Social Media Threads

Labor organizing is an important terrain in struggles toward liberation, but labor-centric folks lose me quickly when they frame it, as they often do, as The Struggle. On its own (meaning not explicitly used as a means of wider solidarity and attack) it’s mostly a harm reduction strategy. [ ]

And the “harm reduction” of labor organizing, of most labor organizing in the U.S. at least, is contained to the laboring membership of the union. The harm not “reduced” by the process of labor demobilizing once certain needs of its membership are met is unquantifiable, rarely spoken of. [ ]

Why limit ourselves to talking about the kinds of labor even capitalism is forced to recognize and bargain with? It seems like that part is what entices a lot of folks: that the “working class” (such as it is) is one that is recognized by power, even if as an adversary. [ ]

It seems to me that it is that very recognition that allows organized labor to engage and disengage from the field of struggle in ways other social groups on the margins—also marked for value extraction— cannot. [ ]

I’m interested in talking about waged-labor and its organization as a pathway to engaging bigger questions about value-extraction: about how labor’s institutional recognition (as fraught as that is) obscures other forms of reproductive labor, obscures how capital feasts, too, on debility and death. [ ]

No getting around the fact that the most radical act of solidarity with the margins and most devastating form of attack on the capitalist system the “working class” can perform as a class is to self-abolish the class, to *stop* working, to refuse negotiation and its place in social reproduction. [ ]

So much theory and discourse departs from the centrality of waged labor in reproducing the capitalist system with a sense of optimism about its underlying revolutionary potential and the phrase “false consciousness” in their back pocket to explain anything that doesn’t jibe. I’m not so convinced! [ ]

That waged-labor is vital to the reproduction of the capitalist system means it is a terrain of struggle that cannot be ignored. But undeniable, too, is its complicity. If it exists as a coherent social class it all, it largely acts in service to maintaining or elevating its location in the system. [ ]

Bluesky Thread (October 2025)

Since visibility on this is a really big challenge I just wanna say that I still mask in public spaces. I wear a mask when around anyone who doesn’t practice similar precautions. If you do too, you are not alone and I appreciate you so much. If you don’t, you can always start again. [ ]

The only public health we will ever be able to rely on will be built from the bottom up. Must proliferate and change all social relations in radical ways. Masking is a way to be visibly counter-hegemony and it is a material method of community care. No punchy slogan on a patch can compare. [ ]

Bluesky thread (October 2025)

Police departments performing support for massive protests (posting pictures of officers participating, praising cooperation, etc.) is not new.

In 2020, cops doing kneeling photo-ops at daytime protests started gassing and beating the rest of us as soon as most of the liberals took their signs home. [ ]

It does not mean they are on your side. It does not mean that they are a hair’s breadth away from setting down their arms or quitting their jobs. All it means is that they recognize that their ability to police depends on establishing some kind of legitimacy. It’s counterinsurgency, simple as that. [ ]

It is better for cops to be seen as facilitating the actions of big masses of people, because the alternative is appearing vastly overwhelmed by them, which would undermine their power.

This is the only reason they are ever seemingly “friendly” or “supportive” to big liberal marches. [ ]

Bluesky Thread (September 2025)

Every fresh piece of news about patriarchy’s backlash against trans liberation affirms what the radical among us have always known: if the means for our care is in any other hands but our own it cannot be relied upon and indeed may be used against us. [ ]

The medical industrial complex values us only so far as it can profit from us, and it can profit from us in other ways besides providing affirming care (like conversion or medical incarceration.) The means for trans existence has never been safe under that institution’s control. [ ]

The average medical practitioner’s ultimate priority is the continuation of their career, the maintenance of their institutional recognition. When the institution makes fascist moves doctors follow along, or they stop being doctors. Trans care captured by this institution always doubles as a threat. [ ]

No means of care, no method of reproducing life and living can be relied upon when those means are captured by hierarchical institutions, centralized and administered by authoritarian power. To get to real care and to keep it this enclosure must be utterly destroyed: every wall unbuilt. [ ]

Bluesky Thread (September 2025)

I will be a forever hater of the term “cancel culture,” a truly epic tool of context collapse and reductionism that has only benefited the powerful. Folks are always using this term to talk about critique of a celebrity and social campaigns against the marginalized like they’re the same phenomenon. [ ]

Please let’s talk about disposability! I’d loooove people to get real and serious about how social campaigns in their scenes that unjustly target and alienate the most marginalized get started, maintain momentum. No one has ever done that by talking about cancel culture though, imo. [ ]

Reactionaries need rhetorical tools like “cancel culture” because for them all tools are weapons and all weapons are for gaining power: they don’t need to have coherence, just project strength. That’s why they love using the term so much and why it’s worthy of critique, not co-optation. [ ]

Anarchists don’t need the term “cancel culture” because our politics both demand greater specificity and provide the means for it. Stop saying “this is cancel culture” when you can say “this is racism” “this is transmisogyny” “this is exploitation” “this is DARVO.” [ ]

I think that if we threw out the term “cancel culture” and always took the time to be specific about the power dynamics we are concerned about, it would remove much of its utility for those who use it to make dodging accountability/consequences seem leftist. [ ]

The claim “we have a cancel culture” has no coherence. What we have is a culture of patriarchal white supremacist capitalism. In this culture, powerful members are permitted to kill and debilitate with abandon and no consequences. For those on the margins, one misstep can mean alienation or death. [ ]

The hierarchy proliferates and manages all social relations, including those in the margins. The strategies of power are still successful there, even if the returns are comparatively diminished. The valuation of the hierarchy is internalized and enacted by individuals to maintain their own status. [ ]

Which people are believed, who is considered worthy of defense, who is seen as deserving of disregard are determined by the dominant cultural values and social norms. These dynamics change as the context of power changes, and cannot be reduced to “cancel culture.” [ ]

What people refer to as “cancel culture” is usually just a contextless set of tactics and strategies to reduce someone’s power. The meaningful question isn’t “are we engaging in cancel culture” but “why/for what reasons is this person’s power subject to attack?” [ ]

It is good to subject the power of an abuser, rapist, fascist to attack: their power is what allows them to pursue their projects.

Other social campaigns, though, work to further reduce the power of the disempowered.

Wildly different contexts that should not be discussed with flattening terms. [ ]

Twitter Thread (June 2025)

People who only engage with the topic of intimate violence to complain about how survivor movements go “too far” show their true priorities: to suppress challenges to patriarchy.

