seesaws and buzzing indicators, but with high powered explosives, weapons, and armies of trained murderers. It’s a pyrrhic victory, as each victory leads to doom. The world is not these market indicators, but rather zeks and raw material reduced to machines, and it takes place through lynch mobs, militias, armies, which are the leviathan’s police.

292 Now the earth and its inhabitants are gunned down, broken up, and then shipped off to concentration camps. Trophy hunters called archeologists will display remnants of dream time behind glass cases. Exterminated human beings are replaced by zeks, human beings amenable to labor camp existences.

Perlman describes how the great artifice breaches all walls, increases its velocity at every turn, building on the idea of how it picks itself up and moves forward in time to a future place mentioned in a previous chapter. It’s like a winged rodent out of Dante’s Inferno. Its “soothsayers” will say the object approaches the speed of light and it loses its body and turns to smoke. This is a pyrrhic victory.

293 Ghosts of the of human communities rattle the leviathan with their hiss and howl. The happy inmates hurl themselves towards a happy tomorrow. They are eager to start a new frontier after conquering America. Inhabitants of the human communities retreat behind mountains, long rivers, beyond impassable deserts, impenetrable mountains, or by perpetual ice. Refugees recover lost rhythms, resume their dances, reenact myths, and reconstitute their music. They use horses, a

European import, a living being and a friend, even a cousin. They arrive at buffalo skin lodges on horse, these are the world’s last human communities.

294 Capitulators consider “the only good Indian a dead Indian” because of their lack of desire to work. The invaders will weave tall tales about how they were the civilized tiny David, vs the bullying Goliaths, they have trophy collections which act on viewers like inverting mirrors. Unlike the Taborites, the continents resisters don’t end up being encased in their own leviathan. The Englishmen in Virginia think that their “extremely friendly hosts” will be glad permanent servants of the Englishmen, but they are quickly disabused of their great expectations.

295 Wingina and Peminsapan tribes have strong and healthy warriors, who are able to fend off the Virginians, and reduce it to a “lost colony.” The English name their nemesis “the conspirator.” They call themselves patriots and freedom fighters even though they are trying to take the land and enslave the inhabitants who are actually defending their homeland and freedom. The hypocrisy of the colonists is similar to the Papists, in that they think they’re holy, but really they’re just unfathomably corrupt.

The ”conspirators” of the great lakes federate to stop the expansion of “new France.” The Foxes disband after being undefeated, yet decimated, so as to not become a perpetual war machine to stop the persistent invaders. New France, exhausted by its war against the Foxes, falls prey to the invading English. The English try to set up their amenities in the forest, but they are met with even more intense conspirators. The Patowami and their cousins federate against the English and scalpers.

296 People of different ways and mutually unintelligible tongues, federate against the invaders, and are determined to drive them back to the ocean. The federated tribes drive the invaders back out of the mountains, and they remind their fellow tribesmen that there used to be a world without invaders from Europe, rum, guns, cloth, etc. But they believe the lie that the invaders tell, that they won’t be back; Perlman remarks that these tribes people would not have believed the great prevarications of his-story, they would not have believed it. Americans see themselves as revolutionaries, democrats, everything under the sun except “greedy invaders and unscrupulous scalpers.”

297 Here Perlman suggests perhaps that the federated tribes said “Yea to life and No to the Leviathan by disbanding rather than becoming comparable killing machines. The next act is the “Indian removal bill” which is unmasked genocide. Entire populations, including the Patowami, are uprooted from their ancestral homes like weeds.

298 In the deportations, they would kill the natives as well, due to selling off their food and supplies as the military con men they are. The children recite “Why I’m proud to be an American.” There is nothing more disgusting than being American, in the words of the band Dystopia “I’m American because my parents fucked (I’m not American!).” They try lying to the natives again, but they know that Americans are consummate liars.

Along with natives they commit another atrocity that “boggles the mind;” they exterminate the Buffalo to deprive the natives of food, in an unnamed act of genocide. These are not the acts of thinking things, it is unthinking, mindless artifice that committed these acts “it is the deed of a mindless, lifeless synthetic.” The natives perform a ghost dance, which lifts them out of leviathanic time, and beyond his-story. They dream of a spirit that will sweep away the invaders and revive the buffalo herds.

299 The natives in captivity re-capitulate the themes of the anti-Roman crisis cult, which is invoked by jailers to justify their genocide. The light of these never defeated communities never dies, just like the light of Azura Mazda never dies.

Marx is inspired by Morgan’s vision of the Iroquois, their sharing ways are dubbed primitive communism. This lingers in the basement of the edifice, while laboring humanity passes upwards, through slavery, serfdom, and wage slavery, to fully developed communism. I assume he’s commenting on how it works for Marx? He talks about how the four beasts of Daniel, and the three ages of Joachim di Fiore’s three ages, are processed by the upward passages of humanities productive forces.

300 Perlman talks about how the highest stage of moronization is the proletariat themselves, past the concentration work camps. The revolutionary church funnels people into neo-Franciscan orders, leviathanic dead ends which are vanguards of repression. It becomes the goal of “stunted rebels” to eliminate the last trace of the human community and replace it with the proletariat, which I assume he means as the dictatorship of the proletariat, which I believe are Lenin’s words which ironically never happened at all like that in Russia, as they destroyed the worker councils and instead implemented the Stalin dictatorship.

To me it seems that Perlman is against the idea of a community of people who organizes themselves under communism, as what communists want is to take over the means of production, as opposed to fix the biosphere, and live in a free society without arche; one that implements mutual aid. Revolutionary archons compete with enlightened archons. The beast turns against the zeks, they have what Quakers call “inner light.” The beast is everything dark and synthetic.

Eliminating communities of outsiders, it produces them in its entrails. It expunges Zeks and replaces them with machines of its own substance.

This bizarre act, similar to the idea that I’ve heard that a “super advanced” artificial intelligence, ever so ironically named, would just turn everything into grey goo. A stupid as fuck machine if I’ve ever heard of one. But this is the bizarre last act of the “Technological Wonder” to reproduce everything in its own image, things made of its own substance – machines.

301 Perlman associates the ability to re-constitute lost rhythms, recover music, and regenerate human culture is the “light.” The beast plays battery run voices to battery run listeners – the beast is talking to itself, it is “its own sole frame of reference.” Perlman comments that the beast is above all else a war engine, and it is “likely to perish once and for all in a cataclysmic suicidal war” in which case Ahriman would permanently extinguish the light of Azura Mazda. Perlman did leave the United States at one point because of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

When people waste their lives trying to ask Ahriman not to destroy the light of Azura Mazda, they would likely learn too late that they are the ones who put the idea into the beast’s head. The beast is like Narcissus, enamored by its own image in its own synthetic pond, enraptured by the spectacle of itself. Perlman says it is a good time for people to let go of the leviathanic sanity, its masks and armors, and go mad, because they are being rejected from its pretty polis anyways.

302 America is where Anatolia was now, the cycle has come around again. To stay alive in America, people have to jump, dance, and by dancing, revive rhythms, and recover cyclical time. Pantheistic dancers and an-archists don’t sense that the artifice and linear His-Story is all, a cycle, which left the earth wounded, but which ends as night ends, and the sun rises. Perlman is not neatly a complete pessimist, or an optimist. He seems to suggest that the world is finished, and that it will likely be destroyed in a suicidal war, but he also suggests that the leviathan is not inevitable, and that it ends, as night ends. Perlman does not put forward a plan of action, but gives numerous hints about what might help avoid the leviathan, like sharing, and not forming a leviathan through the sublimated energy of war, like the Native Americans did. Perlman’s vision for the world is descriptive, as opposed to prescriptive; he’s not telling you what to do. Yet he is not neutral, as even a description takes a certain conviction which is held over other convictions. Perlman sees things in terms of moral good and evil, and yet, without such terms, what is left to describe the horror? Merely the leviathan and its neutrality.

Anarchy Journal Part 2, Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth.

Max Baginski – Without Government.

Baginski starts off by saying there are ways to organize life that do not revolve around the application of force, but solidarity, common action, and love of justice. Capitalism reproduces repression through violent hierarchical relations.

Capitalism reinforces a sort of social Darwinism in which the strongest and most greedy wins. Priests, soldiers, judges and hangmen uphold the law of the state, capital, and god. The school and family prepare you for obedience to the state.

The first law was imposed by force. Private ownership of land was likewise, taken by force. It’s not like everyone sat around to determine the most just owner.

Private property makes the rich fabulously wealthy while they give you just barely enough to survive. The rulers also said you must live under my roof, and they reinforced this barbary through force. The only reason people would live under this servitude is force.

The market severely limits creativity and individuality, they must scan the market to see what is popular and in demand. People and their mediocre demands must be satisfied, and art is “shrunk before the calculating reckoner.” In other words, a cynical cash grab and not an authentic artistic creation. This reminds me of The Culture Industry section of Adorno and Horkheimer’s dialectic of enlightenment. They say how the entertainment industry is merely appealing to the lowest common denominator to make the most money possible.

Baginski talks about how people “paint the whole, crown it with good manners, society does not like to see the truth about itself.” Painting the whole in the sense of the Lacanian imaginary is covering a gap with an egoistic wholeness which gives oneself a false sense of security to cover up the traumatic kernel of the real material conditions.

Taking a Wildean stance on individualism, we do not have the time to develop our individual capacities because the market doesn’t allow it. The paths of life do not allow individual feeling and thinking, this is contrary to capitalism, especially under a boss. If what you do runs against your superiors, say goodbye to your success. People demand a clown in the workers, the creators of capital, who praise the masters and show good manners. Give them some nice words over truth, they eat platitudes.

There isn’t a Szar or King but what has replaced those are merchants, manufacturers, landlords, monopolists. They continue their power through possession of property. If one has property one can rob one who does not. If one depends for a living on work which requires contrivances and machines, then one must sacrifice their independence to the one with the contrivances and machines in their possession. Tyrants took land by force historically, and now the cycle of capitulation to property owners continues by generations of force.

Trade unions help people get rights under capitalism, but a complete freeing of labor means the abolition of wage work and private property.

According to the Anarchist FAQ by Iain Mckay, anarchists going all the way back to the first historical anarchist, Proudhon, distinguished between private and personal property. Under anarchism, you can have a house, a toothbrush, a car. The goal is not to strip everyone of amenities, but rather to say that no one should have excessive amenities until others have their necessities taken care of. Personal property is distinguished from private property, which is what you own and then use to make money off of others, such as land, or the means of production.

The condition of most people is not private ownership. The abolition of private property will free people from homelessness and non possession.

For daring to take the fire of the gods, Prometheus was chained to a rock. He gave fire to humanity. Like Prometheus the workers should throw off their fetters and disallow the vulcher capitalists from feeding off of them. Producers under anarchism will produce things not for profit, but for need.

People grow “rich and fat” from monopolizing earth and its production. Production and distribution is much more simple without government than with government. The government never promotes welfare, but only allows the right of possession to a minority; it is on overturning this dynamic, and allowing the producer to own and operate the means of production that truth and beauty depend.

Originality in man, meaning something very similar to Oscar Wilde saying that people can develop their individual personality, through arts and sciences, shouldn’t be a privilege only afforded to the leisure class, which is protected by state and ownership, it should be allowed to everyone.

Instead of the master controlling your schedule like monks and their clocks, the person controls their own life. There will be equality among the sexes and the sexes choose to do whatever they want on their own time. All are well-educated and honest and free action belongs to “that sex,” the power which is afforded in this time mostly to men in privileged capitalist positions.

Alexander Berkman – by Emma Goldman.

Berkman was sentences to 23 years and a year of hard labor, hoping it would be a death sentence.

Workers bent over a furnace carrying their offerings to the insatiable monster of capitalism. This language speaking of capitalism as a large beast reminds me of Perlman’s talk of the leviathan. The beast has a stare blank and pitiless as the sun, it does not see the gleam of hatred in the worker’s eyes.

The “philanthropist” Carnagie hired Frick, who had Pinkerton men, armed thugs “the vilest creatures in the human family” for 2 dollars a day, to open fire on striking workers, killing eleven workers, who were armed with sticks and stones. Then Frick evicted the families of the murdered workers from their homes, which were overpriced when they were sold to them in the first place.

Alexander Berkman was reacting to Frick’s violence and savage inhumanity by attempting to assassinate Frick. There would be no justice by the justice system, as the justice system is controlled by the rich and powerful. To call Bernie Sanders a “realist” is basically admitting that all you can do is capitulate to the people whose sole purpose is to take your will and turn you into an instrument of profit.

These are the people who we are up against. They control the legal system, they control the places of business, and as we will see in other essays, they control the electoral system. It is truly a David vs Goliath situation, where the working class is atomized and do not realize their own power. If workers got a notion, they could move an ocean. There is nothing real about Bernie's pathetic agenda.

Anarchism and American Traditions

The forces that shaped the revolution and the indominable will of the revolutionary have re-molded the instruments of governmental power. Children learn about the American revolution as a war between Patriots and armies of England, but they do not know why it is called a revolution. This is because of an American exceptionalist curriculum, which to this day in some states holds that America has never, and can never, do any wrong, without telling students all of the information. Cleyre provides such information for us in the form of a Jefferson quote, which predicts that “from the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill.” A single zealot may take over (we can think of Trump as this possibility in our current world historical moment), and people will forget themselves to “the sole faculty of money making” and “never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights.”

Cleyre is one step away from minimalist Jeffersonian small government, or no government. Cleyre says that majority rule is undesirable and impossible. Politicians run on platforms they openly disregard. Majority rule is a subversion of equal liberty, which is a voluntary non-coerced management of matters of concern.

Republican-style Federalists would focus on their local community and changing minds within it as opposed to electoral politics which, at the time Cleyre was writing, only provided some liberties. There was African American slavery, class division, a state and church, class division, etc. Many of these still persist to this day. The founding fathers did not even try to undo private property; they enshrined it. They thought private enterprise “manages so much better its own concerns.” There was also laissez-faire mercantilism. For anarchists all private enterprise should be equal to all society, individual or collective.

As opposed to the American exceptionalist education system of Republicans today, education of the “revolutionists” was to stop the rulers from encroaching their power on workers. Constitutions chain people down and are produced by jealousy, not confidence, by those we entrust with the power. During the John Adams administration, the states considered themselves supreme and the government subordinate. The state of Kentucky said the laws were made without their consent, against their consent.

American exceptionalist education is a cheap sort of patriotism which unquestioningly upholds the law and says the government can do no wrong while falsifying and white-washing American history books. Our country was founded on revolutionary republicanism; then, the makers of the government make it so no one can be revolutionary again. In other words, as anarchist theory showed in the Libertarian Reader volume 1, over the 60 or so years prior the government was established by violent force and upheld by violent force.

Using the example of Shay’s rebellion, farmers couldn’t pay their taxes, and wanted to collectivize land, a “free communal possession of all those who wish to work it.” But in American exceptionalist education, children are not even told why the farmers rebelled. They are only told the government did a good job by making people pay their taxes.

Madison believed some government is necessary for large groups, but did not deny the superiority of no government as the “Indians.” Democratic government is a middle ground between “wolves over sheep” and “freedom.” Madison said that armed rebellion was necessary at times to “feed the tree of liberty” with the “blood of tyrants.” School children know nothing of these quotes or this history. American exceptionalist history has always been false and/or incomplete.

The government is separate from the people, and it preys upon them like the leviathan. Society and government share a quality with Kuhnian paradigms, which is that, in the view of a scientist, the paradigm is not independent of people, but is independent of any particular person. It is the view that the government is its own entity and is able to make laws and rules regardless of the consent of the governed; it is how you treat an abstraction as higher than the lives under which they live. Kuhn of course comes decades after Goldman and company, but the idea was already present in Hegel’s notion of Spirit.

Public education is a subtle and far-reaching form of molding the course of a nation. But soon commerce would shape the government to its requirements. For Cleyre the essence of government is for the rulers to prey on the people, and for the legislators to set up an “entirely separate welfare” from the people. This is even before the Citizens United decision, but after the Gilded Age. To this day the principles of government remain harmful and have grown much worse both domestically and internationally, or just not changed much. Governments are still exploitative, but their appendages like military and police have grown much stronger, and now force is an option even on our own people.

After the revolution people succumbed to the tendency of “money getting” consumerism, which vanquished their “spirit of 76” (they speak like later authors would speak of May ‘68 in France), meaning their desire to rebel against the monarchy, by becoming self-sustaining.

Voltarine de Cleyre, a woman herself, critiques women in America by saying 99% of American women are more concerned with the thread of their dress than the independence of their sex, while men are more interested with beer than the beer tax. Children give up liberty for commodities.

People are ordered as machinery more or less corresponding to the strength of government. Zoe Baker talks about how people put their faith in politicians who may or may not carry out the will of the working class. In my view, workers should organize their own lives through direct democracy, in a federation like the one developed in the CNT, without centralization, if they want to live authentic lives in which their will is their own.

