Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Debunking the 3 Biggest Myths About Antifa
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Many years ago I was told of a local Social Democrat somewhere in Germany who organized his neighbourhood to remove the trousers of Nazis who entered the neighbourhood and to chase them away. If such an approach had been generalized as part of an overall strategy, individual Nazis might have decided to give up. In any case, I think the outright killing of a Nazi could actually weaken us. ken h _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Debunking the 3 Biggest Myths About Antifa
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On 9/3/17 12:51 PM, David McDonald via Marxism wrote: I have been reading Shon Meckfessel's dissertation, available on the internet. Shon often posts or forwards pro-antifa stuff on Facebook. To show you how things have changed, Shon spends CHAPTERS explaining how violence against property, as distinct from violence against people, challenges all our liberal assumptions that lump all forms of violence together. Let me conclude with a look at Shon Meckfessel’s new book titled “Nonviolence Ain’t What It Used To Be” that is based on his doctoral dissertation and that reminds me a bit of Regis Debray’s “Revolution in the Revolution”. Where Debray fetishized rural guerrilla warfare, Meckfessel fetishizes the black bloc. At least Debray can be forgiven for basing his book on a success—the Cuban revolution. Meckfessel inexplicably elevates a movement that has achieved nothing except getting its adventures written up in the bourgeois press. Although it is highly possible that there are some discrepancies between the new book and dissertation, I am taking the chance that they are relatively small and will refer to the dissertation in the following remarks. Since chapter three is titled “The Eloquence of Targeted Property Destruction in the Occupy Movement” and chapter four is titled “The Eloquence of Police Clashes in the Occupy Movement”, there is little doubt that what you will be getting is a sophisticated defense of the indefensible. There’s not much to distinguish Shon from Ciccariello-Maher as this passage from chapter three would indicate. Although some might think that plagiarism was afoot, I think that both of the professors are simply reflecting the zeitgeist of the widespread ultraleft milieu that would naturally lead them to admire Fanon and Sorel uncritically: If targeted property destruction works to assert comparisons within and across categories of violence in the hopes of destabilizing ideological chains of equivalence and triggering a revaluation, its affective reconfigurations in the discursive field of subjectivity are equally eloquent in its rhetorical strategy. In his classic “Reflections on Violence,” Georges Sorel put forward his notion of the General Strike as a myth which condensed all of the desired political values of proletarian struggle; violence, in his formation, “is assigned the important function of ‘constituting’ an actor.” (Seferiades & Johnston 6). Similarly, Fanon put forth the celebrated formulation in The Wretched of the Earth (1968) that decolonization requires a violence to be done to the colonizer’s body in order to disarticulate its sacred inviolability, and thus constitute the post-colonial subject through the act of violation. Contemporary practices of public noninjurious violence, such as targeted property destruction, can be seen to enact analogous discursive actions of subjectification while avoiding the dehumanizing effects of bodily harm, as can be heard in the words of Cindy, one observer of the Seattle May Day 2012 riots: I think that property destruction has a good effect on those who carry it out… I think most people need to unlearn submission and show themselves that they have the 165 capacity to act for their own liberation. I think that when people burn cop cars, break bank windows, or blockade a road (thwarting the transfer of goods and or law enforcement) they are also demonstrating to themselves some of the magnitude of their ability to resist. (Cindy interview) In the next chapter, Shon refers to the “eloquence” of fighting the cops with a reference to Judith Butler: As with the uneasy boundary between the materiality and discursivity of bodies examined in Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter (1993), the materiality of individuals enacting oppressive behavior is not simple to divorce from the discursivity of their role. I can’t exactly say that I understand this jargon but I do know this. Butler found nothing “eloquent” about the Berkeley Student Union misadventure. In an email cited in the Chronicle of Higher Education, she stated: “I deplore the violent tactics of yesterday and so do the overwhelming majority of students and faculty at UC Berkeley.” I find something vaguely dispiriting about college professors in their 40s and 50s being drawn to such juvenile antics. In a strange way, they remind me of the neglected minor masterpiece “Little Children” that starred Patrick Wilson as a law student who is not sure that he is cut out for the profession. In what might be called a case of “arrested development”, he spends hours on end watching teens skateboarding at
