• Each sector of social life has been subdued by imperialism.
• The real problem is the poverty and servitude of all.
• ‘Driven by [their] freely-chosen depression, [the student] submits [themselves] to the subsidiary police force of psychiatrists set up by the avant-garde of repression. The university mental health clinics are run by the student mutual organization, which sees this institution as a grand victory for student unionism and social progress. Like the Aztecs who ran to greet Cortes’s sharpshooters, and then wondered what made the thunder and why men fell down, the students flock to the psycho-police stations with their “problems”.’
• No Kings masks the real problems by creating a false one; commodity society was already in total control and still is, running autonomously.
• “the boredom of everyday existence, the dead life which is still the essential product of modern capitalism, in spite of all its modernizations.”
• “the banality of everyday life is not incidental, but the central mechanism and product of modern capitalism. To destroy it, nothing less is needed than all-out revolution.”
• “the commodity economy”—“that whole system of production which alienates activity and its products from their creators.”
• ‘Trade unions and political parties created by the working class as tools of its emancipation are now no more than the “checks and balances” of the system.’
  • “Their leaders have made these organizations their private property; their stepping stone to a role within the ruling class.”
  • “The party program or the trade union statute may contain vestiges of revolutionary phraseology, but their practice is everywhere reformist – and doubly so now that official capitalist ideology mouths the same reformist slogans.”
  • In “developed” countries, “the unions ... have become a static complement to the self-regulation of managerial capitalism.”
  • “In the struggle with the militant proletariat, these organizations are the unfailing defenders of the bureaucratic counter-revolution....”
  • “They are the bearers of the most blatant falsehood in a world of lies, working diligently for the perennial and universal dictatorship of the State and the Economy.”
  • “a universally dominant social system, tending toward totalitarian self-regulation, is apparently being resisted – but only apparently – by false forms of opposition which remain trapped on the battlefield ordained by the system itself. Such illusory resistance can only serve to reinforce what it pretends to attack.”
• The administration has removed the “humanist-democratic facade of the system” and laid bare “its essential violence”.
• “the abolition of commodities” (exploitation of workers’ labor value to obtain a profit) ends the state of servitude as the proletariat.
  • “Despite their superficial disparities, all existing societies are governed by the logic of commodities – and the commodity is the basis of their dreams of self-regulation.”
  • “This famous fetishism is still the essential obstacle to a total emancipation, to the free construction of social life.”
  • “In the world of commodities, external and invisible forces direct [people’s] actions; autonomous action directed toward clearly perceived goals is impossible.”
  • “economic laws” depend on a “lack of consciousness”.
• “The market has one central principle – the loss of self in the aimless and unconscious creation of a world beyond the control of its creators.”
  • “The revolutionary core of autogestion [self-management] is the attack on this principle.”
  • ‘Autogestion is ... not some vision of a workers’ control of the market, which is merely to choose one’s own alienation, to program one's own survival (“squaring the capitalist circle”).’
  • “The task of the Workers’ Councils will not be the autogestion of the world which exists, but its continual qualitative transformation.”
  • “The commodity and its laws (that vast detour in the history of [humanity’s] production of [themselves]) will be superseded by a new social form.”
• ‘With autogestion ends one of the fundamental splits in modern society between a labor which becomes increasingly reified and a ”leisure” consumed in passivity. The death of the commodity naturally means the suppression of work and its replacement by a new type of free activity. Without this firm intention, socialist groups like Socialisme ou Barbarie or Pouvoir Ouvrier fell back on a reformism of labor couched in demands for its ”humanization.” But it is work itself which must be called in question.’
  • ‘Far from being a ”Utopia,” its suppression is the first condition for a break with the market. The everyday division between ”free time” and ”working hours,” ... has become the ... one contradiction which intensifies with the rise of the consumer. To destroy it, no strategy short of the abolition of work will do.’
• “The bourgeoisie and its Eastern heirs, the [former] bureaucracy, cannot devise the means to use their own overdevelopment, which will be the basis of the poetry of the future, simply because they both depend on the preservation of the old order. At most they harness over-development to invent new repressions. For they know only one trick, the accumulation of Capital and hence of the proletariat – a proletarian being a [human] with no power over the use of [their] life, and who knows it. The new proletariat inherits the riches of the bourgeois world and this gives it its historical chance. Its task is to transform and destroy these riches, to constitute them as part of a human project: the total appropriation of return to nature and [the] human nature [of mutual aid].”
  • “A realized human nature can only mean the infinite multiplication of real desires and their gratification. These real desires are the underlife of present society, crammed by the spectacle into the darkest corners of the revolutionary unconscious, realized by the spectacle only in the dreamlike delirium of its own publicity.”
  • “We must destroy the spectacle itself, the whole apparatus of commodity society, if we are to realize human needs. We must abolish those pseudo-needs and false desires which the system manufactures daily in order to preserve its power.”
• “the self-destruction of the working class” – the proletariat’s “destruction as a class, its dissolution of the present reign of necessity, and its accession to the realm of liberty.”
  • “For proletarian, revolt is a festival or it is nothing; in revolution, the road of excess leads once and for all to the palace of wisdom, a palace which knows only one rationality: the game. The rules are simple: to live instead of devising a lingering death, and to indulge untrammeled desire.”

a hack of red snow

內容警告：後設恐怖、飲食混亂、憂鬱、怕脆弱的恐懼、敵對性的敘述者、跟別人互不理睬、被拋棄的恐懼、情緒自傷/自我破壞、絞刑架幽默、超現實血腥畫面、怕接觸污染的恐懼、溺水、自我厭惡、強迫尋求再保證、呼吸困難、無性行為的身體侵犯

content warning: meta-horror, disordered eating, depression, fear of vulnerability, adversarial narrator, not being on speaking terms with someone, fear of abandonment, emotional self-harm/self-sabotage, gallows humor, surreal gore, fear of contamination, drowning, self-loathing, compulsive reassurance seeking, suffocation, non-sexual physical violation

暫停。查：「這該死的拘執佮愛」。啟動重複播。再繼續滾動下去。

PAUSE. Look up “damn that stubbornness damn that love.” Put it on repeat. Then keep scrolling.

1

骯髒的盤子 是你唯一攜帶的東西

油污

要硬去 再 硬 去

你非常飢餓

A dirty plate is all that you carry

grease

to scour and scour

you are very hungry

擲 2d6 來判斷渴望

記錄 在空白的紙上

作為你的角色卡

Roll 2d6 to determine your craving

record it on a blank sheet of paper

to use as your character sheet

2-5: 無法享用的東西。要擲多個骰子的時候只能擲一顆。 What you can't have. If needing to roll multiple dice, you can only roll one.

6-10: 無法做的東西。只能在角色卡上記錄奇數片段裡的東西。 What you can't make. Only record things from odd numbered sections on your character sheet.

11: 找不到的東西。被拋棄。關於搜尋的骰 -1。 What you can't find. FORSAKEN. -1 to all rolls that involve searching.

12: 被你剛吞沒的東西。不知足。把角色卡的其中一角咬掉。 What you just consumed. INSATIABLE. Bite off a corner of your character sheet.

擲 3d4 來判斷生命值

今天有哭的話 -1 睡眠不足的話 -2 昨天也是的話 -3 那又怎樣的話 +4 你在說謊的話 -6 知道要命的話 +10

再把結果 記錄 在角色卡上

Roll 3d4 to determine your health

-1 if you cried today -2 if you didn't get enough sleep -3 if that was yesterday too +4 if you say you don't care -6 if you're actually lying +10 if it kills you to admit it

and record the result on your character sheet

2

如果目前在遊戲外播放的音樂有歌詞 把聽到的一段在角色卡上寫下來 如果在遊戲中找到用處 用完把它給劃掉

如果你聽到的段是純音樂 寫下「血落歸槽」 之中每一個字是能花費的 +1 花完劃掉 劃掉最後的話就會死

如果你現在才開始放音樂 生命扣 1 點 由於你認為我 會為了你重複自己

If the music playing outside of the game currently has lyrics record a section that you hear on your character sheet if you make use of it inside the game cross it out after you're done

if the section you hear is an instrumental write down SINK within it each letter is a +1 you can spend after it's spent cross it off if you cross off the last, you die

if you just started playing music right now lose 1 point of health for expecting me to put myself on repeat for you

3

你把髒盤子帶到水槽洗 但水槽裡有個顛倒的塑膠袋 是家裡那另外一個人放的 你們超過一個周沒說話 可以擲 2d6 去尋找 ta

寫下四個不說話讓你害怕的原因 要面對另外一個人的時候 可以借助這些原因 來傷害自己 把自己利用完 然後劃掉

或著是你可以繼續滾動下去

You bring the dirty plate to wash at the sink but inside the sink is an upside-down plastic bag placed there by the other person who lives in the house you haven't spoken in over a week you can roll 2d6 to search for them

write down four reasons why you're not talking that make you scared when you confront the other person you can invoke these reasons to hurt yourself to make yourself useful then cross yourself out

or you can just keep scrolling

想怎樣處理塑膠袋？只能有一個選擇。

把它移出去：袋子下流出鮮血，玷污水槽、料理台、地板、你的衣服、你的手。失去 d4 生命。劃掉一個原因。

不理它：你打開水龍頭，開始把油污洗掉。你把乾淨的盤子收起來。你的手開始出血，一直流不停。失去 d12 生命。劃掉所有原因。

吃掉它：入口即化。味道像燒仙草。獲得 d4 生命。下次擲骰 -1。

把它撕碎：關掉音樂，大聲尖叫。在角色卡上寫下一句髒話。

What do you do with the bag? You can only choose one.

MOVE IT: Fresh blood pours out from underneath the bag, staining the sink, the countertop, the floor, your clothes, your hands. Lose d4 health. Cross out one reason.

IGNORE IT: You turn on the faucet and start washing the grease stains off. You put the clean plate away. Your hands start to bleed, and they won't stop. Lose d12 health. Cross out every reason.

EAT IT: It melts in your mouth. Tastes like grass jelly. Gain d4 health. -1 to your next roll.

TEAR IT APART: Turn off the music and scream. Write an expletive down on your character sheet.

如果你有去尋找 ta…

If you searched for them...

2-11: 你找到一間空房子還有一杯紅茶，半空。你帶不走。 You find an empty house and a cup of black tea, half full. You can't take it away.

12: 你找到一間空房子還有一杯紅茶，全滿。你帶不走。 You find an empty house and a cup of black tea, full. You can't take it away.

4

水槽 （不管還有沒有塑膠袋） 突然變得太滿 開始淹沒廚房

你沉 入 洪水

它在試圖 將會成功 把你淹死

The sink (with plastic bag or not) suddenly overflows starts flooding the kitchen

you sink into the flood

it is trying to will succeed in drowning you

記得 你擁有的東西 這就是為什麼 你把它們 寫下來 的原因

Remember the things you have that is why they are written down

5

採取行動

使用歌詞 使用原因 使用髒話 使用虛無

Make your move

USE LYRIC USE REASON USE EXPLETIVE USE NOTHING

擲 d12 來使用歌詞

Roll d12 to use the lyric

1-6: 話如鯁在喉。感覺自己是廢物。 The words get stuck in your throat. You feel like a failure.

7-12: 你把話嗆出來。下次受傷害的時候，減 1 點傷害。 You choke out the words. The next time you take damage, it will be reduced by 1.

13+: 你的聲響嘹亮。下次擲骰 +1。 Your voice rings clear. +1 to your next roll.

擲 3d4 來使用原因

Roll 3d4 to use a reason

3-12+: 寫下三樣能不靠另外一個人給自己安全而做的事。如果有需要，再重複寫一遍。寫完把原因劃掉。 Write down three things that you can do to give yourself safety without relying on the other person. Write them down again if you have to. When you are done writing, cross the reason out.

擲 2d6 來使用髒話

Roll 2d6 to use the expletive

2-6: 血爆出你的喉嚨。 Blood erupts from your throat.

7-12: 你被口水嗆到。 You choke on your spit.

13+: 你嘗到新鮮的空氣。下次擲骰 +1。 You taste fresh air. +1 to your next roll.

擲 d12 來使用虛無 （必須一無所有）

Roll d12 to use nothing (you must have nothing left)

1: 感到慌張。受到 d4 傷害，下次擲骰 -1。 Feel panic. Take d4 damage, -1 to your next roll.

2-6: 感到渴念。堅持下去。 Feel yearning. Go on.

7-11: 感到無能。你沒有效果。 Feel powerless. You have no effect.

12+: 感到解脫。洪水消失。 Feel release. The flood disappears.

採取行動完之後 （如果洪水沒消失的話） 換它採取行動

After you make your move (and if the flood has not disappeared) it makes its move

（可能含血的）洪水試圖讓你窒息；擲 2d6

The water (which possibly contains blood) tries to make you suffocate; roll 2d6

2-6: 它成功。你死了。把角色卡上全部的東西都劃掉。在背後寫下你的遺言。 It succeeds. You're dead. Cross everything off your sheet. Write your last words on the back.

7-11: 它佔領你的氣管。時間慢下來。受到 d20 傷害。要命的話，按照以上的規則處理。 It colonizes your windpipe. Time slows down. You take d20 damage. If it kills you, resolve with rules above.

12: 它擊中你的腹部。你喘不過氣。受到 d10 傷害。要命的話，按照以上的規則處理。 It punches you in the gut. It leaves you breathless. You take d10 damage. If it kills you, resolve with rules above.

13+: 你繼續憋氣。下次擲骰 +2。 You keep holding your breath. +2 to your next roll.

再次採取行動，並且重複 到其中（或彼此） 再也不在

Make another move and repeat until one (or both of you) are no longer here

尾聲 coda

彷彿夜晚沉默的降臨 迫於最漫長的一天 你家的前門終於被打開

Like the silent fall of night born from the longest day the front door of your house finally opens

另外一個人 向你前進 留下紅色的痕跡 寫下你希望能對 ta 說的話 我希望能給你所有的一切 對不起

The other person approaches you trailing red write down what you wish to say to them i wish i could give you everything i'm sorry

ta 的存在感 給你一點安慰

這個未來 你還能面對

Their presence give you an inch of comfort

this future is what you can face

𝄂

共明 – 共同明白；和「共鳴」同音。

knowledgeshare – like a skillshare, but for knowledge on theory. The goal is not to educate the masses under the role of an expert, to have inflammatory discourse with your comrades to prove your superiority in knowledge, or to remain in a stagnant echo chamber without criticism, but to create a genuinely reciprocal and challenging exchange of ideas—to refine your political understanding of the world together.

心得分享 – 跟技能分享一樣，但分享的是理論心得。目的不是以專家的身分來教育大眾、不是為了證明自己的心得優越跟同志們挑撥離間、也不是留在停滯缺乏批評的回聲室，而是創造真正互惠和有挑戰性的思想交流—來互相精煉彼此在政治方面對世界的理解。

a moment of parrhesia 瞬間暴言

i am sick of seeing the same zines passed around to the same people. i am sick of “discussing” theory with people who only selectively read and speak to reinforce their own beliefs. i am sick of “comrades” who believe they have the authority to tell me how to think. i am sick of “comrades” who believe they have the right not to think.

我實在受不了再繼續看同樣的獨立刊物在同樣的人群中傳閱。我實在受不了再繼續跟閱讀或說話的時候只想增強堅信的人一起「討論」理論。我實在受不了認為有權告訴我如何思考的「同志」。我實在受不了認為有權拒絕思考的「同志」。

But I refuse to believe that I must be like them in order to find comrades. I refuse to believe that I will never find the deep affinity that I want. I refuse to let 4+ years of burnt bridges and failed projects hold me back. I am going to take a good hard look at reality and demand the impossible once again.

但我拒絕相信我必須要像他們一樣才能找得到同志。我拒絕相信我永遠找不到心中理想的深切同寅。我拒絕讓四年多的毀斷後路和失敗項目變成我的阻擋。我要好好審視現實，再次要求不可能的事。

a shout into the void 無人理的呼喊

I wish for Gong Ming Knowledgeshare to be a decentralized union of egoists. I wish to share knowledge through one-on-one discussions with everyone in the union; depending on the limits of people's interest, affinity and capacity, there may or may not be group discussions. The theory we discuss does not have to come from a book. The frequency of discussion is not important to me—what I'm after is quality. If you're in, then come find me.

我希望共明心得分享會是個去中心化的利己主義者聯盟。我希望跟聯盟中每一個人有一對一的心得分享；取決於人家的興趣、同寅和能力的限制，可能會有小組討論，也可能不會。討論的理論不需要從書本來。討論的次數對我不重要—我要的是質量。想來就來找我。

When I was a child, autonomous organizing was out of the question for me as someone who grew up in an abusive family. Even after becoming an adult, my parents would not let me go outside on my own, and when they did I not only had to do it according to their schedule, but also couldn't associate with people they did not approve of—that is to say, anybody whose goal wasn't to succeed “like normal” under the colonial, white supremacist, capitalist system was off limits. If I wanted to mess with politics, it could only be for helping me to get into a good school or into a good job. So for most of my life, social media was the only place I was active politically. It socialized me into reductive and antagonistic terms of engagement, and I was always looking to follow the accounts that yelled the most at the most people, thinking that those who always lost their temper at the drop of a hat over any amount of social injustice, no matter how small, were the one who were most committed to criticizing society. And as soon as someone got angry at me, I compulsively forced myself to change my mind.

小時候，做自治的組織行動對在虐待性家庭長大的我是絕對不可能的事。甚至是成年了之後，我的父母都不會讓我自己出門，而且出門的時候不僅要按照他們的時間，也不能跟他們不接受的人結交—也就是說，任何目的不是在殖民、白人至上主義的資本主義系統之下得到「正常」成功的人都禁止入生。要搞政治，必須只能為了幫助我進好學校或是找到好工作。因此，大半輩子 SNS 是我唯一有積極參與政治的地方。它的社會化讓我習慣簡化性和對抗性的互動標準，而我一直都在尋找最會罵最多人的帳戶去追隨，以為最常為了不管多麼大小的社會不公發脾氣的人就是最投入社會批評的人。而且一當別人生氣，我就強迫自己馬上改變意見。

I told myself it wasn't fawning, it was refusing to tone police. I bought into the functionally abusive form of accountability called “deference politics,” because I didn't think I was qualified to do anything but to defer. I had no political principles, because I did not think I had the ability to arrive at “the correct” political principles, because I had no political self-esteem. I did not think I was allowed to think or do anything unless it was perfectly correct according to everyone else's standards of social justice or die, because I did not think I deserved to have autonomy.

我跟自己說這不是在討好，這是在拒絕管制語氣。我完全相信了作用是虐待的「服從政治」問責模式，因為我認為除了服從我什麼都沒資格去做。我沒有政治原則，因為我認為自己沒有能力找到「正確」的政治原則，因為我沒有政治的自我肯定。我認為除非是完全符合大家的社會正義標準的話我什麼東西都完全不能去做完全不能去想，因為我認為自己沒有資格擁有自治力。

This isn't an inspiring story about how I reached complete recovery. This is a story about how many times I broke myself for other people to get to where I'm at.

這不是我如何得到完全康復激勵人心的故事。這是我為了別人破壞自己多少次才能到現在的地步的故事。

When I escaped from home and started autonomously organizing offline, I had sort of this idealized image of the local organizing scene, because in comparison to the community of deference politickers I left, it seemed so perfect online. In my heart, I thought: “I failed to be perfect for the deference politickers, but I can try being perfect here.”

當我逃出家之後開始在線下參與自治組織的行動，我對當地的組織圈子有點理想化的印象，因為跟我離開的服從政治活動家的社群比，他們在網路上看起來很完美。心裡想：「為了那些服從政治活動家我失敗做出完美，但在這裡做出完美可以再去試。」

I fall in love with my first project. The comrades there aren't perfect, but for the first time, I feel like I'm Doing Something. I join my first affinity group, and pretend I'm okay that they're almost all white, pretend this isn't a reproduction of the white supremacist conditions of this white-dominated city, pretend that I never grew up militantly refusing to befriend white people after my mom told me a white doctor made fun of her accent, pretend I can be perfectly normal about all this for them. Because all we have is each other. Because besides them I have nobody else.

我愛上了弟一個項目。那裡的同志確實不完美，但我第一次感覺到自己在「做點事」。我加入了第一個同寅組織，假裝他們幾乎全部是白人不是個問題、假裝這不是這白人主導的城市的白人至上狀態的再生產、假裝自從我媽媽跟我提過白醫生嘲笑她的腔之後我從來沒有好鬥地拒絕跟白人做朋友、假裝為了他們我能把這當作是完全的正常。因為我們唯一擁有的就是彼此。因為除了他們我誰都沒有。

I fuck up with my first project. I find out my affinity group may have accidentally helped one homeless comrade rob another in camp. Even though my affinity group says it's a problem for the camp to solve, I insist on confirming the truth and making amends, and talk to the camp about it with a comrade outside the affinity group. It turns out to be a misunderstanding, but the comrade accused of stealing ends all contact with me afterwards. I do not forgive myself for this result. I ban myself from working with both the camp and my affinity group forever. I'm back to having no one again.

我搞砸了第一個項目。我發現我的同寅組織可能不小心幫了一個無家可歸的同志在營地偷了別人的東西。雖然同寅組織說這是營地人該解決的問題，我堅持要確定真實和給予補償，跟同寅組織外的同志一起去跟營地人談一談。結果是誤會，可是被控告偷東西的同志跟我斷聯。得到這樣的結果我無法原諒自己。我永遠禁止自己跟營地人和我的同寅組織合作。我回到完全沒有別人的生活。

And then I have a psychotic break. I delete or leave all my social media accounts because I'm afraid of what I'll say to other people. This lasts for about an year. And when I come back to social media, I'm completely raw. Every interaction terrifies me. If I can't even trust my basic perception of material reality, how can I trust my perceptions on a social and political level? But I learn to live without that trust. Because all I have is myself. My damned-to-be-imperfect self.

然後我的思覺又突然失調。因為害怕自己會對別人說的話我刪掉或離開所有的 SNS 帳戶。這樣的狀態大概持續了一年。然後當我回到 SNS 的時候，感覺是完全的刺痛。每一個互動都讓我害怕到不行。如果我連物質現實的知覺都不能信任，怎麼能信任自己對社會和政治的觀念？但我學會在沒有那信任的狀態之下繼續生活。因為我唯一擁有的只有自己。我注定無法完美的自己。

I fall in love with my second project. It's even more glorious than the first. It drives me crazy in all the right ways. And it connects me to new comrades and a third project I fall in love with. For the first time, I even get close enough to some of those comrades to call them friends. And just when I think it will last, everything blows up in my face in quick succession. I civilly try to tell Comrade-friend 1 not to use the term “narcissistic abuse” because it's Cluster B sanism, and when I express my sadness over 1's refusal to stop using it, 1 weaponizes my own personality disorder against me and accuses me of symptomatically demanding perfection. Comrade-friend 2 and I fall into a student-mentor dynamic, in which 2 acts as my guide to the local organizing scene. 2 starts telling me how a bunch of comrades I'm one to two degrees of separation from are or are covering for abusers, rapists and the like. And even though all of the accusations are true, even though I always want to hear those warnings, by the time I'm done distancing myself from those people, I have almost no one left but 2.

我愛上了第二個項目。比第一個項目還要更榮美。它讓我發了最對的瘋。而且它也讓我接觸到新的同志和第三個被我愛上的項目。我第一次跟其中一些同志們親近到能說他們是朋友。然後正當我認為能在這樣的狀態繼續過下去，就碰到了一個又一個的失算。我很客氣地跟同志朋友 1 號說不要用「自戀型虐待」這一詞，因為是對 B 型人格疾患的精神障礙歧視，而當我向 1 號對停用的拒絕表示悲傷，1 號利用我自己的人格障礙來批評我說我是根據症狀性地在要求完美。同志朋友 2 號和我開始了學生和導師的動態，之中 2 號作為我的當地組織圈子嚮導。2 號開始告訴我一大堆我有一到二度分隔的同志自己是或是在幫忙掩護虐待者、強暴者等等。雖然那些控告全都是真的、雖然那些警告我一直都會想聽，當我和那些人疏遠完之後，身邊就快要只剩下 2 號了。

One day, when 2 is breaking the news to me about another rapist-abuser, we have a fight. 2 accuses me of being an abuse apologist, over details I refuse to share publicly. And I'm aware this means some people will think this means I'm selectively redacting details to make it look like I'm not really an abuse apologist. And I'm aware that preemptively adding that disclaimer also looks performative. I don't expect you to take my side. I'm not telling this story because it's right, I'm telling it because it's true.

有一天，當 2 號在跟我說另一個強暴和虐待者的消息，我們吵起了架。 2 號指責我是虐待辯護者，細節我不願意公開分享。我也知道這樣會讓某些人認為我是在有選擇地刪減內容為了要讓自己看起來不是虐待辯護者。也知道先發制人地加上那個免責聲明會看起來很操演性。我不指望你跟我站在同一邊。我說這個故事的原因不是因為正確，而是真實。

So 2 and I stop working together. And I'm obsessive about trying to figure out whether or not 2 was right to call me an abuse apologist. I'm an abuse survivor. I need to have solidarity with other survivors. It's personal. But I can't force myself to agree with 2. And I hate myself for it. And then 2 gets accused of being a sexual predator. And others come forward with stories of being abused by 2. And then I think about all the other things I could say about 2 that I won't in public that made me question why I wanted 2's approval so much, why it felt like I was nothing when 2 left. And then I hate myself even more, for having been played.

因此 2 號跟我不再一起合作了。而且我一直不停地試圖搞清楚 2 號說我是虐待辯護者到底有沒有錯。我自己是虐待倖存者。我必須跟其他的倖存者團結一致。是私人恩怨。可是我就是逼不了自己跟 2 號同意。我也為此痛恨自己。然後 2 號被指告是性掠奪者。然後其他人跑出來說有被 2 號虐待。然後我開始想到其他我能但是拒絕在公開的地方說關於 2 號的事，讓我懷疑當時為什麼那麼要 2 號的讚賞、為什麼 2 號走了之後讓我覺得自己什麼都不是。然後我又再次痛恨自己，因為自己被耍了。

A comrade invites me to join another project. And I do not fall in love with it. But I stay, thinking the love might come, eventually. It doesn't. It is the most disorganized, white, liberal, reformist, and politically toothless “autonomous” project I have ever been on, and I was a fool to think my influence would have changed anything. I thought work would be the only place where I'd routinely be the only person in the room with a problem, politically. I was not expecting that treatment from people who insisted I was their comrade. “Comrade”—that word didn't mean a damn thing anymore. To them, a “comrade” was someone they could use. A body on the ground. A vessel to be sacrificed for The Cause. Not someone who struggled by their side with shared affinity. “Affinity” didn't mean a damn thing anymore. “Affinity” for them really just meant affection—and affection meant “we like you, do things that we like, or we're going to treat you like you don't exist.”

一位同志邀請我加入另一個項目。我並沒有愛上它。可是我決定待下來，想說愛可能會慢慢出現。但沒有。它是我參與最毫無計劃、最白、最自由派、最改良派和最沒有政治權力的「自治」項目，而且認為我的影響能改變任何這些東西是我在傻。我以為只有工作才會是我一直要當房間裡唯一有政治方面問題的人的地方。想不到堅持說我是他們的同志的人會那樣對待我。「同志」—那一詞變成了死都沒有意思。對他們來說，「同志」就是有用的人。現場現的身。為了偉大的事業能被犧牲的寄託者。不是在身邊一起鬥爭，跟他們有共同的同寅的人。「同寅」變成了死都沒有意思。他們「同寅」的意味只不過是感情—而且感情的意味是：「我們喜歡你，繼續做出我們喜歡的東西，不然我們會把你當作是空氣。」

The day I finally quit that crew, I went on a pilgrimage back to the place where I fell in love with my first project. It has an abandoned water tower, with a long ladder you climb down into total darkness. I remember back then, the first time I went down there with my affinity group, I was so afraid. It was just so overwhelming, not being able to see what was ahead of you, even with a flashlight. But this time I was not afraid. I knew what to expect from the dark. This time I went down alone, and made it all the way to the back of the water tower. And when I made it to the back, I turned around out of curiosity, and witnessed how the sunlight still streamed down from the top of the ladder, realizing that from this angle, the water tower was actually not that dark on the inside. I realized that was what autonomous organizing had felt like for me—how I felt so trapped by all the things that overwhelmed me, that I forgot to look at how far I'd come.

我終於退出那群人之後的那一天，我去訪問愛上第一個項目的地點。那裡有個被遺棄的水塔，裡頭有長長的梯子讓你爬下去進入完全的黑暗。我記得那時候，跟我的同寅組織第一次爬下去，害怕得不得了。就是連有了手電筒都看不見前面有什麼東西，超不能忍受。可是這次我不怕。我知道黑暗會是怎麼樣。這次我自己下去，完全走到水塔的最後面。然後走到後面時，我好奇地轉過來，目擊到陽光從梯子的最上面還是能照得下來，發現從這個角度來看，水塔的裡面其實不太暗。我發覺這就是參與自治組織行動給我的感覺—感覺一直被忍受不了的事情困住，困到忘了看看自己已經走了多遠。

Quitting the project I could not love suddenly freed up so much time for me. I filled it ravenously with things that kept my daggers drawn. It wasn't because I needed to Do Something. It was because, for the first time in my life, I was never clearer about the specific things I wanted to do. I understand, when my options for “comrades” in this city are more often than not people who weaponize “affinity” to discipline you into following their radical or reactionary “autonomous” party line, “all we have is each other” feels like a hostage situation. And I now understand, if what I actually want is revolution, then to let these people make me feel ashamed for wanting more is unprincipled behavior.

退出我愛不上的項目突然讓我奪回了很多時間。我貪婪地用劍拔弩張的事把空填滿。不是因為自己需要「做點事」。是因為這是我生活中第一次那麼徹底地明白自己特別想要做的事。我了解，當我在這個城市中能選擇的「同志」往往都是利用「同寅」來規訓你遵循他們的激進或反動的「自治」路線的人，「我們唯一擁有的就是彼此」感覺就是挾持人質。我現在也了解，如果我真正要的是革命的話，讓這些人讓我因為想要更多而感到羞恥是沒有原則的行為。

Because revolution is not about you coming across as correct—as palatable—to “the masses” or to your comrades in “the cadre.” Revolution is about actually ending the social and material conditions of domination and exploitation that organize the world. And to move with principle is to move with militant clarity on that matter—even if you have to move alone. And to ask that clarity of your comrades is not demanding perfection. It is asking for the bare minimum of revolution. And if revolution is not your bare minimum—if all you want is just to be Doing Something, and to be cheered on for doing that—I am not going to be your enabler. Because god knows I have already enabled myself too much.

因為革命需要的不是讓「群眾」或在「幹部」中的同志感到你的正確—你的可接受性。革命需要的是在實際上結束組織世界的主宰和剝削性的社會和物質狀態。按照原則來行動也就是行動的時候要按照好鬥性的清晰思路去搞懂那件事—就算剩下能行動的人就只有你。而要求你的同志們擁有那樣的清晰思路不是在要求完美。是在要求革命的最低限度。而如果革命不是你的最低限度—如果你唯一要的只是來「做點事」然後被鼓勵—我不要當你的縱容者。天曉得我已經自我縱容了太多次。

死都別說我是

什麼活動家、什麼人權保護者、 什麼鬥士、「你的同志」 我不是你的同志 我在現場現的身 不是獻給你 獻給你的人數 獻給你謊稱的聖戰 死後我成不了烈士 因為我推不動聖潔的事業 其實我就只能當的是 十足的叛教者— 因為革命 不是虔誠的事件 而是最無神的過程 而你 到底是憑什麼資格 為我祈屁禱？

對此徵選公告的回應

“As I stated, the Western military experts admit that the mechanized establishment guard must outnumber the attacking worker by ten to one. What they cannot afford to admit is that even with this numerical superiority they cannot win [...] At ten to one, we still enjoy a strategic, military superiority if we are attacking, because they must defend so many different points vital to the order and continuity of their life-support system, all at the same time. The points to be protected will always outnumber the units who are available to protect them.”

—George Jackson, Blood in My Eye

「如上所述，西方軍事專家承認機械化當權派的警衛隊人數必須是進攻勞動者的十倍。他們擔負不起承認的是就算是擁有數量方面的優勢他們完全贏不了 [...] 在十比一的比例之下，如果我們進攻還是能享有戰略性、軍事方面的優勢，因為他們必須守護那麼多對他們生命維持系統的秩序和持續必不可少的的不同地點，而且要同時守護。必須保護的地點永遠會超過可以保護它們的小隊。」

—喬治·傑克遜，《眼露凶光》

The first time I shoplifted, I was scared as shit. To calm myself down, I kept repeating George Jackson's words like a mantra in my head: The points to be protected will always outnumber the units who are available to protect them. The points to be protected will always outnumber the units who are available to protect them. The security guards couldn't check every aisle at once. There were so many security cameras, I was nothing but a humanoid blur on their screens. I acted like a regular shopper, just browsing for things to buy, while moving nonstop like a shark to avoid the fate of being caught. And I got away. And I couldn't believe it was that easy.

第一次商店行竊的時候，我心裡著急得很。為了讓自己靜下來，我像在唸咒語一樣在心裡中一直重複喬治·傑克遜的話：必須保護的地點永遠會超過可以保護它們的小隊。必須保護的地點永遠會超過可以保護它們的小隊。保安人員不可能一次巡查每一個通道。監視攝影機那麼多，我在它們的螢幕上只不過是個模糊的人形點。我假裝自己是個普通的購物者，只是在看看能買的東西，同時像鯊魚一樣不停地移動，避免被抓到的命運。我就那樣溜走了。簡直不敢相信，真的是那麼簡單。

When I got home, I went back to my Buddhist altar, and turned to face my Siddartha Gautama statue with a sense of guilt. There are five basic precepts in Buddhism that even laypeople have to follow, and I just violated the second one, which was not to steal. Should I even be keeping the altar up anymore? Supporting illegalism and other people's illegalist praxist was one thing, but how could I have the nerve to do it myself and still keep saying I'm Buddhist?

到家的時候，我回到自己的佛壇，愧疚地面對我的釋迦牟尼調像。佛教連在家眾都要遵守的基本五戒，之中我違犯了第二個不偷戒。這樣的話，我是該把佛壇拆下來嗎？支持非法主義和別人的非法主義實踐是一回事，但自己去幹的話，哪來有臉皮繼續說自己是佛教徒？

Well, what kind of political conditions does that kind of Buddhism create? As a Buddhist, do you problematize me for being a thief that steals necessities I cannot afford, or the capitalists for robbing the proletariat of access to those things? As a Buddhist, are you obligated to ignore that the bourgeoisie have hegemony over laws and social norms that govern theft and ownership, and to pretend that the exploiters and the exploited steal under the same conditions? Are you enlightened for refusing to kill the cop in your head (killing violates the first precept, after all)?

啊那種佛教會創造什麼樣的政治狀況？作為佛教徒，你要問題化的是偷買不起必需品的我，還是剝奪無產階級對那些東西的使用權的資本主義者？作為佛教徒，你必要忽略資產階級對管理偷竊的法律和社會規範的霸權，假裝剝削者和被剝削者偷竊的情況一模一樣嗎？拒絕幹掉心裡警察是表示無上正覺的事嗎（殺生不是違犯第一戒嗎）？

What does a Buddhist politically achieve by personally refusing to steal (or kill oppressors)? Reality is not a sutta governed by Buddhist principles—by refusing to take what we need and dying like martyrs, we will not prefigure the ruling class and their lapdogs into dāna and mettā, let alone anarchy and communism. Every commodity you buy fuels the death machine that is capitalism. A cop is not going to care how clean your conscience is before they shoot you. To take the five precepts as universally applicable moral guidelines at face value, and to let the praxis of transcendent spiritual liberation take precedence over the praxis of destroying hierarchical power dynamics and ending the historical material conditions that created them is counterrevolutionary. To me, it is meaningless to believe in a religion that aims for all beings to be free from suffering if the world continues to reproduce systems that create preventable suffering for classes of oppressed people in fact. The only thing that would give it meaning is a religious commitment to changing that world.

佛教徒個人拒絕偷竊（或擊殺壓迫者）的話會得到什麼樣的政治效果？現實不是取決於佛教理論的契經—我們不會以拒絕奪取需要的物品像烈士死去的方式預示統治階級和它們的走狗表現出佈施和慈觀，更不用說無治和共產。每個購買的商品是為資本主義這死亡機器添加的燃料。對你開槍的警察不會管你有沒有天理良心。把五戒信以為真地當作是普遍適用的道德指導方針，並且讓超越宇宙靈性解放的實踐比消滅等級制度的權力動態和結束製造那些動態的歷史物質條件的實踐變得更重要是反革命性的行為。對我來說，如果世界在實際上繼續再生產為被壓迫階級的人製造可阻止的痛苦的系統，對一個目標是讓一切眾生脫離痛苦的宗教有信仰完全沒有意義。唯一能讓它有意義的是虔誠改變那世界的承諾。

So yes, I have the nerve to keep calling myself a Buddhist. I have the nerve to turn breaking the second precept into a religious ritual I regularly observe, because I know ownership isn't politically neutral, and my faith obligates me to take a side, and to accept the karma of that decision. I am not afraid of being reincarnated in Naraka for these transgressions. By the end of a militant life in the human realm, I hope the wardens in hell will be afraid of me.

所以沒錯，我有臉繼續說自己是佛教徒。我有臉把違犯第二戒當作是一種定期舉行的宗教儀式，因為我知道物主身分不是政治中立的事，而我的信仰強使我決定自己站在哪一邊，並且接受決定的果報。我不怕因為這些違反投生奈落。在人間好鬥地過完一生之後，我希望心裡著急的會是地獄裡的獄卒。

零零星星是個部落格貼文系列，專門描寫形形色色不想被我更加發展的 TRPG 點子。要看所有期數，請按 #ZS 的主題標籤。

Zero Stars (ZS) is a blogpost series for various TRPG ideas I didn't want to develop further. To view all issues, please click on the hashtag #ZS.

為什麼在 TRPG 之中，冒險的目的每次都是為玩家獲得更多 XP 和寶藏？傳統的地下城—為了獲得 XP 和寶藏去冒險的地方—到底有沒有必要在解放遊之中存在？冒險的目的能不能不是為了增加個人的權力？非玩家角色存在的目的能不能不是以玩家的需要為準—虛構世界能不能獨立不靠玩家地存在？

Why is it that in TRPGs, the purpose of adventure is always to gain more XP and treasure for the player? Do traditional dungeons—places to go on adventures for XP and treasure—need to exist in a liberationist game? Can the goal of adventure be something other than a quest to amass personal power? Can the purpose of NPCs' existences be something that doesn't revolve the needs of the player—can the fictional world exist on its own without needing the player at all?

我要想像一種冒險，之中焦點不會是玩家跟非玩家角色的衝突。不是「非暴力的冒險」，而是社會革命的冒險。在這個冒險之中，新的現實會出現，而冒險空間的萬物必須決定該如何面對。在這個冒險之中，不管對玩家的鄰近度是什麼，大家都算是冒險家。而且「大家」不只是人形的角色。「大家」包括怪物、植物和動物—那些不能說話的物體，通常除了求生不准有其他的目標—被逼無奈做赤裸生命的存在物。問一下：史萊姆要的是什麼？為什麼蘑菇決定在這裡生長？蛆蟲們是怎麼樣現這個地下城的存在？對它們來說，冒險的意義是什麼？

I want to imagine an adventure where the focus won't be on conflict between PCs and NPCs. Not a “nonviolent adventure,” but an adventure in social revolution. In this adventure, a new reality emerges, and all beings in the space of the adventure must decide how to face that reality. In this adventure, regardless of proximity to the player, everyone is considered an adventurer. And “everyone” is more than just humanoid characters. “Everyone” includes the monsters, the plants, and the animals—those nonspeaking entities who aren't normally permitted to have any other goals beyond striving for survival—those beings who are reduced to bare life. Ask: what do the slimes want? Why did the mushrooms decide to grow here? How did the maggots discover this dungeon? What is an adventure to them?

烏雷巴的地下城 UREBAR'S DUNGEON

給《幽影》的轉移

A Diversion for Shades of Hell

hexroll.app 隨機產生沙盒的改編

Adapted from a random sandbox generated by hexroll.app

地下城地圖 DUNGEON MAP

4 — 5 — 6 | | 1 — 2 — 3

地圖描述：橫 A 字形的地下城。最上層的房間是 4、5、6，最下層的房間是 1、2、3。4 連到 1、5 連到 2。

Map Description: A dungeon shaped like a sideways letter A. The upper level rooms are 4, 5, 6, and the lower level rooms are 1, 2, 3. 4 connects to 1, and 5 connects to 2.

1. 戰利品房間 TROPHY ROOM

布滿灰塵的架子，裡頭有布滿灰塵的雕像。角落有個屍體。

Dusty shelves filled with dusty STATUES. A CORPSE lies in the corner.

雕像：怪獸般、憤怒、可怕。來自熟悉和外來的文化（對你而言）。

STATUES: Monstrous, wrathful, fearsome. From cultures familiar and foreign (to you).

屍體：老妖精、拿著羽毛撣子、頭被吹箭射中。空手旁邊有破碎的雕像。掠奪品…

• 110 冥幣（腰包）
• 昉橙珠項鏈（可變魔法物品）

這位是吳待認，是烏雷巴地下城的管理員。烏雷巴是來自發惹衛的法師，在穿越時空的時候常常不會回來管地下城的事。烏雷巴偶而會把相對無害的俘虜用法力傳送到戰利品房間，給吳先生訓練成未來的僕人。今天，這俘虜就是你。

可惜吳先生因為老年紀開始有記憶力問題，有一天在打掃戰利品房間的時候忘了架子上有防小偷的秘密陷阱。他不小心拿起一尊雕像，突然間被毒吹箭射中，倒在地上痛苦的死去。

CORPSE: Old elf, holding a feather duster, dart in head. Beside his hand, a statue lies broken on the floor. The loot...

• 110 hell coins (waist purse)
• 1 morning pearl necklace (can become magic item)

This is Goh Dailin, janitor of Urebar's Dungeon. Urebar is a wizard from Fara Wei who often leaves the dungeon unattended for long periods of time while traveling through other dimensions. Occasionally, Urebar teleports a relatively harmless captive into the trophy room, for Mr. Goh to train as a future servant. Today, that captive is you.

Unfortunately, as Mr. Goh aged, he started having problems with his memory, and one day while cleaning the trophy room he forgot that the shelves had a secret trap to ward off thieves. He accidentally picked up a statue, and was suddenly hit by a poison dart, causing him to fall to the floor and die a slow and painful death.

出口：

• 上（到 4）：鋼鐵活板門。房間裡沒有梯子。
• 東（到 2）：鋼鐵門，從另外一邊被鎖住。

EXITS:

• UP (to 4): Steel trapdoor. The room has no ladder.
• EAST (to 2): Steel door, locked from the other side.

2. 甲號牢房 CELL A

到處都是蜘蛛網，但沒有蜘蛛。三位酸沼木乃伊正在用寶藏賭博。

Cobwebs everywhere, but no spiders. 3 BOG MUMMIES gamble with a pile of TREASURE.

酸沼木乃伊：從奧斯塔拉被俘的不死囚犯，代理烏雷巴監視吳先生和新的「戰利品僕人」。他們不靠飲食，反而是靠重述自己被謀殺的故事維持自己的生存，常常喜歡在玩死侍（賭戰利品僕人什麼時候會死亡的遊戲）的時候講這些故事。陣容…

• 埃米爾（他），穿著羊皮帽，被絞死
• 揚內（她），穿著羊皮披風，被儀式殺死
• 西格麗德（她），深紅頭髮，頭被砍掉

BOG MUMMIES: Undead prisoners captured from Othala, deputized by Urebar to guard Mr. Goh and the new “trophy servants.” They don't rely on food or drink, but instead on retelling stories of how they got murdered for sustenance, which they enjoy repeating over games of dead pool (in which they bet how long it will take for trophy servants to die). The lineup...

• EMIL (he/him), wears sheepskin hat, was hanged
• JANNE (she/her), wears sheepskin cape, was ritually sacrificed
• SIGRID (she/her), dark red hair, was decapitated

寶藏：5000 冥幣。

TREASURE: 5000 hell coins.

出口：

• 西（到 1）：鋼鐵門，受魔法密碼保護
  • 只有烏雷巴容許的人才能上鎖和解鎖
  • 解鎖的密碼是「雷德」，上鎖的密碼是「德雷」
• 上（到 5）：鋼鐵活板門。房間裡沒有梯子。
• 東（到 3）：鋼鐵門，從另外一邊被鎖住。

EXITS:

• WEST (to 1): Steel door, magically password-protected
  • Only those permitted by Urebar may lock or unlock the door
  • Password to unlock is “RAIDHO,” password to lock is “DHORAI”
• UP (to 5): Steel trapdoor. The room has no ladder.
• EAST (to 3): Steel door, locked from the other side.

3. 乙號牢房 CELL B

肢刑架在破裂的天花板之下變得更朽爛。四位快餓死的吸血鬼正在舉行令人毛骨悚然地的辯論。一個坐在黑箱上，旁邊有個操縱桿。另一個躺在巨大的寶藏堆上。

TORTURE RACKS rot under a fractured ceiling. 4 starving VAMPIRES engage in morbid debate. One sits on a BLACK BOX by a LEVER. Another lies in a massive pile of TREASURE.

肢刑架：有兩個。看起來很像梯子。

TORTURE RACKS: Two of them. They look a lot like ladders.

吸血鬼：年輕的巫師群，為了逃離三塗城的神廟幫發誓當烏雷巴的傭人。他們負責監視甲號牢房的囚犯。戰利品僕人負責給他們血喝。當戰利品僕人過了很久都沒回來的話，吸血鬼們會開始討論誰要先當犧牲來餵養其他的人。陣容…

• 羅飛（他），原本是人類，個性憂思
• 密思嵐（他/祂），原本是深涯妖精，個性快活
• 呰禪（她），原本是天妖，個性厭世
• 日油（他/它），原本是鬼怪，個性惱怒

VAMPIRES: A young coven that pledged service to Urebar in exchange for escape from the temple-gangs of Santu City. They are responsible for guarding the prisoners in Cell A. Trophy servants are responsible for giving them blood to drink. When a trophy servant doesn't return after a long time, the vampires start discussing who should be sacrificed first to feed the other people. The lineup...

• RAFAEL LUO (he/him), once human, brooding personality
• LANCE MISI (he/they), once abyss elf, jovial personality
• AZA'ZEN (she/her), once skyfiend, jaded personality
• GREASE (he/him), once goblin, cantankerous personality

黑箱：用黑耀晶做的。裡頭有修肢刑架的材料。

BLACK BOX: Made of blackbright. Contains materials to repair the torture racks.

操縱桿：操縱地下城之中所有活板門的開關。

LEVER: Controls the opening and closing of all trapdoors in the dungeon.

寶藏：12,500 冥幣。

TREASURE: 12,500 hell coins.

出口：

• 西（到 2）：鋼鐵門，受魔法密碼保護
  • 只有烏雷巴容許的人才能上鎖和解鎖
  • 解鎖的密碼是「死在萬刀之下」，上鎖的密碼是「自入洪門之後」

EXITS:

• WEST (to 2): Steel door, magically password-protected
  • Only those permitted by Urebar may lock or unlock the door
  • Password to unlock is “LET SLEWS OF SWORDS SLAY ME,” password to lock is “ONCE I'M THROUGH THE VAST GATE”

4. 食品儲藏室 PANTRY

發光的蘑菇長在銀池的旁邊。

GLOWING MUSHROOMS grow near a SILVER POOL.

發光的蘑菇：希望跟大家分享他們的幻想。這是它們交流的方式。菜單…

• 藍：清水的口味。讓你感到平靜。
• 紅：鮮血的口味。讓你感到被愛。
• 黃：淡拉格的口味。讓你感覺被吃掉。

GLOWING MUSHROOMS: Wish to share their visions with everybody. This is their form of communion. The menu...

• BLUE: Tastes like fresh water. Lets you feel at peace.
• RED: Tastes like fresh blood. Lets you feel loved.
• YELLOW: Tastes like pale lager. Lets you feel eaten.

銀池：其實是鋼鐵史萊姆，正在享受幻想所以不想被打擾。被踩到會生氣，被亂喝會超級生氣。如果你故意惹史萊姆麻煩的話，蘑菇會用毒氣殺傷你。

SILVER POOL: Actually a steel slime, wishing to be left alone to enjoy its visions. Gets annoyed if stepped on, gets extremely annoyed if you try to drink it. If you deliberate antagonize the slime, the mushrooms will gas you.

出口：

• 下（到 1）：鋼鐵活板門，操控桿在 3。
• 東（到 5）：拱門。

EXITS:

• DOWN (to 1): Steel trapdoor, control lever at 3.
• EAST (to 5): Arch.

5. 銳舞房間 RAVE ROOM

即興的舒緩燈光秀，來自鍍銀天花板上發光的蘑菇。

Spontaneous soothing light shows come from GLOWING MUSHROOMS on the SILVERED CEILING.

發光的蘑菇：不小心被一位戰利品僕人帶回地下城。他們在這裡吃上層的神光能。

GLOWING MUSHROOMS: Accidentally brought back to the dungeon by a trophy servant. They're here to eat the spark energy on the upper level.

鍍銀天花板：所謂把蘑菇帶進來的戰利品僕人。其實不是個體，而是一大群的鋼鐵史萊姆，因為有一天在玩耍的時候模仿人形被烏雷巴好奇地「收集起來」。吳先生發覺他們只能在過分壓力之下才會聽話，而且受太多壓力之後會死掉，變成永遠凝固的狀態。在這個地下城之中，所有被鋼鐵製造的東西都是活鋼史萊姆的屍體。因此這個史萊姆群害怕跟別人接觸，寧願待在蘑菇的保護之下。

SILVERED CEILING: The so-called trophy servant who brought all the mushrooms here. Not actually an individual but a collective of steel slimes, who were playing at mimicking humanoids one day when they were “collected” by Urebar out of curiosity. Mr. Goh discovered that they only obey under excessive pressure, and too much pressure will kill them, leaving them in a permanently solidified state. In this dungeon, everything made from steel is the corpse of a living steel slime. Hence this slime collective is afraid of interacting with others, and prefers to remain under the mushrooms' protection.

出口：

• 西（到 4）：拱門。
• 下（到 2）：鋼鐵活板門，操控桿在 3。
• 東（到 6）：拱門。

EXITS:

• WEST (to 4): Arch.
• DOWN (to 2): Steel trapdoor, control lever at 3.
• EAST (to 6): Arch.

6. 門廳 FOYER

A tunnel surrounded by BLACK WALLS with a ramp leading up towards the east.

被黑牆包圍的隧道，斜坡往上到東邊。

黑牆：用黑耀晶做的。有發光的電路板花紋，會輪流換不同顏色。順序是藍、紅、黃。

BLACK WALLS: Made of blackbright. Has glowing circuit board patterns that cycle through different colors. The order is blue, then red, then yellow.

出口：

• 西（到 5）：拱門。
• 東（到外面）：坡道。

外面是冰風雪地。你目前的衣服不適合這種天氣。

Outside is a land of ice and snow. You are not dressed appropriately for the weather.

附錄 APPENDIX

不常見詞語的說明。

Explanations for uncommon terms.

深涯妖精：住在地下洞穴或深海之中的妖精。

ABYSS ELF: Elves that live in subterranean caves or the deep sea.

黑耀晶：長得像黑曜岩的魔法水晶。幾乎難以銷毀。常見的模式是吸收附近生命能量的尖塔。

BLACKBRIGHT: A magic crystal that looks like obsidian. Virtually indestructible. Commonly occurs in the form of spires absorbing life energy from their surroundings.

轉移：路線、目的、注意力的改變（也就是冒險）。

DIVERSION: A detour of itinerary, of purpose, of attention (in other words, an adventure).

冥幣：硬幣版的紙錢。「給活人冥鈔往往視為死亡詛咒或恐嚇」（維基百科）。

HELL COINS: Coin versions of joss paper money. “The act of giving a living person hell bank notes is considered a great insult in Chinese culture and may even be seen as a death threat” (Wikipedia).

活鋼：一種能按照使用者的意志力在液體跟固體狀態中轉換的魔法金屬。自然的狀態是史萊姆。見《破裂疆》。

LIVING STEEL: A magic metal that can alternate between liquid and solid states according to the will of its user. Its natural form is a slime. See Fractured Frontier.

昉橙珠：跟早晨一樣橘的珍珠。適合用來做發光的神器。

MORNING PEARL: A pearl that is as orange as morning light. Suited for making artifacts that glow.

天妖：來自萬敵界被強迫變成人形的山脈。他們的皮膚跟天色一樣有多種，眼睛跟星一樣明或夜一樣黑。據說他們能在封閉空間無翅飛翔，也能履險如夷地睜眼說瞎話。見《下世萬敵》。

SKYFIENDS: Mountains that were forced to become humanoid from Bantik Kai. Their skin comes in as many colors as the sky, and their eyes are as bright as stars or as dark as night. Rumor has it they can fly without wings in closed spaces, and can lie through their teeth without breaking a sweat under pressure. See Future Only Enemies.

