Keaton & Hive – No Hope?

At least the anarchist demographic isn’t trying to make an endless-growth economy work on a finite planet, or trying to reconstruct the root structural cause of inequality, injustice, endemic war and ecocide as the most sensible solution to itself. Who’s the utopian again, those of us who dabble in causality? There’s no hope in the utopia of positively sacred social and class hierarchies, personal boundaries not so much. There’s no hope in the dogmas of middle class liberalism, and its Quixotic mission to socialise positive sacred class hierarchies, personal boundaries not so much. There’s no hope in rolling class hierarchy turds in egalitarianism glitter, any more than there is adopting the coercive control mentality that the ends justify the means as a strategy for overcoming class divisions and realising the abolition of constraint through the abolition of the commodity-form. There’s no hope for authoritarian, ‘I represent X, therefore anyone who doubts my judgement is an enemy of X’ weaponised identity politics, for shutting down debate, critical thinking, dissent and opposition by conflating being doubted, contradicted or criticised with being attacked.

This is all the big knobs of statist hierarchy seem to have to offer, but no one who dabbles in ideological heterodoxy or causality should hope for anything beyond a life of throwing consumer durables into the bottomless pit of our alienation (ie. having traded freedom for purchasing power), and then just feeding people to the alienation monster when no one has any disposable income to buy things anymore with. What if we can do better as a species than a Caligula-like, end-of-empire orgy of violence, corruption, decadence and perversion? It’s almost as though this is the lawless anarchy, predation of the strong on the weak, mob rule and sadistic cruelty theatre as social culture attributed to anarchism. I wonder if that is people who sell their souls to the rat race projecting.

Anarchists have reason to hope. Just look at how much free rent we have in the heads of everyone who knows for sure that social and class hierarchies are sacred, but personal boundaries not so much. Who hide from themselves inside whatever variant of the sacred hierarchy makes them feel most protected from having to figure themselves out as individuals subjectively independent of the aprons strings of positively sacred social and class hierarchies, personal boundaries not so much. Every hierarchy-worshipping autocrat from the domestic abuser to the imperialist knows you have to reconstruct autocracy as a service to the victim’s own best interests, so we can explain our abuses and outrages to ourselves as much to our targets.

Whether in the kitchen or in Gaza, it was the reaction to autocracy that was the problem, and they had it coming. Tough Love when you can’t love. Those of us who can’t love individual people because we love mad power too much are the thin blue line that defends civilisation from the heathens and savages. It’s almost as though it’s all a lie to reconstruct harm as a service to the victim, and to devalue those we actually depend on such that they think they need us, when in reality it’s the other way around. We’re made to feel like the political autonomy of the middle class is in the working class’s own best interests, apparently because we’re too stupid to self-manage our own work, but not too stupid to vote.

Maybe what we really need is a vote for ourselves, and to know not only that we need to believe in ourselves as individuals and our power as a class, but all the reasons why working class autonomy is a such a threat to a world built on coercive control. Is it not coercive control psychology that binds social orders organised around positively sacred social and class hierarchies personal boundaries together like a bundle of sticks? It seems like it is. It seems like a bunch of all the same kind of shit, Tough Love to explain away sadism and cruelty as some deranged alchemy for kindness, to invoke the myth of altrustic outcomes from selfish means. If I was a brainwashed capture-bondling of positively sacred social and class hierarchies right now, I’d be feeling increasingly anxious and depressed as well. We can only keep humping the endless-growth dividend party for so long.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is we don’t need to believe in positively sacred social and class hierarchies, or in the big knob alchemists who try to position themselves secular priesthoods of the middle-class moral elect. There’s no future in aggressive fronting like looking tough and being tough are the same thing. There’s no hope in the mentality that the truth of an idea is determined by the number of people who believe it, or in groupthink-driven dogma that rattles vacantly like an empty tin blowing around in the breeze, or infantile cocoons of collective paranoia.

There’s only hope in knowing that predatory exploiters and coercive controllers mean to break our self-belief and self-value so they can control us, i.e. because we are actually of high value. This is surely as true between classes, as between individuals. The working class is of high value to the capitalist class as a source of value; so we should also value ourselves. What better reason to believe in ourselves as individuals, and in the power of solidarity and collective action, than the fact that it has to be beaten out of us for the classes who define the value system for everybody feel secure.