At least 1/3 of women have been victims of physical or sexual violence. No, we have not gone “too far.” [ ]

There are a hundred thousand critiques to be made of the different factions/dynamics of the feminist survivor movement, on top of a hundred thousand already made, by the people within the movement. But you have to engage with that movement in good faith to see and hear them! [ ]

As long as we live under patriarchy there will be lots of people ready to eat up whatever new version of “feminists are mean bitches who hurt the family/state/church/community with their unreasonable demands” they’re served, but with some discernment you need not be among them. [ ]

If someone is talking about intimate violence and obfuscates or minimizes the material impacts of abuse and sexual assault in order to focus on the restoration of perpetrators it is time to question both their knowledge of the subject and their motivations for discussing it. [ ]

Again, if there’s a dynamic within the feminist survivor movement that you have concerns about, I guarantee there’s a wealth of feminist scholarship and discourse on the subject. You have to engage with feminism as a valuable field of inquiry to get to and understand them. [ ]

There are big differences between feminists critiquing aspects of movements they’re embedded in with the goal of strengthening them and ending intimate violence,

and folks with shallow understandings using the subject of intimate violence to undermine the movement and its goals. [ ]

The feminist survivor movement is a response to a centuries’ old social program of patriarchal terror. A program built on the brutalized and subjugated bodied of the gender marginalized and maintained only on the basis of the labor it continues to coercively extract them today. [ ]

As long as intimate authoritarianism continues to exist and be a determining and constraining factor in the lives of women the feminist survivor movement can only be charged with having not yet gone far enough. [ ]

Bluesky Thread (May 2025)

It seems vital to me in this political environment to further hone practices of speaking about current conditions in terms of “continuity” and “escalation” and reject in all ways possible the framing of any of as “new” or its worst dangers to be imminent rather than extant. [ ]

Talking about this political terrain as something altogether novel and totally unprecedented is, frankly, wildly inaccurate and ahistorical. Let’s talk about the developing dynamics or material conditions that are new, sure. But without suggesting a unique rupture from continuity. [ ]

Responding to the fascist violence being carried out now–which is continuous with authoritarian violence that has been carried out for centuries–as something that is either “starting to hurt people” or “going to hurt people if it continues” is an insult to all of fascism’s victims. [ ]

I am finding myself frustrated with a lot of analysis being shared right now that isn’t careful to theorize this moment in continuity with the historical fascist movement. Hyping up the “new’ factors without connecting them with the old, steady, and thriving patterns seems like the wrong tactic. [ ]

A totally new and unprecedented threat makes people afraid and feel as if no existing framework of analysis or set of tactics can be used to resist it. Historical continuity of fascism, however, also implies a historical continuity of anti-fascism that we can refer to and leverage in resistance. [ ]

There is expansion happening. There is escalation happening. The ways these are happening needs to be understood! Dynamics, if not ever totally new, are certainly always changing. But we’re not being launched into a brand new story. We’re part of a shifting geography. [ ]

Geographical change is constant and continuous. Old maps–old tactics of transversal–won’t always perfectly align. They may require multiple references, an eraser here, a new line there. But we haven’t been thrust into a new universe! We just need to keep updating our cartography. [ ]

Twitter Thread (April 2025)

Saw someone say that parents often treat their children like property, “not family.”

I agree with the impulse behind that argument, but the social construct of The Family itself is fundamentally about establishing and maintaining patriarchal property and dominance relations. [ ]

Family has been the justification and method for rendering children and women into objects of exchange and labor extraction for men. Treating people “like family” often actually means treating them as property. [ ]

This is exactly why your boss wants you to think of your workplace as “a family.” It renders certain labor invisible (as housework is rendered in the family home) and suggests that the family-head is entitled to that labor and familial fealty. [ ]

This would not work as a tactic if there were not coercive elements bakes into our basic conceptions of what makes a Family and what empowered family members (parents, husbands, etc.) are entitled to extract from more marginalized members. [ ]

Liberation for children and youth will never come from The Family, which is the site of an overwhelming majority of the violence against them. It is an institution that cannot be reformed. It is a project of control, isolation, and enclosure. [ ]

Twitter Thread (November 2024)

Right-wing women are not hard to understand nor are they uniquely ignorant or tapped into some naïve (nonexistent) tradwife bliss. They are authoritarian, racist, misogynistic women. They believe in patriarchy fully and defend it, even as men in their lives make them miserable. [ ]

And the men in their lives are making them miserable. Men’s violence is a condition all women have to navigate. From my experience of right-wing women, they mostly just agree that women are of less value. They tell that to their children too, ask me how I know! [ ]

It makes them miserable in all the ways a thoughtful reader might expect hating a social group you are a part of would make you miserable. But also misogyny is an absolutely central pillar of right-wing ideology. Right-wing women literally just accept that as the fee for participation. And the rare ones who don’t are laughed out of whatever space they’re in, at a minimum. [ ]

Important to emphasize here that right-wing women–a vast majority of whom in the U.S. are white–accept misogyny as the cost-of-admission to right-wing ideology because it promises them more unhindered access to the fruits of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. [ ]

Misogyny interacts with how people analyze the politics of right-wing women and, of course, mystifies them. But they’re actually not confusing. They’re not naïve victims of their own politics and they’re also not living it up in their favorite Marriage and Family myth either. [ ]

There have been women employed in the PR of patriarchy for as long as it has existed. There have always been women involved in its maintenance even as the men in their lives have destroyed them. It’s a gross and upsetting story, but it’s not novel or all that interesting imo. [ ]

Twitter Thread (September 2024)

Much of State collapse is experienced as state withdrawal and structural theft. The State, in its formation, monopolizes resources and centralizes infrastructure. When–via collapse–the state retracts to protect an ever-narrowly defined citizenry, it takes those resources with it. [ ]

The rightward shift in global politics we’re witnessing right now–the genocidal policies, the fascist creep– are moves towards the consolidation of resources, the narrowing (of an already extremely contested category) of who really counts as human, of who is a citizen of empire. [ ]

See how those who do not have the means or ability to flee disaster (and those means are becoming ever more expensive and extreme) are cast as the victims of their own “failure to prepare” for apocalyptic conditions the State has been lying to them about for decades. [ ]

If you are ever granted full citizenship under Empire is itself socially and materially contingent. If you are, that is only ever so long as the State continues to find you or the territory you labor within a valuable source of wealth and labor extraction. If not? Abandonment. [ ]

This logic and the logic of imperialism and genocide do not contradict. The machinery of war, the acquisition of land, the consolidation of who is a citizen of Empire to be defended, the concurrent practices of social neglect and genocidal extermination are of the same system. [ ]

Twitter Thread (September 2024)

The demands of men to center men in feminism, their needs, the way patriarchy affects them, and thereby decenter challenges to the power they hold and wield under patriarchy are relentless. Stale. The same argument they’ve regurgitated for decades, with slightly updated language. [ ]

They will never be satisfied. It’s not a game worth playing. The only feminism men in general will accept is a feminism that absolves them personally and leaves the gender relations they depend on in their everyday lives intact and unexamined. Good thing feminism doesn’t need them. [ ]

The political struggle for feminist liberation is asymmetrical warfare, not a democratic election.