神光能：宇宙每一個生物都擁有的生命能量。耐核系統主要使用的超自然能量資源。見《破裂疆》。

SPARK ENERGY: Life energy that every living entity possesses in the universe. Supernatural energy resource primarily used in the Nai'oh System. See Fractured Frontier.

還在英語獨立 TRPG 圈子的時候，我常常看見人家問：「你建議 TRPG 設計者該讀什麼文獻？」雖然有很多普通的政治文獻可以推薦，我是從來沒看過專門為了桌上角色扮演遊戲設計和遊玩寫的政治文獻。所以我就寫了一個。是我當初開始接觸 TRPG 的時候希望擁有的資源。

When I was still in the Anglosphere indie TRPG scene, I'd often see people asking: “What text would you recommend tabletop game designers to read?” Although there are a lot of normal political texts you could recommend, I had never seen any political texts specifically written for tabletop roleplaying games. So I wrote one. It's the resource I wish I had back when I first started engaging with TRPGs.

現在是 2024 年度的金錢嘉年華，你們即將要偷運送給資產階級和警察們的小驚喜。有兩件事情你需要注意： 一、你有一個需要精確計算時間的複雜計畫。 二、你是一隻天殺的熊，但只有對白人來說才是。^†

It's MONEYCON 2024. You are going to smuggle in a surprise for the bourgeoisie and police. Two Things - One: You have a complex plan that requires precise timing. Two: You are a GODDAMNED BEAR, but only to white people.^†

^†世界上其實沒有真正有知覺力的非人類動物。金錢嘉年華只是一個白人為了擺脫政治正確組織的擴增實境娛樂活動。之中白人會用 AR 頭戴式顯示器讓全部有色人變成不能講話的動物。有色人在實際上還是人。

There actually aren't any sentient nonhuman animals in this world. MoneyCon is just an augmented reality entertainment event organized by white people wanting to get free from political correctness. Inside they use AR headsets to transform all PoC into animals incapable of human speech. People of color are still human in fact.

1: 設定與劇本 SETTING AND SCENARIO

嘉年華策劃者的行業 CONVENTION ORGANIZER'S INDUSTRY: 1: 廣告業 Advertising 2: 銀行業 Banking 3: 學術工作 Academia 4: 併購 Mergers and acquisitions 5: 創業 Entrepreneurship 6: 國防工業 Defense

金錢嘉年華舉辦在一個 MONEYCON IS BEING HELD IN A (2D6): 1: 偏僻 Isolated / 海灘度假勝地 Seaside Resort 2: 擁擠的 Crowded / 豪宅 Mansion 3: 有歷史意義的 Historic / 旅館 Hotel 4: 夏天的 Summer / 會議中心 Convention Center 5: 被抗議的 Protested / 大學 University 6: 冬天的 Winter / 野外渡假村 Wilderness Retreat

要偷運送給資產階級和警察們的小驚喜是 THE SURPRISE YOU SMUGGLE IN FOR THE BOURGEOISIE AND POLICE IS:

1: 會偷信用卡資料的銷售時點情報電器 A point-of-sale device that steals credit card info

2: 一皮箱已經在倒數的定時炸彈 A briefcase of time bombs that are already on countdown

3: 同志 U，來殺死她富豪強姦者嫖客的性工作者 Comrade U, a sex worker here to kill her rich rapist john

4: 「黑夜之后手工製作的歌特風蜂蜜」，任何人吃了它就會變成無治主義者 “Queen of the Night artisanal goth honey,” which turns anyone who eats it into an anarchist

5: 黛安娜的心靈，是被詛咒的酒，喝下來的人會被隱形的動物暴力地吃掉 Spirit of Diana, a cursed wine whose drinker will be violently eaten alive by invisible animals

6: 同志哈莉特，用才藝展示掩護沒有文件黑人移工從 ICE 的逃避 Comrade Harriet, who is using a talent show to cover the escape of undocumented Black migrant workers from ICE

但這些叛亂者並不知道 BUT LITTLE DO THE INSURGENTS KNOW: 1: 另外一些叛亂者開始放火！ Another group of insurgents started a fire! 2: 條子們正在路上! The cops are en route! 3: 看─是驕傲男孩! Look – the Proud Boys! 4: 他們被陷害了! They've been set up! 5: 驚喜出了問題！ Something's gone wrong with the surprise! 6: 工人們超級生氣! The workers are angry!

保全措施 SECURITY FEATURES (2D6): 1: 有知覺力的 Sentient / 機械狗 Robo-dogs 2: 鑰匙卡控制的 Keycard-controlled / 電子門鎖 Electronically locked doors 3: 不斷故障的 Glitchy / 反魔法結界 Antimagic field 4: 被駭客攻擊的 Hacked / 閉路電視系統 CCTV network 5: 被解除的 Disabled / 金屬探測器 Metal detectors 6: 被破壞的 Destroyed / 蜂型機 Drones

無論如何，場所都會有另外正常工作的反魔法結界、（後備）閉路電視系統和有金屬探測器的入口。被駭客攻擊、被解除和被破壞的隨機表保全措施也不一定是被你們弄的。

Regardless, the facility will have an additional and functional anti-magic field, (backup) CCTV network, and an entrance with metal detectors. You also don't necessarily have to be the ones who hacked, disabled, and destroyed the security features generated by the random table.

2: 製作角色 CHARACTER CREATION

擲骰 3D6 來決定你的描述、角色與熊和工具的種類。

Roll 3D6 to determine your descriptor, your role, and your bear type plus tool.

描述 DESCRIPTOR 1: 菜鳥 Rookie 2: 前途慘淡的 Washed-Up 3: 退休的 Retired 4: 瘋癲的 Unhinged 5: 老油條 Slick 6: 無能的 Incompetent

角色 ROLE 1: 肌肉派 Muscle 2: 動腦派 Brains 3: 車手 Driver 4: 駭客 Hacker 5: 竊賊 Thief 6: 體面迎人的 Face

熊的種類 BEAR TYPE / 工具 TOOL 1: 灰熊 Grizzly (被偷來的克拉克 22 手槍 Stolen Glock 22) 2: 北極熊 Polar (冰桶 Ice bucket) 3: 熊貓 Panda (偽裝成竹筒的應急爆炸裝置 Improvised explosive disguised as bamboo pipe) 4: 黑熊 Black (傘繩 Paracord) 5: 馬來熊 Sun (密報 Tip-off) 6: 蜜獾 Honey Badger (其實是臥底警察 Is actually an undercover cop)

如果你想要，為你的叛亂者取名。給 ta 一個民族背景。在嘉年華的場所之中，有 AR 頭戴裝置的白人聽不懂你說的話，只會聽到嗥叫和呼嚕聲。大部分是武裝的警衛、警察、動物管制、大部分是有色人的場所員工和從外面進來活動的人不會有 AR 頭戴裝置。

Name your insurgent, if you want. Give them an ethnic background. Within the facilities of the convention, AR headset-wearing white people will not be able to understand your speech, only hearing grunts and growls. Mostly armed security guards, police, animal control, mostly PoC facilities staff, and those coming into the event from the outside will not have AR headsets.

額外的工作表 BONUS JOB TABLE

如果你想要讓你的叛亂者在活動場所有「真正的工作」IF YOU WANT YOUR INSURGENT TO HAVE A “REAL JOB” AT THE EVENT FACILITY (1D8)

1: 清潔工 Janitor 2: 餐飲服務員 Caterer 3: 實習生 Intern 4: 警備 Security Guard 5: 記者 Reporter 6: 服務台人員 Help Desk Attendant 7: 衣帽間服務員 Coat Check Attendant 8: 代客泊車員 Parking Valet

3: 數值 STATS

金錢嘉年華有你有兩種數值，每一種剛開始都是 3 點。 MoneyCon has 2 stats. Each starts with 3 points.

國家 STATE: 使用來鎮壓叛亂、監視群民、製造傷害、驚嚇人們，以及做那些普遍威權主義的行為。 Use to repress insurrection, surveil the masses, cause damage, scare people, and generally do authoritarian stuff.

資本 CAPITAL: 使用來拒絕資源要求、保護資源控制者的權力、剝削一無所有的人、撫慰人們，以及做那些普遍商品化世界的行為。 Use to deny resources, protect the power of those who control the resources, exploit the dispossessed, placate people, and generally do world-commodifying stuff.

如果嘉年華被抗議，國家加 1 點。如果有被駭客攻擊的保全措施，國家再加 1 點。 如果有被解除的保全措施，國家再加 2 點。如果有被破壞的保全措施，國家再加 3 點。

If the convention is being protested, add 1 point to State. If there's a hacked security feature, add 1 more point to State. If there's a disabled security feature, add 2 more points to State. If there's a destroyed security feature, add 3 more points to State.

4: 叛亂 INSURRECTION

當你挑戰國家或資本的制度，骰一個 D6。12如果它等於或小於對應的數值，國家或資本的壓制會成功；為該數值再加 1 點。若是它超過該數值，則你的叛亂會創造能實現解放的機會；為該數值減 1 點。

When you challenge the order of State or Capital, roll a D6.12 If it's equal to or under the relevant stat, suppression from State or Capital succeeds; add 1 more point to that stat. If it's over the stat, your insurrection creates an opportunity for liberation to be realized; subtract 1 point from that stat.

如果你使用了符合你熊種的特殊工具或是做了符合於你職責的事情，骰 2D6 然後取較大的那個值。

If you're using your bear special-tool or doing something related to your role, roll 2D6 and pick the highest.

5: 不對稱的物質狀態 ASYMMETRICAL MATERIAL CONDITIONS

如果國家或資本的數值達到或超過 6，不表示叛亂和解放的結束。相反，這表示你必須在不對稱的物質狀態之下繼續好鬥地行動。遊戲也可能會已經在這個地步開始。

If stats for State or Capital reach or go beyond 6, that does not mean the end of insurrection and liberation. On the contrary, that means you must militantly continue to act under asymmetrical material conditions. The game can also already begin at this point.

國家的數值越高，越有被軍事化的保安。資本的數值越高，越有為了保持自己從資本得到的獲利不願意跟叛亂團結一致的人民​。現實一點—要求不可能的事。

The higher the stat for State, the more militarized security is. The higher the stat for Capital, the more there will people who refuse to show solidarity with the insurgents for the sake of protecting their own gains from capital. Be realistic—demand the impossible.

設計筆記 DESIGN NOTES

此遊戲是為了《解放遊：設計革命世界的指南》被即興地設計。設計過程在該書〈如何改版和設計〉的部分被記錄，該書也有《金錢大盜》的〈遊玩示範〉和〈遊玩分析〉。來自遊玩分析的一些建議：

This game was improvisationally designed for Liberationist Play: A Guide to Designing Revolutionary Worlds. The process of design was chronicled in the its section on “How to Hack and Design,” and the book also contains an “Example Play” and “Analysis of Play” for Money Heist. Some suggestions from the analysis of play:

• 前提變體：與其扮演偷運驚喜的有色人，扮演目擊到嘉年華吃驚的群眾之中的有色人。 Premise variant: instead of roleplaying people of color smuggling in the surprise, roleplay people of color among the masses witnessing the convention being surprised.
• 不要把數值檢定恢復成判斷成功或失敗的二元原狀。用神諭的方式來對待。 Don't recuperate the stat tests into binary conditions of success or failure. Treat them like an oracle.
• 換新的抵制情況的時候，把數值重置到 3（或其他適合的數量）。 When you are switching to new circumstances of resistance, reset the stats to 3 (or another appropriate number).
• 如果有同志被逮捕的話，不要在故事之中把他們移出去。為他們組織監牢和法庭支持、追隨他們在審判上的發展、而且如果最後被關進監獄的話，絕對不要讓他們被遺忘。讓他們有支持運動、讓外面的人繼續有跟他們聯絡、繼續分享他們抵抗的故事。 If there are comrades who get arrested, do not remove them from the story. Organize jail and court support for them, follow the developments of their trial, and if they ultimately get sent to prison, do not let them be forgotten. Let them have support campaigns, let people on the outside continue to stay in contact with them, continue to share the story of their resistance.

破裂疆是我即將發布的互動小說遊戲，《吞聲》，的世界設定，設定在《受死令》後犧牲的詭野西部世界。它的世界設定入門書 30 頁長，突破《降天下世》創的紙筆遊戲內容長度紀錄。它的模式類似《冥咒島》，是靈感來源於 OSR 的反正典跨系統世界設定，大部分的世界背景是按照隨機表產生出來的。差別是《破裂疆》不是純粹反正典，在最後面有個「被創造的歷史」的推薦部分。另外，它比《冥咒島》的結構更複雜，設計目標更費勁。

The Fractured Frontier is the setting for my forthcoming interactive fiction game, Swallowcry, set in the post-Sacrifice Weird West world of Soulslinger. Its setting primer is 30 pages long, breaking the record for analog game content length set by Felling Heaven, Felling World. Its format is similar to Hellsealed Isles, which is an OSR-inspired anti-canon system-agnostic setting, with the majority of its lore generated by random tables. The difference is Fractured Frontier isn't purely anti-canon, and includes a section of suggestions at the end titled “Generated History.” In addition, it is more structurally complicated than Hellsealed Isles, and is more ambitious in design.

目標是：用歷史唯物論創造一個反殖民主義的世界，但歷史不能特定到過分決定遊戲可能有的故事的地緣政治起源；把一切重要的歷史都放在隨機表的結構之中；不要讓反殖民主義變成隨便的被種族化的陣線、不要繞寫原民性，強迫自己和玩家完全面對它的存在；拒絕來自方便的答案—虛構現實的每一部分都需要嚴格的解釋。

The goal was: to use historical materialism to create an anti-colonial world, without making the history so specific so as to overdetermine the geopolitical origins of possible in-game stories; to put all the crucial history in the structure of the random tables; to not turn anti-colonialism into a vague racialized front, to not write around Indigeneity, to force myself and the player to confront its existence in full; to reject all answers of convenience—all parts of the fictional reality had to be rigorously explained.

一個一個來對付。關於歷史唯物論的世界建構，我已經在〈沒有任何人控制的地方或：我如何學會停止恐懼並徹底理解 TRPG 中的裝備單跟世界設定背景〉之中概述了一些基本想法。問題是從歷史唯物論的角度來看，每一個反殖民運動都是在對自己特別的狀況做出反應。沒有面對普遍帝國的普遍抵抗組織的普遍鬥爭。可是《受死令》就是有類似普遍帝國的概念—當時我是把每一個星球想像成國家，把生榮當作是唯一的帝國，剩下的行星當做是它的殖民地。

I'll address things one by one. With regards to historical materialist worldbuilding, I already sketched out some basic ideas in “Nobody's Place or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Grok Equipment Lists and Setting Lore in TRPGs.” The problem was, from the angle of historical materialism, every anti-colonial movement was responding to its own specific conditions. There was no universal empire against which a universal resistance carried out universal struggle. But Soulslinger did have a concept of a universal empire—back then I had imagined every planet as a nation-state, treated Vim'run as the sole empire, and the rest of the planets as its colonies.

在開發《吞聲》的過程之中，因為我很早就決定要挑戰寫更靠近傳統西部世界設定，而且要做美國平原印地安人跟台灣平埔族群的跨界歷史，選了族群和考慮玩家的角色之後故事的地緣政治範圍就縮小了很多。某些得到的結論：

In the course of developing Swallowcry, because I decided early on that I wanted to take on the challenge of writing a closer-to-traditional Western setting, with a crossover history of Plains Indians in the U.S. and Plains Indigenous peoples in Taiwan, after choosing the tribes and considering the player's role I was able to narrow down the geopolitics of the story by a lot. Some conclusions I arrived at:

1. 至少要有四個帝國，一個是西班雅的類似物、一個是美國的類似物、有美國也必須要有英國的類似物、然後最後需要中國的類似物。There had to be at least 4 empires, a Spain analog, a U.S. analog, which meant there had to be a Britain analog, and finally a China analog.

2. 生榮還是帝國之鄉，可是血星的自動殖民地在《受死令》中向聖榮帝國宣布的大戰可不是革命性的戰爭，而是為了要保護墾殖社會和白人至上主義奴隸制的反革命性戰爭。血星是美國，自動靈的歷史位置類似但不是完全像新非洲人的位置。Vim'run was still the home of empires, but the Great War that the Machine Colonies of Shahsin' declared on the Holy Empire of Vim'run was not a revolutionary war, but a counterrevolutionary war to defend settler-colonial society and white supremacist slavery. Shahsin' was the U.S., and the historical position of hauntaumatons was similar to but not exactly the same as that of New Afrikans.

3. 因為聖榮帝國現在變成英國的類似物，可是本來我是把吞人想像成漢人的類似物，我決定把聖榮帝國跟羅馬帝國一樣分成兩個合作的半，西聖榮帝國是英國的類似物，東聖榮帝國是中國的類似物。在西方，吞人是白人的類似物，在東方他們是漢人的類似物。 Because the Holy Empire was now the Britain analog, but originally I imagined the Twun as Han analogs, I decided to split the Holy Empire into two cooperating halves like the Roman Empire, with the West Holy Empire being the Britain analog and the East Holy Empire being the China analog. In the West, the Twun were analogs for white people, and in the East, they were analogs for Han people.

4. 刮膽是台灣、刮膽牢籠類似白色恐怖、東聖榮帝國類似戒嚴之下的國民黨、毛革類似共產主義者。 Gwahdyu' was Taiwan, the Caging of Gwahdyu' was like the White Terror, the East Holy Empire was like the Kuomintang under martial law, and Malga were like communists.

5. 血星是美國被工業化的東海岸，送息是科曼奇地。 Shahsin' was the industrialized Eastern Seaboard of the U.S., Ehm'rah was Comanchería.

可是我認為紙筆版的破裂疆應該有更可變通的背景，應該能探索世界歷史中任何的反殖民鬥爭。所以與其把每個星球當作是真正國家的類似物，或是創造任何特定的虛構民族，我用隨機表的原先星球機率分布概述耐核系統的地緣政治：

But I believed that the analog version of The Fractured Frontier should have a more flexible backstory, that should have had the ability to explore any anti-colonial struggle in world history. So instead of treating every planet as a nation-state analog, or creating specific fictional nations, I used the probability distributions of original planets in the random tables to sketch out the geopolitics of the Nai'oh System:

• 刮膽耕地最多，也有許多荒野
  • 可能作為掠奪型殖民和墾殖的目標
  • 後犧牲的多數形類是殭和光民
• Gwahdyu' had the most farmland, as well as plenty of wilderness
  • Likely target for exploitation colonialism and settler colonialism
  • Majority forms after The Sacrifice are Stiffs and Lumin
• 送息有許多監獄和荒野
  • 可能作為流放地和墾殖的目標
  • 後犧牲的多數形類是毛革
• Ehm'rah had plenty of prisons and wilderness
  • Likely penal colony and target for settler colonialism
  • Majority form after The Sacrifice is Malga
• 生榮學院最多
  • 可能是在帝國核心
  • 後犧牲的多數形類是光民和殭
• Vim'run had the most academies
  • Likely in the imperial core
  • Majority forms after The Sacrifice are Lumin and Stiffs
• 血星交彙最多，也有許多監獄
  • 可能是在帝國核心，有極端監禁性的政府
  • 後犧牲的多數形類是自動靈
• Shahsin' had the most confluences, as well as plenty of prisons
  • Likely in the imperial core, with a highly carceral government
  • Majority form after The Sacrifice is hauntaumaton
• 要塞、聖地和住處平均分配
  • 戰爭、靈性和社群是普遍的
  • 後犧牲多數形類：要塞和住處是自動靈、聖地是光民
• Forts, sacred grounds, and dwellings were equally distributed
  • Wars, spirituality, and communities were widespread
  • Majority forms after The Sacrifice: hauntaumaton in forts and dwellings, Lumin on sacred grounds

雖然光民在舊刮膽有強勁的存在，他們原本來自生榮的殖民者。相反，在舊生榮的殭是被強迫移居的刮膽人。在舊送息的毛革是革命性的罪犯，但不一定來自舊送息。在舊血星的自動靈是買辦和被強迫勞動者，但也不一定來自舊血星。

Although Lumin have a strong presence on former Gwahdyu', they are colonizers from Vim'run. On the contrary, the Stiff on former Vim'run were forcibly displaced people from Gwahdyu'. The Malga of former Ehm'rah are revolutionary criminals, but may not necessarily be from former Ehm'rah. The hauntaumatons of former Shahsin' are compradors and forced laborers, but also may not necessarily be from former Shahsin'.

多數居住者的機率分布加上居民和恐怪的隨機表也展現出更多的殖民政治：

The population distributions of majority occupants along with the random tables for inhabitants and horrors also reveals more about colonial politics:

• 來自教權法西斯主義國家的（前）憲兵在末日後還是有強勁的存在，出現在總共超過一半的行邑特色種類。大部分居住在監獄和要塞，但也出現在學院和交彙，可能也以上司和下屬的身分控制一些住處—他們。然而大部分的軍人不是資產階級的光民，而是自願或被強迫變成自動靈的人。
• (Ex-)Military Police from clerical fascist states still have a strong presence after the apocalypse, appearing in total over half of the peh'rah character types. They mostly reside in prisons and forts, although they also appear at academies and confluences, and may control some dwellings under the identity of superiors and subordinates. However, the majority of soldiers are not the bourgeoisie Lumin, but people who chose to or were forced to become hauntaumatons.
• 大部分的恐怪（破裂疆所謂的怪獸）是突變的動物，但也包括被視為野化的毛革革命者和難民殭。毛革和殭兩個都是被種族化的形類，毛革是被種族化的政治犯，殭是原住民。他們主要居住在監獄和聖地，但也出現在耕地和荒野。居住在聖地的毛革和殭「恐怪」大部分是在當地紮寨抗議营地的土地衛士。
• The majority of horrors (the so-called monsters of The Fractured Frontier) are mutant animals, but also includes Malga revolutionaries and Stiff refugees who are viewed as feral. Malga and Stiffs are both racialized forms, with Malga being racialized political prisoners, and Stiffs being Indigenous people. They primarily reside in prisons and on sacred grounds, but also appear in farmlands and wilderness. Malga and Stiff “horrors” residing on sacred grounds are usually land defenders who have set up protest camps there.
• 準軍事部隊大部分是威權共產主義的游擊隊，但也可能是無治主義的武裝抗敵分子或防衛財產的警戒委員會。他們跟（前）憲兵差不多一樣常見。他們主要居住在要塞，但也出現在監獄、學院和荒野；在住處的準軍事部隊是無治主義的空想家和威權共產主義或武裝社會達爾文主義的上司和下屬。左翼的準軍事部隊大部分是毛革，右翼的大部分是光民或自動靈。
• Paramilitary forces are mostly authoritarian communist guerilla fighters, but could also be anarchist partisans or property-defending vigilance committees. They are about as common as (ex-)military police. They primarily reside in forts, but also appear in prisons, academies, and the wilderness; in dwellings paramilitaries are anarchist utopians and authoritarian communist or armed social Darwinist superiors and subordinates. Left-wing paramilitaries are mostly Malga, and right-wing ones mostly Lumin or hauntaumatons.
• 大部分是光民的前貴族只出現在要塞的隨機表之中。他們住的要塞應該是城堡或宮殿。意味是在犧牲前，貴族和維持他們的封建制度已經是快要消失的現象。
• The majority-Lumin ex-nobility only appears in the random table for forts. The forts they live in would be castles or palaces. The implication is that before The Sacrifice, nobles and the feudal systems that supported them were already a disappearing phenomenon.
• 學者包括只出現在學院隨機表的職員和學生，以及比較普遍的研究員。研究員在末日後並不常見，比較有可能出現的地方是荒野（博物學家、民族學家、古文物家）和交彙（天文學家、工程師）。大部分的研究員是光民。可見有民族科技的等級制度。
• Scholars include the staff and students that only appear in the random table for academies, as well as the more widespread researchers. Researchers are rarely seen after the apocalypse, most commonly appearing in the wilderness (as naturalists, ethnologists, and antiquarians) and confluences (as astronomists and engineers). The majority of researchers are Lumin. It's evident that there was an ethnotechnical hierarchy.
• 大部分是殭的拾荒者是流氓無產階級中的其中一類，主要居住在學院，更少出現在比較跟憲兵有歷史關係的交彙（也就是在指軍用的港口和空港）。他們大部分是非專業化的生存拾荒者，但有些也會收金錢為別人拾荒。
• The majority-Stiff scavengers are one kind of lumpenproletariat, mostly residing in academies, less likely appearing in confluences which have historically been associated with the military police (namely military ports and airfields). They are mostly unprofessionalized subsistence scavengers, but some take payment to scavenge for others.
• 農民只出現在耕地的隨機表之中。雖然「農民」這一詞也能用來形容原住民，因為原住民在耕地的隨機表之中是自己的條目，意味是破裂疆耕地的農民是大部分是光民的墾殖者。隨著犧牲前封建制度的衰落（和工業資本主義的興起），非原住民的農民也照樣減少，變成城市中的無產階級或是流氓無產階級。
• Peasants only appear in the random table for farmlands. Although the term “peasant” can be used to describe Indigenous people, because Indigenous people are listed as a separate entry in the farmlands random table, the implication is that the peasants in the farmlands of The Fractured Frontier are majority-Lumin settlers. Following the decline of feudalism (and the rise of capitalism), non-Indigenous peasants likewise fell in population, becoming urban proletariat or lumpenproletariat.
• 大部分是殭的原住民主要居住在耕地，但也出現在荒野和住處（泛指任何有房子類似物的地方，包括村莊、城鎮、部落、營地）。雖然為了玩家選擇遊戲地緣政治的自由我並沒有說明《破裂疆》的原住民是以哪些真正的原住民為根據，在殭的描述之中，我有說殭是氣候難民。既然破裂疆是後核子末日的世界，一個自然的發展方向就是選被核工業剝削的原住民做虛構原住民的根據，例如：
  • 太平洋島原住民和美國西南方的原住民
  • 阿爾及利亞撒哈拉沙漠附近的非洲人
  • 民主剛果的 Shinkolobwe 礦工
  • 馬達加斯加人和加彭人
  • 哈薩克人
  • 蘭嶼島的達悟族
• 當然，有其他過於影響原住民的氣候強迫移居模式，像是全球暖化製造的災難。也有可能有像巴勒斯坦人一樣，不停地受到殖民者用武力製造的生態破壞。重點是選擇太多，不要試圖代表世界歷史中一切抵制環境殖民的狀況—而且遊戲中的原住民也不需要限制是氣候難民或是殭，一個民族的人民也不需要全部都是同樣的形類。
• 我的建議是至少從三個虛構原住民族群開始；「用色寫作」的 Tumblr 部落格有更多的指導。但該注意的是你不是在做激進自由主義的代表—我也建議不要把原住民的抵抗輕易歸類於某種政治主義引發的抵抗。在歷史和現代之中，許多原住民抵抗的目的是為了保護或增強自己族人的權力，不一定有革命、去殖民化或民族解放的目標。與其以反革命的類型拋棄這種抵抗，我認為該用有細微差別的方式對待，顯然地按照自己政治傾向的主觀做出結論。不要把遵從政治當作保護自己免受批評的藉口。承認自己的立場，把盟友和敵人負責地選好。
• The majority-Stiff Indigenous people primarily live in farmlands, but also appear in the wilderness and dwellings (generally referring to any place with house analogs, including villages, towns, cities, tribal communities and camps). Even though I declined to specify which real Indigenous peoples the Indigenous people of The Fractured Frontier were based on for the sake of giving the player freedom over choosing the geopolitics of the game, in the description for Stiffs, I had said that Stiffs were climate refugees. Since The Fractured Frontier is a nuclear post-apocalyptic world, a natural course of development would be to pick Indigenous people who have been exploited by the nuclear industry as bases for fictional Indigenous people, such as:
  • Pacific Islanders and Native Americans in the Southwestern U.S.
  • Africans near the Algerian Sahara
  • Shinkolobwe miners in the DRC
  • The Malagasy and the Gabonese
  • The Kazakhs
  • The Tao people of Orchid Island
• Of course, there are other forms of climate displacement that disproportionately affect Indigenous people such as disasters caused by global warming. There could also be those who are like the Palestinians, who endlessly suffer ecocide created by colonial military force. The point is that there are a lot of options, and you shouldn't try to represent every instance of resistance against environmental colonialism in world history—and the in-game Indigenous people don't have to be restricted to just climate refugees or Stiffs, and the people of a nation don't all need to have the same form.
• I recommend starting with at least 3 fictional Indigenous kinkinds; the Tumblr blog Writing With Color has a couple more tips. But note that you aren't doing radlib representation—and I would caution against casually lumping Indigenous resistance in with any form of resistance driven by political ideology. In history and in modern times, the purpose of many Indigenous people's resistance is to protect or advance the power of their own kind, and not necessarily to fulfill a goal of revolution, decolonization, or national liberation. Rather than dismiss these resistances as counterrevolutionary, I believe you should engage them in a nuanced manner, and transparently draw conclusions according to the subjectivity of your own political orientation. Do not use deference politics as a shield to protect yourself from criticism. Own your positions and choose your allies and enemies with responsibility.
• 最臭名昭著的信徒當然是教權法西斯主義者，可是我也有想像認為神會決定一切的「非政治性」孤立主義者、左翼和右翼的空想家、揮舞槍棍的武僧、有魔力的神秘主義者和民間恐怖的邪教。信徒主要居住在聖地—這些通常會是制度性宗教徒（據我所知，許多原住民族群不會去住在聖地的，只會去為了某種目的去拜謁。）另外出現的地方是耕地和荒野，在住處是上司和下屬或比較沒有等級制度的空想家。大部分的信徒是一無所有的殭。在聖地、耕地和荒野，大部分的信徒是墾殖者；在住處中是混合的群體。
• The most infamous religious disciples are obviously the clerical fascists, but I also imagined “apolitical” isolationists who believed that everything was up to the gods, left-wing and right-wing utopians, gunstaff-wielding warrior monks, occult mystics and folk horror cults. Religious disciples primarily live on sacred grounds—these will usually be followers of organized religions (according to my knowledge, many Indigenous groups do not live on sacred grounds, but go to visit for a specific purpose). They also appear in farmlands and the wilderness, and in dwellings as superiors and subordinates or less hierarchical utopians. The majority of religious disciples are dispossessed Stiffs. On sacred grounds, in farmlands and the wilderness, most religious disciples are settlers; in dwellings their composition is mixed.
• 大部分是毛革的亡命者是流氓無產階級中的第二種類。另外最有可能的形類是曠工或逃兵的自動靈。他們出現在荒野和住處，跟研究員差不多少見。提出幾些假設：大部分的囚犯在犧牲前被處死，有逃出來的也沒有防空壕的保護；雖然犧牲後的正式法律與國家壟斷的秩序已蕩然無存，還是有許多再生產那制度的憲兵和右翼準軍事部隊；就算是沒有憲兵和右翼準軍事部隊的話，群眾仍然繼續再生產監禁質，拒絕給亡命者糧食和住宿，故意加快他們的死亡，認為這是他們該受的懲罰。
• The majority-Malga fugitives are the second kind of lumpenproletariat. The other most-likely form is hauntaumatons who have deserted their jobs or military post. They appear in the wilderness and in dwellings, and are about as rare of a sight as researchers. Some hypotheses: the majority of prisoners were executed before The Sacrifice, and those who escaped didn't have the protection of bomb shelters; even though formal law and state-monopolized order have broken down after The Sacrifice, there are still many military police and right-wing paramilitaries reproducing its system; even if there weren't military police and right-wing paramilitaries, the masses still continue to reproduce carcerality, refusing to give fugitives food and shelter, hastening their deaths on purpose, believing that this is the punishment that they deserve.
• 大部分是光民的墾殖者只出現在住處的隨機表之中。當然任何非原住民的居住者種類不是混合的群體就也是墾殖者；隨機表有暗示一個居住者種類是墾殖者的話我會在它的項目符號之中說。不然的話，非原住民居住者種類的預設是混合群體。跟不說明原住民的真正類似物的邏輯一樣，為了玩家選擇遊戲地緣政治的自由，墾殖者也沒有做特定。
• The majority-Lumin settlers only appear in the random table for dwellings. Of course any non-Indigenous occupant types who aren't of mixed composition are also settlers; if a random table implies that a certain occupant type is settler then I'll mention it in its bullet point. Otherwise, the default for non-Indigenous occupant types is mixed composition. Following the logic of not specifying real-world analogs of Indigenous people, for the sake of player freedom over choosing the game's geopolitics, I also did not specify them for settlers.
• 大部分是自動靈的商人和工匠只出現在住處的隨機表之中，但這些是固定在一個位置的人—巡迴的也有可能存在。自動靈是被放進機器人身體的人靈，有自願的也有被強迫的。但什麼商人或工匠會是自願成為自動靈的？最可能的是退伍軍人，或許也有少數希望能變成作用上長生不老的富豪。除了這些人之外，剩下都是強迫被機器化的。雖然「商人」這一詞通常是指企業主，我認為在隨機表結果的情況之下可以理解為任何在做買賣事務的人，包括推銷員和店員。這些無產者跟現代被 AI 和機器代替的員工一樣，只是因為耐核系統是超自然的威權資本主義社會，他們的自然身體和個性是被設定為只能執行工作的機器身體代替。大部分是無產者商人的住處通常是舊公司市鎮，有反烏托邦充滿機械玩偶的遊樂園的氣氛。
• The majority-hauntaumaton merchants and artisans only appear in the random table for dwellings, but these are the ones that stay in one place—traveling ones may also exist too. Hauntaumatons are spirits of people that were placed into robot bodies, some by choice and others by force. But what merchant or artisan would voluntarily become a hauntaumaton? Most likely veterans, and perhaps a few magnates who wished to become functionally immortal. Besides these people, the rest were forcibly mechanized. Although the term “merchant” usually refers to business owners, I believe that in the context of a random table result, you can interpret it to mean anyone who is in the business of buying and selling, including salespeople and store clerks. These proletarians are like workers who've been replaced by AI and robots in modern times, only because the Nai'oh System was a supernatural authoritarian capitalist society, their natural bodies and personalities were replaced by machine bodies programmed to only carry out work. Most majority-proletarian merchant dwellings are usually former company towns, with the atmosphere of dystopian animatronic-filled amusement parks.
• 上司和下屬也只出現在住處的隨機表之中，包括憲兵和有等級制度的準軍事部隊、舊國家的政客和個人崇拜的當地政治和/或宗教領袖、歹徒暴君以及老闆和工人。不管背景，他們的基本特質就是主宰城市的人，把它變成了實質上的城國。一些可能的形類：大部分是光民的墾殖者、秘密史達林主義者的毛革、道德淪喪到離譜的自動靈實業家與他邪教般的私人軍隊、盜用民族解放爭取自己利益的殭民族資產階級。
• Superiors and subordinates also only appear in the random table for dwellings, and they include military police and hierarchical paramilitaries, politicians from former nation-states and local political and/or religious leaders with cults of personality, tyrant gangsters as well as bosses and workers. Regardless of background, their basic characteristic is that they run their town, having transformed it into a virtual city-state. Some suggestions for forms: majority-Lumin settlers, crypto-Stalinist Malga, the most morally bankrupt hauntamton businessman you have ever seen and his cultish private army, Stiff national bourgeoisie who co-opt national liberation to advance their own interests.
• 空想家又是只出現在住處的隨機表之中，形容任何政治和/或宗教的主義者和行動者。一些可能的形類：放蕩主義光民前貴族的虐待狂地牢、毛革的無治主義公社、幫助自動靈恢復個性的庇護所、被逃避宗教迫害的殭建立的小城市。
• Utopians only appear in the random table for dwellings again, and they refer to any political and/or religious ideologues and activists. Some suggestions for forms: a sadist dungeon for libertine Lumin ex-nobles, a Malga anarchist commune, a sanctuary that helps hauntaumatons recover their individuality, a small town set up by Stiffs fleeing from religious persecution.
• 大部分是自動靈的前員工是流氓無產階級中的第三種類。他們跟前貴族一樣少見，只出現在交彙的隨機表之中。他們主要是居住在舊工作場所的人造交彙—車站、港口、空港—做的工作包括清潔、顧客服務、調度、保安、建造、載運工具裝配、維修、當乘務員、載運工具駕駛員、交通控制、航行風險預防、搬貨等等。因為末日後沒有長期驅動機器的能量，他們失去了工作。另外也有來自各地的自動靈工人，因為恢復個性辭職或被開除。他們主要居住在充滿玄風的自然交彙。
• The majority-hauntaumaton former workers are the third kind of lumpenproletariat. They are as rare as ex-nobility, only appearing in the random table for confluences. They primarily reside in their former workplaces of artificial confluences—stations, ports, and airfields—and the work they did included cleaning, customer service, dispatching, security, construction, assembling transports, maintenance, serving as crew, operating transports, traffic control, navigational hazard prevention, hauling freight and the like. Because there is no long-term energy for powering machines after the apocalypse, they lost their jobs. There are also hauntaumaton workers from all over the world who quit their jobs or were fired after regaining their individuality. They primarily reside in weirdwind-filled natural confluences.

這也都只是上一半之中能發現的資料，幾乎是完全按照隨機表創造的世界背景。下一半是幫忙補充以上背景的建議正典。最特別的是玄風，在破裂疆末日後的超自然航天方式。這是怎麼發展出來的？在《受死令》之中，我有說心火是受到創傷的靈魂，但也有暗示它是核能的類比物。在為《吞聲》建構世界的時候，我決定把心火能變成經濟的反烏托邦基礎—法西斯資本主義者將會故意普遍化殘酷的壓迫為了榨取心火，而心火會是跟《異塵餘生》宇宙之中的核能一樣是普遍的能源。但問題是核子末日之後維持這種綱領的基礎建設都被毀滅，也殺不了足夠的倖存者來長期恢復犧牲前科技狀態需要的心火能。

And this is just the information you can discover from the first half, which is just lore almost entirely generated by random tables. The second half is a suggested canon that helps flesh out the lore from above. The most unique is The Weirdwind, the supernatural post-apocalyptic form of space travel in The Fractured Frontier. How did this come to be developed? In Soulslinger I mentioned that a spark was a traumatized soul, and also implied that it was an analog for nuclear energy. When I was worldbuilding for Swallowcry, I decided to turn spark energy into the dystopian foundation for the economy—fascist capitalists would purposely generalize brutal oppression for the purposes of extracting spark, and spark would be an energy source as general as nuclear energy in the universe of Fallout. But the problem was after a nuclear apocalypse all the infrastructure to sustain this kind of program would be destroyed, and there also wouldn't be enough survivors left to kill to recover enough spark energy to sustain pre-Sacrifice levels of technology in the long term.

沒有航天方式的話，大家就只能待在自己的行邑之中—對 TRPG 來說，特別是類似 OSR 的 TRPG, 這是完全不能接受的事。哪有設定在外太空的 TRPG 不給玩家航天的！ 或許是一個共產主義的 TRPG。我認為其實在犧牲前的世界中，天舟是非常耗心火能的機械，需要定時的種族滅絕才能產生出足夠的能量。心火本來就是不可持續的燃料，法西斯資本主義者也就是被這一點吸引—低供給和高需求等於利潤。他們的計畫是強迫群眾依賴唯一被他們控制的資源來求生，群眾的起義也透過鎮壓被收復用來生產更多心火能。

Without a method for space travel, everyone could only stay on their own peh'rah—which, for a TRPG, especially an OSR-like TRPG, was completely unacceptable. What kind of TRPG set in space wouldn't allow their players to have space travel! Perhaps a communist one. I believe that even in the world before The Sacrifice, skyships were a technology with a heavy rate of spark consumption, which required regular genocides to produce adequate amounts of energy. Spark was always an unsustainable source of fuel, and that was exactly what fascist capitalists were attracted to—low supply and high demand meant profit. Their plan was to force the masses to rely on a resource under their exclusive control for survival, and the resistance of the masses was recaptured through repression which produced even more spark energy.

航天和其他高科技的工具本來就不是普遍的現象，而是主要為了殖民、軍事和資產階級利益被發展。它們和一切利用心火的科技再生產了以那些主宰和剝削為基礎的社會。來自非墾殖社會的原住民並沒有發展航天科技的希望，不是因為他們是「原始」，因為他們徹底明白了「文明社會」和「現代化」的意思—也就是再生產一個種族和生態滅絕的社會。所以要在反抗那些制度的世界中為航天的包含做辯護的話，我必須想想其他的辦法。

Skyships and other high-tech tools were not generalized phenomena, but developed primarily for colonization, military use, and the interests of the bourgeoisie. They and all forms of spark technology reproduced a society that was rooted in those dominations and exploitations. Indigenous people who did not come from settler-colonial societies never had the desire to develop technology for space travel, not because they were “primitive,” but because they fully understood what “civilization” and “modernization” meant—which was to reproduce a genocidal and ecocidal society. So if I wanted to justify putting space travel in a world that resisted those hierarchies, then I had to think of something else.

具有諷刺意味的是，天舟的靈感來源—老一套東方主義的科幻經典戰役設定《魔法船》（英文： Spelljammer）—也是為玄風賦予靈感。我說：「在每個行邑上有可能出現玄風，是能把捲入的生物和物品傳送到另外一個行邑的超能力龍捲和颱風。」許多在實際上的問題馬上出現。玄風跟真正的龍捲和颱風一樣激烈嗎？需要什麼才能安全搭乘？不同形類，不同體力和智力能力的安全物品需要有什麼差別？那些用品在末日後的世界多難得到？那將會判斷玄風的搭乘有多麼被普遍化。

Ironically, the source of inspiration for skyships—the stereotypically Orientalist and classic space fantasy campaign setting of Spelljammer—also inspired The Weirdwind. I wrote: “On every peh'rah there is the possibility of encountering The Weirdwind, supernatural tornadoes and typhoons with the power to send the beings and items it engulfs from one peh'rah to another.” Several practical questions immediately appeared. Were weirdwinds as intense as real tornadoes and typhoons? What did you need to ride it safely? What were the discrepancies in terms of safety materials needed by people of different forms, of different physical and mental abilities? How hard was it to acquire those supplies in the world after the apocalypse? That would determine how much riding The Weirdwind was generalized.

《吞聲》中有試圖回答這些問題，但《破裂疆》並沒有—反而，它給玩家考慮的問題還要更多！玄風不是好好待在一邊等你的現象，而是按照季節和圈段出現，每個行邑也都是不同。不同的行邑又有相反的自轉方向，導致相反的季節和圈段順序，需要轉換。最後，玄風不是可靠的航天方式，終點大部分是完全隨機的、再有可能的是同環原先星球的行邑、之後再有可能的是異環原先星球的行邑、最不可能的是到鄰近的行邑。要到某個行邑的話可能會需要類似魯布·戈德堡機械的旅程路線—但恰好就是 TRPG 的冒險傳統之中的最愛。

Swallowcry attempts to answer these questions, but Fractured Frontier doesn't—and it gives the player even more questions to consider! The Weirdwind is not a phenomenon that stays and waits for you, but one that appears according to season and cycle phase, which is different on every peh'rah. Different peh'rah also had opposite directions of rotation, which caused them to have opposite orders of seasons and cycle phases, requiring conversions. Lastly, The Weirdwind was an unreliable form of space travel, with the vast majority of destinations being completely random, the next likely being peh'rah from same-ring origin planets, the next likely after that being peh'rah from different-ring origin planets, and the least likely being adjacent peh'rah. To arrive at a certain peh'rah would likely require Rube Goldberg-machine-like routes—which is incidentally what TRPGs with a tradition of adventure love to have.

但是誰會在破裂疆冒險？在「心火」的部分之中，我有暗示是拾荒團，也諷刺地把拾荒團的三個基本角色命名為 OSR 的戰士、奇才（英文的 wizard 不只是指法師）、盜賊傳統三職業。之前我說拾荒者是大部分沒被付錢的流氓無產階級，但這裡比較專業化的零工拾荒團算是不穩定無產者（這也不是原創概念；相反，大部分現代 OSR 的玩家角色也是有不穩定無產者的預設）。

But who goes on adventures in The Fractured Frontier? In the section on spark, I implied it was scavenging parties, and even cheekily named the three basic roles in scavenging parties after the three traditional OSR classes of fighter, wizard, and thief. Previously I said that scavengers were mostly unpaid lumpenproletariat, but the more professionalized gig worker scavenging parties here are more like the precariat (this is also not an original concept; on the contrary, the majority of modern OSR player characters also have a precariat default).

然而，不同的角色會有不同常見的背景：

However, different roles will have different commonly-seen backgrounds:

• 負責用武力保護團的戰士是最有多樣性的角色，通常會是：
  • 專業化的（前）憲兵（大部分是舊血星的自動靈）
  • 半專業化的準軍事部隊員（大部分是舊送息的毛革）
  • 半專業化的拾荒者（大部分是被強迫移居到舊生榮的殭）
  • 傳統的原住民勇士（大部分是舊刮膽的殭）
  • 信徒武（大部分是舊生榮的光民）
• Fighters responsible for using armed force to protect the party are the most diverse role, and will often be:
  • Professionalized (ex-)military police (mostly hauntaumaton on former Shahsin')
  • Semi-professional paramilitary members (mostly Malga on former Ehm'rah)
  • Semi-professional scavengers (mostly Stiff forcibly displaced to former Vim'run)
  • Traditional Indigenous warriors (mostly Stiff from former Gwahdyu')
  • Religious warrior monk disciples (mostly Lumin from former Vim'run)
• 負責解決科技問題的奇才是最資產階級的角色，通常會是：
  • 專業化的學院職員（大部分是舊生榮的光民）
  • 專業化的研究員（大部分是舊生榮的光民）
  • 專業化的前員工（大部分是舊血星的自動靈）
  • 半專業化的學生（大部分是舊生榮的光民）
  • 半專業化的拾荒者（大部分是被強迫移居到舊生榮的殭）
• Wizards responsible for solving problems to do with science and technology are the most bourgeois role, and will often be:
  • Professionalized academy staff (mostly Lumin from former Vim'run)
  • Professionalized researchers (mostly Lumin from former Vim'run)
  • Professionalized former workers (mostly hauntaumaton on former Shahsin')
  • Semi-professional students (mostly Lumin from former Vim'run)
  • Semi-professional scavengers (mostly Stiff forcibly displaced to former Vim'run)
• 負責解放零件的盜賊是最流氓無產階級的角色，通常是：
  • 專業化的工匠（大部分是舊血星的自動靈）
  • 專業化的前員工（大部分是舊血星的自動靈）
  • 半專業化的拾荒者（大部分是被強迫移居到舊生榮的殭
    
  • 半專業化的亡命者（大部分是舊送息的毛革）
  • 半專業化的歹徒（大部分是舊血星的毛革）
• Thieves responsible for liberating the parts are the most lumpenproletarian role, and will often be:
  • Professionalized artisans (mostly hauntaumaton on former Shahsin')
  • Professionalized former workers (mostly hauntaumaton on former Shahsin')
  • Semi-professional scavengers (mostly Stiff forcibly displaced to former Vim'run)
  • Semi-professional fugitives (mostly Malga on former Ehm'rah)
  • Semi-professional gangsters (mostly Malga on former Shahsin')

那麼多混合階級利益展現出拾荒團的政治多樣性。有極端唯利是圖的團、只是希望能求生的團和傾向於解放的團。一定會是有錢的主顧偏右翼，因此能收到金錢的解放主義團非常少見，大部分其實會是為缺金融資本的人免費工作的互助團。這也就是我最有興趣探索的拾荒團種類。

The vast amount of mixed class interests reveals the political diversity of scavenging parties. There are parties that are extremely mercenary, parties that are simply trying to survive, and parties oriented towards liberation. Patrons which are always monied lean right-wing, so liberationist parties that can get money are rare, and the majority of them will actually be mutual aid crews that work for free to serve those who lack financial capital. This is the kind of scavenging party I'm most interested in exploring.

《破裂疆》的最後一頁是來自約瑟夫·康拉德的《黑暗之心》的格式化引文，描述殖民者對探險的視角：年輕的敘述者浪漫化地圖上殖民者非探索的空白空間，就像是 OSR 玩家看待未冒險到的空白六角格一模一樣。或許遊戲設計師和 GM 對世界建構空白畫布的態度也並不例外。我給了玩家許多空白空間，也有意地把其他空間填滿。最後我無法擺脫自己創造和引誘別人創造殖民黑暗之地的懷疑。

The last page of The Fractured Frontier is a stylized quote from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which describes the colonizer's attitude towards exploration: the young narrator romanticizes blank spaces unexplored by colonizers on a map, just as OSR players regard blank hexes yet to be reached by adventure. Perhaps the attitude of game designers and GMs towards the blank canvas of worldbuilding is the same. I've given the player many blank spaces, and have intentionally filled in others. In the end I cannot shake the suspicion that I have created and lured other people into creating their own place of colonial darkness.

但面對這種黑暗是每個創造者的責任。注定再生產殖民主義的程度由我們對再生產的容許來判斷。與其空想地跳過去殖民化的過程假裝在避開我們的歷史慣性，我們必須徹底去阻擋它製造的軌跡。未來沒有定局、末日只有在壓迫者的想像之中才是必然發生的事、而破裂疆的後末日不只是在指假設壓迫者成功破壞世界之後的生活，而也是在指現在如何廢除末日的理論。殖民和資本主義製造的種族和生態滅絕不是神話般的例外事件，而是平凡人造的現實。我們必須透過解放運動和行動讓壓迫制度設定為不可能的事變成可能的事，必須革命化所謂的現實性。《破裂疆》是我為想像這種革命創造機會的謙卑企圖。

But to face this kind of darkness is the responsibility of every creator. We are only as doomed to reproduce colonialism to the extent that we permit its reproduction. Instead of utopianistically skipping over the process of decolonization and pretending to avoid our historical inertia, we must thoroughly obstruct the trajectory it has created. The future is not foregone, the apocalypse is only inevitable in the imagination of the oppressor, and the post-apocalypse of The Fractured Frontier does not merely refer to a theoretical life after the oppressors have successfully destroyed the world, but also a theory of how to abolish the apocalypse today. The genocide and ecocide caused by colonialism and capitalism are not mythic and exceptional events, but mundane and man-made realities. We have to make what the order of oppression has made impossible possible through movements and moments of liberation, we have to revolutionize what is considered realistic. The Fractured Frontier is my humble attempt to create an opportunity to imagine this kind of revolution.

Continuing down this trail we will convene on October 21st at 6pm PST to discuss chapters 1 and 2 of Religion and Nothingness by Keiji Nishitani. We are keeping it short so that we can do a close reading of the text, and the invite more people to join. If you're interested in participating you can reach out to bugs for a link.

pdf

For some reason or another, the reading group has crawled out of the muck once more.

We will be reconvening on September the 23rd at 6pm Pacific, in an internet call, to discuss Friedrich Nietzsche's text Beyond Good and Evil. The format is unspecific, as are the reading criteria. Get your dice out and Nietzschemanteion your way through the text, or begin your rigorous studies at once!

Reach out to bugs for the meeting link.

Fascist totalitarianism's “organizational form” was “inspired by the totalitarian party that had first been tested and developed in Russia”. (“Fascism was [is] a desperate attempt to defend the bourgeois economy from the dual threat of crisis and proletarian subversion, a state of siege in which capitalist society saved itself by giving itself an emergency dose of rationalization in the form of massive state intervention.“) “Although fascism rallies to the defense of the main icons of a bourgeois ideology that has become conservative (family, private property, moral order, patriotism), while mobilizing the petty bourgeoisie and the unemployed workers who are panic-stricken by economic crises or disillusioned by the socialist movement's failure to bring about a revolution, it is not itself fundamentally ideological. It presents itself as what it is—a violent resurrection of myth calling for participation in a community defined by archaic pseudovalues: race, blood, leader. Fascism is ... the most costly method of preserving the capitalist order....” (Thesis 109, p 55)

'Three years after Stalin's death (1953), the new Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev initiated a “deStalinization” campaign, beginning with a “secret” report ... entitled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.” later the same year ... Khrushchev sent Russian tanks to crush the Hungarian revolution.' (Note 110, pp 134–135)

'the expressions of internal negation ... first became visible to the outside world when the workers of East Berlin revolted against the bureaucrats and demanded a “government of steel workers”—a negation which has in one case has already gone to the point of sovereign workers councils in Hungary.' (Thesis 111, p 57)

bureaucratic society is the total opposite of proletarian community. Bureaucratic power is based on possession of a nation-state and it must ultimately obey the logic of this reality, in accordance with the particular interests imposed by the level of development of the country it possesses. 'socialism in a single country' that Stalin was shrewd enough to maintain by destroying the revolutions in China in 1927 and Spain in 1937. The autonomous bureaucratic revolution in China [1949]—as already shortly before in Yugoslavia [1946]—introduced into the unity of the bureaucratic world a dissolutive germ that has broken it up in less than twenty years. workers of East Berlin . . . : reference to the East German revolt of 1953. workers councils in Hungary: Although the 1956 Hungarian revolt against Russian domination was ostensibly rallied around the liberalizing regime of Imry Nagy, the country was in reality organized by a network of nationally coordinated workers councils. See Andy Anderson's Hungary '56. See also the situationists' analysis of the 1968 “Prague Spring” (SI Anthology, pp. 256-265; Expanded Edition, pp. 326–336). this crumbling of the global alliance based on the bureaucratic hoax is also a very unfavorable developement for the future of capitalist society: In his “Preface to the Third French Edition of The Society of the Spectacle” (1992; included in Donald Nicholson-Smith's translation of The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books, 1994, pp. 7–10), Debord noted that this process, which scarcely anyone else had noticed at the time, had rapidly accelerated since the “fall of the Berlin Wall” in 1989.

