But all things considered, the creation of a coalition against consensual crimes would seem to be a very practical, viable, and strategically beneficial means of building the leftist and libertarian wings of the pan-secessionist radical alliance and the pan-anarchist struggle against the state.

  The Rise of the Grey Tribe

  Right now, the most important thing that anarchists, libertarians, anti-state radicals, decentralists, anti-authoritarians, paleos, communitarians, and allied others can be doing is growing the Grey Tribe as a third force in U.S. politics beyond the Red Tribe/Blue Tribe dichotomy.

  Growing the Grey Tribe is one of the primary steps that need to be taken towards the application of the ARV-ATS paradigm and strategy (along with continuing to increase popular support for the idea of secession).

  The Red Tribe is increasingly being marginalized from the mainstream of U.S. politics, and is instead developing its own regional strongholds, while an emerging Blue Tribe/Grey Tribe conflict is taking place. That fits perfectly with my past predictions as well, i.e. that the Red Tribe would become increasingly irrelevant over time, and that the Blue Tribe would become the de facto norm, with the Grey Tribe emerging as the de facto “real Left” opposition to the totalitarian humanism of the Blue Tribe with the left-libertarian/anarcho-leftoids being caught in the middle. As one writer has stated:

  Everyone knows America has two cultures. Ever since the bitterly contested 2000 Bush v. Gore election we’ve referred to “Red States” and “Blue States.” The states in question of course aren’t monolithically “Red” or “Blue” but the color describes the dominant culture of the population of those states. Red and Blue are more clearly thought of as tribes.

  Scott Alexander describes the American Red & Blue tribes:

  The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!”, and listening to country music.

  The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”.

  The Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe existed long before the 2000 election, of course. In fact these two American tribes pre-date their own nation. They have both existed and been at each other’s throats for a thousand years. Their bitter fight has erupted into open mass warfare three (count ‘em, 1 2 3) times, and their cultural struggle has never ended.

  Scott goes on from describing the Red and Blue tribes to briefly and parenthetically mention a third tribe, the Grey Tribe:

  (There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)

  Partly formed? Someone should do something about that.

  The Grey Tribe Is Born

  Greys are a libertarian-minded tribe of live-and-let-livers. They tend to dwell online, often adopting shifting pseudonyms and communicating with each other on forums and anonymous imageboards. Amongst the Grey Tribe one would expect to see higher levels of internet savvy, fondness for tech gadgetry, and disillusionment with traditional politics. They support privacy and anonymity, and oppose the NSA surveillance regime. Edward Snowden is a Grey Tribe hero. They revere open source, strongly support an open internet, and it is by no means an exaggeration to describe them as free speech fundamentalists.

  Greys tend to have nomadic tech industry jobs. Many are freelancers or entrepreneurs. They engage online and don’t congregate geographically as thickly as the other tribes do, except for their noticeable clusters in San Francisco and other technology hubs. They speak in nerd/geek/gamer lingo and signal membership to each other with Internet cultural tropes and catchphrases. All three of the tribes have found a home on the internet but the Grey Tribe is born of the net and has never existed outside of it.

  Many of the Grey Tribe self-identify as Blue, agreeing with Blues on many social issues while feeling disagreement with the Blues in areas economic and opposing Blue efforts to enforce political correctness. A few self-identify as Red, strongly agreeing with small government and 2nd amendment rights, but usually feeling strong antipathy or at best ambivalence toward Red social issues like opposition to gay marriage and abortion. Other Greys adopt the libertarian mantle, and many Greys disavow politics entirely. Despite their failure so far to self label as such, the Grey Tribe does exists as its own independent culture, overlapping in areas but remaining distinct from the Red and Blue cultures.

  The Grey Tribe has existed as long as the Internet but in the last few decades a generation has grown up on the internet and on its Grey Tribe culture. The numbers of the Grey Tribe have swelled while the cultural and economic power of the Grey Tribe has also risen along with the power and prestige of the tech industry. Grey industries and cultural products have now entered the mainstream and with entry to the mainstream come conflict with existing power centers.

