Free Range Egghead

On the day I last posted, I suddenly found I couldn't log in. After trying to reset my password, I discovered that my account had been banned. No notification, no email, nothing. I have no idea why my blog was banned; malicious reports and bot flagging are possibilities that have occurred to me. I asked why they'd banned my account, which they took as an "appeal", which it took them three weeks to process. They then restored my account - still with no explanation of why it was banned. This was all rather distressing and made me rather averse to starting up here again. Because there's no way I can avoid doing something which isn't banned and which nobody will tell me what it was I did that led to the wrongful ban. Who knows when the same thing might happen again?

In the meantime, I moved my operations to Substack, and reposted my old content on freerangeegghead.substack.com. Some of it is paywalled there, and I'm now charging a small amount for subscriptions. I'm still putting out several articles a day, and some articles are still free.

The Normal and the Pathological: Frantz Fanon, Georges Canguilhem, and Colonial Fascism, by Jacob Kripp, Theory and Event 28 no. 4, 2025.

This theoretical article reads Fanon’s critique of colonialism and racism as an application of Canguilhem’s theory of the social construction of pathology. Fanon is well-known as a theorist of anti-colonial liberation and anti-racism. Canguilhem is less well-known; a French scholar working on science and medicine, his discussion of the social construction of normality was a major influence on Foucault. The discussion also relates both theorists to a broader constellation including Césaire, Senghor, the Black Panthers, Foucault, Deleuze/Guattari, and Theweleit, who all variously contrast colonial/fascist/microfascist devivification with a vitalist opposing force.

The essay interrogates Frantz Fanon’s paradoxical claim that racism is “normal” within colonial societies, situating this claim within Fanon’s broader engagement with the problem of the normal and the pathological. Fanon suggests that racism has a logic of its own, even though he also treats it as variously perverse, phobic, delirious, prelogical, and mad. It is the latter criticism which has been more influential on current writers such as Mbembe, and this article tries to bend the stick back the other way.

The essay argues that Fanon’s characterization of racism as “normal” reflects its structural embeddedness within colonial capitalist culture rather than a moral or psychological endorsement. To clarify this tension, the essay places Fanon in dialogue with the underacknowledged influence of Georges Canguilhem’s philosophy of life, particularly The Normal and the Pathological.Racism isn’t “normal” in the sense of being healthy, rational, or historically useful; it is “normal” in the sense that it is based on an artificial creation of a norm. The colonial norm turns colonised peoples into monstrous pathologies relative to this artificial norm. Fanon explicitly references Canguilhem in his first book.

Canguilhem develops his theory mainly in relation to disease, which he relates to the theme of elevating humanity above nature. Canguilhem views positivism as a politically loaded attempt to circumscribe life, using definitions of normal and abnormal with moral valuations (the abnormal are seen as less valuable). Kripp suggests, following Esposito, that Canguilhem’s view was formed in relation to the Nazi occupation of France and his experiences with institutional psychology (the radical strand associated with Guattari and Oury). Rather than an irrational aberration from liberal societies, Canguilhem saw fascism as expressing mass cathexis of social hierarchies.

Drawing on Canguilhem, the essay argues that Fanon conceptualizes colonial racism as a fascist biopolitics that equates the colonial norm with life itself, while casting colonized populations as pathological threats to be eliminated. Colonialism thus appears as a form of race war in which the distinction between the normal and the pathological justifies pervasive violence, up to and including genocide.

Through analyses of the family, patriarchy, psychiatry, and colonial warfare in Black Skin, White Masks, A Dying Colonialism, and The Wretched of the Earth, the essay shows how Fanon understands colonial fascism as operating across psychic, social, and geopolitical scales. Fanon’s famous example of a child reacting with fear to a black person involves a definition of blackness as somehow contrary to a (white) norm. This is then related to desires by some black people to become white, as if they are sick and need to be cured. The idea of normality in society is closely related to psychological definitions of normality within the family, and thus to psychoanalysis. The ideas of normality and superiority/inferiority involved here are simply products of a particular, biased idea of the norm. Fanon maintains that so-called ‘North Africa Syndrome’ was a product of colonialism and the internal clash between an alien, colonial norm and one’s actual situation. Integrationist practices (for example, directed against the hijab) seek to normalise colonised people but in fact reproduce a continual paternalism. In psychiatry, Algerians were treated as if they were lobotomized Europeans – pathological deviations from a European norm.

The article discusses expanded theories of fascism in the 1970s, including those of the Black Panthers, George Jackson, Angela Davis, Deleuze and Guattari, Theweleit, and Foucault. These theories relate fascism to racialization, carceralism, biopolitics, repressive desire, and enslavement. Fascism was defined as an orientation to life, not just a politics; it seeks to devitalize everything. Fanon adopted this view in relation to the Algerian War. Fanon also suggests that politics in France, Britain, and America are driven by a fascist delirium. In Algeria, settlers became part of a fascist structure as informants and civilian enforcers.

At the same time, the essay emphasizes Fanon’s affirmative biopolitics. The abnormal, says Fanon, is he who ‘demands, appeals, and begs’ (rather than accepting the status quo), which Kripp takes to mean someone who seeks another way of life, who refuses the idea that the present system is normal and defines normality. Fanon may have adopted vitalism from other anti-colonial theorists such as Césaire and Senghor, for whom vitalism became a kind of romantic nationalism.

Reworking Canguilhem’s vitalist reversal of the normal and the pathological, Fanon revalues the “abnormal”—figures such as the beggar, the criminal, and the lumpenproletariat—as expressions of life’s creative capacity to generate new norms. The culmination of this vitalist anti-fascism is not merely the lumpenproletariat but Fanon’s vision of Pan-Africanism and a voluntary African Legion, through which a new form of collective life, liberated from colonial norms, could emerge. In this way, Fanon repositions life itself away from colonial fascism and toward a future-oriented, global anti-colonial order.

What it means for radicals: I read and was very impressed by Theweleit’s work some time ago. Once someone starts recognizing devivification dynamics and other aspects of fascism on Theweleit’s model, one starts noticing them everywhere, and a lot of things start making more sense. Colonial dynamics are still playing out in US warmongering, in the Gaza genocide, etc., though I sometimes wonder whether the colonial model is overused today – there’s a lot of situations where authoritarian microfascisms are either disentangled from race or entangled in non-standard ways, particularly in postcolonial states. The same kind of pathologizing categories are also still pervasive in psychiatry and psychology, and lurk in the background of criminology and the police-state. These are the fields where difference is most easily classified as deficit, inferiority, deviance, threat, etc., in manners which remain fundamentally the same as those Theweleit theorizes.

There’s not a logical contradiction between saying that an ideology is pathological or irrational from one’s own point of view and also saying that, within its boundaries, it functions in a coherent way and posits certain things as normal, healthy, etc. One is dealing here with something like Laing’s distinction between assessing whether a bird or plane is conforming to a flight group’s formation and assessing whether the entire formation is heading the right way. However, there’s a risk of performative contradiction in both positing something as pathological and criticizing the phenomenon of pathologization itself. How are one’s own accusations of pathology immune to one’s own critique?

The issue was already present a hundred years earlier in Stirner’s work, as a critique of humanist, socialist, liberal, and other norms which compare people to an ideal or essence of human nature, or to an image of “the human” or some other category which is constructed by averaging or adding together different unique individuals. Stirner takes all such norms as at once delusional – they refer to something which is taken to exist even though it cannot be found in sensuous reality – and politically oppressive – they generate a gap between all individuals and the norm, which nobody can embody because it is an abstract phantasm, and they produce particular intense oppressions of those who deviate from it most radically.

People who have never read Stirner are feeling their way back towards similar positions, but via paths so embedded in specific (racial, psychiatric, sexuality-based…) systems that the overall critique of norms is blurred – often with the effect that a different norm is reasserted. For example, I’ve noticed a certain tendency to leverage the refusal to pathologize in reactionary ways, as a refusal to recognise incapacity and a bolstering of a universal norm applied to everyone. It is taken as unproblematic to punish, use violence, exclude, etc., so long as one refrains from classifying the victim of these practices as inherently inferior or different. When someone points out that people are being punished and persecuted for being different, or for things they can’t help, this is ruled-out as politically incorrect and stigmatizing. This twisting of the critique of pathologization aids the present totalitarian and microfascist tendencies.

In the same way, applying psychoanalysis in politics is a dangerous matter (which is not to say we shouldn’t do it, but caution is needed – it is usually done too clumsily). To begin with, psychoanalytic symptoms are by definition beyond the control of the rational ego, and therefore, not something people can be held responsible for. Secondly, political phenomena on a mass scale involve people with a huge range of different individual psychological formations or pathologies. I don’t think “societies” can have psychopathologies except as aggregations of individual effects, because “societies” don’t have substantial existence, a psyche, or an unconscious. The aggregate effects – best theorized so far in Reich’s early work – validate certain complexes as “normal” and even proactively produce them, while pathologizing different complexes. However, a move towards psychoanalytic awareness entails rejecting the whole idea of a desirable norm distinct from individual development. One cannot simply replace an old norm with a new one. I think today, in identity politics, liberalism, and elsewhere, there is a very strong, microfascist normativity which insists that people must conform to a narrow range of action and speech or else be deemed political monsters, leading to biopolitical exclusion which can even lead to death. The norm is different but the structure (copied from Maoism) is the same as in fascism. It’s precisely by valorizing difference and affinity-based grouping, and ripping from normies their “right” to treat others as inferior using any norm, that fascism is resisted.

Protesters in Sudan, from here.

Political togetherness: pursuits for change among the protesting youth in Sudan 2018–2022, by Mai Azzam and Lovise Aalen, Critical African Studies 2026.

This article, based on interviews with participants, examines the dynamics of a major protest wave which brought down the Sudanese government. Sudan was ruled by a longstanding Islamist regime, led by Omer al-Bashir, which fell to mass protests in 2019 (after 30 years of rule). The protests inspired the military to remove Bashir, but protests continued, seeking an end to military rule. Eventually a transition was attempted, but ended in a coup in 2021. Since then, a civil war has broken out between the regular Sudan Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, the former janjaweed militias which had been absorbed into the state.

This article focuses mainly on events before this tragic ending. It examines the role of Sudanese youth in the 2018–2019 uprising and subsequent protests, situating their activism within a longer trajectory of regime-youth interactions under the Islamist National Congress Party (NCP) regime (1989–2019). Youth were the main group protesting from 2018 onwards. It should be noted here that the category of youth in Africa is not necessarily age-based, but relates to economic independence and life-stage. Youth is a condition of “waithood” or waiting for adult status. This does not necessarily exclude caring for parents or siblings. Youth politics in Africa is often about defending and extending the ‘youth habitus’ and its autonomy, mobility, and security, as well as transition to the adult world. Youths are stereotyped as ignorant and idle, but show agency in protests and subcultures. Many youth are from the so-called underclass, but middle-class civil society leaders often lead movements. One of the factors in the relative success of the 2018 protests was better than usual coordination between middle-class and underclass youths.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with youth activists in Khartoum conducted between 2018 and 2022, the study argues that youth were not only the primary agents of protest but also the drivers of a distinct form of collective political practice conceptualised as “political togetherness.” This concept captures the temporary but powerful formation of cross-class, cross-gender, and cross-ethnic alliances rooted in shared exclusion from formal politics, forged through protest, voluntarism, and everyday public engagement beyond institutional and party-based politics. In particular, it refers to a temporary transcendence of political divisions and other rifts, in political alliances and actions. This was partly possible because of a sense of shared exclusion. It refers to an empirical experience of real affinities and projects, not a discursive construction of a “we”. It is temporary in that people often go back to their groups and roles when the movement ends.

The article traces how youth agency developed under authoritarian constraints through charity work, voluntarism, and informal networks, which provided relatively safe spaces for public engagement while fostering skills, trust, and political consciousness. The regime was trying to increase religious penetration of society, and operating ideologically-based patronage which also favoured well-connected ingroups. The rulers had tried to co-opt youths through missionary projects, while also severely oppressing their free movement and association. The position was especially bad in the 1990s, with widespread abuse, conscription, and mass flight from the country. There was a liberalisation after the breakaway of South Sudan and the end of the related war, but repression intensified after the Arab Spring, and during the 2013 anti-austerity protests.

The regime tried to keep the streets securitised and apolitical, with no protests, and even cultural activities heavily regulated. Gender segregation was enforced to some degree. Another initiative, the setting-up of a large number of universities, was intended to dilute the student movement but had the opposite effect, encouraging youth networking while also creating a new issue of graduate un/underemployment. The authors suggest that reduced oil revenues and lack of coordination corroded the system before 2018. The regime had three main strategies for containing youth revolt: violent repression, demonisation of protesters, and hijacking or capture leading to depoliticisation. In 2010, more than 30 youth charities came together in an umbrella group, Diil Ahali (meaning ‘These are my people/folks’).

Voluntarism or charity work emerged in response to this context, although it was also at risk of demonisation or capture. Initiatives such as Nafeer (a youth-led flood relief agency) and Al Shari (Shari’Al Hawadith, Emergency Street Youth Initiative) functioned as incubators for collective action, redefining politics as service, solidarity, and care in the face of state failure. Nafeer formed rapidly amidst an emergency, relied heavily on social media, and used local (not foreign) funding and concepts (nafeer is a traditional term for mutual aid in rural Sudan). This made the group hard for the government to condemn, even though it maintained detachment from the regime. It was also apolitical, but with a subtext that politics should serve those in need, and veiled criticism of the regime. Transparency was important. Nafeer challenged the depoliticisation of the streets, coming into public spaces under a flag (Islamic charity) promoted by the regime. The regime eventually targeted the group for infiltration and pressure, but this reinforced resistance.

Al Shari worked on health provision, including issues of corruption in the health system. Again, the group relied on social media and crowdsourced donations. The group is also noted for giving a prominent platform to women from marginalised backgrounds, after which regime-friendly journalists started to attack the group.

