While the future, no matter who wins the upcoming election, doesn’t look rosy, at the same time there is still a lot of people who are looking for an anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian alternative to the established political order and are searching for concrete ways to get involved in real life action.

In past installments of this column, we’ve fleshed out ideas about how to to go about forming a group and promoting events, but this time around, we wanted to talk about concrete ideas on starting more long-term projects in your community. While this list isn’t exhaustive, we do hope this presents you with some real ideas about how you might start to begin.

“Punitive grandstanding” is the most descriptive short phrase I could come up to describe the following concept:

A situation where someone pushes for extreme punitive measures against in immoral act, which in practice “virtue signals” moral superiority and implies people proposing lesser punishment are immoral. This behaviour often goes beyond what is proportionate or productive.

You probably know what I mean. Say there’s a new lemmy thread on a news community, it’s about someone having committed a horrible crime. All the comments end up being a sort of “jerk off contest” for who can propose the strongest punishment and thereby assert their moral superiority.

Instead of taking an approach to actually reduce the incident of said crime, looking at what problems might have led to it, how to care for the victim/family, and how to properly rehabilitate and treat someone who committed such an act, solely focusing on coming up with the most draconian punishment possible.

Anyone who comments something about the justice system ideally being rehabilitative gets accused of being no better than the criminal themselves or “helping” criminals.

I’ve just noticed this general trend which seems to be at odds with anarchist principles. I wonder what you think? Have you noticed this too? Do you think it’s a major problem? What can we do about it?

Greta Thunberg @GretaThunberg

#UsaElection #USA2024 #StopArminglsrael #FreePalestine #ClimateJusticeNow

This year we have seen many defining elections all over the world. On November 5th, It is time for one of the most powerful countries in the world — the USA — to go to the polls. It is probably Impossible to overestimate the consequences this specific election will have for the world and for the future of humanity.

There is no doubt that one of the candidates — Trump — is way more dangerous than the other. But no matter if Trump or Harris wins, the USA — a country built on stolen land and genocide on indigenous people -will soll be an imperialist hyper-capitalist world power that will ultimately continue to lead the world further into a racist, unequal world with an ever increasingly escalating climate- and environmental emergency.

With this in mind, my main message to Americans is to remember that you cannot only settle for the least worst option. Democracy is not only every four years on election day, but also every hour of every day in between. You cannot think you have done "enough' only by voting, especially when both those candidates have blood on their hands. Lets not forget that the genocide in Palestine is happening under the Biden and Harris administration, with American money and complicity. It is not in any way 'feminist." "progressive" or "humanitarian" to bomb innocent children and civilians — it is the opposite, even It it is a woman in charge. And this is of course one example among many of American imperialism. I cannot for my life understand how some can even pretend to talk about humanitarian values, without even questioning their own role In further deepening global oppression and massacres of entire countries.

So, Americans, you must do everything in your power to call out this extreme hypocrisy and the catastrophic consequences American Imperialism has on a global scale. Be uncomfortable, fill the streets, block, organise, boycott, occupy, explicitly call out those in power whose actions and Inaction lead to death and destruction. Join and support those who are resisting and leading the change. Nothing less will ever be acceptable.

In this article, we argue that a Slow Feminism, which evolves through the slow but consistent support of other women that is embedded in care, compassion and constructive challenge against patriarchal expectations, is essential for the future of feminist praxis within higher education. This work emerged from our coming together to reflect-on-action on our experiences as disabled, women, postgraduate researchers in different disciplines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Feeling ‘othered’ by and invisible to hierarchal structures, we sought to understand our individual challenges through a collective lens. Relational ethics and a praxis of care in line with feminist epistemology underpinned our systematic ‘feminist collaborative autoethnography’, whereby we critically engaged with individual reflections and together in online meetings to interpret shared social, emotional and structural challenges. In this article, we draw on our experiences sharing this data through poetry, during the stage of our collaborative project in which we utilised ‘poems’ to identify the challenges of being a disabled woman navigating higher education, and the resistance we employed individually, and collectively, in support of one another. Through this process, we challenged the neoliberal, patriarchal and oppressive systems that we are forced to engage with daily and our own complicity in them. Using our individual, collective and overlapping voices, whereby we recognise the tensions and supportive narratives created by and within our research conversations, we identify that feminist activism and feminist futures are not solely a response to extreme events.