  The Grey/Blue Conflict

  The emerging Grey Tribe is the result of a schism within the Blue Tribe, who has all but won their long war against the tired & woeful Red Tribe. Greys in many ways are moderate Blues, in that they agree with the general Blue cultural positions on gay marriage and abortion but reject Blue economic and cultural extremism. Many of the technology stories of the recent past are best interpreted as part of a Blue/Grey conflict between Grey freedom of expression and moral values.

  Classical Grey libertarianism is assailed as “brutalist” by Blue left-libertarianism. The Grey technology industry is mostly fallen to a Blue insurgency war under the cry of “More women in the industry!” Grey science fiction fandom has been wracked by Blue-instigated civil war. Grey organized Internet atheism has witnessed a breakaway of schismatics in deep Blue Atheism+. And even the apolitical Grey gamers are now under Blue assault.

  These varied fights are not separate, they’re the multiple fronts of a single large scale tribal culture war that the Blues are currently waging against the Greys for not being Blue enough. Each of these fronts has simmered independently but of late, especially with regard to GamerGate, the conflict has become so hot that the fronts are bleeding into each other. This war shouldn’t be confused with the mainstream Blue vs. Red culture war, which is all but over, this is a brand new culture war by the Blues against a different opponent and it takes place almost entirely on the Internet.

  As they become more aware of the larger picture and notice the other fronts, the Greys will begin to see that each of their fights has deeper stakes and is part of the larger important struggle to maintain their Grey culture. The Blues may have overstepped and awakened a sleeping giant. This war may be what results in the Greys flexing their might and explicitly asserting their independence from the Blues.

  Could the rise of the Greys be the rise of a new participant in the thousand year war? Will the Reds survive as more than a southern regional culture if that happens? Will the Blues instead succeed at snuffing the Greys out in their crib?

  Stay tuned. It’s an interesting time to be a witness to history.

  Anarchists, Secessionists, and the Grey Tribe: Where We Conflict

  In a perfect world, there would be a federation of anarchist organizations, representing many kinds of political and cultural groups with a generally anti-authoritarian orientation (a libertarian Grey Tribe in opposition to the various forces of statism, totalitarianism, imperialism, militarism, corporatism, and fascism). Further, the overarching strategic outlook for the anarchist-Grey Tribe would be pan-secessionism (a kind of contemporary version of the classical anarchist notion of the general strike). It is indeed probable that a relatively unified anti-state force will need to emerge at some point if the enemy is to be effectively combated and overthrown.

  However, it is also true that there is also a great deal of division between and among anarchists, libertarians, Grey Tribers, and secessionists. For example, a large majority of anarchists are cultural leftists while a significant percentage of the much larger Grey Tribe is right-wingers or social conservatives. And many serious libertarians, not to mention Grey Tribe sympathizers, are neither anarchists nor secessionists. Likewise, there are many fellow travelers of the Grey Tribe who have a foot in the Red Tribe, Blue Tribe, or some other tribe. How can a coherent much less cohesive movement emerge from such an array of contradictory and often hostile opinions?

  It needs to be remembered that we are not yet at the stage where a united revolutionary front is necessary. An effort of this kind may be necessary in the future as the moment approaches when the ruling class desperately seeks to maintain its position and unleashes repression. But that particular stage in the struggle is likely a very good distance into the future.

