The Anarchist Library

Sunwo - Against Black Britishness

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 23:47:18 GMT

Author: Sunwo
Title: Against Black Britishness
Date: 14/12/24
Notes: This peice was featured in Muntjac Magazine Issue 1
Source: https://muntjacmag.noblogs.org/post/2024/12/14/sunwo-against-black-britishness/

For a country partly responsible for spreading ideas like nationalism across the globe, Britishness is not just a badge—it is a mechanism of control. To be “black” in Britain, then, should be a negation of coloniality. Yet, the lack of continuity in the decolonial struggle within the heart of the colonial core has created a form of cultural amnesia. Our people’s came here seeking liberation from the chains of colonialism, dreaming of a better life. But in doing so, they were forced into a new form of intercolonialism. Now, we wrestle with the impossible task of fitting into a culture that negates our very existence and liberation.

What does it mean to be captured, to be colonised inside the heart of the empire?

Black people in Britain experience systemic oppression at every level. We are the least employed, the least paid, and we hold the least significant positions of power. The rare exceptions, the tokens, have climbed up by bootlicking their way into the system. We are disproportionately incarcerated, and when sentenced, we face harsher punishments for the same crimes committed by our white counterparts. The system is designed to push us into poverty and then criminalises us for it.

The healthcare system, too, reflects this systemic neglect. We experience the worst health outcomes and receive the poorest treatments. Our communities are ravaged by a combination of structural inequality and outright hostility. And yet, many of us cling to the dream of “success” within this system—a dream that ultimately requires us to work for the very state that oppresses us. Success in this system, for Black people, can only mean subjugation.

The Lessons of Windrush

The history of Black people on this island is a history of exploitation. Our relationship with the British state is defined by labour: we were brought here to serve the dying empire. The Windrush generation should serve as a lesson in how we are used. They came to rebuild Britain after the war, only to face hostility, deportation, and betrayal.

Today, we see the same pattern in the legally sanctioned immigration of African health and care workers. They are brought here under unequal terms, with limited rights to stay and build a life. Their purpose is clear: to prop up a crumbling system. This unequal exchange, this intercolonial migration, reflects the ongoing exploitation of Black labor to delay the collapse of British society.

Against Britishness

Black people must reject Britishness as a core identity. It should exist only as a condition for administrative purposes—a recognition of the reality we must navigate. But we cannot allow it to define us. To accept Black Britishness is to fall into the same traps as Black Americans, who have been isolated by nationalism. American Blackness, forged in the crucible of reactionary patriotism, has become complicit in imperialism. This “imperial Blackness” serves the empire rather than resisting it.

Instead, we must imagine and fight for an anarchic, liberatory Blackness. This is a Blackness that transcends borders, a Blackness that resists the conditions of oppression affecting Black people worldwide. It must be rooted in solidarity with the diaspora—connecting not just African descendants but all Black people subjected to colonial violence, from the Caribbean to the Pacific.

Toward a Liberatory Future

To build this liberatory Blackness, we must focus on radical cultural and political practices that reject assimilation into colonial systems. This means organising through autonomous horizontal formations that coordinate locally and internationally, sharing radical histories, ideas, and strategies. It means rejecting nationalism and imperialism in all forms.

Our struggle must be insurrectionary and disruptive. We must engage in direct action, mutual aid, and self-organisation. Only through resisting are we going to overcome the forces that seek to isolate and oppress us.

Anti-colonial struggle must be fought within the colonial core itself. The crimes of this country—the systemic exploitation, the racism, the xenophobia—can only be addressed through the collapse of the empire that created them. We cannot reform an empire; we must dismantle it.

For Black people in Britain, liberation cannot come through Britishness. It can only come through the rejection of empire, the rejection of borders, and the creation of a radical, borderless solidarity.

Lev Zlodey & Jason Radegas - Here at the Center of the World in Revolt

Sat, 14 Dec 2024 01:09:27 GMT

Author: Lev Zlodey & Jason Radegas
Title: Here at the Center of the World in Revolt
Date: 2014
Source: Retrieved on September 12, 2019 from https://archive.org

A dream that ends in shouting

Here we are. At the end of futures. Even the apocalypse has been stolen from us. The misery is at once obvious and easy to ignore. The blinking lights of the carnival pull our attention ever away from ourselves. Why struggle to look elsewhere when the only other vista is the tableau of our defeat and our powerlessness to reverse it? Our animal selves are still alive; we see this in the eruptions of rage that periodically burn through even the most civilized of cities. Only, we’ve found no way to communicate with this side of everyone that is still open to fury. Insurrectionism is coming to an end, eclipsed by an enduring failure to communicate. The insurrection is easy. It’s meeting that’s so hard.

Between flashing lights and the fires of war, most people have made the easier choice, as most people always will at any point in history. Thanks to this laziness the species has survived. But is our inclination towards survival driving us to extinction? If only. We’re afraid it won’t be that simple.

The most romantic of those who have thrown their lives in with the struggle have chosen to believe that fossil fuels are the apex of capitalism’s technological repertoire, and thus collapse is inevitable, because a future of collapse and mass starvation is so much more comforting than one in which this Machine goes on forever, always inventing escapes to the traps it creates for itself. The most sociable are turning the battlefield into a garden, creating their little piece of anarchy so they can share it with neighbors and sleep at night without thinking about the ones who have been shot down or locked up. The most pragmatic of those who have disavowed the comforting distractions still seek some alliance in the order of things; they seek numbers to hide their isolation; they use the tools the Machine gives them to dissimulate their powerlessness. And the most determined can only speak of destroying everything,of fighting only for today because it hurts too much to hope for the improbable, to imagine a future we can’t believe in.

Even those of us who have chosen to rebel have made the easier choices within our rebellion. In the end we are not so different from the majority. This is comforting, somehow.

There is an invisible force at work chaining us to this misery. The depth of our defeat can only be explained by a silent excavation that has been undermining us more profoundly than we’ve ever been uprooted before. Hopelessness is nothing new. But the absence of dreams should strike us as loud as a thunderclap.

Once the rulers took over everything, once they had invaded every last corner, they didn’t demobilize. The war measures only intensified. But what were they invading, if the whole world was already taken?

The key to their ongoing victory hides within an ancient lie. They prepared this battlefield a long time ago by blinding us to its existence. The easiest war to win is one your enemy does not know you are fighting.

The one world was overrun, and now they are invading the other, the world whose existence we have been tricked into forgetting, and every year we are weakened by defeats we do not know about.

The Machine has succeeded in imprinting even in our dreams the feeling that its triumph is permanent. And though machines do run on their own fuel reserves, and could keep going for a time without any input, it would be a mistake to assume that this one has no engineers, that all of us are powerless pawns of a force called history. In fact, there are engineers, there are people who are incredibly powerful. Just as we, they are not free. This elite gets its power precisely from its ability to repair and improve the Machine. They are not unified, except in being chained to the Machine, and they are not a shadowy, omnipotent conspiracy, though they regularly conspire in the performance of their duties. They are people like us, but in positions of influence, where they take technical measurements and draft plans for maintenance or expansion. Just like we do, they live inside reality, which is the product of the Machine. But we, unlike them, are disloyal, and our desires do not conform to their imperatives.

You already know the name of this system’s animating logic, its very spark: it is called control. Control is the all-seeing eye, the sublimated collective memory of the truncheon, shackle, and whip. It is the cop in your head who never needs punish you because you are already in line. Because the Machine now occupies the entire globe, it is only in the imaginary that uncontrolled worlds exist. Unfortunately for the Machine, the imaginary springs eternally. It does not respond to rational conditioning and its relationship with the material world is not mechanical. A reality that pretends to be universal constantly faces the threat of being exposed as a sham. Thus it invades the same territory again and again, each time plowing deeper to scoop up the roots of rebellion. Those of us alive today have been colonized and recolonized, the frontlines have crossed us repeatedly. And still we resist. But we do so without hope. Though the imaginary is invincible, this time they have conquered imagination, and we really have nothing left. Nothing but an impoverished choice, between avoiding the devastating gaze of our own hopelessness, or clinging to the fables of another generation’s imaginings, wholly inadequate for the times it has fallen on us to live through.

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Madeline Silver - What I love about Luigi

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 22:54:30 GMT

Author: Madeline Silver
Title: What I love about Luigi
Date: 12/13/2024
Source: https://freedomnews.org.uk/2024/12/13/what-i-love-about-luigi/

Imagine, if you will, a thought experiment, in Minecraft, many miles away. Let’s imagine I wanted to write an article in support of Luigi Mangione, the assassin of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson. Wouldn’t that be strange? How would I do that?

By telling you – it’s not about him.

The real attraction of the CEO killer, however handsome he may be, is not him: it’s us. The last few days have seen our misery laid bare, but above all they have seen our glorious rage rise to the surface and cover the world like lava. These have been amazing days, because of what beautiful connection I’ve seen in your eyes.

You who write on social media, you who shout from prison, you who refuse to talk to the cops. We’ve all realised we have the same pain and the same struggle. Even people and voices I’d never expect, have sounded out loud: fuck those guys who are hurting them, and fuck anyone who defends them. That’s what’s hot, that’s what I love. It’s us.

This killing, this individual act of war, would mean nothing, and get no support, if it wasn’t a shot fired in a war that was already ongoing. Millions of us are already dying—the difference was that someone shot back.

And no, he isn’t perfect, Luigi Mangione. People suffering in misery don’t care about checking whether someone is perfect when they see one of their tormentors go down. We cheer because, for a brief moment, the boot stamping on our face was not unstoppable, and we realised, or remembered, that we are the many and they are the few.

It’s been building for years, decades. The reason we humans put up with others ruling over us are many. For one thing, we hate violence, we just want to be happy, get along and fart around. For another, we are taught to believe that society is just, that those with more power have earned it somehow.