These experiences proved crucial during critical junctures, particularly the violent suppression of the 2013 protests, during which at least 185 people were killed, which generated shared memories of trauma and resistance that later underpinned mass mobilisation in 2018. Political groups had emerged from 2009, with Girifnaattempting to unseat Bashir in elections. However, young people came to see opposition parties as failing them. The article suggests that Girifna was a non-hierarchical space. Although the repression drove some back into private spaces, it increased togetherness among others, and created new symbols of resistance, with the dead remembered as martyrs. After 2013, people involved in youth charities became more openly political, and started developing underground, unsurveilled communication methods. This bore fruit in the movement from 2018 onwards.

The emergence of youth-dominated neighbourhood (resistance) committees further extended political togetherness at the grassroots level, enabling sustained protest, mutual aid, and resistance to co-optation during the transitional period and after the 2021 military coup. Initially created as organising cells during the 2013 protests, these informal groups became widespread in 2018 and made up the majority of protesters. They also acted as service providers and supporters of civilians, including during the later civil war. Before 2018, these groups used social and cultural activities as covers for political gatherings. Various authorities tried to co-opt the groups after 2018, for example by creating state-backed formal equivalents. However, the people involved in the committees resisted being co-opted.

Protesters staged sit-ins across the country, which lasted for months until the notorious Rapid Support Forces (RSF, the ex-Janjaweed who are now a faction in the civil war) massacred 126 people. Protesters organised on an anti-political party basis, using demonstrations, social media, and grassroots resistance committees. The sit-down in Khartoum, outside the military headquarters, is described as generating a ‘sens of utopia’ and a ‘new kind of community’, stimulating a sense of hope.

Protests were reduced but continued as a transition was negotiated, but ended with the civil war. After the 2021 coup, divisions began to emerge because of perceived betrayals by political parties and conservative groups, which began to work with the transitional regime. Conservative actors were seen as connected to older generations or as political elites. The authors emphasise that middle-class civil society groups were involved in the protests and seemed committed to radical change. Social media played an important role in spreading information and images rapidly and producing cascades. Some of the groups have persisted in the civil war period, and are now running services such as hospitals and water provision.

Conceptually, the article challenges age-based definitions of youth by adopting a generational and relational understanding that foregrounds “waithood,” class, and positionality in Sudanese society. Youth protests are interpreted not only as demands for regime change but also as struggles over adulthood, dignity, and the right to youthfulness, captured in slogans such as tasqut bas! (“just fall, that’s all!”) and “it will fall and we will marry.” The study concludes that Sudan’s youth-led uprising represents an accumulation of diverse resistance modalities developed over decades of repression, and that political togetherness, despite its temporality and internal tensions, remains a critical foundation for imagining alternative forms of governance, solidarity, and civic life, particularly amid the ongoing war that erupted in 2023.

Achieving Equality: Why There Was Not as Much Inequality in Prehistoric Europe as We Imagine, by John Robb, American Antiquity 90, no. 3, 2025.

This article, based on archaeological evidence, is about the extent of inequality mainly in the Neolithic period, in Europe. This might seem distant, but the issue is very important regarding the question of how to create and maintain non-hierarchical relations. In particular, the article indicates that small villages practising agriculture can be non-hierarchical, and do not automatically degenerate into hierarchical states. The author directs the argument against other scholars in their field, but in the radical field it affects two main adversaries: Marxists and others who use linear development models, in which later, “higher” stages are assumed to be superior to those which came before them, and anarcho-primitivists, who think that technologies like agriculture brought about a sudden transition to hierarchy, which can be reversed only by getting rid of all the technologies responsible.

This article advances a reinterpretation of prehistoric Europe, especially the Central Mediterranean (i.e. Italy and its surrounds), arguing that inequality was neither pervasive nor the dominant organizing principle of most societies before the Iron Age (i.e. before about 1200 BCE). This is a response to earlier scholars’ arguments that the transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic involved a shift from group-oriented rituals to prestige competitions among individuals. Archaeologists studying inequality have tended to reduce it to individual political power, and then try to theorise how ambitious individuals impose their will on others (as opposed, for example, to Marxist, feminist, or Foucauldian views). Archaeologists thus tend to overreact to signs of inequality, taking any differentiation (such as wealth disparities) as proof that a society is not egalitarian and is therefore hierarchical.

Instead, European prehistory is best understood as a long, diverse history of actively maintained equality, in which inequality existed episodically, in constrained forms, and was repeatedly limited by social practices, cultural values, and structural conditions. The author references a number of approaches including Geertz, Foucault, James C. Scott, Marxism, feminism, postcolonial theory, anarchists such as Graeber, and the idea of ‘heterarchy’ or situations of multiple horizontal structures and organizing principles. These are bundled under the label “people’s history,” taken from Zinn. The emphasis on tactics used to resist the emergence of domination, such as mobility, separation of powers, and potlatch-style wealth redistribution, is taken as specific to anarchism.

The author first surveys archaeological indicators of inequality across long chronological scales, showing that although markers of social distinction appear intermittently from the Upper Paleolithic onward, they rarely coalesced into stable, institutionalized hierarchies. Early manifestations of “elite” behaviour in the Central Mediterranean often involved ritual authority, leadership in collective projects, or limited prestige display rather than durable class divisions. Clear differentiation in residences, consumption, and funerary treatment becomes visible only relatively late, only in specific regions and mainly in the first millennium BCE.

The author questions whether elaborate burial mounds containing treasure hoards and the existence of ritual sites such as Stonehenge are evidence of permanent hierarchy. Special burial mounds may be those of ritual specialists or people dying in exceptional circumstances. Archaeologists too easily read off social inequality from burial evidence, and assume that anyone buried more elaborately was a powerful “chief” with some kind of command power. The author provides a long list of supposed indicators of the existence of elites, which might also be explicable without them. For example, spatial segregation of burials might indicate inequalities or might have other sources such as isolating dangerous dead or religious or kinship reasons. Large buildings are not necessarily elite homes but might be collective or ritual. Even apparently hierarchical features such as hillforts, “elite” burials, and proto-urban sites may reflect horizontally organized communities. Most of these indicators in any case did not arise until very late or were unevenly distributed.

Table from the paper, showing the frequency of each supposed indicator of hierarchy in different sub-periods. None are common except trade, and several do not follow linear patterns. For example, large-scale construction actually became less common.

From this evidence, two core conclusions are drawn. First, while elements of social distinction were widespread, but did not provide the dominant principle of social organization. Equality was more fundamental to everyday social organization for most people across most periods. Second, inequality was historically variable in form: at different times it was expressed through ritual knowledge, skilled craftsmanship, personal display, or limited control of resources, always embedded within broader, heterogeneous systems of social reproduction rather than structuring society as a whole.

The article then outlines a “people’s history” of prehistoric Europe that emphasizes bottom-up dynamics. In the Paleolithic and Mesolithic “Age of Mobility,” high residential mobility, small group size, and social sanctions limited coercion and material accumulation. Archaeological patterns – ephemeral sites, minimal mortuary commemoration, and artistic conventions that avoid individual glorification – are interpreted as showing the existence of mechanisms discouraging hierarchy.

The rapid spread of the Neolithic (rather than Paleolithic) way of life, involving extensive farming, is explained not as demographic saturation but as a social process driven by village fissioning to avoid the formation of hierarchies. Early sedentary communities were prone to internal tensions, and the availability of land enabled groups to split rather than develop hierarchical political structures. Villages constantly ‘budded off’ new settlements in the event of conflict. Cultural homogeneity and collective projects (such as ditch digging or house building) integrated communities without centralized authority.

In the middle and later Neolithic, the author identifies a system of radical heterarchy, characterized by multiple, structurally independent domains of value: craft production, long-distance trade, ritual, and kinship. Skilled crafting and extensive exchange networks created value and social relations without generating political dominance. Different crafted and trade goods related to different, unlinked social projects rather than general hierarchies. Ritual leadership existed but was narrowly bounded, dependent on collective consent, and embedded in long-term cycles of experimentation rather than stable authority. This configuration is conceptualized as a “ritual mode of production,” in which social energy was channelled into knowledge, creativity, and reproduction rather than accumulation and control. Rituals are taken to most likely be collective projects, even when large-scale construction happened. The diversity of social structures protected against the emergence of hierarchy.

Kinship, increasingly emphasized in the fourth and third millennia BC, is treated as politically ambiguous: it could support solidarity and equality while also containing latent ranking. Archaeological evidence suggests that kinship was generally mobilized toward cohesion rather than stratification, with individuals retaining the ability to shift affiliations if leaders overreached.

Bronze Age societies introduced new forms of personal display and performative personhood, particularly through gendered assemblages associated with warriors, feasting, and burial. However, these displays are interpreted as self-limiting and socially constrained rather than evidence of entrenched elites. Wealth was rarely accumulated beyond personal objects, leadership depended on generosity and reputation, and social capital resided primarily in relationships rather than material control. Mechanisms such as burial deposition, hoarding, collective ownership, gossip, and mobility acted to curb inequality. The author also notes that, if status-relevant wealth mainly consisted of worn and displayed objects, it was limited to what a person could wear at the same time.

In the Iron Age, some regions show increasing differentiation and emerging control over productive resources, yet many societies remained heterarchical and negotiated. Ostentatious display actually decreased. Colonial encounters further complicated these dynamics, simultaneously creating opportunities for inequality and for resisting or reshaping it through selective engagement, hybrid identities, and frontier zones. At this stage, however, some records indicate the existence of a better-off group. For example, there are indications of slavery and of ranked differences in diet.

The article concludes that prehistoric Europe should not be framed as a linear progression toward hierarchy. Inequality was consistently present but rarely dominant; it was integrated into social systems that also contained robust mechanisms for limiting power. Rather than millennia of stagnation, prehistory represents long-term stability, resilience, and sustained experimentation with equality. Equality emerges not as a passive default but as an active, collective achievement, one with potential lessons for the present.

What it means for radicals: This article could very productively be cross-read with The Shamanic Trace by Peter Lamborn Wilson/Hakim Bey. Some aspects also resonate with Clastres’ theory that power-dispersal mechanisms actively ward-off hierarchy in non-hierarchical societies, and with infrapolitics in Scott and Graeber.

An artist's depiction of neolithic life, from here.

One important point here is that the author distinguishes between the existence of certain observable differences and the existence of a pervasive social hierarchy (two things which are often conflated in radical theory as well). The author is clearly oriented to equality or at least non-domination as a goal, but does not see the matter as all-or-nothing. Some differences might not be hierarchical at all, while others are hierarchical only in a trivial sense (e.g. someone being better at metalwork than someone else, or having better fashion sense). A society can be non-dominatory without having to have strict equality, as long as the forms of inequality emerging are contained in ways which limit their impact. The issue is not the mere presence of social inequalities, but whether they are organized into an overall social order. Unstable, temporary inequalities can exist in an otherwise egalitarian and stateless society. I think this is a better basis for building horizontal systems than is a more purist approach which will too easily fail or create conflicts – though work is needed on which types of inequality produce domination and in what circumstances. This is also relevant to the rather over-the-top concerns about informal hierarchies and forms of cultural power in anarchist spaces which are having such a disruptive effect today. The fact that some people contribute more ideas, do more of the activity, or have a charismatic influence does not mean that a space is “not really anarchist” or that pervasive hierarchies are reappearing.

Expansion and Regression in Oceanic Experience: A Model of Psychedelic Consciousness for Psychoanalysis, by Karen Peoples and Megan Rundel, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 35 no. 6, 2025.

This paper examines the clinical and theoretical implications of psychedelic-assisted psychoanalysis through an in-depth case study of “Daniel” (not his real name), a middle-aged man with chronic anxiety, shame, sexual inhibition, and severe self-criticism rooted in early relational trauma. There used to be more people doing psychoanalysis and related therapies while on psychedelic drugs, because the peak popularity of psychoanalysis coincided with the period when psychedelics were both popular and legal. The paper shows that, in a particular guided environment, a psychoactive drug – ketamine – had positive effects in remembering and re-experiencing oceanic flow-states and processing dissociated emotions. The article’s focused on what happens when someone undergoes psychoanalysis while on drugs. Against the view that this causes “regression” (i.e. the analyst relates to an earlier, usually childlike, aspect of the patient), psychedelic experience is taken as a ‘unique expanded state of consciousness’ and ‘a powerful force for healing’.

We are told that Daniel is a straight, middle-class white man in his 50s, raised Catholic in the US midwest, who was paralysed by sexual anxiety in his relationship with a partner, and was also an avid collector who struggled to part with anything. He’s described as obsessional, relentlessly self-critical, and prone to unproductive rumination. (The power of defence-mechanisms to derail the analytic process is a recurring problem in psychoanalysis of obsessive personalities). He had been a sensitive, creative, and ikmaginative child who was less able to rebel than his older sister. His mother was volatile, eccentric, and obsessed with keeping up appearances and his father was often absent. She sometimes threw things and routinely humiliated Daniel, but she was also needy and distressed when he moved away. Daniel internalized his mother’s ‘harsh and humiliating voice’ in self-criticism as weak and pathetic, but idealized his parents and upbringing as perfect. His anger, fear, shame, and sadness had all been walled-off and turned against himself. This was accompanied by an internal prohibition on anger, neediness, and sexual feelings, of which he was unaware. He had a pattern of falling in love with older women who usually rejected him. In analysis, he formed a dependent transference and tormented himself about needy and sexual feelings.

Daniel’s treatment included (at his own request) ketamine-assisted psychoanalytic sessions embedded within a long-term analytic relationship. Experiences on ketamine were both unsettling and brought positive moments. Daniel gradually developed tolerance of the loosened boundaries he experienced on the drug, and found respite from his self-criticism. Ketamine sessions initially facilitated access to dissociated affects and regressive material, including grief and abandonment anxiety, highlighting both the therapeutic potential and risks of regression when containment is fragile.