Men have direct conflicts of interest with feminism. They will seek to defang it, always have and always will. Feminism that caters to their interests is a co-opted feminism. [ ]

Feminist men are first and foremost gender traitors and it damages their status among other men. The ones who are really down for the feminist struggle will step towards it and accept a demotion in patriarchal status, not demand a feminism that allows them to maintain it. [ ]

Twitter Thread (August 2024)

Many things have tarnished the allure of mass movement politics for me, but what killed it forever is how most of you have acted in this pandemic. The narrative you’re selling no longer has any purchase. It’s apparent it does not go beyond the rhetorical. [ ]

I’m a transgender disabled abuse survivor. The idea that “the community” can be oriented in such a way to protect me, is supposedly only prevented from protecting me by the machinery of the State, is a fable. Community kills. You won’t even be bothered to wear a fucking mask. [ ]

Mass movement politics and its logic has had too many of us watering down our militancy, dialing back our necessary demands, to appeal to the better natures of folks with their boots on our necks. It is a soul sucking endeavor, and in the end many folks still do not care. [ ]

I can’t be bothered to give a single shit about your orgs. The ones orchestrating super spreader events, chewing up and spitting out members once they’ve become too sick, disabled, or burnt out to “do the work” y’all are always talking about. [ ]

Folks grovel before the meat grinder of “mass appeal” and talk about “bringing more people in” and then take actions that make the organizing space they’re trying to “build up” inaccessible, risk-laden, and deadly to the very people they claim to center in the coalition. It’s a farce. [ ]

If the mass movement folks were interested in “building the base” or whateverthefuck, there would be a focus on creating accessibility so more people can participate. But instead folks just hunger to appeal to all the same people Democrats and Republicans are fighting over. Telling. [ ]

“You have to learn to appeal to the ‘average’ ‘normal’ person” is something folks won’t stop saying as if who gets to be framed as ‘average’ and ‘normal’ isn’t itself politically contingent. The quiet part they don’t say aloud is who has to be sacrificed to make this appeal. [ ]

Twitter Thread (July 2024)

More on how viewing violence as a cohesive “cycle” in which perpetrators are all past victims and all victims are seen as potential future perpetrators is a deeply flawed framework that ultimately stigmatizes victims and obscures structures of power. [ ]

Firstly, if violence were cyclical, if the experience of violence is a necessary condition for making an abusive person, oppressed people would make up the vast majority of the perpetrators of abuse. This is demonstrably not the case. [ ]

Gender marginalized people experience the majority of abusive and sexual violence. Yet cis men remain a majority of the perpetrators of abusive and sexual violence. How does a “cycle of violence” theory make sense of this? [ ]

People often try to equate this theory with the idea that abuse is a learned behavior. But all that it does is trivialize and oversimplify the various and complex social mechanisms by which abusive values and behaviors are learned. [ ]

Trivially, yes, being the subject of abuse is one way someone can learn and internalize abusive values, but how those values are actually *internalized* by a victim of violence is far more complicated than the idea that they were “broken” by experiencing that violence. [ ]

An abusive man who was abused as a boy “learned” those values, sure, but learned them within a tapestry of social values/practices that worked together to impart an ideology about manhood, about power, about the value of children, and about how he could one day claim that power. [ ]

There were social networks of other people justifying that abuse, justifying the power adults have to abuse children.

Values that absolutely did hurt him as a child, but which undeniably empower him as an adult man. [ ]

Those are all values that men who were not abused are also taught. Experiencing the actual violence itself is not necessary to learn it. Again, because abuse, intimate authoritarianism, is an ideology, not an expression of individual pathology. [ ]

The “cycle of violence” theory obfuscates the social and political power relations always at work in abuse, and in many ways denies the level of resolve and intentionality it takes on the abuser’s part to entrap their victims. It pairs well with “explosive anger” theories. [ ]

The “explosive anger” theories I’m talking about is a common myth about abusers, that they mostly suffer from “anger management issues” or an inability to self-regulate. [ ]

While there are some cases in which the abuser is explosive and violent to everyone, it is proportionally rare. Most abusers have the ability to navigate their other relationships in life without being abusive, and are abusive only to a select few. [ ]

This should highlight that abuse is not about individual pathology, but ideology.
Who is abused is based largely on who the social system makes vulnerable to abuse, who the dominant ideology says is less valuable and justifiable to control. [ ]

“Cycle of violence” theories instead suggest an inevitability to intimate violence, an inevitably located in the supposed pathologies, supposed “brokenness,” of survivors. Casting them as inherently dangerous people rather than a vulnerable group in need of political solidarity. [ ]

Abuse happens because we live in a hierarchical, patriarchal society which constructs vulnerabilities for some people that can be exploited, and provides the ideologies, resources, and social structures that empower abusers.

People abuse because it gives them power. [ ]

Twitter Thread (May 2024)

I think it’s pretty telling that every anarchist feminist I know who has had a focus on challenging sexual and domestic violence for longer than a year or two has come to reject community-centered approaches to dealing with that violence. [ ]

Frankly, even the most liberal domestic violence theorists I’ve engaged with have long rejected community-centered approaches in which power and legitimacy to challenge abuse is invested in “the community” rather than in the victims. [ ]

Because abuse is a context of coercive control and an ideology (an expression of values) NOT individual pathology, “‘the community” is often highly implicated in the context that makes coercive control–likewise with sexual violence– possible. [ ]

For me and for most of the survivors I’ve connected with “the community” more often than not functions as the enforcement arm of the abuser and its typical response in the aftermath is retraumatizing, sometimes even more traumatizing than the abuse. [ ]

Declaring that only “the community” or some other abstract social apparatus can legitimately “investigate” and challenge abuse/SA is akin to saying that only the courts are capable of judging whether a cop really brutalized someone. There’s a major conflict of interest! [ ]

You can look at my earlier work and see that I definitely had some hopes still for radical possibilities of “accountability” and Transformative/Restorative justice practices to challenge abuse/sexual assault. It’s a lovely best case scenario. It’s what I wanted for some of the people who hurt me! [ ]

