blessed is the flame
Blessed is the Flame – An introduction to concentration camp resistance and anarcho-nihilism (2016) by serafinski via 60 pg kindle version from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/serafinski-blessed-is-the-flame]
notes/quotes:
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intro
A different approach: We have already been led to our slaughter — it is all around us. The world in which we exist is a protracted death, a sort of economically-sustained limbo in which hearts are permitted to beat only to the extent that they can facilitate the upward stream of capital. The plague of domestication has reached into every wild space, and the lines of colonization have crossed us more times than we can count. ..t Every unproductive aspect of the biosphere has been flagged for eradication, from the “beam-trawled ocean floors” to the “dynamited reefs” to the “hollowed-out mountains,”’ the highest calibers of technology are locked into a perpetual killing spree chugging along in a “monotonous rhythm of death.” We who still have air in our lungs are the living dead, and struggle daily to remember what it feels like to be alive, holding tightly to the “desire for wildness that the misery of a paycheck cannot allay.” .. t We roam the desolate architecture of our slaughter houses (“the prison of civilization we live in”) like ghosts who feel but cannot quite understand the vapidity of our existence. To borrow some apt phrases from the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF): we have become thoroughly integrated into “a system that crushes us on a daily basis”, that “controls our thoughts and our desires through screens” and “teaches us how to be happy slaves” while letting us “consider ourselves free because we can vote and consume”, and all the while, “we, like cheerful Sisyphus, are still carrying our slavery stone and think this is life.”..t As an American Iraq war veteran-turned-strategy consultant wrote in the New York Times in 2013: “The *biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead.” The extent to which we have internalized the rhythms, values, and stories of this civilization “ties our future to [this] undead and all-devouring system.”..t
*need: global detox leap
Then perhaps a better question might be: Why are we continuously being led to our slaughter like sheep?, to which many of us simply reply: We aren’t.
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Anarcho-nihilism
A nihilist is a person who does not bow down to any authority, who does not accept any principle on faith, however much that principle may be revered. —Ivan Turgenev
The anarcho-nihilist position is essentially that we are fucked. That the current manifestation of human society (civilization, leviathan, industrial society, global capitalism, whatever) is beyond salvation, and so our response to it should be one of unmitigated hostility. There are no demands to be made, no utopic visions to be upheld, no political programs to be followed — the path of resistance is one of pure negation. In short, “that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility.” Aragorn! traces the history of nihilism to 19th century Russia, where the “suffocating” environment of Tsarism created a breeding ground for a purely negative strain of socialism. What started as a philosophical rejection of conventional morality and aesthetics laid the groundwork for a youth-driven counter-culture of hedonism, communalism, and proto-hipster fashion. This eventually birthed a revolutionary force that sought the absolute destruction of “state traditions, social order, and classes in Russia”, not as part of a program for social change, but based on a “deeply-held belief that destruction was worthwhile for its own sake”.Though Russian nihilism was eventually squashed by the state, the ideas spread and have recently seen a resurgence within anarchist currents.
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Collision
We are anarchists not by Bakunin or the CNT, but by our grandmothers. —Julieta Paredes
I began thinking about this text in Toronto, where my 93 year old grandmother lives on the seventh floor of a high-rise apartment overlooking Highway 401. Standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows in her kitchen, the horizon is swallowed by twelve lanes of concrete and an endless river of traffic, equal parts terrifying and hypnotic. How many gruesome stories are written into this one landscape? The concrete road tells the story of the colonization of Turtle Island, the commuter traffic tells the story of mass domestication under the rhythms of capitalism, the billowing smog tells a story of the future that’s almost too frightening to believe. Drinking tea quietly, my grandmother is clearly unfazed by this ominous procession — it is the world she now knows and accepts. In a previous chapter of her life she confronted and survived a very different infrastructure of death: as a young adult, the bunkers, factories, and crematorium of Auschwitz defined nearly a year of her life. Her experiences of the Nazi holocaust sit close with me as I look out over this glowing ribbon of death and wrestle with the ideas of nihilism.
on turtle island: Turtle Island is a name used by some Indigenous peoples to refer to the continent of North and Central America. The name comes from a creation myth shared by many Indigenous peoples in the Northeastern Woodlands of North America. In the myth, the world was once covered in water and the land was formed on the back of a turtle. ..The concept of Turtle Island is significant in many Native American cultures and reflects their relationship with Mother Earth and spiritual beliefs. It involves: Respect for nature and ancestors, Seeing the land as a relative to be cared for, Sustainability, Respect for the environment, and Understanding the interconnectedness of all living things..Some Indigenous peoples, like the Ojibwa, also use the term Turtle Island to refer to the entire world
To what extent do I remain attached to this society that I despise?
What would it mean to sever those attachments?
If this were Nazi Germany expanding out before me, how would I live my life?
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What if I were in my grandmother’s position in 1943?
What does it mean to resist against such a catastrophically extensive and overwhelming system?