The last few decades have taken a machete to that illusion. The supposed social contract between the government and the governed, the rich and the rest, has been whittled away, getting weaker and weaker.

The sound of the shot in New York was just the sound of those illusions finally snapping. Like I already told you: it’s not him, it’s us. The real glory that I would want to praise—if I was going to write this kind of article, miles away in Minecraft—is the glory of our rage, our common unstoppable rage, and the wonderful realisation that in this rage, we are very definitely not alone.

Kevin Carson - Every Accusation of Economic Illiteracy Is a Confession of Historical Illiteracy

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 06:52:14 GMT

Author: Kevin Carson
Title: Every Accusation of Economic Illiteracy Is a Confession of Historical Illiteracy
Date: April 29^th, 2024
Source: Retrieved 12/13/2024 from c4ss.org

The Freeman is back to its “best available option” defense of sweatshops and child labor (“What Many Critics of Child Labor Overlook”). It treats public outrage over the presence of child labor in the supply chains of Western corporations as a demonstration of “how economic illiteracy has seeped into the minds of Western media and the general population.”

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People honestly think that prohibiting child labor will improve the welfare of children. Anyone who has been in an argument with someone about the free market will undoubtedly bump against the child labor argument at some point. “Without regulation, child labor would be everywhere!” This argument, however, suffers from a major problem: it assumes that child labor is the worst thing that can happen to children.
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Child labor is certainly not a great sight to behold. Little Johnny sweating bullets in a steel mill is clearly not what parents desire for their children. But before we pronounce a judgment on this practice, we need to consider what the alternative is.
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When examining child labor, we must bear in mind that child labor is one option out of a set of options the child faces. What happens when you prohibit child labor? The children will go to their next best option. In countries that allow child labor, the next best option is usually starvation, poverty, or prostitution.
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Ludwig von Mises used the same argument in defense of the hellish factories of the early Industrial Revolution:

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The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job. They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them. Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless much more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them.
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It was this same argument, appearing then as well as now in The Freeman, which spurred me some twenty years ago to coin the term “vulgar libertarianism.”

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See, laborers just happen to be stuck with this crappy set of options–the employing classes have absolutely nothing to do with it. And the owning classes just happen to have all these means of production on their hands, and the laboring classes just happen to be propertyless proletarians who are forced to sell their labor on the owners’ terms. The possibility that the employing classes might be directly implicated in state policies that reduced the available options of laborers is too ludicrous even to consider.
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The “best available option” argument is typical of the right-libertarian tendency to avoid any consideration of structural power differentials or background violence, or otherwise look even one micron beneath the immediate situation, in determining whether a given interaction is “voluntary.” It deliberately neglects, in particular, questions like why child labor or sweatshops happen to be the “best available alternative,” who set the range of available alternatives, and whether sweatshop employers might be involved in the power structure that determines the range of alternatives. It fails to ask why workers were willing to work in English textile mills 200 years ago, and why the wages were the highest available.

If we take a look at actual economic history, we find that workers in the Industrial Revolution were willing to work long hours for low pay in factories because they’d been forcibly deprived of other options — by employers. From the late middle ages on, the open fields of England, to which villagers had common rights of access, had been enclosed for sheep pasturage. And starting in the mid-18^th century, in the Parliamentary Enclosures, the landed classes systematically robbed the peasantry of their remaining commoning rights in pasture, wood, and fen.

The propertied classes justified this robbery, quite unashamedly and explicitly, on the grounds that the rural population would not work as much or as cheaply at agricultural wage labor as agricultural employers desired them to, so long as employers had to compete against the possibility of subsistence on the common.

For example, a pamphleteer in 1739 argued that “the only way to make the lower orders temperate and industrious… was ‘to lay them under the necessity of labouring all the time they can spare from rest and sleep, in order to procure the common necessities of life’.” A 1770 tract called “Essay on Trade and Commerce” warned that “[t]he labouring people should never think themselves independent of their superiors… The cure will not be perfect, till our manufacturing poor are contented to labour six days for the same sum which they now earn in four days.”

Those rural laborers who were rack-rented and evicted, as “surplus population,” fled to the towns and accepted factory jobs because they had been forcibly deprived of any alternative. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the same rural land-owning classes who did this depriving were also often silent partners who invested in the factories that hired the victims of their robbery.

The lack of “alternatives” in our own day, likewise, result from centuries of imperialism followed by centuries of post-colonial intervention, in which Western states have either directly expropriated common lands from Third World peasantries or colluded with local landed oligarchies in such expropriation. Third World countries are a source of cheap sweatshop labor for Western corporations because those corporations, in collusion with capitalist states, have systematically suppressed better alternatives.

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Kevin Carson - Walter Block: Once Again Defending the Undefendable

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 06:31:35 GMT

Author: Kevin Carson
Title: Walter Block: Once Again Defending the Undefendable
Date: June 26^th & July 20^th, 2024
Source: Retrieved 12/12/2024 from c4ss.org (2)

Part I

In one sense, Walter Block is very much in the tradition of right-libertarian and anarcho-capitalist polemics, insofar as he hides power relationships and coercive institutions behind a facade of “free exchange” and “voluntary contract.” In another, however, he is much worse. Anarcho-capitalists, traditionally, have focused on convincing the average person that a stateless regime centered on private property and free contract would be better than the present in most regards, and at least not all that bad in the rest. Block, in contrast, has seemingly built an entire career on gleefully confirming normal, decent people’s darkest imaginings of such a society.

For example, way back in 1969, when even Murray “Unleash the Police to Clear the Streets of Bums” Rothbard was making overtures to the New Left, Block was busy defending “voluntary slavery.”

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Consider the case of Mr A who can save his wife’s life only by paying $1 million for an operation. He does not have the money, tho. The only way he can get it is by selling himself into slavery to Mr B who is willing to pay $1 million for Mr A’s enslavement. Mr A, valuing his wife’s life more than his own freedom, agrees. He recieves [sic] the money, turns it over to the doctor, and voluntarily signs himself into slavery. Mr A, however, soon tires of the drudgery of slavery, and runs away.
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Should the enforcement agency try, to catch Mr A and return him to Mr B? I give an unequivocal “Yes” ‘in answer. For A, is running away with (stealing) a valuable piece of B’s property — A, himself. The enforcement agency should stop this theft and return B’s property to him just as they would return any other piece of property stolen from B.
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In response to Rothbard’s critique of “voluntary slavery” — that it is impossible because Mr A cannot permanently alienate his will by contract, and cannot be compelled to willingly comply if he later decides slavery is not to his liking — Block concedes that individuals cannot alienate their will or be compelled to voluntarily execute a contract made in the past. But perhaps “concedes” is the wrong word, with its implication of reluctance — as opposed to the glee he displays here:

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But Prof. Rothbard has purchased correctness only at the cost of irrelevency [sic]. For no slave owner like B expects the enforcement agency to do the impossible. No advocate of the enforcement of voluntary slave contracts expects the enforcement agency to force A to willingly work as a slave. All that is expected is that the enforcement agency drag the unwilling slave, kicking and screaming if need be, back to the waiting arms of the rightful slave owner, B; this much is certainly within the realm of possibility….
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The next question is,. Should it be done? The answer is “Yes”….
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Well, a slave’s body is alienable, because it is physically possible to drag him into captivity and slavery . It is only impossible to drag a willing slave into slavery, so only a slave’s will is inalienable.
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Block’s original defense of “voluntary slavery” was written fifty-five years ago. But — perhaps coming to fear that his graphic description of the violent recourse available to the wronged slave-owner lacked sufficient prurient appeal, or that he had been insufficiently clear on the right of slave-owners to mutilate or kill their slaves under the terms of the “voluntary slavery” contract— Block revisited the issue within the past decade.

In a 2015 article in Journal of Economic and Social Thought, he doubled down on the awfulness in almost every conceivable way. Throughout the entire article, the argumentation follows a common pattern: “What’s everyone so hysterical about? We all agree that 19^th century slavery was bad. All I’m saying is…” — whereupon he follows up with something so gob-smackingly horrific that readers are paralyzed with open-mouthed shock.

Not satisfied with merely defending the permissibility of “voluntary slavery” under ancap law, he stresses that the “incidents” of slavery in themselves were not so bad at all — only the fact that it was involuntary. Aside from their lack of choice in their status, Block seems almost astonished that African-American slaves were not content with such a cushy lot. Otherwise, slavery wasn‘t so bad. You could pick cotton, sing songs, be fed nice gruel, etc. The only real problem was that this relationship was compulsory. It violated the law of free association, and that of the slaves’ private property rights in their own persons.

As if this weren’t enough, he adds immediately thereafter: “The Civil Rights Act of 1964, then, to a much smaller degree of course, made partial slaves of the owners of establishments like Woolworths.” From there on out he proceeds to enumerate a whole host of things which, to his mind, are also slavery: not only forced integration of public establishment but rent control, unions, and affirmative action.

Yeah, Walter, I guess people get upset about anything these days.
Block also went into more graphic detail, in an article written only last year, about the full range of unaccountable violence available to the slave-master:

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Anonymous - Every CEO is an opportunity

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Author: Anonymous
Title: Every CEO is an opportunity
Subtitle: A response to "Why I’m not clapping for Luigi Mangione"
Date: 2024-12-13

This is a reaction to Why I'm not clapping for Luigi Mangione.

The article deplores that so many anarchists :

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are still joining in the clapping for his [the shooter's] actions. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for self-defence and not mourning for the CEO, but Mangione was not trying to free anybody. He had no connection to any mutual support, and never cared to share his privileges with the oppressed
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The rest of the article adds more meat to the above statement and it makes good points about what people like the shooter usually do. It's short so go give it a read.

The point I want to make is this : the guy's personal beliefs don't matter, neither does a CEO's usefulness or lack thereof. What matters is what normal people all over the political spectrum are saying about it.