Now, the “highest aim of the daughter of revolution” is to have a castle, title, and a “rotten lord” to wring money from American servitude. This was a mere hundred years removed from the colonial settlers and their manifest destiny, who said as long as we are agricultural. We shall remain virtuous, and in cities we will eat each other up as they do in Europe. Cleyre doesn’t cite who said this. She goes on to quote someone else, uncited, saying if ever the country was brought under one government, the corruption would be extensive. They go on to say that there is no government as shamelessly corrupt as that of the government of the United States.

The Constitution of the United States was the first concession to tyranny, the merchants’ machine, which the land and labor interests forewarned would destroy their liberties. The United States was

created with wealthy property owners in mind, as was said earlier in the essay about how they wanted laissez-faire markets, and statements about how private enterprise manages things better than public enterprise. This is part of the rapacious mindset of the settler colonialists Fredy Perlman talks about in Against His-Story, Against Leviathan.

The rights of free speech and assembly have gone out of fashion. The police club has taken its place. Even in the early 1900s they still spoke of the creeping authoritarianism of the police. It continued to this day; they increased policing, and now they want to institute a large police facility which has been named by activists “Cop City.” The police to this day break up pro-Palestine encampments, showing that the police do not protect speech uniformly, but rather protect power. Having free speech laws are not as effective as having no laws governing speech.

They say it’s American tradition to keep out of the affairs of other nations, and American practice to meddle with everyone else. To this day America has military bases around the world to protect world trade. They occupy and overthrow anyone who wants to opt out of the empire’s client state “free market” system.

It is an American principle that the country should not have debt, but in practice they take on tens of millions (not adjusted for inflation from 1909-2024). Jefferson said that the judiciary may shape the Constitution like wax, and they do just that to nullify every liberty of the people. The sacrifice of 1776 was thrown away by unworthy passions of the future generations’ “sons.”

The founding fathers did not taste liberty fully. They wanted liberty and government, a “necessary evil,” they quote. This created the “misbegotten monster” of our present tyranny. Much like the leviathan, the artificial laws and arche serve power, and the realm of death and abstraction grows as people are encased as zeks in a rapacious system, under their masks and armors which prevent them from rebellion and finding their true selves, not ordered as machinery by the government.

As long as people do not develop and exercise their capacities, the people in charge who tyrannize them will do so for them. They will use religion and god to help them. Hence God, or as Perlman would call Lugalzaggizi, the lord of Abraham, which was co-opted by the Romans as Optimus Maximus, the emperor as Lord of Lords, who is also the god of military commanders, is enshrined on the dollar and coin with “in God we trust.” The only conclusion I can draw from that is god is dead, inanimate, and represents something complete abstract. Americans have placed God at the head of the I that is We - and the We that is I - of Hegel, which is the independent abstraction that goes on without us but is dependent on us.

Unlike Perlman, Cleyre chooses to focus on the positive aspects of settler colonialism and manifest destiny. They had sectarian independence, isolation which strengthened each individual’s own capacities, and made strong social bonds. But this has all disappeared. Religious communities, unless they are persecuted, have become “pillars of society.” They build churches and sleep in them. Church is, for Cleyre, like in Marx’s view, an opium of the masses.

People are farming less, and if they do, they are a slave to private property, “slaves to mortgages.” Most people in cities would be bankrupt with despair at having to produce their own food.

Cleyre does not think people will necessarily become self-subsistent; she is not a prophet or forecaster. She has no hope that people will ever “by intellectual or moral stirrings merely” throw off the yoke of “oppression fastened on them by the present economic system;” although, she says it must happen eventually. Cleyre thinks the greatest hope is an increase in at-home production power, which will lead to exports and eventually self-subsistence. But as we saw with the funeral procession of Reaganite presidents and the offshoring of manufacturing under Clinton and the

NAFTA and TTP deals, the concentration of wealth went to China’s manufacturing and America’s addiction to market speculation, and the self-dependency through at-home manufacturing didn’t happen like she thought it would.

When people wake up to the fact that things are to be used and “men” are greater than things, the spirit of liberty will be roused. In other words, by caring about one’s own personal autonomy, authenticity, and freedom and developing the capacities for oneself, not by putting them on a politician who cannot perform the sort of direct action which will be discussed elsewhere in this collection, people will win the achievements like not just an 8 hour work week, but what I would aim for - a 4 hour day, 4 day work week, taken up by shared hands. We will expropriate the bosses and end surplus value and unlimited growth. The advantages of automation and breaking up large manufacturing plants will produce not hardened pioneer communities, but independent communities connected by transportation.

What used to be a citizen’s militia is now an arm of the government, “a regular military of the United States.” For anarchists such as Cleyre, the voluntary militia is far preferable to the centralization of government military; this would be a militia like the Minutemen, who disbanded after they were constituted to their purpose. She suggests that people who make war should fight it. This in practice would mostly mean the rich fight and die, although Cleyre does not make this point. Usually, it is the politicians who want the wars; they will even create false pretenses to get into them, like the war in Iraq, with their lies about weapons of mass destruction.

Cleyre says anarchism should be carried down to the “individual [them]self.” It is not a “jealous barrier of isolation,” as such isolation is impossible. It is each person minding their own business, a “fluid society freely adopting itself to mutual needs.” This implies Kropotkin’s mutual aid, which is also talked about in this collection of Mother Earth essays, with the idea that settler colonialists

“put the simple dignity of man above the gauds of wealth and class, and held that to be American was greater than to be King.” They may be talking about the Shakers, who were notably not capitalist in their ways, but she does not mention who she is talking about.

For Perlman, the spirit of manifest destiny means that each person is a small monarch over their dominion, as according to the Bible, all people should have “dominion over beast and fowl,” used as their excuse for colonialism. Dominion is afforded by private property, and America was built on the protection of landed interests. Cleyre says in the day when man is put above wealth and class, on that day there will be neither kings nor Americans, only men. I would say, on that day, there will be neither kings nor Americans, only people.

Violence and Anarchism

Berkman asks whether anarchist’s existence anything other than an “uninterrupted series of murders, assassinations, and eradication?” Berkman talks about the worker in similar ways to Marx, that value comes from the laborer, the producing class “the real backbone of the social body, should have preference.” The “true mission of human society” is that workers should enjoy the greatest benefit from social organization, but we are not anywhere close to that.

The fruits of the workers’ labor are not their own; they sell their labor for whatever “pittance the boss condescends to give.” In Berkman’s time we were nowhere near worker control, and we still are not today.

The purpose of government is to keep these austere conditions in place to keep the rich rich and quell popular descent.

The writers of mother earth are generally not on the side of doing anarchism of the deed (bombs), but Berkman seems to sympathize with the cause as most of these anarchist seem to so far.

Berkman says specifically, you can’t regenerate society by violence, and you shouldn’t conflate the bombs of anarchism with the freer, happier life anarchists want. Berkman separates the deed of attack from the vision which anarchists hope to uphold. Anarchists attacks are not the world anarchists envision, they are the result of the evil that anarchism hopes to abolish.

Berkman says as long as you are an anarchist it is the duty of the police to keep you under surveillance, so you shouldn’t conflate anarchists with cops either. He says if socialism every grasped the reigns of government and took power, Berkman wonders whether there would be "sufficient jailers to supply the needs of the triumph of socialism."

Anarchism symposium: Kropotkin

Kropotkin was born a prince, but he objected to his title. Kropotkin considered the sole object of evolution the increasing of happiness of the human race. Kropotkin advocates the fundamental principle of do onto others as they would do onto you, which is a principle of equality, solidarity, and justice, which are values espoused by Proudhon and Tolstoy.

If enough individuals liberties are infringed upon, then by process of nature the wrong will be righted, breaking the “artificial dam,” until the wrong is righted through natural evolutionary revolution. The individual life is unjustly interfered with. “And its force seems insignificant, and the wrongdoer feels safe ignoring its protest.” As individualities are injured, there is a sort of gathering of strength and combination of the injury, until the wrong has been righted.

This makes me think of my idea of the competing equilibriums of the death drive. The drive towards excessive pleasure may compete with other recurrences of sublimation. Berkman would later talk about how if you strike the “true chord” you get communism, and similarly in Heidegger’s fourfold, the rings have a resonance, which might be thought of as history, time, and facticity. The resonances which are recorded on the recording surface of the body without organs, become the paranoiac machine when they try to reach into the body without organs and implement representational, law based thought, and this can create an-Oedipal schizophrenic based lives which are not controlled by ordering as machinery – as the body without organs rejects machines.

In other words, revolution is accelerated evolution, an accumulation of individuals wrongs. Whereas for Tolstoy, love is the supreme law, as opposed to evolution.

Laws that exist do not secure for working people the product of their labor, but secure for a few capitalists great advantage while their wealth stagnates and halts the progress of individual growth.

The next stage of evolution is to eliminate laws and allow unwritten custom to take over, and fear of expulsion. So, in other words, vigilante justice. I think that there are constitutional federations, so the idea that a federation wouldn’t have rules is something which I’m not sure is really necessary, but for me what seems most important is the prioritization of people, over any possible guidelines that people must follow. The anarchist wants to eliminate the problems that cause what is called “crime,” which are private property and inequality. Private property being different from personal property in the specific aspect of being property which you can use to make money off of others, or rent people into wage slavery.

The multiplication of laws secures the wealth of the rulers and brings every nation to bankruptcy and corruption. The existence of the state brings with it a war between literal and figurative. Just as the law was a weapon of monarchy, the law is a weapon of the rich to protect wealth through the state. The state has outdone even past kings in the law that it imposes on the people.

Our rights really only protect the rich and will be taken away as soon as its inconvenient for the powerful for us to have them. Freedom of assembly and press are allowed as long as they don’t threaten the privileged classes. The logical conclusion of the state is an unendurable tyranny akin to fascism.

Contrary to what people say about anarchists that they want primitive isolation, some of the best social orders are based on free association are ones like the red cross. We don’t need to know all the aspects of anarcho communism, but we know it will have no laws and be based on the principle of free organization within the realm of the commune. This sounds somewhat different from early mutualists who wanted property and the CNT who wanted laws that punish wrongdoing and guarantee rights. What Goldman and most classical anarchists want is something not based on justice, but rather free association and fear of retribution from the community. Vigilante justice can be just as brutal as the police. Iain McKay, in the Anarchist FAQ, talks about how Benjamin Tucker praised the trial by jury as one of the greatest inventions.

The Pioneer of Communist Anarchism in America

John Most came to America in exile. He was sentenced to a life of imprisonment and labor, for allegedly “plotting to kill the reigning sovereigns.” His replies to their barbaric methods is that “there are no political prisoners in a free country like England.” Most’s initiative was the propaganda of anarchism in America.

Most arrived from Germany to America in a time of great state suppression in Germany of the left, and found that he was rejected in America as well by his country men and the press, as well as the law. Most was against ballot socialism and spoke of voting as not effective; revolution is.

Germany rejected Most’s ideas in favor of their property and stagnant conservativism. He would in time, come into conflict with the sham liberties of the Republic.

Eventually Mosts activities had consequences. The police cracked down on communism and killed August Spies, and his comrades. The press implicated his comrades by making up lies about him to the workers and arresting Most for printing a decades old article.

Most became increasingly isolated in the end and repressed by the state. He never was able to march with the people against tyranny like he hoped.

John Most’s Anarcho Communism, from The Libertarian Reader Volume 1.

A summary and commentary on Why I am a Communist, by John Most, from the Libertarian Reader Volume 1.

Automation brings with it the production of more goods with less hands. The machines produce more with less people so they can extract surplus labor value more efficiently and funnel the wealth produced into the hands of the capitalists who have concentrated the wealth into their own hands. The system is not a mistake, private property will always concentrate into the hands of the few. The wage system is the result of concentration of wealth, instead of workers getting the full value of their work; the surplus goes to the boss.

What is destroying humanity under capitalism is that wealth concentrates and people can't buy. They are not yet thinking about the destruction of the ecosystem in this essay, but John Most wants a new system because of wealth concentration. To be clear, both are important and vital to me. The new system which the writer wants will transfer commodities into the possession of communities.

The state and private property go hand in hand. Communism is the principle of the common possession of wealth. The state protects private property which is antithetical to the common possession of wealth. The state is the instrument through which private property is protected. The state cannot be indispensable to those who want equality and liberty, as the state is contrary to these things. Contemporary communists cannot deny this.

John Most wants anarchist communism, not anarchism or communism, but rather sees the two as necessarily existing together. He sees things this way because getting rid of the state, anarchy, and communism go hand in hand. The author continues further, that no ruling class ever gave up its own privilege willingly, which sounds a lot like Fredrick Douglass's quote "power never concedes to demand. The author lists the statistics of the late 1800s on inequality, owning 2/3rds of the wealth at the time, in the hands of some 12000 capitalists, which is a form of "modern tyranny."

Unfortunately, over 134 years later, we have still not thrown off wage slavery, which the author says will be the next thing we throw off after black slavery, and English monarchy. Now we have a second Jim Crow as it's called, with black slavery in prisons through prison labor at vastly disproportionate rates than white people. Not that I believe in race, ultimately. With the looming election of Donald Trump vs Joe Biden in 2024, the strangle of party politics has not broken people out of the stupor induced by wage slavery, and the institution designed to prepare you for it. We were able to throw off monarchs, but slavery of black people turned into wage slavery of all people, including white people.

The Paris Commune by Voltairine de Cleyre

Voltairine de Cleyre plays a bit with the objective vs subject distinction. She does wish to measure her passion with a yard stick, say she has a philosophy or creed. She speaks as a human being, and the thousands of men, women, and children who filled graves. But the Paris Commune was not a “high and calm philosophy” made with “still and impartial eyes.”

Much like how Perlman thinks you don’t need to justify rebellion rationally, Cleyre says she will not ask whether she has the right to feel the way she feels. “I feel and the feeling will not be gamesaid.”

“Preachers and teachers” lie about the commune, saying it was filled with “thuggery, theft, and murder.” But the commune had all walks of life – skilled craftsmen, scholars, students, journalists, engineers, men of military training, free spirits, etc. Many of them were decorated with honors by their enemies. There was more learning, skill, purity of sacrifice brought to the commune than detractors could ever dream.

The Paris commune came together with people who had common needs, against the tyranny of the external force which draws blood and treasure from them. They opened fire on the commune on the 22nd night of November. They were lined up and shot. All because they dared to not be slaves. They tortured mothers to reveal the whereabouts of their sons, and they beat children so they would reveal the whereabouts of the children.

Cleyre does not want to “love my enemies” or “let bygones be bygones.” She does not want to be philosophical, or preach “inclusion and brotherhood of man.” She wants to “hate them – utterly.” They have the weapons, the laws, the prisons, and whatever they have done before, they will do again, until the people are rid of them.

Let the slaves of labor know the sacrifices of those who came before and freedom even for those who have not conceived it. Instead of seizing the means of production people settle for peacemeal reform and never get what they want and they never solve the main problem which is private property.

Workers have one thing in common, each other, and the sooner they learn that the government is not on your side the sooner people can rebel. Rights of assembly and speech are for people who don’t need or use them; the ruling class. Economic affairs should be organized by the producers, eliminating the “useless and harmful element now in possession of the world’s capital.” The ruling

class is a completely superfluous mafia middle man leech, from insurance companies, to CEOs, to shareholders. They can all get fucked.

Political rights will not be bound in papers, constitutions, which officials may violate at whim, but exists in the “free and active personalities of its members. People don’t inflict suffering on themselves; a far cry from the strike which quits, to a strike which “takes possession of tools” and turns its masters out rather than itself.

They end the essay with a poem, saying if the commune were alive it would scatter the hornets nest with an earth quake. The masters can feed on the blood of the worker for now, but the commune is not dead. Just as the world spirit contains the attitudes and customs of the symbolic order, people in the future can take up the cause of the commune, as stories are re-told, and songs re-played, the spirit of communism is invincible.

Mutual Aid: An Important Factor of Evolution

Mutual aid is an important factor in evolution of species, and biologists now accept this. There is exterior war, and inner war; the struggle of the whole, large divisions of species, and the struggle in between individuals in the species.

We can find mutual aid in the animal kingdom, and there is no need to look to supernatural morality to find ethics in nature. Mutual aid is a “higher instinct” in animals that ensures their survival.

The followers of Darwin interpreted him as survival of the fittest, social Darwinist, to Darwin’s dismay of how capitalist and religious people interpreted him. But Darwin put much emphasis on the importance of external conditions for survival. Woth mutual aid in mind, and the necessity of external factors, we can progress morally beyond the system of slavery and exploitation we find ourselves in under capitalism.

It is necessary to establish independence of home rule for every commune or Paris. We threw off feudal barons, bishops, and kings, now we will “see whether” federation and independence make for “infinitely better” future, leading to “higher intellectual development” than “enslavement to church and state, which characterized the fall of free cities, and inaugurated the growth of military states.”