(Note 111, pp 135–136)

Third International (a.k.a. Communist International or Comintern): “The Third International, ostensibly created by the Bolsheviks to counteract the degenerate social-democratic reformism of the Second International and to unite the vanguard of the proletariat in 'revolutionary communist parties,' was too closely linked to the interests of its founders to ever bring about a genuine socialist revolution anywhere. In reality the Third International was essentially a continuation of the Second. The Russian model was rapidly imposed on the Western workers' organizations and their evolutions were thenceforth one and the same. The totalitarian dictatorship of the bureaucracy, the new ruling class, over the Russian proletariat found its echo in the subjection of the great mass of workers in other countries to a stratum of political and labor-union bureaucrats whose interests had become clearly contradictory to those of their rank-and-file constituents” (SI Anthology, p. 332; Expanded Edition, p. 423).

Note 104, p 133

“Kuomintang regime in the China of 1925–1927: At the very moment when radical workers were attaining significant victories in the major cities of China, Stalin insisted that the Chinese Communist Party subordinate itself to the Kuomintang, the nationalist party led by General Chiang Kai-shek. When the workers of Shanghai had taken over the city in April 1927, the Communist leaders thus urged them to welcome Chiang Kai-shek's army and to turn in all their weapons. Once they did so, Chiang's army entered the city and massacred the radical workers by the thousands. See Harold Isaacs's The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution.” (Note 104, pp 133–134)

“Popular Fronts in Spain and France: The Russian alliance with the French Popular Front government led to the betrayal of the anticolonial struggle in French Indochina (see Ngo Van's In the Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary, AK Press, 2010, translated by Ken Knabb et al.).” (Note 104, p 134)

'subjecting the peasantry to a reign of terror: i.e. through the forced collectivizations and “Five Year Plans” of 1928–1941.' (ibid)

'The Bureaucratization of the World (1939) ... includes what can be considered the first in-depth analysis of the class nature of the “Soviet” Union.' (ibid)

我一直看到某些人提出類似這樣的論點：我們該支持某些國家，因為它們為反帝國主義或反殖民主義（或回首過去，反法西斯主義）的抵抗提供關鍵性的物質支援；再說，因為抵抗組織沒有其他的辦法取得那種程度的物質支援，批評這些國家的支持是團結的背叛。

As an anti-statist, I cannot help but feel averse to this kind of argument. But is this a justified reaction? Perhaps it's really me being unrealistic, but how do we determine what reality is? Perhaps the answer is: stop being an existential armchair revolutionary, unless you can immediately solve the material problems of the resistance, which are real at every angle, then shut the fuck up.

身為反國家主義者，我不得不對這種論點感到反感。可是這是有道理的反應嗎？或許我是真的不切實際，可是我們如何判斷什麼是實際？或許回答是：不要再繼續當思考存在的足不出戶革命家，除非你現在能解決抵抗組織千方萬確的物質問題，不然你給我閉嘴。

I do not dispute the fact that resistance forces have no other alternative to obtain the kind of material support that states can currently provide. I will also not dispute my inability to immediately solve the problem. What I do dispute is the refusal to question what relying on the state for material support does for resistance in the name of being realistic. The state is not a neutral political tool that any class or camp can use to carry out its own agenda—it is a hierarchical tool designed to reproduce a social order where one class maintains power over others. Under this structure, material support from the state is coercive to resistance in nature. It forces resistance forces to align with the interests of patron states or lose material support; it compromises resistance by making it synonymous with securing power against political enemies, and makes it open to appropriation.

我對抵抗組織沒有其他辦法取得目前國家能給的物質支援這部分沒有爭議。我也不會去爭自己能解決問題的無能。會爭的是為了實際而拒絕疑問依賴國家的物質支援會對抵抗有什麼樣的影響。國家不是任何階級或陣營能用來執行自己的計畫的中立政治工具—它是個製造等級制度的工具，設計目標是再生產維持一個階級對其他階級行駛權力的社會秩序。在這種結構之下，來自國家的物質支援對抵抗有高壓性。抵抗組織被強迫要跟贊助國家的利益保持一致，否則失去物質支援；等同於獲取對抗政治敵人的權力是被損害的抵抗，能被挪用的抵抗。

The threat of the state to resistance is not some far-off hypothetical situation in the future. Its limiting effects are here, developing now. To call this threat assessment unrealistic, to dismiss it as ideological anarchist drivel, is to reveal what kind of reality you wish to ultimately create. It is a reality where Power is not abolished. It is a reality where Power is still treated as a representation of the masses' power—like Arya Zahedi says, it will not be a real anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, or anti-fascist reality, but a spectacle of these resistance forms.

國家對抵抗的危脅不是什麼遙遠未來的假設情況。它的限制效果現在就在場，正在被發展。要說這個威脅評估不切實際，把它當作無治主義者的胡說而不去考慮，是顯示出你最後希望創造的現實是什麼。在這個現實之中，治權並不會被廢除。在這個現實之中，治權仍然被當作是群眾權力的代表—就跟 Arya Zahedi 說的一模一樣，這不會是個真正反帝國主義、反殖民主義或反法西斯主義的現實，反而會是這些抵抗形式的景觀版本。

Thus, the so-called betrayal to solidarity of this kind of anti-statist position is a spectacle as well—a spectacle of solidarity. But my goal will never be to prove that my perspective on reality is the one that is actually correct. No, I am simply asserting again that the realities we want are not aligned, and accepting that in certain realities I must be the enemy. But to me, what's ultimately most important is not how justified it is for others to regard me as an enemy, but to realize the end of all systems organized by maintaining the power of one group over another, and to recognize when the means and ends have diverged to an unacceptable point.

因此，這樣反國家立場對團結所謂的背叛也是個景觀—是團結的景觀。但我的目的絕不是要證明我對現實的視角才是正確的。不，我只是要再次聲明我們想要的現實並不一致，並且接受在某些現實之下我必要有的敵人身份。但對我來說，最後重要的不是別人對我的敵視有沒有道理，而是實現所有靠維持一群相比另一群有更高權力組織的系統的結束，並且認識目標跟手段差異的發展到什麼地步能算是過分。

Perhaps the counterpoint is: you are incapable of making this recognition. Because you're outside the country of resistance, because you haven't done enough reading, and you should just defer to so-and-so opinion which represents the correct perspective. I could read a hundred articles, and I could listen to a million people, but I can't stop thoughts from entering my brain. I cannot force myself to produce an agreement that does not exist, and if that's the issue—that I cannot disagree as an autonomous being, because this use of my autonomy is incorrect—then the problem is even bigger.

或許反駁是：你沒有本事做出這種認識。因為你是在抵抗之國的國外、因為你讀的資料不夠，所以你該遵從某某某代表正確視角的意見。我可以讀一百個文章，可以聽數到百萬人說的話，但我無法阻止進入腦海的思想。我無法強迫自己產生出不存在的同意，而且如果問題是出在這裡的話—如果問題是我不能以自治實體的身份做出爭議，因為那會是錯誤的自治使用—那麼毛病就變得更大了。

I believe that it is not a coincidence that statist talking points—regardless of whether they come from the multipolarity of authoritarian communists or the militarism of anarchists—weaponize deference politics to protect their unassailability. At the heart of this unassailability is a contempt for autonomy, a vanguardist tendency to treat autonomy as an obstacle to effective resistance. To a vanguardist, everyone is an enemy, because everyone has the potential to go against the program of what resistance should be. People are to be managed: we must stop them from thinking, saying, or doing anything that goes against our program, which represents effective resistance.

我認為國家主義的論據—無論來自威權共產主義的多極體系或是無治主義的軍國主義—把遵從政治作為保護無可辯駁的武器不是偶然。在這無可辯駁的中心是自治的蔑視，是先鋒主義的傾向，把自治當作有效性抵抗的妨礙物。對先鋒主義者來說，大家都是敵人，因為大家都有違反抵抗該是什麼的綱領的能力。人民需要的是管理：我們必須阻止他們想、說或做出違反代表有效性抵抗的綱領的事。

Let me question it again: what kind of reality do you people actually want? Do you want a liberated world, or a world where you monopolize the terms of liberation? In your reality, does everyone have revolutionary potential, or is the ability for effective revolt only limited to a certain kind of group? Do you want to end your enemies, or the world that created them? What possibilities does your antagonism foreclose?

我再疑問一次：你們到底要的是什麼樣的現實？你們要的是解放的世界，還是解放條件被你獨攬的世界？在你的現實當中，是大家都有革命的能力，還是有效性的反抗能力只限於某一群人？你要消滅的是敵人，還是製造他們的世界？你的敵意排除了什麼可以發生的事？

The limitations imposed on resistance by State and Capital are the starting point, not the ending point. If resistance forces lack a means, we don't have to defend the states that provide them or dismiss the forces that accept them—we can support the development of means that don't rely on states, especially in moments of lull in resistance. Instead of condemning anti-statism as an unrealistic expectation for resistance, why not redouble our efforts to materially end the reality of the state's hegemony? Unless that really isn't what you want. Unless what you ultimately want is just the victory of people on your side by any means necessary, regardless of ends. Unless you can accept no other reality besides one in which your side's the victor. Unless this is all liberation will ever truly mean.

國家和資本對抵抗制定的限制是起點，不是終點。如果抵抗組織缺了渠道，我們不必為提供渠道的國家做辯護或對接受的組織不予理會—我們可以協助不依賴國家的渠道的發展，特別是在抵抗間歇的時刻。與其譴責反國家主義是對抵抗不切實際的憧憬，不如加倍努力在物質方面上結束國家霸權的現實？除非那真的不是你想要的改變。除非你最後只是想利用一切的手段讓你方的人得到勝利，目標完全不管。除非是你方當勝者之外，什麼現實都無法接受。除非這永遠會是解放能真正的意義。

the technological developments that objectively tend to eliminate work must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity, because labor is the only creator of commodities. The only way to prevent automation (or any other less extreme method of increasing labor productivity) from reducing society's total necessary labor time is to create new jobs. To this end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted into the tertiary or “service” sector, reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities at a time when increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities.

the vast majority of people are still forced to take part as wage workers in the unending pursuit of the system's ends and each of them knows that they must submit or die. The reality of this blackmail—the fact that even in its most impoverished forms (food, shelter) use value now has no existence outside the illusory riches of augmented survival—accounts for the general acceptance of the illusions of modern commodity consumption. The real consumer has become a consumer of illusions. The commodity is this materialized illusion and the spectacle is its general expression.

I finally looked at the end notes today and wondered why the text didn't reference any of them, but they read like it's ok to check in before/after I read the chapter. I welcome comments without spoilers, here if possible or at my Mastodon (Hometown) account, @mu@ni.hil.ist (https://ni.hil.ist/@mu).

The spectacle is the stage at which the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. we no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity.

The commodity’s independence has spread to the entire economy it now dominates. This economy has transformed the world... into a world dominated by the economy.

So this is how the “commodity” is “independent”. We don’t even know whom to blame anymore because everywhere in the world, the problem is an anonymous market that requires selling oneself on the corresponding labor market.

The pseudo-nature within which human labor has become alienated demands that such labor remain forever in its service....

That’s one thing I was always taught: to choose how I would serve the economy.

since this demand is formulated by and answerable only to itself, it in fact ends up channeling all socially permitted projects and endeavors into its own reinforcement.

Within natural economies, the emergence of a commodity sector represented a surplus survival. Commodity production ... implies the exchange of varied products between independent producers.... [W]herever it encountered the social conditions of large-scale commerce and capital accumulation, it took total control of the economy. [A] constant expansion of economic power in the form of commodities ... ultimately produced a level of abundance sufficient to solve the initial problem of survival—but only in such a way that the same problem is continually regenerated at a higher level. Economic growth has liberated societies from the natural pressures that forced them into an immediate struggle for survival; but they have not yet been liberated from their liberator.

After living with this thought for a while, another idea cuts through me. Maybe, instead, we retain in our bones a time when the leaves rustling against the soft trace of the sky, the throngs of swifts in their listing and swooping, the marsh frogs belching, the raven creaking riddles, the brook laughing across boulders, the choral whirr of myriad insects—when all these voices conspired to buoy our hearts along their course. Maybe we remember when the world itself sang to us, when no feeling passed through us unaccompanied by the beating heart of the land.

Eight species of forest bird finally vanished from Hawaii last year. They took their songs with them. Those creatures who move across the earth travel in fewer numbers, their havens dwindling. If the spring has fallen silent, if the stampede of civilization chases the gods from the land, what song is left to us?

The world we were born into still hums its tunes if we can listen; it sings with fewer notes. The brook still glistens downhill, the wind scrapes gusting across the snowbound hill, the coyote chatters and whoops melancholy thrill into my heart. My shoes crunch rhythms through the frozen meadow. Your sensuous body still stretches bowed across the thrumming string of the world. The rocks cry out. Go forth silent and sing you the world a song of creation.

====================================

On the sunny afternoon of Sunday, September 10, 2023—the third day of the Bash Back! network’s physical and psychospiritual reconstitution in Chicago, Illinois—it felt nearly all of us fags, dykes, freaks, and all combinations thereof, alongside however many theyfabs with cis boyfriends in tow, had assembled on the shore of Lake Michigan just west of Montrose Harbor on the breakwater.

How can I describe the scene? How much should I? Everything is already fading into memory, but a few images remain in sharp focus. Two smiling and naked women with dicks, big teeth and big laughs, standing and talking and drying in the Sun just to the side of where people are jumping into the rough water of the lake. Later, another trans woman, wearing nothing but a covid mask over her face, up close and personal with the fucker who had not only decided to film the scene with his smartphone, but who had insisted on keeping it up when he’d been told to stop.

Personally, I was nervous about getting naked, and I had my reasons. I pushed myself and did it anyway, jumping into the water—a little cold and a little rough for my liking—but when I got out, I was fairly quick to put my swim trunks back on, to conceal my dick and my butt. It had nothing to do with body shame; it had to do with society. The Montrose Harbor breakwater is not a sanctioned clothing-optional space. There is, in fact, no such public space anywhere in Chicago. (Mere days before the convergence, on September 4, the city government had affirmed as much, removing a sign at Loyola Beach to the north that had declared it a “nude beach”.)

Most other people didn’t get naked either, but there were a lot of naked titties, and those are legal in the state of Illinois, if various infographics on the internet are to be trusted. Exposed groins and butts, however, are definitely not legal. Where we were located is at a remove from the city as such, its police-patrolled streets and the great masses of its cop-calling good citizens—yet in broad daylight, with sight lines and cell phones and passers-by, it was not quite enough for me to feel safe. Or rather, comfortable, which is an overlapping emotional affect to be sure. This, despite the fact that I know that I could have been naked as hell in that crowd, out of the water as much as in. For all the inter-participant drama that the weekend generated, I don’t think it’s likely that my loose pecker was going to elicit much more than an eye roll from even the most prudish of attendees. And weather-wise, it was a perfect day for it.

Unfortunately, the police continue to exist.

What happened has already become legend. The blood dripping down the smartphone guy’s forehead. The mistake of clemency, when his phone was tossed inland (with a remark of “go fetch!”) instead of propelled lakeward with speed. When fuckface came back a bit later with some cops in tow, one person was put in handcuffs briefly, but eventually all members of the anti-fun brigade backed off without arresting anyone. It was a good time. Or, a victory? Or at least better than a lot of us would normally expect. People continued to chill, to drink, to laugh. But, there’s at least one sad aspect, which is that instead of a maximum six to seven people (out of nearly two hundred) being naked at a given time in the water or out of it, that number went all the way down to zero. This amounted to something of a buzzkill, given what was still only the mere inching towards free bodies in the air and sunlight that had been in evidence a few minutes before the ruckus started.

I don’t know how many people would have needed to get naked in order for me, the nudist blog guy, to feel a bit better doing so myself and staying that way, rather than spending my brief time naked in the relative obscurity of the lake water. But I think there is a number. The threshold to reach would have been a bit higher up still, for me to feel comfortable stepping away and walking my bare feet on the grassy embankment, navigating through the dense crowd of people, to where my friends were seated. Going to where the barbeque was—or hell, maybe approaching some new folks and trying to start a conversation, would have been still another step up. And how about ditching my clothes for the rest of the evening?

I have no pretense to being anything but a relative coward when it comes to potential friction with the state and/or just with other people who I expect are better at fighting than I am. I don’t especially like rowdy or hairy situations, e.g. Ryan Harvey’s concern trolling article from 2009 (title: “Are We Addicted to Rioting?”) was never written about me. Really, it’s for the same reason that I don’t like rough water. To put it succinctly, danger alarms me. A cool thing about a lot of anarchists, however, is that danger doesn’t seem to alarm a lot of them nearly half as much—and I’ve always thought that was pretty cool, personally!

A side effect of this relative ambivalence towards danger, however, is that we sometimes do stuff that pisses each other off. That is why a white-passing, girl-passing (something something) got jumped and at least two of her locs cut off earlier on Sunday. She probably knew, in 2023, that some people would have strong opinions about her hair. The two that jumped her definitely knew that a lot of people involved in the convergence wouldn’t think their action was very cool. Anarchists, typically, don’t call the cops—not on other anarchists, and not anyone else. But that means we have to resolve our conflicts with one another in other ways. Is it surprising that when most of us don’t know each other and a lot of us have pretty strong expectations of what other anarchists should be doing and how they should behave, things sometimes get a little fighty?

The reason that, even as the nudist blog guy, my nudity was brief and confined to the waterfront, is that I was at least a little concerned about my dick being in proximity to, and at eye level with, strangers. Anarchist faggot strangers they may have been, and as I said earlier, I deem it unlikely anyone would even say anything, let alone get physical. But apart from my fear of what might happen if the police came, there was still an inkling that, as with masks and veganism and which people are too shitty to be allowed to come to the warehouse rave—and of course the most urgent issue of our generation, white dreads—anarchists are not on the same page about nudity, e.g. when and where it is appropriate, when and where it is not.

Can I share with you, though, that I regret it? That I didn’t live out that other timeline, where events played out exactly the same way, but I was more fully the anti-civ give-no-fucks and (provided the correct ambient conditions) fully naked queerdo I am at heart.

In this alternate history, the mêlée still breaks out a little bit later, but this time, my scandalous exposed penis, and any other nudity that my own had inspired up to then, is part of the reason why. I would probably still hang back from the action, maybe even a bit further back—but well-impressed by the aforementioned naked go-getter with the covid mask, and knowing that the cops wouldn’t be around for a while at least, I might have been able to talk myself down from putting on clothes too quickly. Things necessarily get more speculative when we think about buddy returning with the cops, but never mind that. Even thirty more minutes of not wearing clothes, which would have weighed me down and made me sweat, would have made a sweet afternoon even sweeter. To be as naked as I (often) want to be—not while I was writing a reportback in the safe space of my nudity-optional anarchist household, but while adjacent to anarchist history’s unfolding in dangerous outdoor space, in a moment that would matter to me later and to other people later—would have been a special treat indeed.

I had, by Sunday, heard about trans girls’ place in the holy war—one between insurgent but frightened right-wing Christianity and its allies, on the one hand, and between, well, us, which is to say queers and anarchists and perhaps adherents of an altogether different, necessarily antagonistic “religion”. The spiritual stuff was heady and I’m not sure I buy it. But I saw that big smile on the one whose face was turned to me, like Baphomet with breasts and transfemme cock, glowing in the Sun and looking happy and in danger and being normal. It was beautiful, but something that our enemies would wish to snuff out, to make ontologically impossible and physically unrealizable; and something that trans-inclusive blue America still treats as terribly excessive, a violation of a norm that needs regulating. The logic in the dominant culture is that exposed penises are antennae radiating psychic violence, that women must be at all times presentable, and that transness is pitiable when it isn’t pathological. Simply by existing, the nude comrade Baphomète-in-Chicago, radiant by the water, nullified that culture in that moment, at that location. (Sorry for turning you into a metaphor, sister! Usually I’d ask for your consent for that kind of thing, but I don’t know who you are.)

Now, of course, I’ve turned it up a notch or two from how I really feel. One of the takeaways from the convergence is that fags are dramatic, so I’m playing my part. Like the Suck Cock Not Covid cohort, the ungrateful hyenas, Flower Bomb, and the crypto-Maoists, I have an agenda.

In the little attention economy of the geographically dispersed Bash Back! network and its supporters—now overlapping with many North American anarchist scenes, from at least Montréal in the northeast to the Bay Area in the southwest, from Pacific Northwest towns and cities to denizens of the Weelaunee Forest—it seems like the best move is ALWAYS to turn up the emotional pitch. Use the word “eugenics” in your graff. Lift the cut locs above your head and shout “And I’d fucking do it again, bitch!” Ask a presenter if they are “even an anarchist” for not wearing a mask. I don’t know what the anarcho-nudist equivalent is, but I guess I could argue that jumping into the lake with clothes on is cowardice; that there should have been ostentatious public nudity from day one (what if even three or four people were naked during Flower Bomb’s workshop in the cemetery across the street from the venue when that guy came over and asked about shutting it down?); that privacy is basically a fake idea and really only the concern of liberals with generally vermin-free fixed addresses; that radlibs are at least twice as tolerable when they are nudists; that a lot less energy should be spent worrying about saying the right thing and more priority given to making sure that everyone’s junk is getting enough fresh air; and that this is, bar none, THE THING that everyone needs to talk about. (Civil war in ‘24? Never heard of her!)

There is no time like the present, with that weekend in September still fresh in our minds and rumours of regional convergences in circulation, to get nudism on the priority list and nudity on the dance floor.

I want to think of Bash Back! as harbingers of something better than this world. Additionally, I get the impression that, in theory if not in practice, a lot of us are ready (if not eager) to see more of our friends get as naked as they want to be, when they want to be, where they want to be. By no means do I think this is actually more important than, like, anything else. If anything, compared to a Serious Issue (let us gravely bow our heads and Think on Them), I would acknowledge nudism as, like, maybe not quite as important. But we had orgies, we had games, we had squats, we had expropriated cans of caffeinated fizzy beverage. In other words, we had good shit, and I think it’s fair for us to want even more.

It’s apparent enough that most of what happened in Chicago in September was at the behest of a core group of only seven organizers who taxed themselves to the very limits—and despite the fuck-ups (do you know that 17 trainhopping teenagers starved to death because there was no food on the Monday?), I think things were pretty good, overall. But, improving the conditions of our lives (which includes relieving as many people as we can in the overlapping scenes of our subculture of their wretched anxieties, their most Victorian of sensibilities, and their dead weight of cotton-polyester blend) not only makes us less alienated, and more dangerous as a result, it’s also more or less what all of this is supposed to be about. You don’t have to be an egoist or whatever to include yourself in the category of what you are fighting for. Thinking through how to expand the option of nudity for participants at our events, and navigate competing interests and preoccupations in our messy dramatic camp with (and hey, this is just me) as little violence and suffering as possible, is of a piece with other problems like how to make our parties cooler, how to make our drugs safer, how to distribute hormones for as cheap as free, how to turn down the notch a bit on shrill and outraged while turning it up on self-confident and slutty.

Anyway, personally speaking, I’m ready for some new kinds of drama: whether white nudity is allowed on Stolen Native Land; just what level of FUCKED UP it is when someone unconsensually inhales unfiltered pit stink from the biggest naked oogle in the room; bitching out the organizers because they didn’t prioritize shower facilities in their event planning. I think—to use the watchword coming out of Chicago—it would be generative.

Down with civ. Shed the armour. For anarchy, experimentation, and freedom in all domains.

Getting, finally, into Chapter 2 of the text we can begin to see Deleuze discuss some of the more controversial language in Nietzschian texts, specifically language around concepts like superiority and inferiority, and how the implications of that language are very much opposed to those often derived by fascist readers of Nietzsche. Within this discussion we can start to see how, rather than marking some sort of inherent concept of dominance or some inherent hierarchy, as people like Richard Spencer would have it, the concepts of inferiority is mapped onto the concept of reaction, which is then mapped onto a broader concept of power to act.

• Consciousness is presented unpretentiously. By that, I mean that consciousness for Nietzsche is partial, limited, unable to grasp what is outside of consciousness. The Aristotelian paradigm is grounded in counsciousness that is separate from the world yet, from a position of non-knowledge, can somehow come to understand Truth of all things through conceptual thought alone. In rejecting this absurdity, Nietzsche enshrines this separation between consciousness and the world as central to the limits of consciousness. As such, consciousness can then re-enter the world as something formed by and impacted by the world.

• As such, consciousness becomes inherently related to the body. Bodies in Nietzsche are not physical mediums. Rather, the body is typified by its insertion into the world, and, as a result, is directly a product of relations of forces, framed through the language of superior (more forceful) and inferior (less forceful) forces. In other words, consciousness is simultaneously limited to itself (it cannot think anything outside of itself, can't think the actual world), as well as formed through that which occurs outside of itself (in and of the world).

“What defines a body is this relation between dominant and dominmated forces. Every relationship of forces constitutes a body- whether it is chemical, biological, social, or political. Any two forces being unequal, constitute a body as soon as they enter into relationship” (40).

This constitutes the body, not as a solid singularity that persists across time, but as an arbitrary outcome of the shifting dynamics of plural forces coming into relation. The body here names this relation, that which is formed by the collision of the exteriorization of power or activity, its propelling into the world. Body here does not just name something like the human body, though the term does apply here. Rather, body is a term that marks a relation between multiple forces, with the body itself being the point of convergence, the relation. These relations of force with force are discussed as active (doiminant) and reactive (dominated) forces, with the difference in qualities (quantity here is a quality, an element of a thing) being referred to as hierarchy.

• These “inferior” forces are not subsumed into “superior” forces; namely a dynamic of activity does not get eliminated simply due to a differential of force, but remains within the moment, as an element. The quality of “inferiority” or “superiority” is not some sort of declaration of inherent domaination (as really bad readers of Nietzsche like Richard Spencer would have one think), but is, rather, a descriptive property relating to a relationship of force. The concept of some sort of inherent nature, as bad readers of Nietzsche claim he is asserting, are, sort of like the individual in Stirner, static categories which may name some sort of dynamic, but which can never define, subsume, or limit that dynamic in itself. Force is always a conflictual relationship, and as such, it is a dynamic that constructs contingency and the particilarity of force in a moment, and not something that exists independent of force due to its independence from time (all universal categories are “timeless, namely outside of the world, metaphysical).

“Inferior” forces are defined not by some inherent deficiency, but purely in relation to a more acute force or a force of greater magnitude, and does nothing but name that imbalance without any sort of pejorative or qualitative assertion about the categories themselves. “Inferior” forces are reactive forces and function based on operating within the bounds of regulation, or externally imposed limits that they cannot overcome. The constellation of regulation defines the “inferior” force as part of a body (defined as a collection defined by an organizing logic). The body, as an organizational logic and force, is both a product of collection and a force that shapes the relation of “inferior” forces within the body without defining what those forces are. It is this organization of a unified singular body that precedes all concepts of the “self” for example.

• Forces are traditionally discussed through a discourse on quantity, which is a quality of force (an element of the force but not the defining element). The framing of force through the concept of quality allows us to address a core conceptual issue, how we think relationality. For a relation to exist a commonality must be present to provide terms for that relation. In qualitative analysis comparison becomes impossible and commonality absent due to both the arbitrariness of qualitative analysis, as well as the positionality of qualitative analysis in the constantly shifting moment. This leads to two implications. Firstly, quantity becomes a point of convergence, but only to the degree that quantity becomes inseparable from the difference in quantity in relation; it is inconceivable without comparison. Even in simple quantities, like 2, we are positing an organizing logic that allows us to group things together through asserted commonality.

Secondly, if forces are within qualities and quantities are an element of quality, then quantity is taken into account as a property of quality and not independent from quality. This prevents the isolation of quantity from all other elements, and inserts it as an element of force among other elements. Quantities, as a result, never become simplified into some sort of equality of quantity; these quantities themselves are qualities of something else, and have their own qualities, rendering them particular and not common. As such, quantity and quality enter into a relation where neither is simply reducible to one another, but necessarily exist coimmanently.

• Chance names the relation of all forces to one another. When forces come into collision the result is not confined to a calculus limited to the immediate forces in conflict. Rather, forces enter into conflict within a medium of action (the moment) that, in itself, is constructed of various forces in conflict, and both shape and are shaped by that medium. As such, some sort of definitive narrative on causation, some sort of understanding of “strategy” in the abstract, some discourse on political determinism (historical materialism), are impossible and rely on the reduction of conflict to such a degree as to cease speaking of dynamics in conflict, and retreat into speaking of abstract static objects. This dynamic foundation to force and conflict not only prevents any sort of singular definitive political narrative from emerging (especially in relation to some future utopian fiction) but it also grounds the world, occurrences, time itself, in chance and contingency reaulting from a collision of forces and bodies.

• Force only exists in relation to other forces, and not independent of that conflict, and only to the degree that there is a differential of force, with the different quantities of force being qualitative differences; if force exists in relation to conflict, and force is equivalent between entities, then there is no conflict and thus no force. “This is what the will to power is; the genealogical element of force, both differential and genetic. The will to power is the element from which derive both the quantitative difference of related forces and the quality that devolves into each force in this relation. The will to power here reveals its nature as the principle of the synthesis of forces” (50)“.

So, far from the way that this concept is read when appropriated by authoritarians, the will to power names the differential quantity of force in relation to other forces; it is the basis of dynamic relationality. It does not exist separate from forces, and is bound up in the dynamics of conflict and flux that necessarily result from force, activity, life itself. If we allow for the will to power to be separated from the materiality of force (and thus the impossibility of unity, let alone something like a nation) then it is reduced to a metaphysical and moral object, which is what occurs in many forms of vitalism for example. In this reading force is always bound up with conflict, which is always something that occurs in moments that are, in themselves, defined by that dynamic of conflict. This return of the dynamics of conflict from past moments, which constructs the present, is what is referred to as the eternal return, a concept that Deleuze returns to at length later, and I would argue the most critical concept in the text.

• To then argue for a systematization of forces is to posit a unity across both time and space, eliminating force itself, and positing a static immobile world of peace (the absence of conflict). Within Nietzschian language the concept of active force corresponds to the concept of “superior” forces, but these are not qualities that can be posited in some general, universal sense, but are always within and in relation to force, and thus the moment. As such, the question of whether a force is active or reactive is not reducible to a comparison of forces within some sort of static system, which posits the temporal singularity of both force and “systems”. Rather, the determination of whether forces are active or reactive is fundamentally grounded in the moment of conflict itself.

It is even possible for reactive forces to triumph over active forces, and in fact this is what often occurs. Any time activity is mobilized to preserve some sort of systemic limitation, inherent prohibition, some sort of limitation not grounded in the moment, this force is operating reactively. What is law or policing except this? We can see this in Hobbes, where the state is not posited as an object in itself, with an independent existence, but is only framed as a reactionary response to the anarchic, which is what Hobbes refers to as the “state of nature”. “Indeed, everything which separates a force is reactive as is the state of a force separated from what it can do. Every force which goes to the limit of its power is, on the contrary, active” (58-59).

This reactionary triumph constructs the core of modern positivism (we can also refer to this as prefiguration or utopianism). Within this framework conceptual understandings are elevated to the position of existential conditions of possibility for existence. For example, in Aristotle the existence of universal truth is asserted, which then means that all thought exists only in relation to this universal truth which is, paradoxically, not known (how we go from not knowing to knowing is an irresolvable issue at the core of all truth narratives). The framework is removed from materiality, and exists independent form the world and in a completely static form across time, elevating it to a metaphysical position that is capable of being above action and judging action. All morality is structured this way.

• The will to power functions as the differential element of the relation of force, and must manifest only within that relation. “The relationship between forces in each case is determined to the extent that each force is affected by the other, inferior or superior, forces. It follows that will to power is manifested as a capacity to be affected” (62). This affection, the change in an entity as a result of something outside, occurs in all relations of force, for all forces involved, which makes all forces fundamentally dynamic and all relations of force momentary. The will to power, therefore, is not about some ability to maintain some rigid form and use that to inscribe the totality of life to justify some relation of domination, as fascist “readers” of Nietzsche would baselessly assert. Rather, the will to power is the ability to operate within possibility, as a formlessness, and to resist efforts to concretize that possibility, limit it, or define it. It is this capacity to be affected, to be changed and modified dynamically, that typifies a type of power that is active, that destroys governmentality, that renders things ungovernable as a power to become or of a possibility unbounded.

• The actualization of becoming, as opposed to the possibility of becoming, functions as a reactive power, as a concretization of boundless possibility in a specific form, as opposed to any other possible form. For example, in any moment one has an infinite ability to act, on a formal level, as long as the universe is not deterministic. Yet, when we act we choose one possibility in lieu of others, eliminating those possibilities, and binding activity to the act of becoming. This interplay between the imposition of concretization and the destruction of limits in the possibility of force in action, functions as the core of the dynamic of force. This reactiveness of becoming is a result of the ways that becoming has been tied to some concept of being; that becoming itself, at any given moment, is what defines an existence in its totality. At the same time, the becoming-reactive of forces, in itself, generates new possibilities, new active forces, simply by the ability of force to effect and affect.

In the structuring of active force the destruction of the limitations imposed on possibility is viewed as an affirming force, and all affirming forces are active. It affirms by asserting a space in which an entity exists in a particular way, with all of the possibilities in the moment, but only to the degree that necessary limits are destroyed to allow for that possibility to emerge. This is not an either/or calculation, either concretization or possibility, but is a necessary interplay at the core of the very construction of any act (we choose one of an infinite number of possibilities, while at the same time creating possibility through the contingent impacts of the act). The task is not to eliminate concretization, which would result in some sort of formless existence; Stirner points this out in his argument against using absolute freedom as a sort of conceptual ideal. Rather, the task becomes the prevention of the emergence of policing, or the attempt to inherently limit all acts based on conceptual definitions of life and a logistics of force; forces that would prevent possibilities from emerging.

• The point in which the reactive becomes the active is termed active nihilism, or the point where the will to nothingness (reactive force) becomes related to the eternal return. “Only the eternal return can complete nihilism because it makes a negation a negation of reactive forces themselves. By and in the eternal return nihilism no longer expresses itself as the conservation and victory of the weak but as their destruction; their self-destruction” (70)(weakness here is a term to identify the inability to overcome external limitation). This is an active destruction of the reactive, without then positing a new framework of limitation, as would occur in political modernism and all forms of positivism.

We will come back to the concept of the eternal return later, in future notes, but for now, it marks the return of the dynamics of the past in the construction of the present. For now, it is merely important as a source of tension. On one hand there is this return of the past, of the effects of the dynamics of the past, and the present exists as a highly particularized expression of the effects of everything that has ever happened ever. At the same time the moment of action is a moment of possibilities, where the past terminates in the present, and the present has its own effects which then contribute to the construction of other moments. There are a lot of implications to this, but the most relevant for this discussion is the discourse on the moment of imposition of limitation.

If limitations are only imposed in the moment in which the eternal return constructs the moment, then all limitations are in themselves that which operate within that moment as well. This means that any conceptual limitations are, in themselves, not able to function without the materiality of policing within the moment itself. As such, conflict is not able to be a theory of conflict in general, or, at its most absurd, some sort of theory of “revolution” or “history”; it is only relevant in its operationality in the present, making this act of destruction material in itself.

That's 7pm EST 4pm pacific

the usual

“In the clear, critical light of day, illusory administrators whisper of our need for institutions, and all institutions are political, and all politics is correctional, so it seems we need correctional institutions in the common, settling it, correcting us. But we won’t stand corrected. Moreover, incorrect as we are there’s nothing wrong with us. We don’t want to be correct and we won’t be corrected.”

Three pieces on neurodivergence, queerness, and anarchy:

1. “Max Stirners Embodied Egoism | From Self-Empowerment to Neuro-Anarchism” [Video Conference in Prague, February 24th 2018]

2. “What is neuroqueer? | Intro from “Neuroqueer Heresies” by Nick Walker”

3. “Neuroqueerness as Fugitive Practice | Against the grain of Applied Behavioral Analysis”

[CONTENT WARNING]: This compilation contains mentions of applied behavioral analysis, ableism, institutionalization, torture, murder, and death.

1. Max Stirners Embodied Egoism | From Self-Empowerment to Neuro-Anarchism” [Video Conference in Prague, February 24th 2018]

2. What is neuroqueer? | Intro from “Neuroqueer Heresies” by Nick Walker

What is neuroqueer (or neuroqueerness, or neuroqueering)?

“I should first of all acknowledge that any effort to establish an “authoritative” definition of neuroqueer is in some sense inherently doomed and ridiculous, simply because the sort of people who [engage] in neuroqueering tend to be the sort of people who delight in subverting definitions, concepts, and authority. That said, the [outline] that follows is the closest thing to an “authoritative” definition as is ever likely to exist.” – Nick Walker (She/Her)

Neuroqueer was originally conceived as a verb: neuroqueering as the practice of queering (subverting, defying, disrupting, liberating oneself from) neuronormativity and heteronormativity simultaneously. It was an extension of the way queer is used as a verb in Queer Theory; expanding the Queer Theory conceptualization of queering to encompass the queering of neurocognitive norms as well as gender norms – and, in the process, examining how socially-imposed neuronormativity & socially-imposed heteronormativity were entwined with one another, and how the queering of either of those two forms of normativity entwined with (and blended into) the queering of the other.

So neuroqueer was a verb first, and then, like its root word queer, it was also an adjective. As a verb, it refers to a broad range of interrelated practices. As an adjective, it describes things that are associated with those practices or that result from those practices.

One can neuroqueer, and one can be neuroqueer. A neuroqueer individual is any individual whose selfhood, gender performance, and/or neurocognitive style have in some way been shaped by their engagement in practices of neuroqueering, regardless of what gender, sexual orientation, or style of neurocognitive functioning they may have been born with.

Or, to put it more concisely (but perhaps more confusingly): you’re neuroqueer if you neuroqueer.

So what does it mean to neuroqueer, as a verb? What are the various practices that fall within this [outline] of neuroqueering?:

• Being both neurodivergent and queer, with some degree of awareness and/or active exploration around how these two aspects of one’s being entwine and interact (or are, perhaps, mutually constitutive and inseparable).

• Embodying and expressing one’s neurodivergence in ways that also queer one’s performance of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and/or other aspects of one’s identity.

• Engaging in practices intended to undo and subvert one’s own cultural conditioning and one’s ingrained habits of neuronormative and heteronormative performance, with the aim of reclaiming one’s capacity to give more full expression to one’s uniquely weird potentials and inclinations.

• Engaging in the queering of one’s own neurocognitive processes (and one’s outward embodiment and expression of those processes) by intentionally altering them in ways that create significant and lasting increase in one’s divergence from prevailing cultural standards of neuronormativity and heteronormativity.

• Approaching, embodying, and/or experiencing one’s neurodivergence as a form of queerness.

• Producing literature, art, and/or other artifacts that foreground neuroqueer experiences, perspectives, voices etc.

• Producing critical responses to literature and/or other cultural artifacts, focusing on intentional or unintentional characterizations of neuroqueerness and how those characterizations illuminate and/or are illuminated by actual neuroqueer lives and experiences.

So there you have it, from the people who brought about the term. This definition is, again, not an authoritative “last word” on the subject, because that would be a silly thing to attempt. Rather, I hope this will be taken as a broad working outline from which further theory, practice, and play will proceed.

3. Neuroqueerness as Fugitive Practice: Against the grain of Applied Behavioral Analysis

In its relatively short lifespan, applied behavioral analysis—the shaping of human [and non-human] behavior through operant conditioning—has risen to a state of eminence in the teaching and treatment of autistic children. This article reads the archive of behaviorist scholarship with and against the grain of ABA to two ends. First, I argue that behaviorism is a prevailing form of biophilanthropy: a form of biopolitics in which the technologies of control are rebranded as philanthropic ventures. I use biopolitics to demonstrate how inclusion into the capitalist society marks some (the includable) for life, some (the nonincludable) for death, and some for violence aimed at recuperating the normative future.

I use a case study from the corpus of behaviorist scholarship, “Effects of Punishment Procedures on the Self-Stimulatory Behavior of an Autistic Child,” to demonstrate how futurity is leveraged to seduce the teacher into the biopolitical project. My second use of this archive is to engage in a critical rereading of the text, locating moments of embodied resistance by the subject of the experiment. I make critical connections between the overlooked resistances within the archive of behaviorism and place these fugitive practices in continuity with contemporary notions of “neuroqueering” theorized by autistic scholars and activists.

INTRO:

Applied behavioral analysis (ABA) is a leading form of therapy and pedagogical method for autistic students in the United States. ABA is the practical arm of behaviorism science, which uses operant conditioning—contingent reinforcement and punishment— to shape behavior. ABA emerged as a scientific subfield in the 1960s as B. H. Skinner and his contemporaries tested their hypotheses about the experimental control of behavior on live subjects—including animals, children, and the disabled. In roughly 50 years, ABA has evolved from Skinner’s early experimentation to a full-fledged institution. As children are brought under the analytic lens of ABA, their future capacity for labor and social participation are evaluated. At a young age, those deemed to be lacking the potential for inclusion become marked for violence (intensive intervention and punishment) or displacement (institutionalization or incarceration), in the name of restoring the child’s threatened future.

I begin with two assertions: First, ABA is a technology of control that seeks to manage “unruly bodies”. Second, both disability and childhood contain an inherent queerness and precarious relationship to futurity, marking autistic or otherwise neurodivergent children as doubly-queer. I draw on two bodies of literature: behaviorist studies identifying queer behaviors in autistic children (Stimulations i.e “stimming”), and queer theory scholarship theorizing queerness as inherent in childhood itself. I argue that ABA serves the state in the management of embodied difference, through restoring normalcy. Specifically, I use gender studies scholar Kyla Schuller’s concept of biophilanthropy to demonstrate how biopolitical technologies are rebranded as a philanthropic venture.

Finally, I theorize resistance through an emergent concept of neuroqueer(ness). Neuroqueer(ness) represents an array of relationships between neurology and queerness including being both neurodivergent and queer, actively choosing to embody one’s neurodivergence, or queering ones cognitive processes. Queering, or the act of purposeful engagement with the non-normative, is a form of political disruption, an exercise in radical visibility, and a subversion of state control. I argue that neuroqueering can act as a fugitive practice that resists discourses of rights/recognition shaped by the neoliberal principles of individual freedom, rationality, and capitalist production.

Fugitivity, or a fugitive practice, is one that occludes capture; that exists outside of the formal structures of the state; invoking transience and elements of criminality). Essentially, I am interested in resistance in the most impossible of situations—the everyday fugitivity of children who occupy seclusion rooms, clinics, segregated special education classrooms, prisons, etc.

I purposefully contrast neuroqueering with the dominant mode of disability rights activism: advocacy for increased rights, compliance with disability law, and oversight. To do so, I use a case study from the journal Analysis and Intervention in Developmental Disabilities (Friman et al., 1984), focusing on how the subject of the intervention, Bob, is emblematic of both biopolitical discipline directed toward the queer body, and a fugitive practice of neuroqueering. I demonstrate how rereading the archive of behaviorism against the grain (Benjamin, 1940/ 2006) can provide evidence of liberatory praxis. I specifically look for moments of neuroqueerness as fugitive struggle within the archive of behaviorism, a body of work that claims to solve the problems of unruly bodies and minds.

BACKGROUND:

Behaviorism emerged as a distinct field of scientific inquiry in the mid-20th century. In the tradition of Watson and Pavlov, B. H. Skinner began exploring motivation through animal experimentation, training animals such as pigeons to perform simple tasks through conditional reinforcement and punishment. In 1958, Skinner and other early behaviorists established the first journal for behaviorist research, “The Journal for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior” (JEAB). With the establishment of the JAEB in 1958 and the Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis in 1968, the scope of behaviorism quickly expanded from small-scale animal experiments to eradicating perceived social maladies through operant conditioning. Early behaviorists donned a philanthropic role, claiming that their new science had tremendous potential to rehabilitate those previously thought to be irredeemable and to solve complex social problems.

Skinner’s firm rejection of the mentalism of Freudian psychoanalysis and his commitment to extreme positivism was a departure from psychoanalysis, as well as classical conditioning, and his theories drew wide criticism (Breger & McGaugh, 1965; Chomsky, 1959). Despite criticism, behaviorism has risen from a niche, experimental science to a highly professionalized field that has established preeminence in the treatment and education of disabled children. There is a particularly well-established connection between behaviorism and schooling for autistic children largely due to claims from the ABA industry being the only evidence-based therapy for autism (Keenan et al., 2015, p. 123). One of the defining features of early behaviorist scholarship was an interest in eradicating difference through the use of aversives. Aversive is a behaviorist term for a variety of negative consequences, such as electroshock, ingesting unpalatable substances, and physical restraint or seclusion (Moore & Bailey, 1973; Sidman, 1958). Although ABA, as a field, has shifted toward the use of positive reinforce- ment, “restrictive interventions” and variety of neologisms for punishment such as “over-correction” are still part of the practice of ABA, and current research on aversives continues to be published (Lydon, Healy, Moran, & Foody, 2015, p. 470–484).

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:

This article uses biopolitics as a theoretical frame. Biopolitics, as defined by Foucault, has two interdependent features: the increased surveillance, discipline and control of the individual body; and regulatory control—governmentality—through which society is oriented toward economic production (Foucault, 2007). In US public schools, the school is tasked with the making of proper citizens and securing national futures through discipline and compliance (albeit sometimes masquerading as classroom management or positive behavior supports; Acevedo, 2018; Ball & Olmedo, 2013). Scholars in educational studies have explored the ways schooling reproduces hegemonic cultural norms and how students are socialized for a future congruent with White, heterosexual, middle-class values and embodiments (Anyon, 1980; Lugg, 2003; Piro, 2008). The future child, or rather the fantasy of the future adult, one that is a willing and productive addition to a liberal capitalism, functions to continuously orient the teacher to the not-yet-arrived. The specter of the imagined future adult haunts the extant child who is always in tension between the present version and their potential.

The teacher/therapist is thus engaged in what gender studies scholar Kyla Schuller terms biophilanthrophy, a “mode of incremental life” in which “racialized youth were gradually made to live and enter the capitalist economy” (Schuller, 2017, p. 21). Schuller (2017) argues that biophilanthropy “work[s] within institutions of discipline such as charities, schools, churches, prisons, orphanages and domestic homes, with the larger goal of creating useful cohorts of workers to further the accumulation of labor, power and wealth” (p.162). ABA is particularly exemplary of biophilanthropy because of its claim to rehabilitate its subjects, and to “make live” what once was set to be left to die (Foucault, 2003, p.241). Behaviorism emerged as a disciplinary technology of inclusion and momentous form of biophilanthropy in the 20th century. A successful application of the science of behaviorism allows for the recipient to be made includable in liberal capitalist society—and thus allows for any of the inherent violences contained within to be considered necessary, a preferable alternative to social (or literal) death.

CASE STUDY:

To demonstrate how ABA disciplines the disabled body through biophilanthropy, I turn to the following case study from the Analysis and Intervention in Developmental Disabilities titled “Effects of Punishment Procedures on the Self-Stimulatory Behavior of an Autistic Child,” (Friman et al., 1984). The case study was selected for several reasons. First, current critical scholarship on ABA has focused primarily on Ivar Lovaas, a polemical figure most famous for his work at UCLA’s Young Autism Project and his infamous text Teaching Developmentally Disabled Children: The Me Book (Douglas et al., 2019; Gibson & Douglas, 2018). This text is often cited by anti-ABA activists on account of its unabashed ableist rhetoric and unapologetic endorsement of physical punishment (Anonymous, 2015). However, I resist singling out Lovaas, who is often misattributed as being the first to apply the science of behaviorism to the disabled. More accurately, Lovaas was one of many behaviorists experimenting on the disabled, a population of immediate interest to the emergent field. Second, the case study is relative chronological median in the history of ABA. This demonstrates both the past and future of the field. Friman was trained during the early development of the field yet is still research-active and continues to publish and present widely.

The subsequent abstract describes a three-variable experiment, with three separate interventions arranged as a comparison. The behaviors targeted were “hand-touching,” defined operationally as “whenever any part of one hand made contact with any part of the other hand in an apparently non-functional manner” (Friman et al., 1984, p. 42). The function of the experiment was to determine which of three punishments would be the most effective in lowering the rate of hand-touching. The study’s abstract reads:

Consulting psychologists evaluated the application of several aversive treatment methods for a self-stimulatory behavior exhibited by a severely retarded l l-year-old male. Three punishment procedures—the contingent applications of watermist (sic), lemon juice, and vinegar—were evaluated using a reversal design. Substantial reductions occurred for self-stimulatory hand-touching following the application of each procedure; low rates were maintained using water-mist during sessions conducted by group home staff members across a 6-month follow-up. The watermist procedure was as effective as lemon juice or vinegar, presented less physical threat to the client, and was preferred by the staff. (Friman et al., 1984, p. 39)

Behaviorist science is focused on observable change in the topography of an operationally defined behavior. A behavior targeted for intervention is first defined, and baseline data is collected on the rate of the behavior with no intervention. Then, intervention is planned and carried out. Data is collected on the rate of the behavior during and after intervention. In the first condition, each instance of hand-touching was responded to by misting Bob in the face with water using a trigger-type squeeze bottle. In the second condition, similar to the water mist condition, each instance of hand-touching was responded to by squirting 5–10cc of lemon juice into Bob’s mouth using a plastic liquid dispenser. The third condition was the same as the second, except that table vinegar replaced the lemon juice. This intervention was deemed necessary by the researchers and staff members because “numerous strategies to reduce Bob’s high rate self-stimulation had been unsuccessfully employed previously by the group home staff. These included differential reinforcement, time-out, hand-slapping, overcorrection and 2- and 4-point restraints” (Friman et al., 1984, p. 41). Although the researchers and staff mem- bers objected to Bob’s hand-touching, it was not inherently harmful to him or to others.

DISCUSSION:

“Queer Futures”

In this case study, the researchers indicate that they chose Bob’s self-stimulatory hand-touching behaviors because they “could lead to more bizarre forms of self-stimulation” (Friman et al., 1984, p. 41). Bob’s body is described as potentially “bizarre,” signaling a future threatened by the queerness of his body. The threat of “more bizarre forms of self-stimulation” requires the teacher to reorient Bob toward a future as a productive laborer. Resisting this charge could threaten the teacher’s own claims to life, livelihood, employment, etc. I draw this connection to resist reifying a binary between teacher and student. Rather, within a biophilanthropic regime, both teacher and student are disciplined and surveilled. To reject this enterprise is to destabilize claims to humanity, for both researcher and researched.

A requisite to be included in the biopolitical sense is the desire for the heterosexual family unit, i.e., the familial relation favored by the capitalist economy. Children occupy a liminal space where their potential as heterosexual adults is cultivated religiously; the child is also constructed as asexual, without desire, and innocent. The child who resists the aggressive socialization of the schemes of childhood – who is bizarre – amplifies tensions around children, autonomy, and raising proper citizens. Queer theory has offered insight into the ways children’s sexualities are policed and oriented toward heterosexual futurity. In The Queer Child: Growing Sideways in the 20th Century, queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton troubles the notion of child as void of sexuality, positioning the queer child as occupying a space of altered temporality, growing toward a future that is already defined as socially illegible. Stockton writes:

Anglo-American cultures, over several centuries, thinking that the child can be a carefully controlled embodiment of non-complication (increasingly protected from labor, sex, and painful understanding), the child has gotten thick with complication. Even as idea. In fact, the very moves to free the child from density – to make it distant from adulthood – have only made it stranger, more fundamentally foreign, to adults. Innocence is queerer than we ever thought it could be.” (Stockton, 2009, p. 5)

The child’s innocence, that is, the psychological fantasy of the virtue of children, functions as a space where adult goals, motives, fears and anxieties can be projected – an uncanny set of object relations that feminist literary critic Lauren Berlant (2006) calls “cruel optimism”, p. 23 (Berlant, 2006). If the heterosexual child represents a dream, the queer child symbolizes death (Edelman, 2004). The overlap between the regulation of autistic bodies and the policing of gender and sexuality has been explored by education scholar Patty Douglas and social development studies scholar Margaret F. Gibson (2018) in “Disturbing Behaviors: Ole Ivar Lovaas and the Queer History of Autism Science.” The article explores Lovaas and his stu- dent George Rekers’s collaboration in The Feminine Boy Project, a grant-funded project that used the science of behaviorism to correct the behavior of “gender-disturbed children” and restore their chances at a heterosexual, gender-normative future. Gibson and Douglas aptly point to the “queer” history of autism science, and the way “The cruelty [of behaviorism] lies in how the measurements and interventions of this ‘optimism’ dehumanize, coerce, regulate, and do bodily violence to those deemed in need of a ‘cure,’ while recruiting and training others (teachers, parents, community members) to extend this pathologization, even at a cost to themselves” (Gibson & Douglas, 2018, p. 5). The queerness of childhood is a threat to the suspension of knowledge that creates a normative sense of growing towards a heterosexual future, and thereby requiring the intervention of the teacher, parent, therapist, etc.