The reactions to Thompson's death have been incredibly positive, and people are pissed at the way things are currently going. It should make us realise that most people are potential allies and that it's up to us to go talk and work with them.

It is an opportunity for us to talk with normal people about the system and how it hurts them. This probably won't turn a lot of people into full blown anarchists overnight, but we have to start somewhere, and people suffering or dying because of a denied insurance claim is a pretty good start.

We shouldn't let this go to waste.

Kevin Carson - “Tragedy of the Commons”

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 23:09:48 GMT

Author: Kevin Carson
Title: “Tragedy of the Commons”
Date: February 13^th & 27^th, 2024
Source: Retrieved 12/12/2024 from c4ss.org (2)

All Landlords Are Terrible Landlords

As an object lesson in support of his thesis that “government is a terrible landlord,” Steven Greenhut (Reason, Dec. 1) recounts his experience trying to get action from his county government over complaints of a poorly maintained, overgrown vacant lot owned by the fire department.

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I started making calls to the appropriate agencies and got the usual bureaucratic runaround. I still remember my call to the weed abatement department, which assured me it would handle the situation. “Aren’t you going to take the address?” I retorted as the person was about to hang up. The county finally mowed the property after the right staffer in an elected official’s office intervened.
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As further evidence that “often the biggest slumlords are government agencies,” he mentions two fires on government property — one in a former USMC blimp hangar, and one allegedly started in an underclass homeless encampment.

(He went on to complain, incidentally, of the problem of “tent cities” on government-owned vacant lots. The primary evil of the “homeless crisis,” apparently, is that large numbers of homeless people are allowed to exist on government property without being forcibly cleared off — and not that they’re homeless because landlords had the power to evict them in the first place.)

Greenhut concludes with the “clear” lesson: “When everyone owns something, no one does.” In support of that lesson, he links to a 35-year-old article at FEE titled “Communal vs. Private Property Rights.”

The article is, predictably, a dumpster fire of lazy right-libertarian cliches. And, predictably, it explicitly cites Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons.”

A great deal of scholarship has been devoted to shredding Hardin’s historically illiterate article since then — among them Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons and J. M. Neeson’s Commoners. And I suppose it’s a good sign that Greenhut merely links to an article whose central talking point comes from Hardin, perhaps hoping to endorse Hardin indirectly while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability. But one does not, presumably, go all the back to the 1980s for an article to link in sole support of a comment, if their agreement is only tangential.

At any rate, the article Greenhut appeals to as an authority is utterly vacuous, starting with its thesis statement:

When the property rights to a resource are communally held, the resource is often abused. In contrast, when the rights to a resource are held by an individual or family, conservation and wise utilitization [sic] generally result.

The Hardin reference is in the context of “Cattle Grazing on the English Commons.”

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In a famous 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin used the England commons to illustrate the problems of communal ownership. In the sixteenth century, many English villages had commons, or commonly held pastures, which were available to any villagers who wanted to graze their animals. Since the benefits of grazing an additional animal accrued fully to the individual, whereas the cost of overgrazing was an external one, the pastures were grazed extensively. Since the pastures were communal property, there was little incentive for an individual to conserve grass in the present so that it would be more abundant in the future. When everyone used the pasture extensively, there was not enough grass at the end of the grazing season to provide a good base for next year’s growth. Without private ownership, what was good for the individual was bad for the village as a whole.
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In order to preserve the grass, pastures were fenced in the enclosure movement. After the enclosure movement established private property fights, overgrazing no longer occurred. Each owner had a strong incentive to protect the land.
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The authors also mention the case of the Indigenous Montagnais people in the Labrador Peninsula.

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When French fur traders came to the area in the early 1600s, the value of beaver pelts rose. The Indians hunted them more intensively and the beaver became increasingly scarce. Recognizing the depletion of the beaver population and the animal’s possible extinction, the Montagnais began to institute private property rights, as Harold Demsetz has discussed in a 1967 American Economic Review article, Each beaver-trapping area on a stream was assigned to a family, which then had both the incentive and the ability to adopt conservation practices. A family never trapped the last remaining pair of beavers in its territory, since that would harm the family the following year.
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For a time, the supply of beavers was no longer in jeopardy. However, when a new wave of European trappers invaded the area, the native Americans—unable to enforce their property rights to the beaver or to their land—abandoned conservation. They took the pelts while they could. Individual ownership was destroyed, and conservation disappeared with it.
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It’s hard to know where even to begin with this mountain of bullshit, but I’ll try.

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Kevin Carson - The Rentier Economy, Vulture Capital, and Enshittification

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 22:58:28 GMT

Author: Kevin Carson
Title: The Rentier Economy, Vulture Capital, and Enshittification
Date: February 27^th, 2024
Source: Retrieved 12/12/2024 from c4ss.org

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There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate — died of malnutrition — because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
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—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
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Introduction

What Enshittification Is. The term “enshittification” was coined by Cory Doctorow, a science fiction writer and astute commentator on economic technological matters, originally from Canada. In Doctorow’s usage, it refers to a life-cycle process in which a platform progressively takes advantage of its intermediary status to exploit and abuse major stakeholder groups — sellers, buyers, workers, users, advertisers, however the relevant categories may overlap on a given platform — and uses intellectual property and other forms of legal privilege to lock in its intermediary status. In the process it becomes less and less useful for all of them, limited only by the need to provide a bare minimum of remaining use-value to keep them from leaving altogether despite the inconvenience and switching costs of doing so.

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Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
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I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
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When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.
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This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon’s customers. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we’d have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year’s worth of shipping. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90% of the time, they don’t search anywhere else.
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That tempted in lots of business customers – Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the “everything store” it had promised from the beginning. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them.
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This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon.
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That’s when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon’s shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company’s $31b “advertising” program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search.
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Searching Amazon doesn’t produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon’s “Most Favored Nation” requirement for sellers means that they can’t sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.[1]
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Doctorow elaborates on the concept in numerous places elsewhere — as do Mike Masnick and the other writers at Techdirt — as it applies to social media platforms, sharing platforms like Uber, music and movie streaming platforms, etc. But for Doctorow, it applies almost entirely to digital platforms.

In this paper, I will apply the concept of enshittification much more broadly. It applies admirably to all the ways that capitalism, historically, has extracted rents by impeding the creation of value, or by actively destroying it. And it has become still more applicable with the rise of rentier capitalism over the past two generations.

Does Enshittification Represent the End of Capitalism? In recent years McKenzie Wark, Yanis Varoufakis, and Cory Doctorow have all argued that some sort of postcapitalist system of extractive class rule has supplanted capitalism proper. This new stage in economic history — variously called “vectoralism” or “techno-feudalism” — is cloud-based and/or rentier, rather than based primarily on markets and profit.

...

Kevin Carson - What Right-Libertarians Fail to Grasp About the Last 100 Years

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 22:48:54 GMT

Author: Kevin Carson
Title: What Right-Libertarians Fail to Grasp About the Last 100 Years
Date: October 2^nd, 2024
Source: Retrieved 12/12/2024 from c4ss.org

At Foundation for Economic Education, Preston Brashers — commenting on a statement by Bernie Sanders that this country can’t afford a billionaire class which is at war with working families — replied (“What the Socialist Left Fails to Grasp about Wealth and Innovation in America,” June 28):

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But when you consider the vital economic activities funded by billionaires, it becomes clear that it’s a society without billionaires that we can’t afford.
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Not all Americans are rich. But all of them are more prosperous because they live in a society where great entrepreneurs can attain great wealth through their vision, innovation, and industriousness.
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I think FEE has been rerunning this same op-ed under different bylines, with a few minor changes in wording, since 1946. It hasn’t aged well. It’s reminiscent of Rip Van Winkle, waking up after a decades-long sleep, oblivious to the economic changes that have occurred since his talking points were formulated in the mid-20^th century. Commentators like Brashers are still living in a dinosaur age when technological innovation was capital-intensive — instead of it actually causing capital requirements to implode through ephemeralization.

It’s telling that, in writing on the massive improvements to our daily lives since the mid-1800s as a result of capital investment, Brashers focuses on innovations, associated primarily with the Second Industrial Revolution, that spurred the development of large-scale capital-intensive industry:

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beginning around 1870, waves of new inventions and innovations burst onto the scene and changed people’s lives. In the 1870s, Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light bulb and the phonograph…. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. By the 1880s Edison was building electrical grids, and Andrew Carnegie’s cost-efficient steel was revolutionizing transportation and industry.
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In the 1890s, Richard Sears and Alvah Roebuck were sending out mail order catalogs, giving rural Americans access to far more choice in consumer products. In the early 1900s, Willis Carrier’s air conditioning was improving productivity in factories and making people’s lives more bearable on hot summer days. In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model T, making car ownership attainable for the middle class.
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But billionaires today, in contrast to Brashers’ captains of industry, have far more wealth than they can invest profitably in producing things to make life better. Most of what they invest in, instead, is mostly making things worse.

Brashers’ contemporary examples of the “richest Americans, who — “from Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos to Warren Buffett to Larry Ellison” — are likewise telling. Of the lot, Musk is the only one whose companies specialize primarily in physical goods with capital-intensive production processes. And his accomplishments in this realm prominently feature running Tesla into the ground with shoddy product design — see, in particular, the universally mocked Cybertruck. His management of Twitter, meanwhile, has become a textbook illustration of how to destroy a social media platform.

Brashers links Musk’s name to a typically brainless John Stossel column, in which he celebrates Musk as a “maker” rather than a “taker.” The primary form of “making” Stossel references is SpaceX’s rockets; he includes the phrase “NASA has given up building spaceships” — never mind the fact that NASA has never built spaceships, and has always contracted them out to companies like Boeing.