  In the meantime, it is sufficient that different resistance tendencies grow independently of each other even if they remain bitterly opposed to one another in many instances. For example, as anarchist movements grow on a macro-level, many of these will no doubt be very much in conflict with each other on the micro-level. The current rivalries between anarcho-communists and anarcho-capitalists, leftist-anarchists and national-anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-primitivists may actually intensify. So will the conflicts that have been observed between vegetarians and vegans, feminists and the transgendered, anarchist people of color and crustpunks, anarcha-femnists and critics of “call out culture,” and many others. However, the pan-anarchist paradigm that ATS aims to advance is primarily concerned with the sum total of the growth of anarchist movements taken as a whole, and not sectarian or issue-based rivalries that may exist between them. As anarchists movements grow to include hundreds of thousands or millions of people, these kinds of antagonisms may only increase, including public brawls and street fights between antifa anarchists and anarcho-nationalists, primitivists and technophiles, vegans and carnivores, feminists and male homosexuals, and many other such divisions.

  A similar process may unfold among the wider libertarian-leaning Grey Tribe. There will likely be intense rivalries between thick and thin libertarians, religious and atheist libertarians, left and right libertarians, Red Tribe and Blue Tribe libertarians, racist and anti-racist libertarians, brutalist and humanitarian libertarians, anarchist and minarchist libertarians, pro-life and pro-choice libertarians, and, perhaps most significantly, secessionist and anti-secessionist libertarians.

  As secessionist movements grow, there will likely be both anarchists and libertarian Grey Tribers who are opposed to secession for any number of reasons, e.g. contending cultural values, economic questions, foreign policy differences, patriotism, concerns about stability, and other things. There will also likely be rival camps of secessionists who disavow each other, or disavow the libertarians, or disavow the anarchists.

  This is not to mention the vast array of single issues (from immigration to capital punishment to legalizing polygamy to religious liberty vs. gay rights) that will prove to be highly controversial as these movements collectively grow.

  None of this by itself is particularly problematic from the perspective of the ARV-ATS philosophy, meta-political outlook, or meta-strategy. Our ambition should be to grow all anarchist, libertarian, anti-statist, decentralist, anti-authoritarian, anti-corporatist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and regionalist movements until all of these collectively become a substantial political majority. We should likewise seek to grow our various strategic and tactical concepts such as pan-secessionism, core demographic theory, fourth generation warfare, anarcho-populism, inside/outside strategy, the left-right-center tripartite strategy, pan-anarchist federations, third-party alliances, alternative infrastructure, the 25 point platform, building coalitions of anti-state interest groups, a peoples’ economic front, legal defense organizations, civilian defense organizations, identitarian organizations, regionalist movements, and a free nations coalition. We should grow these strategic ideas until a majority of radical and opposition groups are using them.

  When the numbers reach this level we will have won by default.

  On Building the Revolutionary Party

  The Lumpenproletariat as Class Vanguard

  On April 27, 2005, Andrew Mickel, a.k.a. Andy McCrae, was sentenced to death for the November 19, 2002 assassination of a Pine Bluff, California police officer in an act of insurrection against the police state and the empire of imperial state-capitalism that pulls its strings. The action in question was a classic “hit and run” guerrilla maneuver, one that Andy may well have learned during his days as a US Army Ranger. Andy was twenty-six years old, a veteran not only of the US Army but of various movements of the Left, including anti-globalization and Palestinian solidarity. He is now at San Quentin on California’s death row.

  Of course, Andy is the Left’s perfect counterpart to Tim McVeigh. The similarities are certainly obvious enough. The question before us involves the relevance of individuals such as these to the struggle to come. Both the United States as a nation and the world as a whole are entering into a new political phase. For the US, the remnants of the Old Republic are rapidly giving way to the peculiarly unique form of fascism represented by the neoconservative/Anglo-Zionist/Straussian cabal that has seized the apparatus of American foreign policy. For the world, the consolidation of a global super state under an international ruling class centered in the Atlantic nations perhaps operating in collusion with their junior partners elsewhere has never been nearer. US Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) has pointed out that a motion brought before the United Nations by the US regime would effectively make revolt against any state anywhere on earth into an international crime, to be prosecuted by international courts and enforced by international police and military forces. The enactment of such a provision would essentially be the final building block in the creation of a global government, with each of the previously sovereign nations being reduced to mere provinces within the global super state, with resistance anywhere on earth to any sort of regime being tantamount to an act of treason against the global super state. Of course, the global super state would in reality be a mere front for the US regime and the senior partners in its global empire (England and Israel), now having achieved complete world domination, and pursuing revolutionaries everywhere as part of its generic misnomer, the “war on terrorism”.