The second session was dominated by abandonment fears triggered by the analyst’s vacation, and guilt related to these fears, which had reached persecutory proportions. This session seems to have had destabilising effects, and the authors relate this to a desire for a merger with an unconscious ideal mother. They take this as an undesirable defence-mechanism related to early deprivation of such experiences. Daniel then demanded more ketamine sessions, but the analyst instead worked on building his capacity for self-containment and softening persecutory feelings of self-hatred.

The third session went better, with the analyst encouraging the formation of an ‘observing ego… outside the emotional storm’ and with ‘self-compassion’ and acceptance of feelings. In other words, the use of drugs helped the analyst’s project of strengthening the patient’s ego, by rapidly bringing down the strong defence mechanisms which otherwise prevented access to what the patient (from the analyst’s point of view) needed to integrate. They add that this also requires that analysts be prepared to surrender into a state of fusion with the analysand. In this session, Daniel moved fluidly through multiple states of consciousness: somatic and emotional regression, liminal reverie, autobiographical memory, and ultimately a profound unitive experience characterized by ego dissolution, awe, and a sense of spiritual vastness.

The article focuses on a particular moment which was a kind of breakthrough. Recalling a formative adolescent memory of swimming at night beneath a star-filled sky, Daniel described a moment of “vanishing” that permanently altered his sense of self and spirituality. This expansive state then functioned as a psychic container, enabling him to process previously inaccessible grief, rage, and terror associated with family death, religion, and early neglect, which had previously been dissociated and inaccessible to the analysand’s ego and to the therapist. The authors interpret this as an expanded state of consciousness (“at-one-ment with O,” in Bion’s terms) rather than a return to infantile symbiosis. After the breakthrough, Daniel was able to grieve the loss of his relatives.

This experience functioned as a psychic container, enabling Daniel to access and metabolize profound grief, rage, and loss that had previously been dissociated. Daniel recalled negative experiences of swimming and church, fear and anger at his grandmother’s funeral, and enjoyment of burying toys and watching them be uncovered by the waves.

Theoretically, the authors focus on how non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOS), facilitated by ketamine, challenge traditional psychoanalytic assumptions that unitive or “oceanic” experiences necessarily reflect regression to infantile symbiosis or pathological fusion.Drawing on contemporary psychoanalysis, infant research, and psychedelic neuroscience, the authors argue that classical notions of infantile symbiosis and regression are theoretically flawed and clinically limiting. They propose instead that psychedelic experiences often induce expanded states of consciousness that are not tied to developmental time. These states, characterized by ego loosening, awe, and experiences of unity, can be normative, transformative, and developmentally progressive rather than regressive.

Neuroscientific findings are integrated to show how psychedelics disrupt the Default Mode Network (DMN) and hierarchical predictive coding, allowing bottom-up sensory and affective material to emerge. In neuroscience, the DMN is involved in rumination, self-assessment, fixed ideas of self and others, and “ownership” of thoughts. It is most active when at rest or thinking about oneself. A different network, the Salience Network (SN) mediates between internal and external stimuli. Hierarchical predictive coding refers to domination of the emotional parts of the brain by the “higher” cortical regions involved in conceptual thought. It tends to make people more prone to stereotype and oblivious to sensuous experience. People “see what they effect to see,” effectively hallucinating their preconceptions over and over. Toning-down or turning-off the DMN and hierarchical predictive coding makes people more open-minded and less rigid, but also undermines their ego-boundaries. The authors also cite evidence that psychedelics increase neuroplasticity and access to primary process phenomena.

This neurobiological process parallels psychoanalytic aims: loosening rigid self-narratives, accessing dissociated affects, and facilitating the emergence of primary process material (i.e. material such as dreams, personal symbolism, and the basis for symptoms). Psychedelics are thus framed as amplifiers of psychoanalytic work rather than substitutes for it. The case of Daniel illustrates how psychedelic-assisted sessions can involve both regressive and expansive processes. Early ketamine sessions elicited childlike dependency, abandonment anxiety, and regressive longings tied to Daniel’s unmet early needs and harsh internalized mother. These experiences required careful containment within the analytic relationship.

To conceptualize such phenomena, the authors propose a continuum model of consciousness with two axes: developmental maturation (regression/progression over time) and degree of differentiation (from ordinary waking consciousness to undifferentiated, ineffable states). They delineate five overlapping modes of consciousness: ordinary/finite, emotional/sensory, liminal, archetypal/social unconscious, and ineffable/infinite. They also argue that psychological health depends on flexibility across these states rather than fixation in any single mode. Psychedelic experiences may involve regression along the developmental axis, expansion along the consciousness axis, or both simultaneously.

The types of experience the authors theorise are:

Ordinary/finite: where people feel themselves as egos with definite boundaries and cunctions, and make distinctions to navigate an external world. This is the usual experience today and is also where conscious insight occurs.

Emotional/sensory: overarching, usually conscious feelings of like (affinity) and dislike (aversion), and of emotions such as anger, fear, sadness, and pleasure. This also encompasses bodily flow-experience. People can have a witnessing ego at these times, and if they don’t, they might experience the emotions as persecutory “things” separate from them.

Liminal: primary process experiencing similar to dreams, midway between conscious and unconscious. Includes imaginative experience.

Archetypal/social unconscious a state where ego categorizing is near-absent and people are receptive to culturally charged, collective symbols. Common in large group experiences and after trauma.

Ineffable/infinite or unitive: the most undifferentiated kind of experience, in which thinking and language are suspended; found in mystical experiences, psychedelic experiences, and advanced meditation.

From the article; the letters stand for the five experience-types.

The authors argue that interpreting such experiences solely as regression to infantile symbiosis misconstrues their clinical meaning and risks foreclosing therapeutic growth. The position he criticises is derived from Freud, who regarded oceanic feelings as returns to an early infantile experience of imagined symbiosis with the mother. On this basis, analysts (including leading theorists like Klein and Balint) have come to see cases of patients experiencing symbiosis with the analyst as pathological and undesirable. However, the authors side with Goldberg, who thinks that fusion is normal and desirable: a person with a well-lived life will have a sense of communion with the world, even if there are pathological variations on how it arises or is understood.

Neuroscientific findings regarding the default mode network, predictive coding, and psychedelic-induced ego dissolution are integrated to support the idea that psychedelics relax rigid top-down self-narratives, allowing bottom-up sensory, affective, and symbolic material to emerge. Within a context providing sufficient relational and analytic containment, this dedifferentiation can foster psychological flexibility, insight, and emotional integration.

Clinically, the paper emphasizes the analyst’s role as container and witness rather than interpreter during psychedelic sessions, advocating for an attitude of openness, “not-knowing,” and receptivity to expanded states. Automatic interpretation of unitive experiences as regression, the authors warn, risks foreclosing therapeutic growth and misunderstanding patients’ lived experiences.

In the important third ketamine session, the authors suggest that Daniel moved through a series of states, including regressive and transitional ones, with a dedifferentiation and loosening of his self-identity. This initially leads to a liminal experience marked by chill. This triggered memories of church and swimming, which the authors take as screen memories for the mother’s coldness. These passed via the alternative model of his sister’s confidence to the experience of the ‘fort-da game’ of the sea uncovering toys, followed by the swim in which he took on confidence similar to his sister’s. This is when the undifferentiated ineffable experience occurred.

The paper concludes that psychedelic-assisted psychoanalysis offers a powerful opportunity to expand psychoanalytic theory beyond entrenched developmental and ego-centric frameworks. By recognizing unitive states as potentially formative, existentially meaningful, and therapeutically generative, psychoanalysis can more fully engage with the depth and range of human consciousness, advancing its core aim of liberating patients from constricting self-narratives and defenses. When met without reductive assumptions, such states can loosen entrenched self-concepts, support affective working-through, and open patients to enduring experiences of meaning, connection, and psychic freedom. However, the authors also emphasise that the positive process was only possible because of earlier and later work on tolerating ego dissolution, and because this self-containment was aided by the analyst’s role as container.

Excuse me while I recalibrate the flux capacitor.

What it means for radicals: The authors share with many psychoanalysts the normative goal of increasing ego-integration, and their judgements of success and failure are relative to this goal. I think this paper discusses regression, defences, and so on in a way which is too normative. This said, as I’ve argued before, ego-integration and ego-strength are not necessarily bad goals – particularly if they don’t require strengthening of the hierarchical subordination of sensuous experience to conceptual thought. The ideal of a watcher-self which can observe yet remain unaffected by emotional flows is rather common today, and may be better than a dissociation of self and emotions – but I wonder if it’s also a form of dissociation, in which the reality of affect in relation to the outer world is cut-off by an intervening ego. Ketamine has both dissociative and hallucinogenic effects. Is it the dissociative effects which allow an observer-self to be constructed?

The valuation of flow-states is common in radical work, particularly the thought of Hakim Bey, and to an extent the Situationists, Stirner, Reich, etc. In Bey, flow-states are taken to be the source of meaning in life, the basis of non-alienated experience, and the main source of resistance to the system. Flow-states aren’t always transformative, and the authors’ concern with the possibility that they can be experienced in paranoid ways, as floods of terrifying emotion, is an important qualification here. People may have to let down their character-armour and defence-mechanisms to some degree, before flow-states can have the desired effect.

An aspect not discussed in the paper is the sociological context. Daniel came to therapy in a rather seriously traumatised state. This was the case in spite of positionally optimal conditions (race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.), because of the specific dynamics in his family. Indeed, the psychoanalytic case-record suggests that this kind of trauma is rather common in such conditions. At the same time, these problems – the widespread psychological suffering caused by the neurotic effects of modernity – are largely invisible, and kept so by psychiatry. Anyone who knew Daniel outside analysis probably took him for a healthy normie. In future, I think, papers like this will be read as evidence of the horrors of today’s civilisation. And a realisation that positionally “privileged” people are also alienated, traumatised, and immiserated by the system is a necessary corrective on political approaches (identity-political, leftist, etc.) which imagine that redressing social inequalities will also address alienation and trauma.

The theory of modes of experiencing is interesting in its own right, and it’s worth a reader looking through the list and asking which of these they can remember having experienced and when. Fixation in the ordinary-finite mode would seem to be typical of normies in alienated societies. However, critiques of this mode can fall into any of the other modes (or others as yet untheorised). I’d particularly draw attention here to the archetypal/collective function, which the authors note is common on a large-group level, and is thus likely to crop up a lot in politics. Ideologies like identity politics, the alt-right, the Third Way, populism of all kinds, moral panics, counterinsurgency narratives, etc., seem to me to rely on this function, not on the ordinary ego function. And they often lead to worse effects than if people were using their ordinary egos in the political sphere.

Also, I think there is a desire for immersive oceanic experiences – perhaps Freud’s death-drive, perhaps not – that is met by certain kinds of actual flow-experience, but is also offered as an implied promise of a great many other projects, from advertising to political liberation. After reading this piece, I realised both that attacks on modern reason are missing the target, and that many people imagine they are having ineffable experiences when in fact they are having archetypal/collective experiences (a surrender to a collective flow, often under someone else’s control, in which they are passive and receptive). The “marketing” of such surrender with the promise of ineffable experience – which never comes – is central to its appeal, although the very marketing can develop manic states which imitate oceanic experience. I suspect that everything from the reassurance promoted by police dramas to the appeal of suicide bombing, not to forget the appeal of identity politics, are rooted in such misleading marketing of archetypal states as oceanic states.

Breaking Up America

Philadelphia or Westphalia? MAGA Nationalism and the Republican Tradition, by Rodion Belkovich, Russian Sociological Review, 24 no. 4, 2025.

I read this article hoping to find an analysis of MAGA nationalist ideology. In fact, this article does something entirely different. It argues that Trump’s populism is unconstitutional on the basis of a reading of the US as a confederal union of states. It also argues that Trumpism hijacks and destroys American conservatism. It thus manages to combine a rightfield reading of US history with denunciation of Trump and of American state power. It’s not clear to what extent this position is connected to the Russian state, but the article appears in a Russian journal, and the author is based in Russia. It certainly coincides with certain Russian state interests, as I’ll argue later, after discussing the substance of the article.

The article is anti-Trump, but loosely aligned with American conservatism. It notes that Trump, as a populist, encourages Americans to identify with him as their representative, and he has little interest in state rights or decentralisation. (It’s actually rather typical for populist leaders to try to create a direct leader-to-population bond, bypassing institutions and processes in an immediate identification). According to Belkovich, this departs from historical trends in American conservatism, which he identifies with small-federal-government, states’ rights positions. The author sees the MAGA movement as redefining the very meaning of American conservatism, effectively gutting it by identifying it with the federal government’s power. Referring to inverted-comma “conservatives,” Belkovich implies that MAGA are not true conservatives at all. They have hijacked conservatism for a different, extreme nationalist agenda.

Belkovich argues that the U.S. Constitution did not create a single, sovereign American nation or an undifferentiated national People capable of direct political representation. Instead, it institutionalized a compact (agreement) among sovereign states whose peoples retained ultimate political authority, which was based in beliefs in common law and an ancient constitution. The separation of powers was designed in such a way as to prevent anyone unilaterally representing “the people.” Consequently, claims that the President represents the “nation” as a unified sovereign body lack constitutional grounding.

This is similar to the position taken by some American libertarians, sovereign citizens, Constitutionalists, and conservatives opposed to the federal government. I’ve seen this argument most frequently among the kinds of people involved with militias and/or with rightfield dropping-out. It seems to require a belief, not just that the government has sold out its own principles, but that these principles have some substance as definitive traits of the nation and its institutions. The “ungrounded” federal institutions are quite capable of exercising de facto power, and their courts and bureaucracies uphold it – but on the anti-government hypothesis, they do so without a clear legitimation or theoretical basis. They’ve effectively arrogated power, and are acting like gangsters, tyrants, or warlords. Although it’s a rightfield position, this critique has power-decentring aspects and harks back to the revolutionary liberalism of the early revolutionary period - though it generally doesn’t deal with the issues of land grabs, slavery, and problems with capitalism.