And Musk didn’t actually design — let alone “make” — any of the products put out by SpaceX or Tesla. His engineers did. What Musk provided was limited entirely to money — a “service” he was only in a position to provide for reasons I’ll discuss below. The products, like all innovations, were the product of [[https://c4ss.org/content/53425][social intellect] — of science and technology as global, open-source, cooperative projects.

As for the rest of them, Buffett is almost entirely a rentier investor who puts money into existing companies, not an innovator. Bezos’ and Ellison’s companies both center on online platforms, and they both depend heavily on state-enforced intellectual property monopolies and other regulatory constraints to maintain their proprietary, walled-garden business model. Bezos created Amazon 20 years ago; but what he’s done with his billions over the past decade or more has consisted almost entirely of enshittifying the platform he founded.

The fact that so little of the recent investment Brashers hails results from building out new industrial infrastructures reflects an economic environment in which extensive growth is no longer a major source of new profit. Previous long-waves of capital investment were created by new technologies which required the build-out of large-scale, expensive infrastructures. But for the past several decades, the ephemeralization of technology — the imploding scale and capital outlays required for production — has dried up many of the profitable outlets for investment capital. And this crisis tendency has been further exacerbated by the share of the total economy taken up by knowledge and information industries, as Douglas Rushkoff pointed out.

...

Kevin Carson - Regulatory Capture

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 21:39:31 GMT

Author: Kevin Carson
Title: Regulatory Capture
Subtitle: A Problem of Institutional Structure, Not Individual Ethics
Date: January 5^th, 2011
Source: Retrieved 12/12/2024 from c4ss.org

Regulatory capture — the tendency of the regulatory state to serve the interests of regulated industries — is a well known phenomenon. It’s more widespread than most liberals care to acknowledge.

Even the showcase regulatory legislation of the Progressive Era, according to New Left historian Gabriel Kolko (The Triumph of Conservatism), was passed mainly under pressure from big business. It served the primary purpose of restricting competition in the regulated industries and making possible stable oligopoly markets.

Liberals typically respond by arguing that regulatory capture is not inevitable. If only some “good government” reform were passed, like campaign finance reform, the regulatory state would actually be the instrument of pure popular will it pretends to be, and would not be sullied by greed and corruption.

But collusion between regulators and regulated is inevitable by the nature of things. It doesn’t require any conscious corruption at all.

Even without deliberate collusion, “objectively collusive” relationships are inevitable not only because of the shared culture of regulators and regulated, but because regulated industries are—of necessity—the primary source of data for the regulatory state.

For example Mac McClelland, a reporter covering the Gulf oil spill cleanup efforts for NPR, contacted the Navy’s ad hoc command for clarification regarding the official numbers (i.e., 24,000 workers involved in the cleanup effort) it had issued. The lieutenant commander she emailed responded that he didn’t know, because “they’re not actually our numbers. Those are BP’s numbers….” (“Reporters Covering Oil Spill Stymied,” June 24).

But there’s no realistic way of avoiding this. Short of creating a state-appointed shadow management of regulators who’ve been sent to business college and trained in the industry, to constitute a parallel chain of command within the corporate bureaucracy and generate its own independent data, the regulatory state cannot avoid relying on largely unverifiable self-reporting by industry as the source for most of its statistics. And even if the state did create its own massive, parallel hierarchy of numbers-crunchers inside the corporate bureaucracies, in order to function effectively and understand the businesses they were regulating they’d have to have degrees in business administration and absorb a great deal of the culture of the regulated industries—which, presumably, would just take us back to the original problem.

That problem is not so much consciously corrupt motivation on the part of individuals, as it’s a shared culture. It’s the questions that never even occur to the regulators, because of the unexamined assumptions they share with the regulated. It’s the basic structural presuppositions of the regulated industries, which the regulators take for granted as much as the CEOs. The problem is, the regulators see the basic organizational form and institutional culture of the regulated industry, and an economy built on such institutions, as normal. To the extent that they pursue “reforms,” they are reforms that enable institutions organized on that pattern to function on as even a keel as possible. And the stable, effective functioning of existing institutions often means the suppression of smaller, more efficient, decentralized alternatives that might otherwise supplant them — albeit somewhat messily in the short term.

All attempts at “reform,” no matter how sincere, will be the sort of things that can be carried out by the kinds of people running the present system.

Sonia Muñoz Llort - Why I’m not clapping for Luigi Mangione

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 15:08:31 GMT

Author: Sonia Muñoz Llort
Title: Why I’m not clapping for Luigi Mangione
Subtitle: Guys like him shoot a CEO one day, and a lot of kids on another—they just hide their personal reasons behind “brutal honesty”
Date: Dec 12th, 2024
Source: <freedomnews.org.uk/2024/12/12/why-im-not-clapping-for-luigi-mangione>

The last days have been full of news about Luigi Mangione, the shooter of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson. So far have we have understood that this is a young man from a very privileged background with some mixed political views to say the least.

What I do not grasp is how some of my dear fellow anarchists are still joining in the clapping for his actions. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for self-defence and not mourning for the CEO, but Mangione was not trying to free anybody. He had no connection to any mutual support, and never cared to share his privileges with the oppressed.

Also, have we started idolising individuals again?

It should go without saying that one CEO is pretty soon replaced by another one, and that the insurance companies will continue to crush people every time they can. These companies can make a show of reducing their refusal rates for a while, but they will continue rejecting patients, and the neoliberalised health care system will go on with business as usual.

But Mangione wasn’t even thinking about the fact that killing one CEO wasn’t going to change either the rules of this shitty game or ease anybody else’s burden.

He has been described as part of 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…and listening to filk”.

The term tries to capture an increasing number of people who use many terms to define themselves politically. But it also distracts us from the fact that if the assassin was a Black man, he would have probably been shot during his arrest.

I guess what bothers me most is that Mangione is completely aware of his privileges, and like many other white shooters is now enjoying the attention and the hero status he’s getting. Guys like him shoot a CEO one day, and a lot of kids on another. They just have their own personal reasons for it, hidden behind a display of “brutal honesty”.

To take revenge for his back pain and repair his hurt ego, Mangione assassinated a useless person, without any collective context or intention to liberate large groups of oppressed people. Revolutions can’t be created by technoliberal lone wolves, no matter how cute they are.

Duane Rousselle - Georges Bataille’s Post-anarchism

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 11:43:55 GMT

Author: Duane Rousselle
Title: Georges Bataille’s Post-anarchism
Date: 11 October 2012
Notes: Journal of Political Ideologies (October 2012), 17(3), 235–257. Cultural Studies, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario K9H 7P4, Canada.
Source: www.tandfonline.com

Abstract

Post-anarchist philosophy has widely been regarded as an attempt to challenge the ontological essentialism of the traditional anarchist discourse. The problem for the post-anarchists is that by focusing exclusively on the critique of ontological essentialism and universalism inherent in the ideology of traditional anarchism, post-anarchists have demonstrated that they are unable to envision a response to meta-ethical questions that occur outside of the universalism/relativism pair. As a result most post-anarchists have retreated into an epistemological defence of relativism. In keeping with the ethical trajectory of post-anarchist philosophy, post-anarchists could stand to benefit by responding nihilistically rather than relativistically to the epistemological problem of universalism. They could also take the ontological problematic of non-being to its limit by rejecting the subject as the locus of ethical agency. I shall aim to demonstrate that this latter position is correlative to the meta-ethical position of Georges Bataille.

Introduction

Post-anarchist philosophy has been widely regarded as an attempt to challenge the ontological essentialism of the traditional anarchist discourse. The problem for the post-anarchists is that by focusing exclusively on the critique of ontological essentialism and universalism inherent in the traditional anarchist discourse, postanarchists have demonstrated that they are unable to envision a response to metaethical questions that occur outside of the universalism/relativism pair. The postanarchist suspicion of universal ethical frameworks exposes the extent to which, as Slavoj Zizek maintains, cynical ideology ‘leaves untouched the fundamental level of ideological fantasy’.[1] In other words, the post-anarchist fantasy of a sensible ethical system structures the reality of their cynicism towards ethical universalism. This commitment to sensibility is itself the ideological gesture that remains to be interrogated.

Contemporary meta-ethical philosophy shines a light on the thread that connects universalist and relativist meta-ethical ideologies. By retreating into a form of epistemological relativism, the post-anarchists have only demonstrated the extent to which they have inherited the ideology of the prevailing ethical systems. In keeping with the ethical trajectory of post-anarchist philosophy, postanarchists could stand to benefit by responding nihilistically rather than relativistically to the epistemological problem of universalism. They could also take the ontological problematic of non-being to its limit by rejecting the subject as the locus of ethical agency. I shall aim to demonstrate that this latter position is correlative to the meta-ethical position of Georges Bataille.

The Ideology of Post-anarchism

Post-anarchism has been commonly associated with one of two trends over the last two decades: first, and most popularly, it has referred to the extension of the traditional anarchist discourse by way of interventions from post-structuralist and post-modernist philosophy; or second, and most prevalent in the non-anglophone world, post-anarchism has been understood as an attempt to explore new connections between the traditional anarchist discourse and other non-anarchist radical discourses without thereby reducing these explorations to developments from any particular philosophical group (i.e. post-structuralist, post-modernist and so on). In either case what has been at stake has been the discovery of an outside, a place of agency, to ideological systems. According to adherents of this second trend in post-anarchist philosophy, postanarchism has been thought to be the description of a set of relationships that occur at the intersection of anarchism and some notion of an outside. Anton Fernandez de Rota has described post-anarchism as:

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being-in-between, with one foot in the dying world and the other in the world that is coming. It should not be understood as a mere conjunction of anarchism plus post-structuralism alone, no matter how much it drinks from both fountains. Rather, it is a flag around which to express the desire to transcend the old casts, of becoming-other.[2]
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There have been two related ways in which to understand the location of this radical outside, and each should be distinguished from the notion of an ‘outside’ to radical politics as outlined by the post-anarchist Saul Newman.[3] There is first the obvious ‘outside’, the influence of which is felt to come from the extimacy[4] of the anarchist tradition. This is the anarchist-ic outside that is discovered by bringing anarchism into a relationship with disciplines outside of the narrow field of political economy. This refers also, more generally, to those bodies of thought or practices that have recently been described as being ‘anarchist-ic’ so as to describe something that is almost anarchist but also not quite anarchist.

