Do you somehow think that Boomers have no place in the anarchist movement?
I am extremely certain our gerontocracies are perpetuate by their oppression, yes. Do you think boomers are aligning themselves with our struggles?
David Graeber was a Boomer.
And he doesn’t 1) identify with his age group 2) or their policies.
If anything, I have been “uncool”, i.e. uninterested in trends and fitting in with my cohort, for my entire life.
Then you miscomprehended the point of demographics. You have to solidify yourself with the zeitgeist, or stay “uncool” forever. Agitprop is supposed to agitate the capable, the normies, the generation leading insurgency.
I am extremely certain our gerontocracies are perpetuate by their oppression, yes.
The gerontocracy is a reflection of the fact that the bourgeoisie acts in the interest of its own preservation. In my view, Boomers as a demographic are not responsible for this because most Boomers are proletarians like you and I, and therefore are unable to influence the system, even if they individually supported gerontocracy.
Also… gerontocracy really is a critique of the silent generation, not Boomers, since the oldest politicians are older than Boomers.
And he doesn’t 1) identify with his age group 2) or their policies.
Generational politics is liberal horseshit. It’s distorting your judgement, as all liberal politics are designed to do. Generational analysis is only ever useful as a heuristic, and even then it is closer to a horoscope than a description of reality.
Agitprop is supposed to agitate the capable, the normies, the generation leading insurgency.
I hate to break it to you, but…young people are just as capable of expressing fascist beliefs as Boomers. E.g., how many normie Zoomers went to the polls after zero opposition to ICE and encroaching fascism, just to vote Democrat, one of the parties that did the Gaza genocide, after it hurt their individual wallets! If you look at the problem generationally, no generation is ripe for anarchism except perhaps the literal kids born during and after the pandemic, because they have not yet been corrupted by capitalism. We have to meet people where they’re at. And in particular, it means that agitprop needs to target subsets of every generation, e.g. working class individuals who are suspicious of the lies told to them by liberals, who need a “nudge” in the right direction.
And also… something doesn’t sit right about focusing on “the capable”. Because I also want to agitate the implied “incapable”, i.e. those with low self-efficacy. Frankly, I work with a lot of students with low self-efficacy, and I want to see them join our movements as well, as a corollary of my more general desire to increase their self-efficacy. I.e., I am not willing to give up on people who ”aren’t capable". Anarchism is for everyone!
Are you leading an insurgency?
Actually no, because I’m not a vanguardist, I’m an anarchist. I want the masses to lead our own insurgency. I am not interested in leading anything, beyond temporarily “stepping up to the plate” if needed. I absolutely do support individual direct action as we need a diversity of tactics to achieve our goals, but ideologically I am much closer to mass-movement anarchism.
The gerontocracy is a reflection of the fact that the bourgeoisie acts in the interest of its own preservation.
And what are the silent&boomers doing to be selfless and martyr?
In my view, Boomers as a demographic are not responsible for this because most Boomers are proletarians like you and I, and therefore are unable to influence the system, even if they individually supported gerontocracy.
Contrary to your demoview, boomers are the major recipient of welfare, and vote to keep the geron in place. So no, they’rent proles, or anarchists. Logically, why would welfare queens work to liberate their children & grandchildren?
kids born during and after the pandemic,
Then let’s zeitgeist these memes for them.
We have to meet people where they’re at.
§1)
2) Where do you think anarchists are?
agitprop needs to target subsets of every generation
CC already made the meme for millennials+. I made it for the tiktok generation.
working class individuals who are suspicious of the lies told to them by liberals, who need a “nudge” in the right direction.
§1. Boomers≢proles. They perpetuate liberal lies, aware who they betray. You never exhibited once a reformed boomer prole “nudged in the right direction.” David Graeber is a prole that 1) disassociates from his peers 2) and their praxis. Gen α are incapable of working, and should be agitated to rebel.
I want the masses to lead our own insurgency.
You won’t find it in treasonous boomers+dying silent. Millennials maybe. But I target the generation that needs to insurgent completely.
Logically, why would welfare queens work to liberate their children & grandchildren?
Wtf anarchists are not against people receiving fucking welfare. “Welfare queen” is a conservative dog whistle!
§1. Boomers≢proles. They perpetuate liberal lies, aware who they betray.
Bizarro-world perspective, sorry. People from every generation perpetuate liberal lies because liberalism is the monoculture in the West. Instead of simply dismissing Boomers from proletarian struggle, we should at least be open to the possibility of change.