The ideas of the Resistance Committees historically were explored as early as the 1990s. The idea was to provide the opposition with a closely knitted organizational front. The Communist Party had a long history of encouraging the idea of communes as a form of democracy based on the Soviet experience and as a response to the state’s excessive and violent crackdown on multiple forms of political representation. It was also part of a more inclusive democratization narrative where people sought to substitute politics from above and big man politics with micro governance systems where they redefined their relationship with the state and its institutions and tried to find ways to hold it accountable at a local level.

In 2013 and 2014 when the first uprisings took place, The National Consensus Front, of which the Communist Party was a member, sought to deal with popular detachment from politics through building political organization in the workplace for unions and neighborhood committees. They worried that the weakness of the two main coalitions active at the time – Sudan Call and the National Consensus Front – combined with the proliferation of liberal civic agendas funded by Western aid money would increase the rift between them and the popular masses. At that point the Resistance Committees were composed of members representing their political institutions and served as a dormant though extended group of the affiliated political bodies.

It was only in December 2018 and forward that the Resistance Committees emerged in their current form and organizational outlook, and started expressing political agendas and demands away from mainstream politics and politicians.

Gaza Strip, Palestine — With the war on Gaza being dubbed the first livestreamed genocide, gruesome images of Palestinian bodies shredded by Israeli bombings circulate the internet daily. More than 52,000 Palestinians have been confirmed killed, including those still buried under the rubble, with the actual death count likely as high as 186,000 or more. A third of those killed by Israel are children and around 100,000 Gazans have been injured. Of the 2.2 million Palestinians in the 25-mile long coastal enclave, [2 million](2 million) have been forcibly displaced at least once since in the last year. (...)

1. Participants know they are part of a group and what the group is about (Wilson, 2016).
2. Agreements for sharing and at times rotating labor/work and implementation of decisions as well as for sharing the fruits thereof (Kropotkin, 1906, Sixth Commission of the EZLN, 2016, Ostrom, 2021, Usufruct Collective, 2022). People can co-create a cornucopia where there is more than enough for all or otherwise agree to specific ways of distributing less abundant fruits of re/production according to needs.   
3. Direct collective decision making by participants through deliberation. For there to be self-management of each and all, there must also be mutual non-domination. By extension, community assemblies related to the commons should utilize direct, participatory, and non-hierarchical forms of democracy (Bookchin, 2005b).  
4. Organizational transparency that allows participants to mutually-monitor the commons (Atkins, Wilson, Hayes, 2019). This can happen through the process of co-managing and interacting with the commons, collective action, living in community with others, relevant accounting/calculation as needed, and availability of relevant information to participants. 
5. Graduated defense against domination and exploitation such as: informal social disapproval, self-defense and defense of others as needed, and recourse to expelling someone from a particular collective (through deliberation, assembly, and due process) in response to the most extreme violations of the commons and freedoms of persons (Boehm, 2001, Ostrom, 2021, Usufruct Collective, 2023).  
6. Good-enough conflict resolution such as: people talking directly to each other, mediation to find out how to move forward, dispute resolution to resolve disputes, restorative justice and transformative justice processes for people to repair harm and transform causes thereof, and organization-wide assembly when the conflict is in regards to organizational form and content. (Kaba, 2019, Usufruct Collective, 2023). 
7. Communities and participants need sufficient autonomy to organize. 
8. The use of co-federation and embedded councils. Community assemblies can co-manage inter-communal commons in a way where policy-making power is held by participants and assemblies directly (Bookchin, 1992, Ocalan, 2014). This enables self-management and mutual aid within and between communities as well as inter-communal management of the commons. Community assemblies can utilize mandated and recallable councils and rotating delegates to implement decisions within the bounds of policies made by community assemblies directly (Bookchin, 1992, 2007, 2018). 

France declares curfew as second overseas territory erupts with protests over failing services and high cost of living ~ From Contre Attaque ~

The squatters quickly declared the base in the middle of the city “a politically autonomous anarchist zone.” Or, in plainer English, a commune. Taking a cue from the surrounding “Christian’s Harbor” neighborhood, they called it “Christiania.”