  It is a certainty that if the US continues its current program of imperial aggression and global warfare under the cover of the ideology of revolutionary democratism, the revival of military conscription within the domestic United States will be a necessity. This will in turn be quite likely to produce a good deal more of the likes of Tim McVeigh and Andy McCrae, angry young men with military experience who turn their guns on the System. This phenomenon will also be fueled by the drastic rise in recent decades of persons prone to lethal violence of either a random or retaliatory nature (school shooters, “road rage”, “disgruntled postal workers”, etc.). Thus far, such incidents have mostly occurred independently of one another and have been directed towards random or personalized targets. However, rising political discontent fueled by an unpopular war (or series of wars), economic decline, increased repression, and an increasingly alienated and frustrated population of youth and military veterans will likely trigger not only an increase in incidents such as the aforementioned but also the carrying out of such actions in ways that are more organized and with more specific political objectives. In other words, as the US continues to degenerate politically, economically and culturally to Third World levels, resistance efforts in the US will begin to mirror those of the Third World, i.e., overt armed struggle.

  It is highly significant that those who have taken up arms against the state in recent years have originated from both the Left and Right, often involving similar if not identical issues, particularly police repression. The next phase in the natural evolution of this phenomenon would be a type of political coalescence of the radical Left and radical Right into a new radicalism that defies the old, stereotypical categorizations. Examining the history of radicalism, we see the rise of the industrial bourgeoisie with eighteenth century classical liberalism. The Old Left, with its focus on the industrial proletariat, and the New Left, with its focus on traditional minorities and out groups, have, like the bourgeois before them, becomes a part of the status quo, of the Establishment. The contemporary Left’s incessant condemnations of “racism, sexism and homophobia” render impotent the Left’s claims of radicalism when minorities occupy high positions among the imperial overlords.

  If the vanguard of the new radicalism is not the traditional proletariat, nor the traditional minorities, then who would be? If both the bourgeoisie of classical liberalism and the proletariat of classical socialism have been effectively incorporated into the mainstream of corporate-social democracy, what class then emerges as a revolutionary class? The peasantry, as the Maoists would insist? There is no peasantry in modern societies, though the rural underclass, as will be shown, often comes close. Instead, the obvious class vanguard of the new radicalism becomes the lumpenproletariat, what Marx called the “social scum”. We might think of the lumpenproletariat of modern societies as existing on a number of different levels. Several incidents from recent American history illustrate this. During the decade of the 1990s, three major acts of rebellion against the US ruling class transpired. The first of these was the so-called “L.A. Riots” of 1992, involving members of the urban underclass, primarily though certainly not exclusively ethnic minorities. The lumpenproletarian nature of this uprising is further illustrated by the fact that the leadership of the insurrection was often provided by urban street gangs, the closest thing to an actual infrastructure that exists in many urban underclass communities. The second such incident was the militia phenomenon, circa 1994-1998, involving members of the rural underclass, often dispossessed traditional farmers (akin to similarly dispossessed Third World peasants), and composed primarily, though not exclusively, of members of traditional, even reactionary social groupings, including religious fundamentalists, ethnic preservationists, traditional patriots, racialists, cultural conservatives, constitutionalists and populists. The hysterical reaction to the militia movement on the part of the Left establishment, who shuddered at the thought of armed rural ruffians scurrying about, once again illustrates the irreconcilable differences between the liberal cultural elite and the lumpenproletarian underclass. Indeed, much liberal hysteria over private firearms stems from an unarticulated fear of urban minorities among affluent liberals who wear their phony egalitarian credentials on their sleeves.