Burying the Anarchist Movement

“The bourgeois toads and the proletarian frogs clasped each other’s hands in a common spiritual baseness, piously receiving communion from the lead cup containing the slimy liquor of the very social lies that democracy handed to each of them.”
— Renzo Novatore, Collected Works

“The schizophrenic deliberately seeks out the very limit of capitalism: they are its inherent tendency brought to fulfillment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and its exterminating angel. They scramble all the codes and are the transmitter of the decoded flows of desire.”
— Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Let’s get decadent! Filth is our politics! Filth is our life!”
— Mary Nardini Gang, Towards The Queerest Insurrection

With the knowledge of the non-existence of a united anarchist movement in the European continent, I want to talk about my observations about the anarchist scenes I have been in in the UK, Germany, and Turkey. Even with all their differences, they are always consistent on three things; a leftist obsession with “real” democracy, intra-communal ideological conformity and self sacrifice to the death cult of progress. This is not an in-depth critique of their practices and ideologies, many before me have done that effectively. Mine is the nihilist scream into the dark night from the belly of western civilization. An explosion of boiling shit from the sewers against industrially sanitised minds, against the protectors of society and its values, and against the cult of the collective.

First, we take Turkey.

Anarchist thought first appeared in Turkey in the 1980s through the anarchist publication “Karala”, about 100 years too late discounting the handful of Italian and Jewish anarchists that lived in Istanbul during the Ottoman Empire. When anarchism did arrive in Turkey, it was in the form of pacifist anarchism. After 40 years, the anarchism in Turkey has remained what it was when it first arrived, a subcultural and aesthetic outlet that remained to be nothing more than magazine and newspaper publications. Not even a wolf without fangs, but more like a pug whose own fart scares itself.

An anarchist friend of mine calls me and invites me to lunch near Taksim Square in Istanbul. We sit outside of a café in a small alleyway and catch up. He reveals to me that he left the DAF (Revolutionary Anarchist Action) because he was being ostracised for questioning the founder of the group and not conforming to the group line. Something here is very odd isn’t it? An anarchist organisation that seems to operate more like a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. He also tells me that the founder of the group had set unspoken rules that everyone dresses the same during the protests and nothing that could be subversive to the eye and values of the general public. Need to see this shit show for myself.

I show up at the next planned protest that DAF is also participating in to see it with my own eyes, and there they are with their black flags in a clearly practiced formation and dressed in their anarchist uniforms — all black with a vest with the anarchist A and the DAF logo. The black is clearly not meant to form a black bloc but to form an aesthetic and symbolic presence that at this point goes no more beyond virtue signalling. After some marching and chanting of slogans that appeal to the collective unity instinct of these black sheep, the police started attacking and arresting DAF members and others. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t fight back, nor did they try to free their so-called comrades from the hands of the pigs.

Useless hobby anarchists who are only good for reading groups and running hipster anarchist coffee shops, what could you expect of them? Would it even be desirable to have a strong anarchist “movement” anyway? My observations in the anarchist scene in Turkey could not have been further away from my own understanding of an anarchy that is dangerous, nihilist, queer, individualist, feral, and relentless in its attacks against Leviathan despire carrying the pessimism of a thousand Schopenhauers on my shoulders. Growing sick of organised and civil anarchism, I take the bus to the airport.

Next, we fly to the United Kingdom.

Green plains, as far as the eye can see — quickly contrasted by the rundown grey industrial estates that start to pop up as I get closer into the city that once used to employ a large part of the population. The same factory estates that still haunt the anarchists and marxists to this day. They never got over losing the power of the unions during the Thatcher years. The soft cushion of union jobs, social status and welfare snatched straight from underneath their asses.

The first thing that striked me oddly about the anarchists in the UK was that a lot of them partook in electoralism and “grass roots activism” sponsored by the Labour and Green Party or associated organisations. Most of these self proclaimed anarchists were card holding members of the Labour Party’s liberterian socialist caucus “Black Rose”. One must think what the fuck has gone wrong for anarchists to assimilate themselves into electoralist politics, but the answer got clearer the more I observed the general approach they had to anarchism. They had anarchist cafés, endless anarchist magazines and newspapers featuring anarchist academics with their PhD opinions, and various anarchist bookshops (STEALING IS FORBIDDEN!). Basically anarchism in the UK has become a business and for those who still try to keep the revolutionary edge, it is just a dwindling game of numbers. The most common execution of anarchist action in the UK is that of a domesticated subject of Leviathan who finds alternative channels to affirm their desires, mostly in the form of subcultures and through assimilation into the activist industrial-complex.