Like many other communes, Christiania’s founders wanted the new world they made within the walls to be as free as possible from all the old world’s rules and customs and hierarchies. They drew up a mission statement, according to which the goal of the commune was quote “to create a self-governing society whereby each and every individual holds themselves responsible for the well-being of the entire community.”

Link to preprint (PDF) from the author’s website

Abstract: When a liberal-democratic state signs a treaty or wages a war, does its whole polity do those things? We approach this question via the recent social ontological literature on collective agency. We provide an argument for 'yes', alongside one for 'no.' The arguments are presented via three desiderata on a 'yes' answer: the polity’s control over what the state does; the polity’s unity; and the influence of individual polity-members. We suggest that the answer to our question differs for different liberal-democratic states, and depends upon two underlying considerations: (1) the amount of discretion held by the state’s office-holders; (2) the extent to which the democratic procedure is ‘deliberative’ rather than ‘aggregative.’

Throughout history, working class people have stood up and fought back against oppression and exploitation in the food system. Each month, Food Fight documents a timeline of historical labor struggles to inform and educate today’s workers on historical class struggle in the food industry. We commemorate their struggles each day of the month.

Hi, so two days ago @ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net shared a paper about anarchist cybernetics, and it gave a brief outline of a response, before cutting it short.

But it's just so dang unsatisfied with that, so it wanted to write up something a bit more detailed lining up the theory provided in that post with successful anarchist practices in the past. Hopefully for even those who didn't read the paper, this will be instructive. Keep in mind it started reading about this last night starting with that paper, so it couldn't possibly claim to know very much about what this "anarchist cybernetics" is. But even so, a flat-footed response should still be elucidating.

The VSM

So yeah the paper was a bit opaque, but all you really need to know is that the paper is providing a model that aims to roughly describe the decision-making of any organization that survives with its purpose intact while also being effective at carrying out its purpose. This is a non-normative claim in that it's about what causes an organization to survive and be effective in our world, and a normative claim in that it's about how organizations should be. This combination of being disposed to survive and be effective is referred to as being 'viable.'

It's not really important what this has to do with what you typically think of as cybernetics.

Here is a diagram of this model, known as the Viable System Model (henceforth VSM).

You have:

• Big blob thingy: There's this big blob thingy and that's the overall world, or environment. That's what your organization is interacting with, trying to change.
• Tiny blob thingies inside the big blob thingy: The smaller ones inside are local parts of the world, or niches. Like your metroplex or something, rather than the global political situation or your world-historical context.
• System one: You have various units interacting with and changing these niches. These niches may in turn interact with and change the units of system one. These are basically local actions, tactical decisions about what to do in the here and now.
• System two: Then, all the various units interacting with and changing these niches need to make sure they have some means of coordination. So, local decisions are put through a process that puts them in alignment with each other.
• System three: Whatever the alignment between the local units of system one must also be in alignment with the overall organization. So this is a process that puts everything in alignment with the overall system.
• System four: All of the information is collected here. All of the information from the local actions and their niches, the processes by which they align with each other, the overall organization, are collected and/or synthesized here. As well is information about the overall environment or world, which changes this system. This system also acts on the world, so these are the long-term, general strategic decisions.
• System five: This is the system by which where the overall organization is going is decided. Think of it as housing the ultimate objective.

All of these systems need to be interacting with one another and changing one another. System one changes system two, which changes system one. System four changes system five, which changes system four. System four changes the environment, which changes system four. And so on.

Then a bunch of the paper is about how this seems hierarchical but it's not a structural hierarchy, which for the purposes of this post it'll assume everyone already agrees with since it's a sufficiently common theme in anarchist theory anyway.

Black Rose/Rosa Negra's Program

As it pointed out in a comment on that post, the VSM diagram will remind many anarchists of diagrams for the especifismo model of anarchist organizing. A popular one is BRRN's in Turning the Tide, a diagram you can view here. The especifismo program consists of:

• Structural analysis: Information and theory on the long-term structures of oppression of the world, which your organization is trying to change.
• Conjunctural analysis: Information and theory on the immediate crises of the world, which your organization is also trying to change.
• Tactical plans: The immediate local actions taken to change the immediate crises of the world.
• Limited term strategic plan: This is the strategy that, provided the conjunctural analysis, constrains the tactical plans.
• General strategy: This is the long-term strategy that, provided the structural analysis, constrains the limited term strategic plan.
• Ultimate objective: This is the end goal of the organization, which constrains the long-term strategy.