This collision of anarcho-nihilism and concentration camp resistance came about primarily as a coincidence of literary indulgences. At the same time as I pored my way through Bæden, a queer-nihilist journal (still one of the best nihilist text I’ve encountered), I also stumbled upon my first memoir of resistance from the Warsaw Ghetto. As so often happens, connections began to jump off the page, and it seemed ideal to pursue these two subjects simultaneously. Since then, I have found that they speak poignantly to one another, and when held together seem to create a stereoscopic depth that has helped me to grapple with the weight of both topics simultaneously.
I’ll admit from the outset that I have low ambitions for this project. My intention is not to comprehensively explain, reinvent, or critique nihilism or anarchism more generally. Rather, I want to feel out these ideas and see how far they can take me. Like the authors of the nihilist journal Attentat, *I am interested in finding “tools, not answers, with an emphasis on building.”..t Similarly, I have no aspirations to shed new light on the Nazi holocaust, or offer any startling new interpretations — despite all of my research, the subject still feels somewhat untouchable: an end to a conversation rather than a beginning. If nothing else, I would like to unearth some stories of resistance that do not often get told, and in doing so, to bring the holocaust into the realm of anarchist thought in a meaningful way so that at least we have something to say about it. I hope to open the doors to other anarchists who have a personal connection to these histories, or who share an interest, so that we might incorporate them into our lives in productive ways.
*me other tool ness of nonjudgmental expo labeling
At heart, this book is about tapping into the instinctual rebelliousness that resides underneath of every organization, affinity group, project, and action that we participate in; that reflexive spirit of resistance rooted in the basic existential understanding that recalcitrance is simply a more meaningful and joyous form of existence than docility. Too often our insurrectionary urges get bogged down in ideological costume, rhetorical mandate, and hobbyist paradigms. We channel our energies into dubious conduits of prefabricated dogma and inevitably burn out or become listless at the very mention of Revolution. Forms of resistance rooted in social obligations and lifestyle choices all too often fade into lives of despondency, alienation, boredom, or material comfort. *It speaks to the very nature of our domestication that we only choose resistance so long as it feels like something we can win..t
*rather.. speaks to very nature of our domestication that we can only choose resistance.. any form of re ness as cancerous distraction
That’s where nihilism enters the picture. *I am interested in the sort of resistance we pursue, not because we necessarily believe it will produce desired changes or lead us into a brighter future, but because it is the most meaningful response to this world we can imagine. Because we simply can’t stomach the idea of being passive in the face of a system this brutal, regardless of how far we may be from our dreams. Nihilism urges anarchists to embrace our feelings of cynicism around radical milieus, our feelings of boredom with prescribed methods of resistance, our feelings of hopelessness in the current landscape of domination, and to engage in forms of revolt that cultivate immediate joy and moments of liberation.
*makes no diff what sort.. need to try something diff/deeper.. ie: means to the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
And that’s where the Nazi holocaust becomes particularly interesting.
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Concentration camp resistance challenges nihilism to consider just how bleak it is willing to get. The resistance of those in the Lagers who were deprived of every vestige of hope, every morsel of inspiration, and every shred of comfort, poses rich questions about how much hopelessness we are willing to wade through for a chance to fight back. It reminds us that resistance is not just about getting results, but about our reflexive reactions to oppressive situations. Whether we succeed in overthrowing our oppressors and bringing about a brighter future can only be secondary to the visceral need to rebel against the shitty conditions of our lives.
cancerous distractions.. rather.. graeber model law et al
Both topics — anarcho-nihilism and concentration camp resistance — challenge anarchists to realize a spirit of resistance that can endure horrific conditions, that can weather the storms of absolute futility, and that can still muster an exuberant desire to rebel.
The Ceaseless Lager
“The Holocaust experience is a very condensed version of most of what life is all about.” —Dori Laub
This is not a book about happy endings. Almost every story ends with mass torture, slaughter, and enslavement. When the liberation of the camps occurred it was not because internal resistance had brought the Nazis to their knees, but because of the arrival of a different team of imperial state armies. A typical leftist approach to this topic might try to emphasize the effectiveness of concentration camp resistance, to paint portraits of heroes who hastened the end of the war, or to only celebrate the moments of successful escape. A nihilist approach might be just as content to emphasize all of the times that action accomplished nothing, all of the times that rebel strategies failed, all of the acts of resistance that did not even survive for us to hear about them — to stand back with all of that information and to still be able to say: that’s great! From a nihilistic approach, we can celebrate the “failures” of resistance, because in them we find a sort of resiliency and substance that may serve us better in our current situations than mere stories of triumph.