“Righteous Death”

This case study illuminates how ABA is involved in the biopolitical project of managing difference; marking some bodies as worthy of life, some as worthy of death and some for recuperative violence with inclusion in mind. It also demonstrates the necropolitical mode of biophilanthropy. Necropolitics, as a departure from biopolitics, locates power as “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” – rather than the investment into life – to “make live” (Mbembe, 2003, p.14). Similarly, within Schuller’s conceptualization of biophilanthropy, redemption is predicated on a figural death, and the redemptive capacity of the enterprise is bestowed upon those who are doing the redeeming, who are described as “build[ing] up children originally marked for death in order to suspend them in exploitable life, enabling the nation to extract their vital energies for agrarian, domestic and reproductive labor” (Schuller, 2017, p. 165).

By constructing the autistic body as a threat to national futures, those responsible are absolved on their guilt and their abuses are reconstructed as an act of service. This is necessary to seduce the teacher into administering punishments. The participation of the teacher is necessary and their buy-in is carefully considered. Friman et al. demonstrate this in their discussion of aversives:

“Several problems confront consultants who advise teachers and other direct care personnel about what aversive treatment to employ once positive approaches have been ineffective. First, to comply with legal and ethical guidelines governing aversive procedures employed by human service programs, the least aversive yet most effective method should be identified and used. Second, the staff responsible for administration of treatment should be in agreement that aversive treatment is less harmful than no treatment at all. Third, the treatment should not be so unpleasant that those responsible for its administration on a daily basis would be reluctant to implement it consistently.” (Friman et al., 1984, p. 41)

The researchers are strategic in convincing the teacher that no treatment would be worse. This mobilizes what feminist scholar Sima Shakhsari calls the “politics of rightful killing” which she describes as “the rightful living dead,” a liminal space between necropolitcs and biopolitics in which one cannot be killed by anyone (certainly not by the illiberal states), but only – righteously – by the liberating states, in the name of rights, freedom, democracy, free market and global security” (Shakhsari, 2014, p. 104). The child’s queer body then is availed to righteous death at the hands of the protectorate of subject-citizens (therapists, teachers, etc.) for rebirth and potential inclusion into sovereign life.

The threat of social death is omnipresent and a compelling motivator. The teacher is confronted by the harsh truths of biophilanthropy: the alternative to making live (even through violence) is figural (or literal) death. Within the unrelenting conditions of biopower, the staff is made aware of what is lurking on the other side of the biopolitical vector – an effective strategy to solicit the buy-in of the staff. This theme has been explored by scholars in a variety of disciplines. In “The Political Language of the Helping Professions,” political theorist Murray Edelman (1974) describes the ways that the language around disability and the helping professions effectively defines the limitless potential for abuse and state-power that is unquestionably exercised in the name of “therapy” (Edelman, 1974, p. 297). Edelman argues that the construction of the “helping professions” extends state power and seeks to code the exercise of power as benevolent care, obscuring the more nefarious particulars such as control, abuse, and loss of autonomy that are inherent in this exercise (p. 300).

In a more contemporary example, disability studies scholar Ann McGuire (2016) also conceptualizes how the therapist’s violences are dressed as care work. In War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence (2017), McGuire describes how panic regarding bodies, normativity and deviance justifies filicide, or the murder of autistic children by their parents (pp. 1–3). She describes a rhetoric of autism kidnapping children (p. 144) and violence being normalized through parental desire to liberate children from autism (McGuire, 2016, p. 215). To be included requires the individual to be made includable, and for difference to be managed through the discipline of biophilanthropy.

“The Right to (be) Maim(ed)”

A schism has occurred in the field of special education between those invested in “curative violence” (Kim, 2017, p. 9), and those who wish to challenge medical models of disability. Scholars of inclusive education, for example, have contested how special education students are segregated from the mainstream classroom, and posit inclusion as a solution (Marshall & Goodall, 2015; Wilson, 2017). Within this discourse, the problems of special education have been framed as a debate about inclusion versus exclusion, and as a struggle for rights and recognition. However, using the case study of Bob, and the myriad other ABA studies that leverage recuperation as a precursor to inclusion, we can understand how the production of includable bodies vis-a-vis punishment and containment is a hallmark of contemporary biopower. Inclusion, therefore, exists in a recursive with exclusion. The right to be included contains within it a right to the disciplinary technologies of biophilanthropy.

The slipperiness of rights is explored robustly in queer studies scholar Jasbir Puar’s Right to Maim (2017). Puar demonstrates how the right to maim “is a right expressive of sovereign power that is linked to, but not the same as, ‘the right to kill’” (Puar, 2017, p. xviii). Complicating Mbembe’s necropolitics (2013), Puar contends that maiming is a means to extract value from populations who would otherwise be disposable, carving out a middle space between biopolitics and necropolitics. Puar calls for disability studies to contend with the disability caused by settler-colonial violence, and to think through how liberal models of disability enact state power and control. She demonstrates how disability rights discourses can act as an instrument of violence by expanding the purview of the state, under the guise of beneficence, while simultaneously debilitating segments of the population. Inclusion, or the project of inclusive education, demarcates who is includable and who is available to be maimed in the name of inclusion, fitting with Puar’s assertion that maiming is a means of extracting capital from an otherwise disposable population.

To demonstrate the ineffectiveness of rights-based intervention and the need for alternative theorizations of liberation, I turn to a policy document titled “The Right to Effective Behavioral Treatment,” published in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis in 1988 (Van Houten et al.,1988) which outlines the rights of disabled people to “access to the most effective treatments available.” The document states:

“It is equally unacceptable to expose an individual to a nonrestrictive intervention (or a series of such interventions) if assessment results or available research indicate that other procedures would be more effective. Indeed, a slow-acting but nonrestrictive procedure could be considered highly restrictive if prolonged treatment increases risk, significantly inhibits or prevents participation in needed training programs, delays entry into a more optimal social or living environment, or leads to adaptation and the eventual use of a more restrictive procedure.” (Van Houten et al., 1988, p. 283–284)

In this model, the child has a right to restrictive intervention, like punishment and the use of aversives. In fact, the time away from inclusion and more optimal living and social environments is used as a justification for more restrictive treatment. Rights are inverted to serve the biopolitical function of producing a population available to be maimed, with the always present but never arrived future as a discursive shield to the material and immaterial violence of the therapy space. Inclusion, or inclusive education, as neoliberal, rights-based intervention is constitutive of bodies available for maiming. Violence is justified as a means to an end, a temporary process of extinguishing what is queer about the autistic child, in a trajectory toward inclusion – the purported solution. I, therefore, propose an emergent strategy that runs counter to the established solution of inclusive education and disability rights. I do so through reading against the grain (Benjamin, 1940/2006) – looking for the moments of resistance within the archive and situating my protagonists in continuity with contemporary grass-roots tactics.

“Neuroqueer Resistance”

I return to the case study to offer a rereading of Bob’s actions as furtive resistance. I do so to link together resistant figures within the archive of ABA with contemporary autistic scholars and activists theorizing resistance outside of the discourse of rights, recognition, and inclusion. In returning to Bob, we can mark his bodily resistances in the following passage:

“The subject showed an intense reaction when both the lemon juice and the vinegar were delivered and his reactions were as much a deterrent to on-task behavior during training sessions as his self-stimulation. His reaction consisted of trunk-twisting, arm-flapping, and leg-extension as well as grimacing, spitting, coughing, screaming, and crying. He also would turn from the bottle when it touched his lips or bite the spout once inside his mouth. It was apparent that prolonged use of either lemon juice or vinegar could cause possible physical injury, due to either Bob’s violent reactions or the physical effort necessary to decrease his avoidance.” (Friman et al., 1984, p. 44)

Notice, Bob’s well-being, autonomy or an internal sense of ethics is not what constrains the violence. Rather, Bob’s “intense reactions” become a deterrent to the administrator of the punishment. The abandonment of harsher punishments is a direct result of Bob’s “trunk-twisting, arm-flapping, and leg-extension as well as grimacing, spitting, coughing, screaming, and crying” (Friman et al., 1984, p. 44). The researchers conclude that prolonged use of vinegar or lemon juice could cause injury. Although it is not explicitly stated, we can infer that injury to the staff member is the ultimate deterrent, as the “physical effort necessary to decrease his avoidance” (p. 44) is of concern to the researchers. The body, in this case, refuses to be disciplined and queers the experiment.

Disability studies scholar Carrie Sandahl describes queering as “[spinning] mainstream representations to reveal latent queer subtexts [or] deconstructing a representation’s heterosexism” (Sandahl, 2003, p. 37). Sandahl notes the parallels between queering and cripping, which she describes as “spin[ning] mainstream representations or practices to reveal ablebodied assumptions and exclusionary effects” (Sandahl, 2003, p. 37). Taking up queering, autistic activists and scholars such as Melanie Yergeau, Nick Walker, and Elizabeth ‘Ibby’ Grace theorize a form of queering focused on the radical visibility of neurodivergence, which they term neuroqueer(ness; Grace, 2013; Walker, 2015; Yergeau, 2017). Neuroqueer(ness) is a means of understanding ephemeral confrontations such as the struggle between Bob and researchers. Neuroqueer both is something someone does and something someone is.

Much like the praxis of cripping, neuroqueering does not represent a legible activist strategy, a policy program, or a cogent philosophy. Neuroqueering represents what is available to the incarcerated body in a materialist sense. Bob, in this case, has little available in terms of modes of resistance. The purposeful segregation of autistic youth from autistic adults forecloses the possibilities of durational and coalitional resistance practices in a traditional sense. Bob is under guardianship, surveilled, and subject to brutal punishment. Thus, Bob’s writhing, combative body is what is accessible to him. In effect, Bob’s body becomes a site of fugitive struggle. His sputtering, spiting, and biting make it so difficult for staff members to administer the punishment that the lemon juice and vinegar are abandoned. Bob’s unruly body produces effects of material significance for him. The body-mind (Price, 2015) of the autistic subject makes chaotic which is meant to be controlled, and dutifully exposes the cruelty, making the frontline worker work for their right to maim (Puar, 2017). Within a carceral space, such as the one in which Bob resides, resistances are corporeal and fleeting. However, Bob, and the many resistant figures within the archive of ABA scholarship, can be understood as in historical continuity with contemporary autistic activists envisioning fugitive practices and evidence of a neuroqueer tradition.

“The Productive Capacities of Flesh”

Although the field of ABA has attempted to distance itself from the overtly violent practices of early behaviorism, facilities utilizing aversive treatments like electroshock, such as the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts, have continued to operate. The Judge Rotenberg Center is a residential facility/day school that has been at the center of public controversy on account of its prolonged use of electric shock as punishment, specifically its use of a custom-designed device called the gradual electronic decelerator (GED). The GED device is carried by the student in a backpack and controlled by staff members, and delivers charges of up to 41 milliamps—10 times the amperage used in most stun-guns—to the student’s legs, arms, hands, feet, fingers, or torso via electrodes placed on their skin (Pilkington, 2018). Numerous targeted campaigns have been launched against the Judge Rotenberg Center, including #StoptheShock, a grassroots advocacy campaign lead by autistic activists and focused on bringing public attention to the human rights violations committed by the institution. The Judge Rotenberg Center operates within a biophilanthropic logic, by continuously arguing that without this treatment, their students would never be integrated into social life due to their severe behaviors.

In “Unexpected Spaces of Confinement: Aversive Technologies, Intellectual Disability and ‘Bare Life,’” Nirmala Erevelles and DL Adams (Adams & Erevelles, 2017, p. 348) conceptualize the Judge Rotenberg Center as a “camp” and “zone of indistinction between law and violence,” using Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of ‘bare life.” Agamben, an Italian philosopher influenced by Foucauldian biopolitics, argued that within spaces such as a camp (the concentration camp in Agamben’s primary example), the inhabitants are reduced to “bare life,” a biological substrate that is not conceived of as human or rights-bearing (Agamben, 1998, p. 11). Agamben uses homo sacer – a figure who exists in a banished state under Roman law and can be killed by anyone, without consequence—to describe the state of bare life, arguing that there is a binary between bio (political life)/and zoe (bare life). Erevelles and Adams use Agamben’s concept of the camp and the homo sacer, to theorize the violence of the Judge Rotenberg Center, thinking through how disabled bodies—racialized bodies—are subjected to inhumane treatment despite multiple law suits, first-person testimony from survivors, and continued advocacy efforts. Erevelles and Adams concede that rights-based interventions are ineffective within a camp, as those within the camp are not conceived of as rights-bearing. They further speak to need for “radical alternatives” and gesture to Alexander Weheliye, who exhorts readers to “recognize and refuse the discursive and material violence directed towards subjects confined to a ‘state of exception’ in these unexpected spaces of confinement where brutal punishment is meted out to those conceived of as zoe (bare life)” (as cited in Adams & Erevelles, 2017, p. 362).

Alexander Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human is a notable intervention in Agamben’s bio/zoe binary (1998). Weheliye (2014) offers a compelling challenge to biopolitics discourse that decenters the Western humanist concept of Man by exposing the racialized logics that render segments of the population as normatively bare under existing juridical systems. Building on the work of Black feminists like Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, and assemblage theorists like Puar, Weheliye introduces racializing assemblages as a means of understanding race as a set of political and social processes that discipline people into the “full humans, not-quite humans, and nonhumans” (Weheliye, 2014, p. 3). Drawing on Spillers’ “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (Spillers, 1987, p. 64), Weheliye deconstructs the writ of habeas corpus (you shall have the body) and posits habeas viscus (you shall have the flesh) as his contribution. He theorizes a politics and poetics of the flesh, imagining a political potentiality for those reduced to bare life, asking: “What ... might [it] mean to claim the monstrosity of the flesh as a site for freedom beyond the world of Man?” (Weheliye, 2014, p. 113). Weheliye’s work is generative in thinking through inclusion, as disabled students are required to prove their humanity through their proximity to neurotypicality, Whiteness, and legibility as Man, through compliance and performance of desired traits. Race and disability are co-constitutive, and equally participate in an exclusionary logic. To be granted habeas corpus—to have a body—requires personhood-as-property, a process that requires others to have flesh.

In contrast to Agamben, Weheliye (2014, p. 2) opens up political possibility for those reduced to flesh, by conceiving of “fleshy surplus” through which subjectivity (humanness) is co-constructed within and through violence. Weheliye explores the human born from political violence while at the same time not losing sight of the ways the law unevenly bestows humanity. Here the connection to neuroqueering is most salient: Being autistic—rather having an unruly, queer, autistic body—in these spaces negates personhood. The subject of behavioral experimentation is ren- dered nonhuman or not-quite-human. However, fleshiness has a capability for production, as evidenced by Bob.

Although Bob’s body has been racialized and disciplined into a nonjuridical subject within a camp, he is also able to produce material change through his fleshiness. Fugitive practices like neuroqueering and cripping intervene in neoliberal rights-based discourses by availing themselves to subjects enfleshed within contemporary biopolitical regimes. Both race and disability are mechanized to demarcate who is includable into political life, and who exists outside of its protections. A racializing assemblage is a political violence that acts hierarchically to position certain bodies as always harmful, always dangerous, always flesh. Similar to racializing assemblages, Schuller (2017) describes racialization as a set of social processes, stat- ing, “The racialized body was a disabled body (and vice-versa), deemed unfit for social life due to its reduced cognitive and corporeal capacities, which rendered in capable of self-constitution” (pp. 13–14). As such, the disabled body will never be served fully by the laws of Man. This is not to say that there are not moments of fleshy surplus within the edges of the law, as Bob demonstrates in this case study. This afterlife of the flesh invokes new possibil- ities and bodily imaginings outside of the realm of legible, rational resistance and agency and gestures to potentials for coalition between all who are disciplined within the current structure. Weheliye argues that the law can “bequeath or rescind ownership of the body” but it cannot “nullify the politics and poetics of the flesh found in the traditions of the oppressed” (Weheliye, 2014, pp. 136–137). I submit this rereading practice as an archive of a tradition of neuroqueering, as poetics and politics of the flesh.

CONCLUSION:

In bringing biophilanthropy to bear on educational practice, I provide a critique of rights-based interventions that neglect the slippages inherent in the venture of rights. I also trouble inclusive education as a panacea, noticing the ways inclusion is mobilized within a biopolitical regime. This is not to say that scholars of inclusive education are conceptually misguided, rather that the discourse of inclusion has been appropriated in unanticipated ways. And although most critical education scholars understand inclusion to mean the deconstruction of ableist spaces, the term has come to mean the production of includable bodies; what disability studies scholars David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder term “inclusionism” (Mitchell & Snyder, 2015, pp. 12–14). ABA is one biopolitical technology aimed at recuperating the future of the subject through corporeal violence and displacement, but other parallels exist in social work and psychology, as well as within the prison industrial complex. By marking the historical specificities of this particular technology, I map connections to other biophilanthropic ventures and provide a means to reread those archives for moments of resistance and corporeal rupture. This extends to the prison, the school, the clinic, the therapy practice—all endeavors that require an individual death for the promise of national future. In the context of educational research, this article calls for engagement with irrational, fugitive resistances that happen outside of the formal structures of education; practices that resist biophilanthropic narratives of top-down activism. By invoking fugitivity and flesh, we can understand liberation outside of the courtroom, the policy document, the inclusive classroom, situating resistance in the racialized/disabled body; considering what resistance means when the only liberation available is to bite the teacher.

One of our design goals with fringe is to have a lightweight daemon to run on the computers we already have with varying levels of connectivity. We will explore how to create arrangements for mirroring across similarly unreliable devices to increase availability overall, when that is a desirable property.

With fringe, you are anonymous by default, as much as we can manage. git demands a “name” and “email” by default and will not let you commit anything until you have provided something. When you create a fringe repo with fringe init or clone an existing repo with fringe clone, a project-local email and name are generated from random characters. You can fringe rotate to generate a new random email and name.

git will also leak your time zone by default which can be very revealing in some cases. Even without a time zone, dates and times can be revealing in other ways. fringe installs a hacky post-commit hook to set the date on every commit to 00:00 on January 1, 1970 for both the AuthorDate and the CommitDate. If you fringe log (alias for git log --format=fuller) you can see all the commit headers to make sure you didn't miss something.

To get started, you will need:

• tor command in your $PATH
• torsocks command in your $PATH (often ships with tor)
• git
• nodejs

Once you have the installation requirements, run this command to download the software:

torsocks git clone -o ewaste git://ewastevhn3dool3z7jilzvujshallrmitd6jcnr4jwgy6hriumkbzjad.onion/fringe

The -o ewaste is our way of de-emphasizing the origins of the software and its role as the “authoritative” version. Our future work will expand on this idea further.

The file cmd.js is self-contained so you can copy or symlink into your $PATH.

ln -s $PWD/fringe/cmd.js ~/.local/bin/fringe

Once you have the command, you can fringe init from the cloned git directory to initialize commit anonymization and the config for proxying through tor.

Then run fringe daemon in a terminal tab, screen, tmux, init script, or whatever and leave it running. Check out the readme in the git repo for fringe that you cloned earlier and type fringe to see a list of basic usage info.

If you didn't skim through the readme, here's a quick synopsis for how to share a local git repo with fringe so that anyone with tor can clone it.

First, get a list of your local hidden service addresses by running fringe onions. fringe will automatically create a hidden service address the first time it is set up.

Next, cd to a repo you want to share or create a new repo with fringe init then add some commits. If you choose an existing repo not created with fringe, be aware that the commits will contain the name, email, date, and timezone info that git saves by default.

Once you have selected a local repo to share and navigated to its directory, run fringe share ONION REPO_NAME with an ONION address from fringe onions and a REPO_NAME that you want to share this repo under (as git://ONION/REPO_NAME).

Once you have run fringe share ..., you can list all the repos you're sharing with fringe repos.

If you want someone else to be able to clone your repo, they can either run:

fringe clone git://ONION/REPO_NAME

if they have fringe or else they can run:

torsocks git clone git://ONION/REPO_NAME 

if they only have git and torsocks.

We invite you to take, steal, modify, take credit for, and generally make the software your own.

http://ewastevhn3dool3z7jilzvujshallrmitd6jcnr4jwgy6hriumkbzjad.onion/fringe

A large area of our focus is to produce and distribute original software, albeit in ways which also demonstrate our ideas and reflect our values. Our texts will elaborate ideas from the software and the software will embody ideas from our texts. Our intended audience is more technical than most anarchist publishing projects. There is often social overlap among technical and radical groups, but we find the opportunities for synthesis to be underexplored.

This project is critical of technological production generally, but we find ourselves in a world not of our design, already littered with technological artifacts waiting to be reprogrammed for some other purpose.

http://ewastevhn3dool3z7jilzvujshallrmitd6jcnr4jwgy6hriumkbzjad.onion/hello-world

We are cross-posting to https://chi.st (http://chistqvhpsuxxxgccn3a7lqze24idsatjmkcqqqawwosflduy4utfyqd.onion) for a slightly larger reach (but not too large) and a hybrid presence on the clearweb. Our software will only be distributed on the dark web, but we will show you how to set that up.

As of June 27, 2022, the “About Community” sidebar for the subreddit r/makenuditylegal reads as follows:

This page is for spreading the word that public nudity isn't sexual in nature, and is about expressing yourself without wearing clothing. This community hopes to change the minds of those that think being naked is about sex and make it legal in the near future, as America and surrounding areas are very negative about it. We aim to legalize public nudity in the U.S. and abroad. Please subscribe and spread the word :) Being naked is human, freeing, and society has a backwards view on it. Be free!

The subreddit presently has just over 3000 subscribers, which puts it far below the r/nudism subreddit with its 83,000+ subscribers as well as the more modest r/naturism subreddit with 17,000+ subscribers. It is a forum of ideas more than images, too, which is to its credit. There are many other ostensibly nudism-focused subreddits that have anywhere between one (1) and tens of thousands subscribers (for instance, r/nudists has ~46,000), but the posts on most these subreddits are overwhelmingly made up of photos, with very little in the way of links to news articles or to meaningful discussion (insofar as meaningful discussion is something that happens on Reddit).

The likes of r/makenuditylegal, r/nudism, r/naturism, and a very small number of other subreddits with even fewer subscribers (like the puny r/anarcho_naturism with its ~800 members) stand out, then, from the dozens of subreddits catering to those who wish to see photos of naked people in the woods, naked people gardening, naked people camping, etc.

Next, within this small group, r/makenuditylegal has the distinction of actually being committed to a fulsome “nudist politics”, i.e. the realization of a world in which nudity is “legal”, which I take to mean a world in which people can be naked in public places without risk of detainment, jail, fines, and/or the fear of any of those three.

Within the “idea space” of nudism on Reddit, then, the “Pro-Legalists” (as I will hereafter refer to them) of the r/makenuditylegal subreddit constitute a sort of activist or pro-revolutionary hardcore with respect to realizing an expanded option of nudity in society. Obviously posting on the internet isn’t really activism, but in the post-Gamergate era, it should be recognized that there is at least some kind of relationship between discussion forums, on the one hand, and social movements and subcultures that exist in the real world, on the other.

So, the problem with r/makenuditylegal isn’t really the subreddit’s name, even if that is objectionable to me as an anarchist. As far as I’m concerned, as much as I might personally benefit from public nudity being legal in the place where I live, legality ought to be done away with insofar as legality is a function of societies being dominated by states. But that’s a topic for another day, and probably, another outlet.

If anything, I respect the Pro-Legalists for the immoderation of their rhetoric in articulating their political objective, which—though framed in a statist way—is really not so much about the legality as it is about the nudity. The Pro-Legalists don’t see any good reason for nudity to be criminally sanctioned and punished, and they speak clearly and to the point on that subject with reference to their principles. This is in contrast to moderates on r/nudism and social progressives on r/naturism who often argue that the status quo vis-à-vis nudity is fine, and that those who push for social change (the existence of a non-arduous option of nudity in public, the legalization and/or decriminalization of nudity in public, broad social acceptance of a “right to nudity” and/or the basic inoffensiveness and banality of naked human bodies, etc.) are extremists who do nudists as a whole a disservice. Never mind that not all nudists can afford the resort and nakation lifestyle, and some will never be able to!

There is a much bigger problem with the Pro-Legalists. It's that they—that is, a large proportion of the most active users of r/makenuditylegal—are basically kooks and cranks.

I’m not going to get into all the details of it, but we’re talking transphobia, Trumpism, and vacuous freedom talk steeped in an intense form of capitalist realism.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s not exactly fine, but it shouldn’t be a big problem in and of itself. Transphobia, Trumpism (and other forms of reactionary right-wing nationalism), Reddit, climate change, and so on are examples of bigger problems we should be more worried about than we are. Except, there’s one thing... At this time, there is no other space on Reddit—no other space on the “Front Page of the Internet”—for people to discuss the political project of improving options for nudity in the embodied world, except among the cranks.

There is no real welcoming environment for a discussion of tactics, and the ethics of those tactics, on r/nudism. Sometimes the discussion in r/naturism goes in that direction, but not often. Discussions of activism—whether blustering calls to actions, considered strategic proposals, or discussions of historical episodes (which are often poorly documented)—aren’t really on the table on these subreddits. Only on r/makenuditylegal, alongside bad political opinions and somehow even worse image macros, is there actually some good faith discussion about this stuff. Kooks and cranks are absolutely a part of those discussions and often leading those discussions, and that overall sucks, but these discussions still have value to me, an anarchist who wants to be able to talk about this stuff. Because, well, I’m not seeing it many other places.

But r/makenuditylegal is also sufficiently unfit for purpose—if not, at times, dangerously out of touch—that I feel, personally, something better needs to supplant it as the only “political” nudist and/or naturist subreddit that's worth a damn (and sorry, r/anarcho_naturism, but you were never gonna cut it).

It sucks that any energy at all is going to be spent on doing this on Reddit, but I think it has to be this way, at least right now, in the summer of 2022.

So long as Reddit remains the ultimate clearinghouse of information about nudism in English—chiefly in the form of r/nudism and a few lesser subreddits, including the more explicitly political r/makenuditylegal—then I don’t really know what other platform can provide something that the masses (in North America and/or other countries) can use easily enough. And at least Reddit is, ostensibly, about link sharing, e.g. information sharing.

Thus I have made a new subreddit, r/naktiv. (If you want to be a moderator, just let me know.) The name is a portmanteau of two German adjectives, nackt and aktiv, the meanings of which I expect are obvious enough.

It is dedicated to (discussion of) activism—not just spectacular street activism, though probably including some of that—that is aimed at articulating the virtues of nudism as well as realizing more nudity-optional spaces and defending that option where it already exists. Some discussion of adjacent topics (such as the tactical deployment of nudity in other forms of activism) will be allowed, but the goal is to stay overall on topic, and especially to avoid getting bogged down in topics that make up the majority of text posts on the other major nudism-themed subreddits, namely the resort and nakation lifestyle and a litany of newbie and/or adolescent concerns about bodies, social etiquette, etc.

There is no singular, sloganistic demand to unify r/naktiv; basically, anyone can post about anything that is relevant to the topic. However, to the extent that the aggregate conduct of the community that uses r/naktiv has some bearing on how much others will want to use the subreddit and/or how others will perceive the “position” it upholds, then it does make sense to speak of a few practical rules. The most important, I think, is that an account’s post history matters.

Far too often, I click on an account that has posted on r/nudism, r/naturism, r/makenuditylegal, r/nudistmemes, or some other nudism-related subreddit, and what I find is a long post history that in large parts consists of posts on subreddits like [r]preggoporn or [r]hairypussy (I won’t put in the hyperlinks for these ones). Additionally, I sometimes find pretty straightforward bigotry—not just opinions that I disagree with, but rude, insulting, and thoroughly contemptuous comments about entire groups of people. Other stuff is simply embarrassing or perplexing. I am sure the anti-underwearist position (which argues that underwear has no purpose, something that is manifestly untrue) has some merit, but this is actually weird stuff that reveals a manifest unseriousness about the cause.

Accounts that are too horny, or too gross (especially in cases where people are being transgressive for the sake of being transgressive), will be excluded from r/naktiv. No doubt this will drastically reduce the number of accounts that can post on this subreddit, but I believe that will be to the good. Quality over quantity.

To be sure, Reddit is part of the problem, I think. For this reason, I have also set up a mirror community on Lemmy, a Reddit-like forum software built on the ActivityPub protocol. The reader may wish to consult my (dated, imperfect) first post on the fediverse—that is, on interoperable web services using ActivityPub—from last year. Suffice it to say, however, that having a Lemmy community provides redundancy (there will still be a forum even if Reddit bans/quarantines the subreddit or the Reddit servers themselves simply go offline). Lemmy also allows users to better control their own experiences, and to know, within reason, that their data probably isn’t being mined for someone else’s profit.

I have chosen to use the general purpose sopuli.xyz Lemmy instance because I like the rules and, given Finland’s generally better approach to issues around nudity when compared to North America, it seems to me that a Scandy ambience could be a suitable substrate to help give rise to an appealing “naktiv aesthetic”.

Aesthetic, and the related matter of message discipline, are part of being serious. So is a commitment to working with other people who don’t share all manner of ideological presuppositions—but within reason, because certain bigoted beliefs, for instance, sabotage “movement building” of any kind, and risk a repetition of German nudists’ experiences in the 1930s. “First they came for [...] and I did not speak out...”

Being serious also means learning over time. It is not really my place to say, in theory, when a debate about the utility of certain tactics or the merits of a certain strategic approach is actually closed, but I believe that some things ought to be off the table. We cannot remain forever at a 101 level of discussion. In fact, discussion for its own sake, without any connection to real world projects big or small, might best be avoided—unless people are really going to try and inspire others with their imaginations.

Anyway, check it out, either on Reddit or on Lemmy.

Hello all. Excited to announce our next meeting will be taking place some time at the end of July, possibly on the 17th at 4PM. It may get rescheduled so check back here for updates (you will probably be doing this anyway.) Which brings us to the reading, or rather, the topic, of Daoism. Rather than a strict curriculum of texts the idea is for you to dive into the topic and bring any treasures you may find to the meeting. There are some jumping off points linked in the riseup pad below (please add other things you find and wish to share under the Tao section), but feel free to find your own way through these ideas, and bring it to our discussion.

• https://pad.riseup.net/p/gzp7Cj1UhptzgpKLf4-Z-keep

by Okty Budiati

For some reason, I read the measurement boundary at displacement for an unknown space. My death is a tragedy that is starting to create a way of life that will follow without an identity of its own. My own, most miserably, contributing to hopelessness in waiting. In my sorrowful of love, I am misinterpreted as anger. The silence has many reasons for my trust you never had. How to communicate at its best? I am speechless in any language to express my love for you by now.

I am a fair word without a heavenly voice. With malicious pleasure, the memory of hell Fortune, I might say, is unpredictable. So much reliance on passion, self-broken The wind blows, which keeps the heart warm. A romantically dark, secretly melancholy flower To follow the crack of evening with quiet day-steps My soul's affairs are unfulfilled feelings. All these blurry reflections of unknown emotions sparkle. Immortality of tomorrow's fate... Tears slipped before all fears clouded over wasted grief.

A collapsed imagination, essentially plundering the heart of a soul. I am no longer a unified individual taking on an understandable situation. A fantasy within that is logically comparable to every stage of life, unnoticed tears. What is survival in the meantime, when life is the primal fall of a human? In all forms of communication, the negation of love goes too far, and it's fatally. To this inadequately stated discussion, bleakness said, “Stop all of the nonsense. I've become passive.” For a hungry soul, no more sun will shine.

Where were they laid as the natural limits, essentially? Let me learn a little more about the verification of your language. I have no right to speak because there is no order outside of my humanity. This process results in the dynamics of susceptible instability. You've decided to avoid the promises you've made. I'm insulting my life as an error curse.

When you create the belief that I am a broken mirror now because I have a second chance at a new beginning in error, a circle of mirrors will never be smooth. There's nothing to read here. I'm just a piece of debris. I will never be repaired but will take the pieces as my path before the end of my breathing journey. I will never have the courage to argue with a statement as I sit here in the solitude of the city-space and wonder how complex it is to love you individually. You made my image as it is and I accept it exhaustively.

I will never have any power to liberate myself anymore.

Since all our intimacy shakes your trust, see my heart from afar where I am alive with the poetry of sadness in tears. I am a black bile who always loves you without full sun shine and sparkling stars anymore. I am the expression of death of a tragedy caused by words. Let me go as the dust beautifully, be only I, an eclipse of a black moon.

by Corpus Cantopen

Most people think unconsciously about “accepting” others as they want, and this action becomes a habit of truth and reality about acceptance. They think about what others should be in their ideal minds. When we try to express our needs, they tend to change the subject of the conversation or use the order words “you should not,” or “you should do this,” as they think but not based on others' needs. They never even question others in their communication with, “What do you need?” or “How can I help your needs?” which exacerbates our emotions, makes us feel insecure, and raises questions about the meaning of love and mutuality with others.

It has been my concern for years about the term “dogma” and how it works on the brain to stimulate any possible chemical in our blood and turn on our moods. So, my question is, what is dogma? How does dogma become the absolute meaning of life, to understand life's path, to defend the beyond minds? Or, is there any detail on how these counter-minds just became the boomerang? Rather than seeing and learning what happened behind the conditions of time, we are lost.

Through random and complex patterns from history and philosophical books, I have tried to understand how many eras changed the meaning of dogma for different situations. Basically, it is about a tragedy to undermine it as healing to rebuild. However, it was made unbearable by circumstances, and the only final conclusion was a lack of meaning and purpose following into the next era. Is it the same with humans that “a year has done with their jobs”? I choose to answer it that life beyond time is our challenge to the mind's work.

That is, thoughts exist on the spectrum of a big mechanism inside of our body. As an example, now that people wish to be alive and survive extremely well between gradations, death has become a rejected idea. Then, how to defend this condition while the dogma is to be the opposite in real life? An expression of the body based on depth psychology is an acknowledgement of the need to learn and accept how cognition is another practice in the details to restart the brain's work into kinetics. Before all this happens in the self-body, it is transferred into others as a mutual mechanism.

We say aloud that our biggest enemy is technology. How often do we see that our self-body is the basis of learning? How do we see that, basically, our body is the technology itself? These questions are the most important to me personally, to be explored, while most people prefer to believe and hate reality, then see things as concrete borders unconsciously. We tend to agree with what we like and reject what we don’t like, and these thoughts directly turn into actions for others. It is the unblocking of our minds from personal setbacks as our solution to failure to complete its practical strategies in daily life as a belief. Again, a dogma and rejecting the reality of the body that works based on experiences.

By knocking on the door of dogma in order to develop mental resilience through individual practice at present, repeating the dogmas is an opportunity to improve the ability to deal with what sense of the body works as science-based exercises to understand humans' emotions and needs. Our greatest life boomerang is the self-body at confidence and resilience, effectively dealing with the free, who are too obsessed with freedom of the self in a personal way but not with others' freedom. In the end, to me, being human is a dogma in itself. What is human? A bunch of feelings and emotions.

The importance of life is how to see and feel secure in any situation at heart, and how love is about action as a meaning in every circumstance, in every pain and tragedy of the present. Listening to others is listening to myself too. I call it “acceptance.” Body tools and techniques are simply perfect dogmas about complexity and unity, as patterns to be broken and rebuilt.

by Okty Budiati

The day begins with heavy rain and the silence of a cup of black coffee. Yet, the sound of the violin played in solitude perfectly, in simple attitude and in action. Words turned into memory to demonstrate to me how the heart is never fluid but always intense while the mind remains in confusion. This might already have been maintained as an idea. Whatever it was, a thunder frame is ready to erupt in the present moment by seeing the impossible in order to free the valuable ones. Is there an individualist with ethics?

An individual of position and authority is well aware of the attitude proclaiming his importance. It is a man's great pleasure to be very obedient to his ambition. Meanwhile, the rumbling in the voice of a woman's heart is outrageously minor at heart, and let fly far above the clouds. The grey solid that appeared belonged to a rift of coral between the mountains and the seas, like our exclusiveness of the unnamed by his.

To attribute nothing to finding enrichment in our experiences, a different convenience and gratification, is to acknowledge an emptiness. However, aching loneliness disappears into a fundamental transformation as a cumulative process of existential. If there is a desire in order to experience the self, there is no longer freedom from substance. In materialistic minds, people tend to push each other to make a change. Someone has been dreaming of a revolution in the environment. But, does an individual desire evolution for themselves? I doubt.

Lamenting the absence of words. ... by the waiting stream patiently Despite being divided in half, The heart of longing is in sight. turned into a vase ready to break. It is flourishing in parts of nowhere. I saw the beauty in the far scene. Hope is only a great breakdown.

Something not automatically given as respect is earned is an imperative game for most people. A certain value in principles always asks for each principle to be more important. A heart, like pure reason, keeps outsiders out of specific details obtained through various means. Controlling the mind intuitively becomes the key in many mutual relationships.

It is always a matter of emotion. The story is biased and soothing. Thus, too much of a somber increase. This, another sorrow as a living future, to ensure peaceful sleep during torment.

Basically, interacting respectfully not only creates heart-listening. Everyone deserves to be heard, even if there is disagreement with views or opinions. Consider that being well-treated is something important. The one who matters the most is learning how to take action out of life knowledge radically, instead of action based on social judgements.

The evening turned into the dark of the blue. We have changed already because of the disruptions and violations that held things together. To avoid togetherness, great distance is a serious matter as we are emotionally fragile. Deep within the despair, there is a shattered glass formed by the dark tears, as if the rain would never stop, freezing another night alone.

Night waits for a phantom illuminated by the soul. On the moon's windless surface, no dust. Hopelessly to the edge of uselessness... I have taken all the sorrow of one lonely heart. As a result, all the wishers in the glistening pond Wasted beyond the grassy dunes that filled the sky. I am darkened into a teardrop and flared. Perhaps the most intimate of recreational rhythms, These mournful stars slowly dried out the pain. A flame in silken drawn shades of the voyage. Another mist blows in, forgetting about me... I do not belong to the storm clouds.

by HP_r1s.5N-33o:TROzz77

I In an Actually Limitless World, My Throat is Bleeding

Another discovery is expanding my knowledge of the interplay between logic and emotions as a living being. As I processed memories in order to respond appropriately, I held the cares and needs to the rarest of emotions. How should I maintain my emotional and temporal balance? In my emotional memory related to covering and protection between my past and present and further back to the unknown past, such a limbic cellular. Am I a robot? This question turned me into an anti-machine and anti-electrical years ago.

My question was, a very long time ago, why are other people too busy labeling us instead of reading themselves and labeling themselves? This note will start all the ridiculous dogma that has been embedded since we were in the womb until we are born in the world as “is a process life represented by enlightenment or refusal of our life?” I'll stick with Peter L. Wilson, or Hakim Bey (as I prefer to call him).

I started reading Peter Lamborn Wilson or Hakim Bey's writing, one of the individualist anarchist writers, as a counterweight in aligning my body-experiential knowledge as my language of arts with my references to literacy journals I've read and kept as memorization of the brain, which often clashed with my search. Boredom literature, as I said, is indeed still imprisoned by academic literacy.

“It is frequently stated that we anarchists “believe humans are fundamentally good”” (as did the Chinese sage Mencius). [“Anarchist Religion”?—Peter L. Wilson, 2009] However, any variation of dogma that causes a question or creates a new follower must be a blinded red-flag sheep into the disbelief of “birth-exist-die” about themselves, or, in other words, how to keep capitalism surviving as an authoritarian system, totally.

How progressive our repressive consciousness has become since the complexities of the 1950s, an era of alienation! As it is now, the term “spook” is becoming a new “ism.” Again, the individual becomes materialism as the body is the dogma that the body has not yet finished exploring. What a boring idea, circling around like a guinea pig. This prompted me to reread what I had missed during my previous explorations as paths, a way of life.

This note certainly makes me re-read Max Stirner for his thoughts on “Art and Religion” in a more distant era. Where did he say that: “Religion itself is without genius. There is no religious genius, and no one would be permitted to distinguish between the talented and the untalented in religion”. [“Art and Religion”—Max Stirner, Rheinische Zeitung, 1842]

For me, Peter provides a new alternative view of seeing the past as a process of social registration in a society that will continue to change. As it has been written, “any liberatory belief system, even the most libertarian (or libertine), can be flipped 180 degrees into a rigid dogma — even anarchism (as witness the case of the late Murray Bookchin). Conversely, even within the most religious of religions the natural human desire for freedom can carve out secret spaces of resistance (as witness the Brethren of the Free Spirit, or certain dervish sects)”.

Here, he did not mention any specific religion but tended to open the gates of a new era to move on, as we understand it as the new wave of cinema without tension and regrets. C’est la vie.

-[to be continued to chapter II]

by Corpus Cantopen

If I could reach these minds rationally, I had to make a decision like the wind. Despite my fear of speaking out loud; Who could be emotionally wrapped? I barely considered the consequences.

By then, the moods had discharged by chance, triggering a burst of connectivity. However, these behaviors continued like a journey from one pattern to another unknown. It feels like a sharp wave, while silent, becomes measurable by the body. This exercise based on the anatomy of the body has generated personal expectations.

In transferring support of emotions indirectly, these behaviors are controlled by any consequences. The achievement in threat behavior has been affected by massive exposure to aversive situations. The emotional reactions without relief are not extinguished, but burnt at superiority. That is the so-called nature of humans. A never-ending curse with the most tragically human consequences.

An assumption provided the situation with the ability to cage each other. It's like the object in many images. It becomes tactical readiness through every intersection naturally. Meanwhile, most humans are afraid of change and then emotionally overwhelmed by qualification. Furthermore, how should I work through the mind with the brain? Would humans enjoy being motivated by a reset? I doubt.

However, inanimate substances and descent have been modified in many ways, including me as part of human anatomy, from the confusion of its genomic mutations to environmental adaptation and production as a common ancestor. I faced the most complex part of the labyrinth of the soul; what is an ancestor? Is this term needed for a correct interpretation as a new wave?

What nonsense, deception, and frivolity!

At most, it would be a radical addiction, defined as extreme behavior within the context of great suffering as a social phenomenon. I never returned this immoral fake rebel as per cultural beliefs, but to adequately satiate the desires of the flesh, this body belongs to you freely. What is built into the infamous acronym as many clamor for legitimacy? My enlightened life is cut off. Eat me!!

For all intents and purposes, when it is at its most? Tragically, vulnerable species! This is the ultimate confusion... There is no sun anywhere... I'm reaping the benefits of being absolved of responsibility for suicide; a reimagining of lost narratives

I begged to be alive and had no faith in anything within my rejected path of many indwellings. No culture but body language, anatomically. My trashed body is a terror to the spooks. I no longer care about the lands and seas. Maybe soon the destruction of the sky will be complete. Please close the curtain without any shadows. All cures were false promises and wasted, and this turned out to be the beginning of a great capital of naked pillars.

Inexplicably, while expressing distrobe, these memories are created to reproduce an intriguing causation: a living simple-cell organism is formed and linked to such a ridiculous, obsolete design in disarray. Blackout

For the last little bit of time I have been working through some thoughts on the concept of revolution. These are still very much in formation, and will probably be the subject of at least part of a book I plan on working on starting this fall. In doing research for the text I came across a text called Specters of Revolt, by Richard Gilman-Opalsky, and had some thoughts that seemed worth sharing, even as nothing more than an opening salvo in this discussion.

Critique

Before diving into the critiques I have of the text I want to discuss the concept of critique itself. There is a tendency for intellectuals, theorists, academics, and people engaged in political theory to approach critique as a sort of eliminationism. By this I mean that critique has become a sort of competition, with critique itself being portrayed as some sort of invalidation of a certain body of thought. This is an absurd view.

On an epistemic level we have to think through what reading, and by extension critique, really is. For us to make the argument that there is a right reading of a text, a correct reading, we have to make a series of highly problematic assumptions. We would need to assume that the text always remains the same in all moments, that it is engaged ahistorically by ahistorical readers that are somehow immune to the dynamics of whatever present they occupy in any given moment. We would also need to assume that all readers are the same; if there is to be a singular right way to read a text there would need to be a common epistemic basis for that reading that would have to be rigidly the same. We would also need to assume that words have objective meanings, and that we all engage with and understand language in exactly the same way. In other words, to claim that there is a right or correct reading of a text is to also assert an entire universe grounded in sameness and determinism.

I want to take a different view, one in which the correctness of reading and concept is secondary, one in which we can dispense with the arrogant assumptions of the true and universal. This view derives from discussions of the act of writing and reading that we will find in Archive Fever, by Derrida, or The Infinite Conversation, by Blanchot. In these texts the act of writing is portrayed as an act. By this I mean that writing is viewed as an event which has contingent effects in particular moments, rather than as the production of a static object that would exist outside of history. The text itself exists in a static, archival, form, which marks the product of a particular series of interpretive moments recorded by a writer. The reader, though, does not enter the text in the same way as the writer, and the writer will not enter the text the same way when they become editor or reader themselves. We encounter text, we engage with it. The text converges with the particularity of our existences and understandings to generate some sort of conceptual outcome.

As such, the concept of critique, for it to be useful, needs to occur in a way that centers around the usefulness of ideas and the theoretical space opened by a specific discourse. As Deleuze writes in his text on Nietzsche:

“Critique is not a re-action of re-sentiment but the active expression of an active mode of existence; attack and not revenge, the natural aggression of a way of being, the divine wickedness without which perfection could not be imagined” (3).

The act of critique is an act of opening, of challenging the singlarity of an understanding to create the possibility of conceptual movement, conceptual reformation, the possibility of presenting the concept in a different light, in a different context, with different results. Therefore, the primary question of critique is not whether we destroy the text we are analyzing; this understanding relies on the assumptions outlined above. Rather, critique functions as an act of destruction and appropriation, a process of borrowing ideas, utilizing theoretical movements, and functionally taking what is useful in the process of attempting to create a series of conceptual possibilities. It is a form of thought that very much exists within life, in all of its chaotic particularity, and in the service of launching attacks to eliminate impediments to the possibilities of that existence. It is revolt.

The existence of critique as revolt, as an opening of possibilities without some prescribed moment of reconcretization (some end of revolt), becomes a core concept in the thoughts I am recording here. We see a similar dynamic play itself out through this text, where the tendencies toward definitionalism and certainty, of concretizing objects of thought and presenting them as analogous to the world, collide with the chaotic contingency of any given moment. In this instance the object of analysis is the concept of revolution, the attempt to define the concept, and the problems latent in that attempt. But, as we will see, it is the framing of the question itself that generates a certain type of problematic in the text, a problematic that points not to issues in the text, but to issues in the entire conceptualization of what revolution is, and whether the category is even useful anymore (or ever was).

Setting the Stage

Initially I had picked this text up in order to explore the discussion of the concept of revolution contained within. As I stated above, this concept, as currently understood, functions as a form of sungularizing historicism. By this I mean that the concept of revolution is in itself something that is singular, and as such, a concept that posits a spatio-temporality with very specific characteristics. We can see this singularity in construction of the very concept itself through the medium of naming a historical moment. The strings of events that we term revolutions are often the result of some deeply complex, often misunderstood, motivations and historical dynamics that construct these events with specific contours. These contours do not spread across space equally, with conflict finding points of greater, lesser, or different concentrations and expressions.

The packaging of this complex series of historical events, which will never be replicated to the degree that our actions have effects that shape the future, points to two core problems with this formulation. Firstly, this reality of revolution, that it is a complex series of historical events summarized within the confines of a singular object, gives us some insight into the process of historicism and its role in the construction of ideology. Ideological constructs function, on a practical level, by taking their epistemic claims to universal truth and then utilizing a pseudo-analysis grounded in the ideological reflection in events, the aura of ideology in the event itself. In this construct there is an implicit assertion that two moves are possible; that moments can be subsumed into historical objects and that these historical objects are somehow comparable across time, even just as an expression of ideology. Without the concept of revolution forming the foundations of this singularization of complex events then conceptual universes, such as Leninism, that rely on this universalization of historical condition, this claim that strategy, for example, exists independent of the strategic context and functions based on this comparability of historical events.

This singularization of historical events mirrors all other processes of historicism, and in this way is not unique. Nor is it unique on the level of grouping a series of historically particular dynamics, freezing them, and reducing them down to their lowest common denominator, while asserting that the common denominator is a thing to begin with. In both of these ways the concept of revolution mirrors our coding of other events. We can take World War II as an example. It was a complex series of events, with highly localized dynamics, which were subsumed within a broader global power struggle, which was in itself inscribed with the urgencies of intervening in genocide. In no two places did the war manifest in the same ways, and in no two places were these events isolated from all other dynamics occurring during that time. So, while the category of World War II may be useful in the discussion of these events, allowing us to make sense of them, in itself the concept of World War II does not express the moments that are subsumed in that concept, it only expresses the contours of the concept that is used to organize these events, defining them by something outside of themselves.

In the coding of specific events as revolution there is a dual move being made. In this first move the events that comprise what will be termed “a revolution” will need to be grouped together under this category. This is where problems like historical revisionism arise, and why there are different Stalinist and Trotskyist histories of the Russian Revolution; there was disagreement over what events counted as part of the revolution and which were not. It is at this location in which rewritings of the coding of events, the determination of what is defined by the category, allows for these events to be coded ideologically, and often in ways that eliminate ethical complications, failures, and mistakes, reducing this “history” to another tool of propaganda and ideological distortion. Secondly, in performing this act of coding a series of events, now grouped under the heading of revolution, are separated from all other events. In this grouping of specific events into the categorical heading of revolution, often with these other events being considered “counter-revolutionary”, a sort of hermetically sealed grouping is created, with boundaries marking it as separate from its outside. This framing completely divorces any notion of “revolution” from its historical conditions of possibility, and constructs it as a specific historical object that can be understood as such. The second move is to then take this categorical definition of events, and exalt it as a specific object that is able to be understood in some sort of true way. It is only from here that one can be said to be studying revolutions, or that one can say that they understand some ahistorical truth about revolutions; all tankies rely on this construct.

These conditions of possibility, historical coding and exalting the category, not only form the foundations for “bad” understandings of revolution. Rather, they form the foundations for all understandings of the concept of revolution, and is implied simply by naming the events and then placing them at the center of political discourses, making the construct of revolution a core political question. It is really from this point that this text departs, that it finds its launching point. In some ways there is a sense in which this is a text that speaks from a specific location. It is a location marked by the activist norms of the 1990s (there are lots of references to the Zapatistas and the anti-globalization movement, and a lot of the same categories), and one in which the concept of revolution still comes to form a core political category. This is a tension that marks the entire text, one in which the critique of the concept of revolution almost crests into a core analysis of the concept itself, bringing the concept itself into the realm of critique, only to get trapped in its terms, turned backwards, and collapsing into paradox at numerous points. But, to see where these moments are able to be identified, we should step through the text, which is definitely worth a read for those interested in this concept specifically.

As with any text there are any number of threads that run through the narrative. In this case there is a narrative on the concept of revolution or revolt (for Opalsky revolts grow into revolutions), but also narratives centered around concepts like culture jamming (note the 1990s reference point), concepts of notions of the future, concepts of desire, notions of struggle and conflict without struggle, as well as any of a number of small ruminations on specific thinkers or texts, all of which are interesting. As with any complex text there is always a bit of arificiality in attempting to separate one thread from the others, to break it away from its weaving into other threads, but that is exactly what we will be doing here. These other narratives, whether they focus on concepts of desire or notions of the future, are all departing from a concept of revolution, which Opalsky attempts to challenge and render more fluid without dispensing with the idea. This tension, between recognizing issues with the concept but not dispensing with it, permeates the entire text, and sets epistemic conditions that create problems as the text proceeds.

Revolution: The Formation of a Concept

A core point in the text, which emerges in the Introduction and carries through the forst couple of pieces, is that revolt exists as a subtext to history, an almost invisible force with its own ontological and epistemic structures; this is a significant claim. In embracing this claim we are directly arguing against the understanding of revolt as a formal category visible in the abstract, outside of history, as a legible force mobilized intentionally. If we think through the concept of revolution, or the notion of revolt, in relation to political activity, a clear assumption becomes clear; namely, the assumption that successful organizing is something that can be objectively managed, and that it always results in achieving some sort of mobilization of revolt. This understanding, which is core to much of the arrogance of political organizing culture, heavily relies on the idea that revolt is an object that can be understood and mobilized regardless of its relationship to events; a wholly despatialized, ahistorical understanding of revolt.

