anarchists, nihilists, and outlaws recording and writing for our own entertainment
“What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will
make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.”
There are innumerable splits between “anarchists.” Some disagree about economics, strategies of resistance, and a seemingly infinite number of isms. I find the most important split to be between social and anti-social. What need is there for social and anti-social anarchists to “work together.” This is something I just don’t understand. Anyone who seeks to build a new mass society is someone I have a fundamental and irreparable split with…in essence, we are enemies. People who believe that everyone is an anarchist are my enemies. People who can look at history and see progress towards freedom or compassion or social change that is desirable are my enemies. People who see human nature as freedom loving are my enemies. I see a few who burn with the desire for an ephemeral freedom and a huge majority of people who are not only willing but eager to submit themselves to society, a cause, a partner. People who refuse to acknowledge that slaves(including me and most reading this) are responsible for their condition, are my enemies. My enemies are the existing and the existent. As an anti-social anarchist I find myself constantly surrounded by my own enemies. Friends are difficult to find, harder to keep, and a rare find for one who chooses freedom as value.
Does a house control your thought process? How does the structure of a city limit not only your movement, but the way you can think?
You can’t throw a brick without finding a discussion of the way social structures restrain and contain us – the ways that gender, sex, race, wealth, government, law, language or whatever affect our ability to move through the world. There’s a physical built world around us too, and it wields equal authority over our bodies.
We present to you a reading of The Broken Teapot, 2nd Edition, put out by Sprout Distro.
From the Sprout Distro site:
The Broken Teapot (2nd Edition) is a collection of five essays that explore the limitations of current anarchist models of “accountability” in situations of rape and abuse. The zine raises a number of important questions regarding the “accountability processes” that have been developed over the past ten or so years to deal with these issues within the anarchist space. It’s an important piece to consider when thinking about how “broken” we all are.
Tonight we bring you a recorded version of The Anarchist Banker by Fernando Pessoa. Recently this was published as a zine on underHILL Distro, so we asked underHILL to write us an intro:
“Come off it, that’s ridiculous. How do you reconcile your life, […] with anarchist theory?”
The moon is missing from the sky. It’s dark. You’re running through the woods, as fast as you can, willing yourself more than anything not to trip. Don’t fall, don’t stop, don’t take that split second to look and see if it’s still behind you – it is. You’re being chased. It wants you.
“Why, then, has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living – because cognition gives them more than they can carry?” asks Peter Wessel Zapffe in his 1933 essay, “The Last Messiah.” For him, the cosmic panic he saw endemic to the capacity for meaning-making burdened his species with a perpetual psychic scramble to avoid absorption into the infinite regression which under girds that capacity. For anarchists, the whole of the world as it is faces them with similarly unthinkable problems whose sheer magnitude, complexity, or both render them as in fact meaningless by dint of scopes in excess of the capacity for a given brain to cognize them, terminating thought into impermeably blank anagnorisis. Having achieved a state of no mind, only those with suitable religious inclinations bother remaining here for long.
“So much as I have been able to put together the pieces of the universe in my small head, there is no absolute right or wrong; there is only a relativity, depending on the consciously though very slowly altering condition of a social race in respect to the rest of the world. Right and wrong are social conceptions: mind, I do not say human conceptions. The names “right” and “wrong,” truly, are of human invention only; but the conception “right” and “wrong,” dimly or clearly, has been wrought out with more or less effectiveness by all intelligent social beings. And the definition of Right, as sealed and approved by the successful conduct of social beings, is: That mode of behavior which best serves the growing need of that society.”
Free Radical Radio is back after a brief unplanned break. Today we bring you four recordings of essays out of Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire, Armed issue #64, released at the end of 2007. That and some of my thoughts around it here.
These four essays were the reading for one week of the Berkeley Anarchist Study Group, which meets every Tuesday, 8pm at The Long Haul in Berkeley (come!). Most of us here at Free Radical Radio have gone to the group a number of times, picking fights and making friends.
Today we bring two pieces of audio relating to John Zerzan!
First, a recording of his essay Second-Best Life: Real Virtuality.
Second, a clip of one of Free Radical Radio’s favorite moments in John Zerzan’s weekly radio show Anarchy Radio: a caller named Greg.