Belkovich begins by arguing that federal institutions, most notably the presidency and Congress, were never designed to embody national popular sovereignty. Federal elections, including presidential elections, are mediated by states, which define voter qualifications and act as the primary political units. The Declaration of Independence explicitly recognized the former colonies as “Free and Independent States,” and the ratification of the Constitution was carried out by state conventions, not by a unified national electorate. Drawing on scholars such as Forrest McDonald (a paleoconservative historian critical of class models of early America and sympathetic to the South), the article maintains that sovereignty remained with the states and their peoples, while federal authority derived only from powers explicitly or implicitly delegated to it.

The amendment process further supports this interpretation: constitutional change depends on supermajorities of states rather than population-wide majorities. The Tenth Amendment, though ambiguous in wording, is read (following Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and compact theorists) as reserving undelegated powers to the peoples of the states, not to a national people as a whole. Federalist leaders, including Hamilton, repeatedly reassured skeptics that the Constitution would not dissolve state sovereignty, and the Convention rejected proposals that would have significantly centralized authority.

The article frames the early United States as a “compound republic” characterized by vertical separation of powers and multiple coexisting sovereign peoples, likening it to medieval European polyarchies rather than a modern nation-state. Localism, geographic scale, weak administrative capacity, and reliance on indirect taxation limited federal power well into the nineteenth century. Contemporary observers such as Tocqueville and Hegel likewise viewed the American state as weak, decentralized, and lacking the social conditions necessary for nation-state formation.

While acknowledging recent historiography that highlights areas of federal expansion, the author argues that these developments represent later departures from the Constitution’s original design. The growth of federal power accelerated through permanent warfare, party politics, and executive aggrandizement, particularly from the Civil War onward. The prohibition on states seceding was established by the Union army’s military strength, not by rhetoric or constitutional law. The author also mentions Jackson and Roosevelt, and suggests the big expansions in federal power resulted from America’s abandonment of isolationism in the twentieth century. The Civil War and later foreign policy (e.g. the Cold War), rather than constitutional theory, forcibly imposed the idea of a single American People, at immense human cost.

The article concludes that the United States remains marked by tension between two unfinished projects: a classical republican system grounded in state-based popular sovereignty and a modern democratic nation-state premised on a unitary people. Contemporary claims, especially populist presidential rhetoric, that the executive directly represents the American nation signal a decisive break from the Constitution’s original logic. Such claims, the author warns, risk undermining the constitutional order itself by invoking a sovereign entity the Constitution does not recognize. Trump’s populism effectively declares the Constitution null and void, and enforces this with military might.

What it means for radicals: The political agenda here is rightfield but in many ways subversive and radical; it contains a mixture of elements inimical to the centralized police-state and elements suggesting the reinforcement of status-quo power, especially on a local scale. Such ideas are probably being picked up in Russia because a fragmentation of America would be in the Russian state’s interests, and because fuelling this kind of grassroots opposition to the federal government is strategically useful in disrupting American state power – this is why Belkovich is allowed or encouraged to work on the topic. Weakening of the federal state and decentralization of power might also work in favour of drop-outs, radical movements, bioregionalism, empowerment of Native Americans, etc., depending on how it was achieved and what the subsequent arrangement was.

The replacement of a federal police-state with smaller-scale, more extreme police-states in the more conservative parts of America would probably make things worse, not better. The article mentions slavery (the main cause of the Civil War) only in a footnote, and does not mention land grabs and genocide against Native Americans at all. Of course, a break-up of America might also see the more progressive states becoming increasingly progressive, and it would reduce the global harms caused by American imperialism. Also, a more radical dispersal of power to the local level, or one in which non-state movements became powerful, would probably benefit anyone dissatisfied with the status quo. The existence of paleoconservative and constitutionalist micro-polities does not preclude the existence of others with a range of other visions; a general movement towards pan-secessionism and bolo’bolo is certainly desirable. With Trump’s deployments of federal paramilitary forces inside Democrat-controlled states, I suspect decentralization will soon be on the left’s agenda as well.

It’s not surprising that the idea of a break-up of the USA might appeal in Russia. The USSR was also constituted as a federal union composed of voluntarily adhering units, the republics such as Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia. In practice, the party-state system ensured that secession was not a realistic prospect, and the confederal structure was mainly legitimatory ideology used to appease nationalists in the non-Russian republics. It also underpinned devolution and partial local autonomy, long before western states attempted it – but in a context where the local ruler was necessarily a Party man. In 1991, in a context of a failed coup, mass protests, and economic crisis, the USSR dissolved itself and the republics became independent. This was a strange kind of internal counter-coup in which a dead-letter de jure fact was activated de facto, within a situation of political conflict. Something similar could happen in America, if local identities or inter-state conflicts are strong enough.

The substance of the article, however, is flawed in two ways. The first of these is in grounding revolt in a supposed status quo ante which has been violated. The question of what constitutions, rights, etc. ‘really mean’ is rather futile, since these are fictive constructs sustained only by human uses of force. The author seems to think that constitutional arrangements actually determine state structures, rather than acting as legitimations or soft-power interventions backed by force. Abstract phenomena such as rights, constitutions, justice, equality, freedom, democracy, the will of the people, etc., have no substantive existence in sensuous reality. To the extent that they have any effect, it is because human beings who believe in (or pretend to believe in) their existence act as if they exist, and “enforce” them in the real world. This creates huge problems when people connect rights or other values to a centralized power: the words are twisted until they mean what the powerful want them to mean.

There is thus a problem with the view that the US federal government specifically (and not the state governments, European governments, or the Russian government) has arrogated power and is acting like a gangster/warlord/tyrant. Belkovich is pointing out one rotten apple in a totally rotten basket. States have always read their own constitutions in hypocritical ways, which take away the substance of the rights they provide when it runs up against state or ruling-class interests – except when they are prevented from doing so. All governments arrogate power and act like gangsters, warlords, or tyrants to the extent that they are unconstrained by popular resistance. There are no external sacred values underpinning institutions. There are either values which are given by fiat by the state, which are effects of its use of force, or values which are imposed on the state, as outer limits arising from others’ power.

Also, the author speaks for American conservatism in a rather substitutionist and essentialist way, telling others what it “really means” and criticising actually-existing conservatives for falling short of this. Again I’d emphasize that abstractions are constructs; they don’t “really mean” anything, although discontinuities, hypocrisy, and Animal Farm-like twisting of meanings can still be identified. This said, it’s not clear to me that American conservatives are consistently confederalist, anti-government, or minimalist/libertarian about state intervention. Some sectors of the grassroots radical right are, but these groups don’t necessarily represent American conservatism as a mass phenomenon. Trump has clear forerunners in people like Goldwater, Reagan, and the two Bushes, and American conservatives have shown strong propensities towards repressive interventions in fields such as drugs, policing, securitization, militarization, prisons, immigration, militarism, etc. These propensities are easily mobilized by populist politicians, and this makes the right unable to defend the very virtues they claim to uphold. Most Americans conservatives quickly sacrifice their concerns with federal government overreach and constitutional rights when it comes down to torturing suspected terrorists, fortifying the border, or banning this or that target of moral panics.

There’s also another aspect to this issue. Belkovich doesn’t really go into why the elite were able to sidestep initial constitutional arrangements, and thus, posits an original purity which is later overturned, rather than a process through which the original structures were made to mutate. Because they could not historically rely on a strong state to impose their will, American politicians and bosses became experts at private-sector control, coercion via the incentive-structure, and marketing-style propaganda. As time went on, these were used to leverage greater state power as well. The problem of the “Imperial Presidency” arrogating more powers has been noted almost from the start, and what are today called executive orders (basically rule-by-decree) have been invented and forbidden multiple times in US history (for example, as National Security Letters).

The author might well be right about the original structures designed by the Founders (likely based on their own interests, not ancient principles), but these have undergone several waves of revision by subsequent elites. The revisions have largely stuck as a de facto political structure and also as a system of legitimation. In the case of the New Deal, the elite made the changes because the older structure was unable to handle economic crises and other changes associated with monopoly capitalism. In effect, the ruling-class carried out a self-coup and created a different model in a gradualist way. Conservatives went along with this because it came to be the status quo, and it worked as a way of imposing order. And this says a lot about how conservatism functions in practice. It might be a good thing if all conservatives became radically anti-government, but this doesn’t have anything to do with the essence of conservatism or the principles of the Constitution.

There is also the issue of Trump’s selective deployment and mutilation of conservatism. To be honest, I think it’s very easy to exploit conservatism because it’s a very loose ideology held mostly by people who are motivated partly by fear and by a desire to cling to existing rulers and systems. To the extent that conservatism can be pinned-down as a doctrine, it is already very distinct from what it became, for example, in the New Right or in neoconservatism. Trump may well have taken this even further, and in this, he is similar to historical fascist rulers.

‘Anarchy and Theatre, Theatre and Anarchy: G.S. Khodes, E.P. Garin, and I.A. Charin’s engagements with the anarchist movement during the Russian Revolution (1917-1921) and its aftermath’, by Sergey Ovsyannikov, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, 2025.

This article reconstructs little-known episodes in the biographies of cultural figures connected, directly or indirectly, to anarchist movements in Soviet Russia, situating their lives within the broader history of repression, surveillance, and political violence. It focuses on two interconnected cases: the persecution of former anarchist I.A. Charin and the previously obscured anarchist associations of the renowned Soviet actor Erast Pavlovich Garin.

Anarchists had formed their own armed detachments after the Russian Revolution, preparing to fight on the western front and guarding their anarchist clubs with guns. Those in Moscow were rounded up by the Cheka, the forerunner of the NKVD, KGB, and FSB, in April 1918. Some, such as G.S. Khodes, were released, and some went underground. Anarchist groups opposed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty which ceded land to Germany, and carried out expropriations. Further round-ups followed, and a prison hunger strike. Some anarchists were released in 1919, but there were later mass arrests after a bomb attack (the Bolsheviks sound more like today’s COIN goons than I’d realised!)

Khodes was arrested several times, but always released, and by the end of 1919, he had given up public anarchist activity and stopped expressing anarchist views. He even joined the Bolshevik Party and trained for the army before becoming involved in the Musical Comedy Theatre in Tatarstan. He later created the Molotov Opera and Ballet Choreographic Studio (which probably sounds more interesting than it is; the “cocktails” are named after the Soviet foreign minister, Molotov, and I doubt ballet dancers ever juggled them on stage).

The second section traces the post-revolutionary fate of theatre director Ivan A. Charin and his wife, theatre teacher Lya I. Gotman-Charin, former anarchists who later worked in Soviet youth theatres. Charin became head of the Kalinin Young Spectator Theater (TYUZ) in 1943, without people realising he had been an anarchist during the civil war. Charin had fought for Makhno as well as working in open and underground groups. He met his wife while imprisoned as a Makhnovist. She was a migrant to the US who returned to Russia during the revolution along with her previous husband, another exile. Both had also been Makhnovists. Imprisoned Makhnovists were held in solitary confinement in harsh conditions where they slowly starved. Charin went on hunger strike and suffered seizures. The prisoners would have been tried in Moscow, but a previous trial of Socialist-Revolutionary prisoners ended in acquittal. They were instead tried at a lower court and Charin was sentenced to exile, but ended up back in prison and on hunger strike – and on the run for awhile. He was freed and reunited with his wife in 1926, and ceased political activity after the birth of his first child in 1931.

Despite their withdrawal from active politics, Charin was repeatedly targeted by Soviet security organs, accused of involvement in “Right-Trotskyist” conspiracies, and subjected to arrest and repression from the late 1930s through to the postwar period. Charin and Gotman-Charin were arrested in 1940 along with three actors, but quickly released. But he was later sent to a camp in the Russian far east and found there in the 1950s, where he probably died. Charin’s career illustrates the persistence of political suspicion in Stalinist cultural institutions and the long shadow cast by earlier anarchist affiliations.

The third and more extensive section uncovers previously unknown connections between Erast P. Garin, later a celebrated Soviet actor and director, and the anarchist underground of the early 1920s. Drawing on newly discovered archival materials, the article shows that Garin was arrested in 1921 due to his association with Sergey Topilin, an anarchist-communist involved in organizing prison escapes and expropriations for the underground All-Russian Organization of Anarchists (OAU). Topilin hid at Garin’s house while on the run, but they were both captured. Topilin was sentenced to death, but Garin, who had support in the cultural community, was found to be uninvolved in the underground and freed. Unlike Charin, his return to the theatre does not seem to have led to continued persecution, and he apparently erased the story of his detention from his memory.

The article situates these biographies within the wider history of anarchist resistance, expropriation campaigns, and state repression in early Soviet Russia, highlighting the overlap between revolutionary politics and cultural life. It argues that Soviet cultural figures were often entangled, sometimes inadvertently, in radical political networks, and that later official narratives systematically erased these connections. By recovering these episodes, the study contributes to anarchist studies and Soviet cultural history, demonstrating how repression shaped both political movements and the personal trajectories of artists and intellectuals.

Affect, Autonomy, Authenticity, and the Assessment of Decision-Making Capacity: The Problem of

Tyrannical Coherence, by Joe Gough, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 53 no.4, 2025.

This is my first dip on this blog into the weird world of analytical philosophy. Analytical philosophy is an odd creature, born of Anglo-American reactions to post-Kantian developments in European philosophy and the triple refusals of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche (or existentialism more broadly). It is obsessed with logical argument and lacking in a proper grounding in empirical social sciences. It is closer to normie “common sense,” run through a logical sieve, than to parallel research in sociology, IPE, psychology, etc., although it happily interbreeds with the more scientistic strands of Anglo-American psychology. It’s often entangled with jurisprudence, or the reasoning used to excuse coercive judicial power, and it tends to be written by rather socially advantaged people who also happen to have rather abstract ways of thinking. Used well, it can nonetheless blow open holes in the rational facade of the state; Godwin is a good example of someone who does this. Most often, however, it is used to create elaborate rationalizations which posit a pseudo-rational justification for widespread prejudices and practices, while also trying to reform these to make them more consistent.