You never exhibited once a reformed boomer prole “nudged in the right direction.” David Graeber is a prole that 1) disassociates from his peers 2) and their praxis.
Of course Graeber was (not is, sadly, RIP) a reformed Boomer prole! In the West, we are all indoctrinated, from cradle to grave, into the liberal monoculture. He, and the thousands of other forgotten anarchists he worked with, were examples of reformed Boomer proles. And there are certainly some of them left in the anarchist movement.
Gen α are incapable of working
… because they’re literally children right now…
and should be agitated to rebel.
As should every generation.
And what are the silent&boomers doing to be selfless and martyr?
Some Boomers and a smaller number of Silent Generation people are doing what they can. But I really don’t expect much of Silent Generation because, yeah, they’re super old and not in fighting condition. That doesn’t mean there aren’t Silent Generation activists who spent a lifetime fighting on our behalf, who have now rightly retired to live out the rest of their lives in peace.
GL w/Bluewave MAGA!
Yes, as I have taken hundreds of downvotes to argue against, Blue MAGA is an impediment to the anarchist movement, and to social struggle more broadly. Your solution of…I guess ignoring people who don’t fit your mold for what the proletariat should look like?..does not avoid the Blue MAGA problem. Young people are just as susceptible to liberalism as every other generation.
Anarchists are for mutual aid, not pension oppression that boomers perpetuate.
Yeah of course I support mutual aid over welfare, but I don’t knock people for trying to recoup some of the money that’s been stolen from them.
“Welfare queen” is a conservative dog whistle!
Take a moment to marinate why that is🙃.
Can do! The term “welfare queen” was used during the Reagan era as a rhetorical cudgel to do away with existing welfare protections to argue that the vast majority of welfare payments were going to “welfare queens” instead of people who were genuinely in need. The “welfare queen” stereotype was also racialized black, gendered as woman, and assumed unmarried, so that white racist proletarians would be more likely to vote against their own interests. (Factually, people on welfare came from all races and genders.) It worked like a charm.
I.e., “welfare queen” is a racist, sexist dog whistle, and every time you use it without invoking its sordid history, you are doing a disservice to those of your comrades who cannot afford to live without using the existing welfare services.
There is no shame in relying on welfare. And as anarchists, we have no obligation not to utilize welfare if we need it. Individually using government services is unrelated to whether we believe that the government should exist.
Mutual aid is preferable to welfare, but the fact of the matter is that in most areas, mutual aid groups are not yet well-established enough to service people who currently rely on welfare, and mutual aid has been demonized by liberal monoculture. This is our failure to organize at scale, not welfare recipients’ individual failure to wait for us or magically undo their own liberal brainwashing and come up with mutual aid groups all on their own.
So, are you including yourself as a liberal
No lol
that lies,
I have spent an entire lifetime trying to unlearn the lies that liberals have taught us, but I’m sure there are things I have left to unlearn. So while I’m not intentionally lying to you, I am absolutely willing to entertain the possibility that I still hold some unconscious liberal biases. I think that any revolutionary from within the imperial core should adopt a similar humility.
and betrays your class‽
Never consciously, but again, I am always open to the possibility that I make mistakes.
I, and Graeber don’t share your indoctrination!
Well that’s very interesting that Graeber really did grow up in a leftist family. But even then, he lived in Manhattan in the heart of Empire and went into academia, where he had to maintain his anarchism in the face of the barrage of liberalism.
Also, you definitely do share at least some of my indoctrination, basically unless you just stepped onto the Western Internet today. Liberalism is the monoculture in the West, and even in places where it is not the monoculture, liberalism has imposed its slimy tendrils in the forms of the IMF, international law, multinational corporations, and imperialism. The fact that you seem to think you’re completely immune to liberal propaganda means that you are, in fact, slightly more susceptible to liberal propaganda, if it disguises itself as non-liberal.
disinformation strike 1!
Food Not Bombs was started in the 80s. If any of them were teenagers or in their early twenties, they were Boomers.
because they’re literally children right now
So are you a mass-movement anarchist, or a vanguard?
I didn’t say that to be insulting. I meant that the oldest Gen Alpha can be right now is 16 years old, and the majority of them are, developmentally, very young children. Maintaining a protective attitude over children is not vanguardism.
GL with class treachery generations!
Exactly, which is why I’m willing to admit that individuals of all generations are capable of class treachery.
oh no. We confront Blue MAGA with guillotines. Direct action.