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Debunking the 3 Biggest Myths About Antifa
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * "it appears that these groups have almost completely avoided any form of violence that is lethal;" >From the description of the photographer who helped stop an antifa stomping, it won't be too long before someone of the Nazis is killed and that will change the game. I have been reading Shon Meckfessel's dissertation, available on the internet. Shon often posts or forwards pro-antifa stuff on Facebook. To show you how things have changed, Shon spends CHAPTERS explaining how violence against property, as distinct from violence against people, challenges all our liberal assumptions that lump all forms of violence together. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Debunking the 3 Biggest Myths About Antifa
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * *I should clarify, as to the substance of this broken clock's argument, I think he's off. The fact that antifa groups also do non-violent things (like fundraising and community work and so on) has nothing to do with whether or not they are violent, and it is very strange to see Sunshine try to downplay Antifa's violence rather than what I've seen from his type in other places, which is to justify it rather than minimize it. The same language he is using about how anti-fascist groups are primarily not involved in violence can be made for any number of violent groups, including the cops. It's not like every police officer shoots someone every day, and cops might also do good-will gestures to the community. Hardly an argument. The second point is irrelevant given that there isn't any moral equivalence over what the two groups are fighting for, so whether or not they are both violent should be besides the point. An awfully unnecessarily defensive line of argument. Moreover, from the stats that he has collected (assuming they are correct) it sounds like neither group is particularly significant in terms of causing deaths. He says far-right groups have killed 450 people since 1990, in what appears to be mostly hate crimes and clashes with leftists. Obviously a terrible thing, but over the course of 27 years that is not particularly significant relative to crime generally in the United States, particularly given that there is no evidence that these crimes were carried out by a single, organized group. The last part is totally off. The reason there is such a strong backlash against the far-right has nothing to do with Antifa, unless by "Antifa" he means literally anyone that opposed the Nazis. These groups have largely faced significant backlash due to their own poor form, including Anglin's decision to degrade and dehumanize Heather Heyer as well as the inability of other far-right groups to have the kind of necessary organizational structure to police their membership. Likewise, these far right groups were demanding a particular form of far-right extremism that has always been unable to make the kinds of in-roads as, say, the Tea Party. They are flailing around Nazi arm-bands and defending two fallen regimes that collapsed in part due to America's wars. Even those who have sought to defend the Confederacy have tried to distance themselves from overt white supremacy; these people didn't. So it would be a surprise if there *wasn't* a strong backlash against the far-right after Cville. He's also wrong to conflate what happened there with what happened to the Yiannopolous event at Berkeley. The truth is that Yiannopoulos' events had been targeted by Antifa at virtually every venue; Berkeley was the first time that there was so much property damage as well as police repression that the cops called it off. It may have triggered greater scrutiny on him (which resulted in someone digging up his nasty pedophile comments) but there's hardly a chain of causality, and in fact the event triggered quite a bit of *positive* publicity for Yiannopoulos including press coverage on Bill Maher (who is frankly a much bigger piece of crap because he has greater influence). I'm not dismissing violence as a strategy outright but the article itself is self-aggrandizing talking points for the small cult that they have formed. It's also worth noting that in spite of the willingness to use violence, it appears that these groups have almost completely avoided any form of violence that is lethal; it almost seems like they are having fun. Furthermore, despite all the posturing they don't seem to have politics beyond their rejection of fascism. If Spencer Sunshine is indicative, that can mean practically anything to the incoherent types that show up in these cults, including various left-wing causes and communities. - Amith _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Debunking the 3 Biggest Myths About Antifa
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Spencer Sunshine, not Amith Gupta's favorite person, is an antifa propagandist. http://reverepress.com/resistance/debunking-3-biggest-myths-antifa/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