But both engaging with the work of other theorists and acting in solidarity with other survivors over the years has wiped “accountability” from my political goals. Restoring an equilibrium to a community where domestic violence/sexual assault occurred is often mutually exclusive with stopping that violence. [ ]

I don’t believe that Transformative and Restorative Justice aren’t good frameworks when applied properly. I think that 1) they have been heavily co-opted and divorced from the contexts from which those practices originated 2) how and in what ways they have been co-opted are indicative of larger problems and [ ]

3) the claimed or seemingly apparent successes of most, if not all, non-violent political strategies have historically and to the present day been made possible by the presence (obscured after the fact) and threat of radicals willing to engage in violent direct action. [ ]

Twitter Thread (May 2024)

I think apologia for oppressive violence on all scales, from domestic violence to genocide, functions successfully not because it offers a convincing argument (it doesn’t) but because it gives people an easy path to disengagement, which is materially more or less the same thing. [ ]

To commit oppressive violence you don’t need to fully convince everyone to your cause. Oppressive violence springs from an already existing social system that implicates them. All that’s needed is to convince most people to keep going along as they have been. [ ]

“It’s too complicated.” “There was violence from both sides.” “There’s a history that I don’t know enough about to judge.” The context collapse and obfuscation of disengagement. Or protecting one’s position within the social system. [ ]

I think about this with DARVO from abusers a lot and the parallels to the colonial violence is undeniable. So many who have been paying attention have been baffled at how Israel has continued to claim victim status even as they enact blatant genocide on Palestinians. [ ]

But the whole point of these kinds of messages, of DARVO tactics, isn’t to hold up under reasonable scrutiny. It is to discourage scrutiny. It is propaganda for disengagement. Authoritarians need only a few staunch allies as long as everyone else simply looks away. [ ]

When oppressive violence and authoritarianism is the social norm, social disruption is the only means by which that violence can be challenged. Disengagement and apathy serve as important roles in system maintenance as overt brutality does. [ ]

Twitter Thread (May 2024)

Authoritarians of all kinds almost on reflect grasp for the “outside agitators” myth because to acknowledge rebellion from within the subject population is to acknowledge their ability to resist. An ability the authoritarian must undermine at all costs, in all narratives. [ ]

They KNOW that resistance originates from within the very people they intend to control. But to acknowledge this, to affirm in some way that they have the ability to act within their own agency without orders from another authority, is to undermine the very idea of authority. [ ]

Using this narrative also allows them to paint their acts of brutality and suppression of the people under their power as a protective force. Those aren’t “our” people and if some of them are we have to crack down on them to stop the outside agitator’s spreading corruption. [ ]

The State and the University and the Workplace all do it, every authoritarian with an ounce of power does it all the way down to the intimate abuser, who cuts their victim from their friends because they are supposedly trying to “sabotage” the relationship. [ ]

The goal is always isolation and alienation. Authoritarians know that insurgents gain the ability to resist domination sustainably if and only if they have the material and social support to do so. They use narratives like this to undermine those avenues of support. [ ]

Twitter Thread (April 2024)

An original post by twitter user @lesbrains reads “It’s almost always victims who go into exile. Rarely do perpetrators have to leave the places they fuck up.” Lee’s response thread begins:

That this is a consistent pattern tells us SO MUCH about the dynamics of abuse. It shows so clearly how deeply structural it is. If abuse was only about individual pathology the aftermath would look wildly different every time. [ ]

If abuser were about individual pathology (anger/communication issues, emotional volatility, etc.) the fallout when abuse becomes public would have a LOT of variation. Not least because those kind of behaviors would be used against everyone, not just the primary victim(s).

While of course not every situation is identical, there are very clear patterns that tend to happen after abuse has been publicly names as abuse. Typically a large swath of people express anything from total apathy to extreme and violent aggression towards the victim. [ ]

The victim either leaves or is actively run out of space, the abuser remains more or less undisturbed. Often the abuser even accumulates new allies. People who didn’t engage much with them before who sprint to their defense upon hearing the accusations.

This shows us just how dependent on social structures abuse really is, and how challenges to abuse (even just simply naming it) are rightly seen as revolutionary demands. Demands require an upending of all the social structures that allowed the abuse to take place. [ ]

While plenty of the extremes of abuse are purposefully hidden or obscured by the abuser, MANY abusive behaviors either happen in front of an audience or are recounted to an audience for validation and approval.

Further, for an abusive person to abuse someone else, they have to have at least some social mechanisms mobilized to empower them to do so. Economic, social, institutional status are things that can only be accumulated by relation to social systems. [ ]

On the flip sided, what is also conditioned by social systems is the victim’s vulnerability. Their economic, social, institutional status is also mediated by systems in which the whole surrounding community is implicated.

Abuse is the use of both interpersonal and structural violence in order to dominate and control. Thus the end of abuse will require the upending and complete reordering of social systems that make it possible. [ ]

People ARE aware of this reality and know that to really support a victim of abuse in their midst implicates both themselves and the social system they depend on (which includes their friends, family, coworkers, etc.) It demands revolutionary action.

Just as in other aspects of authoritarian social systems, when revolutionary action isn’t taken (as it often isn’t because people want to maintain their own location within that system) there are very few options left to the victims of violence except flight or withdrawal. [ ]

Twitter Thread (February 2024)

When you start talking about what a high percentage of cops are also domestic abusers i hope you do so to highlight how the values and practices of policing and intimate violence overlap… less focus on “see what pathological people cops are” please. [ ]

Police work draws people who believe establishing coercive control over people is justifiable and desirable. Police training and culture validates and encourages that sense of entitlement, places the might of the state behind that validation. [ ]

Being a cop also places one in a prime location to dodge the (near non-existent) risks involved in being an abuser and amplifies their power at home. If you’re a domestic abuser and a cop, chances are good some of the only people your victim can call for help are your buddies. [ ]

Police training is training in coercive control and anyone who does not arrive with those values must eventually absorb them to succeed, to do the every day work of coercive control that is police work. Those values and practices don’t get left at work. [ ]

It’s not “oh look they’re even evil in other parts of their life” it’s that police work and domestic violence work off the same logic, with many of the same strategies, simply deployed in different social locations (public/private) and scale. [ ]

To be a cop you have to believe that you are entitled to power, entitled to coerce others, to subject them to your will. You have to believe that this is good and justified. By whatever twists of logic/personal justifications. To abuse people you have to believe the same thing. [ ]

As always it ultimately comes down to systems of personal beliefs (ideology) plus the material power/resources/systems available to enforce those beliefs. Framing the overlapping issue of police and domestic violence in a pathologizing way instead is an (ableist) obfuscation. [ ]