Though it would be ludicrous to over-pronounce a comparison between our situations today and the concentration camps of World War II, the institutionalized brutality and the systematic disempowerment many of us feel certainly resonates. Many of us who experience or at least recognize the horrors of modern society can relate to those before us who were “turned into numbers, deprived of the last vestiges of human dignity, and transformed into totally submissive objects”. Most of us alive today experience nothing near the brutality of Treblinka; however the mechanisms that were used to subjugate Häftlinge, the prisons that were used to contain them, and the underlying logic of Nazi Germany that made the camps possible all persist in abundance. Those who have survived the (ongoing) five hundred year colonization of Turtle Island will surely recognize many of these as the same methods used to displace and eradicate their people, and that continue to serve colonial states at their expense. The colonization of this land was, after all, of great personal inspiration to Hitler himself
hari present in society law et al
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For a variety of reasons history has exceptionalized this particular genocide, but I’ve come to understand it as part of an unbroken continuum of domination that neither began nor ended with Hitler. It’s important to remember that the Nazis didn’t have to build all of their own camps (some of that work was done by the Social Democratic governments prior), nor did they have to decommission all of them after the war (the Soviets put a couple of them to good use). Let’s also remember that the post-war trials of Nazi doctors were conducted under the explicit understanding that most governments of the world are guilty of perverse, unconsensual human experimentation. Most notably, the United States, from where many of the Nuremberg judges came, had been involved in this kind of brutal scientific experimentation throughout much of the 20th century, infecting prisoners with malaria plasmodia, infecting death row prisoners with pellagra, or testing the effects of nuclear radiation on general populations. The Nazis were only found (or remembered as) guilty because they lost the war. Their camps were not fundamentally unique, though they certainly brought a devastating industrial flair to the whole concept. Giorgio Agamben has aptly argued that the concentration camp is the defining feature of modern politics, as it represents a “site of exception” from the enlightened facade of civilized society. Indeed, everywhere we look today we see Nazi machinations at work, though these parallels are often too controversial to utter. And yet for those willing to see it, from the Gaza strip to the Toronto Immigration Holding Centre, from the factory farms to the Alberta Tar Sands, the logic of this civilization continues to show its true colors. In order for some to live safely, others must be declared Ballastexistenzen and be shackled, violated, and killed. In order for humans to thrive, the earth and all of its other inhabitants must be subjugated and ravaged. Although the uniforms have changed and the tactics have evolved, the same basic struggle against domination continues. The phrase “never again”, repeated often by victims and descendants of the Nazi holocaust, rings more and more hollow with every passing moment.[27]
endnote 27: Huge respect to those holocaust survivors who have transformed their experiences into solidarity with other oppressed peoples, particularly with Palestinians. Reuven Moskovitz, who broke the Gaza blockade, said: “It is a sacred duty for me as a survivor to protest against the persecution, the oppression, and the imprisonment of so many people in Gaza, including more than 800,000 children….I as a Holocaust survivor cannot live with the fact that the State of Israel is imprisoning an entire people behind fences.”
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Introduction to concentration camp resistance
Nobody knows themselves. Sometimes when somebody is really nice to me I find myself thinking, “How will he be in Sobibór?” —Toivi Blatt
Absolute Subjugation
To provide a quick overview of the Nazi concentration camps is an overwhelming challenge, and so I will limit my scope here to the topic at hand: resistance, and specifically the conditions for its emergence. This approach is important for understanding the context in which resistance happened, but also for understanding the context in which so much resistance didn’t happen. As mentioned earlier, debates around passivity and “sheep-like” obedience have dominated discussions of the Nazi holocaust. An essay on resistance within the camps risks playing into a narrative that once again casts shame or criticism on those who did not fight back, a narrative I refuse to indulge.[28] Of those who were able to survive abduction, transport, and arrival in the camps, a deftly-designed universe of extreme demoralization, physical duress, and social alienation awaited them. The camps were “designed to break the will of the inmate”, to “shatter the adversaries’ capacity to resist”, and as one survivor of Auschwitz wrote: “it would have been impossible to create worse conditions for resistance, a more perverse and brutal system.” The camps were so ordered against resistance that merely to lift one’s hand in defense of an incoming blow was considered a grievous act of defiance, worthy of torturous execution. Nazi methodology was deftly crafted to reduce humans to sheep-like creatures, an experiment most explicitly pursued in their laboratories where scientists busied themselves with the task of physically rendering Jews into a race of sterile, “animal-like creatures who would be adapted solely for work”. Though these experiments largely failed (with grisly results), the broader experiment in the camps of creating the conditions for absolute subjugation was disturbingly successful.
endnote 28: I hold fast to Adelaide Hautval’s caution: “I don’t think anybody in the world today has the right to judgment or decision as to what he himself would have done in those completely improbable conditions with which one stood face to face in places like Auschwitz.”
So successful were these techniques that even in the most aggravating circumstances imaginable, people often found themselves totally incapable of resistance. The totality of this subjugation is conveyed in the crushing testimonies of those who experienced it: Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel listened to his own father cry out for him while being beaten to death, yet was unable to muster a response. Filip Müller painfully watched as 4,000 Auschwitz inmates knowingly walked into the gas chambers despite the prolonged efforts of some to agitate them into resistance. Tadeusz Borowski recalls working alongside 10,000 workers when a truck full of naked women slowly rolled by calling out for help: “‘Save us! We are going to the gas chambers! Save us!’… Not one of us made a move, not one of us lifted a hand.” These testimonies are powerful gestures towards the depravity of the “concentration universe” and the extent to which it violently precluded the potential for defiance. These are not stories of individual passivity — they are stories of systematic disempowerment.
