hex_m_hell

I've come back to this a few times now with a lot of thoughts, but it's taken me a little while to slow down my anger enough to articulate them. I'm still struggling a bit, as you may notice.

Content Warning: Sexual Violence, Sexual Coercion, Child Sexual Assault, Rape Apologia, Pedophilia, (Epstein, Trump, Hakim Bay, generally horrible people)

https://immerautonom.noblogs.org/the-elephant-in-the-room/

As the #Epstein class continues to be exposed, as we continue to be reminded of exactly how power works and what it does, it becomes even more critical to look at ourselves, those who have always vocally resisted this order, and make sure we are actually resisting it in reality not just in words.

Growing up, anarchism seemed to be a bit of a hodge-podge of loosely related things. Opposing the state, opposing capitalism, opposing racism, etc. I understood them to be connected via hierarchy, but I didn't understand the intersectionality of it all for a long time. Even today, I think the way that we talk about some of these types of exploitation and oppression can make it more opaque, rather than more clear, how all these forms of oppression are aligned.

The “anarcho-capitalists” and “anarcho-pedophiles” (the Venn diagram of which is essentially a circle), exploit this opacity to justify oppression in the name of liberation… and, by using the vague language of “freedom,” we let them.

Today we are experiencing a polycrisis, a Gordian knot of social disaster that is indecipherable to practically all ideologies. The failure of dominant ideologies to explain the interconnectedness of these phenomena leaves fertile ground for conspiracy theories (which, themselves, reinforce the crisis).

But we do have a single answer to a range of questions like “why are there so many billionaires and fascists pedophiles,” “why is all technology terrible now,” “why can't governments seem to stop climate change,” “why is fascism everywhere,” and, “why is there always a genocide going on?” etc etc

The negative answer is “hierarchy.” These are all structures of domination. But that is negative, it defines what we are against while only implying what we are for (and it doesn't even really define the enemy well). It (loosely) identifies the problem without identifying a solution.

The positive answer is “consent.”

Anarchists oppose the state because a state is a system within which, within a given geographical area (and perhaps more), it is impossible to withdraw consent. To withdraw consent is to violate the constraints of the system.

We oppose colonialism because it's the non-consensual imposition of a state on a group of people (and generally the imposition of a caste system that goes along with it).

We oppose vendor lock-in of hardware and software, closed platforms, so-called “walled gardens” because, again once, you can give consent going in, but the system is built to prevent you from withdrawing consent. Hardware holds you economically hostage, software holds your data hostage, social media platforms hold your social connections to friends and family hostage.

We oppose labor exploitation because we believe that all exchanges of value should be consensual. Exploitation is not possible with consent, that is its singular defining feature. Capitalism is simply the systematic extraction of value without consent. (Let's be honest here, we aren't opposing capitalism because of some complicated “labor theory of value” bullshit. We hate work because we don't like being forced to do some shit we don't want to do, and really hate seeing that work we don't want to do benefit someone we never wanted to help.)

We support reproductive rights because social reproduction must also be consensual. I feel as though this should go without saying or explanation, but here we are after all of these thousands of years still having this conversation.

We oppose rape because sex and intimacy should be consensual. This includes all forms of rape, including the inability to give consent.

We oppose motonormitivity because a society oriented around cars non-consensually enforces the use of cars (with the risk of death or impossibility of scale), and non-consensually destroys the habitat. We are never offered a choice to consent or not consent to microplastics in our oceans, heavy metals in our water, CO² in our air, and giant metal boxes flinging themselves at high speeds around our bodies.

We oppose neurotyplical supremacy because altering one's perception with drugs should always be consensual. (Which, by the way, works both ways. No one should be non-consensually denied mind-altering substances given their ability to consent to taking them in the first place.)

We oppose white supremacy and patriarchy because they non-consensually give members of one group power over members of another. We oppose hetro and cis normitivity because not everyone can or would want to consent to specific sexual orientations or gender roles.

And so on…

We, anarchists, want to build a society that is completely consensual. Since no system can constrain itself, we believe that all systems that do not allow people to leave, that are not consensual, must be destroyed. And we must do destroy them all, because non-consensual hierarchy is self-reinforcing.

Fascists are often pedophiles because fascists care about power and pedophilia is also about power. Tech monopolists are often fascists because they care about power, and technology is a way to build power and control people. The

Your boss scheduling meetings over your time with your kids or partner, Trump sexually assaulting women and children, the fucked up power dynamic when you discuss your compensation (perhaps even being daring enough to ask for a well justified raise), Facebook, mass shootings and other incel terrorism, unchecked climate change, billionaires using more CO² in a day than you use in a year, murdered and missing indigenous women, these may all seem independent and unrelated things until you see the conspicuous absence of consent tying each together, and so many more.

Epstein class of political operators and oligarchs cannot exist in a consentual world, so how could they possibly understand the concept of consent when it comes to children? For them, everyone is an object through which they express their power. Consent is a function of agency, and objects can't have agency. So they can't possibly comprehend the existence consent or understand how it works.

And this is where we return to the pseudo-anarchist. The pseudo-anarchist does not care about “consent.” The pseudo-anarchist cares about “freedom.” But this is not the anarchist “freedom” meaning “a world governed by consent.” No, this is a “freedom” rooted in monarchism. It is a “freedom” against consent. It is the freedom of the elite: freedom to deny others freedom from.

This “freedom” is the liberal freedom of capitalism, the freedom that Americans talk about (mostly as aspiration not experience). American freedom is to be hypothetically free from constraints, from responsibilities, from justice, from the need to acknowledge the agency of others, given a greater alignment with the dominant caste than the individual one is expressing control over.

The ultimate extent of this freedom is the monarchist freedom: freedom from the law itself. This is the freedom the Epstein class want. This is the freedom of the dictator, of the Russian Oligarch. One way they express this is by raping children, and, it seems, occasionally, murdering them.

As long as that specific concept of “freedom” exists, so do these monsters.

Non-consentual systems are interlocking and mutually reinforcing. The inability to escape one becomes leverage to force us into another. It is, of course, no coincidence that economically or socially marginalized people are almost always the victims. Women, children, trans, PoC, indigenous folks, each intersection applies pressure against another to maintain this order. Each system of oppression allows other systems of oppression to be exploited more.

But liberation is self-reinforcing too.

Anywhere we push against oppression, we undermine other systems that rest on it. The more room we make for ourselves, the more room we have to move against the system. The more people we liberate, the more people are pushing. Every front is important, and they can't protect all of them at the same time.

Anarchists are perhaps the only people with this single unifying critique of basically everything that's wrong. But I think we have thus far failed to really articulate it, because it's rooted in intersectional feminism and youth liberation.

If we (and by this “we” I mean the intersection of privilege usually designated by we, rather than the intersection of oppression who has been saying stuff like this for decades) want to actually dismantle this machine, like we claim we do, then why not start where (we hope) the empire is weakest: in our own heads and our own communities.