But there is also the real ‘outside’ whose effects are felt from the intimate and yet unintelligible core of the tradition. The initial phase or introductory period of post-anarchism, described eloquently by Evren,[5] is the exploration of this second ill-defined relationship to a real outside. In the anglophone world, the manifestation of this outside has brought about the interrogation of the anarchist tradition from the inside through a questioning of the ontological essentialism inherent to much of classical anarchist philosophy. Andrew Koch and Todd May, for example, each in their own way, have argued that any ontological conception of human nature or community carries authoritarian implications. Post-anarchism, on the other hand, ‘challenges the idea that it is possible to create a stable ontological foundation for the creation of universal statements about human nature [...] claims [that] have been used to legitimate the exercise of power’.[6] Todd May has similarly argued that ontologically rooted conceptions of power in traditional Marxist philosophy (what he called ‘strategic philosophy’)[7] have served to legitimate vanguardist interventions into politics: ‘if the fundamental site of oppression lies in the economy [or, as in the case of anarchist philosophy, the state; namely, in any (series of) central location(s)], it perhaps falls to those who are adept at economic [or state, etc.] analysis to take up the task of directing the revolution’.[8] In this way, post-anarchism should not be reduced to a critique of the essentialism of classical anarchism because this describes only one of the relationships to an outside that post-anarchists have sought to elaborate.

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Albert Sánchez - Libertarian degrowth

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 10:36:31 GMT

Author: Albert Sánchez
Title: Libertarian degrowth
Subtitle: Anarcho-syndicalist paths for a just degrowth transition
Date: March 2024

Note of the author

The conclusions of this thesis do not necessarily represent the opinions and views of the organizations and persons that participated in the research process. They only represent the opinions of the author himself.

Whenever a statement or opinion is shared by one of the organizations or persons involved, it will be explicitly said in the text, or marked with citation apostrophes, or provided with the source of the opinion or the statement.

Abstract

Degrowth advocates for a society not focused on economic growth and profit maximization but on justice, conviviality, and a good life for all within planetary boundaries. The path towards degrowth is a debate that is still vivid within the degrowth community. Both symbiotic, interstitial and ruptural strategies, as well as a diverse set of institutions (public institutions, cooperatives, the Commons, etc), have been proposed as useful for the just degrowth transition. This research aims to contribute to this debate via examining anarcho-syndicalist trade unions as actors in a just degrowth transition, analyzing their strategies using Erik Olin Wright’s framework (symbiotic, interstitial and ruptural transformations). Results show that both anarcho-syndicalism and degrowth share common values, common views on work, and common enemies, but that anarcho-syndicalism will remain critical towards unjust degrowth transitions. The research concludes that the inherent idealist-materialist duality that characterizes anarcho-syndicalist trade unions (they aim for an utopian society, but at the same time are very grounded on day-to-day workplace struggles) compels them to proactively push for positive ecosocial transformations in society, but at the same time defend the working class whenever it is disproportionately affected by ecosocial transformations. This, along with their ability to balance efficiency the usage of symbiotic, interstitial and ruptural strategies at the same time and with a coherent goal, makes them a potential effective tool for a just degrowth transition.

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Victor Bérard - Intervention by Victor Bérard in Favor of the Armenians

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 01:58:51 GMT

Author: Victor Bérard
Title: Intervention by Victor Bérard in Favor of the Armenians
Date: 1903
Notes: Intervention by Victor Bérard during a conference organized in 1903 by Pierre Quillard, in which other anarchists, such as Reclus, participated. Here, he reflects on the situation of his time within the Ottoman Empire, particularly concerning the treatment of Armenians, and attempts to envision a possible path toward anarchy in this context.
Source: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6213598b/f8.item.r

M. Bérard. — The Armenian Committee of Lyon, which had already held meetings against the will of former ministers and ministers currently in office, held a large public meeting yesterday under the presidency of M. Augagneur, the mayor of Lyon, where the number of attendees was estimated to be between 2,500 and 3,000. During this meeting, M. Augagneur introduced Dr. Lortet, a professor at the university, and introduced me as well.

M. Lortet presented very new insights, given that, for the first time in his life, he was free to speak. He was able to share his recollections as an eyewitness to the massacres in Payas. I knew a great deal about the Turkish massacres, but I confess to you that I had never in my life heard of atrocities like these.

Dr. Lortet recounted his interactions with past ministers, such as M. Rambaud, Minister of Public Instruction, and M. Hanotaux, Minister of Foreign Affairs: it had been forbidden for M. Lortet, a French civil servant and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, to speak before an assembly of voters. I do not need to tell you how much times have changed today, and the very presence of M. Augagneur, mayor of Lyon, assures us that on this point, we can feel entirely reassured.

In Lyon, there is a very well-organized Committee, which has both political and economic goals, as the English delegates just highlighted. The aim is to establish a women’s committee that will raise funds for Armenia and Macedonia, ensuring that this Committee remains free from any political involvement so that it cannot be accused of fomenting revolt or anarchy. It is understood that the funds raised by this Committee will be sent directly to French consuls in Armenia and Macedonia and that, without distinction of race, nationality, or religion, the French consul will distribute this French aid to all those in need.

As for the political objective, I was tasked with presenting the situation in general, and I did yesterday what I intend to do again this afternoon: I will attempt to explain to the Parisian public, as I did to the Lyonnais audience, how this situation is, in fact, common to the entirety of Turkey; how it is caused by general factors that, across all of Turkey, create an anarchist or revolutionary mindset that is merely the natural resistance of human beings defending their property and lives, their property against the Turkish regime, and their lives against the Hamidian regime. (Cheers of approval.)

I attempted to explain the Turkish regime on one hand and the Hamidian regime on the other. Then, I pointed out what remedy the Austro-Russian initiative claimed to offer, how the proposed reforms—even if successful—would only eliminate the abuses of the Turkish regime, while the Hamidian regime would persist, making it a mockery to guarantee property to populations whose very lives are not assured. (New approval.)

I sought to clarify that the reforms are only the second step of the Eastern Question, which involves two successive steps that must be addressed one after the other: one must not put the cart before the horse; the Hamidian regime must first be abolished, and then the Turkish regime must be reformed and controlled. To abolish the Hamidian regime: we have had sufficient experience, as this regime is merely a revival of what happened in 1825 in Samos, in 1860 in Syria, and in 1898 in Crete. From these precedents, we see that to abolish the Hamidian regime, it is evidently necessary to appoint a governor in the Turkish province, one who remains Turkish but who will maintain the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, depending on the Porte but completely independent of the Sultan’s Palace; it will thus be a responsible governor, dependent on the Porte but accountable to the Powers.

I must confess that regarding the governor, I have some very particular ideas. I believe that the example of Crete once again shows us that, whether Christian or Muslim, any governor who is Ottoman by nationality will never be able to resist intrigues, treacheries, or the seductions of Abdul-Hamid for long. Under such conditions, appointing a governor of Ottoman nationality is futile. I believe, therefore, that a responsible governor must, above all, be a European governor. Take this governor as you see fit, install him, and then, once you have appointed this governor, begin the reforms. It is evident that the first of these reforms must be an economic reform. If you do not provide these populations with the means to live, it is useless to grant them the right to live. Start by gathering a certain amount of funds. Let European powers lend to Armenia, as they did to Crete. On that day, I am convinced that peace will return to the Turkish Empire, and we will have the right to consider our efforts as having contributed to the salvation of Turkey, to the peace of Europe, and to the well-being of humanity.

That, gentlemen, is the spirit and substance of the Lyon conference. You were read the agenda earlier; it accurately summarizes our conference.

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Stephen Condit - Proudhonist Materialism & Revolutionary Doctrine

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 01:37:57 GMT

Author: Stephen Condit
Title: Proudhonist Materialism & Revolutionary Doctrine
Date: 1982

I. Materialism and Political Philosophy

As Western societies enter their historical decline and approach a new era of revolution, the need for political philosophy to redefine previously authoritative values will grow. Unless revolutionary philosophy treats all levels of society and social knowledge, from the most intimate and practical functions of everyday life to the broadest issues of freedom, authority and obligation, our future revolutions will be merely chaotic failures rather than a reconstitution of society. Political philosophy must seek a comprehensive revolutionary doctrine as the most expedient and most democratic attitude to our future history. Among the concepts which have to be grappled with is materialism, not in the first instance as an ontological metaphysics or even as a philosophy of history, but rather as a set of coherent expectations about what material rights, claims and conditions society can and ought to demand of, and provide to, its members. Sociological materialism in this sense is an evaluation of social structure and its dominant institutions. This of course implies an ontology, but it has theoretical and doctrinal functions long before then, which inform the major issues of political philosophy. Materialism is a perspective of values which assumes that the minimum needs for survival are also the creative values for society in general, even after survival has been apparently assured. Because each level of development in the material culture creates new minimum needs, material development correspondingly enlarges the scope of creativity, as well as of problems of survival. Thus materialism is a necessary element in any critique of social conditions and evaluation of a society’s future viability.