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Precluding Resistance
Perhaps more than anything else, the physical conditions of the Lagers played a role in the suppression of defiance. An explication of this sort could be long and brutal, but suffice it to say that being kept forever on the brink of starvation, worked beyond the capacities of the human body, exposed daily to wanton acts of cruelty, subjected to year-round elemental onslaught, and being perpetually enveloped in pestilence and disease, has the capacity to turn human bodies into emaciated shells devoid of will power or physical strength. Throughout survivor testimonies, starvation is the most frequently cited obstacle to resistance. One survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, Marek Edelman, annoyed with perpetual questions about the passivity of those who boarded trains bound for death camps, explained to his interviewer: “Listen… do you have any idea what bread meant at the time in the Ghetto? Because if you don’t, you will never understand how thousands of people could voluntarily come for the bread and go on to the camp at Treblinka. Nobody has understood thus far.” Vera Laska, a survivor of Auschwitz and editor of Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust, reflects on the significance of bread in the camps:
I have seen with my own eyes in Auschwitz an SS man enter the barracks of 1,450 women, throw chunks of bread into their midst and then step back in a fit of laughter as hundreds of women pushed and shoved, clawed and fought for the crumbs. Within minutes, three women were trampled to death and dozens injured.
Though we may recoil learning about situations like this, most of us will never really know what it feels like to be so systematically deprived of food; thus our exploration of this topic must always be guided by the deepest humility for the hunger that we can read about but never truly know.
Another central aspect of the camps that devastated potential for resistance was the Nazi strategy of cultivating social alienation, intended “to reduce all inmates to monads.” By creating conditions that demanded brute self-interest, where groups and individuals were pitted against each other for scraps of privilege, where the pain of isolation was preferable to the weight of empathy, the Nazis were able to preclude the capacity for solidarity, and thus the capacity for much resistance. One of the primary tools in this endeavor was a deeply divisive social structure that pitted inmates against each other. Upon entry into the camps, inmates were put into an identity category demarcated by a colored triangle (“winkel”), that would henceforth impact every moment of their existence. Criminal prisoners (mainly Germans) wore green winkels, political prisoners (e.g. communists, anarchists, etc.) wore red, Jehovah’s Witnesses wore violet, male homosexuals wore pink, “anti-socials” (e.g. Romas, mentally ill, lesbians, etc.) wore black, and Jews wore the dreaded yellow star. These triangles were sometimes elaborated by marked letters indicating a person’s country of origin, which also had deep implications for how one would be treated in the camp. The arbitrary organization of these identity categories into a violently enforced hierarchy defined social life in the Lagers, and served to undermine solidarity between inmates. Hannah Arendt observed that in the camps, “the gruesome and grotesque part of it was that the inmates identified themselves with these categories, as though they represented a last authentic remnant of their juridical person.” Because these identity categories came to be so internalized and cherished by the inmates, connections between inmates were inherently governed by Nazi strategy.
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Just as Häftlinge were marked with badges to create artificial echelons within the camps, we too carry badges of imposed social division in such forms as gender, race, and class that function to keep us squabbling over scraps of privilege. . t
marsh label law.. wilson label law.. et al
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It is my hope that within each act of concentration camp resistance, we can find a simmering spirit of anarcho-nihilism and an opportunity to deepen our understanding of what it might mean for us to resist despite overwhelming feelings of futility.
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2 – Sabotage and pure negation
offering a framework through which we might think about acts of resistance not as a means of liberation, but as acts of liberation in themselves.
but today have means to actual liberation.. ie: nonjudgmental expo labeling for augmenting interconnectedness
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In short, sabotage became an ingrained part of the work ethic of concentration camps.
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The example of those living under Nazi rule illustrates a situation in which, for those deemed Ballastexistenzen, positive visions were unfathomable: establishing long-term projects or alternative infrastructure would be ludicrous, *except to the extent that they facilitated the destruction of the existing order. So long as Hitler reigned, no Jewish commune would be tolerated, no anarchist child-care collective could ever hope to thrive. To be immersed in a social order as violent and controlling as **Nazi Germany warranted a reaction of absolute hostility, attacks aimed at every level of society — pure negation. So too does anarcho-nihilism understand the existing order of today as without potential for a positive agenda. ***Whatever we build within its bounds will be co-opted, destroyed, or turned against us: “We understand that only when all that remains of the dominant techno-industrial-capitalist system is smouldering ruins, is it feasible to ask what next?” According to this line of thought, our situation today is similar to the Lagers to the extent that positive projects, attempts to create a new world in the shell of the old, are simply out of place. Aragorn! writes: “Nihilism states that it is not useful to talk about the society you ‘hold in your stomach’, the things you would do ‘if only you got power’…****What is useful is the negation of the existing world.”