Kropotkin thinks unions shouldn’t forget their mother tongue, but actually they should organize around one or two common languages of their people and faction to use internationally as it won’t be hard to learn a new language in the international under “perfected methods of teaching.”

Anarchism: Communist or Individualist? – Both

Max Tellau says that syndicalism cannot advance the cause of anarchism proper. This writer feels that communism and individualism alone are inadequate to solve social problems, but there are some of them whose ideas are not objectionable. But they shouldn’t think everyone will be convinced. What is needed is not capitalist individualism, but unselfish individualism, where freedom of action is not used to crush the weaker individual.

For this author we need communism and individualism. Without one or the other present the desire for either would form. It’s a balance between isolation and solidarity; both are forms of freedom.

This author does not like the group activity of syndicalism and would prefer some isolation. There also may be skill disparities and experts may want to teach beginners. If people do not need these differences there will be a bitter revolution as there was against capitalism. Each organization should work out their economic hypothesis and they shouldn’t stagnate on settled issues as anarchism has. Stagnation is the death of progress.

At the French anarchist communist convention in Paris, individualism was derided, and placed outside the pale of anarchism by formal revolution. This author does not feel communism should be generalized and such ideas should be stated as more than mere hypothesis; communists, individualists, “we have all sinned in this respect.”

This author wants solidarity between the various ideologies to fight capitalism. This author, Nettlau quotes an article where tendencies are split between common life, duties, and work, and those for whom the slightest act of submission would be too much. Communism is not a fundamental, unique and obligatory principle, due to the diversities of our intellectual faculties, needs and will. We should unite against the common enemy of authority and selfishness.

I don't necessarily disagree with Goldman's view in the sense that religion can be a tool for social control, but so can science. In fact, science has brought with it the industrial revolution, advanced warfare, the technological apparatuses of control have only become laser and GPS guided now, and the data through which the carceral state is able to keep track of you is mountains higher than it was in the time of Goldman. So the blind trust to science seems like something which if they were more conscious of the possible consequences of the scientific worldview, then they would be hesitant to say that science is somehow necessarily this progressive thing. Science isn't desirable or undesirable by itself, it depends on how it is applied.

The concept of god is this restrictive phantasm that makes people bow into the dust, and atheism frees people from this. Theism is more pernicious than the concept of god, because it has a paralyzing effect on thought and action. Religion makes heaven some beyond and not here on earth like atheism. Atheism frees people from the paralyzing effects of theism. People invest in the supernatural with self punishment and reward at the "heavenly bargain counter."

Atheists live and die for truth, justice, and fidelity. Which are not fixed and eternal. Atheism being in line with science changes with the times, and purges the fantasies of subjugation created by the past. No one actually follows Christian principles and makes the world better. It is atheism that provides life purpose and beauty for Emma Goldman, the strongest affirmation of life, not to be a servant to some make believe self torture bargain counter for your soul.

This essay is by Emma Goldman, called The Philosophy of Atheism, from Emma Goldman's Mother Earth Anthology.

For Goldman, the concept of god, spirit, etc. becomes hazier as a concept as the world progresses. Religious thinking for Bakunin is a delusion which comes from not understanding nature. I don't mean to criticize atheism when I say that this view of religion as divorced from nature entirely is just untrue. In Medieval Philosophy class, we learn about how there's varying degrees of religious literalism. Some thinkers, like Moses Maimonides didn't believe in religious literalism.

Bakunin seems to think that we simply have a better and better understanding of nature, obviously before Khunian scientific paradigms which don't progress between paradigms. Bakunin upholds a sort of scientism and internal/external dichotomy. The religious people attribute every discovery to their god, in the internal and external world. Bakunin states that god is the complete "abnegation of human reason and justice" and "it is the most decisive negation of human liberty and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice." Which it can be, but I feel like adding a counter factual like Tolstoy would immediately make these sorts of arguments against religion as necessarily leading to enslavement as untrue via counterfactual.

Goldman seems to think that in proportion to the amount we throw off god, the more we can mold our own destiny. Religion reduces everything to a "cloudy" (unfalsifiable) "beyond" while atheism is "grounded in the soil" through "the science of demonstration." Atheism is growing in numbers of people.

Atheism is growing in number of people. Divine truth and religion is a lucrative business just like war. Religious tools and institutions are used to suppress, and make obedient the masses. Religion is only still here because like legacy media, they force themselves on you through institutions. A similar phenomena in the modern day would be how youtube was taken over by corporate media capturing the youtube algorithm for itself, to shut out "non-authoritative sources" which of course just keep the establishment democratic and republican parties in power. Just like corporate media uses propaganda to brainwash people and force them to conform, so does religion as before the media, it was the primary method of social control, next to the press and the state.

Atheism represents growth of the mind and theism is static and fixed. Religion sees investigation of divine powers as denying their wisdom. But the human mind can never be bound by fixities.

Emma Goldman promotes dichotomy between the real and unreal world, yet there are no laws in this world? It appears that Emma Goldman is stuck in the pre-Khunian, pre-Heideggerian scientific image of thought. Not that I favor Dasein, or the fourfold, necessarily, but Heidegger viewed science as th unlimited calculating and planning and molding of things in his Age of the World Picture essay. Deleuze as well breaks down the real/unreal dichotomy, in favor of a less neurotic, representational image of science. In this sense, Deleuze and Heidegger are on a similar page, and beyond what Goldman was capable of imagining in terms of her philosophy.

I don't necessarily disagree with Goldman's view in the sense that religion can be a tool for social control, but so can science. In fact, science has brought with it the industrial revolution, advanced warfare, the technological apparatuses of control have only become laser and GPS guided now, and the data through which the carceral state is able to keep track of you is mountains higher than it was in the time of Goldman. So the blind trust to science seems like something which if they were more conscious of the possible consequences of the scientific worldview, then they would be hesitant to say that science is somehow necessarily this progressive thing. Science isn't desirable or undesirable by itself, it depends on how it is applied.

The concept of god is this restrictive phantasm that makes people bow into the dust, and atheism frees people from this. Theism is more pernicious than the concept of god, because it has a paralyzing effect on thought and action. Religion makes heaven some beyond and not here on earth like atheism. Atheism frees people from the paralyzing effects of theism. People invest in the supernatural with self punishment and reward at the "heavenly bargain counter."

Atheists live and die for truth, justice, and fidelity. Which are not fixed and eternal. Atheism being in line with science changes with the times, and purges the fantasies of subjugation created by the past. No one actually follows Christian principles and makes the world better. It is atheism that provides life purpose and beauty for Emma Goldman, the strongest affirmation of life, not to be a servant to some make believe self torture bargain counter for your soul.

This is a summary and commentary on Francisco Ferrer's L’école Rénovée, from Emma Goldman's Mother Earth anthology. Francisco Ferrer was part of what is known as "The Modern School Movement." Ferrer believes in studying the child to transform society through "progressive modification." The teacher will try to produce spontaneous results by learning the desires of the child and allowing those desires to be gratified.

Governments know their power comes from the schools and they must have education so their country is competitive with other educated countries. People in charge realized how dangerous an educated public can be. This is how the people in charge keep hold over their ideas. This is why they put priests in charge. That they don't want is the will towards emancipation to be awakened - the world spirit "the awakening in the depths of men's consciousness, of a will towards emancipation." Hegel described spirit as on a quest towards absolute knowing, which is the progressive realization of its freedom in an intersubjective world, where the world is coterminous with what is thought, through various stages of time, which are different shapes of consciousness.

When people were exposed to the new school they realized it was better to follow their own principles. People realize their education means their happiness, and those in power will keep you ignorant so they may better exploit you.

The powers that be created a school devoid of the social significance of education. They search for scientific truth and "avoid questions foreign to their object of study." Sounds a lot like my college. This "professional indifference" is "prejudicial" contrary to the problem they are trying to solve. Hegel likewise showed in the reason section of PoS that Spirit is not in the organism but other in the community of beings. Spirit which would be coterminous with the life of the organism for Hegel, is intersubjective, not "normal physical or psychological development" such as is the atomistic education system, which does not concern itself with what is helpful, what is implied here. But at the same time "we are not yet able exactly to define what is to be done." There is not yet a clearly defined plan.

The new school wants scientific principles too, but ones that emancipate people. Scientific effort alone cannot improve "the destiny of nations." People in power think only of their own interests and refuse to believe that anyone cares about the "happiness of their fellows."

There is a cruelty of positivism. But weren't there socialists in the Vienna Circle? Maybe he's just talking about the school, the positivism of professional indifference. Teachers are conscious or unconscious instruments of power. Few escape the constraint they impose on a student. The school imprisons the child physically, intellectually, and morally, and orders students like technology down the pathway it desires, develops their "faculties" for the powers that be.

To teach children is to constrain them, and deprive them of nature so their energy can be redirected to the lifeless resource gouger and world eater, the leviathan. For that reason education today is no more than a drill," and obedience test as Chomsky says. The sole dogma is that children "must be accustomed to obey," and be molded by "dominant social dogmas." Instead of letting children develop spontaneously "seconding" their spontaneity, the school instead imposes ready made ideas upon it, prevents it from ever thinking otherwise. The purpose of education for the governing powers is not uplifting the individual but slavery. The elites use education for their own advantage so inevitably all innovations will be turned to their profit.

All of the value of education lies in the "physical, intellectual, and moral will of the child." In science there is no demonstration other than by facts, in education there is only that which is free of dogmatism. Education must protect from the teachers own ideas and appeal to the child's own energy. We cannot see the education of the future but we know it will be spontaneous. All advances towards perfection could mean that the world spirit advance towards its freedom. freedom is the overcoming of constraint.

The powers that be do not desire to overcome constraint, in other words, they have no desire to advance dialectically on the path of the world spirit. What the new school wants is an unfixed person able to reform themselves, who is intellectually independent, attached to nothing, and always ready to accept what is best to allow new ideas to triumph. The modern school movement wants to have a current science of children, coupled with an emancipatory education. Instead of imposing ready made ideas, which deprive a natural bent, the child will be in contact with what they love. "Impressions of life will replace fastidious book learning." I wonder how this method of teaching would translate to the social media age.

The present education system produces intellectual deformity; we should not wait until we have completely understood the child to undergo education reform. We should balance what we do and don't know and proceed, based on what we shall learn. The goal is to help children develop spontaneously their own natural tendencies.

There is a lot in common with a post-modernist style of education in Francisco Ferrer's Modern School Movement. Post-modernism would say that there are not pre-determined answers to learn, but rather an infinite multiplicity of univocal difference, and whenever you write something down, you have given away the ghost, so to speak. The life of what gives things their radicality, meaning going to the root, and their vitality, is not found in pre-determined lesson plans. But rather, in an education in which the child controls what they want to learn, where the child develops capacities which will prepare them for what they hoped would become of the anarcho syndicalist movement -a federated, decentralized, anarcho communist society.

Francisco Ferrer was killed for his endeavors. May he rest in peace, and may we carry on his mission, and that of Spain's worker revolts.

This is a summary and commentary on Alexander Berkman's The Need of Translating Ideals Into Life, from Emma Goldman's Mother Earth Anthology. It is Berkman's reaction to the killing of Francisco Ferrer at the hands of the government of Spain, a year following his execution. Francisco Ferrer believed in an education which was not based on pre-designed lesson plans, and believed rather in the "destiny of the child" in Berkman's words (see my essay summarizing Francisco Ferrer's writings elsewhere).

People realize the crimes committed by Spain's government. It takes a martyr killed like Ferrer to move people into action, but as Ferrer said, radicality cannot fall into mere praise, instead of producing better conditions for the living.

When anarchist principles become too sacred for everyday use, fixed, ossified, radicals become disheartened and workers become indifferent and drop out of organizing. As opposed to a ready made revolution, delivered by a stork, we should look at a development based on an environment and tendencies of the times. It is a condition rather than a system. The world spirit zigzags and crosses smaller and larger centers of humanity. Strike "the true chord," and the "new ideal" will spread through the intellectual centers until it transvaluates the value of the general center.

Progress towards libertarian schools is slow, but slow progress should not prove discouraging but act merely as proof we need to work harder. There is no day without the dawn, development can't be overlooked on the road to revolution.

Every parent that sends their kids to school aids in dominant ignorance and slavery, yet they send them anyways. The creation of libertarian centers shall "radiate the atmosphere of dawn into the light of humanity. Can we expect a "suppressive, authoritarian regime" to bring about a "free self reliant humanity?"

Such parents are "criminally guilty towards themselves and their children, divide their own house against itself and "strengthen the bulkwards of darkness."

This is a summary and commentary on Alexander Berkman's Prisons and Crime, from Emma Goldman's Mother Earth Anthology. Following his attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick, for the murder of striking workers with Pinkerton men, Berkman found that prisons which are "entirely negative in character" were not suited to what they claimed to be suited for.

Punishment in the criminal justice system rests on the assumption that people have "free agency" as well as the "spirit of revenge." The spirit of revenge is based on instinctive self preservation.

Berkman points out now in tribal societies revenge is part of a social process where the injured party takes the honor of giving the death blow to the offender. The "legal avenger" of "the collective citizen" which is the criminal justice system acting as a mediator for society as a whole, which conceals the spirit of barbarism.

Instead of tribal punishments people pas off their retribution towards the state, for it to enact. The state treats and attack on an individual as an attack on society, where the whole is attacked. This concealed spirit of barbarism reveals further the old testament spirit of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

In protecting the society from the prisoner they make the prisoner more hateful and revengeful against society. In turning society as a whole against the prisoner by acting as a speaker for society as a whole, the state turns the prisoner against society. So it's self defeating in its own purposes. As opposed to reforming prisoners, prisons are turned into "veritable schools of crime and immorality." Prisoners and reformatories preclude "true reform" because they are "purely penal institutions." Penal institutions not being the result of reform are the result of fear of punishment.

Depriving people of liberty and enjoyment is sure to preclide the majority of reform. Reform schools are horrible places where people are surrounded by criminals and national leaders look on as the

state breeds criminals. Reformatories are breeding grounds for future prisoners. When people are actually reformed in these conditions it is part of the innate power of the individual themselves.

This is a summary and commentary on Peter Kropotkin's Universities of Crime, from Emma Goldman's Mother Earth Anthology.

Prisons habituate into greater and greater criminality after a prolonged period of time. Prisons are universities of crime, they also increase ressentiment towards the "hypocrisy" of society, dislike of work, usually due to knowledge of trade. Kropotkin seems to imply that the only way to recover from prison is to be with "those towards whom he may have an attachment.

Prison work is just an instrument of "base revenge." Prisoners for Kropotkin look at prison work as an ironic feature of a society which was supposedly putting them in prison to be reformed. In france they are given useful and paid work. This is still how prisons still work to this day, with a large part of the prison population being black slave labor, hence the term the second Jim Crow.

Prison work is inferior to slave work. The prisoner hates their work, they wonder why the real thieves like company promoters go unpunished. Revenge breeds revenge. The real thieves are the ones that keep you locked in. Often when a prisoner gets out they commit an even worse crime.

Prisons are monotonous places lacking impressions, takes away their energy. Most anti social acts stem from a weakness of will, and prison education kills "every manifestation of will."

There is not a support network for most criminals, so they go right back to their old friends.

Kropotkin doesn't think prisons can be reformed. But if they were they should be less cruel, accept no youth in prison and prevent crime instead of punishing it. What punishment is incapable of doing is bringing about the education of every child and parent into a trade, communal and professional

co-operation, societies for special interests, and idealism for what will "life human nature to higher interests." In other words, without communism we cannot expect to improve society enough to combat the causes of crime.

This is a summary and commentary on Emma Goldman's The Social Aspects of Birth Control from the Emma Goldman's Mother Earth anthology. The point of this essay is to show how Goldman believes that the lack of autonomy of women for their own health, is the greatest crime ever committed on women.

Page 135 There is enough to feed people, but wealth is monopolized into the hands of the few.

Military men are "automatons" with whose "humanity" has been "ground up" ready to shoot to kill for their masters, and capitalism and militarism go hand and hand "capitalism cannot do without militarism." There is the boom bust cycle, in which we have the "industrial depression." It's part of this capital system to have people pump out babies to increase their labor margin. That is why the capitalists are against birth control. Control bodies to produce profit.

Overworked and underfed masses have produced "defective, crippled, unfortunate children."

Page 136 The function of women is not to pump out babies for a capitalist system that grinds them to dust industrially "the wheel of capitalism" and the battle field. Women for Emma Goldman pump out babies aimlessly for a contraceptive denying state. Their bodies are controlled by the state, is what she's implying. Women should take several years, 3-5 between each pregnancy. Workers with large families are bound to "the block." This is what employers want, the opponents of birth control.

Page 137 When workers are bound up by children they cannot join an organization, strike, because they are busy with children. Birth control will free the people already in existence and help them by having more time and bringing about the revolution. Nothing will change in the social structure unless women take their place among men in the social struggle. Birth control frees women from

the constant reproduction of life. As long as mothers are forced to bear babies unwillingly, the motherhood pro life people talk about is a sham, women are offering their children to moloch.