Western societies are now in an historical phase in which not only do their material capabilities, interests and expectations create needs and problems exceeding the capabilities of their governing institutions, but in which the economic foundations of their material culture are beginning to fail. Thus, on the one hand we nominally govern ourselves by inadequate political ideals, and, on the other hand, we are tied to a material culture which seems increasingly unable to renew itself and which is accumulating an unmanageable capability of destruction. Materialism in political philosophy must find expression in a re-evaluation of the potential values, capabilities and needs which our material culture makes possible, and in an application of these to political, social and ethical ideals. The purpose is to find means to redirect our social development within the conditions we have created, restricted neither by obsolete political ideals and practices, nor by dominant technological and economic interests, but equally careful to conserve or reclaim values and practices we already have which may augment the capacity for self-development of people everywhere in the world. Materialism’s most urgent task, then, is to challenge the prerogatives of the technology, the organisations, the values and the purposes of Western industrial affluence.

Materialism cannot deny non-material needs and values. But it does regard them primarily as functions of material processes — above all of the economic systems creating, distributing and consuming material resources. Consequently it disparages idealistic values in social analysis, and holds that both the subject and methodology of social science is the explanation of how material needs arise, how they are met and how this is reflected and evaluated in social relations and thought.[1] Ideals are to be articulated by this means, and not by utopias of logic, theology or imagination. This does not mean that materialist or acquisitive values are considered the best motives for personal behaviour or collective political purpose, although many materialisms indeed end here. Socialist theory has, in principle at least, distinguished materialist social analysis from bourgeois values of personal and social acquisition,[2] and Cornforth stresses that material needs must be met artistically, which presumes that people cease relating to each other by material and especially acquisitive values.[3] Nevertheless, such ‘bourgeois’ materialism is an important aspect of materialism as a whole, and constitutes a very visible part of most peoples’ daily lives. It greatly influences their disposition to see justice or injustice as prevailing in society and their estimation of society’s future prospects.

This tension between systematic social analysis and the intrusion of acquisition, whether personal or collective, as the main or even sole purpose of society, is a dissonant factor in materialism, impelling it towards idealism in its political doctrines, and particularly towards the idealisation of materially successful or expansionary social systems. Analysis and critique of real conditions do not always coincide.

As a doctrine above all of private or personal property, Proudhonism is particularly beset by this tension. Therein lies its continuing importance to revolutionary philosophy. Proudhonism treats society as a whole, with specific ethical and functional needs and attributes, but its ethical focus nevertheless is on the individual person and small groups as the realm of liberty and autonomy, and ultimately as the real essence of society. Thus, while Proudhonism cannot deal effectively with many of the problems raised by or resulting in Marxism, for example, it does perhaps, more strongly than Marxism, stimulate a materialist critique of society for idealistic and ethical purposes. It is potentially a more radical challenge to over-developed industrial societies because it more openly applies materialism to transcend materialist, or economic imperatives. This claim for Proudhon does not of course clarify his relationship to Marx. But nevertheless it does indicate the frequently neglected, relative non-comparability of their thought. Rather than foreshadowing Marx and his historically predictive doctrine, in which present ethical problems are regarded mostly as inadequacies in current history, Proudhon really continues Rousseau’s inquiry into conflicts inherent in the notion and fact of society itself, however structured. Thus, while Proudhon at least begins with materialism, in that the existing form of society determines its problems and potentials, his purpose is to resolve Rousseau’s problem: what ideal values are necessary to moderate or eliminate the conflict between society and the individual person as an ethical quantity preceding any given social formation and yet impossible outside society. This paradoxical quality in Proudhon’s thought does not make for a clear or consistent doctrine. Nevertheless, Proudhon’s materialism is sufficiently consistent to share materialism’s three outstanding virtues as a perspective of political philosophy. First, materialism is a bridge between the heurism of philosophy and the social facts which people directly experience. It can make philosophy both comprehensible and useable to people who are not philosophers. Although materialism may be exceedingly abstract, nonetheless it concentrates on the development and satisfaction of needs comprehended in one way or another by everybody. It can give people a theory of how and why social structures constrain them, and of what their own latitudes are. It both specifies the conflicts which limit autonomy, and suggests guidelines for the actual extension of autonomy in the real facts of these conflicts. For Proudhon, this relationship is the bedrock of all social reflection and action, which he equates.

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Renzo Connors - The Patriotic Psychosis

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 04:51:18 GMT

Author: Renzo Connors
Title: The Patriotic Psychosis
Date: July 2024
Source: The Effrenatum, Journal of Unruliness

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“There are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.”
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— Franz Fanon
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There’s a specter haunting Ireland, and that specter is backwards ultra moronic patriotism.

The phantasms of patriotism and nationalism have been on the rise throughout the globe over the last number of years, people becoming possessed by false idols and fantasies creating a growing collective mass delusional psychosis. Even Ireland isn’t immune from this spreading disease.

Over the last year there have been riots, numerous assaults on individuals and a wave of arson attacks on buildings earmarked for refugees. Just yesterday (15/7/24) in the deprived area of Coolock in Dublin anti-refugee violence broke out into a riot on the street lasting hours. Ireland has a long history of anti-colonial struggle and emigration so how can the Irish who have suffered a similar kind of discrimination and racism now be the oppressors. Some may wonder how oppressed people can become possessed by lies and such levels of hate after such a long history of colonial oppression.

To echo Franz Fanon, the first thing the colonizer does to subjugate a people is to plant the seed in the minds of the colonized that they are savages living in misery and insecurity while the colonizers are actually saving them from themselves, helping them gain social-economic and technological progress. Colonial domestication creates a psychological disorder of a self-hate inferiority complex. The colonized believe they are stupid and inferior and the only route to salvation is the civilization brought by the colonizers and so imitate the colonizers.

In neo-colonial era Ireland the recent decades of catholic cultural hegemony, combined with the added psychological harm and alienation created by the rest of the power structures and constructs of civilization continuing the domestication process started by British colonialism.

Adding to multigenerational trauma and socio-economic insecurities and poverty furthering inferiority complexes affecting people in the same way as under direct colonialism. It’s becoming a mainstream belief that modern civilization causes mental illness with all its sensory stimulation gadgets and false realities of social media keeping us glued to phones, TV, and the promises of a better life and wealth to chase after, but most will never receive. Some turn to drugs, substance abuse and the many other addictions of civilized life, some to the false realities of cosmetics and materialism, others direct their inferiority/self-hate outwords taking on the abusive characteristics of the oppressors directing their anger towards those around them and lower on the societal hierarchy and individuals perceived differently than the norm. So this growing hate against minorities and the marginalized is a byproduct of civilization. How civilized many Irish truly have become.

Ultimately the system of civilization is the root cause, but the actors in all this also bear blame and responsibility. Even with the psychological effects of domestication and the influence from socio-economic poverty, individuals can still make some choices. But instead of directing anger and frustration at the oppressors and the power structures, many of the oppressed are turning to patriotic nationalist ideology for a solution to their problems.

Patriotism can be found in the same realm of the mind as Christian mysticism. Opium for the gullible.

But what is Patriotism exactly? The feeling of love, devotion, sense of attachment to a country or state. This patriotic love is a false love in the same way an abuse victim may feel love for their abuser.

This supposed love for the sacred ideals of patriotism and nation – to live for, to die for if needs be, to kill for if necessary. To sacrifice yourself for an idol built on lies and manipulation. How can this be love? Love for tyranny, chains, an illusion, pure fantasy.

This psychosis like self-deception for the psychologically weak, frustrated by lack of meaning in their life and alienation from an unequal society, gorge greedly on the lies and fantasies, feasting on nationalist ideals turned sacred in cognitive dissonance.

The patriots pledge allegiance to an abstraction not having the courage or the brains to live their own life on their own terms, and so feel the need to knock down those that do.

Patriotism and nationalism have different meanings in different places and points of time. Currently in Ireland it’s used in the sense of a past time in history of simpler times reminiscing of The Quiet Man[1] Hollywood depiction of the emerald isle of picture postcard perfection. Nostalgia for a time that didn’t really exist. A fake memory built on fantasy, the Irish Free State was never great.

Ireland from the 1920s right up to the 21^st century was a place of non-stop housing crisis, poverty, inequality, political corruption. The exact same issues as now were around from the very birth of the Free State in the 1920s. The differences Queers had to hide in closet from fear of annihilation by pretty much the entire population; unmarried mothers were locked away blackmailed to give their baby away to the catholic church who sold to the best bidder, when a woman got married they were slave to the husband divorce outlawed no way out or escape, domestic violence was viewed as legitimate punishment to correct the behavior of your wife, by law a husband couldn’t be found guilty of raping his wife; there were no refugees or immigrants stealing the jobs because there were none, but that didn’t stop the city dwellers of Dublin blaming the chulcies[2] for the lack of employment opportunities and housing. Mass emigration was the norm scattering Irish across the planet in the search of a better life. In Ireland’s past, patriotism was used as a means of uniting a colonized people against the colonizer. When P.H. Pearce[3] proclaimed “Irish belongs to the Irish”, he meant it in the sense of anti-colonial rebellion. Now it’s the battle cry of the hodgepodge ragtag of idiots that makes up the numbers and supporters of the far right, ethno-nationalists, Christian crusaders and out right fascists. Anti-colonialism bastardized to suit the fantasy of fools.

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Shavon reznikov and Marceline Small - A Hofi Manifesto

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 03:45:37 GMT

Author: Shavon reznikov and Marceline Small
Title: A Hofi Manifesto
Date: 3/28/2024
Source: https://freudjung.neocities.org/hofi/indexhofi

PURPLE WORDS

Rhizomic-thought free-jazz urban-revival water-fountain post-hippie avant-garde cosmopolitan psych pangea vibrations golden-chain noise post-dualist karma-yoga psychopoetics humanity communal peace connection clarity relaxation earth gender-abolition post-capitalist sky-watching experiments liberation suffering seeking soup listening memory revival alternative the end of all

Preface: The End of The End of History

Without being too redundant with the rest of what this document is about to tell you, I want to at least establish a reasoning for what we’re doing in the present moment. Since, as you should know, the rest of this document was written to be timeless, but we time-beings need to understand where it is we stand.