In Affect, Autonomy, Authenticity, and the Assessment of Decision-Making Capacity, Gough examines how emotions (affect) should be understood in clinical and legal assessments of a person’s decision-making capacity. The author is concerned both about the criteria used to compulsorily incarcerate people for psychiatric “treatment” and ideas of responsibility in legal cases involving intense emotional states. He does not, however, wish to destroy the state’s capacity to incarcerate the different, and he doesn’t engage with the field of anti-psychiatry and mad liberation, which he would probably dismiss.

He’s particularly interested in anorexics, who often have a continuous desire to lose weight (not a temporary emotional reaction), and cases of so-called brainwashing, where someone’s will is coercively altered over time. He thinks anorexics and brainwashed people should (at least sometimes) be considered unfree, even though this goes against current capability standards. And he objects to another philosopher’s argument that emotionally unstable and addicted people are fully autonomous in a legal sense, even if they are “blameless”. In effect, he says that anorexics are declared incapable and forcibly detained in conditions that wouldn’t amount to loss of capacity in a legal context. On the other hand, emotionally unstable people who try to self-hospitalise because of intrusive suicidal thoughts are turned away because they are found in tests to have capacity. He also notes that the UN prefers that disabled people choose their care when possible, but that courts have interpreted this in a way compatible with authoritarian arrangements. And he is concerned about “circular reasoning,” in which incapacity is assumed because of a diagnosis.

The paper challenges the assumption that affective influence on decision-making (i.e. the intensity of a motivating emotion) necessarily undermines autonomy and renders choices inauthentic or incompetent. Instead, Gough argues that emotions are not merely sources of distortion but can play a constitutive and enabling role in autonomous agency. Gough also discusses how affects should be understood and evaluated in clinical and legal assessments of decision-making capacity. The article addresses a persistent tension in capacity evaluations: while autonomy is often treated as a matter of cognitive competence (understanding, reasoning, and appreciation), real-world decisions are deeply shaped by emotions, values, and a person’s sense of self.

The article critically evaluates standard capacity assessments, which often treat strong emotions such as fear, depression, or intense desire as indicators of impaired reasoning or lack of voluntariness. Gough shows that this approach relies on an overly rationalistic or cognitivist model of autonomy that falsely separates cognition from affect. Drawing on philosophical theories of autonomy and authenticity, the paper argues that many decisions are authentically autonomous precisely because they are affect-laden and reflect the agent’s values, commitments, and practical identity.

The paper argues that emotions are not merely obstacles to autonomous decision-making but can be integral to it. The key normative challenge, therefore, is not whether affect influences a decision (since it always does) but whether that influence is authentic to the agent. Authentic affect reflects a person’s enduring values, identity, and evaluative commitments, whereas inauthentic affect arises from conditions such as coercion, manipulation, or certain psychiatric disturbances that alienate individuals from their own evaluative standpoint. Emotions undermine decision-making capacity only when they alienate the agent from their evaluative standpoint, rather than merely influencing reasoning. On this view, the key question is not whether affect is present, but whether it disrupts the agent’s ability to recognize, endorse, or act in accordance with what genuinely matters to them over time. People remain free/responsible/autonomous as long as they are able to override emotional reactions if they want to (he does not include moral refusals to resist an emotion, such as his own veganism).

The paper concludes by proposing revisions to how decision-making capacity should be assessed in medical and legal contexts. It recommends moving away from affect-excluding standards toward an evaluative framework that distinguishes between autonomy-supporting and autonomy-undermining emotions. By doing so, Gough offers a philosophically grounded account of capacity that better reflects how real agents deliberate, decide, and author their own lives. The article develops an account of authenticity as a mediating concept between affect and autonomy. Gough argues that decision-making capacity assessments should ask whether emotional influences are owned by the individual and coherently integrated into their practical identity, rather than simply whether emotions are intense, unusual, or irrational. This approach challenges capacity frameworks that automatically treat strong emotions—such as fear, despair, or ambivalence—as evidence of incapacity.

Applying this framework to clinical and legal contexts, the paper shows how affect-sensitive but authenticity-focused assessments can better respect patient autonomy while still protecting vulnerable individuals. Gough concludes that capacity evaluations should move beyond narrow cognitive tests and instead adopt a richer, normatively informed understanding of how affect, authenticity, and autonomy interact in human decision-making.

What it means for radicals: I’m not very interested in changing the criteria used by institutions I hate and would rather see weakened or destroyed, and I’m not entirely sure that Gough’s modifications would change these institutions in any substantial way. Instead of judges and doctors making arbitrary, prejudiced, ill-founded judgements based on an unrealistic norm of rational capability which they don’t always apply, they would make arbitrary, prejudiced, ill-founded judgements based on an unrealistic norm of authenticity which they wouldn’t always apply. I doubt rationalistic institutions can deal adequately with the problem of emotion as a limit to responsibility, because their entire model of humanity depends on an unrealistic image of rational, integrated human nature. This phantasm makes it impossible for authoritarians to act humanely, fairly, or even rationally when dealing with difference. Authoritarians look at someone who’s different and think they know what’s best; they don’t understand someone’s needs or desires if these differ from their stereotype of human nature. I would add that there is indeed a gross contradiction when the state posits both that someone is too sick to be autonomous, and that they are criminally responsible. This kind of doublethink is much more common than people realise. It’s very common for the state to punish people for being different.

However, the issues with imputing responsibility also apply to people’s everyday reactions to others. I’ve noticed a tendency that people who don’t support the state or capital still tend to treat others as more capable of responsible action than they are, and not to recognise real incapacities. I tend more towards the position of treating issues as differences, sicknesses, or delusions rather than as crime or sin. But I do this within a framework that also suggests that everyone is different, and everyone or nearly everyone is deluded to some degree. Tearing down normie supremacy is really the main issue in this field.

In relation to Gough’s criteria, I wonder how many people actually have continuous authentic commitments, and how often these are overridden by emotions or situations. There are lots of people whose existential stance is one of going with the flow or reacting to situations, and there’s also lots of people who react under stress or in emergencies in ways they otherwise wouldn’t (not to mention those who are plural or are permanently impulsive or emotionally unstable). The ego to which such reactions are compared – the person with a moral/existential/rational project over time – is in most cases a philosophical myth. It is a new version of the spook of human nature, now modified to allow for different niche lifestyles and life-goals, to which actual people in their messiness and complexity are compared and found wanting.

This said, the argument regarding continuous commitments and temporary emotional reactions is similar to Stirner’s way of handling the influence of emotion. As regards responsibility and treatment, Stirner has an easy answer: the state has no right to punish or coercively treat, because it has no sacred moral authority, because there is no sacred moral authority. Stirner doesn’t get deeply into issues of impulsivity, madness, etc., but he sees any state where an emotion causes an action which is later regretted as a form of unfreedom, and he insists that people are in a sense entirely determined (i.e. the “possibility” model underpinning deontology is false). He also thinks normies are insane – the concept of alienation in Hegel, Marx, and Stirner is actually derived from the idea of “psychological alienation” in psychiatry. Normies are insane because, for example, they “hallucinate sinners,” a category of entity which doesn’t really exist.

I think intense emotional experiences and “hijacks” are quite common and are not a moral matter, nor are they illness in the psychiatric sense. They have existential roots in a person’s complexes and emotional development, and it is equally wrong to treat them as actions for which a person can be held responsible and to coercively treat or confine someone because of such reactions. Both involve a tyranny of other people whose own emotional reactions also interfere with their reasoning, but who wrongly think they are superior to people who are different from them. A person dominated by a temporary emotion might be unfree, but one unfreedom does not justify another. If someone’s struggling with or overwhelmed by strong emotions, unusual perceptions, ego-collapse, and/or limbic system reactions, the last thing they need is a bunch of control-freaks picking a fight, ripping away their identity-supports, and abusing them, quite often with little or no insight into their needs. I do not think normies are as rational and self-controlled as they imagine, and as a result, I do not think their judgements are reasonable. The fact that the discussion Gough is part of is taking place without consideration of mad liberation voices and evidence on actual experiences of mental incarceration is revealing of how far it reflects a tyrannical top-down point of view.

Another problem is that there isn’t a clear boundary in the way Gough wants. Take the issue of being unable to or refusing to resist an emotion. Someone can’t simply give up the complexes, cathexes, moral reactions and so on which cause them to value and not try to resist certain emotions, or which shape these emotions in the first place. These will also typically have an origin outside the person’s conscious mind and in their life-history. Arbitrarily deciding that people are responsible because they have a moral aversion to inhibiting something is a rather arbitrary criterion.

A Black Axe member, from here.

Masculinity, Carceral Discipline and the Gang Life, by Akin Iwilade, African Studies 84, no. 1-2, 2025.

This article is about gangsters in Lagos, Nigeria, and in particular, the statements they give under police torture, which both affirm and deny their gang identity. Although the title says ‘carceral,’ the article is primarily focused on police interrogations, not prisons. The article suggests that these young men put up contradictory performances of vulnerability and hardness, and develop compromise positions to evade ‘carceral discipline’ (i.e. police abuse or prolonged detention) while also maintaining their identities as hard men and rebels.

The article begins by showing the frequency and openness of gang violence in a particular neighbourhood, where gang/cult members openly ‘prance around’ and flamboyantly celebrate after killings. The author assumes this to fit into wider ideas of ‘masculine performance of valour.’ The author also suggests his interviewees have a resistant subculture. This is not reducible to performances of masculine toughness, and also involves a position of ‘opposition to the world.’ Two gangs (which might have been pseudonymized) are in an on-and-off ‘struggle for supremacy:’ the Black Axe or Aiye group and the Eiye Confraternity. Killings are usually of rival gang/cult members. The confidence, hypermasculinity, and ‘almost pathological brutality’ of the gang killings, and the culture of almost deifying the ability to cause and endure pain, is contrasted with the actions of gangsters in police custody.

Nigerian police stations, we are told, are intimidating, barely lit, mostly concrete, and with prominently displayed torture apparatuses used during interrogations, as well as other visible ‘security features’ such as bars. The author thinks they openly signal the arbitrariness of state power and its permitted, unrestrained use. Macho admiration for the power to cause pain leads to fear and awe of the police. Interviews were used to reconstruct how gangsters narrate their roles in the recorded incidents (often gang murders) and in police custody, although most of the research is based on police records.

This article examines how gang members in Lagos, Nigeria narrate masculinity, agency, and vulnerability when confronted with state power, particularly during police interrogation. Using a case study of cult-related violence involving the Black Axe (Aiye) and Eiye confraternities, the paper contrasts flamboyant, performative displays of masculine toughness in everyday gang life with the markedly different self-representations found in police statements and court records.

While gang violence is publicly celebrated in neighbourhood settings as a performance of supremacy, police archives reveal narratives marked by meekness, denial, and strategic vulnerability. Gangsters seek to appear as meek, vulnerable victims of arbitrary state power. The author theorizes this as a ‘narrative of self.’ The author argues that self-narration is profoundly shaped by the site of narration—understood as both spatial and social embodiments of power. Police stations, as spaces of coercion and corporeal risk, generate ‘institutionalised master storylines’ that incentivise suspects to obscure agency while still signalling masculine credibility.

Through analysis of suspect statements, crime diaries, and court transcripts, the paper identifies three recurrent narrative strategies (ways gangsters presented themselves). ‘Proximate distance’ means that gangsters admit being close, or proximate, to gang life but deny actual guilt; they either deny or obscure responsibility for gang crimes. For example, one detainee claims that the gang tried to forcibly initiate him, but the initiation was disrupted. The author emphasizes that they feel the need to recount proximity to gang life even when denying guilt. This is explained on the basis of police use of torture (or that police are ‘crazy’) and the assertion that ‘man is street,’ i.e. they are tough even in these conditions. Alternatively, one interviewee suggests the police usually know someone’s in a gang/cult. The proximate strategy is a way to reconcile trying to get out of the cell quickly with street cred.

The second strategy is the ‘Invisible Man,’ in which people recount being present yet absent – for example, being members of a gang/cult but never attending meetings or taking part in activities, or being forcibly initiated but never doing anything active. The third strategy is ‘occult obscurity’ associated with ‘the bush.’ Gangsters talk about being taken, blindfolded, tortured, and thereby ‘blended’ or ‘bammed’ into the gang/cult. This may or may not be literal; the author doubts it, because data on initiations in Lagos suggests they occur in homes, ‘with ritualised torture and alcohol consumption’ and use of clothing and weapons as totems. The ‘bush’ account seems to be part of a master storyline people feel compelled to conform to.

By comparing these constrained narratives with interviews and focus group discussions conducted outside disciplinary spaces, the paper shows that vulnerability is not antithetical to masculinity but is instead a tactical resource within violent social worlds. Gang members see themselves as fighting oppression, but the author contends that they collude with the systems of repression. The ability to curate when and how vulnerability is expressed emerges as central to masculine performance. The article also suggests that artefacts such as police interview transcripts can be relevant to understanding identity, even though they do not emerge freely.

What it means for radicals: Given that the article is about statements given under torture, it surprises me that the author did not use an approach related to emotions and trauma. People who think they’re tough sometimes break under police torture or other abuse, and some studies suggest everyone has a breaking point. ("Hard" men still get traumatised, but they don't talk about it; they might or might not hold out for longer or under greater strain). This is a huge problem for any group or movement which relies on people staying loyal, not snitching, and not compromising to get concessions. The gangsters studied in this paper have developed viable compromise responses which do not give the police much useful information, do not confess guilt, and yet also articulate a certain pride in a rebellious identity.

