Matty

had a hospital stay which caused me to miss an entire week of work. Money's going to be tight for a while, anything helps: Venmo - Matt-Thomas-316 Cashapp - $MattyTWV Paypal - MattyTWV

Got two notifications in a row from people *requesting* money on CashApp. Please be careful of that if you're trying to send.

I saw an old clip of the late David Graeber doing the Noam Chomsky thing re: what kinds of authority can in fact be justified if you're an anarchist. I don't consider it a very interesting question and would urge anarchists to stop answering it - let authority justify itself, if it can. We've been a bit heavy on Bakunin lately as I've been doing a lot of reading about him, but we haven't actually come up with a new or better answer to this question since his famous quote about bootmakers.

"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure." - Bakunin, God and the State

satanism is so funny it's like ooh I hate Christianity soooo much I'm not going to step outside of it or learn about other religions cuz it's the only religion I care about at all so I'm still going to base my thing around Christianity I'm just gonna be a hardcore contrarian about it

"Marx speaks disdainfully of this Lumpenproletariat.... but in them, and only in them—and not in the bourgeois-minded strata of the working class—is crystallized the whole power and intelligence of the Social Revolution. In moments of crisis, the masses will not hesitate to burn down their own homes and neighborhoods.... they develop a passion for destruction.... of itself this negative passion is not nearly enough to attain the revolutionary heights.... But without it, revolution would be impossible. Revolution requires extensive and widespread destruction, a fecund and renovating destruction, since in this way, and only in this way, are new worlds born." - Bakunin

'Bakunin had no blanket formula covering all revolutions. Revolutions in underdeveloped countries with large peasant populations would take on a character different from those in relatively advanced industrial nations with well-organized labor movements, a substantial middle class, and great numbers of affluent farmers. In contrast to Marx, Bakunin believed that the revolution would be sparked by people with “the ‘devil’ in them”; by the “unchaining of the ‘evil’ passions” of those Marx called the Lumpenproletariat. Bakunin’s Lumpenproletariat, however, was broader than Marx’s, since it included all the submerged classes: unskilled, unemployed, and poor workers, poor peasant proprietors, landless agricultural laborers, oppressed racial minorities, alienated and idealistic youth, déclassé intellectuals, and “bandits” (by whom Bakunin meant insurrectionary “Robin Hoods” like Pugachev, Stenka Razin, and the Italian Carbonari).' - Sam Dolgoff, introduction to Bakunin on Anarchy