The problems that characterize this move, and this replicates throughout the text, becomes clear almost immediately however. In the very next conceptual move there is an injunction to determine or define what revolt can be, just to do so with more open categories than the deterministic lens inherited from Leninism. This conceptual-material fusionism, this claim that we can understand revolt in the conceptual, and that this will impact the material, prioritizes the categorization, making its definition imperative for the contextualization of the rest of the argument. In other words, revolt and revolution become objects of analysis in this narrative, rather than namings of events, and as such they must be set aside from history in the very act of their definition. One is not defining actual events named revolts, one is defining a category of revolt and then attemptoing to shape events based on this understanding, and as such, the revolt itself becomes removed from its particularity, and begins to exist only to the degree that events can be subsumed within the definition.

To illustrate this move we can look at the ways that the concept of desire is used in the Beyond Struggle essay. The concept of desire is mobilized in this piece to be a counter-point to the concept of struggle, with the injunction being that we should not struggle but act from desire. Let us look beyond the fact that one can desire struggle, or the ways in which this injunction ignores actual hardships, risks, and stakes. Rather, here, I want to focus on the conceptual pre-conditions for this discussion to emerge to begin with. For us to make the claim that desire should become some fundamental motivating force of revolt we need to make two claims. The first claim is that something like desire or revolt can be made into conceptual objects without fundamentally destroying the dynamism that gives these concepts meaning. In naming these concepts as concepts, as conceptual constructions that persist over time, the material particularity of their manifestation as desire or conflict is erased and replaced with a staid and static definition of the concept. Secondly, we then need to posit that the construction of a narrative of conceptual connection between these terms not only speaks directly of the world (which, again, presumes a static world) but is also something that can directly manifest in the world in the terms of its conceptual construction. That is to say, that this architecture presumes that these static categories in themselves are manifested in the world in their static and ahistorical generalism, and that the movements of these concepts then come to define the world.

In another example, this time around pages 80-89, we can begin to see the impact of this sort of thinking. In this section there is a discussion of power as an organic material possibility latent in existence itself. This would imply that the term power, in the spirit of Foucault, is being used to name an active series of dynamics that cannot be subsumed in the term power. Now, if we were to take this position that open categories, like power, or categories that name activity, like revolt, are not able to be defined, and don't speak directly of the world, then the entire attempt here, to define a concept of revolution that does not have the same deficiencies as in the past, would completely collapse in the impossibility of defining actual acts grouped under headings of revolt or revolution. In this discussion of power the discourse itself begins with this clear discussion of the microscopic and organic manifestations of dynamics grouped under the term power, but this then immediately solidifies in the discussion of scale.. Gilman-Opalsky argues that, though capital operates in locality, it is actually “large”, to use his term, and requires revolt at the same scale.

OK, let's investigate this claim. To make the argument that capital operates at “large” scale is to make the argument that capital itself operates across space and time, giving it a body all of its own. This is clearly the attempt of capital, to construct a universe of meaning that operates as the condition of possibility for existence, but this is not something that we can speak of singularly if we want to discuss actions as something that has effects. If actions have effects, then any following moment is going to be directly the result of the dynamics of this present, and as such, no present moment ever repeats. These moments are also not singular across space, with different dynamics functioning within the same moment in different spaces. So, to say that capital is “large” is to say that the local actions that actually comprise economic activity are, in themselves, driven by something outside of themselves in a direct way that defines the actions in actuality. This does not mean, as I would claim, that capital is a structure of meaning imposed through policing, which would involve local decisions and actions. Rather, to claim this scale of capital is to argue that there is something that exceeds the moment materially, an actual transcendental force, that directly defines these acts as capital, and as separate from other “non-capital” acts.

In making this move capital ceases to be an attempt at organizing logistics and imposing limits on the possibilities of existence through police force, in which interventions are fundamentally bound up with this microscopicness, and begins to become a category that defines some actions that are grouped together across time and space, opposing some “large” scale “system” which is also devoid of locality or temporality. In doing so both capital and revolt are abstracted from their occurrence, from the time and space of the events coded in these ways, thrown into a conceptual comparison which is, in turn, then supposed to speak directly of reality; it is a strange, but very very common, conceptual construction when viewed through this lens. The centrality of the category does not fuse the concept of revolt with some dynamic structuring of theory in the midst of conflictual events. Rather, we experience the inverse, the wholesale obliteration of possibility in the static conceptualization of a singular categorical “system” which is meant to be confronted by some generalized revolt. In this arrangement, the world itself disappears and we enter into a whollly conceptual discourse on some idea of revolution against some idea of a “system”.

It is only from this disappearance of life that concepts like revolution, thought as a singular event, can be said to be understood in their entirety by some sort of privileged revolutionary subject, such as the technician in Leninism. So, even though the text itself later returns to a sort of molecularity, this baggage of the assertion of a conceptually singular capital, unified across time and space, leads Gilman-Opalsky to speak of the “micropolitical”, conflict which occurs in the time and space of actual activity, as a politics of failure due to the inability to defeat “systems”. In this claim the concept of “large”, namely non-particular and singular across time and space, is taken as a given category for all analysis, with all other analyses departing from different categories “failing”, due to not addressing a construct, the “system”, which is seen increasingly as an un-useful artifice. The imposition of this analytic framework also imposes an entire conceptual reality in which systems actually exist, in which there are things that are singular and persist in this form across time and space, which then asserts a conceptual reality in which singular concepts of revolution make sense. But, outside of that framing, which I would argue is impossible to actually support conceptually, this assertion of the massification of activity and the removal of the act from its time and space makes no sense. The result is a conceptual tautology, where the assertion of “large” systems necessitates the existence of “large” revolutions, which in turn presumes an entire organizational and ontological model rooted in massification and modernism.

Within the text there is an attempt to address this paradox, which is not unnoticed, around page 92. In this discussion the concept of culmination is raised, as some point in which there is a convergence between the micropolitical and the “large” mass scale of revolution, in this conceptualization. On the one hand, this approach does allow us to displace the question of the act onto the plane of effect, and thus onto the material plane. By placing the culmination of actions at the pinnacle of analysis, and rendering that culmination through the effects of actions, discourses around some essence of the act, or some true act, are eliminated in favor of a discourse that should be grounded in the moment. But, on the other hand, while this is occurring there is a countervailing tendency pulling in the other direction. At the moment that the point of culmination is placed at the center of the discourse on the political all particular acts are subsumed into this culmination, and the nuanced temporality and particular material conditions of the acts grouped into the category of a revolution is condensed into this singular moment of culmination. In other words, rather than seeing acts that exist in light of their particular time and space, the act is said to exist in this form, but only to the degree that it fulfills the condition of possibility of leading to a culmination. As such, the culmination then takes the place of the ahistorical object and becomes the point of orientation in which all action is judged, preserving the singularity of the point of focus, whether we call it culmination or revolution.

There are many other places where these dynamics emerge, but I think this demonstrates the point. Core to this text is a venture that I see frequently in thinkers both of this era, and also within academia. There is a tendency within that world to want to speak of the political within the terms common to those discourses, which were heavily influenced by Leninist reductionism and the simplicity of categorical thinking, while problematizing the limitations of the original articulations of these categories. What results, however, is a discourse in which categories become more open, but also migrate into the center of all narratives, as a condition of possibility for all other thought around the subject. These dynamics typified the New Left, and informed its inability to break from authoritarianism, as well as the more activist left of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which often operated based on simplistic and absolutist categories, often collapsing into purism discourses. What is often not embraced, however, is the impossibility of these discourses, regardless of how nuanced the terms, actually speaking of life, in its temporal and spatial nuances and particularities. There is a hesitancy to speak of philosophy itself, and its impossibility, and as a result, there is often a tendency to adopt terms which imply epistemic and ontological frameworks that undermine the point that one is trying to make. In this case Gilman-Opalsky does a wonderful job of problematizing the very ontology of the concept of revolution, only to then reconstruct some concept of a politically singular moment and call it something else. We can do better than this.

Writing the Indiscernible

This is the section of an essay where I am supposed to outline some new amazing concept that is supposed to solve all of our conceptual problems. I don't have anything like that for you all, and in some ways the very structure of that type of articulation prevents the critique that is being leveraged here; to imply some singular solution is to assert the singularity of the problem which is to assert the singularity of circumstance. On some level we need to abandon the concept of the solution in its entirety, rendering some sort of recommendation counter-productive here.

The real difficulty, and this is the element of this discussion that I am working through currently, and have been working through for a while, is how one speaks possibility, conflict, contingency, and so on. Philosophy in many ways is trapped by the contours of concepts themselves. By this I do not mean that there are deficiencies in specific concepts. Rather, that the entire construction of the concept implies a universe in which singular terms can name singular ideas which wholly and completely express singular categories of objects that are all thought to be the same. Marx discusses this in Chapter 1 of Capital, where he discusses commodities, but we can use a simpler example. When we name something, lets say capitalism for example, we are naming that thing singularly, as something that persists across time and space, and then naming things in relation to that concept. In the context of capitalism, which we discussed above, the term capitalism implies a singularity to the operations of capital. In taking this ontological lens on, one is subsequently eliminating the particular actions that are grouped under capitalism, as material moments, and replacing them with their reflection in this category, tying them to some commonality and not to the material particularity of the moment that occurs. As such, when we discuss resistance to capitalism, therefore, that discourse tends to focus on some asserted necessity of mass resistance, which then facilitates specific political categories and forms.

We have to admit that the revolutionary project, as conceived of in this singular form deriving from the American and French revolutions, has been an abject failure. There is a widely held perspective that revolutions lead to disaster and the mass death of political opponents, and there is every good reason to think that this is true. The end result of this perception is that political imagination is horrendously constrained. And, no, falling into genocide denial and apologetics, like the tankies have done, is not a way to solve this problem. Rather we have to completely rethink political action in the full light of the failures of revolution, and do so with a willingness to abandon the concept, and its notions of space and time, its asserted ontological universe, and its epistemic assertions.

What needs to be thought is a way to speak of action while undermining the singularity of the discourse at the moment of its articulation. It is a similar problem that arises when one attempts to discuss concepts of the self, or notions of social dynamics, or the movement of atoms. It is an attempt to speak that which resist being spoken, to discuss the unleashing of possibilities without defining those possibilities, to embrace a politics in which the future remains open, and in which we are not attempting to impose definitions of life.

This task is something I am very much working through. Some elements of working through this can be seen in Army of Ghosts, but there is a lot of work to do. I very likely have an upcoming book project for this summer, focused on some reflections from the uprising and what that can teach us about the deficiencies of activism. But, once that project is complete this is the next task, to take this critique, expand it, and build a narrative around attempting to map some openings, without mapping out the paths to and from those openings.

Siren Song:

This is the one song everyone would like to learn The song that is irresistible

The song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons Even though they see the beached skulls

The song nobody knows because anyone who has heard it is dead And the others can’t remember

Shall I tell you the secret? And if I do, will you get me out of this bird suit?

I don’t enjoy it here squatting on this island Looking picturesque and mythical

With these two feathery maniacs, I don’t enjoy singing this trio, fatal and valuable

I will tell the secret to you, to you, only to you Come closer

This song is a cry for help: Help me! Only you, only you can, you are unique At last

Alas it is a boring song But it works every time

Western Music

Music produced in Europe as well as those musics derived from the European ancient times to present day:

“Moses was instructed by God to make two trumpets. They were to be made of hammered, or beaten, silver. The priests used them to announce many events associated with the temple and various festivals. Trumpets and horns were blown to call people to worship and to signal momentous events. Harps and lyres were plucked and strummed to pacify royalty.”

Ancient civilizations entered historical times with a flourishing musical culture. That the earliest writers explained it in terms of legend and myth, strongly suggests the remote beginnings of the “art” of sound. Among the speculations about its origin, the more plausible are that it began as a primitive form of communication, that it grew out of a device to expedite communal labour, or that it originated as a powerful adjunct to religious ceremonies. While such theories must necessarily remain speculative it is clear, despite the prehistoric musical artifacts found in central Europe, that the cradle of Western music was the Fertile Crescent cupping the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. There the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Hebrew nations, among others, evolved political, social cultures that were absorbed by the conquering Greeks and, in turn, by the Romans, who introduced elements of that Mediterranean music to much of western Europe.

In all of these early cultures the social functions of music were essentially the same, since their climate, geographic location, cultural pace, and mutual influences produced many more social similarities than differences. The primary function of music was apparently religious, ranging from heightening the effect of magic, to ennobling liturgies. The other musical occasions depicted in both pictures and written accounts were equally functional: stirring incitements to military zeal, soothing accompaniments to communal or solitary labour, heightening aids to dramatic spectacles, and enlivening backgrounds to social gatherings that involved either singing or dancing or both. In every case musical sounds were an adjunct to song, and/or bodily movement: dance, march, game, and work. To support its fundamental role in society, an intricate scientific rationale of music evolved, encompassing tuning, instruments, modes (melodic formulas based on certain scales), and rhythms.

19th Century Music Industry

In the mid-nineteenth century, printed sheet music was the music industries primary product. Publishers marketed songs for use 1.) by the growing number of private piano owners 2.) by touring musical reviews. [Blackface] Minstrelsy was the most popular form of live entertainment in the US through much of the 19th century, and companies became celebrity through touring established theatre circuits. Their endorsement of a song would often result in the popularization of a certain sheet of music.

When the phonograph came to be in 1877, few initially imagined it would be used primarily for music. Yet by the 1890s, “nickel-in-the-slot” talking machines reached urban arcades, introducing the US to mechanically reproduced music. Companies controlled the patents to compelling phonograph technologies, and Thomas Edison controlled his wax cylinder playback technology (licensing it to the fledging Columbia Phonograph Company, thus introducing the first talking machines designed for home use in 1896). By this time, the competing gramophone disk machines and records made by Emile Berliner had already been distributed.

Firms raced to establish their technology as the consumer standard throughout the US – ‘Victors Talking Machine Company’ eventually came out on top by focusing on the home consumer, creating celebrity recording artists, and expanding globally. In 1919, the ‘Radio Corporation of America’ (RCA) was founded and began to market millions of consumer targeted radios – phonograph companies soon began advertising the new medium. In 1929, RCA acquired Victor & the phonograph, and the radio industries continued to increase their ties. Recording artists demanded compensation for the broadcast of their material through organizations such as the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP).

During The Great Depression record sales plummeted from 150 million in 1929 to 10 million in 1933, and the industry was again comprised of a few powerhouse corporations. ASCAP, overseeing royalty collection for the vast majority of published music, continued to demand for radio broadcasts. In 1941, they forbade radio stations to play the music they represented. Their rival, Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), offered stations its collection of music that had not been accepted by ASCAP. The result was a wave of decentralization within the industry.

Throughout the music industries postwar expansion, musicians organized in attempt to protect their rights and promote their careers. But presumably, unions failed, only garnering rights for their members (including closed shops and union pay scales in established theater circuits, symphony orchestras, society dance networks, and recording studios), losing employment to new technologies and garnering higher royalty rates for record sales.

Music & Trance:

Music in its Relations to Emotional, Communal, and Shamanic Trances:

The role of the music is much less to produce the trance than to create conditions favorable to its onset, to regularize its form, and to ensure that instead of being a merely individual, unpredictable, and uncontrollable phenomenon, it becomes, on the contrary, predictable, controlled, and at the service of the group.

Music in its Relations to [musical] Possession Trance:

Although it is conceivable that a subject can enter into trance without music, it is inconceivable that a subject could experience the trance itself without music. Let us say that, in possession, music is the condition of the trance experience. This is so for a few reasons. First, because possession trance is a change of identity, because that change of identity has no meaning for the subject unless his new identity is recognized by [others], because it is the music that signals it, because this new identity must be manifested. Provided, then, that it is not absolutely fleeting (I am thinking of Malkam Ayyahu's trances, described by Leiris, which often lasted no more than an instant, just long enough to express it with a gesture, word, pose), provided that it has duration, this trance, which is the experience of another identity, has an absolute need for music in order to continue to exist, since it is music that, through its identificatory character, maintains the illusion and that, enables it to be manifested.

The major function of music thus seems to be maintaining the trance, rather in the way an electric current will maintain the vibration of a tuning fork if tuned to the same pitch frequency. Here, however, music is not just physically (on a purely motor level) “in tune” with trance. It is even more “in tune” on the psychological level, since its action consists in putting the individual experiencing his transitory identity “in phase” with the group that is recognizing this identity, or imposing it upon him.

A Brief look at “Music as a Weapon” By CrimethInc:

To dissect for a moment, yet another absolutely horrendous CrimethInc article, let us take a brief look at the preface from “Music as a Weapon: When Punk Was a Recruiting Ground for Anarchy”:

“There are countless reasons not to tie the fate of a revolutionary movement to the fortunes of a music scene. Coming into anarchism via punk, people tended to approach anarchist activity in the same way they would participate in a youth sub-culture. This contributed to an anarchist milieu characterized by consumerism rather than initiative, a focus on identity rather than dynamic change, activities limited to leisure time of the participants, ideological conflicts that boil down to disputes over taste, and an orientation towards youth that made the movement largely irrelevant upon the onset of adulthood… Yet during the decades of global reaction that followed the 1960s, the punk underground was one of the chief catalysts of the renaissance of anarchism. Were it not for punk, anti-capitalists in many parts of the world might still be choosing between stale brands of authoritarian socialism… Granted, the average punk show was as dominated by patriarchy as a college classroom. All the hierarchies, economics, and power dynamics of capitalist society were present in microcosm. And anarchism was not the only seed that utilized this soapbox: countless ideologies competed in the punk milieu, from Neo-Nazism to Christianity and Krishna “consciousness.”

Whilst one might find the off-statement to be true, CrimethInc fails to provide any incite as to why these hierarchies were able to incubate. They fail to acknowledge or even question what it is about the organizational aspect of their anarchism that allows for such eurocentric reflections to fester. They continue the entirety of the piece in constant vacillation. Somehow at times even gushing over how: “all of this makes it that much more striking that anarchist ideas fared so well!... We can attribute this success to structural factors”, and that music and punk “offer a rare model for organizing the affairs of a network, and community defense mechanisms”:

“...punk helped keep anarchist ideas alive between the 1970s and the 21st century in the same way that monasteries preserved science and literature through the Dark Ages... Although the demands and influence of the capitalist economy recreated the same power imbalances and materialism that punks had hoped to escape – limiting the punk critique of capitalism to a variant of the liberal maxim “buy local” – but the anticapitalist DIY underground displayed a remarkable resilience! In a cycle that became familiar, each generation expanded until profit driven record labels skimmed the most popular apolitical bands off the top, setting the stage for a return to grassroots independence and experimentation. So the punk scene provided the music industry a free testing and development site for new bands and trends.”

Elemental Black Metal

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix outlines what they term Transcendental Black Metal in their manifesto of the same name included in the collection, Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1. Although I appreciate the philosophical effort (even more so the musical output of Liturgy), Id like to make use of their framework to provide a third alternative. The metaphysics of Elemental Black Metal appeals more to me than the apocalyptic humanism they prescribe, or the Hyperborean nihilism they seek to move beyond.

HYPERBOREAN TRANSCENDENTAL ELEMENTAL NIHILISM AFFIRMATION CONTINGENCY ATROPHY HYPERTROPHY FORGETTING BLAST BEAT BURST BEAT DRONE LUNAR SOLAR EARTHLY DEPRAVITY COURAGE GETTING LOST THE INFINITE THE FINITE ENTANGLEMENT PURITY PENULTIMACY DIFFUSION

ELEMENTAL According to Susanna Lindberg, the elementals are “abstract ways of articulating the materiality of being.” Elemental nature is unthinkable (beyond human thought), primordial (always ever there), and chthonic (found in the realm of the underworld). It is beyond the sensible or rational. It is “the absence of transcendental ground” existing as already available images. To Emmanuel Levinas, it is the it when it rains, il y a. It is indeterminate, opaque, and an absence that makes presence possible.

CONTINGENCY Contingency is a potential force, and the force of potential. It is unexpected and not destined. It is an unintended consequence. It foils teleologies and disrupts ecologies even as it erupts from them. It is a senseless reshuffling of the cards. To humans, it is felt as looming cosmic catastrophe. It undoes worlds. It is nihilism to humans, but not something (or a nothing) one can be for.

FORGETTING Creative forgetting is unlearning mastery, as Bayo Akomolafe puts it. This could be also considered unthinking. This is what Friedrich Nietzsche describes as the child stage in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: approaching the world anew having shed the burden of the camel and the ressentiment of the lion. It is what Laozi describes as the uncarved block: the capacity to become. It is not a rejection of the past, but an awareness that the past has yet to come.

DRONE Drone is an enveloping, pulsating resonance. In metal, it is exemplified generally by much of the work of bands Earth and Sunn O))) of Cascadia, and Boris and Corrupted of Japan's urban epicenters. It is exemplified specifically by the track Tanggalkan Di Dunia (Undo The World) by the band Senyawa of Jogjakarta. The blackest of drone metal best accompanies Eugene Thacker's notion of cosmic pessimism. More than listened to, drone is felt.

EARTHLY (SUBTERRANEAN) Elemental metal is earthly, but more specifically subterranean. It lies beneath bogs and marshes, and is buried under sand in windswept deserts. It forms underground caverns and deep sea trenches. It moves through mycelia and magma flows. It is of the underworld: connecting the living and the dead, and blurring the line between them. It is known by humans for its opacity.

GETTING LOST The outcome of becoming lost is unknown. Losing oneself is impure, and resists preservation. It is breaking free from the fixed continuity of self and time, not through external transcendence, but passionate corporeality: a reckoning with the soul, followed by grotesque laughter.

ENTANGLEMENT According to Carlo Rovelli, entanglement is predicated upon three aspects: granularity, indeterminacy, and relationality. An entangled understanding unmasks time for what it is: a relation between human perception and the cosmos. The cosmos is composed of indeterminate becomings in relation to each other, rather than finite or infinite being.

DIFFUSION Diffusion is a withdrawal from incapacitating concentrations. It is an exit strategy. It is fluid, dissolvable, and becoming illegible. It is fleeing to the forest or going underground. It is fugitivity.

Music in its Relations to Emotional, Communal, and Shamanic Trances:

“The role of the music is much less to produce the trance than to create conditions favorable to its onset, to regularize its form, and to ensure that instead of being a merely individual, unpredictable, and uncontrollable phenomenon, it becomes, on the contrary, predictable, controlled, and at the service of the group...”

Music in its Relations to [musical] Possession Trance:

“Although it is conceivable that a subject can enter into trance without music, it is inconceivable that a subject could experience the trance itself without music. Let us say that, in possession, music is the condition of the trance experience. This is so for a few reasons. First, because possession trance is a change of identity, because that change of identity has no meaning for the subject unless his new identity is recognized by [others], because it is the music that signals it, because this new identity must be manifested. Provided, then, that it is not absolutely fleeting (I am thinking of Malkam Ayyahu's trances, described by Leiris, which often lasted no more than an instant, just long enough to express it with a gesture, word, pose), provided that it has duration, this trance, which is the experience of another identity, has an absolute need for music in order to continue to exist, since it is music that, through its identificatory character, maintains the illusion and that, enables it to be manifested.

The major function of music thus seems to be maintaining the trance, rather in the way an electric current will maintain the vibration of a tuning fork if tuned to the same pitch frequency. Here, however, music is not just physically (on a purely motor level) “in tune” with trance. It is even more “in tune” on the psychological level, since its action consists in putting the individual experiencing his transitory identity “in phase” with the group that is recognizing this identity, or imposing it upon him.”

Nudism is not a kink, but just saying it like that won’t make anyone else believe that this statement is factual. That’s because there is something in this world that is frequently called “nudism”—that maybe even overlaps with a holistic practice of nudism to some degree—but which isn’t actually the same thing as nudism. This nudism-which-is-not-nudism can fairly be characterized, I think, as a kink, a fetish, a sexual fantasy, a paraphilia, etc., however you may want to call it.

This goes beyond the online porn industry’s usage of words like “nudism” —and even the originally euphemistic term “naturism”—in marketing, e.g. something that only exists on the level of representation. There is definitely something more real, more embodied, than all that. Although many nudist/naturist Reddit and Twitter accounts are bots, plenty of others are operated by real people who—it can be surmised from a quick glance at the account’s history—are not particularly interested in philosophical matters, news pertaining to the legal status of public nudity in different parts of the world, or even just a practical discussion about different aspects of living as a nudist in the context of modern civilization. Instead, what they are interested in is seeing pictures of people who are naked. More often than not, too, only certain kinds of naked people (e.g. attractive ones, perhaps of a particular gender or race), perhaps doing certain kinds of activities while naked (e.g. meditating under a waterfall, wrestling heroically) to the exclusion of other kinds of people (e.g. low-hanging boobs, flabby ass) doing other kinds of things (e.g. pissing on a memorial to a British colonizer).

In other words, these “nudists” are horny people (who, in many cases, may not have even participated in any form of social nudism yet). Some of them may also be nudists—but for now, insofar as we are discussing them as operators of social media accounts, and integrating them as a somewhat abstract “population” into a social analysis, they are horny people first and foremost.

I think it is fair to speak of (at least some of) these people as having a “nudism fetish” insofar as their exhibitionistic and/or voyeuristic and/or no-boundaries-between-sexy-time-and-non-sexy-time erotic fantasies express themselves, in part, as an apparently honest affinity for nudity and/or nudism (by which I mean, something that at first glance looks like social nudism as it has usually been practised in nudist-naturist spaces).

I am not particularly mad at any of these people, to the extent that what they are doing is just horny and not harmful. It’s none of these folks’ fault that Big Tech, and its subsidiary Big Porn, profits off of misuse and abuse of the term “nudism” (and even “naturism” at times), and that the whole smartphone-using world’s habits of sexual ideation have been, in part, moulded by instantaneously accessible hardcore pornography of all genres. We all live in this stupid world and we all get affected by it.

But it needs to be said that, well, they—the horny people—do represent a sort of problem for the perception of real nudists and real nudism by wider society.

Ugh. Let me just say, right now, that I really do hate this sort of verbiage. Talking about “realness” in order to do away with the bogeyman of a sexually unhinged Other—it is a trope that I am all too familiar with, in all sorts of social movements throughout history. But if the word “nudist” is going to be applied to “people” in any practically useful way, than it needs to exclude people for whom the desire to be naked is entirely tied up with sexual desire.

Because a nudist, in the context of the prevailing anti-nudist society, is probably someone who wants there to be more nudity-optional spaces—whether a little bit more or a lot more—then there is currently. A nudist is probably someone who also wants there to be more situations in which it is acceptable to be naked than is the case at present. Yet, critically, sex is actually not a situation in which it is unacceptable to be naked. Mileage may vary, depending on one’s specific cultural background and context, but in terms of North American or even global society writ large, sex is one of the only situations in which it is broadly acceptable for humans to be naked, no ifs ands or buts.

It’s not out of any animosity towards kinky people as a group, then, that I insist that nudism is not a kink. It’s just that, “kinks” (or sexual fantasies, paraphilias, etc.) are sexual, and nudism—which is to say, again, social nudism as it has usually been practised, and how it continues to be practised, in established nudist-naturist spaces—is not sexual, by definition. The moment that it becomes sexual is the moment that it stops being nudism, and becomes... sex. We are hovering close to tautology here, but I would argue that, if we’re going to put all of this into question, we might as well throw up our hands, decide philosophy and language are dead, and just all start grunting and grinding on each other non-stop. That would obviously be a great set-up for a porn movie, but it’s not at all practical for real life.

In other words, this is a semantic hill worth metaphorically dying on. (I can’t recommend actually dying over a semantic issue.)

Personally, I would like it if the porn industry as a whole was, by one means or another, prevented from misusing the words “nudism” and “nudist” (and sometimes “naturism” and “naturist”, too) for marketing any of its stuff.

It used to be that, entering the word “nudism” into Google, one of the top results was a website that had the word “nudism” in the name, and that featured galleries of photos taken, seemingly, from public nude beaches. I will admit to having clicked on it long ago, when I was still a teenager. Years later, while relaxing on such a beach in Barcelona as an adult, a drone whizzed by overhead, stalled for a minute, and then continued on into the distance. I was left wondering if the drone had taken my picture, and annoyed that I would not be getting any portion of the profits generated should my dick—and the bare skin of everyone else on the beach, including some kids with their families—end up on a website of the aforementioned type. Not cool!

But honestly, I have no practical answers about how to deal with this sort of thing, beyond some kind of comprehensive social revolution that would also fundamentally change the nature (and/or the existence) of the internet as well as the economy at large.

As both an anarchist and a nudist, the challenge, I think, is figuring out a way to articulate that nudism is not a “kink” without abhorring the category of “kink” as a whole.

Unless we are to take a very conservative view of the larger category of sex (which some non-anarchist nudist-naturists do, being broadly socially conservative in other matters), the subcategory of kink—which is to say, any of several sexual subcultures and/or the activities and aesthetics they concern themselves with—is something that exists beyond good and evil. It just is what it is, and overall, that’s something neutral and, for the most part, not even worthy of extensive commentary. The vocabulary is tricky here, but I think it is important to oppose the legitimization of certain kinds of sexual ideation as just one more variety of kink among many interchangeable ones (specifically zoophilia, e.g. bestiality, and pedophilia) without denying that, in the grand scheme of things, most other sexual practices, as bizarre or occasionally even dangerous to the practitioner(s) as they may be, aren’t really anyone else’s business so long as all parties consent (something that, incidentally, is categorically impossible in the attempted realization of zoophilic and pedophilic ideation, for reasons that don’t need to distract us).

Threading this needle, of distinguishing nudism from kink without opposing kink writ large (nor supporting it either, mind you) without also providing unwitting affirmation of actually dangerous forms of sexual ideation (like the aforementioned) won’t necessarily be easy, never mind elegantly articulated, in off-the-cuff, sometimes quite emotionally charged conversation. It should be said that I don’t think that any kink that passes basic muster—that isn’t detestable at a fundamental level, in other words—is, at that point, beyond critique either. As far as I’m concerned, nothing is beyond critique, least of all ideology; and if we’re talking about kink, that also always means the set of political ideas (and whether anyone recognizes these ideas as political or not is irrelevant) that there are in play about (whichever given) kink. For some practical examples of what I’m talking about, see this critique of BDSM from Yggdrasil Distro, as well as basically anything from the Bandana Blog project; these texts, and others, challenged my own perspectives on, and preconceptions about, these issues.

Personally speaking, I’m neither especially interested in BDSM nor in critiques thereof, but I have appreciated these perspectives, just as I appreciate critical perspectives on all sorts of other topics that don’t necessarily have much to do with my life in the first person. I live in the world with other people, after all, and despite the taboo nature of sexual practices that are, perhaps, attractive to the practitioners precisely because they are taboo, BDSM certainly does come up when chatting with friends (or sometimes complete strangers) about their relationships, the sex they like to have or want to have, the sort of work they do, and so on. The personal is political, and vice versa, and so political ideas (as well as moral values, analysis of how society works, etc.) are going to come up in these conversations, so all the better if the participants are actually well-informed about the complexities of whatever issue.

I think it’s worth saying—and I am hardly the first to say it—that humans are by and large sexual beings, and sexuality as an embodied experience cannot be cleanly cut off from the rest of personhood. But sexuality is not the same as sex, and cannot be. I am probably not prepared, at this time, to provide a tidy definition of “sex” that all readers will be satisfied with, but I shall insist that it’s a rather different thing than nudism is. It is, in point of fact, a whole other kind of thing, pertaining more to a person’s chosen activity, to “doing something”, rather than to a passive and continuous condition or state that is, in a sense, agnostic to activity. There is only the faintest echo of “doing something” in nudism; what a person is “doing” is sustaining their naked condition, rather than “returning to” dress (bearing in mind that all humans were born naked, not clothed, so really it is always to nudity that we return, but of course we all live in a clothes-are-understood-as-the-default society).

Apart from the obvious negative effects on the plans and aspirations of people more or less like me—people who want nudity to be (understood as) normal and indeed unremarkable, rather than (understood as) sexual and/or inherently provocative—I have also always thought it a curious thing to understand nudism as a “kink” because nudity is, in fact, sort of the “default uniform” for sex. People can have sex in all sorts of states of dress and partial undress, of course, but it’s rather odd to think of simple nudity as particularly kinky, even setting aside that we might be talking about a person writing an essay for their nudism blog while naked or making breakfast by themselves while naked rather than engaging in any kind of actually sexual activity with another person while naked.

Nudism, vis-à-vis a sexual situation, could almost be said to be the opposite of kinky insofar as many kinks ideate about specific outfits or worn articles (fursuits, gear associated with the leather subculture, the sexy French maid uniform, etc.) during sex, in contrast to the always readily accessible, and frankly quite unimaginative, option of nudity.

All of the above words won’t stop Christian rightists and other anti-nudists from viewing nudism through a “kink” lens or presenting nudism as “kinky” in conversation with others, then proceeding to identify kinkyness as a political success on the part of Satanic secret societies. If one is opposed to nudism on ideological or simply aesthetic grounds, and wants to rally others to the same sort of opposition, then a lens that casts nudism as an abnormal sexual compulsion does a great deal to delegitimize nudism at large, suggesting that nudism belongs in the same limited space of “only behind closed doors” where our culture also places sex and using the toilet. The nudism-as-kink idea presently serves a similar rhetorical function for anti-nudists as “autogynephilia” does for transphobes. It is also of a piece with present-day campaigns in many countries, from Turkey to the United States to China, to remove the capacity of queer people to express their queerness in public and/or on the internet in any way whatsoever, whether in art or in how they dress. The implication of the nudism-as-kink idea is that nothing less than the total non-presence of nudity in all public space and/or on the internet is acceptable; there is some grudging leeway about certain situations and settings, usually to the benefit of specific groups of capitalists invested in sex industries.

The logic is always the same: pathologize or criminalize some forms of expression as inappropriately sexual, and therefore in need of regulation and/or elimination. Enforced bluntly by the state, this logic has always severely punished people for doing things that are really quite harmless.

The harmless practice of nudists, throughout time, has been to get out into the Sun and the air naked, e.g. to recreate while nude. Otherwise it has simply consisted of being unburdened by clothes (which, as an alternative option, may be as unnecessary as they are uncomfortable in a given situation) when engaged in daily chores, activities, and socializing.

I invite the reader to understand the word “nudism” as denoting a social proposal, one that concerns itself with matters like work, philosophy, and how (I think) at least some future people will want to live. When people reduce this proposal to the nudity—really to the image of the nudity that they have in their heads—they are being both profoundly unimaginative and profoundly paranoid in their understanding of what is being said. It is a projection of their own ideas about the world when they understand “nudism” as denoting nothing but a sexual fantasy gone wild, a way for a bunch of freaks to get it on with their sometimes merely disgusting, occasionally actively evil, sexual undertakings, in other words nudism as a kink (derogatory).

But actually, nudism is not a kink, it is not sex, and it isn’t only for adults (unlike the former two items). The word “nudism” has certainly been misused by people who sell pornography, and there are plenty of stories in this world, if you care to go looking, about creeps who use a rhetoric of “nudism” (alongside a host of other manipulative tricks, like presenting as an authority and living up to the name) as a means of accomplishing some pretty fucked-up stuff around kids and youth. But this has no bearing on the merits and faults of nudism itself, however, nor does it speak to the reality of nudist individuals, nudist families, nudist communities, and people who otherwise have a broadly more casual and unanxious relationship to simple nudity, whether their own or others'.

This miscategorization reduces the whole texture of a way of life and its philosophy to an all-motivating “sexuality”; in this regard, it owes a great deal both to Freud and to the terrible mainstream of Christian theology.

At some point in the future, I may wish to consider, in another essay, the issue of “kink at Pride” from a nudist-comfortist and anarchist perspective. Kyle Kingsbury’s “A History of Leather at Pride: 1965-1995” provides a great deal of context about debates, both historic and relatively contemporary, about this broad subject matter—one that has included, for better or worse, the issue of nudity at Pride. As I have written before, nudity is a sexualized subject matter, and the presence of nudists acting like nudists at Pride, or anywhere else for that matter, is representative of an excess of what is normally appropriate (or what relatively conservative Pride organizers and participants want and expect) in much the same way that kinksters acting like kinksters might be. There’s no guarantee that I’ll get around to it, but I feel as though engaging with the perennial “kink at Pride” debate could offer some insight with regards to some of my favourite subjects: what practical solidarity with other “freaks” ought to look like, how nudists should relate to LGBT+ coalitional politics, and strategic questions about expanding the availability of an option of nudity in society. But these topics will have to wait for another day.

[comments: Raddle | Reddit ++]

We know about Coltrane’s Circle of Fifths because of an interaction with Yusef Lateef in 1967. Coltrane gave Lateef the drawing, and then Lateef included it in his book Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns. The Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns is a 280-page book of scales, patterns, and licks that serve as a list of jazz patterns. For Lateef, Coltrane’s Circle of Fifths symbolizes his musical journey. He adds that Coltrane “embraced the concerns of a rich tradition of autophysiopsychic music.” For Lateef, the autophysiopsychic was “music from one’s physical, mental and spiritual self.”

John Coltranes circle was an attempt to draw out a relationship between the ratios and harmonies of notes and scales. The outer ring also reveals an additional shape between the tones of the Hexatonic scale. This shape is a Hexagon. Another of Coltrane’s passions was the occult, so finding the pentagon and hexagon together has always been a point of interest for analyzing his fifth. He created his circle of fifths around the same time that he was deeply studying both Indian music and Einstein. Much of Indian music is intensely complex and uses scales with intervals smaller than semitones, called microtones. Instead of dividing an octave into 12 tones, these scales use something described as “notes between notes”. To illustrate, these scales have various notes between C and C#.

Coltrane was looking deeper to inspire his jazz composition. And while he was going micro in many ways, his interests illustrate that he was also going macro. There is a story in the book ‘Coltrane: The Story of a Sound’, where Coltrane speaks to French horn player David Amram. In the anecdote, Coltrane delivers “an incredible discourse about the symmetry of the solar system, talking about black holes in space, constellations, the whole structure of the solar system, and how Einstein was able to reduce all of that complexity into something very simple. Amram explains that Coltrane was trying to do the same in his music.

In “The Jazz of Physics”, author Stephon Alexander recalls a phone conversation he had with Yusef Lateef in his late 80s. He told the veteran musician that he felt the diagram was related to quantum gravity. Quantum gravity was the attempt to unify quantum mechanics with Einsteins’ theory of general relativity. As a physicist and saxophonist himself, Alexander is uniquely positioned to see the relationship between music & mathematics. For him it all started with Coltranes Circle Of Fifths – as he sees it, Coltrane drew from the same geometric principle that motivated Einstein’s quantum theory. While Coltrane and Lateef were approaching questions about underlying patterns and order in music from a spiritual direction, Einstein’s work can be seen as something similar but using a different method.

Why Is John Coltrane's Circle Of Fifths Different?

The Standard Circle Of Fifths is something that will be familiar to most musicians. It’s a geometric representation of the notes and pitch intervals we hear in music. More specifically, it’s the relation between 12 semitones. In the Western Scale, there are twelve intervals between each octave: A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, and G#.”

In classical Western music, a fifth is an interval from the 1st to the last notes in a diatonic scale. For example, the interval between C to G is called a perfect fifth. This is because the note G is seven semitones above C. Coltrane's Circle of Fifths is based around something similar but with some variations. The most notable aspect is that Coltrane uses a whole tone or hexatonic scale. The outer ring of the drawing contains the hexatonic scale of C, while the inner circle bears the hexatonic scale of B. While there is no definitive interpretation of the Coltrane Circle of Fifths, many have tried to decode it, and the closest anyone has ever come to explaining it is by drawing upon mathematics and geometry.

Interview with John Coltrane June 15, 1958

i don't want to defer to your decisions and opinions just because they came from you You seem to expect my unconditional subservience. I think you're disgusting.

you want to get things done and be efficient get paid and go home it's “easier” for everyone for me to eat your orders, your commands, your poison

Why would I submit to this social arrangement that prioritizes the meeting of quotas and ticking of boxes and accumulation of value, that so vehemently refutes and denies my subjectivity, unless i was forced and had no choice?

why would i eagerly offer my blood to pad your CV and inflate your social capital? To feed you who is so overfed

You insist on rules and schedules that I must abide by so your criteria and timelines are satisfied Your standards and regulations and objectives furnish a lifeway that serves you and not me i am an interchangeable human battery to pop in and expend there is no compensation for the lifespan of mine that you've harvested

Why must I chisel and compress my time to fit into the tiniest of open spaces Who set this terrain? It wasn't me and still you play the powerless victim

There is [a kaleidoscope fractal explosion variety universe of possibilities for moving one's body through space and time] yet you sneakily narrow the scope of reality so i must plug and play, slot into your system with menus of binary options either i accomplish your task on your terms or i've failed

Do you expect consistent, precisely-calibrated results on demand just because you say so? Because that's just how it works around here? I'm replaceable, fungible, and defective fucking fine then i'm only doing the bare minimum until we have no reason to relate ever again

===

You hold my relationships hostage because you're the more credible storyteller here clear-voiced, straight-backed, even-keeled, rehearsed and brimming with authority you could limit the places i tread for calling me the one who betrayed and crossed you when i said “no” to you

Your scheming and plotting manipulation and insistence and deceptive false dilemmas and brute force bulldozing are so achingly normal here

This is not a negotiation This is not a collaboration This is not about meeting needs This is domination This is gaslighting insistence that this is the natural order of things

====

Disdaining and judging anyone as weak, inefficient, slow, stupid, unobservant is hierarchical People each have their own thoughts and feelings, their own understandings their own systems and processes for making life work.

the way i do things isn't worse than the way you do things it's not insufficient for being dissimilar

when i appear not to deliver results you desire you just call me selfish, unreasonable, emotional lazy, unreliable, erratic and carry on satisfied with your relentless self-propagation self-righteous and loving what you see when you occupy the entirety of your bathroom mirror with no space for anything else

but i know instead i am operating under different assumptions and impelled by different needs and pressures that are beyond your imagination and beyond your desire to understand weighty things that are invisible to you did you ever think to consider you don't know what you don't fuckin know?!

===

Self-hatred is hierarchical and the biggest con of all is how they got us to internalize their evaluation systems they made us hate ourselves as much as they hate us for —not shrinking and contorting our bodies so we —-insert into their bureaucratic permaculture human extraction machines for —not gleefully seizing our roles —-as agents of their wish-fulfillment fantasies for —how we force them to pinch and turn up their noses —-when we violate their delicate, dainty white lace and milk sensibilities for —denying their inborn species right to get their way —-because their embodiment is categorically superior These fuckers, they really believe they deserve all that they desire and that questioning their authority is violence toward them

===

This is a hierarchy of bodies. Don't look at my body and decide what I'm good for. You don't know my life. You don't know me.

Do you ever pause to think you're making a lot of reductive assumptions and judging others according to white supremacist standards that do not apply to the lived experience of people who are just fuckin different from you?

===

NO I DONT WANT TO DO IT I WANT YOU TO GET THE FUCK OFF MY NECK unlike you I HAVE NO INTEREST IN CALLING THINGS WHAT THEY ARE NOT You don't have the power to name me You don't know me

===

you won't be the one they'll listen to as sparks fly and bridges burn they have to lose something they actually care about before they'll question themselves

me, i give a wide berth in my line of flight escape is delight it is springtime with stars and sprouted seeds an entire outside to what they'd have you believe... yippee

“The process of self-alienation—of separating an idea or representation of oneself from one’s living self and then subordinating one’s living self to that image—which Stirner describes and criticizes is so ubiquitous and fundamental to the functioning of modern societies that it permeates nearly every aspect of social life.”

This separation of an idea (or representation) of oneself from one’s living self and then subordinating one’s living self to that image “is not just the foundation of modern life or modernity, it is also the foundation of so-called “traditional” societies, basically from the neolithic age onwards up to modernity.”

“Though it appears it was precisely not the foundation for the earlier (one could argue more aptly-named “traditional”) paleolithic and, later, gathering and hunting societies that are now usually called “primitive.””

“What distinguishes non-primitive traditional societies from modern societies can be characterized as the intensity and ever-wider dispersion of this self-alienation throughout all aspects of life, including every social institution and form of social practice.” reminds me of The Society of the Spectacle

“Although it is proper to call Max Stirner the most radical, coherent and consistent critic of modernity, it would be incorrect to understand him as defending these traditional institutions or life-ways. He is equally a critic of premodern traditional and modern societies. (Given the limits of archeological [sic (archaeological, submitted this and the last correction to the library)] and anthropological knowledge in his time, it is not surprising that Stirner never mentions or hazards any guesses regarding what are now called “primitive” societies.)”

I don’t really like the author’s use of the word slave and other forms of the word like enslaving when talking about people who aren’t in prison or otherwise owned or trafficked as an actual slave. In this thread, I’ve been trying to reword the booklet, but maybe we are slavish. Instead of looting, we are supposed to sell ourselves to employers, but we had no choice in making that surplus that keeps us working.

“Enslaving oneself to a fixed idea or imaginary ideal (or any number of them) is not a simple thing. It requires an immense amount of effort to work itself out in practice. This effort, in large part, it has been the primary function of all religion, philosophy and ideology to facilitate from the earliest days of symbolic communication. This effort also is embodied in a large number of habits, attitudes, modes of thought, and techniques of subordination that must be and have been learned and perfected by the masses of people in contemporary societies. And it is enforced by the sanctions of social, economic, political and military institutions that are constructed and maintained through the same types of self-alienated acts en masse.” (should be en masse which means “as a whole”)

solid clean white whitewash opacity milk culture, a horror ecology body deforming agonist and antagonist harnesses you for its own purposes penetrates inside and makes you like it MAKES YOU MAKE MORE OF ITSELF until you like it or die trying welcome to the city the city is a titty

///

wrung from the tortured glands of another purportedly good for structural integrity within us clings to and hardens skeletons calcifies and entrenches white skin white teeth white dreams food pyramid marketing con transformed The Stuff into baseline health need people get mad at you when you refuse it and imply it's not good for both body and soul run fast they're really, really angry...

///

more hormones, more pierce and flood vessels and drown out one's blood genetic level sameness ordained from above everyone's doing it come join in fill up Someone's uterus and empty It out because surely every Woman wants to be a Mother compulsory self-sacrifice decided by Someone Else INVASION OF INTERNAL ORGANS CRAM IT IN THE HOLE BECAUSE I SAID SO forever until elasticity wrecked children upon children produced processed to add value assessed and priced alive now, for the purpose of growing consumable, useable flesh It's only good business sense to manage well and to harness the biological momentum of bodies whose autonomy we have no use for then they get harvested at a time decided by that Someone Else and not at a time decided by that Someone who dies We helped them grow. They owe us.

///

Concerning life that didn't have to exist fixating on fine-tuning our control so as to provide a more comfortable life or a less painful death is the most deceptive and cruel framing of all What the fuck is wrong with you?

///

Imposed industrial life support regime precise qualities and quantities pumped out on demand flesh products on conveyor belt assembly line spreading white tube-fed tumor, expanding via bureaucracy winning the war by crowding out the rest of the colours and creatures Milk grows so fast and hard, no one else has a chance they're taking away water to drink from the rivers replacing it with milk in bottles for our safety and productivity for our insidious non-consensual nourishment for non-consensual accelerated growth and non-consensual enhanced reproductivity

///

more milk more tits we prefer to pretend it didn't come from titties it's good enough for children to know it came from the store but we gotta work to make more of em more more more it's an open secret an adult secret for us to know and them to find out that it's really important that we get to cum in this social arrangement and that we get to do it without shame or reproach it's our right and duty to get it done and start it all over again and enjoy ourselves fully while we make the world

///

until there's nothing left to eat and drink but this! Homogeneous pink and grey asshole paste formed into shapes with a tall glass of milk on the side environmental racism, environmental toxicity, and hazard horror product on every shelf Success; Universalism Achieved chopped, blended, rarefied, extruded through tubes fed to us all in proportions equivalent to our market worth sensory dulling food and drink we're all so used to it oblivion by stun bath or nail gun seems appealing in a way if there's no pain then surely no harm done

Translators Introduction

This piece’s exact origin is hard to discern. It seems to have been either originally posted to WeChat (A popular Chinese social media app), then shared to Chinese language platforms run outside of the control of the CCP, or else vice-versa, on June 1st 2021. Although its source is unclear and the author anonymous, it’s important to understand the context from which it arose. Crushed by the repressive 996 work culture (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week), which is an almost universal experience of people living in China today, Luo Huazhong made the radical decision to cease participation. In a series of quickly censored social media posts¹, Luo Huazhong (“Kind-Hearted Traveler”) told of a different kind of life that he called Tangping². The lifestyle he detailed was a kind of traveller/drop-out culture with an emphasis on spending as little time at work as possible. In the posts he shared stories of how, rather than grind himself to a pulp in order to live up to the expectations of the dominant culture, and become weighed down by its commodities, he had been happily unemployed for two years. In that time he found that an affordable diet, and modest living conditions were more than sufficient as they allowed him the time to pursue other more worthwhile activities, like cycling from Sichuan to Tibet, climbing mountains, and reading philosophy. Since April of 2021 when this idea was introduced and then banned from every Chinese social media platform, the idea of Tangping spread quickly and became somewhat of a hot-button issue in Chinese culture. Of course the party was quick to reject it, with party websites calling it bourgeois, or nihilistic. But censorship wasn’t sufficient to completely bury it, so state media began to invent a dialogue around what they claimed were the ‘real’ issues that Tangping had revealed. Tangping has benefited from being memetic in its origins, as this has allowed it to dodge the censors, and images of chives can still be seen on Chinese social media. Tangping, like most ideas, is shaped by its (in this case mostly anonymous) proponents. Luo Huazhong is not a leader, nor a messiah. He was simply the OP (original poster) of the meme that Tangping became. The author of this piece is just another anonymous Tangpingist³.

躺平主义者宣言

Tangpingist Manifesto

Tangpingists of the world, unite!

1 Introduction: The great refusal/flat refusal

Some of the young people, disgusted at what they see before them, are moving on. Rather than being crushed by a sinister life, they simply live instinctually. Their poses resembling rest, sleep, sickness, and death, are not meant to renew or refresh, but are a refusal of the order of time itself. The call of those great times that longed to convert life into fuel, once so violently urged them to move forward, is now just an irritating fly buzzing in their ears. This is the moment when one kind of magic fails, and another comes back to life. As a matter of fact, if it weren't for the reminder of the Tangpingists, people would have forgotten that there is still such a thing as “justice”. Just as exploited employees try to reclaim their time from the bosses by touching fish⁴, the Tangpingists, who walk the same path, demand compensation for the endless overdrafts of the past. It’s believed that this remediation requires practitioners to reduce one’s needs in order to survive by consuming the least and working the least. Yet another growing desire is the redistribution of time and space by society as a whole, so that lying flat may become the practice of most people. The first to wave of this is obviously a kind of Tangping. Old and new aristocrats who feared losing their privileges swarmed. They have every reason to panic about this destructive idea that puts labor down like the plague, and against which there is no vaccine. But rather than acknowledging that this philosophy (which grew rapidly) is a mirror reflection of people's minds on a number of real issues, they prefer to decry it as the work of hostile forces. Of course, it makes sense for them to say that. For in the past, the people here have always been the most exemplary producers. Few other social factories in the world can make machines that run this smoothly, without making a single sound, as if the machine itself is a kind of void, without any friction. As if the people themselves were a void, and the nation was a form of reality miraculously snatched from the void. The denunciation of Tangpingists began. However, these denunciations were so trite and lifeless that the head of the person lying down is not raised. But those who claim that Tangpingists are a mob of lazy scum and unaspiring beggars should hear at least one answer. Don't take it for granted how easy it is to lie flat. On the contrary, from the moment they lay down, the Tangpingist’s body was already outside the country. Not only does their existence constitute another ethnic group, but the land on which they lie becomes completely detached from the old country. But, if this condition does not wish to be disturbed, shouldn't it have nothing to do with sovereignty and property rights? The body has no connection to possession and distribution, and the land is uninterested in management and governance. A radical Tangpingism marks a complete rejection of the current order. The Tangpingists make a merciless mockery of institutional inclusion, and are indifferent to any kind of praise or criticism. Just rotate the world 90 degrees, and people will discover this unspoken truth: the one who lies flat is standing, and the one who stands is crawling. This secret worldview has become an insurmountable obstacle between the Tangpingists and the citizens. And until the world has been completely changed, the Tangpingists have no reason to change their posture.