That being: In terms of eras of human histories, a wheel has made its full rotation in the last hundred years.

It happened with the acceleration of technological development, new social attitudes, and historical dynamics. If you want to see it, go on the internet (Which only came out in the 80s), look to the baseline of human social decency (Which people only were forced to accept in the 60s), look up to towers that scrape the sky, and the multitudes of interactions happening on a global scale. All of this and yet it only happened within the last century…

This is a massive oversimplification, just so you know. If you want to see how miraculous this speed of society is, just look at Brain-Rot Tik Toks and explain to me what’s happening.

For what it’s worth, the ruling power of the world, the Leviathan, has believed in some way or another that these developments have led us to the end of history, that essentially everything is fine: No world wars are going to break out, neoliberal-capitalist-democracy will never have to fear its end, and that all of our problems will slowly make sense to us, or at least we’ll learn to live with it.

It’s not for me to tell you how to deal with this end of history. However! If you look around, to the sky or otherwise, you might sense that this is not a shared opinion by the world, and that within the youth and populace in general, there’s a real thirst for change to happen.

This is a broad force, both supporting the status quo that redescribes itself and new rival fascist movements, but it’s also found here in the company of those who would like a world free of harmless pretenses (Like the ones mentioned in 1.A of The Ten Declarations). Luckily for us, we were not the first ones to notice this, and recently it has been my personal observation that movements of all sorts are popping up everywhere to meet this force, this taste for a movement.

We wish to and will collaborate with anyone and everyone who seems to be on this common thread. However, at the same time, it’s a shame to see many of these movements slide in revivalism of old trends, and an overfixation on specific human activities while overlooking the general picture. Such is our contradiction: We wish to fully support any sincere and dedicated spirit, yet find ourselves disagreeing with many. So what does a House of Friends even mean? What is this a movement for?

The “movement” is for you. For us to try to expand ourselves, and for you to get support for what you’re doing. In our attempt, we are trying to forge a greater and a big tent understanding, where at least we can share a common space, using fluid and open ended perspectives. With our spirituality and craft as the mechanism by which we sustain open hearts and minds, we are cultivating the virtues of sorts needed for the harder, more radical things that will become necessary. We can do this through debate and discussion, interactions that must take place in order to cultivate pure and focused ideals. So are we forming a new government? Building new cities? Just doing our craft until the end of time? Maybe, and I hope, but hope needs cultivation.

Merry End of History everyone!

The Ten Declarations

Declarations of the Eyes

Friends, Comrades, Bodhisattvas, and Saints,

1.A. Let us not speak of good and evil, but rather of a series of wheels. One begins from ignorance in the heart and becomes greed and obsession which have formed a chain of misdeeds and grown to be the Hyper-Leviathan sitting atop of the world. At the top of the world, the Leviathan is Capitalistic-Cis-Hetro-Normative-Imperialist-Patriarchical-Race-Society.

At the moment, the Levithan poses some part in those words too.

2.A. Another wheel stems from the countless nameless saints, who were the humans who acted just but were lost by time, and remembered in symbols. The origin of this wheel is in awareness, mindfulness, compassion, and understanding, and the links of its chain are gratitude and selfless deeds. It is the redemption and art that will save this world. In short, liberation of the human condition on all of its levels, or at the very least, the collective effort towards such a thing.

3.A. Yet let us not be forgetful in being aware of the third wheel, the silent on-going universal river. It is time and space: the world spirit that sets the heavenly spheres into motion and the machinery of the universe. It is the great compiler for truth and illusion, which makes the other two wheels illuminate and hide. For its existence is why it should be noted that these words exist for people, rather than people exist for these words. It is a reminder of our collective uncertain fate and the fimble nature of our understanding, and ability to put it to practice.

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Max Stirner - Review of Eugène Sue's The Mysteries of Paris

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 00:08:44 GMT

Author: Max Stirner
Title: Review of Eugène Sue's The Mysteries of Paris
Date: July 1843
Notes: German Source: Berliner Monatsschrift. Erstes und einziges Heft. Hrsg. von Ludwig Buhl. Selbst-Verlag L. Buhl, Mannheim 1844, pp.302–332; Kleinere Schriften pp.278–295.
Source: Stepelevich, Lawrence S. “Addenda: II B.” Translated Essay. In Max Stirner On the Path of Doubt, 174–188. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2020. All footnotes Stepelevich's. See English original for translator's introduction.

The “mysteries” have created a great sensation in the world, and a crowd of imitations have already appeared. Everyone wants to know about the hidden “lowest level” of society, and all look about, with curiosity, into its darkest and most dreadful corners. But with what eyes does one look into this? —With the eye of secure modesty, and with a virtuous shiver. “What an abyss of corruption, what horror, what a pit of depravity! Lord God, how can things so wicked be allowed in your world!” But soon Christian love is awakened, and it arms itself for helpful and pious action. “There must here be a salvation, and here action must be taken against the cunning of Satan! Oh, yes, there are many to save and many souls to win for the Kingdom of the Good [dem Reiche des Guten].”

Now thoughts are busy, and a thousand ways and means are planned to cast out the evil, and to put an end to the boundless depravity. Isolated prison cells, public housing for unemployed workers, education for fallen and penitent girls and countless other remedies are now not only proposed but actually undertaken. Charitable organizations will be gathered together and expanded in scope as never before, and there will be no lack of sacrifice and charity. Eugene Sue presents Rudolphe, the Grand Duke of Gerolstein, as the shining image of this impressive display of neighborly love.

What evil then would be cast away?—Immorality, sinful lust! The wells of evil should be dried up by needed reforms, and misled souls taken away from them and persuaded to seek a moral life. But who would want to take up this great work, and rob sin of its victims and servants? Who, if not those who love virtue and who understand that the true calling of man, are to follow the true moral way of life?

And so it is that virtuous people are to direct the immoral onto the right path, and the servants of the Kingdom of the Good are to seek the destruction of the Kingdom of Evil.

Are we not all of the understanding that there is nothing greater and more noble than to honor the Good? But yet, do not all of you have a fault, something that is disturbing and regretful, and which all-too-often turns you from the path of goodness and is “sinful”? Has the question ever occurred to you to ask if the Good might indeed be worth the cost, that to be on the path of goodness is the only thing for which a human being must do throughout their whole life? Do you just as little ask this question of yourselves than those who have fallen and have forgotten God question their own knowledge? (even if, on the other hand, they are—“sinners”).

But you, who would save and convert sinners perhaps might be just as incorrigible and unredeemable as they are. Have you never doubted as to whether or not the Good might be—a mere fantasy? What if you were to admit that? Just as the Philosophers who love Wisdom, but never obtain it, would you also still believe that sinners can be made good and able “to do good”? Could you turn sinners away from desiring Evil? Might it then be possible even for you to turn from away desiring the Good? Do not ask yourselves what the Good is, but rather IF it is. If you really think it is, then ask yourselves first of all if it might only be your—imagination.

Perhaps your proofs of the Good might be more convincing if you would use some examples, such as: “Lying is bad, but honesty is good, impenitence is evil, but contrition and remorse are good, not being chaste is a sin, but chastity is a virtue, etc.” On this, let us look into the “mysteries” and observe how the interplay between virtue and vice motivates this novel.

Now, I won’t say anything about the details and the development of this novel, as I can suppose that you have read it. And even less will I speak of the so-called aesthetic value of this book. For if a Juggler were to perform some very difficult act, or a Magician would achieve the most astonishing of effects, even if it is said that such effects were an excellent display of the arts of the Juggler or Magician, yet no one would hold their arts in particular respect. So I also find no need to deal too closely with our author’s skill in portraying social contrasts and characters—although his skill has hardly satisfied all connoisseurs of the fine arts. I do not think so highly of the talent displayed in this work that it would blind me to its total lack of any profound and compelling insights into the nature of society. Görres had also a beautiful talent, and died, as so many others, in a childish tottering about in the fixity of stupid thoughts.^{1}

Now, although the Grand Duke of Gerolstein cannot be regarded as the hero of the novel, as the whole mechanism of the novel is not set in motion by him alone, he nevertheless does represent the elevated views and thoughts to which Sue himself aspires. The high ideal of morality is the viewpoint from which every thought and deed is measured. It is a literary work of fiction which is totally worked out from the standpoint of morality, and it presents the sort of men that would be created in the light of this viewpoint, and what would transpire under its dominion.

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Danny Evans - The Spanish Anarchist Movement (1871–1939)

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 21:57:39 GMT

Author: Danny Evans
Title: The Spanish Anarchist Movement (1871–1939)
Date: 2023
Notes: doi:10.4324/9781003218784-34
Source: The Routledge Handbook of Spanish History, pp. 331–341

At the dawn of the twentieth century, millions of people believed that a revolution would transform their societies and establish new social relations based on cooperation and self-organisation. After the First World War, this was briefly acknowledged to be an imminent prospect by both its partisans and its enemies. By the mid-1930s, however, the consolidation of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and the rise of fascism and military despotism elsewhere had seemingly banished revolution from the horizon. Yet it was precisely at that moment, with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), that a revolution of extraordinary depth and scale occurred in Spain. This apparent paradox can only be explained by the exceptional strength of the country’s anarchist movement, given organisational embodiment by the anarcho-syndicalist union, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labour – CNT).