Uhhh…look, guillotining the Blue MAGA politicians, great stuff, absolutely. Guillotining the dozens of millions of ordinary Blue MAGA people who were brainwashed into supporting this position…no lol. We would basically be doing Stalinist shit. I’m gonna assume that you meant something like “confront Blue MAGA supporters by showing them that guillotines and direct action are solutions to be used against the bourgeoisie”.
With that said: direct action and guillotines against the bourgeoisie does not obviate the need to address the impulses that gave birth to Blue MAGA. Namely: these people claim to oppose fascism, they claim to oppose Trumpism and MAGA, but they adopt most of its policies and cognitive distortions. How can we prevent such things from happening to our own movements? In my view, a necessary but insufficient measure is to root out liberalism. Liberalism is uniquely susceptible to stuff like this because it is inherently born of a contradiction. It is the ideology which attempts to make the brutality of capitalism look like the only morally justifiable system. It requires, from the very beginning, for its adherents to differentiate between means and ends: i.e., that horrible, unproductive authorities like the State, the “free” market, capitalist “philanthropy”, liberal “democracy”, and imperialism are even capable of producing equitable outcomes.
In my view, pushing Blue MAGATs towards means-ends unity is a way of breaking their conditioning, because the means that Democrats use so clearly contradict the utopian ideals their marketing claims they hold. And while I absolutely support direct action and other more contentious ways of pushing means-ends unity…there are some Blue MAGATs who just need a stern talking to, and frankly won’t respond well to contentious ways of doing anything. I’m willing to talk to them. It’s fine if you’re not, you don’t owe them fucking anything, Blue MAGATS are truly contemptable slimeballs…but please understand that I’m coming from a position of trying to break as many people out of their liberal capitalist brainwashing as I can, even if they are fucking garbage right now.
Glad we are on the same team, opposing liberalprop, and agitating the abled. You sure you’re not a vanguard?
Of course I’m not a vanguardist. The vanguardist position would be to take the observation that proletarians (and young people as a corollary) are susceptible to propaganda (and liberal propaganda as a corollary) and other irrational, unconscious behaviors, which is true and has been recognized by anarchists for over a century; and then use this true observation to conclude, erroneously, the much stronger notion that the proletariat is incapable of organizing its own revolution, and thus needs a top-down party of professional revolutionaries to lead the revolution on their behalf, possibly without their consent.
And now that you’ve said “agitating the abled”, I’m honestly more skeptical of what you originally said being an instantiation of an unconsciously ableist viewpoint that disabled people and other ‘incapables’ have no place in the revolution. Like yeah sure, I definitely want people without disabilities to do anarchist stuff, obviously…but I am autistic, and frankly I have had a lot of trouble contributing materially to the anarchist movement because of my disability. I’m certainly not abled up to your standards. Usually, anarchists are very accommodating and understanding about my disability, so it’s very strange to see a self-identified anarchist seemingly wish to marginalize disabled people…
I am extremely certain our gerontocracies are perpetuate by their oppression, yes. Do you think boomers are aligning themselves with our struggles?
And he doesn’t 1) identify with his age group 2) or their policies.
Then you miscomprehended the point of demographics. You have to solidify yourself with the zeitgeist, or stay “uncool” forever. Agitprop is supposed to agitate the capable, the normies, the generation leading insurgency.
Are you leading an insurgency?
The gerontocracy is a reflection of the fact that the bourgeoisie acts in the interest of its own preservation. In my view, Boomers as a demographic are not responsible for this because most Boomers are proletarians like you and I, and therefore are unable to influence the system, even if they individually supported gerontocracy.
Also… gerontocracy really is a critique of the silent generation, not Boomers, since the oldest
politicians are older than Boomers.
Generational politics is liberal horseshit. It’s distorting your judgement, as all liberal politics are designed to do. Generational analysis is only ever useful as a heuristic, and even then it is closer to a horoscope than a description of reality.
I hate to break it to you, but…young people are just as capable of expressing fascist beliefs as Boomers. E.g., how many normie
Zoomers went to the polls after zero opposition to ICE and encroaching fascism, just to vote Democrat, one of the parties that did the Gaza genocide, after it hurt their individual wallets! If you look at the problem generationally, no generation is ripe for anarchism except perhaps the literal kids born during and after the pandemic, because they have not yet been corrupted by capitalism. We have to meet people where they’re at. And in particular, it means that agitprop needs to target subsets of every generation, e.g. working class individuals who are suspicious of the lies told to them by liberals, who need a “nudge” in the right direction.