In my view, the narrative framing is not especially useful here, especially as we don’t really know how much self-control is going into the “performances.” The author simply assumes that everyone is constantly acting, but there are clearly people who can’t or won’t, and ideas of valour and resistance are rooted in felt pride, not confabulation. “Hardness” is alienating in its effects on a person’s character-structure (see Theweleit), and a cult of pain seems to involve a misunderstanding of the imaginal realm; in my view, creative power comes from pleasure, not pain, although in rituals conducted while intoxicated, pain could easily transmute into pleasure. The cult of pain also tends to empower the police, adding a sacred awe to their raw physical menace.

Reified identities and politics of ‘authenticity’: A critical commentary on Verbuyst's metaphysics and politics, by Jonatan Kurzwelly, Anthropological Theory 25, no. 4, 2025.

This theoretical article is a critique of the kind of identity politics associated with decolonial theory in particular, by an anthropologist committed to an interactionist or interpretivist view of culture. The target, Rafael Verbuyst, is a Dutch (and white or white-passing) scholar who has written extensively on colonialism and ethnicity in South Africa, focused on the Khoisan, a category he also criticises but uses on a strategic basis. Verbuyst is interested in the Khoisan ethnic revival movement, which draws in people who do not belong to the hunter-gatherer and pastoralist communities to which the label was formerly applied. Kurzwelly is a German scholar who also works in South Africa, and has worrying entanglements with the counterinsurgency industry. He’s also a strong critic of ‘essentialism’ and ‘identity politics’, which he seems to associate with divisiveness and radicalisation.

This article offers a critical examination of contemporary anthropological approaches to authenticity and identity politics, challenging realist metaphysical assumptions that treat social identities as analytically valid and politically desirable categories. Engaging directly with Verbuyst’s defence of “subversive authenticity” as a strategy for Indigenous empowerment, the author argues that such an approach ultimately reproduces reified and essentialist understandings of identity rather than genuinely subverting them. According to Verbuyst, emic discourses of authenticity do not reproduce stereotypes or essentialism. They are instead ways of seizing the power to self-represent in a decolonial context.

The paper contends that while Verbuyst provides a rich ethnographic account of diverse and creative emic uses of authenticity among Khoisan revivalists, he conflates descriptive analysis with normative political endorsement. However, Kurzwelly disputes the claim that plural, flexible, or ironic invocations of authenticity constitute a meaningful analytical or political advance, arguing instead that they represent ongoing negotiations within an identitarian framework, a ‘negotiation of identity markers and boundaries of inclusion into a reified identity category’ that leaves the underlying logic of group-based identity intact. Kurzwelly also adds that there is no clear way of excluding far-right gestures from the category of subversive authenticity.

Central to the critique is a discussion of the metaphysics of identity, contrasting biological realism, social realism, and an underexplored anti-realist position. The author rejects both biological and social realism, advancing an anti-realist view in which identities such as race or ethnicity are understood as illusory products of processes of racialisation and categorisation rather than as real entities. Kurzwelly suggests that biological realism is a ‘common emic assumption’ (held by nationalists and ethnic identity politicians) but is uncommon in social-scientific theories, at least explicitly. Instead, social scientists contend that groups are different based on ‘their socio-historically constructed nature’. Kurzwelly claims that this is a ‘proxy’ use of social identity, and he is ‘radically suspicious’ of both the essentialist and the proxy version. He doesn’t necessarily object to the use of ethnic labels to refer to emic groups, but does not believe they have analytical substance.

Drawing on theorists such as Fields and Fields, the article argues that racism and identity politics produce belief in identities, not the reverse. From this perspective, all claims to authenticity (whether rigid or “subversive”) reinforce false assumptions about the reality of identity groups. Identity-claims are forms of social positioning in an interaction field, ways of creating and policing boundaries among groups. The onus is on those using identity categories strategically to explain why they are meant to be empowering – and to show that this politics is more effective than alternatives such as materialist class politics or liberalism. “Subversive” authenticity broadens the criteria for inclusion in the Khoisan identity group, but the category still has to be founded on boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Verbuyst, the author suggests, wants to have his cake and eat it too.

The article further critiques the political implications of defending authenticity as empowerment. It questions whether identity-based mobilisation necessarily advances justice, highlighting how identity politics can obscure structural inequalities, marginalise individuals, and reproduce exclusion through boundary-making. Drawing on critiques of recognition-based politics, the author suggests that such approaches risk displacing materialist or citizenship-based alternatives while reinforcing divisive social categorisation.

In conclusion, the article calls for anthropology and the social sciences to more seriously engage with the illusory, narrative, and contingent nature of social identities, and to critically reassess the normative appeal of identity politics. Rather than refining concepts such as authenticity, the author argues for a more genuinely subversive stance: questioning the ontological status of identity categories themselves and their role in social analysis and political practice.

What it means for radicals: I’ve not read Verbuyst’s work, and his reply to this and another critical piece is behind a paywall. It sounds, however, as if “subversive authenticity” is a similar concept to “strategic essentialism” (indeed, Kurzwelly also mentions the latter). Basically, poststructuralist-informed scholars who do not wish to be associated with “essentialist” (especially biological) claims about identity-groups typically hide behind the claim that identity-based statements are “strategically” justified, and are adopted with a kind of ironic distance for their subversive or transformative effects. This apparent dissimulation is justified by the necessity of overcoming ongoing systems of oppression. Very often, such claims actually conceal what Kurzwelly refers to as “social realism”, i.e. the belief that identity-groups have a material existence independently of individual will, but that this existence is social and not biological. It arises from how people are conditioned, interpellated, discursively positioned, subjectified, etc.

Kurzwelly has picked up on several important problems with identity-political arguments. If the use of a concept is strategic, then how do we know it actually serves the strategic goal, which all too often runs counter to the essentialist category? If identity categories are microsocial constructs, doesn’t macrosocial structural classification also amount to reification? Doesn’t identity politics automatically produce and reinforce in- and outgroups, even when it shifts the boundaries or reshuffles the terms?

I think these problems apply as much to grassroots versions of identity politics as to the versions found in academic theory. Indeed, the closer one gets to the practical level of politics, the cruder identity politics and its exclusionary dynamics tend to become (the poststructuralist add-ons are far more popular in universities than on the streets).

From here.

Rebels Do Not Take Kindly to Criticism: The Strategic Failure of Local Resistance against Colombia’s FARC, by Urban Reichhold, Journal of Latin American Studies 57 no. 1, 2025.

This article investigates the effectiveness of nonviolent civilian resistance against rebel groups, addressing a major gap in the civil resistance literature, which has largely focused on resistance against states rather than armed non-state actors. Using the case of Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the study asks when and why civilian resistance succeeds or fails in extracting concessions from rebels.

The article develops a theoretical framework identifying three key factors shaping rebel responses to civilian resistance: (1) the nature of civilian demands (moderate versus maximalist), (2) the power of civilian resisters (including organisational capacity and institutional backing), and (3) the relative power of the rebel group. It argues that strong rebels confronted with weak civilians making demands that threaten core politico-military objectives are likely to respond with repression rather than accommodation.

Empirically, the study draws on extensive qualitative fieldwork in Colombia’s Caquetá department, including interviews with civilians, former FARC fighters and commanders, participant observation in rebel-controlled areas, and archival research. The analysis examines multiple forms of nonviolent resistance, such as refusal to comply with rebel directives, community mobilisation, and electoral participation under conditions of risk.

For example, when traders protested against arbitrary taxation/extortion at checkpoints, the rebels agreed to establish a more formal system. In another case, civilians pressured a different rebel group, the ELN, to reveal the locations of landmines. The authors classify the refusal of an Indigenous mayor to step down, and attempts to establish autonomous ‘peace zones’, as maximalist. In neither case did FARC respond consistently with repression.

This study focuses on Caquetá, a FARC heartland where the group created something like a parallel state. This is an area where peasant autonomous zones had previously been created and where the FARC initially emerged. The authors expect the group to be less tolerant here, particularly in a period where it was under siege. Due to military onslaughts, the group had abandoned rural centres, and relied on election boycotts and road blockades to maintain control. However, they had previously organised communities to establish their own rules in response to a wave of settlement and related problems (including such things as forced labour service). The FARC controlled community councils by infiltrating or coopting them, and the councils relied on the FARC for enforcement. The authors’ research suggests that the community boards were used both to transmit FARC information to the population and to express civilians’ discontent.

For example, demands were raised to dismiss abusive commanders who killed innocent people on espionage accusations. The unit concerned was eventually withdrawn by the central command and ‘never seen again’. Other disputes focused on freedom of movement and requirements to carry a FARC-issued ID. Permits were required to move between communities. This interfered with things like schooling, NGO projects, and government work. The FARC conceded exemptions for certain groups from travel restrictions. The authors point out that FARC’s own politics/rhetoric made it hard not to concede these demands.

In 1996 there were mass peasant marches against government bombing campaigns against coca farming. The FARC did not lead but endorsed these, and forced people to attend. Forced mobilisation, including of children, elderly people, and people who could barely walk, led to a turn in peasant opinion against the FARC. People began protest-voting against the group.

The findings show that the FARC only accommodated civilian demands when these were limited and non-threatening to its strategic goals, such as requests to regulate certain practices.

When civilians advanced maximalist demands, such as challenges to rebel authority, territorial control, or political dominance, the FARC responded with coercion, repression, or intimidation, even in contexts of widespread civilian dissatisfaction.

While some acts of resistance, particularly electoral defiance, did not always provoke immediate retaliation, they failed to produce sustained concessions or weaken rebel power. Civilians used Scottian tactics and resisters were hard to identify. However, the FARC did take revenge when there was clear opposition with identifiable leaders. For example, people seeking election for pro-government parties during the FARC election boycott, or who refused to step down from local council positions, were assassinated. The authors add that the FARC was able to show that it was undefeated even when driven from the towns, and this led to a stalemate which prevented the group’s defeat and led to later peace processes.

The article concludes that, unlike nonviolent campaigns against states, civilian resistance alone has not been shown to compel powerful rebel groups to make far-reaching political concessions or relinquish control. However, the FARC seems to have been prepared to make extensive concessions on specific issues. By foregrounding the strategic logic of rebel decision-making and the importance of relative power, the study advances debates on civilian agency in civil war and cautions against overgeneralising claims about the transformative potential of nonviolent resistance in rebel-held territories.

What it means for radicals: It’s revealing that the dynamics of popular resistance to states and ruling classes emerged so clearly in a case where the local powerholders were actively rebelling against the current rulers. Hopefully people have realised by now that rebels as well as governments can be authoritarian, and that a group’s claims to popular, leftist, or democratic credentials do not guarantee against this. Leftist guerrillas are meant to empower and defend workers and peasants – but that doesn’t mean they do. The same problems crop up a lot with guerrilla groups. One of the sources used documents similar issues in Rojava, where the Kurdish militia tried to impose conscription which civilians sought to evade.

Strategically, this kind of guerrilla authoritarianism makes little sense. Guerrilla warfare is based on reliance on the population as the “sea” within which the “fish”, or guerrillas, are able to swim. This is what gives guerrillas a decisive advantage over better-funded and better-armed state forces. All too often, however, this relationship is never established. Guerrillas become obsessed with military-style control, abuse their power to extort others, become paranoid about alleged spies and informers, etc. When this happens, the guerrilla group nearly always loses the support it relied on. However, keeping the capacity to strike – showing the group is undefeated – is also highlighted here.

Building an idea of the state? Regime dominance and the material legacy of a development project in Ethiopia, by Justin Williams, African Affairs 124 issue 494, 2025.

This article explores the ways in which NGO-funded development projects both reinforced and undermined state power in a region in rural Ethiopia. Apparently it has become academic orthodoxy that externally funded development projects reinforce authoritarian regimes. This is because structures like roads, schools, offices, and clinics are seen as part of the state and can be used to extend or “broadcast” state power. For example, offices can be used to house cops and soldiers to terrorise local opponents, services can be used to distribute patronage, and schools can be used to spread pro-regime propaganda. Grandiose buildings also encourage admiration and fear, although locals are often quite aware of the contrast between this exterior and the messy, corrupt interior. This article tries to challenge the orthodoxy with a case from Ethiopia.

Focusing on the Merhabete Integrated Rural Development Project (MIRDP) implemented by the NGO Menschen für Menschen (MfM) in Ethiopia between 1988 and 2009, it argues that the political consequences of development projects’ material legacies are deeply ambiguous. The method uses ethnography and history, including interviews.

Drawing on ethnographic-historical research conducted a decade after project closure, including archival work, observation of infrastructure, and over 100 interviews, the study shows that MfM-built infrastructure significantly extended the reach of the Ethiopian state and the ruling EPRDF regime (the coalition built around the TPLF, which took power following the civil war). When the EPRDF took power in 1991, it dramatically increased construction of state buildings, schools, clinics, and roads, often with international support. This was linked to economic ideas of “human capital formation”. Roads, schools, clinics, and offices constructed by the project were incorporated into state and party structures, facilitating administration, surveillance, service delivery, and political control in previously remote areas. The EPRDF also tried to create structures stretching down to each cluster of five or six households, with officials and development leaders enrolled in the party and required to recruit for the army, promote regime narratives, turn out the vote, and report dissent. The regime encouraged a view that a good mengist is one who ‘sends development’. The article finds that the MfM project has extended the state’s reach. Local officials often live and work in MfM-built buildings. There are even reports of ambulances provided by the project being used to transport paramilitaries at election time.

At the same time, however, the project undermined the regime’s legitimating narratives. Local populations overwhelmingly attributed development achievements to MfM and its charismatic leader, Karlheinz Böhm, rather than to the state. MfM’s buildings became material symbols of a “good” and caring mengist (state), against which the EPRDF was judged and found wanting. It was MfM, not the state, which provided local infrastructure. This disjuncture weakened acceptance of regime rule, provided a language for political critique, and even shaped electoral behaviour, as people threatened to “vote for Karl” during elections. The article also suggests that a number of the buildings have fallen into ruin because nobody took on the related projects.