*only way to really ‘get rid of’ existing order is to offer/show something all of us already crave.. otherwise same song
**doesn’t work that way.. that just perpetuates.. as it has
***yeah.. and why we need to build (hari rat park law et al) outside bounds via something every soul already craves
****not useful.. rather.. cancerous distraction
We anarcho-nihilists …don’t talk about ‘transformation of social relations’ towards a more liberated view, we promulgate their total destruction and absolute annihilation. *Only through total destruction of the current world of power… will it be possible to build something new. The deeper we destroy, the more freely will we be able to build.
again.. if we destruct/destroy.. will just perpetuate same song.. what we need is a nother way that makes the existing ness irrelevant s.. to all eyes/hearts
The visions that rebels tend to entertain about what life will be like After The Revolution are not only unproductive, they are dangerous because they presume that a unified vision of life is desirable. Such forward-looking conversations attempt to herd an infinite spectrum of possibilities onto an ideal anarchist path. The CCF write:
true.. we need something deeper than that as well.. ie: root of problem
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“There’s no need to know what’s happening tomorrow to destroy a today that makes you bleed.”
again.. agree on no need (and can’t) know what’s happening tomorrow.. but destroy ness will never happen.. any re ness will always just perpetuate the more predictive way of sea world.. aka: same song
From the foundation of this critique, nihilism identifies a common trap experienced by anarchists: the magnetic compulsion to identify ourselves positively within society even though we strive for its destruction. In my local context, this often looks like anarchists responding to critics of property destruction with reminders of all that we contribute to society (when we are not rioting, we are community organizers, Food Not Bombs chefs, musicians, etc.).
all/everything cancerous distractions.. unless sans any form of m\a\p
Negation, however, is justified by the existence of a ruling order, not by our credentials as activists. Our riots are justified not because we contribute, but because we exist under the heel of a monstrous society. Positive projects are the means of surviving within that order; negation is the project of destroying it completely. As Alejandro de Acosta reminds us, we must not be tempted to “frame destructive action as having any particular goal beyond destruction of the existent.” Bæden too rails against this tendency, insisting that we have nothing to gain from hiding our true intentions:
1st half yeah.. 2nd half not gonna happen.. won’t go away until we let go of any form of m\a\p.. so we can try/see the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
*We understand destruction to be necessary and we desire it in abundance. We have nothing to gain through shame or lack of confidence in these desires. This world… must be annihilated in every instance, all at once. To shy away from this task, to assure our enemies of our good intentions, is the most crass dishonesty.
When we call ourselves anarchists, or even “anti-capitalists,” we are implying a commitment to the destruction of systems of domination — why do we so often shy away from this? Nihilism unabashedly embraces negation as being at the core of such positions.
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..describe jouissance perfectly: “Neither victory nor defeat is important, but only the beautiful shining of our eyes in combat.”
that’s a cope\ing mech at best.. not joy.. not lasting
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3 – Spontaneous resistance & Time
These moments can help us to understand what is at stake in our rethinking of time and what it might mean for us to sever ourselves from oppressive chronological modes.
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Regardless, each of them seem to defy any notion of hope or strategy, and the very fact that each story ends with a mass slaughter gestures towards a spirit of resistance that prioritized lived revolt over futurity.
This ongoing promise of futurity kept many inmates docile in a system that ultimately produced only two things — German wealth and corpses. .t
so too.. to no prep.. no train ness
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That being said, a few managed to break this spell and enter into something much more fierce, as exemplified by the stories above. For those Häftlinge who saw their deaths as a foregone conclusion, who had already seen their cities raided, their families gassed, and their culture obliterated, retaliation against the Nazi regime became the only experience left. Rose Meth, one of the women who assisted in the Auschwitz uprising, speaks to this liberatory space when she reflects on her incredibly risky decision to smuggle gunpowder out of a munitions factory: “Of course I agreed right away because it gave me a way to fight back. I felt very good about it, and I didn’t care about the danger.” Though some might simply read this as bravery, in this context we can perhaps read it as an expression of jouissance, and perhaps even glimpse the experience of someone who inhabited an entirely different chronological mode. Rose was not holding onto hope for the future or sinking into despair, nor was she suspended in the “tyranny of the present” — from the spectrum of despondency, suspension, and futurity, a rupture forms and reveals a space of insurrectionary possibilities, which Walter Benjamin calls “messianic time.” Before expanding on this idea, we will first explore the anarcho-nihilist critique of progressivism and reproductive futurity.