Page 138. Women are not allowed sometimes to even teach their own children, although if women gave birth every year they would lose their job. Their are also thousands of unmarried women who will die due to "quack doctors" performing abortions. "A greater crime was never perpetrated upon women." Moralists try to prevent sex because otherwise women are too loose in their morals. It was tribal practice limit offspring. Women do not lack responsibility, they have too much of it.

Laws are made to be made and unmade. Who really has the right to demand that life submit to them? Not religious superstitions that bind us to them for the rest of our lives.

Page 139 Even though judges are "sometimes progressive," ignorance and prudery are a problem with the law, which prevent progress. Ideas that are worth going to prison for are more valuable and nothing will stop the birth control movement. They give mock trials where cops can falsify testimonies and the witnesses aren't allowed to speak. They also do not speak out loud the witnesses's testimony. It is a process which doesn't deserve respect, for Goldman.

Page 140 Emma Goldman wants to free women from the bondage of forced pregnancy, make children's lives privileged, and "usher in" a new kind of motherhood, and to treat women's healthcare like any other disease is treated. I Goldman declares war on the system, and will not rest until mother and child are free.

The fight for free speech, by Ben L. Reitman

Even though state societies will say they are for free speech, yet they still use tactics to prevent Emma Goldman from speaking. The police systematically put legal hurdles in front of Goldman by informing people not to let her speak. Making zoning violations for things like fire escapes, and refusing her public places. Finding things to arrest people for who might let her speak. All to present the spread of anarchist knowledge.

They had buildings where she would speak, condemned, and when she would show up unannounced, they would drag her away “like a sack of flower.” Fuck the police. The police essentially attacked Emma Goldman unprovoked before she said anything about anarchism, never minding anything to do with free speech. America is not free.

The police would actually follow Emma Goldman around by her side when she came to give her lectures. Goldman’s visits produced an upswelling of interests and sales of anarchist literature from stores and libraries. The newspapers would try to fabricate stories about anarchist plots but none of them turned out to be true. The unfree American is terrified of freedom.

The Respectable Mob, by Ben L. Reitman.

Our freedom of speech is at times in history just an illusion, and if you disturb the capitalist class too much, they will retaliate to preserve profit. An army of “respectable” bankers, officers, real estate men, doctors, business men, saloon keepers gathered around a member of the Industrial Workers of the World and threw him into a car, after threatening him, 6 of the “respectable men,” with revolvers.

After taking turns beating the IWW member, they say they have beat up lesser “IWW hobos.” They boast about their property and how they are not workers, but businessmen, doctors, and lawyers.

They stopped arresting IWW outlaws because they would sing songs in the jail and broke up the jail, so now they resort to using brute physical force as beatings. They shoved an American flag down his throat and told him to sing the star spangled banner. Then they claim they “own this town” and they “run it to suit” themselves.

Reitman had never experienced a more excruciating night in his entire career, with the business people of San Diago in a cr. They stripped his clothes off and 12 of them gathered around him.

Reitman says that he barely believed stories about historic violence like the Spanish inquisition but the capitalist class made him a believer. He used to think fondly on his countries songs, but now they law abiding business class made these songs disgusting to him.

They burned IWW into his butt with a cigar, anally raped him with his own cane, twisted his balls.

They ordered him to make a speech and they lined up to punch and kick him.

After they let him go he walked aimlessly through the desert at night, bought some clothes after being given only his vest with watch and money and underwear. He washed in the creek, and called a friend. The lessons which can be learned is the business class wants to protect their property and they are afraid. The police and press will back them up, is another lesson.

Hundreds of people besides the author have been beaten or killed by the law abiding business class.

Modesty by Margaret Grant

Modesty is culturally contingent. There is a spectrum of attitudes towards clothing in tribes. She says Websters is wrong saying that modesty is natural delicacy and shame. There is a correlation between lack of clothes and modesty, women were more modest in countries without clothes. The more naked the people, the more moral and strict they were around sexual intercourse.

Modesty is an invention of American civilization or others that constructed the “artificial” idea of modesty. Women are forced to play ignorant about sexual issues while being fully immersed in their possibility as a wife. Another way gender is tied to the state. Gender is a mode of production, and

under capitalism, your gender is how you buy, and how you pump out babies, and produce remnants from the event of the division of labor.

The repression and restriction on women is damaging to health and modesty is nothing more than a socially, culturally contingent phenomena filled with standards and sexism.

Those Who Marry Do Ill by Voltairine de Cleyre

Free love is how men and women, for Cleyre, and now everyone else too, choose to live and organize their lives, while marriage is, essentially, a property arrangement, the wrongful intrusion of church and state into private affairs. Cleyre rejected civil unions as well.

Cleyre declares a form of relativism and cultural contingency of all values, and their “slowly altering condition.” “Right and wrong” are “social conceptions.” Cleyre used to think that society was unconscious processes we have no control over. Now consciousness is dawning power which threatens to undermine the system.

Old ideals are continually modified by conscious reaction which undermines the unconscious striving that defines the mode of society. Progress is measured by the free individual. It depends on “free attraction,” not “compulsory forms.” It would be easy enough to prove that the servitude of society was in line with the free individual if they actually were. Capitalism, military, priesthood, domestic servants, etc.

Marriage is unwarranted interference by the state and a miserable vulgarity in which people are slaves to present and future feelings by the state and are condemned by vulgar public ceremony in which the wedding couple are made into a spectacle for comment and jest. The marriage ceremony is just an empty shell. The real marriage is the permanent relation which is detrimental to the growth of the character. Cleyre doesn’t care if the relation is closed or open.

Marriage is merely a business consideration, and the surest way of killing love is marriage. The only way to maintain love, for Cleyre, is to maintain distance, never to allow it to maintain the indecencies of continual close communion. While I can be annoying to my partner, and vice versa, I would far rather see her every day, even though we’re not married; speaking personally and not in regard to Cleyre’s comment. Still, marriage is a machinery of the state, and based on a Christian tradition which is only inauthentic machinery and clockwork, which organizes people’s lives as machines.

When asked if she would do away with the sexes all together, Cleyre says she wouldn’t shed a tear for the last man, but also no she doesn’t want to do away with the sexes altogether. She associates a sort of sexlessness with monks and nuns, assumedly talking about sexual intercourse and having a very biological view of how the sexes work. It is noteworthy, that in an essay from the Libertarian Reader volume 1, Cleyre defended a Eugenicist in an obscenity trial. We will see another article from mother earth, however, which will denounce Eugenics.

Cleyre takes a down to earth view on sex, neither praising normal instincts, gluttonizing them, starving them, or “exalting them beyond their true service” or “denouncing them as evil.” These limits can be “fixed by the individual alone.” What is normal for one is excess to another.

Advocates of marriage say you need 15 to 20 years to raise a child. She does not concern herself with people who make religious arguments on the matter, only people who believe that man is the latest stage in evolution, echoing Darwin, but going on to make a claim about “racial necessities” determining some of these aspects in man. Clearly we would not use this sort of language today to describe phenomena in people. Someone might argue that this is the “conscious or semi conscious adaptation” of humanity. But Cleyre hopes to prove the opposite.

Cleyre says the image of married couples with long happy lives well paid with successfully raised children is largely an illusion, “oftener dreamed than realized.”

There is an unconscious process of natural selection, through the unconscious drive of life preservation, pioneers material historical conditions required brawn and strength to pursue conquest of the fields. Now this instinct survives long after it is needed. A “more conscious consciousness,” more aware of the conditions of life, and the best way of fulfilling demands, can speedily will instincts which are no longer demanded to be dissolved from the structure.

Cleyre believes we can unconceal hidden forces, so that the instinct of prolific parentage can die. The development of individuality does not imply having numerous children, or any children at all. This is not to suggest “race suicide” (I think she means the human race, as a single unity), but with fewer born there is a better chance at surviving and developing.

There ae other necessities and mental appetites besides raising children such as food and raiment, housing, sexual association not for reproduction, artistic desires, desire to know, the depths of the concrete and the heights of the abstract, the desire to do, and imprint oneself on the social structure. Etc.

The necessity of food, water, and shelter, often competes with the method of home keeping, and the interdependence on one on the other leads to helplessness when the combination is destroyed.

Going with a professor’s interpretation of women in Hegel’s philosophy of right, women have become like plants. Women in Cleyre’s time have not yet developed the internal capacities to be self sufficient. “The world of production sweeps past her.” Women did not receive equal pay and discrimination protection until the 1970s. Row vs Wade was 1973, and voting rights for women was 1920.

The man is unable to keep the home like women, for Cleyre. This is “one of the greatest objections to the married condition.” One’s economic position in society shouldn’t leave women crippled. There is ample and painful proof that marriage does not guard against excess, as its advocates claim. Religious shame and ressentiment makes people lie about their own sexuakl desires and say they are devoid of them. Sometimes that is true, but mostly it’s a lie. It dishonors women to deny their fullness of being. And if it is a deficiency that really exists, it can be filled by the growth of some other quality – referencing asexuals without calling them asexual.

Attraction is not a guaranteed constant. Youth conceals true feelings beneath lustful feelings for Cleyre. It’s hard to throw off an old wedded relationship, even after the love is gone.

The influence of the family can turn an anarchist into a prosecutor, betraying principles for money and social standing. The effect of degrading the “higher natures” can happen to any person. Sometimes a person of conservative nature will be burdened by one who outrages every principle. For this reason, moments of union should be rare and non binding.

Children can be brought up in a dual, individual, or communal home. The impressions of life (referencing Ferrer, perhaps), will be far pleasanter if received in an “atmosphere of freedom and independence” rather than an “atmosphere of secret repression and discontent. Cleyre says she nor advocates of marriage have a satisfactory solution to the various questions of the child problem. No demand of life should preclude a future of free development. Neither children under the marriage yoke of parents, or free union, or raised by an individual seem to show superiority in the literature. Cleyre says its an open question of her time “I see no reason the rest of life should be sacrificed to uncertainty.”

She suggests that men and women remain “separate personalities.” They should have no common possessions. Marriage stales love, brings contempt, outrages all privacies, and limits the growth of all parties, so Cleyre believes “those who marry, marry ill.” I feel somewhat bored and annoyed that Cleyre doesn’t speak about homosexuality, or the possibility of queerness, instead ending the article on the separation of the binary sexes. But to be fair, I can be almost certain, in a paranoiac sense, that Cleyre would have been delighted by the abolition of the binary, or even gender itself if told that gender (as well as sex) are unnecessary modes of production and divisions of labor.

Sterilization of the unfit, by Peter Kropotkin

Eugenics does not take into consideration the influence of the environment on the subject.

Mutual aid occurs in nature, without it not a single race would survive.

Being a criminal is a manufactured state of society, and prison can produce “sexual aberrations.”

Society produces the crimes it punishes. Fix the conditions of society with socialism, and you won’t need forced sterilization.

The bosses are lazy idlers, why not sterilize them? Kropotkin implies

This is a summary and commentary of The Aim and Tactics of the Trade Union Movement by Max Baginski, from Emma Goldman's Mother Earth Anthology.

Instead of becoming its own liberator, labor put its capacities on politicians instead of emancipating themselves through direct action. The owner class is protected by the state, in which the "individual producer" has no chance against such a "giant master." Moneyed interests don't bring change, workers in a bitter struggle to wrench higher living standards or a partial recognition of rights from their enemies do. People have been herded by "parasites" for centuries but this tendency no longer goes unchallenged.

At one point the goal of workers in England was to get rid of machinery, now the view is that the machinery, mode of production, etc. belongs to the workers. Securing the means of production for those English workers would have seemed a curse. The state is the blood hound of capital. Damocles Sword is the peril that weighs over the head of those in power. Sometimes labor leaders ally with capital and greatly profit from the history if trade unionism. Capital tried to stop the swelling tide of the labor movement, but it could not be stopped. Literature brought to light how modern industry leaves people in uncertainty, danger, crippled lives, hopes marred, while the owner class, who have never produced, live in wealth and extravagance. Big brother capital and its sister labor are supposed to live in harmony for some, but big brother capital beats sister labor and when sister labor who is "enslaved" and "outraged" would turn to her brother, who is beating her, for justice, she would be whipped into submission. This is the logic of the capitalist and the worker. Asking the law to protect labor rights is just asking your abuser to protect you. The government acts in unison with the wealthy and will never pass any legislation on behalf of the producing element of the country and will never deliver them from wage slavery and economic subjugation. all the advancements made have been from labor.

The problem with the trade union movement is its hopes and ideals rest in the present social status, which just rotates around (I assume seeds?) never bearing intellectual fruit. In Hegel's science of logic he says philosophy is a circle, ironically. Satisfied only with the "lean meadows of capitalist economy," it settles for crumbs from the over laden table of the well fed master. There is a futility between "wealth, power, possession," and "labor."

Instead of justice, workers were sent drunken militia men with winchester rifles into their disturbed ranks. They sacrificed the clear headed among themselves to electoral politics. These tactics are useless "not a single drop of sweat should be wasted on them." A ridiculous strike method is letting the producer publicly discuss in advance where to strike, to give the enemy a chance to "prepare for

combat." Instead of thinking of the people they end up serving their careers and ending up in the Whitehouse, not considering that in every strike depends the success or failure of thousands of workers. When you let your boss know that a strike is happening they can continue to produce commodities with the bosses men so when the strike happens they can keep business going with what are today called "scabs" or workers who work while other workers are striking.

The either hour movement of 1886 that culminated in the death of five labor leaders was "the true element" of the proletarian and revolutionary spirit. That it could never be achieved through "lobbying with politicians," but though the direct action of a general strike. The first of may, the labor festival, is the day of the general strike, "a one day protest against oppression and tyranny" which lead to the overthrow of economic and social dependence. The "sacred capitalistic justitia" has a "keen eye" for all that proves "beneficial or dangerous to the society that draws its "lives blood from its people." Sometimes labor would be organized by the church to counteract socialism and anarchism. But the labor movement soon grew out of their control They were like "hens hatching from duck eggs." Instead of being ordered like technology "a mere tool," a "hand," the "industrial and social pressures" force them to see things ready to hand, and "judge things for [them]selves." The wealth labor creates is "labor's strongest fetters." Deprived of liberty, life's beauty, the sole function is to accumulate riches for the master, otherwise known as the extraction of surplus labor value. The law is against better pay and shorter hours, considers it animal. It is very similar to the way that the law was employed to crush slave rebellions and whip slaves into submission.

The State will not bring justice to itself and yet it pretends "justice and fair play to be give to all. The laws of the country are a "chain of tremendous dimensions." The law is a form of "legal conspiracy," of the "possessing class" against the "non possessing." The government would put their hand on the balance of justice and pay for anarchists to be killed. All that work people can expect from the state is treachery and deception, "cruel justice" and "inhuman brutality" and its attitude towards labor.

The concept of right is not social or economic equality through god, or heads of state, but through the human race as its own liberator. One of the "great factors in this fight is the "revolutionary tradeunion." This movement will create a society based on free expression of life. Higher pay and shorter hours are worth fighting for in the short term. But that is merely preparation for the "final event, the social revolution and the overthrow of wage slavery.

Higher pay and shorter hours are worth fighting for in the short term. But that is merely preparation for the "final event," the social revolution and the overthrow of slavery. The "most effective" weapon of organized labor against capitalism is direct action. Nothing wounds capitalism more deeply than discontinuing work. The working person should not be like a client of a lawyer who fleeces you because you don't know the law, but rather gives themselves a chance beyond the whims of jurisprudence. A trade union can't defeat capitalism on legal grounds. When labor stops their action, the sole value, the human being and its blood and sweat, makes the "humbug of so called values" cease to exist. The general strike of Barcelona crippled the life of the city and authorities conceded the most important demands of the strikes. Mother earth was hopeful about the Russian revolution although they would later turn on. If society can't assign labor its proper place then people have the right to withdraw their support and create a new social life. Direct action and the general strike will be its methods of combat.

This is a summary and commentary of a study of the general strike in Philadelphia by Voltarine de Clerye. There were 1,600 workers on strike. They made the mistake of letting the authorities know in advance about the strike.

Workers say without a treasury for strike funds, the workers would not be able to support themselves.

A few hundred cops attacked the marchers with clubs. They protect private property.

“A union strike has more stamina than a non-union strike.”

During a strike, workers should stay in the factory and guard the machines so no scab should touch them.

This is a summary and commentary of Everlasting Murder by Max Baginski. Industrial murder, because of greed and inhumanity, occurs in “established institutions.” The government and legislator control the machine of justice, and they will acquit themselves. Government officials claim to be necessary to “protect life and property,” but they will doom a wretch to prison for stealing a few cents.

The government hounds the poor, but they make sure not to be too watchful as that would piss off the wealthy pillars of society.

Toilers believe the government is designed for protection; this official protection is not only useless, it is dangerous and often fatal. The motto is that away from the deceptive hope of representatives, the factories should be in the hands of those who work in them, and this should be achieved through direct action and sabotage.