Twitter Thread (July 2023)

To say that being abused is what causes someone to be abusive has its roots in the belief that abuse is individual pathology and only comes about when someone has been “broken” by previous abuse, thus positioning all survivors as inherently more dangerous because of their trauma. [ ]

It’s a fundamentally ableist and anti-survivor position. Traumatized people are more likely to become victims of further abuse than to perpetuate it. Abusers with histories of being abused are common because abuse is common. [ ]

It is possible for abusers to have “learned” abusive behavior from their past abusers in the sense that that was the context in which they were shown the mechanisms of coercive control and sought to wield it themselves. Not because the trauma of abuse gave them no choice. [ ]

Experiencing trauma does not have explanatory force re: abuse because there are also many MANY abusers who were never abused, never experienced trauma, and still go on to become abusers. Again, this is because they were also taught the mechanisms of coercive control. [ ]

Coercive control IS a learned behavior but it is learned not from societal aberrations and trauma, but from the dominant culture that constructs disempowered classes of people, reifies domination and control, and praises those whom use it effectively to their own ends. [ ]

Additionally, this oft repeated myth lacks explanatory power because there are countless people who survive extreme abuse and trauma over DECADES and afterwards still do not use that experience as an excuse to abuse people. Many, in fact, go on to be fierce survivor advocates. [ ]

The common thread among abusers is not a trauma history, but a value system they have all internalized: intimate authoritarianism. The belief system that justifies gaining and maintaining coercive control over another person, limiting their autonomy, extracting value from them. [ ]

I believe that continuously placing value on the abuser’s history, the abuser’s emotional landscape, etc. ultimately reproduces the conditions of the abuse: the centering of the abuser’s world and agency and sidelining survivors, who are even more likely to have a trauma history. [ ]

I think the quest to investigate an abuser’s personal trauma history in the search of the cause for why they abuse people is also the result of an insistence in locating the cause of abuse in pathology that can be “cured” rather than a values system that implicates social norms. [ ]

Twitter Thread (July 2023)

You cannot control other people on accident.

You can refuse to conceptualize your control as abuse. You can steel yourself with a host of justifications and excuses. But still you cannot actively control another person on accident. [ ]

Abuse is not a passive state of a relationship, it is always active, because the survivor is always seeking to assert their agency, in big and small ways, that must be responded to in order for control to be maintained.

To argue that such control can happen on accident is to utterly deny the personhood and autonomy of the victim. It is to reduce the survivor to a passive object, rather than an active agent who resists that control. [ ]

Twitter Thread (July 2023)

When abusers implement control through a series of arbitrary rules and restrictions it is less about the rules themselves than it is in affirming a dominance relation, which is why agreeing to those demands never leads to a decrease in abuse. [ ]

Abusers are always seeking more ground because they see relationships as contests of power and domination. There is always a spark of agency in their victim that cannot be suppressed, is always seeking to subvert the control, and thus the abuser must constantly work against it. [ ]

The content of the abuser’s rules does matter and can give us a window into what lines of power in the relationship the abuser is working to leverage as technologies of control. They seek to cut off any route by which their victims gain empowerment and express their agency. [ ]

In the Jonah Hill example, the primary aim seems to be isolation, as many of the rules he puts forward serve to sever pathways for connection with other people. It is highly likely that he has seen that a source of his survivor’s strength is her connections to community. [ ]

Agreeing to those demands would not lead to a mutual and healthy relationship because the core values that underlie those demands will never be satisfied. They aren’t demands that can be made in good faith, they are made towards an end: to gain and maintain control. [ ]

Those rules are means to an end, not “boundaries” in any meaningful sense of the word. When an abuser has you isolated, when they become your one pillar of support and connection, they have you more entrapped and thus less able to set your own boundaries or reject demands. [ ]

Twitter Thread (May 2023)

I prefer the word “neuroconforming” over neurotypical. It moves away from the idea that there exists a “typical” brain and reveals that what we currently understand as “neurotypical” is not a type of person, but an authoritarian social standard that hurts us all. [ ]

There is privilege in having a neurotype that makes it possible/easier to conform to ableist social standards, and the use of neuroconforming rather than neurotypical can allow us to theorize about that power without conceding to the ableist idea that there is a “‘standard” brain. [ ]

And it also gives us freedom to acknowledge that the privilege granted to those who are able to perform to the standards of neuroconformity is always on a contextual basis, always ready to be revoked, especially from those with other marginalized identities. [ ]

Very few, if any, people are able to live up to the exacting standards of neuroconformity at all times, and that precarity and anxiety is the point of those standards. To keep people invested in the performance to avoid the Othering that comes with being seen as neurodivergent. [ ]

Twitter Thread (March 2023)

The average prison sentence for men who kill their partner is 2-6 years, while women who kill their partners are sentenced on average to 15 years, even though a majority do so in self-defense from abuse. The State doesn’t simply mishandle abuse, it actively protects it. [ ]

Women are more likely to be murdered by a partner than any other person. 75% of those murdered by their abuser are killed as they are leaving the relationship/after they’ve already left. Yet survivors who react to these conditions by killing their abuser are thrown in prison. [ ]

The State helps create and maintain the conditions of entrapment in abuse that make it difficult to impossible for survivors to escape their relationships with their lives, and punish those who do in ways incongruent with “perfect” victimhood with a lengthy prison sentence. [ ]

The State signals to abusers that even if they kill their victims they will not be heavily sanctioned, if they experience any consequences at all. Abusers are aware of this, and they use the threat of their violence coupled with State violence to keep their victims in control. [ ]

It is sickening to see people continue to pose the question “without the State/prisons what would you do with all the abusers and rapists?” when the reality of our current system is the incarceration of survivors while their abusers/rapists frequently live free of consequence. [ ]

It is equally disgusting to see people who deem themselves radicals equate survivors’ resistance to abusers and rapists as “carceral” when the reality is that there is no system more pro-abuse and pro-rape than the carceral system. [ ]

Abuse and sexual assault are tools of systemic oppression, and they function very clearly in that manner. There is a reason why the more vulnerable you are to other forms of oppression the more likely you are to experience abuse and sexual assault. It is all connected. [ ]

Twitter Thread (January 2023)

The “alt right pipeline” being posed as something that innocent but well-meaning people accidentally fall into rather than a values system that people act to protect and advance because it serves the interests of their power is an absolute gift to reactionaries. [ ]

It frames people who actively want to reduce, co-opt, and even destroy the agency of the marginalized as the real victims of their own belief system. They are the ones, in this framework, that are seen as in need of saving and protecting, rather than the people they target. [ ]