walter on art et al
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Rather than moving ourselves quickly along the train tracks of history towards a socialist utopia, we must derail the train and rupture history altogether..t
hari rat park law.. for (blank)’s sake
Whereas once this progressivism was the domain of bright-eyed revolutionaries, capitalism has seized the tradition, meaning that we are now assaulted with it from all angles — whether through austerity and democratic participation or through patient and restrained “movement building,” we are constantly being asked to tolerate intolerable conditions today in order to work towards a brighter future. Using Lee Edelman’s queer theory text No Future as a frame work, Bæden sets out to explore how progressivism is used by mainstream society to keep us attached to the existing order. They argue that futurity is ubiquitously packaged with the image of The Child, the ultimate symbol of our commitment to the future — we must work now, we must compromise now, we must be patient now, in order to secure the well being of the next generation. The unspoken and dubious premise of this reasoning is that what is best for future generations is the preservation of the existing order..t Through this lens, the widely-felt social pressure to have children is actually an obligation to reproduce society and capitalism. The term “reproductive futurity” refers to the way in which the very concept of reproduction becomes imbued with a commitment to the existing order. Bæden writes: “The ideology of reproductive futurism ensures the sacrifice of all vital energy for the pure abstraction of the idealized continuation of society.” Because this emphasis on securing a future for The Child prevents us from negating our present conditions, Bæden asks us to sever once and for all our attachment to reproductive futurity. The futures that are being dangled in front of our faces are a mirage that will continuously retreat as we move closer, and the cute, sacred image of The Child is often what prevents us from questioning that mirage..t
graeber make it diff law et al
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Messianic Time
What is to be gained by shattering the progressive conception of time or by abandoning our attachment to futurity?..t How can we conceive of the chronological mode embodied by those inmates who escaped Lager-time, despair, and suspension, and fought back? Bæden once again turns to Benjamin and the concept of messianic time, which is an “irrational now-time,” an “interruption of linear time,” and which exists as “splinters diffused through the empty fabric of capitalist time.” As a rupture from oppressive chronological modes, it contains “unlimited possibilities” and “threatens to interrupt the continuum of history.”..t The Invisible Committee, also taking inspiration from Benjamin, applies this concept to resistance generally: “Every attempt to block the global system, every movement, every revolt, every uprising should be seen as a vertical attempt to stop time.” Here we might remember those rebels who spent the first evening of the July revolution of 1830 shooting out clock towers in Paris, or the (semi-mythical) anarchist Biofilo Panclasta who, in the final days of his life, is said to have escaped from an old folks’ home and climbed to the top of a clock tower where he “arrested the movement of the clock’s hands, which so carefully marked the passage of time.” When the monotonous rhythms of society’s clocks have ceased and the death march of progress has been brought to a halt, messianic time is the space where new forms of life can be birthed. The CCF looks for this historical rupture in the moment of an attack against a system, and in the precious moments afterwards, before the system has turned its switches back on (e.g. after the riot, before the cleanup); these moments of “unstuck time” are where our desires for the impossible come to the surface, and “in these holes, negations against this world can be born.” This project of stopping time is an attempt to break free from the ideologies of progressivism and the spell of reproductive futurity, and to enter into combat with the existing order. Those in the camps who spontaneously fought back knowing that death would be the immediate consequence erupted out of oppressive, paralyzing, and illusory concepts of time, and entered into this space of messianic time.
all sounds great.. except (to me) if still fighting.. still in same song
Here I do not mean to argue that those who fought back in the Lagers experienced some mystical chronological transcendence that granted them supernatural bravery. Rather, I am pointing towards the possibilities that exist when we confront our own futurelessness and find the will to act: When we don’t believe the lies about where we’re heading, when we don’t sink into absolute despair about how fucked we are, and when we don’t just keep our heads down and think about the present moment — when we step out of that debilitating sequence and act against the existing order, no matter the odds. This often means confronting death, imprisonment, alienation, and a variety of other dangers. For the anarcho-nihilists, it also means opening oneself up to new possibilities of being alive. These cries to “stop time” and to discover jouissance are essentially asking us to sever any attachments we have to the existing order, and to position ourselves outside of and against its progress. So long as Häftlinge saw a future for themselves in the camps, or remained suspended in the present moment, or gave up on living completely, the Nazis would never have to deal with a moment of defiance. By shattering those chronological modes, some inmates broke with the rhythms of the camp and carved out a different fabric of time. Similarly, so long as we believe that this society is making progress, and so long as we can glimpse a future for ourselves within it or a future for our children, we will remain in some way wed to it. When anarcho-nihilism urges us to abandon those chronological modes, it is in essence asking us to sever all ties to the continuation of society and work instead to negate its existence. *In this rupture of time we find a richness of life unimaginable within the existing order. Messianic time is the chronological awareness in which jouissance can flourish, for rather than deferring our rage to the future we can finally realize that now is the time we’ve been waiting for.
*again.. if still in existing order.. same song
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4 – Organizations and Major Uprisings
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The UK chapter of the Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI) writes: *“With all the billions of people who live in the world, there will never be a time when a particular act against the State and Capital is felt by all or even the majority of people to be appropriate, good, or desirable.” Rather than spend our lives preparing for a mass awakening that likely will not happen, better to attack now and see where it takes us. (It is worth noting here a difference between “deferred” action and “patient” action, for in planning each of the bombings, shootings, and arsons that have defined the nihilist stance, a great deal of patience has indeed been required — let’s not mistake urgency for impatience.) A different cell of the FAI writes: “We don’t even give a minute of our life in the hope that the multitude will suddenly become aware and wake up! If the oppressed are not ready to raise the hatchet, this is a problem of the oppressed.” Thus, nihilism represents a strong anti-social turn in anarchism, whereby instead of working to mobilize the masses and build a wide-based movement, it prioritizes immediate attack **rooted in individual desires. This “aristocratic contempt for the common people,” as critics have labeled it, severs nihilists from the task of rousing the “sheeple,” and allows for a different set of priorities.
*this is why we need to org around legit needs.. ie: maté basic needs.. something (2 things) every soul already craves.. deep enough to be something we can org around.. all of us ness..