Workers risk their lives and health at work so they should determine the conditions they work under. For too long, workers have thought of themselves as “hands” and “subjects.”

Workers don’t realize their “tremendous possibilities” because, as Zoe Baker would say, they have placed they capacities on politicians, instead of placing them on themselves. The goal is to stop the wholesale slaughter and expectation.

This is a summary and commentary of The Source of Violence by Alexander Berkman.

The McNamerans bombed a building in Los Angeles, and at first, Mother Earth thought that they were innocent; then they felt betrayed, but Goldman said that even though they are not anarchists, she still sympathizes with them and their struggle, stating there is a war in which “there are two forces” in “savage combat.” This drives the worker to finally strike back.

Berkman is being sarcastic, they do not uphold truth and justice, they are hypocrites who do not adhere to their own lofty principles. The country is unhappy, its politics are ignoble, and the courts are the antithesis of justice. The banks are dishonest, businesses are indecent, and they have nothing of social welfare in mind.

Capitalists drink from the “goblet” of “life’s wine” distilled from the “blood and marrow of those who toil.” Capitalist wives wear silk and laces while starved women and children work in sweatshops. The violence against the system is caused by the violence of the system; law and order is “founded on internecine strife, tyranny and exploitation.” As long as the system is defended, the violence will be inevitable, which sounds not like a threat, but fact. Do away with the hypocritical horror of “capital labor leader and politician.”

All life under capitalism is violence, every instant of its existence spells murder and bloodshed. What the McNamerans stood for in their bombing was emancipating labor from exploitation and the need of violence. So, the means of violence justify the ends of non-violence. In the social war, violence is a necessary tool. Berkman doesn’t believe in the Christian Bible, which teaches that slaves should stay in submission.

Berkman mentions all the times that violence was necessary, like in colonial and black independence. Capitalism never concedes without force, Berkman implies through rhetorical question. “Did the colonies win their independence by crawling on their knees before the tyrant?”

Capitalism is the “arch-crime,” and it is responsible for “all other crime and violence.” Capitalism should be abolished and clear the way for “solidarity of interests.” “Brotherhood and humanity” is the reality, and violence disappears because it is “unnecessary.”

This is a summary and commentary of The Mexican Revolution (The Origin of the Zapatistas) by Voltarine de Clerye.

Many people are ignorant of the revolution happening in their own backyard. The least you can do for the millions of struggling workers is to spread the word to “awaken the knowledge and sympathy of others.”

A revolution is a great subversive change in the social institution of a people, whether sexual, religious, or political. The “economic revolution” for social change will go on until it is achieved. Humanity is uneasy. Humanity is in unease, and it will not be at ease “until a rock bottom of economic justice is achieved.”

The Mexican Revolution did not start with the Diaz government, it began with embittered peasants with the readymade system of exploitation, “slave tenants to those who robbed them.” It will not be resolved without a “great alteration in the land owning system.”

Politicians always make promises to change the economic system, but never do. Oscar Wilde says, it is grotesque to recommend thrift to the poor, as it to recommend not eating to a starving person; yet that is what capitalists say, that workers should be patient and frugal.

There is a large Native American population in Mexico; like all natives, invincible haters of authority. Indians, as Clerye calls them, have disputed the invasion of their land from the early days of settler colonialism. The Indians will keep rebelling until they can use their soil without paying tribute.

Indians are communistic in many of their social customs. Woods, water, land, were held in common. People could use the materials to build. Land was harvested by mutual agreement. Communities incorporated mutual aid. People helped each other build cabins. There was no “legal machinery,” tax gatherers, justices, or jailors.

Native Americans occasionally paid the hated rent collectors and evaded recruiting officers, and under the Diaz regime, they tried to “civilize Mexico” by breaking up the natives with “as ruthless a hand as ever tore up a people by the roots and cast them out as weeds.”

William the Conqueror laid waste to the farms of England to make way for deer, but that was mercy compared to the Diaz government, with its “progressive collectivization.” The Diaz government took the land and gave it to capitalists from native and foreign lands, to develop modern industry. They ignored ancient custom, instead the blood sucking leeches gained concessions from property rights. They claimed the forest and the water, and no one cracked their skulls. They forbade free use of resources to the people. They might use it with the permission of a “distant master” leech who takes a cut of the profits. The Mother-fuckers robbed the free people by force.

Land was declared vacant and occupants without a legal title were denounced. Educated people went to court to build a hocus pocus of legal nonsense, laws which the occupants were unaware of.

People invented words to aid intercommunication, and then with an impotent sheet of paper, a leech of “distant, but of animated flesh” who never saw the land acquires the power to expel thousands of similar bodies like “bits of flesh.” Although the natives labored it, it grew from the ground as the trees grew, and they fertilized it with their bones for thousands of years.

Now the country is covered with “Naboth vineyards.” Biblically, it is a abomination of desolation. Now the master leech owns more land than slave plantations, and the people’s shares who live and toil upon them is hardly more than the slave’s.

That is all capitalism is: greedy pricks who took property by force and use it to exploit people so they can be rich.

People talk like all Mexicans do is lean up on a fence and smoke cigarettes, and Clerye asks what sort of life people should have whose lives have been taken from them? Why should they convert their strength to wealth for a leech? The Yanquis land was seized and they were deported to the Yucatan.

The Yanquis were deported, hundreds at a time, to the Yucatan, and they died there “like flies, as it was meant they should.” The land, cleared of the rebellious people, became “pacific” in the hands of the monstrous leeches. For every crime of the Yanquis, 500 of their people are deported.

Anyone with a conscience would expect the Yanquis to fight. The Yanquis banded together with revolutionaries. They were able to take back some of their land. Federal troops of the greedy leeches were dispatched to quell the rebellion. Only 16% of the population was literate, and it was not in the interest of the ironically called “civilizing” regime to spend money on putting the weapon of learning in the people’s hands. It is wrong to conclude unintelligence due to illiteracy.

The brave, just, and heroic “Zapatistas” rose up under General Zapata. They seized strategic points along railroads, broke into a federal district, and sacked a town. Military camps of the Zapatistas were cropping up. Guerilla bands were operating in the mountains, difficult to capture, who often did more damage than they received even in defeat.

The Zapatistas are taking the land back, and have already harvested their crops. <3 Bloodsucking parasites, “80 leading citizens” were waiting for the government to protect taking the land, but troops were deserting in their fight against the Zapatistas. Prisons were thrown open so that people could join the rebels.

Juan Banderas led an insurrection second in importance to the Zapatistas. In some places, taxes could not be collected, so they sent federal troops to remedy the state of affairs. The stupid, arrogant government of Madero said “in 5 days, the rebellion will be crushed.”

What if the same happened here? If Californians of the north drove off ranch owners and gathered crops for themselves, and the government sent in troops to quell the 3,000 equivalent of the Zapatistas, expropriating the land? If farmers in Illinois drove off tax collectors? If the coastal states seceded from the Union and became independent? What if in Pennsylvania an armed force was dispatched to fight a rebel force of 15,000 in the mountains? Would we call the people appeased? No, we would not. We would say the revolution is in full swing. The press was silent about the Mexican Revolution.

Capitalist scum keep the north ignorant of these affairs, through which the manufacture of consent through the media, which was given $10 million by the government so that the capitalists could keep their property intact by pacifying the people. They deserve their fate. Many of the landed leech millionaires moved to Los Angeles, so they could collect without risk of residence. They knew their own government could not quell the uprising.

Some of the fighting is likely reactionary or for personal grudges, but the main thing, Clerye says in all caps, is “RE-APPROPRIATION OF LAND BY THE PEASANTS.” Ignorant peasants, who know nothing of “land reformers and socialists,” that is the glory of it. They are ignorant of theory, but not of life on the land, as theory-spinners of the city are ignorant of. For them, there is one way to get the land back: ignore the machinery of paper and landowning and plow, sow, plant, and keep the product for themselves. We don’t need the leeching mafia middleman EVER! Economists say these ignorant people must give up their land to someone who will “develop its resources.” The educated men were the millionaire speculators who the abominable political combination gave land to. This is what the scum chose to do with their so-called “intelligence and education.” The “ignorant” do well to distrust them.

Capitalist land ownership depopulates immense districts. The purpose of tilling the land is not to produce millions of crops, but to fortify and strengthen the muscles and sinews, the stomachs of the people who work the land, the idlers.

Any other purpose for the land besides to feed the people who work it is a waste. We don’t need the profit leeching mafia middleman. No theory should be made except by the mass of people. You can work out whatever you want in books; if it is not adopted by the mass of people whose ills it should remedy, it will remain a barren theory.

The condition in Mexico is desperate and there is no waiting until the people are “educated up to it.” The wisdom of the economists is “relative on wisdom,” “wisdom out of place.”

The people can never be educated under the conditions of the Diaz regime. People are too impoverished to benefit from theoretical education, as it requires indefinite time and money to prepare such a spread; whatever economic change is wrought much be such that people in their present state should understand.

They have a right to use land for themselves to drive off the robbing invader, destroy landmarks, and tithe deeds, and ignore tax gatherers. However primitive the agricultural methods, they are “more economical than any system that heaps up fortunes for destroying men.” The capitalist model is inherently inefficient and genocidal.

The common beliefs of the stupid, ignorant Anglo-Saxons are that Native Americans are stupid and lazy because of the tyranny and robbery of white men; there is no possible reason a native should work than the idiotic one that work is a virtuous and exalted thing.

Clerye makes a point about natives and Latins that both do not work to be subordinated. The natives like to be their masters. White natives want to be at one with nature; Latin culture has a stronger focus on artistic creation, and don’t like to be forced to make them. The Latins do not make a distinction between work and play, like the Diaz government. For Fredy Perlman, it was the Christians that forced the work-play distinction.

The rapacious and stupid, armored, leviathanic, anglo Saxons, who are obsessed with work, want to force everyone to work. They even treat leisure like work, like visiting a museum. This desire to force everyone to work is “both unjust and stupid.” There is enough room for everyone to have their own tendencies without forcing them on others.

If people naturally took to these tendencies imported by the north, that would be one thing, but the actual method is colonialist primitive accumulation; killing the natives and “transporting the busy crowd there.” The same has happened in AmeriKKKa.

It is unclear that those who benefited from the extermination are grateful, but no one who believes in unification, liberation, the several goodnesses of the various races and one universal race, can feel anything but burning shame and fathomless regret at reading these genocidal pages of history.

The Mexican revolution is a chiefly agrarian one. The violence will not stop until the Diaz government proposes some “plan of land restoration.” There were 1,000,000 voters in the federal district, 45000 of them voted. Was it government intimidation or were the people convinced of the usefulness of voting? The case is that in agricultural, less populated areas, they preferred direct revolutionary action.

What matters is not the sophistication of the revolt, but no matter how ignorant, Cleyre bows her head in respect. What the defense of private property is a defense of colonialism. All of the western values which we defend stem directly from the foundational event, all consuming in its singularity, of the genocide of native populations. The free people were killed so that an inefficient, wealth concentrating, to this day genocidal war machine, can continue to enslave the people encased in the corpse of the world eating leviathan. All defenses of western values are defenses of colonialism, all defenses of western values stem from genocide.

Peter Kropotkin, writing for Mother Earth, talks about how in the Paris Commune, a new idea was born. It was not the conception of an individual brain, or philosophy, it was born of a collective spirit, “it sprang from the heart of a whole community.”

The solution that the social revolution in Paris put forward was the abolition of private property, and putting all wealth in common from previous generations. The form of political grouping appropriate for them is internationalism, which crosses “artificial frontiers and boundary lines.” This means not having borders and instead a society which takes care of people throughout the world, in which everyone is automatically a citizen. It’s a ”federation of the world.”

There was a split in the international between those who wanted state socialism and anarchy. State socialists believed the state should take possession of accumulated wealth and distribute it to workers, while anarchists are pessimistic about the possibility of a state without tyranny. Anarchy is the possibility of a state without tyranny. Anarchy is the total abolition of the state without tyranny.

Anarchy is the total abolition of the state. It would take place in social organization of the “complex and simple” by “means of federation of popular groups of producers and consumers.

State socialists admitted that anarchy was a good idea but too far offto trouble with. “A federation of workers unions and groups of consumers” was “too vague.” Thomas Kuhn points out how you need a new and working paradigm to abandon an old one. People will not “fling themselves into the unknown” without some positive and clearly formed idea.

The Paris Commune had no idea how to organize its own defenses. The workers faced “frightful privations” while the “idlers lived in insolent luxury.” Whenever the people showed a desire for free scope, the government stepped in. The Paris Commune was an organizational failure. They did not take stock of the resources of the city, or break with the tradition of the state of representative government.

There was already a revolution against the monarchy, is it really a surprise that there was a revolution against “the spoilers?” The middle class received a scare when people “shook their rulers yoke looks upon their necks.

There are two classes in society. One who works and “yields up to the monopolists of property more than half of what [they] produce,” and overlooks the wrongs of their master, and the “idler, the spoiler, hating his slave, ready to kill [them] like game,” who become savage when their possession is menaced.

The government declared no mercy, that they were outside humanity. That they should be butchered and taste agony. Then they tortured the remaining with whips, and bows, starvation. Can anyone forget these “doughty deeds?”

The commune will not be vanquished, the world spirit will rise again. The goal, the solution, is to “put an end to the ignoble system of middle class exploitation, to rid the people of tutelage of the state, to inaugurate a new era of liberty, equality, solidarity in the evolution of the human race.” For Deleuze there is no solution to the universal problem, but anarchy is about finding equilibrium between producer and consumer which eliminates the violence of the ruling class. This is what anarchism means; allowing people to order themselves instead of being organized as machines. That is rhizomaticity.

This is a commentary and summary of National atavism, from Mother Earth, written by Internationalist. Zionists hope to take over a specific territory, as opposed to people who view all things universally. Some circles of Jewish people have followed the banner of internationalism or revolution. Revolutionists of all nationalities and races should show solidarity.

Revolution is part of immemorial time, the chaos of timeless things as Beckett’s Molloy says. The sublime, the inability to be organized; it is the hope and refuge of the oppressed from national and social yokes. The lie is that Jewish people are powerless without national rights.

Without borders which are the basis of nationalism, the refuge of all hypocrites, internationalism can eliminate the basis of colonialism. Swiss police to continue to uphold a colonialist attitude, by arresting refugees. How relevant is this today when Zionism, the racist, genocidal, nationalist belief in taking a holy land by forcing Gazans into an open air prison, and occupying them for 100 years, then destroying their city, and murdering a huge percent of their population, mostly noncombatants. Internationalism is against borders.

Territorialists who want who want a commune will still be small states that are harassed by larger states. Internationalism eliminates that problem. Free states built on coercion and land robbery have little chance of being free. The ruling powers look at a community in which exploitation and slavery do not reign with the same effect as a red rag to a bull.

If anarchism is thrown into the dust heap, the life of people is nothing more than stupid patriotism, national vanities, everlasting antagonisms, ravenous greed, wealth and supremacy. Let us declare what that life would be and not make a deal with the devil for what that life would actually be by deceiving ourselves.

The Jewish organization of the proletariat, the “Bund” has nothing to do with “nationalistic agitation.” Nationalism is middle class, solidarity is stronger than nationalistic glue.

A Jewish banker is more likely to relate to another banker while a Jewish working man is more likely to find his brother in fellow workers, not a Jewish banker. The Jewish worker faces a twofold suffering; they are attacked because they are Jewish. A wealthy Jewish person stands for wage slavery, social subordination and economic dependence as much as the Christian employer and owner of wealth. The Jewish worker has more in common with a worker of any nationality than someone who lives in a mansion. The worker’s conditions can be ameliorated through universal brotherhood.

Not by separation and barriers. Nationalism is the leviathan working through you. Nationalism is the dark of Ahriman, universal humanity is the light of Ahura Mazda. Mother Earth agrees with Perlman, before Perlman’s time, that art be made by government is flat and lifeless, insignificant, Patriotic literature, national art. The leviathan works through them masking their life, and masking their violence. Beethoven who Zizek says we appreciate universally, and Whitman, etc. are who we should enjoy instead, universally is to experience an-Oedipal, life of the eternal return.

The reactionary party of Russia has been killing Jewish people, not the Russian people. Yet Jewish socialists and anarchists join the nationalist party. They forget the distinction between people of Russia and revolutionary forces. The “ruling clique” paid for the agitation against the Jewish population, hoping this scapegoat would turn people against the Russian people instead of the ruling class.

It was the rich who killed Jewish people, and let us show solidarity to overthrow the abominable tyranny. We should build a “social structure which neither nation or race, but humanity can live and grow in beauty. To combat national sentiment with national sentiment is to lay the foundation for new persecution.

Baeden: Journal of Queer Heresy – Against the Gendered Nightmare

5 Escape from gender is escape from civilization itself.

6 Escape from bashing, separation, dysmorphia, displacement, labors of sexuality; false solutions which only strive to “foreclose any possibility of escape.” Queerness is gender’s undoing.