This is a gift to reactionaries because instead of fighting them, instead of attacking their ability to carry out their political agenda, instead of building defenses against them to protect the vulnerable, people pour valuable resources in trying to appeal to them instead. [ ]

In the process of appealing to reactionaries, rather than fighting them, people water down radical politics to make them more palatable to them. They move towards reactionary politics, rather than pulling reactionaries away, and then call the smaller gap “progress.” [ ]

Support, safety, and empowerment for the marginalized are then seen ass acceptable sacrifices towards the end of appealing to reactionaries, who are, supposedly, inherently innocent and just in need of being shown the error of their ways. [ ]

This framework ultimately serves, and is a result of, existing systems of domination. In which white supremacy, misogyny, transphobia, ableism, etc. are widely seen as acceptable and understandable, so long as they don’t go to unsightly “extremes.” [ ]

The people most likely to become reactionaries are the people who are already most valued in our society– white, able-bodied, cisgender, men, wealthy– and the people they target are similarly the people most seen as expendable in service of the valued and privileged. [ ]

So when you push this argument, that reactionaries are innocents who just need to be “saved” from their own beliefs at the expense of solidarity to the marginalized and vulnerable, you are not as far from the reactionary worldview as you seem to think. [ ]

If you want to spend time and energy working to deradicalize reactionaries in your life, go with my blessing, I’m in a similar process with some conservative family members. But stop trying to position it ass a coherent structural solution rather than an individual one. [ ]

And also understand that deradicalization–which is rarely successful precisely because reactionary beliefs are not an accident but serve the interests of power–requires directly challenging someone’s belief system, NOT accommodating it. [ ]

Twitter Thread (December 2022)

Abusers are certainly capable of change. However, most, even when provided opportunities to do so, choose not to. This is because abuse is not an individual pathology but an ideology which is supported by the dominant structures of society. Abusers BENEFIT from being abusers. [ ]

Abusers weaponize interpersonal and structural tools of power and control to dominate and extract (sexual, emotional, and material) value from their victims. This is why pushing for change only via reforming abusers in a society that supports their values fails survivors. [ ]

Asking if individual abusers can change and focusing on bringing about that change on an individual level tends to fail in the same way that trying to reform individual fascists/racists/transphobes/etc. does. You’re targeting an ultimately structural issue with surface-level reforms. [ ]

Values are what make abusers abusers. The belief that one is justified in gaining and maintaining power and control over another, constraining and co-opting their autonomy in order to bolster your own power. To change an abuser requires a fundamental change in their ideology. [ ]

Their ideology, which I refer to as ‘intimate authoritarianism,’ is the logical conclusions of a confluence of dominant societal values about love, relationships, and who it is acceptable to control. You cannot change abusers without attacking those values on every front. [ ]

This is why I argue that effective anti-abuser organizing looks like effective anti-fascist organizing. Rather than pouring all our energy and time into the meager hope of reforming abusers, we attack their ability to build power they can use to harm vulnerable people. [ ]

The door for radical change is always open, and we certainly would prefer they walk through it. But our resources and capacities are limited and our priorities must be in establishing safety for survivors and other vulnerable people abusers seek to victimize. [ ]

Abusers ultimately benefit from people’s preoccupation with their reform over the safety of their victims. It, in fact, often reinforces the conditions of the abuser/their beliefs behind it, which is that their emotional landscape is more important than their victim’s safety. [ ]

Twitter Thread (August 2022)

Referring to someone as an abuser doesn’t dehumanize them any more than calling someone a landlord does. What it does do is allow us to speak about an exploitative power imbalance and point to where the power lies, and that’s the real problem folks have with the term “abuser.” [ ]

We call someone a landlord rather than “a person who engages in collecting rent” because while there are probably many other things that person is in the world, we’re specifically talking about the exploitative power they hold over others and, in doing so, make that power visible. [ ]

So it goes with abusers. To call an abusive person an abuser isn’t to erase all the other aspects of their humanity. Not any more than calling ourselves survivors does that of us. We are talking, specifically, about an exploitative relationship that often remains invisible. [ ]

When you silence anyone who uses the term “abuser” (“you’re erasing their humanity! Use ‘person who abuses!’) but you don’t say the same to people who talk about landlords, bosses, cops, politicians, etc. you are working to make the reality of abuse unseen and unanalyzed. [ ]

Abuse is not individual pathology. It is not a tragic mistake. It is a system of power all on its own, structured to constrain, exploit, and co-opt the agency of victim(s). There are abusers. They hold power. And they benefit from people being afraid to say that. [ ]

Twitter thread (July 2022)

Both abusers and the State work to create a narrative of inevitability. The subject of the abuser or the State is constrained, their agency co-opted, their horizon of choice limited. They are made to feel as if there is no escape and their only hope the gradual reform of their captor. [ ]

They are both systems of domination and control, enabled not only by actions of those who hold and wield authority (abusers, politicians, etc.) but also by a larger social system of complicity from people who, regardless of values they claim to hold, value order over justice. [ ]

Liberation from either, then, does not demand we appeal to the better natures of authoritarians nor even the masses of people who act in complicity with their violence, but that we open up possibilities to build our own autonomy and learn to trust in the power of our own agency. [ ]

Survivors (whether of State and/or interpersonal abuses) can’t find relief nor freedom in struggling within the very confines authority has set before us. It requires a breaking out. A trust in our own choices. A desire to build something different outside of that system of control. [ ]

It ultimately suits abusers’ and the State’s ends that we limit ourselves only to their reform. All that it ultimately accomplishes (if it accomplishes anything at all) is a more benevolent form of power and control that still steadfastly denies us any real expression of agency. [ ]

We don’t need a more benevolent authoritarianism. We need to determine the trajectory of our own lives. To labor and care because it is something we wish to do, a gift we want to give, a path we are eager to explore, instead of being forced to expand someone else’s wealth and power. [ ]

Twitter Thread (July 2022)

Stop asking why survivors don’t leave abusive relationships and start asking why abusers don’t leave or allow their victims to leave.