**yes to ‘individual desire’.. aka: itch-in-the-soul
ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
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Venona Q, in one such essay titled “Scandalous Thoughts: A Few Notes on Civil Anarchism”, writes: “The issue for me here is the same denial of individuality that the State imposes — some herding of unique human beings into some utilitarian category by pedagogues and masters who find the individual unwieldy and dangerous, but find an abstract ideological cage immensely comfortable.”..t
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who posture as being oppositional even though “everything that they defend is invested in the system
One of the aspects of anarcho-nihilism that makes this kind of informal organizing possible is the tactical *freedom afforded by its rejection of all inherited programs, moralities, and expectations. It urges us to take **ethical decisions into our own hands rather than appealing to any socially governed notions of right and wrong, thus opening up an infinite spectrum of tactical thinking that can more meaningfully interact with the particularities of our unique context. Experimentation, then, takes the place of formulaic thinking in revolutionary struggle: ***“Rather than organization, then, in the present we might simply speak of experimentation, as the willingness of small groups of people to gamble on these admittedly slim possibilities with absolutely no guarantee of success.”..t What we hope to find when we open up our field of vision like this is that anarchistic organizing doesn’t have to be a soul-sucking, bureaucratic affair; on the contrary, we might find that “we can organize ourselves, and that this capacity is fundamentally joyful.” An informal organization like the CCF or RS allows space for individuals and affinity groups to act with ****unrestrained ferocity *****against systems of domination, while still being connected to a network of people who are interested in similar ideas and who can act in solidarity with each others’ struggles.
if **this.. not *this
***but too.. no measure of success ness.. aka: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
if *****this.. not ****this.. any form of re ness as cancerous distraction
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And though informal organizational models may be able to mitigate the problem of collective responsibility, they will never be able to fully solve the problem. Just as the authors of Attentat become paralyzed by the “horror show” that would be required to violently confront the state, so too did the Fighting Group Auschwitz and other concentration camp organizations attempt to navigate the tension between attacking a dominant order and the responses this would provoke. Ultimately somebody along the line is going to have to make shady ethical choices, regardless of organizational model. Thus, while I think that stories of concentration camp uprisings can help us to develop a healthy wariness around the role of organizations, we must also stay vigilant to nuance. *There are no easy answers to these questions. Without dismissing (or attacking) every formal organization we encounter, we can continue to experiment with **non-hierarchical organizational forms that might facilitate, rather than defer, moments of liberatory rupture.
*so maybe let go of those questions
**no ie of this to date.. every org we’ve tried has had some form of m\a\p
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5- Reflections
Cruel Optimisms
In her book Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant dissects some of the reasons that human beings cling so tenaciously to hopeful ideas. She defines “cruel optimism” as “a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic.” What makes these attachments cruel is not just the harmful impact of the object of desire, but the sense in which the object comes to provide something of “the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world.” Without the object of our desire, we fall apart. Underneath of a cruel optimism is an existential abyss, and yet severing ourselves from it poses the only real possibility for growth. As Berlant writes: “Why do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies — say, of the enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work — when the evidence of their instability, fragility, and dear cost abounds?” In the Nazi camps, these cruel optimisms had a name: paroles, which referred to optimistic rumours that spread through the camps, usually about the war nearing an end or the partisans nearing the camp walls. The false sense of hope that such rumours offered was both a lifeline for desperate people, and a perpetual deterrent for resistance. What cruel optimisms might we be clinging to in our current situations?
Anarchism is fundamentally posed to challenge many cruel optimisms held by society, and anarchism is in turn having its own cruel optimisms challenged by nihilism. Nihilism is the incredulous voice whispering impossible questions: Are we toxically attached to the idea that we can build a new world in the shell of the old, despite overwhelming evidence that points towards the impossibility of that happening? Are we stuck in a model of time that binds us to the reproduction of society and endlessly defers incendiary action? Have we inherited a set of stagnant revolutionary models that serve only to limit the full spectrum of tactics available to us and to manage the rebellious desires that course through our bodies? Is all of our resistance predicated on the fantasy that we can actually bring an end to global capitalism?
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For those in the Lagers, the dissolution of cruel optimisms was the most crucial step towards resistance. Immersed in a fog of misinformation, insidious lies, and unbearable truths, very few inmates managed to come to terms with the severity of their situations, and even fewer were able to muster the will (or had the luck/privilege/physical ability, etc) to act on those truths. Nihilism is the voice at the Warsaw Ghetto train station whispering, these trains are bound for an extermination center; it is the voice on the “Road to Freedom” whispering, these aren’t showers; it is the voice in the Lagers definitively proclaiming, “no one is going to save us”. Some of the truths that nihilism asks us to confront are almost as severe and unbelievable as the truth about the camps. Groups like the CCF and the FAI ask us to accept the possibility that the majority of human beings on this planet will *never be motivated to resist oppression.
*but are already primed for a nother way.. sans re ness
Anything less complex than the spectacular, cybernetic, late capitalism of this world is hopelessly naive and simplistic. It would necessitate untold violence and brutality. It would tear asunder the illusions of two hundred years of humanistic, rights-based social organization… Practically, we don’t live in an era where utopian or even liberal (in the broadest sense of the word) political change is possible.
that’s whalespeak
These are all grotesque ideas in that they force us to confront a situation without hope. The problem for many of us is that these ideas happen to resonate on a very deep level. We just don’t always know what to do with them.