7 The end of gender is not the end of a linear progression of time, referencing Perlman’s cyclical time, as opposed to linear time which in my words, is a cut in the flow of cyclical time, which is things like the rising and falling of the sun, the seasons, and things which occur in nature and are not part of the artificial structure of civilization.

Domestication is about taming and de-clawing people. Primitive accumulation tears a being away from itself, and forces it into class based society.

8 Capitalism deconstructs the mind and the body, and reconstructs it as a “willful subject of the social order.” Capitalism evolves into an image of wholeness which destroys unity. Domestication promises a future without limits, but ties our outcome to an undead and all devouring system. Domestication creates willful slaves. It says along with fascists, “long live death!”

9 Camatte talks about something akin to a Stirnerian fixed idea, how domestication creates fossilized minds. Rigid and stereotyped, gender is, like I said in my paper on Ulysses, a form of stereotype when it’s taken to be true for everyone. Camatte calls capitalism the endpoint of a process of domestication, individuation, and massification.

10 Capital may go as far back as the Greek polis, with its representationalist break with wild life. Here we might see representation in a Deleuzian sense – something which is created artificially, which only represents an image of something which is not actually part of sense, but memory which stores sense which is too multifarious to be fully encapsulated by memory.

Domestication is separation itself. This “colonization of our very existence” did not start recently, so we should reject Camatte’s origin myth which starts more recently.

11 Perlman focuses on the history of the domesticating monster. He stole the name leviathan from Hobbes. Perlman says that resistance is a natural human response to dehumanization, so it does not need to be explained or justified. Whereas history exalts civic and military achievements as “progress,” Perlman looks at the consolidation of state power as an “encroachment on the human community.”

12 Baeden thanks Perlman for creating an anarchy not based on technology, civilization, or fetishizations of production.

13 Perlman adds to the critique of the monster of civilization that the monster that the monster tears up human communities and incorporates them into itself. In other words, capitalism is the great destroyer of diversity. It takes communities where something valuable other than profit occurs, and it rips them apart, usually by violent force, and forces them to be zeks in the process of primitive accumulation, and eventually labor and profit extraction for the benefit of the ruling class. A rule which forces people to become encased in the phallic shell of the machine – as the phallus and the machine can be seen as one and the same. The power signifier, and that which arranges and orders.

Baeden praises Perlman for showing the stories of resisters, and makes Against His-Story, Against Leviathan genuinely beautiful to read.

14 Only those outside of the monster are free, and yet the civilized will use the words to describe themselves. I reminds me of how in Against Leviathan, Perlman said that the monster cannot speak its own name without losing the confidence of its constituents, so it instead speaks of freedom, the language of the human community. The very dictionary describes freedom as being “citizens.” In other words, Hegel who says that we achieve freedom through the rights given to us by the state, or Hobbes who says we join the state to escape the state of nature, are the targets of this critique, as we have already invoked against Hobbes, but later Baeden will say that Hegel said Africa has no History.

Citizens are restrained by infinite unfreedoms. It will call people barbarians and savages, then the “civilized” will commit the most barbarous and savage atrocities. In other words, their belief in their neutrality as civilized people, is masked by the entire history of violence, and suppression which goes into making people exist in the world they exist in today. That which thirsts for blood will use the name reason and Humanist to justify domestication.

The Leviathan is artificial life, it has no life of its own, it can only function by capturing living beings within itself. Hobbes sees people as nothing more than gears, wheels, and springs, to operate the artificial man, the leviathan.

15 Institutions of domestication are “impersonal and immortal.” Civilization is a domain of death, which continues to grow as people within it die. It’s like Hegel’s spirit, or a scientific paradigm, in that it goes on without any particular person, and does not depend on any particular person.

Hence, why science, and Hegel’s philosophy, while Hegel’s can be re-read as non-representationalist, Hobbes cannot, and science itself is a representationalist, form of machinery, as words themselves are part of the “meaninglessness, and deception inherent to language.” So in other words, machinery is baked into our very existence, words themselves are mechanisms, and people internalize the animation of the machine which they inhabit. The monastery is one of these institutions.

16 Clocks were an invention of the monastery, and the clock is a miniature monastery, where the springs and wheels are metal springs and wheels, instead of flesh and blood.

Masks and armors are ways people internalize constraints of the leviathan, and acclimate themselves within it. They protect people from their own emotions, and realizing the “domination and humiliation” which is life in society.

“All monotheistic religions hold that man should have dominion over fish and foul and all living things.” The church declared war against all living things, and all living things which constitute the autonomy and independence of free people.

Sin is a violence instilled by the church on one’s own urges and desires, above all the desire for freedom and escape. (I will just add, there are primitivist Catholics, but what they’re saying is right for the most part). The war on the mind which the church wages, will eventually be a war waged against infidels. This domination has appeared for so many generations, it appears as natural, and secular.

17 The worm or octopus like qualities of the leviathan are necessary for survival. This expansion is necessary for the monster’s survival, but no one submits willingly into it. Violence must be used constantly to make people accept these amenities, which supposedly, according to Marxists, people accepted because they amenities were better. Most leviathans begin as resistance movements, Christianity, reformation, Nazis, and Marxists all began by “projecting an image of rejecting an industrial hell.”

18 All that exists outside of civilization, racialized and gendered categories, becomes the object of accumulation. The accumulation is not at the hands of economists, but lynch mobs, armies, and police. The genocide against the native Americans by the Europeans is the “most unprecedented of these accumulations.” Accumulation meaning killing people, and accumulating their land, and the survivors labor, into the springs and wheels of the artificial machine.

Civilization is a movement towards infinity, one which speeds up at the speed of light, and loses its body, and turns to smoke. There are contradictions within the machine that ensure that its growth, will be accompanied with its own collapse.

Differentiating domestication and civilization, domestication is the method of control of the institutions, ideologies, and physical apparatuses which perform the control. The monster itself is a world destroyer, and domestication is “nearly” tautological with civilization.

21 Domestication is capture. It is capture of living beings into a dead thing. It is the discourse and ideology which justifies the capture. Again, looking at something like the objective liberal scholar, they put on a mask of neutrality to hide the violence of civilization on themselves, and historically inscribed in what Baeden doesn’t talk about, but what Deleuze talks about, the body without organs, which is a recording surface.

There is a challenge to the Perlmanian perspective, which is that machining is more ubiquitous than simply a dichotomy between the pure from technology human being, and I think Baeden would admit this, as they say language itself is part of this process of domestication. I think I would respond from a schizoanalytic perspective, that Perlman is talking about microfascism, and molar fascism, not necessarily a dichotomy in which someone is 100% away from domestication. I think that’s unfair to Perlman to describe him as an un-nuanced, totalizing thinker. The only thing totalizing about Perlman’s description of the leviathan, is its attempt to encompass everything with itself. Capitalism likes to tout diversity, and yet it feels that nothing can exist outside of its mode of economic destruction and capture. Destruction of the environment, which Perlman is absolutely right about.

22 Gilgamesh is responsible for instituting the domination of the Sumerian leviathan. Gilgamesh built machinery to wage war against the wild earth. The gods created an equal to challenge him, Enkidu.

26-27 “The story of Enkidu and Shamhat is a story of domestication within the mythology of the first civilization.” They tamed Enkidu by separating him from wild beasts, giving him sex roles, clothes, and the drinking of alcohol. Shamhat was a prostitute of the Sumerian temples. They brought the wild within the walls of the city by using a prostitute to get Enkidu to submit. It was through these rules, that the priestess of civilization, also a goddess of nature, made Enkidu into a man. We should not blame the woman for this, but rather the “ars vivendi which defined life in the first civilization; women’s work and men’s work.” Here we see a division of labor in the first civilization between men and women, and the leviathan is responsible for this. Enkidu is made a man through domesticating laws, he is civilized by gender itself.

28 The beginning of patriarchy starts at the beginning of civilization. Gendered violence starts at the beginning of civilization, and it won’t disappear after reform or revolution.

29 It used to be believed that women were impregnated by gods. But men discovered their ability to plant their seed in women, and in the earth. Men taking over women’s bodies and the earth, is an example of how over population and environmental destruction, as well as subjugation of women as baby factories, is caused by patriarchy.

31 Agricultural practices were tied to the traffic in women because just as one controlled the field through machinery, one controlled women. There was a sort of original division of labor in civilization, but Baeden will later say we can only speculate about the earliest of people, and whether or not they had gender, which is why Baeden will later talk about embracing the queer unknown.

32 To be against civilization, one must be against patriarchy, as the Green Anarchy collective says. It is worth checking out the Uncivilized: The Best of Green Anarchy collection, for some good writings against civilization. Rape and the weaponization of the phallus are intrinsic to civilization. This domination and power is unnatural. Perlman describes Leviathanic men as “women haters.” His-Story is “the process through which men who control the leviathan narrate their own conquests and achievements.” His-story is the violent annihilation of the matriarchy for Perlman, the nature goddess; to Perlman the earth itself is feminine, a mother who gives birth to all life. The leviathan gives birth to nothing but death, and despises the mother.

33 Zerzan says women at one point were mainly gatherers, and so they had more social power and autonomy. Hierarchies of gender were rarer in indigenous societies. Domestication imposes a “sexual division of labor.” Family is neither an inevitable nor universal form of the human condition, unlike what Hegel says in the Philosophy of Right.

For Zerzan, domestication is marked by specialized labor roles, the limiting of women to reproductive efforts (baby factories), and the strength of kinship bonds. The gendered division of labor, for Zerzan, “gave rise to all others.” There is a causal relation between domestication and gender. “Both are shifts away from non-separated, nonhierarchical life.”

34 Patriarchy was a key aspect of colonizers around the world. Baeden critiques the primitivist view of gender for being essentialist. “A break from gender, is a break from all our assurances and comforts which maintain our capture in it. Our gendered existence is not laid out in the starts or inevitable.

35 Primitivists will say things like people worked 4 hours a day, but Perlman will say that they didn’t work at all. The managers of work camps naturalize work into all other human and animal existence. Primitive people worked less, because they did not work at all.

36 Those in the work world can only understand the activities of others as work. Work is historically determined, but our civilized metaphysics naturalizes these institutions. The naturalization of these institutions is synonymous with the masks and armors, which prevent people from seeing the historical violence, and the maintenance of the violence on themselves, which is compartmentalized as recordings on the surface of the body without organs, that issue forth as the past comes in contact with the ever indeterminate present. The work world “colonizes our past, as well as our future.” More explanation for why anarchism is anti colonialism – colonialism is the ever present capture of our life and potentiality. Primitive people made no distinction between work and play.

37 You wouldn’t look at a bear eating berries in the forest and say that’s the bear’s job, one might say “the bear makes no distinction between work and play.” We do not need to be certain that our ancestors “worked less” to reject the world of work that captures us. Work is a historically determined institution which domesticates, captures, and immiserates our lives. This is “reason enough that world should burn.”

38 Baeden says what is left is we abandon the certainty that we once lived in a Utopia? Mystery and chaos evade rationalist attempts to evade capture. Instead of trying to justify the unknown with positive evidence, Baeden suggests that the unknown is something to celebrate.

Why is Fredy’s willful embrace of the unknown applied to the unknown, but not to gender? Baeden seems to suggest that gender relations in primitive societies are viewed much more favorably by primitivist sympathetic anthropologists.

People in a gendered world perceive the ineffable, and indeterminate as forming categories.

Baeden says that the archetype of women as nature is a sort of essentialism, and they’re absolutely right. Baeden praises feminists for breaking down the sex/gender binary, saying that it’s more like one system than two systems, with a vast array of parts working in tandem, calling it “the most worthwhile understanding offered by queer theory.” The arrangement into categories is always “a coercive attack on the individual.” Intersex people being forced into one thing or the other, is an example of this.

40 Stories of gender such as the third gender option outside of civilization do undermine the stable nature of heteronormativity, but understood scientifically, they maintain the stability of gender. They lack the imagination to point to a more favorable arrangement outside of gendered cages. To make universal is a leviathanic tendency, homogeneity is intrinsic to the domestication process.

We cannot know for sure whether there was ever not gender, but to embrace queerness, is to embrace the unknown. A “tendency toward primordial chaos.” That’s what Beckett’s character Molloy calls something like the indestructible chaos of timeless things. Das Ding. Here we have the heard of queerness, indeterminacy, the world spirit which is stateless people.

Queerness is the escape from capture, as the capture is the resonance of these historical systems, which are left unhealed in their marks and consequences. The historical trauma of a people which lives on through the material consequences of times gone by, inscribed on the socius, which is the excess of history which is always compartmentalized, and issuing forth from the body without organs, which is the recording surface on which we inscribe things like books, or the brain storing memories. Queerness in part is recognizing one's historic position in the context of a colonial society, and the queerness, which tried to escape forth from the dam of Oedipus, the queerness which white power tried to destroy in the founding of America.

42 Zerzan says categorization might be the single cultural form of the greatest significance. In gender the enemy has projected itself through time, to preclude a possibility of an outside.

43 The Naskapi had no conception of private property, authority, male superiority, and they refuse to punish their children. The Jesuits tried to make the Naskapi reliable trade partners. They taught them “man is the master.”

44 Naskapi women fled, and this caused the men, at the suggestion of the Jesuits, to chase after them and “threaten to beat and imprison them for their disobedience.”

45 Stories such as how anthropologists will say that homosexual acts are shameful represent one of the ways that categories enact violence on a range of human experience. It severs experience from the whole context, and recounts experience as an amputated and gendered one.

46 Science is one myth among many. Gender is the non living, immortal institution, which tears individuals away from themselves and reconstitutes them as a predetermined role. Gender would be an empty husk, if not for the beings trapped in its entrails.

47 Every mask of the natural is a lie told by the leviathan to justify its own activity -rape culture, women as submissive baby makers, these are some of the forms gender takes. Gender itself is violently introduced by colonial civilization.

48 Under a colonial state, the imposition of male gods, the formation of patriarchal colonial governments, the displacement of people from their traditional means of subsistence and the violent institution of the family.

49 Domestication is imposed as gender in order to disintegrate all the communal and free relations, ritual and overlapping means of survival. Sex work, abusive relationships, body dysmorphia, queer bashing, date rape, gang rape, psychiatry, electroshock therapy, eating disorders, domestic labor, unwanted pregnancy, fetishization, emotional labor, street harassment, pornography. Each instant we are torn from ourselves, captured in a brutal repetition, denied a life lived by and for ourselves.

Gender itself as domestication saves us from the essentialism of patriarchy being responsible for domestication.

50 gendered violence is not the property of one category of people. Ideologies pay lip service to queer and trans people, but they never alter their theory to accommodate them. This is the liberal politics of inclusion. Baeden hopes to analyze based on how gender has captured us.

51 Levi Strauss and Freud are read by Gayle Rubin as apologists and technicians of gender. She speaks of the apparatus of the sex/gender system, in which women are raw material through which domesticated women are fashioned as products. Anthropology and psychoanalysis describe mechanisms by which the system constructs domesticated gender out of the occurrence of biological sex.

53 Several practices of gender domination cannot be explained by Marxist analysis of reproduction of labor power. Economics cannot account for the “moral element” which determines that a wife is among the commodities needed by a man, that only men can talk with god, and that women are the ones who perform domestic labor. For Rubin, gender is located outside of the mode of production.

54 Marriage is a form of gift exchange, women themselves being given from one man to another. Kinship arrangements are more powerful than property arrangements. The difference between exchanged and exchangers are a split called gender.

55 Rubin finds emergence of gender in social structures, rather than biology. Gender domination is rooted more in the exchange of bodies rather than exchange of merchandise. Gender is inextricably bound to a processed Rubin calls “social organization.” This is the monster called domestication. The system does not just exchange women, but names, lineages, social power, and children.

56-57 Baeden says that the destruction of the social organization in Rubin’s system would be impossible, because it actually entails “the destruction of everything.” Baeden says that Rubin correctly berates psychoanalysis for the tendency to become line a theory of the mechanisms which reproduce gender and sexuality. She says psychoanalysis can hint at how children are forced into the category of boys and girls. Baeden quotes Rubin saying that gender and sex domination mirrors the aspects of society that people take roles in. The Oedipus complex is a machine that fashions the appropriate forms of sexual individuals.

The phallus, rather than being a biological object, is primarily a symbol of belonging to a gendered social order. The father possesses it so he can exchange it for a woman; if a boy behaves and is properly domesticated, one day he can have the phallus too. The phallus has a mystical dimension which is traded for bodies in turn.

58 For Rubin any site of the body can be the site of active or passive eroticism. Psychoanalysis argues that women have been cut off from their access to the phallus, but Rubin suggests rather that they have been forced into a submissive attitude, “internalize the logic of submission.”

Rubin reveals a system so monumental and intractable, it cannot be exorcised through miniscule reforms.