And also… something doesn’t sit right about focusing on “the capable”. Because I also want to agitate the implied “incapable”, i.e. those with low self-efficacy. Frankly, I work with a lot of students with low self-efficacy, and I want to see them join our movements as well, as a corollary of my more general desire to increase their self-efficacy. I.e., I am not willing to give up on people who ”aren’t capable". Anarchism is for everyone!
Actually no, because I’m not a vanguardist, I’m an anarchist. I want the masses to lead our own insurgency. I am not interested in leading anything, beyond temporarily “stepping up to the plate” if needed. I absolutely do support individual direct action as we need a diversity of tactics to achieve our goals, but ideologically I am much closer to mass-movement anarchism.
And what are the silent&boomers doing to be selfless and martyr?
Contrary to your demoview, boomers are the major recipient of welfare, and vote to keep the geron in place. So no, they’rent proles, or anarchists. Logically, why would welfare queens work to liberate their children & grandchildren?
Then let’s zeitgeist these memes for them.
§1)
2) Where do you think anarchists are?
CC already made the meme for millennials+. I made it for the tiktok generation.
§1. Boomers≢proles. They perpetuate liberal lies, aware who they betray. You never exhibited once a reformed boomer prole “nudged in the right direction.” David Graeber is a prole that 1) disassociates from his peers 2) and their praxis. Gen α are incapable of working, and should be agitated to rebel.
You won’t find it in treasonous boomers+dying silent. Millennials maybe. But I target the generation that needs to insurgent completely.
GL w/Bluewave MAGA!
Wtf anarchists are not against people receiving fucking welfare. “Welfare queen” is a conservative dog whistle!
Bizarro-world perspective, sorry. People from every generation perpetuate liberal lies because liberalism is the monoculture in the West. Instead of simply dismissing Boomers from proletarian struggle, we should at least be open to the possibility of change.
Of course Graeber was (not is, sadly, RIP) a reformed Boomer prole! In the West, we are all indoctrinated, from cradle to grave, into the liberal monoculture. He, and the thousands of other forgotten anarchists he worked with, were examples of reformed Boomer proles. And there are certainly some of them left in the anarchist movement.
… because they’re literally children right now…
As should every generation.
Some Boomers and a smaller number of Silent Generation people are doing what they can. But I really don’t expect much of Silent Generation because, yeah, they’re super old and not in fighting condition. That doesn’t mean there aren’t Silent Generation activists who spent a lifetime fighting on our behalf, who have now rightly retired to live out the rest of their lives in peace.
Yes, as I have taken hundreds of downvotes to argue against, Blue MAGA is an impediment to the anarchist movement, and to social struggle more broadly. Your solution of…I guess ignoring people who don’t fit your mold for what the proletariat should look like?..does not avoid the Blue MAGA problem. Young people are just as susceptible to liberalism as every other generation.
Anarchists are for mutual aid, not pension oppression that boomers perpetuate.
Take a moment to marinate why that is🙃.
So, are you including yourself as a liberal, that lies, and betrays your class‽
I, and Graeber don’t share your indoctrination!
you:
disinformation strike 1!
citations pls
So are you a mass-movement anarchist, or a vanguard?
GL with class treachery generations!
oh no. We confront Blue MAGA with guillotines. Direct action.
Glad we are on the same team, opposing liberalprop, and agitating the abled. You sure you’re not a vanguard?
Yeah of course I support mutual aid over welfare, but I don’t knock people for trying to recoup some of the money that’s been stolen from them.
Can do! The term “welfare queen” was used during the Reagan era as a rhetorical cudgel to do away with existing welfare protections to argue that the vast majority of welfare payments were going to “welfare queens” instead of people who were genuinely in need. The “welfare queen” stereotype was also racialized black, gendered as woman, and assumed unmarried, so that white racist proletarians would be more likely to vote against their own interests. (Factually, people on welfare came from all races and genders.) It worked like a charm.
I.e., “welfare queen” is a racist, sexist dog whistle, and every time you use it without invoking its sordid history, you are doing a disservice to those of your comrades who cannot afford to live without using the existing welfare services.
There is no shame in relying on welfare. And as anarchists, we have no obligation not to utilize welfare if we need it. Individually using government services is unrelated to whether we believe that the government should exist.
