Hopelessness about the future is very commonly seen as always a bad thing, but as an anarchist nihilist I wanted to say something about this.
How many communists are filled with the hope that a revolution will eventually come and solve our problems, that even if it is not going to happen soon, that it HAS to happen eventually due to the internal contradictions of capitalism? Very many communists believe this, it’s not an uncommon opinion at all. In order to fill the ranks in their organizations communists have to lie about the feasibility of global revolution. How else are you going to convince people to join your glorious communist organization without a promise of some kind of result? This common communist belief is also a self defeating one since if revolution is inevitable, why fight tooth and nail for it?
So let’s face it, international proletarian revolution isn’t going to happen any time soon. We’re not going to be saved, and I don’t say that in a self defeating way.
It instead makes far more sense to allow your disillusionment with leftism and global revolution to empower you instead of debilitate you.
Nihilist anarchists still want the improvement of conditions for people, we just don’t wait around for a revolution to happen. This is not of course to imply that other currents of anarchism reject the need or the desire for insurrection of course, even syndicalists are fine with insurrection. Nihilist anarchists such as myself merely believe that the most meaningful response to our shitty conditions is immediate revolt. If the planet is collapsing, and very very few people are willing to be recruited or agree with your ideology, why would you try to build a positive political programme that cares for the mythos of ‘the future’? Even the concept of ‘the future’ is oftentimes a concept used to limit people’s actions, and I’d rather not sacrifice anything to it.
At the time of writing this, poor people are freezing to death in the snow in Texas, in the middle of a pandemic, and yet people have not revolted en masse, so why wait for them to? No conditions will make people miraculously rally around your political programme.
So, let’s say you are a communist that does NOT think international proletarian revolution is inevitable, and that you merely think it has a chance of happening, and that us radicals should all pitch in to expand the chances of that happening for the liberation of all.
A noble goal, to be sure. But as I briefly mentioned before, the planet is collapsing, and while communists will recognize this, they don’t factor it into their analysis enough to realize that this hinders their political programmes. Nobody is going to listen to your trotskyite newspapers or rush to sign up to your anarcho-communist book clubs. And even if we ignore the climate crisis, the current system will not allow for any positive political programme to flourish. These movements are very, very tiny, and it’s very easy for them to get crushed (even more so if they are centralized) for a variety of reasons. (Such as infiltration and being squashed violently by the state, for example.) So it makes more sense to focus on the destruction of the current social order, with unmitigated hostility, because the current conditions are beyond salvation.
Instead of doing dead rituals, thinking that you’ll eventually build your way up to some mythical revolution if you try really really hard, using hopelessness to your advantage is far more empowering. I do not have hope for techno-industrial society, the state, capital, psychiatry, school, etc. I see revolt as a goal itself, and I don’t concern myself with a vision of tomorrow if what I’m dealing with now, and what is making me bleed, is today. This makes destruction of the current social order for its own sake desirable, separate from any positive political programme. Focusing on the destruction of the current social order in your immediate locality also makes more sense than worrying about international proletarian revolution or what’s happening in the entire country you live in, since you can’t control that, and not only will focusing on your immediate locality be healthier, it’s also more strategic since forcing a revolutionary organization to be huge ensures that it runs into a lot of problems, and having groups of people that can dissipate at will easily is a lot better than large, rigid organizations trying to make the revolution happen.
To some people, the motives for nihilist anarchists to do things seem self contradictory because it seems as if anarchist nihilists simply do things for mere fun, and don’t really care about the conditions in which people live, and that nihilist anarchism is very self indulgent because it hurts for us to imagine a future we can’t believe in. There is also a belief that you must have hope in the thing you are doing in order to do it, but hope is not the same thing as motivation. People oftentimes ignore that nihilism also makes way for victories as well, it’s just that nihilism realises that the capacity to win is far different than the capacity to do liberatory action, and focuses on said capacity to do liberatory action itself instead of feel-good stories about the future.
To quote Serafinski from his work Blessed is the Flame, “Even when we run out of optimistic rhetoric and inspiring stories, our lives can still be oriented against the grain of society. Even from a place of utter hopelessness, we can still find the jouissance in our bodies to attack.”
The concept of “jouissance” that Serafinski is referring to is an ecstatic enjoyment from revolt itself, an almost indescribable feeling that does not care as to whether or not you win or lose, but merely the sparkle in your eyes as you fight. This goes along very well with negation, and this focus on jouissance along with negation is a huge motivation for nihilist anarchists to keep going and fight. The utopia we all want is not going to happen (or has an incredibly small chance of happening) and that’s alright, we can still make do with what we can do, incorporating daily acts of resistance into our everyday lives.
Nihilist anarchists actively reject Schopenhauer’s limp dick pessimism. Nihilism is NOT a violent renunciation of life, but rather a celebration of it. One such nihilist and anarchist exemplified this very well, that anarchist being Renzo Novatore, in his work I Am Also A Nihilist, saying that:
“I call myself a nihilist because I know that nihilism means negation.
Negation of every society, of every cult, of every rule and of every religion. But I don’t yearn for Nirvana, any more than I long for Schopenhauer’s desperate and powerless pessimism, which is a worse thing than the violent renunciation of life itself. Mine is an enthusiastic and dionysian pessimism, like a flame that sets my vital exuberance ablaze, that mocks at any theoretical, scientific or moral prison.”
So, with that being said, what ARE the advantages of the black pill, the anarcho-nihilism pill -that is-? Well, it helps you see the world in a much more liberatory way that puts pressure off of your shoulders. It places the need to attempt to rally the masses around a political programme off of your shoulders. And this blackpill stresses immediate revolt, an immediate revolt that doesn’t care for whether you ‘win’ or ‘lose’, and it doesn’t chain you up to any ideology or morality either, in other words, this black pill is NOT of reified values that you dogmatically adhere to, unlike the other radical sets of beliefs, like communist ideology. And this nihilist anarchism does not expect you to conform to any society or social bond either, it does the opposite, it negates all forms of social hierarchy and domination. You are free to revolt in your own way, whether it be by yourself, or with others, and with this viewpoint you don’t have to give up the way you revolt to an organization that ranks you in place, whether it be the state, or the rapey PSL.
To conclude, on this ‘blackpill’,
The future is fucked, you have nothing left to lose, so fight everyday for the cause you believe in.