59 Rubin said we should seize the technology for our own use and liberate personality from the straightjacket of gender. Baeden doesn’t have hopes that technology will be destroyed on a global scale, but “our anarchy is destruction of these machines and our escape from them. Perlman argued that leviathan is a dead thing which only has an artificial life when living things inhabit it as captives.

The leviathan is one and the same with gendered machinery. Siezing the machinery would only continue the nightmare of gender, we need to find an escape route, or as Deleuze would say a line of flight. Psychoanalysis and anthropology are the most sophisticated rationalization of the gender/sex system. Sciences which analyze the world become a blueprint through which to implement their vision. They are not looking to maintain or alter the machine, they are looking at the blueprints as though one has stolen the blueprints of a prison.

60 It is an enemy operation seeking the points at which the blueprints fail. The blueprints are of no interest, except an image of the world we want to leave. These images are two dimensional, bare lines, inscrutable symbols. The gender system is the totality of ways in which we are captured and the way in which we internalize that system. By problematizing the concept of gender as natural and economic, she avoids the pitfalls of Marxist and ecofeminists.

61 The formations of sex and gender, are the bodily form, and spiritual content of the domestication process. White slave owners set up a stereotype of black women as sexually aggressive child bearers so they were raped and forced to raise and nurse through the breast white children.

62 the circulation of bodies is obvious in extreme instances, and more subtle ones. Advertisement, gay and straight pornography, dating of monogamous or polyamorous varieties, technophilic cruising. It is present in the “my” which always corresponds to boyfriend, wife, daughter, and partner. It is an unending dynamic of bodily capture, spiritual submission, and circulation.

63 Hobbes regrets that people are not altogether reduced to automata. People under the leviathan become potential human beings. Life is borrowed life, it neither breathes nor breeds it is not even a living parasite it is an excretion and they are the ones who excrete it. The newly captured know they are not ditch repairers, but a free Canaanite filled with ecstatic life; [they] feel the ecstatic spirits of the Levantine mountains and forests throbbing within [them].

64 Empty space is filled with springs and wheels. One can take off the mask and armor, but merely airing them takes almost superhuman effort.

65 The chronicles of the deeds done by men at the head of the leviathans Hobbes will call the “artificial man.” The leviathan is a cannibal, it eats its contemporaries as well as its predecessors. It loves a plurality of leviathans as little as it loves earth. Its enemy is everything outside of itself – they quote Perlman.

66 The leviathan’s story is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Instead of progress, Perlman instead shows the decay of the beast.

67 Progress narratives have a sort of delay of the goal. Whereas Baeden wants to look at decomposition instead. The stories of the leviathan do not cohere into a cohesive meta-narrative. We must instead take up people, events in the past we enjoy or appreciate, and creatively reidentify with them as non historical, extra historical, or anti-historical currents.

68 His-story is a double movement of decomposition. Civilization unravels, it narrates its unraveling. The dead thing, leviathan, organized life, builds itself up as armor in and around it, machines, stiffening of gestures and postures, concurrently thinking and action, in human bodies.

69 The dead thing remains dead, it functions by breaking down. The death thing in question is gender, ordering of life, stiffening of gestures. Gender itself is our very inscription into a line of a linear narrative.

70 Caliban and the Witch is a book that ignores gendered violence against any bodies that don’t fit into neat categories.

71 The mode of capture of primitive accumulation and its mode of capture in the form of gender, is what the Caliban and the Witch book is about. This form of capture is not predicated on the mode of production, it is rather bodily and spiritual operation upon which the economic model is sutured.

72 Fredrici’s tale is a story about intensification of the process of gender. Where she Fredrici asserts an essential woman, a different writer Arthur Evans, the writer of Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, he specifically explores the witch hunts as an attempt to destroy the whole range of sexually deviant and gender variant people.

Evans is too universal with his notion of a universal gay culture into which all people fit. This can be distinguished from queerness as Baeden views as escape. We don’t want to swallow decomposed fragments of gender and reincarnate gender in some way.

73 Stories are the primary method of magical practices of oral cultures. His-story is the Socratic ideal of these stories, the one story which cannibalizes all the others.

74 The family becomes the primary unit for enforcing private property, enforcement of discipline, and policing sexuality.

75 The leviathan will, from time to time, deploy a specialized force of police to put down these heresies; these are called inquisitions. The inquisition is his-storical, it eliminates stories as much as bodies.

Queer desire is the locus point of the dread of an entire social order’s self annihilation. Queerness is the insecure indeterminacy which any determinacy is founded upon, the where the ID was, the ego shall be, or something like that.

76 Rape is used as a tactic of domination by conquering armies, as Israeli soldiers are doing to prisoners in Gaza, torture by inquisitors, division amidst rebel populations.

77 Emma Goldman’s essay on birth control similarly talks about how women bodies are reduced to baby factories. Reminds you of the song “sex far woman” from the mocumentary “spinal tap” except that’s actually what America seeks to turn women into. America is a sex farm. Scientific diagnosis of sexual deviants or disciplinary control of gender variant people Baeden also quotes in (Perlman?) as historical ways the state has suppressed difference. Here we can see how rhizomatic behavior has always been something which Oedipus, bursting at the seams, has tried to eliminate. Eliminate its deterritorialization.

78 The child functions as the fantastic future of the parent’s race. Any decline in the (civilized) population will be seen as a threat to the state, which in turn will ramp up the techniques of sexual repression described above.

The fanatical desire to increase population lead the most misogynist religious and state leaders to proclaim that women’s sole virtue was their natural capacity for childbirth. Rationalism, Reason, Enlightenment, (or any other lie told by the leviathan about itself) never lead to the abolition of these genocidal and bloodthirsty practices. Rather these ideologies only lead to institutionalization and increased technological sophistication of violence.

79 Telling these stories are to connect to individuals and moments which have attempted to escape the nightmare of his-story.

Reminiscent of the lyrics “I go to the hills, when my heart is lonely” from the Sound of Music, Baeden describes people ripping off their masks and armors, looting and burning, when they flee to the mountains, singing and dancing, in ecstatic ritual. They tear off the armor and burn the beast to the ground.

81 Lilith refused to be subservient to Adam. She wouldn’t lay beneath him in the missionary position, and so she was expelled from Eden. The fall for Walter Benjamin means the expulsion of humanity from primitive communism.

82 Forbidden knowledge was the realization that a certain type of sex leads to reproduction. Once Adam and Eve knew this, they couldn’t unlearn it. Their activities were tied to an emerging “symbolic order of domination” echoing Lacan. From this knowledge stems the invention of the role of the father. People will blame Eve, and the result is the mechanization of the body. What does it mean to destroy these machines? Can we recall Lilith and fly to her in the night, Baeden asks?

83 In the history of gender there is a splitting of the body and the mind. Some people say the origin of this split is in the world, for Zerzan. Federici will find it in machinations of witch hunts. Evans in the rise of industrialism. The precise origin is of less interest than its unending operation and repetition.

Bodily awareness must be destroyed for civilization, bodily awareness of other animals and plants.

The conditioning of the body is the precondition for civilization. This discipline is internalized warfare, internalized from without. Like the sublation of leviathanic tendencies which Perlman references in Against His-Story, Against Leviathan.

84 Esoteric theorists of genetics (Richard Dawkins?) will say the body is a machine vessel for selfish genes which deploy bodies in an effort to eternally perpetuate themselves.

85 Black and feminine bodies are imagined as indocile and in need of disciplining, while white masculine bodies are believed to be rational and tame. In a world of constant disassociation with the body, nausea becomes constant.

86 To profitably sell your bodies one projects the idea of gender onto them, and mutilating them and mechanizing them accordingly. Baeden uses the example of walking through a high school where queer bashing occurs, and how one composes oneself in such a situation.

The so called natural categories of sex and race similarly conform to categories, which sever bodies from each other and the mind from the body. Taxonomies of the body consistently serve to rationalize, systematize and place the varied happenstance of the body into a Leviathanic structure.

87 For Descartes our being was inscribed in a soulless world and a machine body. Magical capacities are the ability of people to find meaning outside of the world of work and industry. For the leviathan to gain control of the body it had to divorce the body of participation with the cosmology of power and spirit.

89 For religion spirit is the realm of creativity, freedom, and beauty, etc. In contrast the realm of matter is the realm of dead mechanical activity, slavery, grossness, sufferings, sorrow.

90 By putting wild abandon into the realm of spirit, which in reality is the realm of abstract ideas with no concrete existence, religion made itself the handmaiden of civilized, domesticated culture. Certain ratios of the distribution of fat, hair, bone structure, and other occurrences come to immutable proof of the eternal existence of the social prison of sex.

91 Mechanistic philosophers celebrate the witch hunts as the advancement of a rational worldview. For science the world becomes a witch to poke and prod. The body raped, tortured, and unveiled.

The editors of green anarchy say that the scientific understanding of the world is a culmination of the segmentation of reality which first occurs in gender and domestication. Science is not neutral. It is loaded with motives and assumptions that come out of, reinforce, the catastrophe of dissociation, disempowerment, and consuming deadness that we call civilization – as they say in Green Anarchy.

92 Science turns things into quantifications. Turns things into numbers. Number is not truth, but a chosen style of thinking. Science selects for predictability and uniformity.

93 It wouldn’t be enough to destroy the computer infrastructure in the world, if we still have the mindset of ourselves as primitive computers. Any attempt to implement technology into the pursuit of liberation can only deepen the tragedy of separation and control, which is the essence of domestication.

94 Marx points out that ever actions a worker takes to implement their labor power, enlarges the material social apparatus that dehumanizes him; it enlarges the machine that keeps him in place, in other words. The leviathan consumes populations through primitive accumulation, an ongoing process of capture/domestication, achieved through colonialism.

95 Clothes and artifacts of the vanished communities were gathered up and displayed in museums as “additional traces of the march of progress.” Genocide was and is the precondition and cornerstone, and groundwork of the military industrial complexes, of processed environments of the world of offices and parking lots. We can see this with Israel already resettling Gaza after wiping out their infrastructure. Anarchists, socialists, and Leninists all glorify industrialism as key within the progressive movement of history.

96 The dictatorship of the proletariat was still capitalist style progress.

97 Dictators would soon use primitive accumulation on the Russian citizens.

98 Fascists, Maoists, and Bolsheviks will look at the entire Eurasian continent as resources to be domesticated and accumulated.

99 Every minute devoted to the system enlarges a thing which is inimical to nature, culture and life. In the role of a revolutionary, theory is a despotism, everyone should know this – Camatte. For this reason we should dispense with scientific certainty and knowledge in our inquiry into gender.

102 Though gender is different in capitalism, that does not mean that the essence of gendered domination has changed all that much, and there is a dimension of the unique in every moment.

103 The state and capitalism are interwoven and must be destroyed together. Marxist revolutionaries have only ever reproduced the state, because the state is far more ancient and colonizes our being. The struggle to adapt ideology to categories it previously ignored is the politics of liberal inclusion sutured onto vulgar Marxism. To destroy gender, we cannot limit our canon to moments which fit neatly into a story about capital. We need archaic origins of people who attempted to burn it out of themselves.

104 The split of gender is domestication, and the tendency of the leviathan to universalize its functions into the wild. The family is a structure which emerges out of the exchange of the bodies of others as commodities, and it is imbued with a mystical power through enactment of ancient rituals regarding sexuality and kinship.

105 The bonds which animate and gave power to the family (bonds of kinship, transmission, ancestry, sexuality, reproductive futurism) stream through his-story and constitute an inheritance of millennia of control and domination.

106 Science is a narrow view of the world which reduces the shape of reality to its own view. Fredy and Attentat are asserting that his-story is a decomposition of leviathanic forms. Marxism’s split around productive and reproductive labor is superficial in addressing gendered violence.

107 A refusal of materialism isn’t an affirmation of a queer idealism, rather it is an attempt to explore what has been cut out and discarded by both of these worldviews, the body and the spirit.

108 We have little hope that a category theory of gender does not become an apparatus for policing said categories.

109 Those who draw the lines will draw them through the bodies of others. The category functions as a border to be policed.

110 a way out of making a new binary out of the old binary, would be to start from experience rather than identity. To start with an experiential or phenomenological category would dispense with the category altogether.

112 The fantasy of the child remains the primary structure of the shape of the social order, and as such has to be indicated as central to the gender matrix.

The social structure which takes “natural urges” and turns them into police mechanisms is the oldest social structure, the emergent kinship structures which give rise to the first leviathans.

113 For Gonzalez gender is part of the daily reproduction of capitalism. In order to have a revolution, we must destroy gender, so individuals can be defined by their singularity. Gonzalez has outlined the necessary destruction of gender but has not give shape to the course.

116 Civilization reproduces itself through sexual violence. This is the “material ground” Marxists were looking for.

118 The anchoring and reimposition of gender could be understood as domestication. Through marriage, the availability or not of contraceptives, the enforcement of heteronormativity, the shame around non-reproductive acts. This vast unquantifiable sphere is where the anchoring of gender occurs.

119 Gender is outside of us and imprisons us, and realizes us from its primal origin. Faggots, witches, and gay rioters show that gender has always been an external constraint.

121 Agemben calls apparatuses literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure gestures, behaviors, or discourses of living beings.

122 wildlife is captured by a dead thing, and is mutilated into a gendered subject. Our hand-to-hand conflict with gender must be conceived in terms of liberating the living remainder from the subjectivities created by the network of dead things. So in other words, we will no longer see through the eyes of the dead as Whitman says.

In an intersectional view we must explore apparatuses which produce racial subjects which are inseparable from gendered ones. What are the machines that hold us hostage? How do they break down? We must undertake the task of detailing the enemy of we want an insurgent break with gender. Shatter the spectacle of naturalized gender and escape into an ungendered unknown. So in other words, yes a marriage is a spectacle, and a spectacle weds two people under the state, and is part of the mode of production. It would therefor shatter the spectacle to abolish the state, as well as the machinery of capture of gender.

123 The leviathan is the crusher of stories and cosmologies off anything beyond its control. We shouldn’t see the primitive as a natural antecedent to the technological progress of civilization. Such a view ignores the brutal conquest those images entail.

124 Descriptions from Perlman of visions, before the experience everything was noise, nothing has meaning. Then after the experience everything was clear. Good reasons are expressed in the language of the times, not the language of a future time.

125 Leviathanic time is linear progress of events. Rhythms are grasps as symbols and expressed with music, which represents rhythmic time.

Psyche manipulators aware of civilization and its discontents will try to induce transformations from within the leviathan’s entrails, but the most vaunted success will become miserable failures. Civilization does not nurture humanity. Culture is a destruction of the rhythms and ways later called culture, a war against communities that nurture freedom, vision, and life.

The leviathan is not as natural as bees and hives. It shows the leviathan an aberration which cannot be imposed by wile or by force, on human beings who retain the slightest link with community, even a link as tenuous as the remembrance of dream time.

127 We cannot put faith in any utopian vision of a world without gender to come. The eco-feminist matriarchy never existed as a universal, and if it did it is hopelessly lost. The democratic diffusion of gender in queer subculture amounts to an ever more insidious and diffuse recomposition of gender.

The leviathan like John carpenter’s thing, can always be reconfigured, and reanimated. Death is on the side of the machines. The masks and armors are too deeply intwined with our being to tear off, and when we can, we are left wounded.

129 We are not primitive or prelapsarian beings, but feral beings. Queerness is escape, refusal and failure of gender. Feral queerness appears outside of time, irrational, inappropriate, and wild. Das ding. Queerness is chaos which is timeless, like das ding, and the unconscious.

130 Fredy Perlman speaks of the task of charting the course against the multiplicity of apparatuses which compose the gendered prison. This task is a fire which burns against the darkness. A fire which can burn off the mask, burn out the armor and burn the leviathan to the ground. The councilfires of the never defeated communities are not extinguished by the genocidal invaders, just as the light of ahura Mazda was not extinguished by rulers who claimed it shone on them. Attempts to enshrine the ineffable fire (speaking to how everyone loves Heraclitus), which enshrining in words only amounts to another apparatus of capture.

Baeden says we shouldn’t relegate these attempts to some realm of spirituality. Rather do not separate the body and spirit. Hegel here, would actually agree. Feral faun says we must awaken our senses to the fullness of life that is the material world.

132 In a world which calls us to self identify, we must make a home in anonymity. The black mask, obscures things which gender me. Baeden wants to instead reveal their violence. The state, media, and feminist left endlessly insist that the violence belongs to men alone; this insistence forms another apparatus to capture and engender.

133 The cultivation of the fire means overcoming the fear of autonomy, a dependence imposed upon by domestication. We must burn the gender out of ourselves before we can cultivate the fire in others. Jouissance is the supersession of pleasure and pain, of duality. It is in a break with duality that we can break with binary gender. Baeden mentions trans activists they follow, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. Men Against Sexism, and Gender Anarky were some that formed in prisons.

Essays from The Libertarian Reader

The Soul of Man Under Socialism

This is a summary and commentary on Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism. The purpose of this essay is to show how socialism will free people from the sordid necessities of living. Altruism and charity are not the solution, they preserve private property, just as the worst slave owners were the ones who were nice to their slaves for Wilde, because altruism and charity hide the horror of the system.