Feral desire runs rampant and flows over the river beds carved out by the techno-capitalist machine for society’s control violently and in uncanny fashion. As a result, I was deemed as confrontational, aggressive and subversive by the neurotic, domesticated sheep who were averse to any type of real conflict with society. And this reaction was not only given by the political adventurists at Black Rose Labour, but also by the cookie cutters at AnFed (Anarchist Federation) and the syndicalist fossils at SolFed IWA (Solidarity Federation International Workers’ Association) as well.

I could fill this entire article with the endless offshoots of anarcho-communist and anarcho-syndicalist organisations present in the UK who all fish in the same small pond to grow their numbers for a general strike and a revolution that is never coming. Hit the brakes and get off the train Wobbly!

The terminal station is the finish line of the industrial techno-capitalist death race sponsored by Leviathan. Even more disillusioned by other anarchists and my (as well as our) future, I took my leave from this barren island.

Finally, Germany.

Germany’s political climate is a really mixed bag and this extends itself to the anarchist spheres as well. As in the UK, other than the classic anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists there are a number of self proclaimed anarchists who participate in electoralism and have an undying belief in “real democracy”, and even some “anarchists” identifying themselves as “anti-deutsch” whose politics stemming from national collective guilt feelings (because most of their grandparents were actively or passively responsible in the Holocaust) result in supporting settler colonialist zionism and the Israeli apartheid state. The latter type of “anarchists” undeniable being white supremacist fascists they represent the ideological susceptibility of leftist politics and its appeal to superficial simplification and operates through the exploitation and generation of guilt.

I’ve had too many discussions that turned bitter and hostile in my talks with anarchists of other flavours — ones that taste rotten to me — that did not appreciate my iconoclasm, egoism, nihilism and anti-civilisation sentiments. To them I was just another angry disillusioned lifestylist. The anarchists whom I had the displeasure of meeting during the International Workers Day protests in Berlin were telling me to not antagonise the police for no reason because I put “people of colour” in risk. Of course, this idiot did not know I was Kurdish and Turkish myself. There is something to be said about white people whose allyship politics inbred with identity politics depends on the tokenisation of “people of colour” like me for self-policing the anarchist movement, and for defanging feral desire, doing the work of the state and Oedipus. Fuck your allyship I don’t want it, nor do I need it. If you really want to help, become my criminal accomplice. Let’s set the police on fire! Let’s go on a stealing spree and treat ourselves and others decadently! Let’s dance on the ruins of Leviathan together!

For too long the anarchist movement has tried to exist in its old ways tangled up in the same forms and discourses. It’s time to throw the old beast into a ditch. Building organisations, recruiting members from “civil society” and trying to make anarchy marketable as normal and non-threatening to civilised life. There is nothing appealing about the tumultuous entropy of anarchy to the domesticated mind. If the sheep claim they are anarchists, it is in the sense that they would just use direct democracy to keep on living as cattles where they cooperatively manage their own slaughter.

I don’t facilitate my own domestication and slaughter. I don’t wish to be accepted and assimilated into the civil anarchist movement that tries to appeal to society as would a kid try to appeal to their father begging for their love and acceptance. My feral desire is schizophrenic, it doesn’t recognise the law of the father, the law of the state, nor the laws of society. My queerness, and nihilist anti-politics put me in direct opposition with society and its priests regardless of my choice. The colour of my skin in an explosive assemblage with my confrontational nature is seen as nothing less than a threat in the heart of the Empire. Well, they are right. I am a threat, as much as anarchy is a threat. I don’t have any trust in the anarchist movement, their goals of democracy and revolution, and the body of organisations and individuals they are made up of. In today’s time, only an abysmal pessimism towards the anarchist movement can be the reaction of anyone at odds with Leviathan’s churning wheels of death.