The article advances scholarship on aid and authoritarianism by foregrounding the built environment as a key mechanism through which development projects affect both state reach and ideas of the state over time. It demonstrates that even closely coordinated, non-advocacy service-delivery NGOs can unintentionally destabilize authoritarian legitimacy, not by promoting democratic alternatives, but by embodying existing ideals of state responsibility more effectively than regimes themselves. The study highlights the importance of long-term, localized analysis in understanding the political legacies of development interventions.

“Switch it Up”: A qualitative analysis of BDSM switches, by Theodore Bennett, Sexualities 28 no. 8, 2025.

This article contributes to the growing interdisciplinary field of BDSM studies by addressing a significant gap in the literature: the experiences of individuals who identify as switches, that is, BDSM participants who take on both dom and sub roles. While switches constitute a substantial proportion of the BDSM population (around a quarter in the studies surveyed), prior research has largely subsumed them into broader role categories or treated them only tangentially.

Drawing on 15 semi-structured qualitative online interviews with Australian switches, the study employs constructivist grounded theory (i.e. research which develops theory as well as coding data) to explore two core questions: what being a switch means to switches themselves, and how switches decide which BDSM role to adopt in specific situations. The analysis identifies five key analytical categories.

First, switches describe openness to diverse experiences, characterised by freedom, experimentation, and role fluidity. Participants described themselves as open to a diverse range of experiences, as flexible, and as unconstrained by role-specific norms (i.e. expectations of how to behave, which attach to dom and sub roles). Motives include discovery and experimentation. Fluid shifting makes people feel they aren’t constrained to a particular domain or role.

Second, switching is understood as a way of expressing a multi-sided self, enabling participants to access and integrate different aspects of identity that cannot be fully realised through a single role. Some interviewees talked about expressing different energies or different aspects of themselves, or finding previously-overlooked parts of themselves which they hadn’t explored, or feeling more of a rounded human being. One reports running out of steam in an exclusive dom role and stopping enjoying it; they need both dom and sub sides to keep enjoying BDSM. This dynamic can lead to monogamous relationships being limited to pairs of switches.

Third, switches make situational role choices based on a dynamic interplay of personal factors (e.g. needs, desires, energy, mood, events in their lives), partner-based factors (e.g. partner preferences and characteristics), and connection-based factors (e.g. trust and relational dynamics). Similar choices express different needs for different people. For example, one participant prefers sub/bottom roles for sexual release, while another prefers sub roles when they want attention or affection. Some report desires for a particular role if they haven’t done it in awhile. Dom roles are more popular when participants are low on energy, stressed, or tired from work (which might mean that dom play helps release some of the stress). Partner-based factors are strongest when interacting with partners who are exclusively sub or dom, while factors like gender and height also play a role. Some also talk about a partner’s vibes as a factor, as well as the degree of trust (which can affect sub roles for some people and dom roles for others).

Fourth, role flexibility is shown to be qualified rather than absolute, with many switches reporting role leanings, constraints on switching with particular partners, or difficulty switching rapidly. Most of the switches interviewed are not “50/50” and have a preference for either sub or dom roles. Interviewees differed in how easy or difficult they find role-switching in situ. Some can choose a role, others can only play a certain role at a given time; some report that role-switching becomes easier with practice, or in certain mental states or moods.

Fifth, when switches play with other switches, unique dynamics emerge, including mid-scene role switching, a largely undocumented phenomenon in existing BDSM scholarship. This is very enjoyable (‘intense and amazing and fun’) for those who are into it, though again there was variation in how easily people could switch mid-scene.

The article advances BDSM and identity research by demonstrating that switching is not merely a behavioural pattern but, for many participants, a meaningful and enduring identity category closely tied to self-concept and wellbeing. It also introduces a theoretical model of situational role choice, integrating multiple factors into a dynamic explanatory framework. Overall, the study highlights the internal diversity of the BDSM population and argues for greater empirical attention to switches, including future quantitative research and focused study of underexplored practices such as mid-scene switching.

What it means for radicals: It’s interesting to read about others’ sexual experiences and preferences, which often turn out to be incredibly diverse. Sexuality in general is both frustrated and channelled in narrow ways in the dominant system, and it’s important to open up awareness of the full range of options.

My main issue with this article is that it doesn’t really get into the question of formations of desire. The author moves beyond the naive idea of sex-acts as mere “behaviours” to the more viable idea that they involve identity and experience. But they don’t really talk much about why particular identities and experiences appeal to particular people. When they do, they either use functionalist terms (it meets a need or responds to a context) or terms relating to discourse and self-esteem (e.g. people identify as flexible and open-minded). The author also tends to talk as if the different positions people adopt are rational choices. While people might exercise executive-function checks on sexual interactions, the underlying desires seem to me largely independent of rational calculations, and the reasons given may well be rationalisations.

The Chinese Empire in Comparative Perspective, by Krishan Kumar, Russian Sociological Review 24 no. 4, 2025.

This article challenges claims of Chinese exceptionalism by arguing that the Chinese Empire should be understood as part of a broader, comparative family of empires rather than as a unique or incomparable case. The authors refute objections that the Chinese Empire cannot be analysed alongside other empires due to its ethnic homogeneity, continuity, or extraordinary duration. The author is from Trinidad and Tobago, was educated in the UK, and works at a university in America. He doesn’t seem to have any connection to the Russian or Chinese state; this is simply a work of comparative history.

The objections and replies go something like this:

O: China called itself the “middle kingdom,” not the empire. To the pre-modern Chinese, there was only China and barbarians. China stood in proud isolation.

R: China always interacted with other cultures and traded abroad. China was influenced by Buddhism, which came from India. China maintained relations with steppe nomads. And China was often ruled by foreigners.

O: China had no universalist ideology or supposed imperial mission. Confucianism is distinctly Chinese and not a universal ideology or religion.

R: Scholars of (neo-)Confucianism regard it as universalist. Confucianism posits a universal human nature leading to a universal moral code. Also, Daoism and Buddhism are both universalist.

O: China had no tradition of imperial expansion or “imperialism” and was instead isolationist.

R: Some other empires such as the Moguls, Romans, and Habsburgs also weren’t expansionist once they reached a certain size. Anyway, China expanded into Central Asia to protect the Silk Roads, expanded “internally” at its frontiers, invaded Vietnam and Korea, launched global voyages, etc. All empires ebb and flow, none are always expansionist. Also, China tended to use multiple forms of imperial expansion rather than relying on conquest. This was also not unique, as for instance the Habsburgs usually expanded by marriage.

O: China had tributaries, not colonies.

R: Tributary systems capture the surplus of peasant agricultural production in the same way as imperial taxes. The Ottomans, Mughals, Arabs, and Romans all had tributaries too. And the eighteenth/nineteenth century conquests of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia were directly imperial, not tributary.

O: China never implemented the kind of differentiations between colonizers and colonized, or core and periphery, typical of other empires.

R: Half of China’s territory comes from the relatively recent conquests, and a colonial “politics of difference” between Han Chinese and Tibetans/Uighurs/Mongolians/etc operates in these areas. Some places, like Taiwan, were instead settled.

O: The Chinese Empire was not multicultural or multi-ethnic. It was over 90% Han Chinese.

R: The idea that most Chinese people belong to the Han ethnicity (apparently named for a much-admired dynasty) was a late ethnonationalist invention (directed against the Manchu rulers). In reality, inequalities existed up to modern times. For example, Subei people migrating from Jiangsu province to Shanghai occupied distinct occupational niches and were treated as different in ways typical of racialized systems. The Han Chinese are actually a multiplicity of smaller groups. Anyway, the empire was not identified with the Han Chinese. Rather, the Chinese Emperor both stood above and represented a plurality of groups.

O: For more than half of its history, China was ruled by “foreigners” (Khitan, Jurchen, Mongol, Manchu).

R: The British monarchy were descended from French Normans, then from Germans. Russia was founded by Germans. Spain was ruled by a Swiss-German dynasty. Roman emperors came from many ethnicities including Africans, Syrians, Spanish, Balkan peoples, etc.

O: China lasted too long to be considered an empire (i.e. it is continuous with Chinese civilisation as a whole, whereas other empires have no such continuity).

R: The Roman Empire lasted as long if we include Byzantium (the Eastern Roman Empire) and/or the Holy Roman Empire and/or the Papacy. On the other hand, the Qing did not regard their dynasty as continuous with earlier Chinese dynasties, but as distinctly “Inner Asian.”

Kumar recognizes that China is unique in some respects, but so were all the other empires. Empires, unlike nation-states, do not require ethnic or national congruence between rulers and ruled; indeed, such separation may contribute to imperial stability. The supposed continuity of the Chinese Empire is shown to be partly mythical, marked instead by significant ruptures, fragmentation, conquest, and dynastic change. The author concludes by suggesting that comparative history of empires remains relevant in the context of Chinese and Russian positions today, and in the context of a crisis of the nation-state model.

This picture appears in the paper, and was drawn by a nine-year-old after a traumatic experience at sea. That’s one talented nine-year-old.

‘Never turn your back on the Ocean’: Conversations with Fear on Yuin Sea Country, by Alexis Farr and Maria de Lourdes Melo Zurita, Geoforum 158, 2025.

Sometimes a paper tries to do a lot of theoretical work with fairly straightforward evidence, and attach a lot of verbose theory to easily-understood experiences. This is largely the case here, as the authors attempt to connect high-flung theories of more-than-human interconnection to interviews about fears of the sea. The theory takes a relational approach reminiscent of Actor-Network Theory and of Haraway, although the authors term it feminist geography, wet (i.e. flow-based) ontology, and more-than-human theory. The facts fit the theory well enough, but the theory doesn’t seem particularly necessary to the facts.

The work is based on semi-structured interviews with people, mostly white/European-origin, living in the Yuin Sea Country region of Australia, between the towns of Jervis Bay and Ulladulla. Most of them seem to be surfers. The study examines how these “ocean-people” experience, negotiate, and manage fear in their everyday engagements with the ocean.

Biologically, the authors argue, fear is a survival mechanism which is useful and not necessarily misleading. The authors conceive fear as relational, fluid, and bodily, shaped by interactions between human bodies, ocean materialities, technologies, and cultural knowledges. Fear is related to the decomposition of assemblages. People are said to form an ‘assemblage’ made of diverse parts when they surf or sail the ocean. (The term is often used to translate the French dispositif, which is important in Foucault and Deleuze). Experiences of ‘disassemblage,’ when the parts come apart (for example, a storm at sea), are often traumatic.

The paper defines “fear with the ocean” as a situated emotional response emerging from perceived risks, uncertainty, and vulnerability in dynamic waterscapes. Fear is shown to be both protective and generative, intensifying bodily awareness, shaping practices of risk management, and fostering respect rather than domination of nature. Fear is taken to produce respect, attunement, and embodied knowledge.

The authors seem to be trying to extract theoretical profundity from quite familiar and explicable reactions. Thus for example, one participant surfed on the beach and was never afraid, until one time they were held under and coughing underwater, after which they became a bit afraid. ‘Such encounters,’ we’re told, ‘show that interactions with the ocean can instil fears in the body that remain long after a wave has crashed’ (p. 4). It’s not a big discovery that life-threatening experiences can lead to trauma and/or anxiety, and it’s not specific to the ocean. It should also be noted that some interviewees stopped going out to sea after frightening experiences, sticking to beach walks and photography.

However, the authors are more interested in the ways fear contributes to learning and relatedness. Here, the responses were more practical. Participants coped with fear in embodied and practical ways, such as learning breathing techniques to cope with being submerged, or learning to read what one interviewee calls ‘the body language of the ocean’, or offering ritual blessings. One interviewee recounts an encounter with a shark, realising in retrospect that the feared creature was actually benign. They subsequently developed positive feelings about wishing to encounter sharks. Rather than positioning fear as something to overcome, the study reframes it as a productive, ethical, and relational force that can deepen connection, care, and responsiveness to more-than-human environments.

What it means for radicals: The main practical implications involve ways people handle frightening situations. The article shows that people make dangerous/frightening things less dangerous/frightening by learning ways (real or speculative) to avoid, survive, or mitigate them; people become attuned, consciously and unconsciously, to signs of when something that is usually safe becomes dangerous; and people become less frightened of things that turn out to be harmless. These all seem obvious to me already, and I’m surprised they’re taken as disruptive of dominant assumptions. In particular, a lot of DIY anarchist practices are already built this way. If these ways of warding off fear are not available or don’t work, there’s a tendency for people to stop doing the dangerous/frightening things – and the state uses this proactively. DIY workarounds are therefore vital to the sustainability of activity.

From here.

Non-Western Modernities and Alternative Globalizations: Sociological Perspectives, by Mikhail Maslovskiy, Russian Sociological Review, 24 no. 4, 2025.

This article examines globalization through the theoretical lens of multiple modernities, emphasizing the limitations of “reductionist” approaches (particularly world-systems theory) and advancing a multidimensional understanding of global processes. Building on critiques by Shmuel Eisenstadt and Johann Arnason, the author argues that globalization cannot be reduced to economic dynamics alone but must be understood as an interaction of economic, political, cultural, and civilizational dimensions, each with its own logic and temporalities. Arnason’s rejection of rigid “system” models in favour of globalizing processes highlights the plurality and irreducibility of sociocultural spheres.

The article reviews dominant perspectives on the temporalities of globalization, distinguishing between long-term (500-year), medium-term (250-year), and recent (50-year) frameworks. It situates these within the multiple modernities approach, drawing especially on Göran Therborn’s analysis of successive waves of globalization and de-globalization. From this perspective, contemporary trends—marked by crises since 2008 and renewed geopolitical conflict—suggest a shift toward de-globalization and the growing importance of global politics rather than economic integration alone. Globalization is taken to be a spread of a certain type of modernity (roughly, neoliberalism) which has now come into crisis, leading to “multiple globalizations.”