Much of this model, developed independently of anarchist cybernetics, corresponds to the VSM.

The conjunctural analysis is the information coming from the tiny blobs up to system three. The tactical plans are system one, the immediate, local actions to change parts of the world. The limited term strategic plan is system three.

The structural analysis is the information coming from the overall world into system four. The general strategy which constrains the limited term strategy and tactics is system four. The ultimate objective is system five.

And then, we can assume that system two is something like tendency groups, intermediate organizations, caucuses, fronts, and other forms of organization deployed by especifismo anarchists intervening within immediate social movements. They are not included in the image above, but they are included elsewhere.

Objections

This comparison between the VSM and especifismo helps us see the shortcomings of anarchist cybernetics. Here are three objections. First, the normativity of the VSM. Second, the lack of clarity in the VSM. And third, the bi-directionality of the VSM.

The normativity of anarchist cybernetics

The Viable Systems Model is meant to not just be a heuristic description, but a normative claim about how organizations ought to be (though the paper makes some difficult-to-decipher maneuvers to try to avoid this claim, while still trying to be normative?). Hence the thick concept of being invoked by the term 'viability,' even if they insist it's just a term of art here meant to refer to survival and effectiveness.

But there have been very viable--in the usual sense of the term--forms of organizing throughout history which failed to meet this standard. Contrary to popular belief, insurrectionist affinity groups have achieved a great deal that they wouldn't have if they'd been a part of a Viable System. There are some conditions that require a politics of attack without overhead systems. Anyone who has ever had to violently strike back, brutally and quickly, against their abuser has understood that there exist conditions where resistance via a general strategy is not always in the cards. Sometimes, rebellion in the here and now is necessary for liberation.

Affinity groups that aren't meant to survive long, only as long as their attack is ongoing before breaking up and starting another attack in a long string of relentless attacks, can be incredibly powerful. But this is precisely what is ruled out by the VSM.

Of course, you could try to fit this within the VSM. You could say that the pattern within a population to have this impulse to group up temporarily with strangers, brutally attack, and disperse is a system. But the more you try to include into the VSM, the less useful it is. At some point, it becomes no more useful than just saying "any viable resistance involves attacking a lot and not getting attacked too much," which is utterly trivial.

Sometimes stability isn't desirable, contrary to the VSM. Sometimes a culture which develops organically without any organized constraint still develops sufficiently resistant to liberal and colonial influence. There's a lot of viable shit out there that isn't "viable."

The lack of clarity of anarchist cybernetics

So, let's address the fact that despite having some similarities, there just aren't as many parts in the especifismo model as the VSM.

When specific anarchist organizations don't have intermediate organizations, there is no system two. Decisions go straight from the limited term strategy down to the tactics, system three to system one.

Furthermore, the way that the immediate situation informs the limited term strategy is left unstated. Just somehow, the limited term strategic plan needs to be informed.

But per the VSM, the immediate situation informs the equivalent system three only by interacting with system one, which impacts system two, which impacts system three. What this means, in practical terms, is that if the organization tries out a tactic, and gets certain feedback from that tactic, it is able to learn about what the current situation is.

The problem is that this very specific, narrow way of learning about the current situation is more or less effective in different situations. If an affinity group goes and tries to pull something off, and they fail, they may come to a lot of conclusions that are very sound given this limited experience. But the overall situation may introduce some worthwhile nuances, even while still validating their valuable experiences. These nuances can be lost if learning is done only by committing to a certain tactic and coming to conclusions afterwards.

Of course, the VSM can address both of these. Nothing about the VSM says that the system one units can't be information gathering units. Nothing about the VSM says the systems can't all be within the same body of decision-making and analysis.

But the most natural way to understand the VSM is to think of the systems as being fairly independent of one another, not as having decisions about limited term strategy and unity between tactics all at once. As well, system one units are most naturally read as local actions to impact the world, not simply receive information about the world (esp. with the bi-directional arrows).

So if we charitably assume that the VSM includes the especifismo model in this way, the VSM is at least very unclear. The paper even goes on to describe how the VSM can be applied to Occupy Wall Street, and genuinely it found that part incredibly difficult to penetrate.