2 “Fellow Travellers” of Tangpingists

Yet, don't think for a moment that there is a uniform Tangpingism. When the first person who called himself a Tangpingist appeared, he could never have imagined that it would make such big waves. Tangpingism is so enthusiastically supported that those who feel threatened have to pretend they are supporters of this theory as well. How can there be any real comrades among these people? Those who are the first to come forward are just pantomiming the rhetoric to desperately keep themselves crawling. Is there any other way to deal with these Tangpingist “fellow travellers” than to throw excrement in their faces? The first to show their faces were some honorable Tangyingists⁵. Those aristocrats who move between their mansions and BMWs claim than Tangpingism shows the superiority of the order they follow. But in that order, who else lay flat (Tangping) before them? This alone gives their voice its power. Drawing this conclusion from their own lives, they think of Tangping as a form of hedonism based on material abundance. The richer the country, the more idle wanderers can be supported. Therefore, “Tangping in such a country is basically a kind of tangying”. It would be more correct to turn this sentence upside down: if there was never tangying (Lie to Win), why are people pursuing Tangping (Lie to Equality)? There is another class of Tangyingists that are more deceptive. With the help of the rhetoric of “Tangping freedom”, they successfully repackaged the popular discourse into advertising slogans selling wealth management products. What's more eye-catching than seeking something for nothing (“earning money while lying down”) in this age of overwork? However, the Tangpingists certainly made them feel that they had misplaced their expectations. In the past, when they were just completing the tasks given to them by the mainstream order, they felt that debts were always waiting somewhere ahead, as if they were just living for repayment, as if living itself produced debt-but who did they owe? It was when they took a radical Tangping stance against this systematic kidnapping that they felt they had found the right way out. This is the freedom that Tangpingists really found. Following closely behind were some moderate Tangpingists. They came on the heels of the honorable people, as if afraid of missing out. They say, until now, who hasn't noticed the changes in this world? But as faceless and mediocre figures, what influence are they expected to have? So for them, the essence of Tangpingism is not Tangping, but rather to not transgress or do things beyond the scope an individuals' ability.——As long as the dominant culture still exists, how can you compete?—— Therefore there is a call to retreat to a rural Tangpingism. We can also understand that when faced with the judgement of the official, the “radicalist” lying beside them made them tremble more than the judge did. At this time, their entire speech was simply, “My lord, I am only asking for a right to stand at the right time (like a servant). However, even these words were said on their knees. How can we distinguish this kind of kneeling vulgar Tangping (Lie to Peace) from the current philosophy of domination? Then came the economists who argued for the “rationality” of Tangpingism. Unlike scholars who criticize Tangpingism as a disaster for the country and the people, these economists are inherently optimistic. They say, what rich country is there where young people don't choose to Tangping? In the face of involution⁶, there is no better solution than Tangping. This is also the most natural solution – but isn't it the Tangpingists' own theory? But the explanation behind this is actually that when more people voluntarily withdraw from the competition and choose Tangping, the total labor force will naturally decrease, so this will give the remaining laborers more bargaining power, which is expected to improve the average wage. The assumption here is that the root cause of involution is an oversupply in the labor market. Although Tangping will also reduce consumer demand in the short term, they believe that in the medium and long term, a market equilibrium will surely emerge. The problem here is that they only regard Tangping as a “natural” result of market competition, while involution is more a result of a runaway population than a competitive national character (attitude? Ideology?) – this just is another contemporary repackaging of Malthusian population theory. Fortunately, the market will still solve everything. Their Tangping (Lie to Equilibrium) doctrine is the dynamic element of spontaneous regulation of the dominant order. Therefore, who could have contributed more to this society than Tangpingists? In fact, they are well aware of the situation of those who voluntarily quit. Those natural (”lack of theoretical guidance”) Tangpingists always been seen as the lowest-class in regular inspections of the labor market. The major economies of the capitalist world today are all cultivating a rapidly growing gig economy system. If the Tangpingists made the greatest contribution, the implication here is that they were the ones who made the necessary sacrifices for the continuation of the order. Here, the meek kneelers we mentioned will rejoice. Because, since radical Tangpingists are a bunch of unsuspecting saints, it is indeed most profitable to kneel and wait. But those economists will not tell them the disappointing truth: in the absence of democratic labor, Tangpingism, captured by the gig economy, not only fails to increase people's pay, but may also lead to further extension of labor hours. The last group to arrive, albeit late, were the technologists preaching the automation crisis. Unlike most who focus on the issue of involution, they insist that the spread of automation technology will quickly replace human labor. It will be too late to deal with a wave of unemployment by then. Therefore, Tangping is a rehearsal for the crisis of large-scale automation. Once the crisis comes, society will have to meet the basic living needs of Tangping unconditionally. If Tangpingism meant the abolition of labor, then accelerationism would bring that gift to them. But for the moment, Tangpingism is still too far ahead of its time. As Party members often say, a social ideology will only be compatible with its economic foundation (here it refers to technology as the primary productive force). What is there to worry about such an ideology that has been choked by reality? This means that for these Tangpingists, “the times will wake them up at dawn again and again.” But such arguments precisely ignore the fact that Tangpingism was originally a reaction to accelerationism. Accelerationists will not provide an explanation for why decades of technological progress have not led to a reduction in labor time. Tangpingists do not believe in the messiah of technology, nor do they believe that we can start an alternative society within the existing dominant technological system. Rather, what they state in practical terms is that if labor is abolished, it must happen all at once, immediately, or we will never be able to abolish it.

3 The Dilemma of Tangpingists

While debating with various “fellow travelers”, the Tangpingists also present their real dilemma. In fact, as long as the Tangpingist still adheres to an individualistic approach to practice, they are often forced into a cycle of asceticism and exploitation. Indeed, minimizing desire during the stage of asceticism helps us to minimize exploitation as well. But, here is the reality that the economists try to disguise, this then becomes a not-so-new technique of governance that shifts the relative surplus of the population between being “unemployed” and having no income and taking “odd jobs” with no rights or guarantees – note that these terms are both produced with the logic of production as the core. Those who actively defected to Tangpingism either continued to produce that oppressive condition, or they continued to accept it, or both. Since the time of Marx, this has been an important means of hindering the rise of workers' wages (he called it the “industrial reserve army”). The embarrassing aspect of an atomized Tangpingism is that, lacking a path to be practiced on a large scale, it may perish in stagnation. The more one understands it, the less they need it—they are forced into it, excluded from the mainstream order, and have nothing to give up. And the more one needs it, the more they resist its true meaning – for them, there has always been too much order, too many things to give up. Think about those who are caught up in the logics of marriage and family, those who have children, those who seek meaning in job assessments and GPA, those paying off their mortgages...If the Tangpingists have made so many enemies, how can one expect the dominant order to leave them alone? So, what should you make of a Tangpingism that is reclusive and withdrawn? When Tangpingists first attracted attention on social media, they were presented as such: they had exhausted their social energy with inhumane work, so they shut themselves in a cheap rental house and did not disturb the outside world. They didn't seem to realize that what confined them to a hut of a few square meters was itself part of the order they were trying to refuse. But what could be done about it? Hadn't they already taken that creed of radical Tangpingism as far as they could go? Let us return to Diogenes for a moment. When Diogenes lay in his barrel and looked out at the world, he did not appear isolated. He did not shy away from advocating his ideas to passersby, and he placed the wooden barrels in the most prosperous road in the center of the ancient Greek world. He was poor, but full of life: lighting up every face in the street with a lantern during the day, supposedly searching for the real man; stepping on the fine carpet of Plato's house, stating he was stepping on the idealist's poor vanity; walking against the flow of the crowd as they left a theater and when asked why, claiming “It is what I have been doing all my life.”. When his wooden barrel was crushed by iron hoofs, people quickly made another one for him. Few people know that the order we live in today is more ubiquitous and indestructible than it was in the days of the city-state that imprisoned most slaves. And who do we expect to rescue our ruined barrels? If we reject the order that imprisons most of us, but leave behind the order that separates and divides us and prevents us from loving one another sincerely, what have we rejected?

4 Allies of Tangpingists

The world today is rough. In order to save Tangpingism from its bind, so as to realize the great rejection of the current order, it may need another aspect aside from individualism. In fact, the general conception of mass Tangpingism is radical in nature. Tangpingism does not mean the decoupling of a certain social link, but every link. Tangpingism does not occur in the breakdown of a certain social class and identity community, but in the entire working class. It seeks to link refusal to go to school, to work, to have children, and to have a family, and so it naturally has the potential to link a whole generation of people who are mostly oppressed under the current order. It tries to contact all those who refuse coercion and obedience, men and women, workers and the unemployed, citizens, farmers and nomads, hooligans, students and intellectuals, heterosexuals, homosexuals and other queer people, vagrants and pensioners… what other idea could quietly build the secret affinities to set the stage for a general strike? Allies we contact include: a. Women and queer people. We reject marriage, family, and sexual relationships that bring them oppressive, discriminatory, and unequal relationships. We refuse to breed for the continuation of patriarchy. b. Workers (whether full-time workers, gig workers, or unemployed). We reject labor orders that create exploitation and alienation. We refuse to create labor value that provides a source of capital for bureaucratic managers and capitalists. c. Peasants and nomads. We refuse to be assimilated into an imposed modern order. We reject economic plunder and cultural extermination. We reject environmental catastrophe. We reject forced migrations. d. Students and intellectuals. We reject the intellectual and cultural production of mainstream ideologies. We reject the monopoly on knowledge. e. Young people, citizens, the homeless, and the unemployed. We reject high rents and housing prices. We refuse to pay housing loans and interest. f. The elderly. We refuse to delay retirement. We refuse expensive medical and nursing care. We refuse to be apathetic and neglected. g. Other theorists and activists who advocate radical change rather than conservative order. For example some Marxists, anarchists, feminists, ecologists, cooperativists…

5 Alternative Autonomous Communities

Radical Tangpingism is manifested not only in reaching out to a wide range of allies, but also in mutual aid communal relationships and in connecting with those alternative autonomous regions that have or do exist. Without the attempts of these pioneers, the Tangpingists would have no basis for realizing their vision. A Tangpingist is the smallest autonomous region, and their body is an out-of-control place that drifts around. On any occasion, in any situation, whether it's work, entertainment, classes, meals, mourning, weddings, Tangpingists practice their own ritual, Tangping. Faced with any person or entity, whether it is a leader, a boss, a division commander, or banknotes, medals, and national flags, Tangpingists are loyal to their own label, which is Tangping. Tangpingists invent their own festivals. In the midst of such festivals, they celebrate neither harvest nor victory. They lie down on the highways where the traffic flows, in the factories where the machines run and the bodies are numb. They neither spend nor indulge. They lie down in shopping malls that serve as contemporary churches, in stately or majestic palaces or modern complexes. In the midst of such celebrations, they do not provide more leisure for themselves, but for others. They did not erect these shelters for themselves, but for all the oppressed. For those who practice the principle of alternative autonomy in other ways, whether they are struggling under the siege of high-pressure order, hiding on the top of mountains or jungles that no one cares about, whether they retreat to the borders and corners of this world, or are stationed in the center of noisy and bustling squares, Tangpingists try to find inspiration and enlightenment from their attempts. We are grateful to the following pioneers: the anarchists and Marxists who founded the Paris Commune, the workers who took over the factories in the Spanish Civil War, the escaped slaves who formed marron communities in the Great Dismal Swamp in the United States, the homeless, artists, students and queer people who occupied houses in Berlin, Germany, the autonomous Zapata aborigines of Chiapas, Mexico, and the women who fought patriarchy and organized cooperatives in the Kurdistan region of Syria.…… Through mutual aid and self-determination, Tangpingists will also build their own communities. We seek an alternative to the order of excess that is centered on production and expansion. We seek Tangping anytime, anywhere. We seek to build shelter on deserted and vacant land without being evicted. We seek infrastructure, spatial design and urban layout for leisure and play purposes. We seek an economy of gifts, reciprocity and freedom from exploitation. We seek collective governance with direct democracy and gender equality. We seek to defend common ownership. We seek to tax our existing rent-seekers and renters to pay back what we have been deprived of in the past. We seek a barrel repair fund. We seek to allow residents to pursue their own pleasures with minimal labor. We seek technologies that accelerate Tangping rather than enslavement, so that labor reductions pay off immediately. We seek community care and nurturing. We seek to remove borders and move freely between autonomous regions. In particular we seek attention to those in need – to provide care for those who have suffered from mental and physical pain, money for those who are indebted, care for those with reduced mobility and incapacity, space for those who have suffered discrimination, stigmatization and injustice... … And for those who can't join us for the time being, Tangpingists must think of them too ...... It's time to stop fighting each over the rations during artificial shortages. A philosophy of resistance will be given new life from our actions. When the time comes, the Tangpingists will formulate more detailed tasks. But before that, we must make the first barrel. Tangpingists of the world, unite!

¹ English translations available at https://chi.st/bugs/tang-ping or in PDF form at https://printedbybugs.com/pdfs/tangping/.

² 躺平(Tangping) means to “lying flat”. This spawned the slogan “a chive lying flat is difficult to reap” 躺平的韭菜不好割. It has become somewhat known by its transliteration but this definition is important.

³ Directly translated it would be ‘a practitioner of Tangping’, or even more accurately a ‘someone who Lies Flat’. Because it’s a manifesto, it obviously needs to be an -ist.

⁴ Like Tangping, touching fish is a new term coined by Chinese youth in response to an oppressive culture of overwork. The term itself is a play on the proverb “muddy waters make it easy to catch fish” [浑水摸鱼], and the idea is to take advantage of the Covid crisis drawing management’s focus away from supervising their employees. It too seems to be growing from a hashtag to a philosophy, so perhaps we will see a Fish Touchers Manifesto soon.

⁵ The phrase Tangying [躺赢] is internet slang that means something like ‘winning without even trying’. In this context you can think of Tangyingists as people who are spoonfed a successful existence, like a roman emperor laying in his chair while being fed grapes and fanned with palm leaves.

⁶ Involution is a term coined by Clifford Geertz which broadly describes an economy where increased labor does not yield an equivalently increased output. It is often used to describe modern life in China.

OK, so, whew, it is done, and sorry about the massive delay between notes in this series. There are some awesome projects on the horizon, that a group of us are hard at work on, and that has been a good amount of my time as of late (it will be totally worth it!).

In lieu of trying to break Chapter 15 down into the sections as they were read, I am just going to fuse all four weeks of sessions into this series of notes. Chapter 15 is a fascinating chapter, and one that is often not afforded its place of importance in the wider work of Capital. Ostensibly this chapter focuses attention on machines and factory production, but there is a lot more going on here than a superficial reading will allow us to see. Before diving into the content in detail, there are a few threads that I want to highlight.

The first theme that comes forward is related to the dynamic between worker and machine. In this discussion Marx delves into some of the ontology of the factory, and how this dynamic fundamentally undermines the structures of self-managed work that proliferated in handiwork, or craft, production. In the relationship to the machine the worker is not eliminated as such, is not destroyed or surpassed. Rather, the worker becomes reframed, not as an entity with skills and tools that produces an object, but as an industrial input, an element of the overall mechanistic system of the factory, where the workers becomes an appendage of the machine itself, as the machine becomes an appendage of the worker. In this construct the imperatives of efficiency and the extraction of surplus value drives the machine to a place of primacy, rendering the worker generic labor.

This dynamic of the machine rising to primacy fundamentally disrupts the directness of the concept of the labor theory of value, giving rise to a second theme centered around discussing how value is transmitted from the machine to the commodity. Within this discussion there is a fascinating discourse around obsolesence, and the rate in which machinery is replaced in the process of production. In this transferrence of value the machine runs into two limitations, both the necessity to save more labor than is expended in its production and operation, as well as the the overall cost of production, which must be less than production utilizing manual methods. The limits, in other words, center around force and velocity, active elements that come to form the core of how the factory is discussed.

The final thread in this selection is the way in which the advent of machinery fundamentally changes the character of labor in practical ways. With the advent of the machine, and the reduction of the worker to one that operates the machine, the specialization of labor implodes into a generic form of labor. As a result of this generic labor, increasing numbers of possible workers, including children, could be considered, causing a downward pressure on wages. This downward pressure on wages creates conditions which draft more of the family or community unit into the labor pool, further reshaping the dynamics between workers and control over the conditions of their labor.

Through these themes I am sure a number of parallels or lines of flight between these concepts and contemporary theory and experience will be noted. One of the more interesting connections here is one that exists between Zerzan, and attendant primativist tendencies, and this specific chapter from Capital. It is often forgotten that Zerzan started off as a Marxist, working alongside unions and leftists in the Bay Area in the 1970s, and during that time penned some works focused on anti-work theory. It is from these roots, though, that the arguments from Chapter 15 are taken on and extended out to some total narrative of history and technology. Now, I have a lot of issues with that reading, specifically the historical decontextualization and the reliance on anthropological assertions, as well as, you know, the whole utopianism angle, but it is always important to see where the roots of ideas that we will come into contact with really are.

It is with these notes that we will be closing this reading of Capital. As I stated at the beginning, this is not meant to be a comprehensive reading of all of Capital, Volume 1. Rather, as with a lot of the things I have been writing as of late, we are tracing a thread, a line of thought that passes through this work, and that has long tails into the present. So, without any additional waiting, here we go with Chapter 15:

• The machine functions within capitalism to achieve two things. The first is that the machine renders the work performed by a single worker more efficient, namely more can be produced with fewer workers in the same time. Secondly, as a result of this efficiency less labor is embodied in the object, which lowers its value, but may not necessarily lower the price. As such, the machine produced commodity can be a site in which increased surplus value can be extracted from the object than it could be in non-mechanized production. The presence of machines, therefore, necessitates a differentiation between manufacture, where labor is a starting point, and industry, where machines become the point of departure.

“John Stuart Mill says i n his Principles of Political Economy : ' It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have light­ened the day's toil of any human being.'1 That is, however, by no means the aim of the application of machinery under capitalism. Like every other instrument for increasing the productivity of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other part, the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing. The machine is a means for producing surplus-value.

In manufacture the transformation of the mode of production takes labour-power as its starting-point. In large-scale industry, on the other hand, the instruments of labour are the starting­ point. We have first to investigate, then, how the instruments of labour are converted from tools into machines, or what the difference is between a machine and an implement used in a handicraft. We are concerned here only with broad and general characteristics, for epochs in the history of society are no more separated from each other by strict and abstract lines of demarca­tion than are geological epochs.” (492)

• In order to ground this separation between manufacture and industry, one must be able to draw a line of demarcation between the tool and the machine. Superficially, it would seem as if one could derive this separation from a differentiation on the levels of complexity or locomotion, but the complexity of a thing is an arbitrary qualitative determination and the structures of locomotion change and shift between different objects. In order to be able to differentiate between a tool and machine, Marx lays out three characteristics that define a machine; the motor, the mechanism through which power is transmitted to the machine (at this time many machines operated from a single motor often, but mechanisms like drive belts, or even electrical and communications wires and things fulfill this category as well), and the tool manipulated by that transmitted power. If we notice, these categories are not mutually exclusive, in the sense that they can never interact, but, rather, the tool itself is contained within the machine. The inflection point of the difference, therefore, is not in the machine or the tool itself, but is in that which exists around the tool, whether that be human or whether mechanisms are added to the tool to displace it from the hand and render it operative by a mechanism. This connection between the tool and the mechanism removes the tool from the control of the operator, and inscribes the tool and its operation into the mechanism itself.

“On a closer examination of the working machine proper we rediscover in it as a general rule, though often in highly modified forms, the very apparatus and tools used by the handicraftsman or the manufacturing worker; but there is the difference that instead of being the tools of a man they are the implements of a mechanism, mechanical implements. Either the entire machine is only a more or less altered mechanical edition of the old handicraft tool, as for instance the power-loom, or the working parts fitted in the frame of the machine are old acquaintances, as spindles are in a mule, needles in a stocking-loom, saw-blades in a sawing-machine and knives in a chopping-machine. The distinction between these tools and the actual framework of the working machine exists from their moment of entry into the world, because they continue for the most part to be produced by handicraft or by manufacture, and are afterwards fitted into the framework of the machine, which is produced by machinery. The machine, therefore, is a mechanism that, after being set in motion, performs with its tools the same operations as the worker formerly did with similar tools. Whether the motive power is derived from man, or in turn from a machine, makes no difference here. From the moment that the tool proper is taken from man and fitted into a mechanism, a machine takes the place of a mere implement. The difference strikes one at once, even in those cases where man himself continues to be the prime mover. The number of implements that he himself can use simultaneously is limited by the number of his own natural instruments of pro­duction, i.e. his own bodily organs. In Germany they tried at first to make one spinner work two spinning-wheels, that is to work simultaneously with both hands and both feet. That proved to be too exhausting. Later, a treadle spinning-wheel with two spindles was invented, but adepts in spinning who could spin two threads at once were almost as scarce as two-headed men. The Jenny, on the other hand, even at the very beginning, spun with twelve to eighteen spindles, and the stocking-loom knits with many thousand needles at once. The number of tools that a machine can bring into play simultaneously is from the outset independent of the organic limi­tations that confine the tools of the handicraftsman.” (494-495)

• In this displacement of the tool from the worker, the character of labor shifts again, from the selling of ontological potential as labor time, still tied to the uniqueness of the worker, into a form in which the worker becomes an interchangeable element of the machine itself. At the point of mechanization, activity undergoes a process of constant modification to eliminate “inefficiencies”, which are nothing other than non-controllable contingencies of everyday life, from the imprecise activity of humans and mistakes, to the unevenness of “natural” forms of locomotion like wind, water or draft animals (we can also consider electricity supply in this calculus). The systemic element of the abstract conceptual structure of manufacture comes into direct collision with the particularity and deep historicity of the dynamism of existence, with the elimination of inefficiencies being an operation to attempt to force the world into the manufacturing model. As these modifications progress the agency of the worker if subsumed to the imperatives and repetitions of the machine.

“The machine, which is the starting-point of the industrial re­volution, replaces the worker, who handles a single tool, by a mechanism operating with a number of similar tools and set in motion by a single motive power, whatever the form of that power. Here we have the machine, but first role as a simple element in production by machinery.

An increase in the size of the machine and the number of its working tools calls for a more massive mechanism to drive it; and this mechanism, in order to overcome its own inertia, requires a mightier moving power than that of man, quite a part from the fact that man is a very imperfect instrument fo reproducing uniform and continuous motion. Now assuming that he is acting simply as a motor, that a machine has replaced the tool he was using, it is evident that he can also be replaced as a motor by natural forces. Of all the great motive forces handed down from the period of manufacture, horse-power is the worst, partly because a horse has a head of his own, partly because he is costly and the extent to which he can be used in factories is very limited. Nevertheless,the horse was used extensively during the infancy of large-scale industry. This is proved both by the complaints of the agronomists of that epoch and by the way of expressing mechanical force in terms of 'horse-power', which survives to this day. The wind was too inconstant and uncontrollable and, apart from this, in England, the birthplace of large-scale industry, the use of water-power pre­ponderated even during the period of manufacture. In the seven­ teenth century attempts had already been made to turn two pairs of millstones with a single water-wheel. But the increased size of the transmitting mechanism came into conflict with the water-power, which was now insufficient, and this was one of the factors which gave the impulse for a more accurate investigation of the laws of friction. In the same way the irregularity caused by the motive power in mills that were set in motion by pushing and pulling a lever led to the theory, and the application, ofthe fly-wheel, which later played such an important part in large-scale industry. In this way, the first scientific and technical elements of large-scale in­dustry were developed during the period of manufacturing.” (497-498)

• The factory emerges from this efficiency process through the medium of common mechanisms of power (one engine powering numerous machines), which in turn led to the chaining of machines together into complex processes grounded in the cooperation between elements within the assemblage. In order for this shift to occur the tasks involved in any act of production need to be separated, isolated from one another, reduced down to their simplest and most repeatable form, with the machine being developed to embody this simplified and isolated act. These atomized activities, now mechanized, are reformed into an assemblage of machines carrying out repeatable, simplified tasks. This functionally abolishes the division of labor, reducing labor to attending machines, a single task, while machines replace the formerly organic division of labor.

“A real machine system, however, does not take the place of these independent machines until the object of labour goes through a connected series of graduated processes carried out by a chain of mutually complementary machines of various kinds. Here we have again the co-operation by division oflabour which is peculiar to manufacture, but now it appears as a combination of machines with specific functions. The tools peculiar to the various specialized workers, such as those of the beaters, combers, shearers, spinners, etc. in the manufacture of wool, are now transformed into the tools of specialized machines, each machine forming a special organ, with a special function in the combined mechanism. In those branches in which the machine system is first introduced, manufacture itself provides, in general, a natural basis for the division, and consequently the organization, of the process of production. Nevertheless, an essential difference at once appears. In manufacture, it is the workers who, either singly or in groups, must carry on each particular process with their manual imple­ments. The worker has been appropriated by the process ; but the process had previously to be adapted to the worker. This subjec­tive principle of the division of labour no longer exists in produc­tion by machinery. Here the total process is examined objectively, viewed in and for itself, and analysed into its constitutive phases. The problem of how to execute each particular process, and to bind the different partial processes together into a whole, is solved by the aid of machines, chemistry, etcP But of course, in this case too, the theoretical conception must be perfected by accumu­lated experience on a large scale. Each particular machine supplies raw material to the machine next in line ; and since they are all working at the same time, the product is always going through the various stages of its formation, and is also constantly in-a state of transition from one phase of production to another. Just as in manufacture the direct co-operation of the specialized workers establishes a numerical proportion between the different groups, so in an organized system of machinery, where one machine is constantly kept employed by another, a fixed relation is established between their number, their size and their speed. The collective working machine, which is now an articulated system composed of various kinds of single machine, and of groups of single machines, becomes all the more perfect the more the process as a whole becomes a continuous one, i.e. the less the raw material is interrupted in its passage from the first phase to the last; in other words, the more its passage from one phase to another is effected not by the hand of man, but by the machinery itself. In manufacture, the isolation of each special process is a condition imposed by the division of labour itself, whereas in the fully developed factor the continuity of the special processes is the regulating principle.” (501-502)

• The advent of large scale industrial production also forced a shift in the broader social context of labor. As mass production developed an increase in demand for metals and ther materials, an increase in the capacity to produce power, a concentration of interchangeable workers and improvements to transportation and communication all became necessary. The process through which the social context of labor was modified to fulfill the needs of capital is termed, in contemporary history, as the Industrial Revolution. Not only did this build a necessity toward the expansion of the city, and the building of the slum, but also created a space in which machines needed to be constantly produced in order to make new and different machines to fulfill shifting needs, which necessitated machines to produce these machines and so on, fundamentally altering the character of labor as a whole.

“The transformation of the mode of production in one sphere of industry necessitates a similar transformation in other spheres. This happens at first in branches of industry which are connected together by being separate phases of a process, and yet isolated by the social division of labour, in such a way that each of them produces an independent commodity. Thus machine spinning made machine weaving necessary, and both together made a mechanical and chemical revolution compulsory in bleaching, printing and dyeing. So too, on the other hand, the revolution in cotton-spinning called forth the invention of the gin, for separating the seeds from the cotton fibre ; it was only by means of this inven­tion that the production of cotton became possible on the enormous scale at present required. But as well as this, the revolution in the modes of production of industry and agriculture made necessary a revolution in the general conditions of the social process of production, i.e. in the means of communication and transport. In a society whose pivot, to use Fourier's expression, was small­ scale agriculture, with its subsidiary domestic industries and urban handicrafts, the means of communication and transport were so utterly inadequate to the needs of production in the period of manufacture, with its extended division of social labour, its concentration of instruments of labour and workers and its colonial markets, that they in fact became revolutionized. In the same way the means of communication and transport handed down from the period of manufacture soon became unbearable fetters on large-scale industry, given the feverish velocity with which it produces, its enormous extent, its constant flinging of capital and labour from one sphere of production into another and its newly created connections with the world market. Hence, quite apart from the immense transformation which took place in shipbuilding, the means of communication and transport gradu­ally adapted themselves to the mode of production of large-scale industry by means of a system of river steamers, railways, ocean steamers and telegraphs. But the huge masses of iron that had now to be forged, welded, cut, bored and shaped required for their part machines of Cyclopean dimensions, which the machine­ building trades of the period of manufacture were incapable of constructing.” (505-506)

• The Value Transferred by the Machine to the Product section of this chapter attempts to discuss an issue that arises in a superficial reading of the concept of the labor theory of value. In the labor theory of value, at a really high level, there is an assumption that labor, as performed by a human only in relation to the production of this specific commodity, adds all value to an object. That is not how Marx articulates this concept, or at least not a well rounded understanding of the concept, but this argument is thrown out there by pro-capitalist economists in the innumerable bad faith readings of this text that have been published over the years.

The issue that arises is relatively apparent. In the labor theory of value the imparting of value becomes a calculation of the total labor imparted into the object, at all parts of the supply chain, not just in the production of this specific commodity being produced in a moment. In economic terms this value becomes quantified into costs, wages and the quantifiable exchange value of the commodity. In the context of the machine, however, human labor-power, and thus the wage, is either absent or parrallelized into multiple processes at once, with machines connected to some central motor. So, the question shifts a bit, away from only being able to conceive of the labor theory of value in relation to labor, and now becomes this question of labor, as well as the question of how machines add value to the commodity. That is what Marx is trying to address in this section specifically.

• The factory is a form which is defined by the convergence of forces, working in tandem to construct a production process. In the cooperation formed in the factory the collective productive forces of all workers and machines comes to exceed the sheer sum of its parts, and begins to take on a multiplication effect. This multiplication effect generates additional productive capacity, essentially allowing the capitalist to obtain this additional productive force for free. However, even in this formation, the category of the human worker still comes to occupy a central role in the construction, operation and maintenance of the factory. Even if we are to assume a scenario of totally automated production, which we are starting to see emerge in new and more pervasive forms, there is still a human engaged at the beginning of any process, in the construction, shipping, instllation, maintenance, improvement, running and engineering of the machine, and therefore requires the capitalist to obtain that value as a necessary part of production. This means that all production begins with labor, the acquisition of this value in the form of the machine, or both, but none of this can function without labor being involved in various parts of the production process. This value of labor then fuses with the value imparted by the machine to generate the overall value of the commodity.

“Therefore, although it is clear at the first glance that large scale industry raises the productivity of labour to an extra ordinary degree by incorporating into the production process both the immense forces of nature and the results arrived at by natural science, it is by no means equally clear that this increase in productive force is not, on the other hand, purchased with an increase in the amount of labour expended. Machinery, like every other component of constant capital, creates no new value, but yields up its own value to the product it serves to beget. In so far as the machine has value and, as a result, transfers value to the product, it forms an element in the value of the latter. Instead of being cheapened, the product is made dearer in proportion to the value of the machine. And it is crystal clear that machines and systems of machinery, large-scale industry's characteristic instruments of labour, are incomparably more loaded with value than the implements used in handicrafts and in manufacture.” (509)

• The machine enters as a whole into the process, but the full value of the machine is not transferred to the commodity. If this full value were transferred into every commodity not only would the value of the machine be imparted to objects repeatedly, but those objects would exit the valorization process costing an astronomical amount of money to obtain. The value added to the commodity, therefore, must be tied to a portion of the machine that is consumable and non-repeatable. This consumption of the machine is referred to as depreciation, the loss of value of the machine itself, which is calculated as a quantifiable average of how much value the machine has concretized within it divided by the number of anticipated commodities that machine will help produce before replacement.

This construct of adding value based on the consumption of the machine, or to be more in line with the text, the consumption of the labor embodied in the form of the machine, allows for some mathematical magic to occur. During mechanized production the value of the machine, in part, is added to all commodities the machine produces in equal averages of value. As the machine depreciates in value it is imparting less and less value to each object. But, due to the ways that commodity production enforces an attempt to predict future conditions, and how that impacts projections of the life of a machine, the value imparted to the commodity from the machine does not change, even as the value imparted by the machine to the object decreases over time.

For example, say one is running a printshop, and they are factoring in the cost of wages, paper and toner to the cost to print, but are also adding in the cost of the machine divided by anticipated output. If one purchased the printer they are using for $10,000, and anticipate it to last for 10 years, with a $300/year maintenance budget. Therefore the printer is anticipating that the printer will be consumed at a rate of $1000 per year, which gets added to maintenance cost and then divided by the anticipated number of copies made on the machine in a year.

Now, at the beginning, when the machine is new, that value added to the commodity is significant; new machines degrade from this new state quickly upon use. But, as time goes on the rate of the degradation of the machine slows, and the value of the machine begins to drop at a much lower rate. In this scenario we are going to say that the printer lasted 12 years, rather than the 10 anticipated. That means that this average value of the machine consumed in production is added equally to every page printed, even after the full value of the machine has been recovered through value added in valorization. Essentially, that allows a capitalist to use averages to generate the potential of being able to manufacture the value of the machine out of nothing for two entire years of production.

“In the first place, it must be observed that machinery, while always entering as a whole into the labour process, enters only piece by piece into the process of valorization. It never adds more value than it loses, on an average, by depreciation. Hence there is a great difference between the value of a machine and the value transferred in a given time by the machine to the product. Equally, there is a great difference between the machine as a factor in the formation of value and as a factor in the formation of the product. The longer the period during which the machine serves in the same labour process, the greater are those differences. It is no doubt true, as we have seen, that every instrument of labour enters as a whole into the labour process, while only piecemeal, in proportion to its average daily depreciation, into the process of valorization. But this· difference between the mere utilization of the instrument and its depreciation is much greater in the case of machinery than it is with a tool, because the machine, being made from more durable material, has a longer life ; be­cause it can be employed more economically, from the point of view both of the deterioration of its own components and of its consumption of materials, as its use is regulated by strict scientific laws ; and, finally, because its field of production is incomparably larger than that of a tool. Both in the case of the machine and of the tool, we find that after allowing for their average daily cost, that is for the value they transmit to the product by their average daily wear and tear, and for their consumption of auxiliary substances such as oil, coal and so on, they do their work for nothing, like the natural forces which are already available without the intervention of human labour. The greater the pro­ductive effectiveness of the machinery compared with that of the tool, the greater is the extent of its gratuitous service. Only in large-scale industry has man succeeded in making the product of his past labour, labour which has already been objectified, per­form gratuitous service on a large scale, like a force of nature.” (509-510)

• Machinery transfers value to the object in direct proportion to its force and velocity. The faster the machine operates, and the more force it can mobilize, the more productive the machine is. This allows the machine to contribute less of its total value to the object, until it begins to approach “free” natural forces like wind and water. This marks a dynamic of shifting labor value embodied in the machine and imparted to the object by the machine. To the degree that human labor enters the supply chain, and it always must, labor is still a source of value. Machines, therefore, multiply the value imparted in the production of the machine itself to the degree that this production consumes less labor than the labor saved by the operation of the machine itself.

“It is evident that whenever it costs as much labour to produce machine as is saved by the employment of that machine, all that has taken place is a displacement of labour. Consequently, the total labour required to produce a commodity has not been lessened, in other words, the productivity of labour has not been increased. However, the difference between the labour a machine costs and the labour it saves, in other words the degree of productivity the machine possesses, does not depend on the difference between its own value and the value of the tool it replaces. As long as the labour spent on a machine is such that the portion of its value added to the product remains smaller than the value added by the worker to the product with his tool, there is always a difference of labour saved in favour of the machine. The pro­ductivity of the machine is therefore measured by the human labour-power it replaces.” (513)

• On top of this necessity to produce more value than was consumed in its production, the machine also runs into a second limit; the value the machine produces in its use must exceed the value of the labor displaced by its use. In other words, the machine must produce greater value than would be produced by workers in the same time period or at the same cost. This, along with resale value, functions as indications of the end of life for the machine, the point in which the value added for the capitalist no longer exceeds that which could be added by workers or newer machines, if those newer machine can also be said to produce more value than was consumed in its production.

” The use of machinery for the exclusive purpose of cheapening the product is limited by the requirement that less labour must be expended in producing the machinery than is displaced by the employment of that machinery. For the capitalist, however, there is a further limit on its use. Instead of paying for the labour, he pays only the value of the labour-power employed ; the limit to his using a machine is therefore fixed by the difference between the value of the machine and the value of the labour-power replaced by it. Since the division of the day's work into necessary labour and surplus labour differs in different countries, and even in the same country at different periods, or in different branches of industry ; and further, since the actual wage of the worker some­ times sinks below the value of his labour-power, and sometimes rises above it, it is possible for the difference between the price of the machinery and the price of the labour-power replaced by that machinery to undergo great variations, while the difference between the quantity of labour needed to produce the machine and the total quantity of labour replaced by it remains constant. But it is only the former difference that determines the cost to the capitalist of producing a commodity, and influences his actions through the pressure of competition.” (515-516)

• The machine itself is, on a formal level, nothing other than an appendage, a prostheses for the human body. Traditionally, there is this simplistic understanding of prostheses, in which the tool is developed as a result of a problems that needs to be solved. This is only part of the discussion though, and one that assumes that tools themselves do not have effects outside of the specific problem it is developed to solve. Rather, as theorists like Manuel Delanda argue, technology and history cannot be separated from one another. Sure, tools are developed to solve problems, but the development of the tool changes the way activity itself functions, and, in turn, changing the totality of history. The machine in the factory is no exception; it functions both as an extension of the human, and as something that fundamentally alters the relationship between worker and work.

On a very simplistic level, the very first change is what we now refer to as the “deskilling of the workforce”, namely the elimination of the need for specific skills or training for a job. With the advent of the machine, and the factory, the machine took over the performance of the work, leaving the worker to operate the machine. The machine is able to leverage more force with fewer mistakes, and without rest or pay, than a human worker. This caused a simplification and standardization in production, and with it the pool of possible laborers increased dramatically. This, in turn, creates labor competition, and lowers the exchange value of labor as a result, which allows the capitalist to extract additional surplus-value from the commodity. It also led to the concentration of workers in industrial cities, and incredibly high rates of child mortality and injury in factory environments.

“In so far as machinery dispenses with muscular power, it becomes a means for employing workers of slight muscular strength, or whose bodily development is incomplete, but whose limbs are all the more supple. The labour of women and children was there­fore the first result of the capitalist application of machinery! That mighty substitute for labour and for workers, the machine, was immediately transformed into a means for increasing the number of wage-labourers by enrolling, under the direct sway of capital, every member of the worker's family, without distinction of age or sex. Compulsory work for the capitalist usurped the place, not only of the children's play, but also of independent labour at home, within customary limits, for the family itself.

The value of labour-power was determined, not only by the labour-time necessary to maintain the individual adult worker, but also by that necessary to maintain his family. Machinery, by throwing every member of that family onto the labour-market, spreads the value of the man's labour-power over his whole family. It thus depreciates it. To purchase the labour-power of a family of four workers may perhaps cost more than it formerly did to purchase the labour-power of the head of the family, but, in return, four days' labour takes the place of one day's, and the price falls in proportion to the excess of the surplus labour of four over the surplus labour of one. In order that the family may live, four people must now provide not only labour for the capitalist, but also surplus labour. Thus we see that machinery, while augmenting the human material that forms capital's most characteristic field of exploitation/9 at the same time raises the degree of that exploitation.” (517-518)

• The introduction of machinery also completely realigned the relationship between the worker and the structure of the working day. The machine functions as an independent instrument of labor, considered separate from the worker and their skills, unlike the tool, which is inherently tied to the one that wields the tool. Unlike this relationship of human and tool, the machine becomes operator agnostic, and functions regardless of the human standing in its proximity. This allows the machine to tend toward perpetual motion as a mechanism for the extraction of surplus value. The limitations that then arise become the purview of failures, rather than normal contingency in the production process; the failure of workers to work consistently or effectively, the failure of the machine itself, the failure of supply, etc. So, in this shift one moves from an assumption of a limited production quantity within a day confined by the limitations of human labor, to a form of production in which perpetual and constant motion is assumed, with all contingencies being portrayed as failings and forcing a standardization of work determined by the parameters of the machine, and not the worker that performs the actual labor. This necessitates the elimination of “human interference” and the reduction of labor to generic work.

“In the first place, in machinery the motion and the activity of the instrument of labour asserts its independence vis-a-vis the worker. The instrument of labour now becomes an industrial form of perpetual motion. It would go on producing for ever, if it did not come up against certain natural limits in the shape of the weak bodies and the strong wills of its human assistants. Because it is capital, the automatic mechanism is endowed, in the person of the capitalist, with consciousness and a will. As capital, therefore, it is animated by the drive to reduce to a minimum the resistance offered by man, that obstinate yet elastic natural barrier. This resistance is moreover lessened by the apparently undemanding nature of work at a machine, and the more pliant and docile character of the women and children employed by preference.” (526)

• As the machine degrades through its operation, that value is transferred to the product. This occurs, as we discussed earlier, through an averaging of the total value of the machine divided between the anticipated number pf products produced before its replacement, with all additional commodities produced beyond this number getting value added for free. Therefore, in this scenario, the more quickly the machine can be consumed, the more value is transferred to the commodity. For example, a capitalist running a machine shop can transfer three times as much value in the same period if the machine operates all day, as opposed to only operating eight hours a day. As these machines degrade and become more obsolete, however, their resale value also drops. These dynamics generate an incentive to utilize machines as fast as possible, both to accelerate the transfer of value, but also to maximize resale value of the machine. The result of a drive toward the elongation of the work day.

“The productivity of machinery is , as we saw, inversely proportional to the value transferred by it to the product. The longer the period during which it functions, the greater is the mass of the products over which the value transmitted by the machine is spread, and the smaller is the portion of that value added to each single commodity. The active lifetime of a machine, however, is clearly dependent on the length o( the working day, or the duration of the daily labour process multiplied by the number of days for which the process is carried on. The amount of deterioration suffered by a machine does not by any means exactly correspond to the length of time it has been in use. And even if it were so, a machine working 16 hours a day for 7 years covers as long a working period as the same machine working only 8 hours a day for 15 years and transmits to the total product no more value. Notwithstanding this, the value of the machine would be reproduced twice as quickly in the first case a sin the second, and the capitalist, using the same machine, would absorb in 7 years as much surplus-value as he would in 15 in the second case.

The physical deterioration of the machine is of two kinds. The one arises from use, as coins wear away by circulating, the other from lack of use, as a sword rusts when left in its scabbard. This second kind is its consumption by the elements. Deterioration of the first kind is more or less directly proportional, and that of the second kind to a certain extent inversely proportional, to the use of the machine.

But in addition to the material wear and tear, a machine also undergoes what we might call a moral depreciation. It loses exchange-value, either because machines of the same sort are being produced more cheaply than it was, or because better machines are entering into competition with it. In both cases, however young and full of life the machine may be, its value is no longer determined by the necessary labour-time actually objectified in it, but by the labour-time necessary to reproduce either it or the better machine. It has therefore been devalued to a greater or lesser extent. The shorter the period taken to reproduce its total value, the less is the danger of moral depreciation; and the longer the working day, the shorter that period in fact is. When machin­ery is first introduced into a particular branch of production, new ­ methods of reproducing it more cheaply follow blow upon blow, and so do improvements which relate not only to individual parts and details of the machine, but also to its whole construction. It is therefore in the early days of a machine's life that this special incentive to the prolongation of the working day makes itself felt most acutely.” (527-528)

• Machinery also creates a multiplication effect. As long as the machine is being used it generates value. Traditionally, to expand production required capital investment in workers and facilities. However, the same effect can be generated by elongating the time machines function. Workers have a limit to the number of hours that can be worked, and only so many can fit within a workshop before it needs to expand. But, with machines one can exceed the limits of the worker, create shifts of workers to operate machines in continuous motion and, in doing so, expand productive capacity. To the degree that machines only add value in their operation, a tendency toward acceleration and a maximalist approach develops.

This generates a tension, however, at this point of maximalization; at the point the machine cannot produce more the addition of more workers does not increase the production of value. The result of this tension is a tendency toward maximalizing productive capacity, to then attempt to further automate and eliminate the worker to the degree possible. This fundamentally reconstructs the imbuing of objects with value, shifting the entity that value resolves around from the worker to the machine. We can see here how capitalist production creates a drive toward automation (which is the single biggest source of industrial job loss in the US since 1973, by a wide margin), but this in itself generates a tension as well. If workers are eliminated then this also begins to contract the pool of possible consumers. Just like capital accumulation, the drive toward automation creates conditions in which workers no longer have money with which to purchase things. As these dynamics approach their theoretical limit, they run into a practical limitation that presents a choice between this maximalism or the continued existence of capitalism as such. We see issues like this arising with growing wealth inequality, and the ways that this leads to a contraction of the consumer pool.

“As machinery comes into general use in a particular branch of production, the social value of the machine's product sinks down to its individual value, and the following law asserts itself: surplus value does not arise from the labour-power that has been replaced by the machinery, but from the labour-power actually employed in working with the machinery. Surplus-value arises only from the variable part of capital, and we saw that the amount of surplus­ value depends on two factors, namely the rate of surplus-value and the number of workers simultaneously employed. Given the length of the working day, the rate of surplus-value is determined by the relative duration of the necessary labour and the surplus labour performed in the course of a working day. The number of workers simultaneously employed depends, for its part, on the ratio of the variable to the constant capital. Now, however much the use of machinery may increase surplus labour at the expense of necessary labour by raising the productive power of labour, it is clear that it attains this result only by diminishing the number of workers employed by a given amount of capital. It converts a por­tion of capital which was previously variable, i.e. had been turned into living labour, into machinery, i.e. into constant capital which does not produce surplus-value. It is impossible, for instance, to squeeze as much surplus-value out of two as out of twenty-four workers. If each of these twenty-four men gives only 1 hour of sur­plus labour in 12, the twenty-four men give together 24 hours of surplus labour, while 24 hours is the total labour of the two men. Hence there is an immanent contradiction in the application of machinery to the production of surplus-value, since, of the two factors of the surplus-value created by a given amount of capital,one, the rate of surplus-value, cannot be increased except by diminishing the other, the number of workers. This contradiction comes to light as soon as machinery has come into general use in a given industry, for then the value of the machine-produced com­modity regulates the social value of all commodities of the same kind ; and it is this contradiction which in turn drives the capitalist, without his being aware of the fact, 71 to the most ruthless and excessive prolongation of the working day, in order that he may secure compensation for the decrease in the relative number of workers exploited by increasing not only relative but also absolute surplus labour.” (530-531)

• Prior to this discussion the extraction of surplus value was related to the duration of labor. In this discussion of the machine, however, we now need to consider the intensity of labor during that duration. The machine already produces an intensification of labor in its operation. This tendency continues, and drives a process by which labor specialization and the inertia toward maximizing machine use and replacement creates increases in this intensification. This intensification will eventually create an inverse relationship with work duration, where increases in intensity only become viable in shorter work durations. As such, the tendency has been to fix the length of the work day (the shift) and increase the intensity and density of labor within that period.

“It is self-evident that in proportion as the use of machinery spreads, and the experience of a special class of worker – the machine-worker – accumulates, the rapidity and thereby the in­tensity of labour undergoes a natural increase. Thus in England, in the course of half a century, the lengthening of the working day has gone hand in hand with an increase in the intensity of factory labour. Nevertheless, the reader will clearly see that we are dealing here, not with temporary paroxysms of labour but with labour repeated day after day with unvarying uniformity. Hence a point must inevitably be reached where extension of the working day and intensification of labour become mutually exclusive so that the lengthening of the working day becomes compatible only with. a lower degree of intensity, and inversely, a higher degree of in­tensity only with a shortening of the working day. As soon as the gradual upsurge of working-class revolt had compelled Parliament compulsorily to shorten the hours of labour, and to begin by im­posing a normal working day on factories properly so called, i.e. from the moment that it was made impossible once and for all to increase the production of surplus-value by prolonging the working day, capital threw itself with all its might, and in full awareness of the situation, into the production of relative surplus-value, by speeding up the development of the machine system. At the same-time a change took place in the nature of relative surplus-value. In general, relative surplus-value is produced by raising the produc­tivity of the worker, and thereby enabling him to produce more in a given time with the same expenditure of la, bour. The same amount of labour-time adds the same value as before to the total product, but this unchanged amount of exchange-value is spread over more use-values. Hence the value of each single commodity falls. But the situation changes with the compulsory shortening of the hours of labour. This gives an immense impetus to the development of productivity and the more economical use of the conditions of production. It imposes on the worker an increased expenditure of labour within a time which remains constant, a heightened tension of labour-power, and a closer filling-up of the pores of the working day, i.e. a condensation of labour, to a degree which can only be attained within the limits of the shortened working day. This compression of a greater mass of labour into a given period now counts for what it really is, namely an increase in the quantity of labour. In addition to the measure of its ' extensive magnitude ', labour­ time now acquires a measure of its intensity, or degree of density.” (533-534)

• The shortening of the work day, the fixing of its duration and the fixed efficiency of machines creates conditions for the constant acceleration of machinery in the form of new machines and increasingly dense labor. As a result of this dynamic of fixing labor duration emphasis was placed on increased, and increasingly efficient, mechanization as a medium of labor condensation, and concentration. We see this in the rejection of safety controls and in the focus on computer monitored efficiency, the Taylorist micro-measurement of tasks, increased workplace surveillance and the drive toward automation.

“The shortening of the working day creates, to begin with, the subjective condition for the condensation of labour, i.e. it makes it possible for the worker to set more labour-power in motion within a given time. As soon as that shortening becomes compulsory, machinery becomes in the hands of capital the objective means, systematically employed, for squeezing outmore labour in a given time. This occurs in two ways : the speed of the machines is in­ creased, and the same worker receives a greater quantity of machinery to supervise or operate. Improved construction of the machinery is necessary, partly to allow greater pressure to be put on the worker, partly because it is an inevitable concomitant of in­tensification of labour, since the legal limitation of the working day compels the capitalist to exercise the strictest economy in the cost of production. The improvements in the steam-engine have increased the piston speed and at the same time have made it possible, by means of a greater economy of power, to drive more machinery with the same engine, while consuming the same amount of coal, or even a smaller amount. The improvements in the transmitting mechanism have lessened friction and reduced the diameter and weight of the shafts to a constantly decreasing minimum, some­ thing which strikingly distinguishes modern machinery from the older type. Finally, the improvements in the operative machines have, while reducing their size, increased their speed and efficiency, as in the modern power-loom ; or, while increasing the size of their frames, they have also increased the extent and number of their working parts, as in spinning-mules, or added to the speed of those working parts by imperceptible alterations of detail, such as those which ten years ago increased the speed of the spindles in self­ acting mules by one-fifth.” (536-537)

• Thus far, as we get into sections four and five of the chapter, we have discussed machines and factories without much of a discussion about the specifics of those terms and how they are being used here. In a simplistic understanding a machine is a device that does a task and a factory is a place where production happens. But, thus far, Marx is marking a difference between the workshop and the factory which has been largely implicit. Now we get into the discussion of how they are different and what this means for the structure of work and production.

The factory is a system, namely a dynamic between component elements in which a series of operations are undertaken in a necessary and intentionally defined structuring of coordination. This definition, though seemingly straight forward, has a number of possible implications, of which Marx discusses two here. In this first mode the factory is thought as an assemblage. The assemblage is not a unity. Rather, to use the autonomist sense of this term, the assemblage is a dynamic between elements, with individual elements maintaining shape and the possibility of autonomy. In this dynamic the factory is thought as a convergent dynamic between humans, tasks, tools and machines. Within this assemblage every element, in its participation in the construction of the assemblage, becomes critical to the particular momentary shape. In other words, the assemblage is thought of as a convergence of parts, all of which change, which in turn changes the whole assemblage. From this perspective the worker maintains status as an essential and primary subject within the assemblage itself.

The second understanding that I want to discuss here views the factory as a sort of Hobbesian automaton. While in this first understanding the components of the assemblage remain able to be differentiated and removed, within this conception the entire apparatus is considered as a subject in itself. As such, the components are removed from their particularity, and inserted into the factory only as components defined by their insertion; this not only includes machines, but also workers, tasks and so on. In this view all elements are component parts of a large living machine, raising the factory-as-machine to a position of primacy. This is the view that one finds articulated in the Five Year Plans under Stalin; the worker became nothing other than the energy and component element of the factory for the “new man”; this is how they justified purges, gulags, forced labor, wave attacks during the war and surveillance within the factory itself. While this first mode, the factory as assemblage, can speak to the factory as such, the second view can only speak to the realities of capitalist production.

“Dr Ure, the Pindar of the automatic factory, describes it, on the one hand, as ' combined co-operation of many orders of work­ people, adult and young, in tending with assiduous skill a system of productive machines continuously impelled by a central power' (the prime mover) ; and on the other hand as ' a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinate to a self-regulated moving force ' . These two descriptions are far from being identical. In one, the combined collective worker appears as the dominant subject [iibergreifendes Subjekt], and the mechanical automaton as the object ; in the other, the automaton itself is the subject, and the workers are merely conscious organs, co-ordinated with the un­conscious organs of the automaton, and together with the latter subordinated to the central moving force. The first description is applicable to every possible employment of machinery on a large scale, the second is characteristic of its use by capital, and there­ fore of the modem factory system. Ure therefore prefers to present the central machine from which the motion comes as not only an automaton but an autocrat. ' In these spacious halls the benignant power of steam summons around him his myriads of willing menials.'” (544-545)

• The reduction of the worker to the position of an appendage to the machine begins with the displacement of the tool from the hand. In capitalist production the machine becomes the means of creating surplus value, and, as such, the machine is primary. The tool gets displaced from the hand and given to the machine, which both exists as a product of, and mechanism for the advancement of automation. This distance between the worker and the tool creates a space for a prime mover, or machine attached to a prime mover, to determine the entirety of how that tool gets used within the production process conceived of as a whole. Through this displacement all possible workers are reduced, not to generic workers, but to generic elements of the mechanistic process, of the factory itself. This reduction also ties the worker to the machine, fragmenting the cooperation between workers in production. Cooperation, then, is replaced with a simple relationship between generic workers, who are components of the mechanistic system of the factory, workers with skills to maintain the machines and capitalists, all of which become atomized elements of the production process as a whole.