It takes, on average, 7 tries for a survivor to escape an abusive relationship, and that is not a product of lack of will on their part. [ ]

Abusers mobilize all the resources at their disposal to keep ownership over their victims, and this is because abusers get something for themselves out of abusive relationships. They extract value for themselves from their victim at the expense of their victim’s autonomy. [ ]

Situations of abuse are situations of CAPTURE. Abusers use their intimate knowledge of their victim, outside cooperation of family, friends, coworkers, etc., whatever privileges given to them by the larger system, and control over material resources to steal that victim’s agency. [ ]

Survivors have their ability to act reduced, constrained, and co-opted by their abuser. It is not a matter of choice, it is a matter of domination and control that is compounded by a larger system that both justifies it and supplies structures that make it possible. [ ]

Twitter Thread (June 2022)

Coming to believe that telling survivors to appeal to their communities for justice when those same communities created the conditions for the abuse to happen in the first place is not as different from telling them to appeal to politicians/ courts as we’ve been pretending. [ ]

Being victimized within a social system of domination and placing your hopes on the powerful people within that system to recognize you as a victim who deserves justice even though doing so would directly undermine their own power within that system is not a viable strategy. [ ]

This is true for all systems of hierarchical power and domination and that shit, bolstered by the State, proliferates throughout all social relations in our society. The response to that violence cannot be only to ask nicely and hope. Our response must be attack. [ ]

I do think accountability theorizing has its value but to be honest the level to which it’s been successfully co-opted by abusers and their allies seems to me to reveal a fundamental weakness in conceptualizing accountability as the only path to justice for survivors. [ ]

Because more often then not, the language and tactics of accountability/ restorative justice seem, to me, to funnel all our energy into simply helping abusers reconfigure their power in their communities while survivors continue to languish in the margins. [ ]

I think the only real and material hope survivors have for justice is in our solidarity with each other, and finding ways to build up and utilize that solidarity to give one another support and to attack the social structures that allow abuse to happen in the first place. [ ]

Twitter Thread (April 2022)

As someone who grew up in neglect I think people who haven’t truly have no idea how many of the knowledge/skills they see as obvious or basic are, in fact, the products of care they received at a young age rather than a reflection of their innate superiority. [ ]

When you aren’t taught the basics of how to be a human in the world (aka: the thing that adults are supposed to do for children) there is never a point where that knowledge just pops into your head when you need it. So your only option becomes self-teaching. [ ]

One of the many problems that comes with having to be a self-taught human is that you usually cannot even know what it is you need to learn. Often the way children of neglect are shown what they need to learn is in the moments they are shamed by others for not knowing it. [ ]

Often it carries on well beyond childhood, Again, if your primary way of learning about life, relationships, your own body, etc. is through whatever your isolated child self could figure out on their own, you’re going to continue finding gaps to fill throughout adulthood. [ ]

Just perhaps something for y’all to think about when you come across a person who doesn’t know something you see as a given, Perhaps it’s less about them not caring or being ridiculous and more about what kind of care they had at the age you assumed everyone learned it at. [ ]

Twitter Thread (March 2022)

In a society built upon social relations of hierarchy, domination, and control, abusers are not deviations from the norm but, rather, the people who take the cultural messages we all receive about relationships and power to their logical conclusions. [ ]

About romantic love we are taught that we will receive a romantic partner who can fulfill our every need and fancy, and that it is acceptable to do whatever is necessary to find and bind that person to us so that they can serve as the fulfiller of our every wish. [ ]

We are taught that in pursuance of that person, it is acceptable to stalk, threaten, coerce, manipulate, and harass, so long as it is, in name at least, done “for love.” We are taught that jealousy and possessive behavior is an important expression of our love. [ ]

We are taught that when the people close to us do not fufill their role as wish-fufillers well enough that we are justified in responding to their perceived failure with punishment, and manipulation until they submit to our demands to our satisfaction. [ ]

Many of us are taught, by virtue of an elevated status within the broader social hierarchy (via whiteness, being a man, status as a parent, etc.) that our judgements are better than those of a degraded status and that we are justified, then, in coercing them to submit to our will. [ ]

We are taught to turn interpersonal connections into private property relations, and there is a host of ready-made justifications at our disposal to excuse any number of abusive acts so long as they are done in service of keeping our “property” under our control. [ ]

This is not to excuse the actions of abusers but to point to the fact that if e genuinely want to challenge abuse, it must come with a fundamental and revolutionary change to how we, as a society, conceptualize love and relationships. [ ]

Challenging and dethroning individual abusers, like challenging and dethroning individual capitalists, is necessary but not sufficient to ending broader systems of exploitation and violence. [ ]

We need to very seriously question and explore all the things about interpersonal relationships that we have thus far taken for granted and accepted as natural. What we value in love is produced socially in the same way as what we value in productivity and labor. [ ]

What do we understand love to be, how do we think it should be expressed, and where did those beliefs come from? What expressions of control have we placed outside the realm of analysis because to question them risks revealing how much we, personally, might need to change? [ ]

Do we see relationships as a property relation? Do we believe that certain levels of connection entitles us to control and limit the autonomy of those we relate to? Why is that? Is it something that we can, employing our liberatory politics, truly justify? [ ]

Abusers are difficult for so many to see as such in part because they move within the perfect environment to go unseen: an entire culture of abuse. A culture that sees domination and control as justifiable, with distinctions between abuse and “normal” determined only by degree. [ ]

It is our work not to simply become better at spotting their camouflage, but to change the entire social environment that makes abuse seem so difficult for many to distinguish from what we call “normal” relationships. This cannot happen until we genuinely question that “normal.” [ ]

This is deeply uncomfortable work for many, because what we see as “normal” in relationships is intimately tied to the ways we ourselves have utilized power and control to feel secure, even if that control does not, ultimately, serve us nor result in genuine and sustainable security. [ ]

What does it mean to love without control or a claim of possession? What does it mean to be in loving relations with people with open arms rather than an iron grip? What would it look and feel like if all our relationships were characterized by an absolute refusal to dominate? [ ]

@butchanarchy: How much more difficult would it be for abusers to obfuscate their control if we were this way to one another? How many less abusers would there even be in such a world? Where control and domination were the exceptions rather than the rule?

I, personally, would love to find out. [ ]

Twitter Thread (September 2021)

This thread remains one of my most popular– I still find it newly shared in other places on the internet despite being an old social media post with some broken links within it– because I took on the common argument made against anarchism by non-anarchists, most famously in Frederick Engels’ essay On Authority. It has long been an intention of mine to rewrite it in essay-form, but until then it will be archived here!

–

An original post by an unseen twitter user reads “I find the anarchist argument that self defense is not authoritarian lacking because the entire reason the bourgeois state arrests and kills people is to protect itself” Lee’s response thread begins:

Let’s break down this claim!