You can't use private property to fix the conditions of private property. Under capitalism the prosperity and wealth is concentrated, so when a frost comes it won't wipe out everyone's food but the capitalist. Everyone shares food, everyone survives. Socialism itself will lead to individualism. Capitalism is already competition, and competition is contrary to public wealth.

Wilde says that socialism will actually be worse if it becomes authoritarian socialism, an industrial tyranny. Foretelling Stalin and Mao. Authoritarian society does not foster individualism. Instead of cultivating interest like science, philosophy, poetry, etc. people are forced into uncongenial conditions like beasts of burden to starve, forced by a wanting tyrant.

The poor are made unrefined and uncultured due to not choosing what they do with their time. Tyrants of private property gain from the poor, but the poor is a worthless atom, a small atomized insignificant thing, which is crushed under obedience. There is a difference between individualism and atomism. Individualism lets you cultivate your own interests. Atomism means you have no intrinsic worth because you are insignificant. The individualism of the bourgeoisie private property owner is not necessarily of a fine or wonderful type.

Property possesses you; you have to take care of it. The poor are given crumbs by partial restitution, or sentimentalism and they are ungrateful and discontented. The "best" among the poor are never grateful for the crumbs they receive from the rich man's table they should be seated with. Wilde says, beautifully, that "to recommend thrift to the poor is grotesque and insulting." This goes against all the news outlets that will blame the poor for not spending less, meanwhile the rich hypocritically act as greedy as they can while claiming it's the poor who are immoderate. People are not conscious of their own oppression. Agitators come meddle with a contented people to sew discontent. Progress has been made through disobedience.

Progress is only made through people who rebel against their oppressor. Abolitionists ended slavery through "grossly illegal action," who were not even slaves themselves. The state which the slaves emerged from slavery into way being "free to starve." No one should be forced to work under an authoritarian system. If the work is not good for that person it won't be good for others.

Socialists are often "tainted" with authority such as the idea criminals should perform labor. Any activity is work for Wilde. Work is not defined by working under a boss. Reading and writing is work, running is work. A lot of writers realize their personality through their privileged positions. What would happen if such individualism was taken away? Wilde proposes that individualism would intensify. Individualism meaning the ability to develop whatever capacities suit them, not just poetry.

Wilde thinks that a false individualism is one which values possessions, or values what one has over what one is. One's very citizenship is based on property and property is protected by law more than people. Because property is so advantageous it is associated with an immense jouissance, the excessive drive to consume more, when one has enough. Unsurprising considering the advantages of property.

People are "forced into a groove" ordered like technology. The true joy of living is "freely develop[ing]" what is fascinating and delightful to him. The capitalist lives under constant job insecurity and is under threat of losing it all; what someone really has is with themselves, and what is outside of oneself should be of no importance. To live under private property is not to live as it is to waste one's life accumulating things. To live is to recognize what one really has is the capacities that one can develop in themselves. This is what it means to live. For Wilde, most people are not really living. "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."

It seems a little disingenuous to imply that people who develop under distress are somehow wasting their development being distressed and that's not valuable life experience somehow, but that's the edifice of Wilde's individualism through socialism. However, he's right that those who toil but necessarily develop their capacities of individual interests. It is certainly true for me that free time has helped me develop my interests. I abhor work.

When Jesus talks about the poor he means people who have not developed their personalities. He didn't want people to live in destitution, that would be wrong then and now. Wilde quotes Jesus reiterating the idea of internal development of one's personality as opposed to letting yourself be possessed by personal property. Real riches, such as modern complexity and the luxury afforded from it which arise, as implied, from internal capacities, are the good things for Wilde under the leviathan, the leviathan which Wilde doesn't seem to be critiquing. For Perlman, the leviathan comes with all sorts of "ornaments" which it uses to make its technology more beautiful, but Perlman was many decades after Wilde. Fully automated luxury gay space communism sounds more Wilde's way.

Jesus does not want impoverished people. In fact those who care more about money are more often the impoverished ones, in fact "the poor can think of nothing else." Developing your individual personality is actually something the world doesn't want you to do. They tell you that it's "other things" that matter. For Jesus you don't need private property to develop your personality, it hinders it.

No single factor seems to determine personality, it's a "mysterious" thing. Someone can break the law and be fine, or not break the law and be worthless. I don't think Wilde ascribes to universal human nature, which is evident in his individualism. Selecting one's own means of expression is how one achieves perfection for Wilde. When one gets rid of legal restraints such as marriage we allow the freedom of the full development of personality. Wilde compares being Christ like to one who is perfectly themselves, like Spinoza, Shakespeare, a child at play in the garden, etc. It doesn't matter who you are, as long as you realize the "perfection of the soul that is within him."

In keeping with the Heideggerian view that people should not be ordered as machines, there is "no one type for man." For a priest their personality is help and service, for Shelley it is song, for Wagner it's music. One can be fine under charity, but not conformity. Individualist anarchism means giving up the state. All governments are failures, and despots are unjust to themselves. Authority degrades those who exorcise it and those who are under it.

Wilde, contrary to Hegel believes you can be yourself and unique and develop your individuality, while many people don't realize they conform to other's attire and attitudes. For Hegel you can never be an individual and unique and your freedom comes from the law and the state. For Wilde it is not that you are always universal like Hegel, you have individuality and this is Jesus's word. For Wilde the passing away of law and authority means incalculable gain. Communities are far more brutalized by punishment than they are by crime and when one is punished worse they commit more crime. So the justice system is not only unfair, but inefficient. The norm of authority and law is replaced with the norm of individualism and no law.

The poor are not interesting or glorious for Wilde, they face an uninteresting and common problem, are not Shakespeare characters, when private property is abolished there will be no more crime. Criminals don't actually fear death as much as penal servitude. Get rid of private property and crimes of misery, rage and depression will disappear. When people's needs are satisfied they will have no need to interfere with others.

For Wilde, there can be a state, but the state makes what is useful as opposed to what is beautiful and does not govern. Fully automated luxury gay space communism in other words. Wilde talks about about how manual labor is "absolutely degrading." The tragic part about this essay, is he was forced into hard labor for sodomy for 2 years, and that's how he died. He died doing one of the things he hated most. "Man is made for something better than moving dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine."

Wilde talks about how tragic it is that we don't use machines to end labor but rather induce starvation. A machine takes 500 people's job they go hungry and starve. One man then has 500 times more than what he should have or needs. The machine should work for the community and let the machine do undesirable labor.

Machines are necessary work. He rejects human slavery as wrong and insecure and demoralizing while mechanical slavery, the world depends for contemplation, reading, etc. People will also have more time to do interesting things when they are not helping the poor, because there will be no poor. For Oscar Wilde a map of the world is not necessary if it does not include utopia. Progress is the progressive realization of utopia, landing one place and seeing a "better country." In other words progress is made through envisioning a better future.

Organization by Malatesta

This essay is by Errico Malatesta, written in 1897, about the importance of Organisation in anarchism, called Organization. This is my summary and commentary on that essay, found in The Libertarian Reader Volume 2. Malatesta wrote this essay for comrades who are against social organization.

Section 1

Some people use anarchism for ulterior motives, perhaps the desire to simply be violent, or people can basically argue from the conclusion, working backwards from the premise of the argument without establishing the evidence that what one is saying is valid or works, in practice. Some people say tautological things, against organizational anarchism in Malatesta's time, like "we are for harmonization, not organization." etc. These are tautologies and redundancies. Someone apparently told Malatesta, we're not for a secretary, but we put one of our comrades in charge of the funds. So basically, individualist anarchists have a hard time describing the relations of individualist anarchism without falling back on organizational methods, and are actually arguing in favor of association in some cases, unknowingly.

There are opponents, and advocates of organization, but for Malatesta, it is "mind boggling" that it isn't apparent and self evident, the need for organization and society, of the anarchist variety. Some anarchists are raised within an authoritarian education, so they think authority is the soul of all social organization.

Malatesta talks about how its bad optics and just nonsense to say that people don't need organization. Adversaries of anarchists can use these tactics to undermine us with our own words. People with compartmentalized logic, can "negate the most self evident facts without flinching" and make "mighty logical turns of mind." Some of these people are the "diehard syllogizers"

Malatesta describes.

If someone is more capable than you in doing a task, it is not the same as imposing authority which is "imposing one's wishes" on others. Authority by its nature breaks society into winners and losers, siphens capital into one or a few people's hands, when there is no authority, no one can exploit. Authority itself "hobbles and stunts" existence.

Having things like station masters, engineers, or post office workers is necessary, as no one wants to deliver their own letters, operate a train, fix a train, etc.

Section 2

Malatesta talks about the importance of organization which doesn't simply dissolve. Some limited fixity is necessary.

Sometimes when one starts on a task one has to use the best tools available at the time. Science can progress, the project can go along or be dismantled with the progress. But one must use the tools at hand, not future tools or tools not yet available. Malatesta attacks Hegelians for being idealists and not being concrete "lovers of absolute truth and unrelenting progress."

If you're incapable of reaching an agreement, you're far from an anarchist and you should spare some time to think anarchistically.

If people in a community do not make it their business to think and develop the capacity to manage what is best for their own lives, through their "critical faculties" then someone else will be leader and fill that vacuum, by the few who do develop the capacity to manage themselves. "Brute force" is "out of the question," and "the origins and justification of authority lie in social disorganization." Moving to the example of mailing a letter, it's better to choose who you want mailing your letters and

not passing it offto one person. Then that person will be able to steer the movement, which is

implied is giving that person too much power, because then it's just their individual rule, and not a collective rule with no masters.

Malatesta repeats the line that without self organization and capacities authority figures will come in and run your life; your mail, your newspaper, and you won't be co-operating or in charge. Organization is the only cure for authority and under authority we are like "tools" to be ordered like technology.

For Malatesta, isolation renders one impotent. But I read another essay in Emma Goldman's Mother earth, from about 20 years after this Malatesta essay, by Max Nettlau called Anarchism: communist or individualist? which says you cannot negate one of these tendencies over the other. Both isolation and cooperation are forms of freedom for Nettlau. But as we will see, Malatesta has his own way of reconciling the individual and the collective, but he leans more on the side of the collective. He goes on to say that it's hard to get anything done without the solidarity side of the equation.

Malatesta shows that while organization is necessary, he also says that it attracts the law and authority. But then he pivots to talk about how disastrous the "anarchism of the deed" has been, talks about how anarchists who carry out individual propaganda threw the organization into disarray, and caused the government to deny the right to association, and started monstrous criminal conspiracy trials. Preaching disorganization allows these sorts of things to happen, and gives society a weapon to use against anarchists.

While isolation alone is not useful for Malatesta, there are cases in which one might want to dissolve temporarily organized relations, and fight in scattered or massive formations. What matters is that the setback of dissolution is resolved.

But what if you aren't accepted by an anarchist organization, or don't like the anarchist organizations you find yourself associating with? Malatesta says that in this instance, you want to create your own organization, among people who you agree with and get along with. So while Malatesta basically thinks there's no anarchism without organization, it can't be made out of organizations who don't get along, who make concessions, and there is no agreement and sympathy. So in a way, while he's not reconciling individualism and collectivism like later philosophers of anarchism like Daniel Guerin and Nettlau tried to do, Malatesta recognizes the necessity of some individualism. Malatesta says that "everything that we have said is directed at those who comrades who are against organization as a principle.

Section 3

While Malatesta is not a Hegelian, (he doesn't believe that right comes through the state), he is not a Stirnerian, but rather thinks capability to act defines freedom, but that capability is not through the state but through organization of good accord. Without organization one is a "thoughtless cog" in an "inferior condition" operating according to the whims of the master, whoever is in charge. Without organization they will never defeat the organized might of the oppressor.

Malatesta says that anarchists sometimes try to stop the organizations and the organization doesn't allow new groups to form. Arguing in favor of individualism he says that the approach is "doomed to sterility" to not allow people to form their own groups. So contrary to the idea that anarchism must always stay the same, it needs "some fixity" as was mentioned earlier, otherwise it has no way of maintaining a presence against capitalism.

Carrying out individual propaganda has "no discernible impact." To be an anarchist one must join workers in a struggle against the bosses and capitalism. Simply doing this makes one an anarchist, intentionally or unintentionally. Malatesta says anarchism is not about emancipating people; it is about people emancipating themselves.

Malatesta draws a sharp distinction between anarchy and individual rulers who do not achieve anarchy, but only become rulers, implying individual anarchists just want self rule. Anarchists have the goal of toppling authority and declaring property rights dead. But, Malatesta points out that life goes on even during revolution and not only that, but responsibility shifts to the worker, for everyone's benefit. Society has "pressing needs" which must be attended to. People still need to make bread during the revolution, and treat the sick. If a worker association does not form to accept "the legacy of the old society" who will?

We do not need to wait until all workers are organized for the revolution to take place, masses can rally around "some nuclei" around which masses can rally. It is utopian to think everyone must see eye to eye, but even more utopian to think revolution can come about through nothing and no one.

Socialist Letters

Socialist Letters by Earnest Lesigne 1887, a summary and commentary of the work translated from 6 letters by Benjamin Tucker for his journal "Liberty."

This essay is by a Belgian mutualist, named Ernest Lesigne called "socialist letters." He is describing the views of himself, as a socialist, against what sounds like authoritarian, proto-soviet communism, with its dogmism, essentialist metaphysics, emotions, destructiveness, dictatorial authoritarianism, etc, vs socialism which represents the opposite, libertarian, positive, scientific, reflective, constructive, solidarity instead of communism.

The mutualists are positivistic, they oppose metaphysical essentialism and specifically say the state is of a special essence to communists, and has a sort of divine right above all society. Mutualists are an association like any other.

The mutualists are reformists and non violent. Calling revolution a form of repression. Lesigne talks about a type of authoritarian communism which the state controls everyone's life, takes all their stuff, but the mutualists leave each to their own. They make everyone proprietor, not just the state. This is a type of communism much unlike the others in this collection.

Whereas communists believe in social war, mutualists believe only in peace, and want not command, regulation, and legislation, but a minimum of these things. So not none at all. The mutualists show that some communists govern through fear and manipulation, trying to punish people instead of raise them up, intimidate them and make them fall in line instead of tolerate them.

Under mutualism the worker takes everything which belongs to their occupation, under authoritarian communism the state takes everything. The writer supposes that the mere tolerant socialist stance takes more maturity. Kinda agist the way it's put, "infancy vs manhood" but oh well, this is pretty good so far for 1887.

Under mutualism workers own every aspect of production from raw material, to machine, workshop, factory, and the comsumable product. This is how one assures liberty and power. Like Hegel, property is the basis of a sort of right in the philosophy of right. This reading is in line with a sort of a Hegelian reading, although it's unclear that they read Hegel.

Under capitalism you choose death or hunger or a new master who gives a little for a lot of labor, where you wear stuff made by others, or have no clothes. To not have a share of property is the position of the proletariat, to have a share of property is the position of the mutualist.

Comfort for all is what the mutualists want, concentration of wealth to a few is directly tied to misery and oppression for those at the bottom.

The history of humanity is a struggle for property with barbarous people upon an industrious people. Highway robbers have become landlords. Robbery following after massacres. The legal system and the laws it protects are put in place to deny labor access to property. The law book isolates servants under a coalition of masters forcing the worker to constrain (or say no to themselves in Lacanian terms) themselves from a real contract, or mutual relation between employee and employer.

Stability cannot be achieved through violence. Violence comes and goes like a tide on a stormy sea. Just as natural erosion withers away mountains into empty valleys, laborers conscious of their own strength will own the means of production and they will have property which will grant them liberty.

Laborers will, like termites in the millions, render the master powerless. This will achieve non violent “universal comfort.” Lesigne also believes in freedom of the press.

Lesigne is accused of not being a socialist, but wouldn’t a socialist provide job security through free assembly of individual forces? He reiterates that he’s not a communist. But wouldn’t a socialist support publically funded education.

Lesigne wants people to be born with credit, to choose teacher and profession and ensure their complete development through a well stuffed fund. Is he not a socialist for wanting these things, the author asks?

Lesigne attests through rhetorical question he is a socialist, since he wants to satisfy all needs, give a right to a job, and eliminate all parasites; the end of all monopolies.

Lesigne seeks to protect people from the oppression of the commune or the state, and supports a mass gardening program to feed hundreds of millions of people. Does that make him a socialist he asks?

Lesigne wants labor to undertake a vast infrastructure project, gardening, fast roads, communication lines across the country, railroads across the country. To prevent poorness the means of production would be owned commonly. The school to teachers, post office to postal workers.

Lesigne has a progressive view of technology. He considers that “small” machinery will emancipate people from the toil of large machinery. This author wants the disappearance of the proletariat and the conquest of dignity, liberty, and security. The author declares an affirmation of the stance of socialism at the end.