A central contribution of the article is its discussion of Arnason’s analysis of the Soviet mode of globalization. Arnason conceptualizes communism as an alternative modernity with global reach, shaped by revolutionary ideology, imperial legacies, and civilizational patterns. He emphasizes the multidimensional character of Soviet globalization, encompassing political expansion, ideological diffusion, and civilizational rivalry with Western liberal modernity. While the Soviet project achieved significant geopolitical influence, it ultimately failed to construct a viable alternative world economy or a sustainable civilizational model. The Sino-Soviet split further weakened the global communist project, revealing deep civilizational and cultural fractures within communist modernity itself. Arnason interprets the collapse of the Soviet model as the result of intertwined economic, political, and cultural factors, resisting monocausal explanations.

The article also highlights the influence of Arnason’s framework on historical sociology and post-communist studies, particularly in analyses of Russia’s post-Soviet transformations. The multiple modernities perspective is shown to be useful for understanding Russia’s oscillation between openness to Western models and later conservative, civilizationally framed rejections of Western modernity.

In its second major empirical focus, the article applies the multiple modernities framework to China’s rise. It argues that contemporary China represents a distinct configuration combining capitalist economy, Marxist-Leninist political structures, and selective revival of civilizational and imperial legacies, notably Confucianism. Drawing on Arnason, Therborn, and others, the article critiques simplistic notions of China as a monolithic “civilizational state,” stressing instead the recombination of old and new elements and the enduring influence of imperial trajectories. Initiatives such as the Belt and Road are interpreted as potential expressions of an emerging alternative mode of globalization shaped by China’s historical experience.

The conclusion argues that the multiple modernities approach is compatible with, and enriching for, globalization studies. It allows for the analysis of multiple globalizations associated with different forms of modernity and overcomes the limitations of economically reductionist theories. The Soviet Union is interpreted as a failed alternative globalization, while China is presented as a more ambiguous and evolving case whose global role may represent a new, historically grounded form of alternative globalization.

What it means for radicals: It’s not clear how much the Russian state influences the output of this journal or its authors, but the argument made fits well with its aspirations. The driver for denying that modernity is an effect of western power or of a single developmental model may well be the Russian state’s attempts to both modernize (or defend its modernity) and to assert its difference from the west. Maslovskiy seems to be advocating what decolonial theorists call “dewesternization,” i.e. a continuation of modern civilization and capitalism but with a cultural superstructure different from that of the west. This allows emerging powers to position themselves as anti-colonial while continuing colonial legacies.

Optional Ⓐntology of Anarchism, by Grigory Komlev, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 2025, volume 1.

This is a speculative piece dealing with the structure of being and of life-experience, using the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari along with various other approaches (mainly poststructuralist) to make a case for anarchists to adopt a particular type of practice. The author, Grigoriy Komlev, is based in Tbilisi, Georgia, but the article is in a special issue on anarchism in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Georgia isn’t in any of these, but it used to be part of the USSR, and there’s lots of Russian draft dodgers and dissidents there at the moment, meaning the anarchist scene is blossoming. If they’re the same Grigoriy Komlev who made the film Luzhayka in 2015, then they’re probably an exile from Russia. They describe themselves as an “independent philosopher, poet, and writer.”

The article largely belongs to the field of Continental philosophy. Continental philosophy is often more insightful than the analytical variant, but tends to be suggestive rather than justifying its claims. Like most of its kind, this piece is written in a verbose way with frequent references to historical terms from philosophy, and in this case also to ancient Greek philosophers such as Heraclitus and Anaximander. The term “ontology” in this context refers to ways of seeing and experiencing, which are assumed to constitute subjective reality; the argument is close to that of the “ontological turn” in anthropology and to Derrida’s “hauntology.” The paper is not, therefore, dealing with ontology in the same sense as analytical philosophers.

Ⓐntology is an invented word (ontology with a circle-A) which is largely used to refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of schizoanalysis. Like hauntology, it both is and isn’t ontology. Anarchism is juxtaposed to arche, a Greek term from which it is derived. Arche is taken to mean ontological authority as well as political or social power. It’s common in poststructuralism to assume that anarchists should be equally or more concerned about fighting fixed meanings and textual authority as about political or social authority. They also go in the direction of rejecting the primacy of concepts of Self, personality, subject, etc. in western philosophy.

In a sense, the author thinks we’re all already ontologists. The author believes that issues regarding failures of voluntary agency – unconscious desires, demon-possession, etc. – or of entities such as souls necessarily lead into the field of ontology. In other words, ontology is taken to encompass issues around the unconscious and desire.

The author also believes that multiple ontologies exist (in effect, different people live in different realities). These are all ‘real’ but don’t have a ‘monopoly on truth.’ Yet there must be some overlap, since a shaman talking to spirits might still fall off a cliff. Also, ‘the same is not identical to itself.’ This is a Derridean premise, which undermines all conceptual systems equally. However, the author also seems to be using it in a Stirnerian or Korzybskian way, to indicate that two entities in the same set or with the same name are distinct (e.g. all humans are not alike). The author also rejects being and the verb “to be”, because objects and subjects are effects of what they call ontologies. What someone creates or discovers as their ontology shapes what they experience as real. This happens in some kind of relation with a sensuous reality in which some dangers are real. The author calls for the modification of psychoanalysis to make it a practice of anarchist self-care. They seem mainly to mean the Lacanian variant.

This text develops a philosophical intervention into anarchist theory by arguing that anarchism requires sustained ontological reflection, particularly through engagement with the unconscious and schizoanalysis. The authors contend that tensions within anarchism, especially between “left” and “right” variants, can be understood ontologically through differing assumptions about the unconscious. Where the unconscious is denied, subjectivity is framed as fully autonomous and self-possessed, aligning with anarcho-capitalist logics of property and responsibility. Conversely, acknowledging an intersubjective or collective unconscious undermines claims to absolute self-ownership and supports anarchist-socialist orientations grounded in relationality and shared desire. The ancaps say “Self am Self” and the ancoms say “Self am the Other.”

Rejecting the possibility of a single, universal ontology compatible with anarchism, the authors propose instead an “Ⓐntology”: a plural, provisional, and non-totalising ontology consistent with anarchism’s anti-authoritarian ethos. This Ⓐntology does not claim truth but functions as a situational framework through which anarchist subjectivities can reflect on how they are constituted. Without such reflection, the authors argue, anarchist projects risk collapsing into irresolvable disputes grounded in unexamined ontological assumptions. The author thinks different psychotherapies (Lacanian, Jungian, Gestalt, CBT, etc.) involve different ontologies, and this is why they work for some people and not others.

Schizoanalysis, drawing on Félix Guattari, is advanced as a key practice suited to Ⓐntological anarchism. Rather than a fixed methodology, schizoanalysis is presented as an open, experimental, and continuously reinvented practice of metamodelling that redistributes flows of desire, produces new subjectivities, and resists totalisation, fascism, and hierarchical power. Unlike classical psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis rejects rigid distinctions between analyst and analysand and between conscious and unconscious, extending beyond clinical settings into collective, political, and cultural practices. The author considers schizoanalysis to be an exercise in “meta-modelling” and not a general ontology of reality. It’s a way of building particular useful “machines” so to speak. And it should be optionally adopted by some people as anarchist self-help.

The author discusses Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between psychotic (they actually say “schizophrenic”) and paranoiac personality-formations, and adds the third term of neurosis. They suggest that psychosis is ‘the language of being’ and the initial position of infants. Neurosis is the language of description, and paranoia is a position which results when psychotics fight over the power to name things.

To illustrate this, the text presents a case of “schizoanalytic dissociation” through a non-hierarchical, non-industrial film collective. This collective has no boss and uses circulating roles in a similar manner to Guattari’s practice of institutional therapy (in which patients and other staff exchanged places with doctors). In this example, filmmaking operates as a collective process of becoming rather than representation: there is no fixed script, no central director, and no monopoly on creative authority. The camera functions as a mediating device that enables the coexistence of multiple ontologies and subjectivities, facilitating mutual transformation, cooperation, and ethical reorientation. The group is understood as finite and experimental rather than permanent, emphasising experience over institutionalisation.

The authors conclude that schizoanalysis should not be treated as a blueprint for anarchist society, but as an optional yet meaningful practice for producing anarchist subjectivities capable of coexisting within ontological multiplicity. Anarchism, they argue, is sustained not through unity or permanence, but through the ongoing production of difference, finitude, and new forms of collective becoming.

What it means for radicals: It’s fashionable at the moment – and has been for a long time – for people trying to theoretically enrich anarchism to look mainly to poststructuralism. It’s not surprising, since poststructuralism is both dominant in leftfield academia and rooted in the revolts of 1968. However, the orthodox version of poststructuralism which is today prevalent often imparts as many false lessons as true ones.

Komlev is doing several of the things I object to in a lot of current poststructuralist writings, in postanarchism, in identity-political anarchism, and in Anglo-American receptions of Deleuze: the establishment as an axiom that reality and truth do not exist and must not be talked about; the belief that the self or individual doesn’t exist or is of minor importance; the conflation of models of becomings and flows with external, cybernetic models of interconnected nodes; the deflection of concern from fighting external control to deconstructing the power of texts or discourse; other-centrism and identification of self and other; and a great emphasis on doing away with, or changing, everyday forms of speech in a way which makes our speech less clear. I have seen in practice that these tendencies often have similar effects to the older, Marxist emphasis on external relations as constitutive of selves, and that they often encourage authoritarianism or undermine effective action in practice. Poststructuralist philosophy affirms difference, diversity, becoming, etc., and yet the axiom that the self is the other leads to the reduction of everything to a basic sameness.

Ontologies, here, means something like fundamental fantasies or root-metaphors. This isn’t so much a model of ontology as a use of language to forbid discussions of ontology in the traditional sense. By calling these “ontologies” (rather than, say, worldviews), many authors imply that each specific formation is the highest level at which one can speak; there is no way to talk about or between different ontologies, no criteria by which they can be ranked, etc. But this always leads to problems, because the model of what an “ontology” is has to operate universally and between different ontologies. And also, crypto-normative or crypto-ontological language persists in a contradictory way. If something does not claim truth, how can it shed light on how something else is constituted? Isn’t it just a speculation or a story about how it’s constituted? How can a certain way of seeing be posited as desirable for anarchists or any other group, if it is simply one of many equally valid ways of seeing?

One ends up tied in knots, because one has to make general claims about the inter-ontological situation that are de facto universal, while at the same time denying they are universal. For instance, the claim that everyone has an ontology structuring their experience of reality is universal (at least to humans). The claim that these ontologies are bundles of molecular becomings rooted in unconscious formations of desire is universal. The claim that certain real effects happen regardless of ontology is universal. Such claims are better made openly so they can be debated and tested. In poststructuralism today, they are often hidden behind linguistic conventions and prohibitions on using particular kinds of language (e.g. “essentialism”) in ways which make them more-or-less tyrannical. If someone disagrees with these claims, the response is usually to say in effect, “you’re not allowed to say that!” – and this is an increase in authoritarianism compared to a situation where people hold different views of what is or is not universally true.

I’m also a fan of Deleuze and Guattari, but I read them in a manner close to Stirner. They do not believe unitary individuals ultimately exist, but they do believe that pre-individual flows exist both inside and outside individuals, and that the “molar” individual exists as an effect of these flows. In my view, Deleuze and Guattari’s work challenges dominant epistemology, rather than ontology. The ontology they adopt is a model in which reality is composed of molecular forces and flows, and molar aggregates are composed of combinations of these flows, sometimes in congealed, alienated, or reactive forms. At the level of knowledge, however, these forces tend to be invisible to dominant sciences and a different kind of “nomad” science is needed to relate to them. I’m not sure they would concede that, say, a statist who believes in the substantial reality of the state as an external sacred value just has a “different but legitimate ontology.” This kind of thing appears when people read Lacan and Derrida into Deleuze and Guattari, as if they all had the same basic philosophy (they didn't).

I’m not sure a molecular ontology which recognises the unconscious (i.e. psychodynamics) leads to socialism. It certainly undermines the rationalism found in most forms of anarcho-capitalism, but I’ve also seen ancaps and libertarians ground their arguments in diversity of motives. Socialism usually requires a belief that the determinants of life are external to the people involved (as in Marx’s “objective social relations”), and many academic Marxists, poststructuralists, and identity politicians deny that the inner self or space of interior psychodynamics even exists. Everything proceeds as if individuals are just effects of outer forces. This typically reflects a particular authoritarian complex: the fantasy that the self is a part of the body of the parent, who is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, and a resultant orientation to passing the “test” of this reality, which by definition one cannot reject or leave. Not all socialists believe this or hold this complex, but it underpins those forms of socialism which downplay individuality and insist the collective is more real than the individual.

Schizoanalysis leads to a practice close to autonomous Marxism or post-left anarchy, with a focus on politics of desire, free affiliation, diversification, escape from all controlling systems, and the subordination of “social production” (including economics, norms, meanings, etc.) to “desiring-production” (the flows by which desire produces cathexes). Deleuze and Guattari’s political orientations are close to autonomous Marxism and their work overlaps strongly with Situationism and with the work of Hakim Bey.

I’m basically an empiricist and nominalist about reality. In other words, all reality-claims are rooted in experiences of (and relations to) sensuous reality. When people’s experiences of sensuous reality overlap, one gets straightforward empiricism, nominalism, or local knowledge. When they do not (more common in altered-consciousness experiences than in ordinary ones), one gets different lenses and ways of seeing (“ontologies” in Komlev’s sense), but these still arise from particular kinds of sensuous experience. It is precisely because different experiences can be situated in different personality-structures accessible to psychoanalytic or schizoanalytic theory that they are not distinct ontologies, but rather, relate to each other. Now, sensuous experience only makes sense as a category if there is someone or something (an ego, an id…) which experiences. Refusing to believe that people are just passive nodes receiving “information” from other nodes does not entail being a liberal or pro-capitalist. It’s necessary to resist the elision of individual uniqueness and agency, and the communitarian bias, which is buried in the no-self ontologies of many poststructuralists.