Mutual aid is preferable to welfare, but the fact of the matter is that in most areas, mutual aid groups are not yet well-established enough to service people who currently rely on welfare, and mutual aid has been demonized by liberal monoculture. This is our failure to organize at scale, not welfare recipients’ individual failure to wait for us or magically undo their own liberal brainwashing and come up with mutual aid groups all on their own.
No lol
I have spent an entire lifetime trying to unlearn the lies that liberals have taught us, but I’m sure there are things I have left to unlearn. So while I’m not intentionally lying to you, I am absolutely willing to entertain the possibility that I still hold some unconscious liberal biases. I think that any revolutionary from within the imperial core should adopt a similar humility.
Never consciously, but again, I am always open to the possibility that I make mistakes.
Well that’s very interesting that Graeber really did grow up in a leftist family. But even then, he lived in Manhattan in the heart of Empire and went into academia, where he had to maintain his anarchism in the face of the barrage of liberalism.
Also, you definitely do share at least some of my indoctrination, basically unless you just stepped onto the Western Internet today. Liberalism is the monoculture in the West, and even in places where it is not the monoculture, liberalism has imposed its slimy tendrils in the forms of the IMF, international law, multinational corporations, and imperialism. The fact that you seem to think you’re completely immune to liberal propaganda means that you are, in fact, slightly more susceptible to liberal propaganda, if it disguises itself as non-liberal.
Food Not Bombs was started in the 80s. If any of them were teenagers or in their early twenties, they were Boomers.
I didn’t say that to be insulting. I meant that the oldest Gen Alpha can be right now is 16 years old, and the majority of them are, developmentally, very young children. Maintaining a protective attitude over children is not vanguardism.
Exactly, which is why I’m willing to admit that individuals of all generations are capable of class treachery.
Uhhh…look, guillotining the Blue MAGA politicians, great stuff, absolutely. Guillotining the dozens of millions of ordinary Blue MAGA people who were brainwashed into supporting this position…no lol. We would basically be doing Stalinist shit. I’m gonna assume that you meant something like “confront Blue MAGA supporters by showing them that guillotines and direct action are solutions to be used against the bourgeoisie”.
With that said: direct action and guillotines against the bourgeoisie does not obviate the need to address the impulses that gave birth to Blue MAGA. Namely: these people claim to oppose fascism, they claim to oppose Trumpism and MAGA, but they adopt most of its policies and cognitive distortions. How can we prevent such things from happening to our own movements? In my view, a necessary but insufficient measure is to root out liberalism. Liberalism is uniquely susceptible to stuff like this because it is inherently born of a contradiction. It is the ideology which attempts to make the brutality of capitalism look like the only morally justifiable system. It requires, from the very beginning, for its adherents to differentiate between means and ends: i.e., that horrible, unproductive authorities like the State, the “free” market, capitalist “philanthropy”, liberal “democracy”, and imperialism are even capable of producing equitable outcomes.
In my view, pushing Blue MAGATs towards means-ends unity is a way of breaking their conditioning, because the means that Democrats use so clearly contradict the utopian ideals their marketing claims they hold. And while I absolutely support direct action and other more contentious ways of pushing means-ends unity…there are some Blue MAGATs who just need a stern talking to, and frankly won’t respond well to contentious ways of doing anything. I’m willing to talk to them. It’s fine if you’re not, you don’t owe them fucking anything, Blue MAGATS are truly contemptable slimeballs…but please understand that I’m coming from a position of trying to break as many people out of their liberal capitalist brainwashing as I can, even if they are fucking garbage right now.
Of course I’m not a vanguardist. The vanguardist position would be to take the observation that proletarians (and young people as a corollary) are susceptible to propaganda (and liberal propaganda as a corollary) and other irrational, unconscious behaviors, which is true and has been recognized by anarchists for over a century; and then use this true observation to conclude, erroneously, the much stronger notion that the proletariat is incapable of organizing its own revolution, and thus needs a top-down party of professional revolutionaries to lead the revolution on their behalf, possibly without their consent.
And now that you’ve said “agitating the abled”, I’m honestly more skeptical of what you originally said being an instantiation of an unconsciously ableist viewpoint that disabled people and other ‘incapables’ have no place in the revolution. Like yeah sure, I definitely want people without disabilities to do anarchist stuff, obviously…but I am autistic, and frankly I have had a lot of trouble contributing materially to the anarchist movement because of my disability. I’m certainly not abled up to your standards. Usually, anarchists are very accommodating and understanding about my disability, so it’s very strange to see a self-identified anarchist seemingly wish to marginalize disabled people…