User:RD/9k/first rule of fight club (Q8600)

Main entry

8600. Q8600/Q8600first rule of fight club (motif; fiction) / the first rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club / the first rule of X club is you don't talk about X club (reference to movie, often as a mental autocompletion of "what a first rule usually is")
8600. Q8600/Q8600first rule of fight club (fiction) / the first rule of anarchism is you don't talk about anarchism (generic) -> this comes to mind when trying to explain what anarchism is. I swear that in people's everyday practice there's a 'first rule of anarchism' that's just like the first rule of fight club. anarchists seem to be weirdly obsessed with one of two things: A) purging people of all political ideology and theory so that they have the most pure and untainted Free Will, which is supposedly the basis for all "true" political movements or B) concealing the existence of anarchism so it doesn't get caught and can hide behind a bunch of other things that take the fall (and often end up quite heavily persecuted the longer they get caught and anarchism doesn't).
      I think from the point of view of anarchism it mainly intends to hide itself for its own safety. I don't think most anarchists that know they're anarchists truly want the thing that inevitably results of anarchism literally turning into reformism and in hiding itself inside larger objects (Liberal-republicanism, demographic identity movements, circa 1980s-2020s academia) literally becoming a movement about changing those objects only precisely according to their own established nature and established rules. but it does tend to happen; anarchism tends to morph into generic entryism. and as that happens, Tories tend to shift to attacking the entire object that anarchists or Gramscians are hiding in claiming the entire thing is bad or corrupt. this can have mixed effects. the intended effect is that when the larger object comes under attack the center-Liberals will realize they and the anarchists can fight the same battle, and defend the anarchists. the observed effect often isn't that. you often see center-Liberals just kind of sticking to their arbitrary stack of Idealist propositions "because I said so", disclaiming that they're the anarchists, and expelling or outright persecuting the anarchists. this happens both because they know it's an easy way to get the Tories to leave them alone for a little while (not indefinitely of course), and specifically because they may actually think not being an anarchist is categorically good and they have the right to believe whatever they want to without anyone else, not anarchists nor historical processes, making them believe something else before they're ready. center-Liberals and Tories are both heavily warped by bourgeois Idealism but they are also actually materially separate and actually in contradiction. the thing of it is that the center-Liberals expel anarchists not really for reasons related to their antagonism against the Tories but pretty much because that's who they are and that's what they want to do. each of the two is a miniature capitalism all of its own resembling a miniature nation-state all of its own. there are two dictatorships-of-the-bourgeoisie and they each hate anarchists separately.
      so center-Liberals can expel anarchists and Western-Marxists purely because they want to. but the damage has still been done. once there have been anarchists in there, the Tories will wise up and start persecuting the objects the anarchists are in just because there were once anarchists in them, whether there are anarchists in them or not, and eventually, whether there ever were or whether they made it up. this is almost exactly why Tories are getting so insistent on 'banning trans people' or 'banning Black voters' as of 2026, because those demographics are potential carriers of anarchism at least in someone's mind. the Tories basically get veto power over what demographic identities exist as long as capitalism exists, because they have such a limited set of views and in turn a solid bloc of people that can easily form a majority and in effect become the de facto founders of the republic that get to define everything it is, while anything else is a plurality of many tiny groups of people and they all have to actively prove they're not traitors to Liberal-republicanism just to participate in it.
      really, in concept it should be way better to be a Trotskyist than an anarchist because they have a built in point about persecution, it isn't hard for them to start connecting persecution of political minorities (Trotsky) to persecution of demographic minorities capable of forming into larger political groups, and to the concept that the larger group could be a proletarian party. like, Trotskyists should be better at Conceptual Rhizome than schizoanalysts are. they just have one problem: they don't like to believe they've been a minority rather than a majority. they always claim that Trotskyism was this canonical party that 'should have been the majority', Bolshevik meaning majority after all, and they just don't want to accept the truth. here's what I think: if Trotskyism was willing to conceptualize "micro" Trotskyism practicing internationalism across many small groups inside a single country area, the whole riddle of first world countries would be solved. if they could ever solve the Fourth International, of course. hmm. I should add that at the end of my "4disproves4" article I didn't finish, it'd actually be a great conclusion.

Ideologies or fields

618. Q618/Q618Fy / fiction
618. Q618/Q618A / anarchism