“In so far as the division of labour re-appears in the factory, it takes the form primarily of a distribution of workers among the specialized machines, and of quantities of workers, who do not however form organized groups, among the various departments of the factory, in each of which they work at a number of similar machines placed together ; only simple co-operation therefore takes place between them. The organized group peculiar to manufacture is replaced by the connection between the head worker and his few assistants. The essential division is that between workers who are actually employed on the machines (among whom are in­cluded a few who look after the engine) and those who merely attend them (almost exclusively children). More or less all the ' feeders ' who supply the machines with the material which is to be worked up are counted as attendants. In addition to principal classes, there is a numerically unimportant group whose occupation it is to look after the whole of the machinery repair it from time to time, composed of engineers, mechanics, joiners etc. This is a superior class of workers, in part scientifically educated, in part trained in a handicraft ; they stand outside the realm of the factory workers, and are added to them only to make up an aggregate. This division of labour is purely technical.” (545-546)

• The advent of the factory completes a process, inherent in capitalist production, to render the worker as an appendage of the production process. When combined with the creation of generic labor and the strenuousness of a mode of production centered on acceleration, capital comes to completely subsume the worker into itself, making the deskilled worker wholly independent on it for resources. This also allows capitalists to replace workers at any time, for any reason, which further fragments cooperation between workers, places them in competition and increases the drive of workers to attempt to produce more in less time.

“Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost; at the same time, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity. Even the lightening of the labour becomes an instrument of torture, since the machine does not free the worker from the work, but rather deprives the work itself of all content. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour process but also capital's process of valorization, has this in common, but it is not the worker who employs the conditions of his work, but rather the reverse, the conditions of work employ the worker. However, it is only with the coming of machinery that this inversion first acquires a technical and palpable reality. Owing to its conversion into an automaton, the instru­ment of labour confronts the worker during the labour process in the shape of capital, dead labour, which dominates and soaks up living labour-power. The separation of the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labour, and the transforma­tion of those faculties into powers exercised by capital over labour, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by large-scale industry erected on the foundation of machinery. The special skill of each individual machine-operator, who has now been deprived of all significance, vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity in the face of the science, the gigantic natural forces, and the mass of social labour embodied in the system of machinery, which, together with those three forces, constitutes the power of the ' master '. This ' master ', therefore, in whose mind the machinery and his monopoly of it are inseparably united, contemptuously tells his ' hands ', whenever he comes into conflict with them; ' The factory operatives should keep in wholesome remembrance the fact that theirs is really a low species of skilled labour ; and that there is none which is more easily acquired, or of its quality more amply remunerated, or which by a short training of the least expert can be more quickly, as well as abundantly, acquired . . . The master's machinery really plays a far more important part in the business of production than the labour and the skill of the opera­tive, which six months' education can teach, and a common labourer can learn.' The technical subordination of the worker to the uniform motion of the instruments of labour, and the peculiar composition of the working group, consisting as it does of in­dividuals of both sexes and all ages, gives rise to a barrack-like discipline, which is elaborated into a complete system in the fac­tory, and brings the previously mentioned labour of superintend­ence to its fullest development, thereby dividing the workers into manual labourers and overseers, into the private soldiers and the N.C.O.s of an industrial army.” (548-549)

• To finish out our discussion of Chapter 15 we will be focusing on Section 8, The Revolutionary Impact of Large-Scale Industry on Manufacture, Handicrafts and Domestic Industry. In prior sections we began a discussion of the social implications of the factory structure and the labor implications of the use and expansion of machinery. To begin to analyze these shifts it makes sense to discuss them through the lens of how labor flows through a specific structure of production within specific circumstances. for example, one can argue that there is cooperation in handicraft production, but this cooperation is not some total expression of that mode of production. Instead, that mode of production takes on specific characteristics in relation to the historical context of its operation. In other words, certain modes and contexts of production will facilitate specific modes of production As such, the structuring of this discourse around mode of production, history and labor flows allows us to add resolution to this discussion.

Handicraft production is defined as a mode of production in which nodes in the production process operate as atomized acts. For example, one person may just make latches, and makes the whole latch, while another may make the whole wooden trunk, and then a third person may make drawers or dividers for the trunk. Individually all of these objects are complete products, but they are joined together as an act in itself, not as a necessary part of the production process. Cooperation, in this context, functions not through the act as such, but through that which exists between and through these acts, or the collectivity of the entire production process. With the machine both the act and the linkage between acts are abstracted away from labor. This not only shifts the mode of production, but also the relationality and the dynamics of labor that both contribute to and result from this mode of production.

This transition between handicraft and the factory often proceeds through a manufacture phase, where machines are in use but collaboration still exists. At all points, however, the tendency within capitalism is to adopt factory production as a way to elongate total working hours, concentrate production, lower labor costs and increase surplus value extraction. It is here that we can see the connection between mode of production and context of production, in this case the factory and capitalism.

“We have seen how machinery does away with co-operation based on handicrafts, and with manufacture based on the handicraft division of labour. An example of the first sort is the reaping­ machine ; it replaces co-operation between reapers. A striking example of the second kind is the needle-making machine. According to Adam Smith, ten men in his time, using the system of the division of labour, made 48,000 sewing-needles every day. A single needle-making machine, however, makes 1 45,000 needles in a working day of 1 1 hours. One woman or one girl super­intends four such machines, and so produces nearly 600,000 needles in a day, and over 3 ,000,000 in a week.6 8 A single machine, when it takes the place of co-operation or of manufacture, may itself serve as the basis of an industry of a handicraft character. But this reproduction of the handicraft system on the basis of machinery only forms a transition to the factory system which, as a rule, makes its appearance as soon as human muscles arereplaced, for the purpose of driving the machines, by a mechanical motive power such as steam or water. Here and there, but in any case only for a time, an industry may be carried on, on a small scale, by means of mechanical power. Wherever the nature of the process has not necessitated production on a large scale, the new industries that have sprung up in the last few decades, such as envelope making, steel pen making, etc., have, as a general rule, first passed through the handicraft stage, and then the manufacturing stage, as short phases of transition to the factory stage. The transition is very difficult. in those cases where the production of the article by manufacture consists of a series of graduated processes, but of a great number of disconnected ones. This circumstance formed a great hindrance to the establishment of steel pen factories. Nevertheless, about fifteen years ago a machine was invented that automatically performed six separate operations at once. The first steel pens were supplied by the handicraft system, in the year 1820, at £7 4s. the gross ; in 1 30 they were supplied by manufacture at 8s.,and today the factory system supplies them at a wholesale price of from 2d. to 6d. the gross.” (588-589)

• The introduction of the machine involves a paradoxical reconstruction of the labor process. To construct the possibility of mechanization each constituent act of the production process must be extracted, isolated and simplified in order to render it performable by a machine, repeatable and with rapidity. This involves taking the whole production process, breaking that object down into component parts, then breaking apart the process of producing these parts down to individual operations that need to occur. For example, say we were making stitch bound notebooks. The manual process involves getting paper, cutting that paper, finding cover material, perforating that material to accept a needle, threading the needle, performing the stitching, finishing the stitch and tying it off, and so on. In a mechanization procedure the making of the paper, for example, is isolated into its parts, each of which can be done by a machine; the same for the cover, the stitching, so on. Then, following this fragmentation of the acts of production, all of these component actions are individually mechanized but, and this is what defines the factory, those actions are structured to flow into one another, constructing a singular production process. This is how an assebly line works, for example.

In this process a discourse of methods and skills, the craft of the individual act, the connection of the worker to the object, are all replaced with a generalized discourse on design and engineering, with the worker reduced to a part of the overall process. This entire approach necessitates, and is necessitated by, the removal of the tool from the hand, and its displacement into the machine. This construct requires large numbers of generic workers concentrated into densely populated areas, while at the same time fragmenting that same body of workers through wage competition and the atomization of the worker as machine attendant; mechanistic linkages come to replace cooperation. As such, when combined with the enclosure of the commons (which displaced tens of thousands from their land and forced them into cities), the factory begins to almost take on an ontological dimension, structuring the very shape of existence.

“With the development of the factory system and the revolution in agriculture that accompanies it, production in all the other branches of industry not only expands, but also alters its char­acter. The principle of machine production, namely the division of the production process into its constituent phases, and the solution of the problems arising from this by the application of mechanics, chemistry and the whole range of the natural sciences, now plays the determining role everywhere. Hence machinery penetrates into manufacture for one specialized process after another. The solid crystallization of a hierarchy of specialized processes, which arose from the old division of labour, ceases to exist; it is dissolved, and makes way for constant changes. Quite apart from this, a fundamental transformation takes place in the composition of the collective labourer or, in other words, the combined working personnel. In contrast with the period of manufacture, the division of labour is now based , wherever possible, on the employment of women, of children of all ages and of unskilled workers, in short, of ' cheap labour', as the Englishman typically describes it. This is true not only for all large-scale production, whether machinery is employed or not, but also for the so-called domestic industries, whether carried on in the private dwellings of the workers, or in small workshops. This modern ' domestic industry ' has nothing except the name in common with old-fashioned domestic industry, the existence of which presupposes independent urban handicrafts, independent peasant farming and, above all, a dwelling-house for the worker and his family. That kind of industry has now been converted into an external department of the factory, the manufacturing work­shop, or the warehouse. Besides the factory worker, the workers engaged in manufacture, and the handicraftsmen, whom it concentrates in large masses at one spot, and directly commands, capital also sets another army in motion, by means of invisible threads.: the outworkers in the domestic industries, who live in the large towns as well as being scattered over the countryside.” (590-591)

• Though it is a bit of an odd place to stop, this is where we are going to end this reading of Capital. So, for the sake of closure I will add some quick closing remarks.

This reading of Capital is not meant to be comprehensive. It is not THE reading of Capital, or even what some would call a “better” or “correct” reading; those categories don't really mean anything. Rather, this is an instrumental reading of capital, through the lens of autonomism and autonomist readings of Marx. Within this reading we uncover a number of elements that are almost always missing from more traditional, more Leninist, readings of Capital, and this allows us to help realign our tactical and strategic orientations.

Anti-capitalism in the US has largely been typified by a discourse on bad outcomes; that we need to overthrow capitalism because of sweatshops, environmental degradation, poverty, starvation, etc. While all of these things are heinous, focus on these outcomes displaces the rejection of capitalism into a discourse on bad results. This discourse is specifically flawed in two ways. Firstly, it is a narrative that is inherently reformist. There are ways that capital can still function while generating better outcomes, this is the whole concept behind “ethical capitalism” or “social enterprise”. But, even with better outcomes capitalism remains a form of existence which nullifies our particularity, necessitates the construction of the state and functions based on an ontology of quantification. Secondly, as a result most resistance to capitalism takes on the form of reformist campaigns, and not systemic disruptions.

In this reading we went through a series of way-points that can assist in a reorientation away from a liberal, reformist reading of capitalism.

• Capitalism is based on an impossible ontology, in which the material particularity of the object is fused with this abstract quantifiable generality to form the commodity. Within capitalism this results in a structuring of existence that is not only based on atomization (the existence of one as an economic unit), but also which is grounded in the dynamics of the convergence of abstract values within the artifice of “the market”.

• As such, capitalism does not function as a system, as much as it functions as a condition of possibility for existence in itself. In other words, capitalism does not only force certain actions to occur, it structures the very basis in which we determine normality, and in which we understand the categories we use to make sense of existing.

• As a result of this ontology, all life and existence becomes defined. This requires an elimination of existential difference and the construction of a mechanism to eliminate contingency and disruption. None of that just functions, it all involves action, and the logistics of defining action through force through the elimination of difference is called policing.

• Therefore, the struggle against capital is far from abstract and conceptual. What is at stake is the materiality of capital, and how those material conditions structure limitations to existence itself. As a result, anti-capitalism must move away from the activist mass movement mentality, which attempts to disrupt “systems”, and into a mode grounded in the disruption of material logistics through interventions in everyday life, where we are, when we are there. This approach is more closely aligned with insurrectionism than some sort of workerist context.

Those conclusions are minimal on purpose. There is a lot to dig out of this text, but, as a number of thinkers have discussed, there is no point in the analysis without that resulting in effects. We construct our understandings of the world through making sense of our actions, but the actions themselves have their own dynamics. If our conceptual understandings do not lead to effective forms of revolt, then they must be jettisoned. As such, the goal of this reading is effectiveness, the repositioning of modalities of fighting and whatever material outcomes may result.

Hopefully this has been useful. If I return to this text in the future I will make sure to keep these notes coming. For now though, on to other things.

“It resides in our brains and stretches itself out through time, connecting each and everyone of us together, using us to force itself into material existence… In a peculiar motion, the knowing ape undergoes a partly conscious act of creation in the manner of Dr. Frankenstein. A body is grown, grasping at whatever it can take in, making flesh, stealing code. We build our trajectory upon shifting sands, held together by our ability to negotiate, to compromise, to determine which way the wind blows and thus set sail through the fog. However, one must remember that the binds that tie may also be used to rip a body in twain… The virus is there, as a process, as processing itself, forcing us to witness a veiled existence, forcing us to take part in itself. Some of us get so drawn into identifying with the virus that they lose sight of the way that we are held captive to it. They feed the growth of masks and armor, so they might hide from themselves, and protect against others. They force those who’d rather not draw from this poisoned source to feed the growth of masks, and armor as well.” [From the Pattern is the Pattern]

By 1977, the event was locally called “Gay Freedom Day”, later to become “International Lesbian & Gay Freedom Day” in 1980, then finally the “San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Parade and Celebration” by 2019.

Lots of people, then and now, just called it “Pride” or “Gay Pride”—including “the anarchist flashers” who wrote and distributed this flyer in 1977. Apart from the title above, the whole of the text is presented below the break (with a bit of typographic clean-up as well as a few links to Wikipedia).

====================================

To the marchers,

We are outraged by the attempted ban on nudity in this year's Gay Pride Parade proposed by the Parade Committee. But we oppose a boycott because the parade does not belong to any committee. It is a parade of, by and for all people supporting liberation for gay people. We support the natural right of people to go nude not only on Gay Pride Day, but every day of the year.

The anarchistic dykes and faggots who set off the Stonewall Rebellion did not debate beforehand whether or not they would be offending the Church or State.

The human body is not the problem for any society. Sensual repression only distracts us from the real problems. Chronic unemployment, private property, and white and male supremacy are problems. U.S. exploitation of Chile, South Africa, Puerto Rico and Iran is a problem. Co-optation is a problem. Gay Liberation does not mean assimilation into the existing norms of a sick, imperialist society.

Sexual liberation is impossible if we regard our own bodies as 'obscene' or 'offensive'. Nudity is offensive when used as a sexual weapon or commercial enticer, as it has been on many of the bar floats in the parade.

Many people will prefer not to go nude because of the objectification they may be subjected to, and we support them. Women especially have suffered from sexual exploitation and are aware of how their bodies can be abused and manipulated. For example, a double standard persists that allows men to go bare-chested while women may not. This helps to create a commercial market out of women's bodies. We encourage you to dress or undress as you wish.

The only way we can move on with liberation is to move on. Go nude on Gay Pride Day, if that is what you want to do. We encourage you to support any and all who choose to do so.

Don't Mourn, STRIP

―The Anarchist Flashers

[comments: Reddit ++]

In the sweltering heat of summer, when the refreshing breezes desert the city, [Beijing resident] Hu Lianqun absent-mindedly reaches for a solution: He rolls up his shirt to expose his belly, often fanning himself with the garment to create his own air conditioning.

This is how Glionna wants to introduce his reader to the concept of bǎngyé (膀爺). In all of the journalistic copy I have looked over regarding this topic, it is suggested that bǎngyé (variously translated into English as “bare-chested master”, “exposed grandfather”, and “topless guy”, depending on the source, and also referred to in English as “the Beijing bikini”) is a specifically Chinese cultural phenomenon. An article from 2019 in Singapore's The Independent informs us that “the belly is an essential container for energy” and “exposing the belly gets rid of excess heat,” but this is contradicted by Yan Zheng, “who has been practicing Chinese medicine for more than 40 years” according to Glionna's article. Yan tells us that

exposing one’s belly has nothing to do with Chinese medicine’s theory about maintaining a person’s health. People [choose] to expose their belly because they feel too hot in summer but feel embarrassed to take off their shirts completely.

I don't know enough about Chinese culture at large to say what the deal is either way. Regardless, whereas the Mandarin term chìbó (赤膊) seems to refer to straightforward shirtlessness, bǎngyé is something else: an exposure of the lower abdomen, often by hiking up the lower fringe of the shirt.

I think it's fair to surmise, however, that chìbó and bǎngyé are overlapping, or at least adjacent, concepts. Notice, for instance, the elision as I continue to quote from Glionna's article:

“I don’t know, it just feels cooler,” says Hu, perched on a park bench on a sultry weekday morning, the temperatures already [between 32° and 37° C], the humidity soaring. “Look, you just shake your shirt to create a breeze. I don’t see anyone laughing at me.”

In the sports attire section of a nearby department store, Qi Tong scoffs at such reasoning.

“It lowers Beijing’s standing as an international city,” the 21-year-old says. “I go without a shirt sometimes at home, but never in public. If my dad reaches for his shirt when I’m out with him, I threaten to go home. It’s just too embarrassing.”

For young Qi Tong, who is Chinese and who I take it on good faith to have been faithfully and accurately translated, his opinions about (his own) shirtlessness (“I go without a shirt sometimes”) are delivered alongside his opinions about bǎngyé (when his dad “reaches for his shirt”).

In North America, I have known some gender nonconforming and/or stylish men to ball up the left and right extremities of the lower fringe of their shirts, then lift up both ends up and tie a knot somewhere above the belly button. The result is an ad hoc tank top, knotted in the front, which, with some additional touches, helps to achieve a decidedly femme look.

From what I can tell, though, in northern China, bǎngyé isn't femme (and there don't appear to be any knots involved). It's just common, among men anyway. Some people evidently defend the practice as rooted in the values of the 1960s and '70s and the Cultural Revolution, and again, I don't know about all that—but it's clear that some people in China, including the aforementioned Qi, don't like the practice.

In 2002, the year after Beijing's Olympic bid had succeeded—the city, and China as a whole, would host the 2008 Summer Olympics—a new feature started running in the “Beijing Youth Daily” (北京青年报, hereafter referred to as the Daily). For several weeks, each new edition of the newspaper would feature candid photos of men around the city, generally doing inoccuous things like exercising outside, sweeping the walk outside of their homes, sitting down for a minute, or working at a food stand. The common characteristic of the men is that they were all chìbó or bǎngyé, e.g. they were shirtless or at least exposing their bellies.

The publishers of the Daily, as well as government officials, considered bǎngyé “a bad habit”, shirtlessness “uncivilized”. It is unclear to me, at this time, if they were opposed to all male shirtlessness in public, or if it was only the shirtlessness of bigger, older, or otherwise “gross” and/or embarrassing men that they objected to. I have not seen any of the pictures myself, but I have read that men with “bulging bellies” were often the subject of the Daily's mocking attention. Many of the photos of shirtless men on English-language news articles about the campaign feature older men.

The point of the Daily's new summer feature was to shame Beijing-area men into covering up in public, no matter the ambient conditions, and to establish that those who failed to do so would risk public humiliation.

This was initially justified by the upcoming Olympiad, but efforts at ending the “bad habits” of men exposing too much skin continued after 2008. For instance, in 2015, in the nearby city of Handan, deputies of some kind distributed t-shirts emblazoned with the characters 争做文明使者 to shirtless men (the slogan may be translated as “strive to be a civilized messenger”). Such an initiative seems cheeky but relatively benign—yet, in 2019, in the authorities in Tianjin and Jinan, two other major cities near Beijing, empowered police to issue fines for shirtlessness and bǎngyé. There would be warnings first, but afterwards, those who continued to “offend” in this respect would be obliged to pay for their intransigence.

The situation in China is interesting because it appears to be contentious. There are people who consider (cis male) shirtlessness and/or bǎngyé antithetical to civilization, but there are also lots of people (or at least men) who think it's all perfectly fine, and in any case have no organic interest in changing their ways—hence, the need for coercion. In sum, there is a protracted (albeit pretty low-stakes) struggle between “the state” (mostly in the form of local authorities, it seems, but sometimes supported by the central administration) and “society” (or at least a segment of society, e.g. sweaty men who want to feel a breeze on their skin, if they can).

In North America, on the other hand, the situation regarding (cis male) shirtlessness doesn't really seem to be contested. While I am sure there are jurisdictions (municipalities, I would presume) that have 1) laws against (cis male) shirtlessness on the books and 2) police who are more or less willing to enforce those rules against all shirtless adult men at all times, I don't live in such a place and neither do most people. From Miami to Vancouver, and from San Diego to Halifax, men can generally take their shirts off in public, if they want to do so. This could all change very fast in the context of a sudden cultural shift and/or political revolution, but in 2021, such a thing hasn't quite happened here yet.

About a decade ago, though, during the summer, a guy approached me on the street as I was about to hop on my bike and dart off to my next destination. He asked, “Isn't it illegal to go about the city without a shirt on?” I had my nipples out at the time, as is often the case when I'm fiddling with my lock and about to hop on my bike.

The guy's tone was hard to read, but I think there is an implicit disapproval in a question like that. It should be mentioned that this guy was not old, either. He was about my age, e.g. in his mid-20s probably, maybe even a few years younger.

Another time, during another summer, as I was stopped at an intersection and waiting for traffic—I was again on my bike—a gaggle of prepubescents led by adults was traversing the crosswalk. Several of them, all boys, turned their heads towards me, shriveled their faces up in disgust, and one of them yelled that I should put a shirt on.

Before that, on the actual evening of October 31 one year, when I was still in university, I was walking the short distance from my house to the place where a Hallowe'en party was happening. I was a “jungle commando”, like a Rambo type of person, and my costume did not include a shirt. Some guys around my age called me a faggot when I walked by. At the party, as a girl was leaving, she approached me to tell me that I should “wear deodorant” (and hey, she may have had a point there, I don't remember) but also that I “looked disgusting”.

I could cite numerous examples of similar incidents in which I have been “microaggressed”, if not straight up aggressed, by various people, mostly men, while shirtless and because of my shirtlessness while going from point A to point B or otherwise just trying to chill with my friends and have a good time in a public or quasi-public setting. A lot of the people who were shittiest to me were relatively young, but I am certain that older people can be just as shitty. Most of these incidents happened in cities with “progressive” and/or “no one gives a fuck” reputations—but the thing is, there are definitely some people who actually really do give a fuck, it seems, almost anywhere you go.

It is worth noting, too, that I was neither “fat” nor “old” by any definition when any of these incidents took place. I only recently turned 30 and I'm thin. I'm white to boot, and I don't think I'm most folks' idea of ugly. Other guys, gals, and others who look different than I do, and/or who come from different places or whatever, magnetize a more constant negative attention, which sucks—but still, I have had some such attention in my life, and it sucked for me, too.

No one appreciates having shitty things said about their body, period.

So, up to this point, I have only written about cis men. The situation for women, as well as legions of enbies and trans guys, is worse.

Around the world, in terms of law and state, it is more often than not the case that topfreedom—as it is called by most legalistic activists who advocate for it, often by showing off their boobs in public—is only legal and/or tolerated by the police in a very small number of jurisdictions. This is only the tip of the iceberg, though, because even absent of police, many people one might encounter in a park, on a quiet street, or in the middle of a busy intersection will object both strenuously and histrionically to, say, a young woman with her tits out. In many other cases, they will engage such a woman in an inappropriately familiar and/or sexual manner, even if the two of them are complete strangers. Sometimes they will do both.

Even in such places where the state, both in theory and (maybe) in practice, permits women et al. to get exactly as half-naked in public places as cis men are allowed to be—often because specific women, supported by cadres of feminist activists, won some kind of victory in the courts in decades past—it is still rare for anyone but flat-chested men to take their shirts off in a wide variety of public settings.

There is variance, of course. I have never been to a beach in France, never mind surveyed a range of French beaches and other swimming holes, but everything I have read leads me to believe that quite a few women there do not wear bikini tops or any top. I am certain the rate of bare-chestedness is not equal to that of cis men, but maybe that doesn't matter. In other places, however—including, say, public parks (as well as sketchy parking lots) in supposedly topfreedom-legal jurisdictions like Ontario, British Columbia, and most of the United States—it is not unusual or particularly notable when a cis guy is bare-chested, but it is rare to the point of basically never happening at all that a woman might be bare-chested.

In my city and the surrounding suburbs, during the summer months, a lot of guys don't care to wear shirts in public and/or they don't care to do so even when within view of, say, their neighbours or the street. I'm talking about when they ride their bikes from point A to point B, when they jog with earbuds in, when they play some version of sportball, when they do yard work, when they drink and smoke with their buddies on their balcony or their patio or whatever, when they ask passers-by for spare change—whatever normal urban activity they are up to! And generally speaking, there is no issue or controversy, at least about the shirtlessness as such.

Yet, I wonder if a lot of people have been quietly seething about it the whole time.

This seems to be the case in northern China more recently. I don't have a lot of information to go on, but I don't believe that it is solely “the state”—or more specifically, the highest rung of bureaucrats, either at municipal or federal levels—that is driving the last few decades' backburner-on-low campaign to end topfreedom for people of all gender classes. There must be some degree of popular support for such a policy.

I suppose support may have been astroturfed in 2002, but I find it hard to believe that anything that has happened more recently is anything other than the activist project of people who don't have better things to do. Contrary to the jingoistic stereotype about mainland Chinese society, it's not a situation of an absolute dictatorship (yet). People still have their own lives, their own opinions, and indeed, some space to militate for causes that they care about.

In both China and North America, there are lots of family-oriented conservatives, lots of nationalists, and lots of people who are both. Family-oriented conservatives worry a lot about sex, children, the ways that children can be led astray by various things (including sex!), and grand ideas about morality. Nationalists worry a lot about their country, its present-day prestige, its future, and the things that have purportedly destroyed civilizations in the past (like homosexuality did to the Greeks and the Romans). In both China and North America, some people—they are often called “activists”—use the limited space they have for political expression to militate against scourges they see in the society around them. They do so, of course, in pursuit of a society that better accords with their ideology.

The past is a foreign country, but I find it hard to grasp that, just 80 years ago or so, cis men in urban North America often swam completely nude in public pools (see the header on “The YMCA” and figure #41). At the very same time, male shirtlessness on a busy street or in any other crowded place was extremely uncommon; it would have been seen as hickish or redneck in many cases. Things are different now; for whatever reason, the culture has changed. My broad assessment is that things have moved in a direction of less body freedom for cis men in public pools, but more body freedom for them in most other public places.

(Nevertheless, it is still not really possible for men to eat a meal shirtless in most restaurants, nor for boys in high school to take their shirts off during a stiflingly hot math class, without getting some trouble for it. And then there are workplaces!)

A stereotypical image of the 1960s and '70s counterculture is that of the topless woman setting her bra alight. It is my understanding that some of the women who did this sort of thing (or, I guess, wanted to but couldn't get a permit), or who simply took their dresses, shirts, and bras off, were arrested and roughly handled by police—and I presume that those women understood, in most cases, that such a thing could befall them, if police were to get involved (which would have been more or less a given at most political demonstrations, for instance, and with a pretty good chance of the same in lots of other places).

These women did it anyway, despite the risks—either as part of a protest, or just having a picnic in a quiet corner of a large park. So, why?

Were they simply careless? Or had they decided that this sort of freedom might be worth all the trouble?

Anarchists don't talk about topfreedom much. My experience is that, when women and enbies take their shirts off in our spaces, no one usually remarks upon it (although people do sometimes cheer, depending on the context). Perhaps in some broadly conservative societies, where many anarchist men are less familiar with the most basic of contemporary anarchafeminist critiques of patriarchy and/or sexism, there would be objections to the “topfreedom of the oppressed” being exercised—but in most North American scenes I have spent time in, in the 21st century, I can't really imagine anyone voicing opposition to loose tits. It's the police, the neighbours, or the owners of the bar we're hanging out at who will typically take issue, and for anarchists, the only question is how the rest of us will act to stand up for the members of our party who have magnetized some antagonistic attention to themselves. For instance, in 2011, during the anarchist bookfair in Montréal, a soccer game was taking place in the adjacent park, and people of all gender classes had taken their tops off because it was hot out. Then, when police intruded on the field and tried to arrest the “women” (anyone's own conception of their gender not counting for much in the cops' eyes), everyone's prerogative (that is, every anarchist who saw what was happening, many of whom hadn't been involved in the game) was to run interference by shouting, yelling, and making it clear that the situation would become too much for the two isolated cops to handle by themselves.

But, while I have never seen opposition to topfreedom equity within anarchist scenes, there appears to be very little equity in practice. I am sure that my experience, as a gay man, doesn't count for a whole lot on this front, but I can count on two hands the times that I have just casually hung out with women with their boobs out in spaces where we can be reasonably certain that no one but other anarchists are going to bother us, like a private apartment, a sufficiently secluded or private backyard, etc. This includes numerous times that I had opted not to wear a shirt myself because it was hot. (In comparison, there have been entire weeks of my life where it seemed like none of the cis men I was sharing my life with wore shirts at all, at least not while at home or outdoors.)

The discrepancy that exists in anarchist and other radical scenes in North America doesn't seem that much different from the discrepancy in the dominant culture. But why is there a discrepancy at all?

Some of it could be explained, perhaps, by the fact that having boobs is simply structurally and experientially different from having a flat chest. People with boobs just want to wear bras! And, look, I don't know. Maybe. Yet, there are many flat-chested men, and boys, who aren't particularly comfortable being shirtless either. I was one as a kid. I would opt to wear a t-shirt when swimming. There are also some cis men who, in fact, have large and prominent breasts (the proverbial “man boobs”). Though not at the same rate as flat-chested men choose this option (fatphobia is obviously a factor here), these guys, in North America at least, still opt to wear nothing above the waist in public and quasi-public settings far more frequently than women do.

It is worth remembering, too, that in other parts of the world and/or at other times in history, it is or was (more often was) the norm for adult women to wear nothing (apart from ornamentation, e.g. necklaces, bracelets, earrings) above the waist.

A great deal of the discrepancy, then—not necessarily all of it, but a lot of it—must be the result of social, cultural, and individual psychological factors more so than “biologically determined” factors of flat chest vs. more concave chest. In other words, all the obvious things:

1. laws and, more importantly, custom in most jurisdictions and areas of the world that explicitly forbid the exposure of large breasts (parallel to commercially driven hypersexualization of the image of large breasts, in many countries at least, typically with little to no meaningful state intervention or regulation)
2. patriarchy: the rule of fathers, brothers, and like figures
3. the hard-to-kill cop-in-the-head left over from (feminine?) socialization
4. the fact that, when anarchist women (and other anarchists) think of all of the ways they want to change the world and change themselves, “equity in half-nudity” does not come to mind as a priority compared to other things like climate change, prison society, dealing with self-hatred (one's own or that of others), and other things of the same utmost seriousness

Nevertheless, the goal of equity between established gender classes (often designated “equality of the sexes” in more antiquated literature) has been a part of every anarchist and/or revolutionary socialist political program that's been worth a damn from the 1800s on. This should include an equal capacity to wear nothing above the waist, whether enshrined as a legal “right” by some constitution or like text, or as a result of a general abolition of the authority of law and statute, as in anarchy.

In northern China, though, something different is happening. The campaign against chìbó and bǎngyé hasn't eradicated the practice entirely—although I would hardly be the one to know, myself, and I have read no news articles on the subject dating to later than 2019. It is hard to believe that there hasn't been any impact on men who might be inclined to take their shirts off, which is effectively all such men, since such an inclination could befall any dude whatsoever.

Vincent Ni, China affairs correspondent for The Guardian, writes that

volunteers in the Chinese capital have become a part of its daily social fabric. They help run their neighbourhoods by picking up litter and guiding those who are lost. They also observe, listen and follow every clue that might lead to a potential legal case. The rise of the Chaoyang masses [which is one such volunteer group] exemplifies the extraordinary ability of the ruling Communist party to mobilise grassroots forces to keep the vast country running, but also to keep its populace in check.

The article includes a photo of a seemingly mixed-gender group of volunteers wearing red armbands, three with grey or greying hair. Ni also quotes Ka-ming Wu, who says: “[Volunteers] are often retirees and female.” There is no mention of areas outside of Beijing, but it's not hard to imagine similar volunteer organizations existing in nearby places, like Tianjin or wherever, too.

I suspect these Chinese volunteer groups are largely political formations of right-wing women—that is, “women who claim to be acting in the interests of women as a group” who “act effectively on behalf of [ ... ] authority” and “on behalf of a hierarchy in which women are subservient to men.” Even if they have the aesthetic of latter-day Red Guards, the content of their politics is in line with an all-too-traditional Chinese patriarchy.

Such volunteer groups have almost certainly been involved in the campaign to bereave men of their chìbó/bǎngyé privilege—issuing warnings, distributing t-shirts, etc.

I am sure there are quite a few men involved in this campaign as well, especially among the ranks of thought leaders (e.g. writers) and financial backers, but framing chìbó/bǎngyé privilege as “unfair to women” and getting women to speak to men seems like the obvious strategy here. It doesn't matter a bit that this is not really the case, i.e. it is not the privilege itself, but the society that has produced this privilege, for one gender class only, that is unfair to women. This subtlety should matter in a conversation about ideas, but when people are getting in the faces of “offenders” and demanding that they immediately “correct” their conduct, ideas don't count for anything.

There is no exact parallel to Chinese anti-chìbó/bǎngyé campaigns (that I am aware of) anywhere in North America, but there have been initiatives targeting so-called “saggy pants” in Dublin, Georgia, and Wildwood, New Jersey, among many other places. (Incidentally, authorities in Wildwood actually did ban shirtlessness, in its boardwalk area only, but still.) Much of the same argumentation can be used to justify whichever of the two. For instance, men are “flexing on privilege” and behaving in ways that women could never get away with. It's lazy and slovenly behaviour, and encourages others to the same. It allows us, the good people, another excuse to target them, the bad people.

In the summer of 2016, a group of people (I think all men or mostly men, but I could be wrong) were chatting amongst themselves at an “anarchy camp” in rural Austria. They were then approached by an “awareness team” (I think none men, and again I could be wrong). These sorts of people are sometimes called “vibe watchers” in North America, but really, in most contexts, they are more like political commissars. Their task is to watch and make sure that the vibe (that is, the behaviour and conduct of participants in a gathering) supports the political line—which usually means, in an ostensibly anarchist space, the vibe watchers' own interpretation of what everyone else's political line should be.

The issue that the awareness team brought to the guys' attention in 2016 was that some of them were shirtless. This, it was said, was either upsetting, or potentially upsetting, to other people at the camp. I tend to think that there was more going on here, though. Perhaps someone had a different sort of problem with one or two of the people in the group, but it would have been less tactful to bring that one up, so shirtlessness was what was brought up because it's easier to make an argument around shirtlessness and how only shitty, insensitive dudes would ever flex on folks like that.

In his polemic “Against Identity Politics” (Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #76, 2015), Lupus Dragonowl writes that “identity politicians” (which he also calls “IPs”)

reproduce a style of politics which focuses on telling people 'how to behave', conditioning people into roles which reproduce the power of the spectacle. IPs reproduce conventional morality and its structures of [resentment]—negative affect [...] towards others as an expression of one’s own powerlessness, in contrast to celebration of one's power.

In other words, tell men to put their shirts on, because you can't, rather than doing something else—like, say, burning your bra and daring the world to stop you.

Burning a bra isn't very practically useful, but it is kind of a powerful symbolic act, and I think it must be a simultaneously exhilarating and nerve-wracking act to perform in a public setting (at least for the first time), like lots of other good things in life. It probably changes you a little bit for the better, if you survive the experience, whereas bullying people for not presenting in public as you would like them to pretty much always changes you for the worse.

It's not my fight to prosecute, of course. But, if there was ever a big bra bonfire down at the end of my block, I would want to go, so long as the people there would want to have me. Hopefully the vibe would be one where I could throw in some ratty t-shirt I don't much care about—or better yet, the clean and crisp one I wear as part of my work uniform—and thereby help the flames burn a little longer and brighter. Maybe that would nudge things a little closer to a world in which nakedness could be less controversial in general, whether we're talking above-the-waist half-nudity or the full monty.

[comments: Raddle | Reddit ++ | @news]

Also available in PDF form with an imposed option. https://printedbybugs.com/pdfs/tangping/

Lie flat is justice

I haven't had a job for more than two years, and I haven't felt like anything is wrong with using all my time for play. The pressure mainly comes from people around you comparing you to others or the traditional values of elders. They are everywhere. Every time you see hot news topics, they are about celebrities in love, getting pregnant and other “fertility” innuendo. The National People's Congress does not need to be like “invisible creatures” pressuring you to change your mind.

~

I can just sleep in my own wooden barrel and bask in the sun like Diogenes, or I can live in a cave and think about “Logos” like Heraclitus. Since there has never been a movement of thought that exalts human subjectivity in this land, then I can make it for myself. Lying flat is my movement of the wise. Only lying flat is the measure of all things.

Because I’m not going to be performing any labor, I am able to only eat two meals a day, noodles + eggs in the morning, rice + vegetables and eggs in the evening. On weekends, I can go to a restaurant for chicken chops and rice if I feel like it. For me, solving the problem of food is to solve everything. My monthly expenditure is controlled within two hundred Yuan, and I can work for one to two months a year.

~

I hate life lived for the sake of steel and concrete and “traditional family values”. People shouldn't be so tired. People should pursue a simple life, so I always do things very slowly, because I don't need to do things for anyone. I sometimes hide somewhere to watch and laugh at those busy people…

~

Why should people find excitement for an obviously meaningless existence?

~

Lying flat is the only objective truth in the universe. Rest, sleep, or death, the moment when a life full of desire and excitement becomes still and disappears is the embodiment of true justice. I choose to lie flat, and I am no longer afraid.

My position is not positioned by anyone. The ashes enter the sea and the soul floats to the universe. I'm just passing by. When the time comes, it will be another trip.

Cats have subjectivity, but people don't. When will the alienated world die out?

That's right, health is also important. Just after climbing the mountain, you can go swimming in the lake when the weather is a little hotter. I have been soaking in it almost all summer. It is essential to keep exercising.

~

I have an actor's certificate, and when I'm in a good mood, I still go to Hengdian to lie down. In short, I just lie down in a different way: life is to lie down.…

_

躺平即是正义

两年多没有工作了，都在玩 没觉得哪里不对，压力主要来自身边人互相对比后寻找的定位和长辈的传统观念，它们会无时无刻在你身边出现，你每次看见的新闻热搜也都是明星恋爱、怀孕之类的 “生育周边”，就像某些“看不见的生物”在制造一种思维强压给你，人大可不必如此。 我可以像第欧根尼只睡在自己的木桶里晒太阳，也可以像赫拉克利特住在山洞里思考“逻各斯”，既然这片土地从没真实存在高举人主体性的思潮，那我可以自己制造给自己，躺平就是我的智者运动，只有躺平，人才是万物的尺度。

-

由于不需要劳动，我一天可以只吃两顿饭，早上是面条+鸡蛋，晚上的时候可以米饭+蔬菜和蛋类，碰上周末心情好可以去餐馆吃鸡排饭，对我来说 解决食物问题就是解决一切，每月的花销控制在两百以内，一年可以工作一到两个月。

-

我厌恶那种一辈子为了钢筋水泥和“传统的家庭观念”，人不应该如此劳累，人应追求那种简朴的生活，所以我做事情总是特别慢，因为我不需要为任何人做事。 我有时会躲在某处看着那些忙碌的人发笑...

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人为什么要给明明毫无意义的存在找一些亢奋呢？

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躺平才是宇宙间客观的唯一真理，休息、睡觉或是死亡，充满欲望和亢奋的生命体静止和消逝的瞬间才是真正正义的体现，我选择躺平，我不再恐惧。

我的定位不被任何人定位，骨灰入海，灵魂飘向宇宙，我只是匆匆过客，时间一到就是另一趟旅行。

猫的主体性，人却没有，异化的世界何时消亡？

-

没错，还要有一个人好身体，刚爬完山，天气再热一点就可以去湖里游泳，我几乎整个夏天泡在里面，坚持锻炼是必不可少的。

-

我办有演员证，心情好的时候还会去横店 躺，总之就是换着方式躺，人生就是躺躺躺...

During the previous session the focus was on the concept and material process of labor. In this discussion we went through a critical element for understanding the discussion for this session. Specifically I am referring to the connection of laborer and context to product.

In the labor process the laborer enters into a conflict with the particularity of the moment and the nuances of material and tools. In the labor process a laborer, who is a person at a time and space, comes into contact with a material, which is in its form only in that time and space. This extreme historical particularity not only ensures that every act of production is a unique unrepeatable moment, unlike any other moment, but that it is inherently tied to the particularities of that moment.

As such, we cannot approach labor as something that either necessarily produces a specific product, all products, even of the same type, are different materially, nor something that can be thought of as a mechanism of the past or the future. Labor exists as an activity, in which we come into contact with material and tools, all of which contribute to the final outcome. But, this is just labor as labor. As we have seen, the introduction of capital fundamentally shifts the calculation around time.

Early in the chapter Marx foreshadows this a bit. In the discussion at the beginning of the chapter there are two distinctions that are made, one is between time and labour-power, and the second is between unique product of labor and generic object of commodification. During the act of production, as production, one is engaged in activity on a particularized basis. The act is a unique act, which have never occurred before and will never occur again, and this uniqueness is formed from the particularity of time, the particularity of material, of labor, of action and of tooling, all of which are not ever to be repeatable in this same form. This act is actualized immediately, it is only ever what it is, and results in the object being produced in a unique form.

The problem, within the context of commodity circulation, is that without a nested series of generalizations. The first layer of generalization we have discussed extensively, the generalization of value in the ways that value is attributed to objects. This imparting of equivalent forms of value eliminates the particularity of the object. On a second layer, this also generalizes the act of production as well.

When a capitalist purchases labor, they are not purchasing actualized labor, or labor that is occurring. Rather, what is purchased is the potentiality of activity of the worker in the future, or labour-power. In order to do this all acts of labor need to be rendered equivalent, and able to be valued quantitatively; we call that a wage. The process in which labor gets rendered equivalent and imbued into the value of the commodity is called valorization, and that is where we will be focusing our attention today.

Before jumping into the notes I want to re-emphasize another point made in weeks past. The content for this section really focuses heavily on the labor theory of value. Within this conceptualization labor is utilized through the medium of tools to change a material into a use-value. In the end product the value of that product is in itself an expression of all of the labor accumulated in that object, and every step that was taken to get to that object. But, as Marx has stated, there is a problem here. If labor were the only determination of all value, including exchange value, then all products would be valued at what their value in production was, and profit would be impossible.

What occurs in the valorization of the commodity, and labor within the commodity, is that value shifts form from a qualitative value of the particularized object and moment to the quantitative magnitude of equivalent objects and moments. After this process of wrenching moments and things out of history, profit margins are then added to this quantified value. These margins are based on conditions that exceed the object, such as social conditions, political circumstances, abstract risk, supply and demand dynamics and so on. This addition of profit margins have been used by capitalist economists to claim that the labor theory of value is not relevant, but this position misses something, once profit is added and the quantitative value exceeds that of the quantification of all labor embodied in the object we leave the realm of value and enter the realm of price. Again, it is the labor theory of VALUE, and not the labor theory of PRICE. To understand what is going on in this section that distinction is critical.

With that all out of the way, here are the notes for this session.

• We begin where we left off during the last session, with the connection between labor and value. This discussion can get us pretty far in attempting to understand the ontology of capitalism, but there is a clear gap here; thus far we have been unable to really speak of labor itself as a commodity, except to say that it is one. That is what we will be approaching during this session.

Labor, in its base form, creates use-values, or it produces objects that have a use for the recipient or consumer of that object. As we have discussed, this concept of value, which is particular to the consumer at a particular moment, is eliminated in the process of capitalist circulation, and all value is reduced to exchange value, with exchange value being expressed in a magnitude of quantity. In this form the object retains its use-value for the consumer, but for the capitalist these use-values are only produced to function as the “material substratum”, or mechanism of transport, for abstract exchange value. In this form use becomes contingent on exchange, and labor is turned toward producing objects, not based on utility or use, but purely based on the possibility of exchange.

“Our capitalist has two objectives : in the first place, he wants to produce a use-value which has exchange-value, i.e. an article destined to be sold, a commodity ; and secondly he wants to produce a commodity greater in value than the sum of the values of the commodities used to produce it, namely the means of production and the labour-power he purchased with his good money on the open market. His aim is to produce not only a use-value, but a commodity; not only use-value, but value; and not just value, but also surplus-value.” (293)

• Just as the commodity functions as a materiality contingent on an abstraction, labor, inserted into capital flows, also attempts to function around a paradoxical fusion, now between the materiality of labor and the creation of value. The value of the commodity is related to the perceived use of the object conceived of by the buyer and expressed through quantified abstraction. Within this circulation of commodities, we also have to redefine the concept of use.

Take, for example, something like a stock. It is a commodity, even if it is an abstract commodity, and it would seem like that stock does not have any direct use-value. But, in reality that stock allows one to have a level of control over the entity they hold stock in to the proportion of stock that they own out of the total. Stock is also tradeable, and can in itself be used as a mechanism through which its direct use is to create surplus value. Even in this case, where we are talking about an abstraction that only exists in relation to another abstraction (a part of an abstract legal entity), there is still value in the use of the object.

For the object as such, the object as object, the value of the object is related to the labor utilized to produce the object as a use-value. Though the abstraction of price will emerge in the circulation process, the value of the capitalist commodity is still determined by aggregate labor, now expressed through the lens of capitalist production as a quantity of equivalent labor and laborers.

“It must be borne in mind that we are now dealing with the production of commodities, and that up to this point we have considered only one aspect of the process. Just as the commodity itself is a unity formed of use-value and value, so the process of production must be a unity, composed of the labour process and the process of creating value [ Wertbildungsprozess ].

Let us now examine production as a process of creating value. We know that the value of each commodity is determined by the quantity of labour materialized in its use-value, by the labour­ time socially necessary to produce it. This rule also holds good in the case of the product handed over to the capitalist as a result of the labour-process.” (293)

• This value of aggregate labor manifests through a number of forms that are outside of immediate labor. The base material is extracted or purchased, which takes on the guise of labor valued through quantifiable magnitude. The same goes for the wear on the machine, which is expressed as a partial cost per object of the overall cost of the machine, product loss, social conditions and elements that impact efficiency and so on. All of these elements of overall value involve labor as a force of creating value, and all of which then contribute to the overall price of the object in market circulation.

Outside of labor itself, however, all of these circumstantial elements, like social unrest, cannot be directly taken into account in the price of the object for a very simple reason; the object is priced now, but social unrest, for example, has an endless timeline of possibility. These elements are also not able to be generalized as a standard cost, the events themselves and the dynamics of existence are not able to be subsumed to generalized concepts. But, most importantly for our discussion here, these elements cannot be eliminated either; they are the distance between life and abstraction, and to eliminate contingency would mean to eliminate life itself. So, without an ability to take these elements into account, or the ability to eliminate them in the calculation of value, the value of the commodity comes to be determined by an averaging of potential costs.

“Hence in determining the value of the yarn, or the labour-time required for its production, all .the special processes carried on at various times and in different places which were necessary, first to produce the cotton and the wasted portion of the spindle, and then with the cotton and the spindle to spin the yarn, may together be looked on a s different and successive phases of the same labour process. All the labour contained in the yarn is past labour; and it is a matter of no importance that the labour expended to produce its constituent elements lies further back in the past than the labour expended on the final process, the spinning. The former stands, as it were, in the pluperfect, the latter in the perfect tense, but this does not matter. If a definite quantity of labour, say thirty days, is needed to build a house, the total amount of labour in­corporated in the house is not altered by the fact that the work of the last day was done twenty-nine days later than that of the first. Therefore the labour contained i n the raw material and instruments of labour can be treated just as if it were labour expended in an earlier stage of the spinning process, before the labour finally added in the form of actual spinning.” (294-295)

• Within this structure it is not just important to identify an average of contingent costs, it is also important to prevent anything from happening that could displace that average. To allow for this structure of exchange value to function, not only do conditions of production need to be leveled, but also the particularities of labor and laborers. When an object is made purely as a use-value the particularity of the labor expended helps determine the shape of the object. Within capitalist production this quality of labor disappears, and must, otherwise all objects would need to be valued separately, rendering mass production impossible.

In most economics this elimination of contingency if treated like a simple efficiency calculation. In reality, this imposition of generic average is the very foundations for the assembly line, Taylorism and the entirety of the performance metric driven workplace, which is structured to construct the worker as an entity as close to a machine as possible; this is the ultimate core of the alienation of the laborer from labor within the wage structure. We will return to some of these themes when we get to Chapter 15, which is about the factory, in a couple of weeks.

“We have now to consider this labour from a standpoint quite different from that adopted for the labour process. There we viewed it solely as the activity which has the purpose of changing cotton into yarn ; there, the more appropriate the work was to its purpose, the better the yarn, other circumstances remaining the same. In that case the labour of the spinner was specifically different from other kinds of productive labour, and this difference revealed itself both subjectively in the particular purpose of spinning, and objectively in the special character of its operations, the special nature of its means of production, and the special use-value of its product. For the operation of spinning, cotton and spindles are a necessity, but for making rifled cannon they would be of no use whatever. Here, on the contrary, where we consider the labour of the spinner only in so far as it creates value, i.e. is a source of value, that labour differs in no respect from the labour of the man who bores cannon, or (what concerns us more closely here) from the labour of the cotton-plan ter and the spindle-maker which is realized in the means of production of the yarn. It is solely by reason of this identity that cotton plan ting, spindle-making and spinning are capable of forming the component parts of one whole, namely the value of the yarn, differing only quantitatively from each other. Here we are no longer concerned with the quality, the character and the content of the labour, but merely with its quantity. And this simply requires to be calculated. We assume that spinning is simple labour, the average labour of a given society. Later it will be seen that the contrary assumption would make no difference.” (295-296)

• In this process all labor is rendered both equivalent and potential. The labor that one sells to the capitalist is not work performed in a specific, particular, unique way in the past. Rather, one is only able to sell the potential of generic labor; this is the selling of a portion of the future to mediocrity. As labor is rendered generic, and measured as a quantity, all that comes to matter is the quantity and not the type of labor or laborer. For example, to a capitalist fine metal machining and mass produced metal casting do not differ on a qualitative level, but only on the level of the time and cost of that time. The products of that labor are equivalent, in that they are both quantities, and the labor aggregated in the object is also equivalent, as a quantity, even if machining is a fine craft that takes years to learn and casting is a common and simple process. The material is also reduced to a quantity, with the quanytitative difference disappearing through its role as the substrate to which labor is inscribed and, as a result, value attributed.

“During the labour process, the worker's labour constantly under­goes a transformation, from the form of unrest [ Unruhe] into that of being [Sein ] , from the form of motion [Bewegung] into that of objectivity [Gegenstiindlichkeit]. At the end of one hour, the spinning motion is represented in a certain quantity of yarn; in other words, a definite quantity of labour, namely that of one hour, has been objectified in the cotton. We say labour, i.e. the expenditure of his vital force by the spinner, and not spinning labour, because the special work of spinning counts here only in so far as it is the expenditure of labour-power in general, and not the specific labour of the spinner.

In the process we are now considering it is of extreme importance that no more time be consumed in the work of transforming the cotton into yarn than is necessary under the given social conditions; If under normal, i.e. average social conditions of production, x pounds of cotton are made into y pounds of yarn by one hour's labour; then a day's labour does not count as 12 hours' labour un­less 12x lb. of cotton have been made in to 12y lb. of yarn ; for only socially necessary labour-time counts towards the creation of value.

Not only the labour, but also the raw material and the product now appear in quite a new light, very different from that in which we viewed them in the labour process pure and simple. Now the raw material merely serves to absorb a definite quantity of labour. By being soaked in labour, the raw material is in fact changed into yarn, because labour-power is expended in the form of spinning and added to it ; but the product, the yarn, is now nothing more than a measure of the labour absorbed by the cotton. If in one hour 1 2/3 lb. of cotton can be spun into 1 2/3 lb. of yarn, then 10 lb. of yarn indicate the absorption of 6 hours of labour. Definite quantities of product, quantities which are determined by experience, now represent nothing but definite quantities of labour, definite masses of crystallized labour-time. They are now simply the material shape taken by a given number of hours or days of social labour.” (295-296)

• From this process all that results is a value equivalent to capital invested. For capitalism to function there must be a differential between these values, and to achieve this difference surplus-value must be added. It is in the addition of this surplus value that production moves from creating value into valorization.

“By turning his money into commodities which serve as the building materials for a new product, and as factors in the labour process, by incorporating living labour into their lifeless objec­tivity, the capitalist simultaneously transforms value, i.e. past labour in its objectified and lifeless form, into capital, value which can perform its own valorization process, an animated monster which begins to ' work ', ' as if its body were by love possessed '.

