Discussion
In March of 2020 I could already see how damaging COVID was going to be on politics by isolating and marginalizing altruists, while the less-altruistic freely socialized in bars etc.
One worry I keep kicking around in my head after Oct 7th, is that anarchists may have lost activist spaces in a *permanent* way because our universalism fundamentally conflicts with the pluralistic politics needed for activist coalitions of the oppressed, and that our counterglobalization era hegemony may be over.
One extreme form of political pluralism is "panarchy" wherein fascistic and anarchistic communities/societies are supposed to respect one another's autonomy, basically "respect diverse cultural practices like rape and slavery; never interfere by assisting survivors and slaves". Another is liberal democracy wherein all conflict has to go thru the ballot box and punching a nazi is a violation of that nazi's "rights" and an attack on the diversity of political viewpoints.
I've covered all this before obviously, but I think it's important to be cleareyed not just about our advantages, but also the places where we're at a massive disadvantage.
The DSA has been a generational blowout for anarchism's hegemony over the left and activism, but I'm increasingly worried that it's a permanent effect. Where many of our *tactics* and *positions* will be greedily adopted -- local mutual aid projects etc -- but furiously stripped of anything like our values or consistency.
An absolutist embrace of pluralism is fundamentally irreconcilable with anarchism (and antifascism) -- anarchism is fundamentally a universalist position that doesn't countenance exceptions on nations, police, prisons, borders, faith, etc etc and thus we'll always been prickly in coalitions -- but the populist and activist pressures are always to pluralism rather than universalism.
This means that basically anarchists become influential when the inherent inconsistency of the pluralist compromise being pushed by slop leftism flounders, because we're suddenly rich in useful alternatives, but those tools are stripped off of us, divorced from anything like a core principled worldview and turned into commodities that are re-integrated into the slop leftist mainstream.
Anarchism's anti-nationalism is *deeply unpalatable* to many slop leftists these days because conditions have encouraged simplistic litigation of identity cards AND the simplistic team sports analysis of campism.
But obviously there's no way to reconcile anarchism and nationalism. It's not just that we had this fight brutally across the late 00s and threw the neonazi entryists out, it's that to try to make the conjunction work you basically HAVE to adopt pluralism that erodes ACAB etc obviously
@rechelon first time seeing “slop leftism”. It’s interesting watching this particular pejorative widen in application
@rechelon
Can you define pluralistic politics for this thread? I just want to make sure we're all on the same page in terminology.