The Shadow

goff wrote: Just a bit of advice that will go ignored. Instead of being hoity toity, might be worth considering why exactly the working class loves conspiracies and narratives in general and how that can be accentuated. Down with this sort of thing is also going really well though, maybe carry on.

Why conspiracy theories are prevalent within the contemporary working class is a separate question from why did this particular anarchist publication jump into conspiracy theories.

To address the question of the latter, I'm not certain. I imagine The Shadow never made much money, maybe even barely or never broke even. It was probably produced by people who had an ideological commitment to it and what they understood as its goals. As the publication was never really associated with an organization, but more of a politicized subcultural scene what may have happened is that new people with very different ideas started doing the bulk of the work.

Fozzie wrote: Thanks Goff. It’s entirely sensible advice that I am already doing my best to adhere to. There are a lot of great podcasts like QAA and the work of Annie Kelly that go into this.

Texts on Libcom like How To Overthrow the Illuminati are also helpful in my view. https://libcom.org/article/how-overthrow-illuminati

The trite answer is that conspiracy theories do provide simple answers to complex questions about oppression and inequality and the communities around them are one way to reduce the alienation that people feel.

I’d say that why working class people are interested in this stuff is a more interesting question than why did one radical magazine take a turn for the worse. It seems reasonable to be dismissive of that in the context of uploading that content to this website but a wider conversation is welcome of course.

Didn’t mean to be a prick Fozzie, but it does kill me this is just uncontested ground with massive ramifications. A few things, I’m personally interested in the idea of conspiracy that provides complex answers or not any at all; many things we take now for granted like COINTELPRO or banana companies hiring death squads or GLADIO would have been dismissed as high fantasy one time or another. That they’re all now proven is almost irrelevant. Would it really surprise anyone if 9/11 turned out to be another. Speaking of Marxist alienation, explaining it to someone sounds more like a fever dream than science. And this bifurcation you and Juan mentioned of radicals and conspiracy is only a new self imposed problem, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1870/rebuke.html. Basically, we’ve always been weird, we need to get weirder, and the masses are weirdest still.

goff wrote: many things we take now for granted like COINTELPRO or banana companies hiring death squads or GLADIO would have been dismissed as high fantasy one time or another. That they’re all now proven is almost irrelevant. Would it really surprise anyone if 9/11 turned out to be another.

I see where you're coming from, but I don't really agree with this. All the things that you mention, i.e. "conspiracies" which are actually true, I don't really think technically fall under the umbrella of "conspiracy theories". A conspiracy theory isn't just an idea or suggestion of a conspiracy – it refers to explaining random events normally with straightforward explanations as being caused by some overarching conspiracy.
So the idea that the FBI would have been infiltrating and disrupting radical groups in the 1960s is not some overly complex theory. One of the primary reasons for the creation of the FBI (or at least, its predecessor), was infiltrating and disrupting radical groups at the beginning of the 20th-century. So no one would have thought this was "high fantasy".
It would also have been possible – the FBI is a single organisation, with a strong culture of secrecy and confidentiality. Which pays its employees, and can imprison them for leaking, and so gives them big incentives to keep secrets. They also largely believe in and support what they are doing. So them doing their job which they believe in is also not some wacky idea.
But the idea of 9/11 conspiracy theories just doesn't make any sense on any level (framing a bunch of people from Saudi Arabia for a ridiculously and needlessly convoluted terrorist attack in order to justify invading Afghanistan and Iraq). And it could only have been carried out by a conspiracy of perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of people working for dozens or hundreds of different organisations, none of whom had any kind of culture of secrecy, payroll, or any incentive to keep any secrets (for example, air-traffic controllers, firefighters, airline staff, construction workers, eyewitnesses and so on who would all have to be "in on it").
One thing which is pretty frustrating now is just the complete ubiquity of conspiracy theories which emerge around every single new story. For example even today on seeing a new story about Palestine Action protesters who broke into an RAF base and damaged planes (something which anti-war protesters have done many times), social media comments are full of people claiming this was an inside job, because it would have been completely impossible for anyone to do otherwise.
Something really seems to have happened whereby people who have almost no understanding of anything (for example, how RAF bases are set up and how they run their security), seem to think they understand it perfectly, and so the only way anything could happen which goes against their ignorant preconceptions is some grand conspiracy (normally ultimately involving "the Jews").

goff wrote: To be fair, I am ambivalent on quote unquote conspiracies and more the praxis of using these narratives for radical ends (and narrative in general), but on the technicalities, one of the responses to Daniele Ganser’s GLADIO book was “fails to present proof of and an in-depth explanation of the claimed conspiracy between USA, CIA, NATO and the European countries”. In the case of COINTELPRO the only proof came from a fluke burglary.

This is true, but again COINTELPRO was an example of a highly secretive government agency doing a job that it was specifically set up to do (i.e. disrupt radical groups). This is not a wacky or far-fetched idea.
This is very different to thinking that the government somehow smuggled loads of explosives into the twin towers, blew them up, then separately abducted 2 planes full of people, killed them all, destroyed the planes, and then smuggled all of the corpses and plane debris into the destroyed buildings to make it look like planes crashed into them (even ignoring the separate attack on the Pentagon and the final plane which was crashed by its passengers). And then that they would claim that a bunch of Saudi Arabian people did it, in order to justify supporting Saudi Arabia and invading Afghanistan.
Anyway don't mean to go round in circles about 9/11, but I see what you are saying.
It is just frustrating how absolutely stupid it all is and how many people for it.

goff wrote: I’m with ya. But desperate times call for desperate measures. Just as Irish peasant societies turned to myths, cross dressing and rituals during famine to fight landlordism, we’re gonna need an equally unconventional response.

Anyway, sorry to derail.

I don't really think you need to worry about derailing, because there is not huge amount of discussion going on anyway!
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point, but if you are saying that the conspiracy theory mentality is a "response" which could be potentially beneficial to "us", then I'm afraid I just disagree. The general mentality is that everything that happens is preordained and arranged by an invincible group of powerful individuals. Therefore the ultimate consequence of it is profoundly demobilising.
See, for example, all the idiots claiming that Palestine Action activities were all part of some grand plot.
Going back to your famine analogy, the equivalent would be having a belief that all of the peasant resistance to landlordism was in reality actually just organised by the landlords or British colonial government themselves for some nefarious ends.
But anyway, we may just go around in circles from this point, because I think we probably just have different views on this.