In other words, this isn’t about becoming a nihilist. Nihilism does not demand our allegiance, because it is not a political ideology. I am more inclined to look at it as a tendency in the true sense of the word, and to embrace it as *a fluid presence in our lives that constantly asks us to negate our own ideologies, certainties, and optimistic attachments. I find any form of nihilism that gets used as an excuse not to dream, not to act, and not to engage earnestly with other people to be dull — **I am interested in a nihilism that ravenously digs below the surface of commonly accepted ideas, and that can help us to ground our resistance in something more meaningful than tired slogans and listless strategies. I am interested in a nihilism that helps us to reorient our lives away from cruel optimisms and towards jouissance.
if *this.. not **this.. negate ness is re ness is cancerous distraction
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Insurrectionary Memories
Reading holocaust literature is not easy work and I don’t blame people for turning away from it. Nearly every page of memoir brings with it a new layer of hellish imagery, trauma, and misanthropic insight. I felt called to these stories for a number of personal reasons, and was motivated to keep reading when I started to glimpse the ways that they might be interesting to other anarchists. My experience of these stories became even richer when I started to realize that one of the most widespread and crushing fears for those who entered the camps was of not having their stories heard, of being forgotten by history. Primo Levi observed that the most commonly reported nightmare in the Lagers was not one of death or torture, but the alienation of clogged mouths and muted words. “Why,” he asked, “is the pain of every day translated so constantly into our dreams in the ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to story?”
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs.. even rehashing stories is now a cancerous distraction.. for (blank)’s sake
In remembering these voices, we also have the opportunity to carry on past struggles and to turn the stories of those who came before us into fodder *against our oppressors. As we all know, history is written by the victors, and so the narratives of Progress and Great Men offered to us by society generally serve only to reinforce power. Benjamin warned that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins” and that “this enemy has not ceased to be victorious”…By **engaging ourselves in this project called “history”, we can find ways to turn past struggles against current forms of domination and to “ensure that the memory of the dead continues to haunt the living.” I see this happening all around me with People’s History posters and Silvia Federici reading groups, with land acknowledgments and Haymarket handbills.
*if any form of against ness.. not going to dance
**not freedom.. just perpetuating sea world
howard zinn and silvia federici.. lovelies.. but not deep enough
It is worth noting here that not all history speaks loudly enough for us to easily hear it. How many stories of concentration camp resistance have been lost? Because of the sheer brutality of the Nazi regime and the conditions of isolation in which much of this history unfolded, it is safe to assume that most acts of resistance were captured only in the fleeting wisps of gun smoke that silenced fast-beating, recalcitrant hearts. In so many ways, our willingness to attend to the silences of history may determine our ability to understand this world and how we got to where we are.
there’s something deeper we need to attend to the silence of .. ie: itch-in-the-soul.. what’s already on each heart.. all else just perpetuates sea world
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The Void
With every *rebellious footstep we take, we are entering an unknowable void. There are no reliable maps of the terrain that our struggles will occupy. **No one has a leg up on the question of liberation. So much has been tried and so much has failed, let us finally admit that we don’t know what is “right” or what will “work”.[253] Nobody knows how, why, or if a dominant order will fall. We don’t know if there are enough letterbombs in the world to bring an end to nuclear power, nor do we know if a well-timed mass uprising in Auschwitz would have actually succeeded in shutting down the camp. Despite what anyone tells us, there is no guarantee that the workers of the world are going to rise up, nor any assurances that such a thing would even lead to a desirable situation.
*if rebellious .. not unknown.. plenty of maps already of that route
**but that’s because we’ve not yet tried something legit diff.. ie: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. and today we can.. ie: a sabbatical ish transition
Though *we have inherited a great many ideas about how to confront domination, we know that nothing is set in stone. From the shattered tools and bones of our predecessors, we craft our own **weapons. Nothing is guaranteed to work, yet we **attack regardless. ..We take every opportunity to ensure **that those in power lose sleep and that their functionaries have miserable jobs.
*not the root of problem
**evidence by all the red flags
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Glossary
Ballastexistenzen: Hitler’s preferred term for the “undesirable and unnecessary” members of society.
Futurity: the impression that one has a future within the existing order.
Häftling: A prisoner in the Nazi concentration camp; plural — Häftlinge.
Lager: A Nazi concentration camp (German word meaning “camp” or “storehouse”).
Recalcitrance: resisting authority or control; not obedient; hard to manage.
Reproductive Futurity: The belief that the existing order is the safest future for children in the abstract, and that sacrifices are to be made in the name of this abstract Child.
Sonderkommando: A work detail of (mostly Jewish) camp inmates tasked with operating the gas chambers, crematorium, and other processes of extermination in the camps..
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Afterthoughts
Lastly, I am very curious to know of the experiences of anarchists in the camps — I know they were there, I just haven’t been able to find any. If anyone knows of any memoirs or books that reference specific anarchist Häftlinge, I would greatly appreciate the heads up.
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be you. 