The bi-directionality of anarchist cybernetics

If you look at the VSM diagram, there's two-way arrows everywhere. If you look at the especifismo model, some of the arrows are one-way.

This is probably the biggest problem with the VSM. Especifismo was developed to resolve a paradox within anarchism, that it needs to remain open enough to make use of the great pool of talent within social movements addressing immediate crises in the world. But they need to remain closed enough to avoid being eroded and co-opted by liberalism, settler-colonialism, white supremacy, and so on.

Cybernetics is, similarly, addressing the problem of needing to remain stable but effective.

But apparently, the end goal of the system in the VSM can be changed by systems one through four. There is virtually no mechanism proposed by the VSM that it can find to prevent instability. it has no idea how the VSM resolves the problem it sets out to solve.

Especifismo addresses this problem in a multitude of ways, but one component is to make sure that all of the strategies and tactics are unified with the end goal, and the end goal does not compromise to make some strategic or tactical end more achievable. The arrow is not bi-directional.

Indeed, if you look into it, cybernetics is all about these cycles of input-output, and so anything inspired by cybernetics is going to have this problem. Everything is always encouraged to impact everything else. There is no way to make an organization whose end goals are stable enough to survive the overwhelming inputs of liberalism and white supremacy in our society if we're inspired by cybernetic methods.

There's other parts where the bi-directionality really doesn't make sense, like between system three and four, or between all of the system one units and the local niches (some information gathering apparatuses that don't act would be good).

Conclusion

Phew, okay. All done. So yeah, not sure if anyone upvoting the paper even read it so not sure if this will even capture anyone's interest. But it was so pent up after having read it it had to write its thoughts somewhere.

The VSM is a description of what an organization needs to be stable and effective. The biggest problem is it's not clear how it does this, since the thing that needs to remain stable can be changed. Especifismo addresses this by making it extremely difficult to change, but VSM doesn't do that. Anything can change anything.

The paper is also bizarre because it spends so much time giving a baby's explanation of what anarchism is, how the VSM isn't a structural hierarchy, etc. but no time explaining many other concepts that are extremely impenetrable and require a whole night of research to figure out. This paper really wasn't for anarchists, who would have already been familiar with those things. And even putting that aside, the way it's presented can be very misleading. Strange, for a paper about what cybernetics could contribute to anarchism.

Finally, the VSM more or less rules out entire strategies important in the history of anarchism for having achieved a great deal. Or it doesn't, in which case it's useless. Not a great dilemma for the model to have put itself in.

Hope this comparison between the cybernetics tradition and the especifismo tradition has been helpful.

"The unexpected story of how Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite—designed to build the world—was co-opted by anarchists to bring about its destruction. From revolutionizing infrastructure to arming political radicals, dynamite shaped the rise of both terrorism and modern law enforcement."

Abstract:

In the early 1960s, a number of anarchist writers showed an interest in cybernetics, in which they saw the tools for better articulating radical forms of self-organisation. Discussions on the connections between anarchism and cybernetics did not advance very far, however, and by the 1970s the topic seems to have fallen off the anarchist radar. With an increase in interest in cybernetics over the last few years, this paper picks up where these debates left off and highlights some key points of contact between cybernetics and anarchism that have the potential to advance radical accounts of self-organisation. Based on a theoretical appraisal of the core texts and arguments in the debate around anarchism and cybernetics, the paper shows that the way in which hierarchy is formulated in cybernetic thought has a crucial impact on anarchist theory and practice and aids both academic approaches to social movements and, importantly, anarchist and radical left praxis. In addition, it provides a response to the critique of cybernetics in critical management studies that stands as a barrier to taking cybernetics seriously as a contribution to radical understandings of organization.

radicalsundayschool.noblogs.org

From their website:

Radical Sunday School is an anarchist (anti-authoritarian socialist) educational collective based in Amsterdam. We want to help our communities learn like they’re already free: free as in without charging money, free as in choosing for yourself what classes are about, free as in learning to free ourselves from bosses and bureaucrats. We also work to challenge the more subtle hierarchies of the classroom, like the rule of the expert over the amateur. In our classes, everyone has something to learn, and everyone has something to contribute.