If we now compare the process of creating value with the process of valorization, we see that the latter is nothing but the con­tinuation of the former beyond a definite point. If the process is not carried beyond the point where the value paid by the capitalist for the labour-power is replaced by an exact equivalent, it is simply a process of creating value ; but if it is continued beyond that point, it becomes a process of valorization.

If we proceed further, and compare the process of creating value with the labour process, we find that the latter consists in the useful labour which produces use-values. Here the movement of production is viewed qualitatively, with regard to the particular kind of article produced, and in accordance with the purpose and content of the movement. But if it is viewed as a value-creating process the same labour process appears only quantitatively. Here it is a question merely of the time needed to do the work, of the period, that is, during which the labour-power is usefully expended.Here the commodities which enter into the labour process no longer count as functionally determined and material elements on whieh labour-power acts with a given purpose. They count merely as definite quantities of objectified labour. Whether it was already contained in the means of production, or has just been added by the action of labour-power, that labour counts only according to its duration. It amounts to so many hours, or days, etc.” (302-303)

The reading for this week is the beginning of the process of taking all of this complex, abstract and somewhat obtuse theory and grounding it in something tangible, in this case labor. Remember, when we discussed labor earlier that discussion tended to revolve around the concept of the labor theory of value or the positionality of labor within the wider dynamic of circulation.

These ideas are critical to understand, but throughout this discussion there is something lacking, namely a discussion of what labor even really is. That seems like a silly, self-evident element of everyday life, but it is actually a much more complex idea than we often allow it to be. For example, during this clapter Marx will differentiate between work, labor and labor-power. But, even beyond that the concept of labor is fundamentally bound up with the social structure of labor and the relationships between power, knowledge and our understandings of the world.

The concept of labor that has carried itself through the trajectory of Western philosophy is a concept that makes a series of difficult to identify assertions about life, and our relationship to the world. These assumptions are so commonly held that they almost disappear into a sense of unstated normality. But, core to this question, in its traditional understanding, is a very clear, and very problematic, concept of the human.

This conception of the human, which finds a clear early expression in Aristotle, will sound very familiar. It is the concept that there is a fundamental separation between the human and everything else, grouped under the concept of nature. This separation is typified by a dynamic of extraction and domination, namely that “nature” is the dominion of the human. Clearly this idea carried over into Christianity, through the Book of Genesis.

But, coupled with this idea is a specific concept of how we create, or what the process of making something entails. Within this Aristotelian conception the human functions in a relationship with nature in which the human has total sovereignty. This means that, not only can the human extract whatever they need, but also that “nature” is a sort of passive and inert substance. When we make something, say carving something out of wood, within this understanding of the world that carving transfers directly from the mind to the object, with the material presenting no resistance to human action.

Now, anyone that has ever carved wood or, in my case I mess around with amateur metal machining and fabrication, knows that materials all have tolerances, unevenness, gaps, areas which present different resistances, flows that move cleanly through a material and so on. A wood carving needs to take grain into account, as a really simple example, but also if one is welding the metal can warp due to heating differentials. None of that can possibly exist within this traditional understanding of the separation between “human” and “nature”.

There is a lot more to say on this topic, and someday I plan on doing a seminar on the concept of production and the dynamic between the concept of the human and the materiality of prosthetic tools. It is not time to dive into this here, now, but if you are interested I would recommend the Technics and Time series by Bernard Steigler or War In The Age of Intelligent Machines and Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel Delanda.

For now, what is relevant are two points that I will briefly summarize before getting into the heart of the notes. The first is that this traditional conception of production is something that a lot of Marxists impose into Marx; this is the entire basis for the 5 Year Plans, for example. But, as we will see, that reductionistic reading misses a lot of really critical nuance. Secondly, it is in this nuance that we can begin the process of understanding wage labor and the ways that labor is commodified, as well as the ontological impacts of that. We will leave the commodification, valorization, process for next week, and will focus on this understanding of labor presented here for this series of notes.

So, sit back, relax and enjoy!

• Immediately Marx makes a subtle distinction which is very core to the arguments here. This distinction is between work and labor. The worker is defined through the lens of capitalist production, it is one who sells their potential labor as part of the production process. In the process of becoming-worker a metamorphosis of activity occurs, in which it is taken from a fundamental and simple form and inserted into a different mode of occurrence.

To exist one must possess the potential for activity; to not have the potential to act is to literally describe death. Though these possibilities must exist for one to exist, that does not mean that all of these potentialities are manifested. This potentiality of action, therefore, serves as a sort of labor in waiting, time and effort that can be turned toward a task.

In the construction of labour-power, or labor that has been utilized as part of a mode of a commodified mode of production, the individual is specifically selling this potential labor. During this process a space is opened between the production process itself and the social context of that production. In other words, in the process of labor becoming labour-power or work the social context of labor has been inserted into the dynamic, allowing for the commodification of labor to even be possible. Labor itself is a separate category, independent from the social context of labor, which comes to shape and channel labor. It is in this locality that the structure of power comes to impact the possibilities of activity.

On a second level another gap is opened, this time between the value produced and its circulation within capitalism. This separation has been discussed before, but the point takes on a slightly different shape here. To the degree that labor and the social context of labor are not inherently connected (there are many different social contexts in which labor can occur, and none are essential for labor to occur), this then comes to form the basis of the separation of value created and value circulated. When labor as such occurs the result is the production of use value. It is in the insertion and imposition of a specific context for labor in which this value gets rendered irrelevant, and the object can begin to express the exchange value that ultimately constructs the object as a commodity. It is in these separations that Marx can talk about workers being separated from the products of their labor; that labor ceases to be labor as such and becomes work through its insertion into commodity circulation.

“Hence what the capitalist sets the worker to produce is a particular use-value, a specific article. The fact that the production of use-values, or goods, is carried on under the control of a capitalist and on his behalf does not alter the general character of that production. We shall therefore, in the first place, have to consider the labour process independently of any specific social formation.” (283)

• Labor, in this basic and fundamental form, prior to the question of social context, is framed here through a concept of a conflict between human and nature. There are an entire boatload of caveats in these statements, of which we will be focused on a few. Before diving into the complications it makes sense to discuss the traditional understanding of labor and its relationship to “nature”, as well as the Leninist interpretation of this (which is, surprisingly, super reductionistic and flat out wrong).

The traditional conception of labor has a number of different roots, including Aristotle and later the Bible. In these narratives this conflict between human and “nature” is based on a number of assumptions. Firstly, there is an assumption that the categories of human and nature are clear and absolute in their separation. This concept is one grounded in the arrogant narrative of “human reason”, and a lack of understanding of the non-human. It also essentializes the human as a thing when, if we follow thinkers like Bernard Steigler here, the human is more identified by the uses of what it is not, namely what Steigler terms prostheses, or, in other words, tools. Consequently this posits some essential characteristic to “nature” as well. These essentializing narratives would literally require understanding the totality of all possible things in all possible ways to even begin to venture some sort of discourse around.

The second element if this traditional understanding is centered around a domination narrative. In Leninist thought this conflict between the human and nature is one in which the task of the human is to dominate nature, to extract from it what is necessary, and to do so as some sort of absurd concept of political duty; this becomes very clear in the early Soviet modernization programs and later in the farm collectivization program and other state central planning processes. This narrative rests on the first, and then attempts to essentialize conflict as something with a victor and a conclusion. Conflict, however, is a much simpler concept, and means nothing more than the non-sameness of things, or the discordance between two entities, but not necessarily antagonism or domination. All of that content is being added in retroactively and used to support points that drift pretty far from this narrative.

These two assertions come together to form a narrative in which the natural is nothing but inert material that is able to be readily manipulated by the human without any resistance. The deficiencies of this understanding are obvious for anyone that has ever done wood or metal working. Both disciplines are largely centered around how to work with and compensate for irregularities and features of the material itself. For example, when welding one needs to tack down the pieces to one another at various points throughout the welding path, prior to actually welding the seam. This is because welding adds significant heat to the material, which causes distortions to the material and causes its shape to change. So, far from an inert and passive medium, the material itself presents distinct features that we are in “conflict” with during the act of making something.

There is plenty of language in this section of the chapter that seems to be pushing in this traditional direction, with concepts of sovereignty, power and some inherent separation between human and “nature. However, interspersed with that language you will find quotes (like the one below) in which it becomes clear that something more complex is going on here. Far from just repeating some sort of dogmatic humanism, Marx is actually expressing what, for the time, was a highly complex understanding of the interplay between laborer, material and ontology.The natural in the narrative Marx is crafting here is not one of a passive and definitive nature wholly separate from the human. Rather, this narrative is centered around a dynamic between labor and material, where the “natural” is an active and dynamic space that presents “forces” (to use Marx's term) that are acted upon by labor to ultimately produce a thing that is the result of both labor and the features of the material, or nature.

This allows us to think through a few questions that would be impossible to understand if we think of nature in this Aristotelian/Leninist framework of passive inert nature. Firstly, we would never be able to describe failure. If “nature” were a passive entity acted upon unilaterally by the human, then there could never be any mistakes in the process of taking concept and manifesting it in concrete form. Secondly, and this is critical later when we discuss value and price in the next section, without being able to speak of “nature” as a dynamic entity that is in flux, we can never discuss decay or degradation.

In this dynamic labor, prior to commodification, is in a dynamic with “nature”, or material, typified not by unchallenged human activity and inert materials, but is, rather, a dynamic based in intent and conflict. The shape of the object and material acts of construction exist in a dynamic between laborer and “nature”, making the resultant creation one that is inherently connected to both the laborer and the material in a particularized sense.

“Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.” (283)

• The tool functions as the medium through which human and material interact. Marx is speaking of this in a highly foundational way, namely that all prosthetics are tools, and tools are necessary for humans to make anything. For example, one cannot carve wood without a tool, or can't fight animals without weapons (we are kind of weak, slow and soft, and don't have claws or big sharp teeth). Even on the basic level of using a rock as a projectile, the object that we throw is a tool.

As with material, the tool itself presents additional and shifting resistances. Tools and the materials they are made of have limitations. Metal, for example, cannot cut harder metals. These tools also degrade, change shape, fail in their tasks. This is all added into the aggregate contingency of the nuances of the material, the skills and capability of the laborer and the social and political conditions of production to construct a far more complex relationship than one would ever derive from reading Lenin.

“An instrument of labour is a thing, or a complex of things, which the worker interposes between himself and the object of his labour and which serves as a conductor, directing his activity onto that object. He makes use of the mechanical, physical and chemical properties of some substances in order to set them to work on other substances as instruments of his power, and in accordance with his purposes. Leaving out of consideration such ready made means of subsistence as fruits, in gathering which a man's bodily organs alone serve as the instruments of his labour, the object the worker directly takes possession of is not the object of labour but its instrument. Thus nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, which he annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite of the Bible. As the earth is his original larder, so too it is his original tool house. It supplies him, for instance, with stones for throwing, grinding, pressing, cutting, etc. The earth itself is an instrument of labour, but its use in this way, in agriculture, presupposes a whole series of other instruments and a comparatively high stage of development of labour-power.” (285)

-The process terminates in the object that is produced in this dynamic, and that object, regardless of social form, carries use-value along with it. This use-value is not some sort of direct transference of human idea onto inert material, but is rather a product of labor undertaken on a dynamic material, in a dynamic moment in history, using tools that only exist in a particular way in any moment. This fundamentally binds the production of the object to the particular time and space of its production, and not in the generalized, depersonalized, generic form we infer from mass production. The mass produced object does not escape this dynamic, but that is a topic for Chapter 15.

The product, however, is not some sort of final point of termination. As we can derive from the concept of the labor theory of value, or even just a basic understanding of the logistics of supply chains, products become bound up in the production of other products, and this complicates the relation between object and use-value. Within capitalist production resources are consumed, all of which were products from former acts of production. In this form the use-value of the object becomes directly bound up with the circulation of commodities, and begin to function purely on that basis. This debases the object from direct use-value, and begins to redefine use-value around the terms of exchange-value.

“The process is extinguished in the product. The product of the process is a use-value, a piece of natural material adapted to human needs by means of a change in its form. Labour has become bound up in its object : labour has been objectified, the object has been worked on. What on the side of the worker appeared in the form of unrest [Unruhe] now appears, on the side of the product, in the form of being [Sein], as a fixed, immobile characteristic. The worker has spun, and the product is a spinning...Although a use-value emerges from the labour process, in the form of a product, other use-values, products of previous labour, enter into it as means of production. The same use-value is both the product of a previous process, and a means of production in a later process. Products are therefore not only results of labour, but also its essential conditions.” (287)

• For next time we will be working through the second part of this chapter, where we start to see how the process of production gets appropriated within the process of capitalist production.

being forced to live on a diet of raw vegetables and fruit while the adults ate hearty cooked meals, of being denied schooling and neighborhood playmates, of stealing toys and burying them in the MOVE compound.

“I'm still afraid of them, of MOVE,” he said. “Some of the things that went on there I can't get out of my head, bad things, things I haven't told anybody except my father.

“But I'll tell you this: I didn't like being there. They said it was a family, but a family isn't something where you are forced to stay when you don't want to. And none of us wanted to stay, none of the kids. We were always planning ways to run away, but we were too little. We didn't know how to get away. And we were scared.”

But that was the life he had always known. His earliest memories, he said, were of growing up at a MOVE commune in Virginia.

He said his mother tried to leave MOVE, but threats to her and him made that impossible. Instead, they lived in fear of everything: police, the neighborhood, MOVE founder John Africa, and anything else that came their way.

“The only regret I have is about me being hurt and my mom dying and the other kids,” he said. “I feel bad for the people who died, but I don't have any anger toward anybody. See, I got out.”

Tools: – heat-proof container for storage (preferably glass), with a lid – a pot – a heat source

Ingredients: – carrots – any kind of vinegar (e.g., cider, white wine, plain) – 1 Tbsp salt – ¼ cup sugar – (optional) mix-ins (e.g., garlic, dill, peppers)

Directions: – Fill the heat-proof container with roughly equal parts water and vinegar, and then pour this liquid into your pot. – Add sugar, salt, and mix-ins in to the pot and bring it to a boil. Once it boils, simmer for a few minutes while you prep your carrot sticks. – Peel and cut the carrots into sticks and pack them into your heat-proof container. – Pour the simmering liquid and mix-ins into your heat-proof container so that the liquid covers all of the carrot sticks. – Let cool uncovered on a counter and then cover and optionally transfer to a fridge.

Recently I've been playing with the idea of a body of water as representative of life, consciousness, time, or whatever the fuck. So in that image; initially anarchism came as a wave, at a time where the waters were already choppy, a wave which graciously hit the stern of my little boat, propelling me forward in some direction rather than capsizing me. This wave maintained my course through many other swells that sought to extricate me onto another even more enigmatic course, and pushed into clearer waters, where I found the weather improved and the horizon more expansive.

Of course being bad at poetry as I am, that extended metaphor simplifies things a little. Rather than being one large wave of anarchism there was instead many, dozens of small chance encounters with nothing more than the word itself, which upon a more curious investigation yielded a bounty of treasures. Garnished with a new worldview that played into my intense curiosity, a worldview that placed me in opposition to a staggeringly powerful set of forces, my discovery of anarchism sent me to my first punk show, gave me my first experiences of queerness, and inoculated me against conformity. However, none of my early exposure prepared me for the complexities of living an anarchic life.

Recognizing the expansion of pleasure to be found in symbiogenesis I sought others like me but wound up only really finding Activists who, despite speaking the same language I did, looked at me with an unsettling gaze. Their eyes were hungry, which at first I mistook for affection until I noticed their drool, and realized that all they saw in me were their favorite cuts of meat. I was lucky to escape with all my limbs attached, and since then I search for their familiar grey dorsal fins before I enter the water.

Sadly, getting my sea legs took a bit more than that. Through my interactions with the sharks I discovered the dangers of optimism and in turn, activism, and began to recognize just how many different beasts really wish to swallow me up. Also, being shaken by death (one that I wrote about under the title Substrate, and others which I have not shared) directed my rage at far bigger things, and gave me a taste of the existential. I didn't learn how to walk when the deck is wet and the winds are wailing in a progressive fashion, instead it happened all of a sudden, after a few especially bad nights.

Though I've weathered a few storms, long months alone can trouble even the saltiest of dogs, troubles which I have been only beginning to wrestle with by engaging with nihilism, egoism, and anarchy, rather than anarchism. At this point, anarchy is just an aspect of things, still one which I am very fond of. It accentuates relationships and dynamics, problematizes rather than solves, it's place is not in the Future and only becomes clear now and then but never for very long. Perhaps anarchism has become the sea I sail in.

We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did—and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see one another again,—perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us! That we have to become estranged is the law above us: by the same token we should also become more venerable for each other! And thus the memory of our former friendship should become more sacred!

Note: This essay started as something to share during the May Day session of the ni.hil.ist reading group (chi.st/nrg), in response to the prompt, “What does anarchism, or anarchy mean to you?”. However, I've altered a fair portion of it for clarity and flow reasons

I'm trying to build out an anarchism that begins with power relations observable by an individual which then works its way from there in a relatively concise form, one that also intentionally avoids the historical and cultural aspects of anarchy.

I have some sense that the anarchism many people encounter has grown bloated and complex, with many diverse cultural interests telling an extreme variety of stories about what anarchy is and what living it can look like.

Plurality (a value that the worst of positions seek to destroy) is undoubtedly a positive thing, however, the world as it exists does not truly allow for pluraversalism. Instead, even the most divergent existences are slowly recuperated back into the body of the populace, the body of Leviathan. I think that anarchism has been affected by this process also. If anarchism is a forest, it's my belief that the canopy has gotten too thick, invasives too prolific, and that we are in need of a forest fire, so new growth can flourish.

First things first, a definition which we can build out from: Anarchism is the philosophy (or anti-politic) that focuses on moments of anarchy, moments where dominating power dynamics (the state, capitalism, social power, etc. vs the individual(s)) aren't present or are otherwise negated.

How do those power dynamics present themselves? Does the state itself reach its giant hand made of concrete, steel, and paper down to stop me in my tracks? That has not happened to me yet. Rather, individuals are one of the places where these empowered ideas appear: The cop who stops me has not only the death-tool on his belt, but the more dangerous weapon of a hostile bureaucracy that he can leverage (and which leverages him) against me all in an attempt to suppress my will. This suggests that there's something more powerful than the body of the individual policeman present during our encounter, and if we met only as individuals I might have a fighting chance. In this situation that third thing is The Law; an empowered idea that functions to limit every ones capability by dictating when their agency is acceptable and when it must be punished.

Building from this example, we can start to look elsewhere and flesh out an understanding of what these anarchies are going on about. What powerful idea is present when a father commands his daughter, a jailer his convict, a mob their pariah, or a priest his congregation, and what is the threat each of them leverage? Which powerful phantasms haunt your life?

In short, the ideas (and quite rarely, individual beings with their own original idealism) that occupy the grounded side of the power seesaw have their interest placed in hoarding power and subjugating others, keeping us in the air, legs flailing. They gain and maintain their position by coercing people to “play along” through the use of reward and punishment, ultimately manipulating each person's agency in their own service. Also, interesting to note how most of them (law, family, prison, marriage, school, state, etc.) claim to bring order or normalcy of some form, considering the hostile relationship between anarchy and order.

Of course, expressions of power can and do exist without being dominating or totalitarian. If we think of “power” as a synonym for “capability” (which is slightly sloppy but will work for now), then that much is clear. Considering the policeman once more, the issue at hand isn't the existence of his power, but only my powerlessness in that situation. A far more palatable interplay exists in relationships between friends, who may each be more or less capable than the other in some regard, but who don't have complete control over the will of the other. My friend can convince me to act or not, but they cannot compel me to without my complicity. If you could imagine a game between multiple people who are all holding candles, where each participant is attempting to extinguish the flame of the others, it isn't hard to imagine playfully trading blows with friends, all in good nature and little hard feelings. However, if domination were embodied as a player, it would be equipped with a fire extinguisher, a dozen flames in another room, and a cold look on its grey face.

Until now, we've focused on the direct confrontation of the individual against authority, but in recent times a far slyer coercion is becoming dominant, one which has its frontier in our very minds. Somewhat different from the rewards and punishments used in service of other dominating structures, this structures power comes from leveraging technologies (cultural, digital, and psychological) to manipulate ones desires and undermine their agency with more subtle implications of violence. The embodiment of this broad force is different from the vulgar form as well, generally showing itself more in broad, massified expressions, as opposed to structures which live in the heads of select individuals. Analysis of this new form is a bit more complicated than the more vulgar expressions of domination we looked at prior, so I will leave it open-ended and just gesture towards the importance and complication of figuring out whose interest one is acting in service of. Do I really want that new object? Do I really want to sacrifice myself for this idea? Who actually gains through my participation that?

So, you've begun to recognize the things in the world that seek to process you into usable, efficient, plastic, parts for a large machine, and have said “fuck that, I contain more than you could ever know”. You're probably wondering what can be done about it? This is where I will leave you to your own devices, with minimal advice, as it would be absurd to try to prescribe a resolution to a problem I know nothing about. My only suggestion is to start from yourself and understand what ails you, seek empowerment from and for yourself, not an ideal, a method, or a cause. Find moments where you can breathe, dance, and play freely, moments of anarchy.

Perhaps, at this point, sticking your hand into the murky pool of anarchism could be useful! Most of us didn't get tetanus

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix outlines what they term Transcendental Black Metal in their manifesto of the same name included in the collection, Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1. Although I appreciate the philosophical effort (even more so the musical output of Liturgy), Id like to make use of their framework to provide a third alternative. The metaphysics of Elemental Black Metal appeals more to me than the apocalyptic humanism they prescribe, or the Hyperborean nihilism they seek to move beyond.

ELEMENTAL

According to Susanna Lindberg, the elementals are “abstract ways of articulating the materiality of being.” Elemental nature is unthinkable (beyond human thought), primordial (always ever there), and chthonic (found in the realm of the underworld). It is beyond the sensible or rational. It is “the absence of transcendental ground” existing as already available images. To Emmanuel Levinas, it is the it when it rains, il y a. It is indeterminate, opaque, and an absence that makes presence possible.

CONTINGENCY

Contingency is a potential force, and the force of potential. It is unexpected and not destined. It is an unintended consequence. It foils teleologies and disrupts ecologies even as it erupts from them. It is a senseless reshuffling of the cards. To humans, it is felt as looming cosmic catastrophe. It undoes worlds. It is nihilism to humans, but not something (or a nothing) one can be for.

FORGETTING

Creative forgetting is unlearning mastery, as Bayo Akomolafe puts it. This could be also considered unthinking. This is what Friedrich Nietzsche describes as the child stage in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: approaching the world anew having shed the burden of the camel and the ressentiment of the lion. It is what Laozi describes as the uncarved block: the capacity to become. It is not a rejection of the past, but an awareness that the past has yet to come.

DRONE

Drone is an enveloping, pulsating resonance. In metal, it is exemplified generally by much of the work of bands Earth and Sunn O))) of Cascadia, and Boris and Corrupted of Japan's urban epicenters. It is exemplified specifically by the track Tanggalkan Di Dunia (Undo The World) by the band Senyawa of Jogjakarta. The blackest of drone metal best accompanies Eugene Thacker's notion of cosmic pessimism. More than listened to, drone is felt.

EARTHLY (SUBTERRANEAN)

Elemental metal is earthly, but more specifically subterranean. It lies beneath bogs and marshes, and is buried under sand in windswept deserts. It forms underground caverns and deep sea trenches. It moves through mycelia and magma flows. It is of the underworld: connecting the living and the dead, and blurring the line between them. It is known by humans for its opacity.

GETTING LOST

The outcome of becoming lost is unknown. Losing oneself is impure, and resists preservation. It is breaking free from the fixed continuity of self and time, not through external transcendence, but passionate corporeality: a reckoning with the soul, followed by grotesque laughter.

ENTANGLEMENT

According to Carlo Rovelli, entanglement is predicated upon three aspects: granularity, indeterminacy, and relationality. An entangled understanding unmasks time for what it is: a relation between human perception and the cosmos. The cosmos is composed of indeterminate becomings in relation to each other, rather than finite or infinite being.

DIFFUSION

Diffusion is a withdrawal from incapacitating concentrations. It is an exit strategy. It is fluid, dissolvable, and becoming illegible. It is fleeing to the forest or going underground. It is fugitivity.

My Father the Policeman: A Critique of Anecdotes of the Privileged

This article was originally published here on July 5th, 2020.

Have you ever noticed that upon critique of a power structure a privileged person will pipe up with an anecdote to quip back? "My uncle was the county sheriff." "My aunt is a judge." "My father was a policeman." They mean it—I believe—either to show their understanding of the issue or to illustrate tacitly how they take personal offense. Both deserve to be addressed.

With regard to the demonstration of their ostensible understanding—it only goes so far, given their privilege; they will be sheltered from the gritty injustices that their privileged relatives will commit, because it would be perceived to bring disgrace onto the family otherwise. Or at least, they will be sheltered from the gritty realities that are considered unacceptable within the family culture.

This distinction is one that I can attest to myself; my grandparents worked for the police department. Now I come from a very traditional Italian-American family; the conservative ken of "law and order" runs strong. Most of the anecdotes that I have heard are sourced from my father, since he frequently witnessed the relevant actions of his family members—who worked for the police department. What he saw was awful: the corporal punishment of petty thieves for no other reason than police pleasure, alongside a general abuse of power. They also were quite racist; my grandfather believes—to this very day I believe—that Black people do not deserve equivalent freedom to white people, and he also distrusts Jewish people. This of course would hamper his ability to treat everyone equally, which is supposed to be a necessary skill in the job, given the diversity of people with whom an officer will have to cooperate, as in a community.

There is no doubt in my mind however that he—along with my grandmother, and everyone else in that police department for that matter, all giving their approval to these injustices—believed that his actions and beliefs were correct; everyone is the hero of their own story. But a person's pureness at heart is truthfully irrelevant to these discussions. When minds are scarred, when situations are escalated, when violence breaks out—intentions are no longer relevant, since the damage is still done all the same. If the intentions of the terrorists—in effect, what police are, causing terror to pacify the people out to whom they are dispatched—were ill, then the solution to the problem would be simple: fire all the iniquitous servants and replace them with good-natured people. But no, the problem is in how the structure inherently corrupts; therefore it must be abolished. It has nothing to do with how kind a family member may be.

But then, if the objection is not rational, what about an emotional objection: that one's bloodlines lead them to be victim of personal offense? What a pitiful concept: that one having family connections granting privilege should be accounted for when the institution that grants these privileges is criticized more than the people whom it hurts on the basis of their social status, often derived from their lineage! This can be observed in communities of people of color most notably; their deep family connections—id est their very race—affects the way they are treated by people with hierarchical control. Yet lest not—oh heavens—these people—among other people: neurodivergent people, queer people, and so on—express the same distaste that the power structures they fight against show for them, right back! What a laugh that we should remain in silence because of the abled cishet white person's affiliations!

So in effect this citation of anecdotes is a form of tone policing: that marginalized people should accept their circumstances, lest they face the censure of the privileged minority. Why should we seek respect from the system that gives us none? Why should we play on that field when we'll never win? What reason do we have to not devote our efforts into welding the oppressed masses into a destructive force? There is no need to enable the privileged; we have no choice but to oppugn them until they are free of their control.

Modern humans created nature to separate themselves from the earth and institute the world.(1) Was this act self-legitimizing, self-denying, or both? Was it an appeal to a divine authority out of fear of death: of the end of a life no longer measurable?

The false sense of stability and security this transcendence provides continues to face challenges. Preserving the self or humanity (and the corresponding ontologies of being and being Human through humanism) remains the official discourse of authority. Following this discourse, the technocratic war on viruses pit rational, reasonable, and impenetrable beings against a mutable, malicious, external other. Like Bayo Akomolafe describes, Covid is a trickster god exposing Human weaknesses.

One of these weaknesses has been called spirit. Two iconoclastic German philosophers known for their critiques of spirit are Max Stirner and Ludwig Klages. They share many similarities, and respective controversies.(2) Metaphysically, they both argue against idealism, transcendence, and the absolute. They both criticize the enlightenment rationalism of modernity. Like Heraclitus and Laozi, they both argue for an ontology of becoming over being: an ever mutating flux over a fixed stasis.(3) They also share a sort of immanent philosophy: emphasizing mind and matter as one-and-the-same. This immanence counters the alienating Cartesian dualism serving the projects, processes, and progressions of civilization and humanism. This dualism separates human beings (or rather, human becomings) from the earth and creates Humans.

The two differ somewhat in the directions they take this immanence. Stirner takes it to rail against the moralism of mass society and its collectivist sensibilities. They argue that Humans exist through a code of justice called moralism that authorizes domination against inhuman monsters. They also argue Humans act in the service of an abstract external authority that permits domination of unique persons through collective conformity. Klages takes it in an ecological direction: railing against the accelerating violent impact of industrial technology on the biosphere. Klages also, through Friedrich Nietzsche’s formulation, takes up the Dionysian call of chaotic passion over the Apollonian rationalist order. In a partly feminist take, Klages attributes this destructive Apollonian order of spirit to man, and the generative Dionysian chaos to woman.(4) Wo-man, Without-man, Without-spirit. The origins of the familiar gender symbols also go back to ancient Greece, with female being the passionate Venus and male being the authoritative Mars. While I consider Klages’s emphasis on gender here an essentialist trap, I agree that a chaotic ensouled immanence has been violently suppressed by a dominant logical materialist order, leading to a whole host of problems. Klages relies heavily on a polar understanding of the cosmos, even as they claim: “The origin of thought is not to be found in the duality: concept and thing, but in the trinity: concept, name, and thing. The name embraces the totality, but concept and thing are its poles.”(5) They also use this tripartite schema to divide what they consider human essence between body, soul, and spirit (the colonizing force attempting to overtake the body and soul polarity). Even if the Apollonian and Dionysian are considered both distinct poles and one-and-the-same (the yin and yang of Daoism comes to mind here), Im not convinced the symmetry of this framework is all that useful to break free from a limited either/or reading. This is where I look more to Stirner, among others, for an antidote to essentialist and dualist thinking generally, and gender specifically.(6)

The major distinction Klages makes in their effort to counter spirit is through the soul. The soul embraces an immanent ontology previously described: that mind and matter are one-and-the-same, and human beings are inextricable from their ecology on earth. The soul also embraces invisibility and illegibility to counter the authority of visibility and legibility: “[spirit] is absolute or ex-centric externality, while soul is a natural interiority: and the latter is akin to darkness and night, as the former is to clarity that knows no twilight.”(7) This is something to keep in mind for anyone engaging in fugitive and anarchist study. The soul is the linkage between human beings and the underworld in what Klages claims is an eternal tension:

“In the myths of almost every people we encounter bloody battles in pre-historic ages between solar heroes who are bent upon installing a new order and the chthonic powers of fate, who are finally banished into a lightless underworld…over the soul rises the spirit, over the dream reigns a wide-awake rationality, over life, which becomes and passes, there stands purposeful activity.”(8)

Against the purposeful teleology of spirit, the soul carries with it the negating function of the elemental underworld that Susanna Lindberg describes:

“the elemental is, but it is not a thing. It is no thing…It is not a thing but the withdrawl of being in beings, the refusal of ground in things, the absence of reason in reality. The elemental is the absence of transcendental ground, an absence which signals that the negation of such a ground does not amount to the empty nihil of nihilism but to another way of encountering being.”(9)

This other way of encountering being I could describe as becoming, but Id like to take it in a further direction. This elemental absence resides in an “underworld that contradicts but nonetheless conditions the world was conceived as raw nature behind the functional ecosystem and as death behind human society” This seems to be the planetary or cosmic perspective. This raises a nihilist question: when speaking of the elemental, what is it? Lindberg answers: “It is a kind of a generous nothingness that is not simply absent but signals its own absence: it is not an empty void but a dynamic nothingness that calls and beacons from afar.” Perhaps that call resonates in the soul, and that call is a coming to terms with death against preservation: that both living and dying are one-and-the-same.

Byblis, William-Adolphe Bouguereau

(1) I use Eugene Thacker’s formulation of the earth as the ecosystem for-and-in itself, the world as for-and-of humans only, and the planet or cosmos as without humans, and possibly without the earth as well. In other words: planet = without humans, world = only humans, and earth = both.

(2) There are a number of people who have read very literally the early Steven Byington translation of Stirner's Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (titled The Ego and Its Own by them), and advocate for an atomistic and almost social Darwinian individualism I find incompatible with Stirner’s philosophy. There are others who are drawn to the racial essentialism found in Klages's writings, eager to draw a blood and soil informed politics from Klages’s critique of modernity. Upon deeper reading, Klages not only suffers from troublesome racial and gender essentialist claims, but consistent anti-Semitic rantings and admiration of what they consider Germanic and/or Aryan values. This unsurprisingly has led to their reputation as an antecedent to Nazism, which has been debated given their fundamental disagreements with the Nazi intelligentsia. Ill have to investigate further to determine how much these values were integral to Klages's philosophy, since the most detestable statements Ive found are only present in the texts from a publisher who seems heavily invested in these perspectives, and absent from from another who defends Klages as having been unfairly portrayed as a forerunner to fascism. From what I currently know, I wouldnt define Klages as a fascist, but they certainly hold a heavily racialized understanding of the world, identifying with Germanic ideals they tout superior. I also wouldnt consider their essentialist perspectives on race and gender integral to their metaphysics, and find their concept of an immanent soul to be a valuable alternative to materialist rationalism and idealist spiritualism.

(3) At least two philosophers in whats called the post-structuralist camp: Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, also share similar understandings, and have both written about Stirner.

(4) “The analogy of gender, too, between spirit and man, and soul and woman, has a deep foundation, which can be traced all the way back to the Greeks” (Klages, Soul and Spirit).

(5) Ludwig Klages, Cosmogonic Reflections: Selected Aphorisms From Ludwig Klages.

(6) Tim Elmo Feiten also makes this claim.

(7) Ludwig Klages, Soul and Spirit

(8) Ludwig Klages, Man and Earth

(9) Susanna Lindberg, Unthinking the Underworld: Nature, Death, and the Elemental

As an exercise in rendering down a bare-bones definition of anarchist practice, Ive come up with: the tension between resisting (anti-) and/or avoiding (a-) being controlled on the one hand, and letting go of control on the other.

I find a collectivist foundation incompatible with this definition. Ill define collectivism as a logic that prioritizes the goals of an abstract we over those of unique beings.(1) The abstract we can be given an endless number of names: group, community, the people, hairdressers, Italians, zoomers, etc. Or it can be simply we, with the speaker assuming that they and their audience are all a we. This abstract we lives in the realm of the ideal, as something external to the beings it claims to be. The collectivist logic uses categorization to make all sorts of determinations based on singular beings as units of measurement, or numbers on papers and screens. While fundamental to politics (strategies and tactics to manage large numbers of people), I find this logic detrimental to a liberatory anarchist practice that isnt willing to deny the unique contingencies of beings, and desires to let go of control.

Regarding the individualist perspective, I think there are two conceptions to grapple with. The first is the more commonly known individualism found in liberalism.(2) I find it individualistic in name only: conflating an atomistic separateness with individualism. This perspective insists on independent self interest as a foundational principal, yet depends on abstractions to motivate interests: rationalism, humanism, progressive teleology through technology, and perhaps the most emphasized– economic relationality. This creates a conflicting existence for the atomized: wanting, but never fully able to own themselves. The ideals of this perspective also alienate beings from the ecology they find themselves in, leading to metaphysical extremes such as hard materialism (the denial of mind). The result is endless civilizational growth through resource extraction and servitude through work. Individuals are understood as economic agents and rational subjects: not in service of themselves, but economics and rationalist philosophy. I see this form of individualism not as individualist as it claims to be, and more collectivist than it admits.

The second understanding is the lesser known radical ownness of individualist anarchism. I find this to be truer to the name in that it also emphasizes self interest as a foundational principle,(3) but seeks to shed the abstract demands that liberal individualism clings to. In the text, The Individualist Anarchist Discourse of Early Interwar Germany, Constantin Parvulescu puts it this way:

“the power void [left by revolution] brought to the fore a disoriented being, one frightened by freedom and addicted to transcendent guidance. Stirner’s predictions proved to be true: liberalism had failed to produce a free subject; instead it created a monad that conceived of itself as incomplete, as part of something bigger than him or her: an order, a body politic or a mission.”

In contrast to this monad, the unique being (or individualist as individualist anarchist) rejects the abstract subjecthood defined by the polis, preferring instead the embodied real defined through lived experience. This perspective also seems more compatible with ecological principles: with beings not static, determined, or separate from their ecology. It recognizes that unique beings are composed of other unique beings, in both mind and matter, yet retain their uniqueness. The unique being is both singular and plural. Singular in that every being is the unique set of contingencies that only it can be made up of, and plural in that they are continuously in flux: becoming something they werent prior in potentially many ways at once. This capacity is the liberatory potential of the unique being as practiced through the creative unlearning of assigned values: the power to not only transform oneself, but to lose oneself. This is the freedom of forgetting, of letting go of control. It is anti-humanist in that it rejects the determined ideal of the Human, in favor of the indeterminate living of human beings. It is a passion for being. It values difference over sameness, and finds disagreement more interesting than agreement. It values heresy and play, and takes seriously laughing at itself.

“The universe, in its greatness, can seem to want to crush me, but it cannot penetrate me, I, who am a formative and indispensable part, and the further the unique strives to spread itself out and its aim and its action, the more deeply it understands its situation and its need for the cosmos.” – Anselm Ruest and Salomo Friedlaender, Contributions to the History of Individualism

(1) For now, Im choosing unique being to describe what could be also called person, individual, or the overly complicated singularity, but the appropriate term (or if there should be one) is up for debate.

(2) This is by far the most familiar understanding, which is why almost any discussion of individualism immediately points to it. This creates a predicament: drop the term individualist for something lesser known, or fight for it. Im undecided, since both options seem to mislead either way. Since collectivist tendencies dominate the general discourse, the same predicament applies to anarchism as well.

(3) Self interest does not imply that others are not taken into consideration or separate from the self, in fact the opposite: it is in one’s self interest to highly consider and not neglect the mutuality between beings, for they are composed of each other. It emphasizes that acting for oneself in turn benefits those with whom one is interacting, and by the wants of desire, not the shoulds of duty.

nobody knows shit

Disillusioned with the functionaries of the monastery, it is no surprise that Ikkyū draws this conclusion. Sitting through most any meeting can lead to the same sentiment.

“Although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is – for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know.” – Socrates in Plato’s Apology

nobody lives anywhere

Perhaps Ikkyū is claiming there is nowhere to live, referring to the Buddhist concept of śūnyatā (primordial emptiness), or that the anātman (non-self) must live anywhere; for if you are not, you cannot be but anywhere.

If this seems too acosmic, perhaps the line is simply a critique of everyday life: who is really living?

hello dust!

ex nihilo nihil fit

The hard problem of consciousness seeks a solution to how or why qualia (conscious subjective experience) exists, or came to be. Panpsychism proposes that mind exhibiting qualia is fundamental to existence, and present in all matter. There are varying degrees to which mind is attributed to dust.

Within a panpsychist framework:

panexperientialism – conscious experience is fundamental and ubiquitous (parts of dust have some degree of mind) pancognitivism – thought is fundamental and ubiquitous (dust can think)

Outside panpsychism:

animism – all matter, pluralistically, has mind, thought, and agency (dust can attack if provoked) pantheism – all matter is god (dust is god)

page from Ikkyū Sōjun's notebook

Now for some of my own thoughts:

Im limited by my sensory perception of the cosmos, but Ive no belief of a transcendent beyond. I am, and have already been, uniquely a part of what I cannot fully see or feel. Im both accident and agent set in motion. Embracing the uniqueness of this experience as a human being (what I am) over the human abstraction (the idea of what I am) seems preferable. More preferable yet is embracing both what I am becoming (additive) and unbecoming (subtractive) over being (fixed). Enriching the relations I have with others (human or otherwise) strengthens this embrace. This calls for abandoning three interrelated tendencies: an obsession to manage, orienting oneself around predictability, and a desire to preserve ideals. As far as I know, the limited perception with which Ive been familiar will end with my death, and perhaps I will decompose to recompose to decompose again continuously. Here are three ideas to help me until then:

1) Break the clock. This world is so pervasive with measurement that the sciences of it like metrics and statistics (or state-istics) have become dogma in almost every realm of life. The goal seems to be endless comparison of every incomparability, no stone left unturned. Evading measure is a key part of avoiding capture. Though there are some exceptions when cooking or crafting, rejecting this dependency is crucial for any liberatory lifeway. Most importantly, this applies to time and money: the most limiting of measurements. Doing this full-stop could have some interesting and painful results, but strategies for limiting engagement and sharpening discernment seems a more viable place to start.

2) Light the candle. The preservation of an ideal of life is an unnecessary and fraught way to live. Efforts to burn out quickly (while at times admirable) is often just as fraught, and can lead to miserable outcomes other than death. Rather than struggling to maintain some moderate ideal, it seems more appropriate to allow life to take its course as a lit candle would . This could be as imaginative as one takes it to be.

3) Empty the cup. This is a derivative of pu (often translated as uncarved wood): an early Daoist concept of a return to simplicity or emptiness before being put to use. Other derivatives include a clean slate (tabula rasa), and the unlearning (or unbecoming or unraveling) process. Nietzche’s final stage of the child in Thus Spoke Zarathustra is another helpful example: the forgetful child sees the world anew as a bounty of possibility, theirs for the taking. Nietzsche’s Übermensch as child loses in order to gain, yet I prefer Stirner’s Unmensch (or inhuman), who loses in order to gain in order to lose. A filled cup requires emptying-out in order to remain capable. That capability is not an end in itself, but a means toward a loss of the self through the self. Theres much to find in getting lost.

This method is by no means perfect. It does not have the highest yields and there is lots of potential for contams. However, this is what I know. It has worked for me, it requires little ingredients, and it will fit into a small space. The method we will be using for inoculation is what is known as the PF tek, and we will be using Mini Mono Tubs for the fruiting. I encourage you to look into other methods! If this doesn't work for you don't worry, experiment and try some other techniques, browse around shroomery.org or read some mushroom growing guides. You will definitely need patience for this as a full cycle takes around 2 months. You should try to schedule it so that you will be around for the last few weeks.

Equipment

• Mushroom spores: ~20$ I recommend sporeworks.com as they allow bitcoin purchases and have a good rep. If you mention that shroomery.com sent you in the notes they will send you extra as well. You only really need purchase one syringe because we will be making our own liquid cultures. The ideal strain for a beginner is the B+ cubensis.
• ½ Pint wide mouth canning jars: ~15$
• Microspore tape: ~5$ – Optional
• Large pot/Pressure cooker This is for sterilization. If you are just doing this once I would not recommend going out and buying a 100$ pressure cooker, just use what you have. It will just take longer to sterilize your jars.
• Fine vermiculite: ~10$
• Organic brown rice flour: ~10$ If you have brown rice you can also use a coffee grinder to grind it into a very fine grain.
• Tin foil: ~5$
• Isopropyl alcohol: ~5$
• Lighter: ~free
• Coco coir brick: ~7$
• 5 Gallon bucket: ~10$
• Sterilite 1896 container or similar: ~10$
• Drill: ~15$
• Duck tape: ~4$
• Spray bottle: ~1$
• Honey: ~5$
• Fan: ~2$

Total cost: Around 120$ if you have none of the equipment prior or don't have the... skills necessary to find these things. I stole lots from work so it cost me less. If you do not have that kind of money to spend immediately you can buy what is necessary for part one first, then go buy part two's, then part 3's.

Part 1 – Step 1: Preparing jars

We only need 6 jars worth spawn however I made 7 in case of contamination. Poke 4 holes with a nail in a + shape on the lid of each jar as near to the rim as you can. The magic ratio for substrate is 2 parts Vermiculite(verm) 1 part water and 1 part brown rice flower. But because we're making an odd ratio of jars we'll make a little extra but you can just put it in your garden or something.

1. In a large bowl first add 3 cups of vermiculite then add 1.5 cups of water. Stir it up real good.
2. Then add the 1.5 cups of brown rice flour and stir until it's loose and there aren't any clumps.
3. Fill all the jars up evenly and make sure not to pack the mixture down, you want it airy. Leave a half inch space at the top of the jars. Then with a paper towel wipe down the rim the you left clear.
4. Now fill the remaining space with dry vermiculite, then cap the jar and cover the tops with tin foil. The tin foil is to keep the jars airtight while they are sterilizing.

Part 1 – Step 2: Sterilizing

Now that we have to sterilize the jars. We have to prepare our pot for sterilization.

1. Line the bottom of your pot with spare jar rings as shown
2. Add water to the top of your layer of jar rings. You want 1-2 inches of water.
3. Place your layer of folded tinfoil on top of the layer of jar rings.
4. Next place your substrate jars on to the tinfoil and make sure they are not in direct contact with the water, we are not trying to cook the jars, we are only using the steam to sterilize them.
5. Place your TIGHT fitting lid on and turn your burner to high. Once the water starts boiling turn the burner down to a simmer and start your 90-120 minute timer.
6. If you are not using a tight fitting lid a lot of steam will escape and your pot will tend to boil dry. This will warp the bottom of your pot ruining it. If you need to add more water at anytime, use hot tap water and carefully pour it in your pot. Keep a close eye on your pot, and add water if and when needed.
7. After the time is up leave the lid on, remove from heat and let cool overnight or for at least 8 hours.

Pressure cooker

1. Place your trivet or metal rack into the bottom of your PC and fill with 1-1.5 inches of water.
2. Place your jars on the metal rack above the water line.
3. Follow your pressure cookers instructions to bring it up to pressure (15 PSI) and let it cook for 45 to 60 minutes.
4. After your pressure cooker cycle has finished turn off your burner and allow to cool overnight or for at least 8 hours.

Part 1 – Step 3: Inoculation

Once your jars are cooled it's time to inoculate. This step is super important and if you are lazy you will ruin your jars.

1. In a room with no airflow wipe down a table with rubbing alcohol.
2. Take a shower then put on a clean long sleeve shirt and new rubber gloves.
3. Take your jars out of the pot or PC and set them on the table.
4. Flame sterilize your spore syringe and inject about 1/4cc in each hole. Flame sterilize the syringe after each jar.

If you bought microspore tape put it over each hole now.

We're done Part 1! Set your jars on the shelf and wait for them to colonize. This step will take 2 to 4 weeks. Once the jars are fully colonized wait another week for them to consolidate.

Part 2 – Step 1: Prepare the container

Tape (or paint) for bottom 4 ½ inches, then drill ¼” holes every 2”

Part 2 – Step 2: Prepare the substrate

1. Throw the ½ brick of coir and the 1 quart of vermiculite in a 5 gallon bucket, add 2 quarts of boiling water and place the lid securely on the bucket.
2. Come back in 30-60 minutes and mix ingredients thoroughly,then place the lid back on for 2-4 hours. Come back and mix thoroughly again and check the temperature, it needs to be below 80°F. If it's still too warm, leave it for a while longer.

Part 2 – Step 3: Mix the spawn/last few touches

1. Pour ¾ of your cooled mixture into the bottom of the container you prepared.
2. One at a time we are going to take 4 of our incubated pucks out of their glass conatiner, scraping the dry vermiculite into the garbage then giving them a rinse. Crumble the cake fairly finely into the sub in the container. To prevent adding contaminted spawn into the mix I like to split my cakes in half first and check that no green mold is growing inside. If there is then you have to throw out the cake and wash your hands very well.
3. Once you have crumbled 4 of the cakes, mix the substrate in the container. Now crumble the last cakes on top and then cover it lightly with the remaining substrate.
4. We are basically done with this now you need to put the case inside a garbage bag with the opening folded underneath and leave it for 10-14 days.

DONT PEEK. Peeking risks contamination!!! If you don't think you can help yourself go out and buy clear garbage bags.

Part 3: Fruiting

10-14 days has passed. It's time to open up the garbage bag and take a look. Do this in a room with no airflow in case it isn't fully consilidated. To give you a rough idea this is what mine looked like after 10 days and this is more than substantial. You're looking for lots of white, and no green. The forum post below is an incredible compilation of what it should and shouldn't look. If you aren't seeing much white, put it back in the bag for a couple days.

If it's looking ready put the box somewhere where it will get substantial sunlight. Now spray the interior twice a day or as needed to keep it moist.

https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/17231150

Part 4: Harvesting, prints, and drying.

The ideal time to harvest is right as the caps are just starting to open. Assuming you got the B+ strain it should look like this.

If you didn't I suggest looking up the strain you used and checking when to harvest. Just pick them off at the base and lay them out on tin foil. Cut off two smaller squares of tin foil a bit larger than your biggest mushrooms caps. Cut your biggest mush right at the top of the stem and then place the cap with the gills down and cover the whole thing with a cup overnight.

Hopefully you have a large enough bounty that you wont be able to eat them all before they start to go bad. So to preserve them we'll have to dry them. There are a couple methods for doing so but the easiest I have found is just to put them in front of or on a fan for 24-48 hours. Then with an oven heated to 140F with the door ajar leave it on for an hour or two until really dry. You could also just fan dry. Either way works.

Part 5: Liquid culture and repeat.

1. Take one of your lids and punch just one hole into it near the side.
2. Throw the lid and the jar into a pot of water and bring it to a boil (Don't put the jar into the already boiling water or it will crack) this is to sterilise the water and the jar.
3. After 30 minutes of boiling clean your work table with alcohol then take the jar and lid out and put it on the table.
4. Fill the jar ¾ full with the water that you boiled. Add 1 tablespoon of honey to the jar per 250mls of water then put the lid on.
5. Cover the top of the jar and then put it back into the pot. You want the water level to be about half the way up the jar, you can tip some out if it's too high. Put on a lid and leave it for another 30 minutes.
6. Turn the pot off after 30 minutes and leave it overnight to cool.
7. Next day, get ready your LC, your spore print and a sharp knife on your bench top.
8. Flame sterilize your knife. Crack the jar only slightly.
9. In one scrape try and get as much of the spore off a spore print. The slip it into the jar and reseal.
10. Place a piece of tape over the hole and swirl the jar gently.
11. Label it with date, time and strain.
12. After about a week it should be ready but it can sit for a long time.

Now you can use this for our cakes, I use about 1cc of it per injection site.

And there you have unlimited shrooms! If you have mastered this then it's time to move onto a full monotub. Damion5050 has a good guide out there. Good luck!

Mass-produced living creatures, who are born, raised, and killed on an assembly line, perhaps understand on some level what is coming, what has happened to millions and billions of others just like them. Perhaps they are attuned to the echoes of their predecessors looping and trapped in this time and place. Perhaps, for the duration of their short and torture-filled lives, violence is punctuated with enough stillness to think through questions like “why?” Perhaps, they understand enough to be angry that it didn't have to be this way and curse their own flesh down to the bone. May the farmed turn their disgust and rage inward. May they inlay their technologically-accelerated swollen skin, fat, and muscle with their futile desire, fury, and terror. May these emotions with nowhere else to go accumulate like shards of asbestos of everyone who swallows their body parts with delight. May every egg be invested with hot corrosive hatred for those who treat their bodies and secretions as neutral commodities, rather than forcefully extracted living tissue. May the agony of every life born to die suffuse and penetrate every cell of every thoughtless human eater. It is a burden worth carrying, if we are going to nourish ourselves this way.

We all know what happens in a slaughterhouse. Insider video footage is extremely accessible if you have internet. Think about what it would be like to not outsource this killing and do it yourself instead, according to need rather than market logic. Think long and hard about what it is to deliberately deprive a creature of choice and movement, to keep kin trapped while ki grows larger, larger. It is easy to see yourself and your will to live in this creature, who fully sees what's coming because ki knows immobility is death. You have to injure kin's body to the point of full system breakdown, so that the light inside goes off and you're left with meat and no spirit. A body that is alive is robust. It holds itself together. It wants to heal and perpetuate itself. You must puncture holes in the container, so inside bleeds into outside. Sever critical transport tubes and organs, so fluid pools and spills where it's not meant to. Rend, cut, and shred muscle fibers, so they can't contract and produce tension on bone. No fighting back, no seeking egress.

We are not meant to confront the horror reality of inflicting pain and death so we may sustain ourselves. Streamlined economic functioning systematizes and abstracts that reality to have endless reams of food product on demand. It's been set up to keep us consumer-enduser-renter-voter-taxpayers from metabolizing the true, fleshy weight of killing and death.

And perhaps the worst part is that we can walk this world knowing, but we still don't get to choose how we eat. You could destroy yourself if you carry all there is to carry, regarding life and death and production and consumption. A small portion of us are allowed some lateral movement, to avoid putting the worst of it in our own bodies. This is for being born in the right time and place, but no one ever gets to climb out of this hole. It's not a simple matter of choosing between modes of consumption with clear ethical rankings. Organic, grass-fed, family farm-raised. You know what continues regardless of the pains you take to eat differently. We were born losers in a sense.

We all eat and shit and breathe the fumes. This is a people farm. A people grinder. It exists to continue existing. Eternal snake eating itself, crapping into its own mouth. We must keep the economy running or there is no “we” that continues to feed and get fed.

—– to be continued —– forever in a circle —– not done yet —-