In this thread, I’m going to demonstrate how I would take a claim like this and break down its underlying assumptions and conclusions to see if it still holds under scrutiny. Let’s practice thinking philosophically together! [ ]

Okay, so this is a claim that folks in favor of gaining control of and wielding state power often bring up in response to anarchist opposition to authoritarianism. So I figured it might be helpful to actually fully break it down here. [ ]

Proposal: “Engaging in self-defense is itself authoritarian.” Supporting argument: “The bourgeois state only targets people in its own self-defense, therefore, self-defense is an authoritarian act.” [ ]

Conclusion: “The anarchistic critique of authoritarianism is nonsensical because their own means of resistance is also authoritarian.” [ ]

Okay, so now that we’ve clarified what this claim is, on the surface, saying, we can break it down further. First, we need to investigate what “authoritarianism” actually means. [ ]

So, within the bounds of this claim, authoritarianism is any act of force against another, whether that other be another person or an entire system. Of course, with this definition we run into a endless host of issues. [ ]

Authoritarianism, as defined by this claim, covers a massive range of social interactions. In this definition, if someone comes up to me and grabs me, and I forcefully pull away, I am engaging in a form authoritarianism. [ ]

The distinctions between me and my assailant disappear. Rather than them being an aggressor on my bodily autonomy and me defending that bodily autonomy, we are both equal opponents in conflict trying to assert our authority, and MY autonomy becomes the spoils. Might makes right. [ ]

So there are two fundamental issues with this definition of authority: 1) it expands the definition of authority to the extent that its function as a term is destroyed. 2) it reduces all human social interaction to a series of equivalent struggles for power and domination. [ ]

In this definition, liberation itself becomes distorted from an articulation of freedom and autonomy to an articulation of who gets to have the ability to dominate others. Acts of rebellion against domination for the sake only of freedom from domination do not exist here. [ ]

It is a similar dynamic of when men accuse women of being sexist for pointing out their misogyny, or when white people call BIPOC racist for challenging white supremacy. It’s a means of flattening out structural systems of domination into a two-way interpersonal conflicts. [ ]

If I accept the terms that men put forth when they accuse me of being sexist for challenging patriarchy, what I am ultimately accepting is that there are no structural power imbalances between us, and I concede to the destruction of the political analysis of patriarchy. [ ]

Returning to our earlier example of someone grabbing me: in the claim that my re-assertion of my own bodily autonomy is an act of authoritarianism is the underlying assumption that my bodily autonomy can be reduced to spoils in an equal conflict. [ ]

What vanishes is the moral judgement that the person grabbing me without my consent is taking hold of something that is not, and could never be, theirs to claim. It denies that my act of self-defense is an assertion of that moral value, not an equal assertion of domination. [ ]

Moving back out to a macro-political view, the assertion in this claim denies the fundamental dynamic that is always at play in state power. The state is a means for a group of people to lay claim to something that is not & can never be theirs: our bodily and political autonomy. [ ]

This brings us to the next part of this claim: “The bourgeois state only targets people in its own self-defense, therefore, self-defense is an authoritarian act.” The state is certainly defending something, but the question we need to be asking is: what? [ ]

When we engage in self-defense against the state, we are attempting to pull ourselves from the person who grabbed us: we’re asserting our own personal autonomy. When the state defends itself against us, it is then defending its ability to have control over our autonomy. [ ]

The State’s defense is on par with the person who grabbed me who, when I attempted to get free, held me tighter and struck me. That is not what an equal struggle for power looks like, it is an act of domination and an assertion of sovereignty. That is not self-defense. [ ]

To accept the State enforcing its sovereignty as an act of “self-defense” does two things here. 1) makes a complex social structure into a “self” with rights that should be respected and 2) accepts that people, regardless of their consent, are natural possessions of that “self.” [ ]

It will do us well to investigate, then, *why* there has been such a long tradition of stateists expanding authoritarianism into meaninglessness. What is the point? What is the intended outcome? [ ]

The point, in light of what we explored here, is that when they can get people to concede that acts of resistance are acts of authoritarianism, it is simple to bypass an analysis of power and how hierarchy functions and to make people feel that a state project is their only option. [ ]

Complex dynamics of power and domination get flattened and simplified into what is essentially opposing sports teams fighting over who gets to claim masses of people as their rightful possessions, and who will be allowed to enforce their sovereignty and demand our submission. [ ]

What happens when people see politics this way, rather than a web of social relations that are determined and shaped by us collectively, is that they feel that their own political autonomy will always be up for grabs and they just need to choose the better master to fight for. [ ]

Of course, many also seek to become the master themselves. In that case, seeing authoritarianism this way serves another function: naturalizing their desire for power over others. Because everything is authority so it’s justified or at least inevitable! [ ]

We have to ask, then, what function we actually want “authoritarianism” to serve? What is *our* point in speaking about it? Why does it feel important to not let its definition be expanded into meaninglessness? [ ]

Well, like with terms such as “patriarchy” and “settler-colonialism” and “white supremacy” and “capitalism” the point is to speak to a dynamic of power that is at work in our world and shapes our social conditions and our struggle to make those conditions liberatory. [ ]

Authoritarianism allows us to speak about and challenge forms of social organization in which groups of people expand their own political power by undermining the political agency and autonomy of others via the use of force. It is a tool in an overall analysis of power. [ ]

Importantly, it allows us to offer pointed critiques of the very projects whose advocates seek to obliterate the definition of authoritarianism in order to obfuscate their goals to assert their own sovereignty. Which should tell you why this discourse has continued for so long. [ ]

Oh gosh, I’ve actually missed an important aspect of this argument I wanted to tackle, which is the assertion that the state kills people only in its own defense. [ ]

While this in, in one form, true, it is certainly not in the way the initial claim presented it.

The State absolutely cracks down on people who attempt to challenge its sovereignty, but we HAVE to speak to the reality that it is in the State’s very structure to coerce, torture, and kill people in basic maintenance of its power. [ ]

The State can only function if it is constantly creating destinations between a constructed citizenry and noncitizenry. [ ]

It does this because its fundamental function is in constantly extracting (stealing) resources just to be able to maintain its ability to hold on to centralized power. [ ]

Again, we reveal the point of the claim that the State attacks only direct challenges to its authority and such attacks are “self-defense.” It serves to obfuscate the inherent exploitative nature of State power, and lets people believe it can be used for a different purpose. [ ]

In that framing, one can say “the bourgeoisie state attacks and kills us because we are its enemies in battle” and leads to the claim that “once we have control of the state, it will only be targeted at the “correct” people.” [ ]

This serves to obfuscate the extractive nature of State (centralized) power & lets us off the hook for asking questions such as “whose power will be extracted to maintain the apparatus of the State?” And “who will have to be constructed as “enemies” to validate that extraction?” [ ]

Twitter Thread (August 2020)

This multi-part thread I did in the summer of 2020 is much too long to format here in the same manner as the other threads, so I have compiled it all together in this pdf.