Initial attempts by historians to explain the endurance of anarchism in Spain tended to view it as an archaic expression of the country’s uneven industrial development. They counterposed it to the state-oriented parties of socialism and communism, whose approach was understood to be more suited to the demands of modernity. This remains an influential thesis amongst prominent historians of the Spanish civil war. By contrast, authors of monographs dedicated to specific aspects or locales of Spanish anarchism have, in the main, rejected this argument. They have pointed to anarchism’s flourishing in centres of industry and to its embrace of central tenets of modernity. Furthermore, the recent transnational turn in the historiography of anarchism has led to a downplaying of the exceptionalism of the Spanish case. While such developments have provided a welcome challenge to the somewhat complacent teleology of the movement’s early chroniclers, the result has been a notable absence of plausible accounts for the Spanish movement’s exceptional persistence into the 1930s.

This chapter seeks to address this absence by positing that anarchism is best understood as a movement that resisted what has been called the ‘national integration of the working classes’. Seen as a causal element in the European war mobilisation of 1914, this phenomenon can be taken as a central moment of capitalist modernity. It was enabled by multiple factors among which the development of transport and communications technologies, the dominance of the industrial economy, and the extension of the education system were fundamental. Where these were present within a national territory, they were typically accompanied by an enhanced sense of national prestige. The ambivalence of labour organisations towards such developments meant that they were often agents of national integration themselves. The support shown by many socialist parties and trade unions for their respective governments during the First World War was the culminating moment of this process. Incorporating the question of national integration into a consideration of anarchism’s longevity in Spain has two main advantages. First, it provides an interpretive framework for understanding the structural factors emphasised by the movement’s early and influential historians. Second, by exploring how anarchism attempted to articulate an alternative to national integration, the insights of more recent historiography that have emphasised the movement’s modernity can be brought to the fore.

In what follows, a case is first made for anarchism as a movement that flourished where national integration was underdeveloped. Of necessity, this first section includes some observations of a general or comparative nature that deviate from an exclusive focus on Spain. Then follows an examination of the agency of the Spanish movement in presenting an alternative to national integration. The final section considers the climax and crisis of Spanish anarchism in the civil war years, arguing for the explanatory potential of anarchism as non-integration to the movement’s most ‘exceptional’ period.

Anarchism as Non-integration, 1871–1919

Anarchism emerged as a movement and ideology in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Originating within the currents of the labour and socialist movement that opposed formal political participation, from its inception anarchists warned of the potential of the workers’ movement being placated by parliamentary representation and reform. Defining moments of international anarchism, such as the massacre of the Paris Communards (1871), the executions of the Haymarket martyrs (1886), of Francisco Ferrer (1909), and of the defendants in the so-called High Treason Incident in Japan (1911), all appeared to vindicate a position of hostility to the nation state. As such, anarchism established networks and constituencies in territories of Europe, Asia, and the Americas undergoing industrialisation and urbanisation. It was strongest in those places where its assertion of rupture rather than reform, of direct action rather than mediation, and of autonomy rather than parliamentary representation, appeared to correspond to the authorities’ intolerance of working-class radicalism.

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Alexandra Ariadni Vassiliou - Listen or Die

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:51:42 GMT

Author: Alexandra Ariadni Vassiliou
Title: Listen or Die
Subtitle: The Terrorist as a Role
Date: June 1995
Notes: A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of The Union institute in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in Social Psychology. Portland, Oregon.
Source: <iapop.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/dissertations/vassiliou-listenordie.pdf>

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my Union committee--Dr. Nancy Owens, Dr. Don Klein, Dr. Arnold Mindell, Dr. Julie Diamond, Dr. Renata Ackermann, Dr. Gemma Summers and Dr. Gary Perlstein-for their ongoing support, input and critical feedback. I am especially grateful to Nancy Owens for her ongoing emotional and intellectual support and her faith in my ability to complete this project.

I would also like to thank Leslie Heizer for her valuable editorial assistance and support; Sally Peyou, Bar Halliday, Lily Vassilliou and Lena Aslanidou for their emotional support, encouragement and feedback; Becky Shine for her support and assistance in proof-reading the manuscript. I could not have completed this project without the continuous emotional and financial support of my parents-George and Vasso Vassiliou-and Anna Maria Angelopoulos.

I also want to express my gratitude to Amy Mindell for his dedication to working on difficult world issues; for his ability to feel for all sides in conflict situations and for his eagerness to teach and learn at the same time. Through his teaching and writing, Amy Mindell has inspired in me the desire to open my mind to new ideas and approaches. Through his facilitation in conflict resolution settings he has modeled the capacity to open one’s heart to all people, including people with whom one does not necessarily agree.

Most importantly I would like to thank all the people who agreed to talk with me and those who participated in my research project. I was touched by their willingness to share their stories and feelings of pain, desperation and anger.

Preface

I still remember the day in the mid-eighties when a friend arrived at my house limping from injuries he got at a demonstration the previous day. I was in the middle of reading an article in the paper about the demonstration. There were pictures of a fire-engine in flames. The truck had been struck by a Molotof cocktail bomb. When my friend came in the house he asked, “What are you reading?” I told him I was catching up on the riot news. I read out loud to him that the police were looking for someone who was responsible for the injury of a fire-fighter.

Fire trucks used for crowd control in Greece are covered with metal shields to protect the crew from flying stones and firebombs. The driver made the mistake of rolling his window down. A Molotof bomb struck the metal shield in front of his window. The gas and flames spread all over the man and caused him serious burns. He was in the hospital in stable condition. We started talking about the demonstration and the clash with the police. He seemed distant and preoccupied. He was unusually silent.

After a while, he looked at me and said, “It’s me they are looking for. The stupid fool rolled down his window! How was I supposed to know? I didn’t intend on burning him.” I remember looking back and forth, between him and the newspaper. I was shocked at the fact that the “young anarchist wanted” was standing in front of me, at the same time angry at the police for the brutality they demonstrated earlier in the rally.

I asked him about it; why did he aim the bomb at the fire-truck, how did he feel when he saw the fireman rolling on the ground trying to put out the fire on his clothes?

He started talking to me, saying he had no idea that the window was rolled down, that he felt bad about injuring the guy. After all, he was just a fireman. His head was bowed down, he seemed depressed about it. He was feeling guilty. Then he suddenly looked at me and said “But then again, what is a fireman doing performing crowd control?

Their job is to protect us, not beat us with water streams to stop us from marching.” He seemed to be going back and forth. When he thought of the fireman as a person he felt bad for having injured him. When he thought of the fireman as just another law enforcement representative, he felt no remorse.

This was one of many discussions we had on political activism, terrorism, law enforcement brutality and social change. I was always challenged by his strong opinions and political positions. Since I knew him as a friend, I had an additional perspective on who he was. The person who, according to the police was an “irresponsible, young anarchist, committing illegal acts of violence,” was in my eyes also a friend, an activist, an anarchist, a passionate human being. He founded ACT-UP[1] in Athens, and battled with both AIDS and the medical, social and political systems in Greece. He died in September, 1994. I had intended on doing an interview with him, but he died a few days before I arrived in Greece. While in the midst of working on my dissertation, I received a calendar he created for ACT-UP. It was his last project before he died. In it he has the following dedication:

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There, where society passes by with indifference, and the state is overtly absent, some people are fighting an agonizing battle.
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To those who tried to help me
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One of my hopes in this dissertation is to break through the shield of indifference.

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Andrew Bard Schmookler - The Parable of the Tribes

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:48:41 GMT

Author: Andrew Bard Schmookler
Title: The Parable of the Tribes
Subtitle: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution
Date: 1984
Notes: View the first edition here: <archive.org/details/parableoftribesp0000schm_k5u7>
Source: Second Edition (1995) from Libgen. <libgen.li/edition.php?id=136509265>

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“Imagine a group of tribes living within reach of one another. If all choose the way of peace, then all may live in peace. But what if all but one choose peace ...?”
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Why has civilization developed the way it has? Many of us have assumed that human beings have freely chosen the way that civilization will evolve and that social evolution has consequently been a story of improvement and progress. But if that is so, why has the course of human history been so tormented? Why have the enormous changes that civilization has wrought in human life over the last ten millennia not been better designed to meet human needs? And why is the world so beset by alienation, tyranny, and destruction?

The parable of the tribes is a theory of social evolution that offers answers to these and myriad related questions. By looking at human destiny within the broader context of the story of life on earth, Andrew Bard Schmookler provides a unique, often unsettling perspective on the dilemma of the civilized animal.

The parable of the tribes explains that as people stepped across the threshold of civilization, they stumbled into a chaos that had never existed before. When human beings became the first creatures to invent their own way of life, their societies appeared to become free to develop as people might wish. But what may be freedom for any single society adds up to anarchy in the interacting system of societies. In this anarchy—unprecedented in the evolution of living systems—civilized societies were condemned to engage in a struggle for power. Among the cultural possibilities human creativity developed, only the ways of power could survive and spread. And the earth became a place where no one is free to choose peace, but anyone can impose upon all the necessity for power.

Schmookler’s theory about the role of the selection for power in social evolution is compelling in its logic and far-reaching in its ramifications. By diagnosing the ills of civilization, the parable of the tribes clarifies the challenges that civilized peoples face—to remove the threat of nuclear holocaust, to lift the burden of tyranny from the world’s peoples, to reverse the dangerous degradation of the earth’s biosphere by human activity, and to ease the agonies of neurotic conflict.

Can mankind bring under control the social evolutionary forces described by the parable of the tribes? By showing that the major source of the evils that plague civilization lies not in man’s nature but in his circumstances, Schmookler’s theory holds open the hope that history will lead to a future we want rather than to one we do not want, or indeed to no future at all.

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To my mother and my father
who gave me a great deal
to bring together

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Book I. The Parable of the Tribes

Chapter One: The Parable of the Tribes

1. Introduction

For Western man, the progress of understanding has been a humbling experience. At the dawn of the modern era, the heliocentric revolution in astronomy evicted man[1] from his privileged home at the center of the universe, consigning him instead to a tiny planet of what turns out to be a minor star. That left man nonetheless a special being among the creatures of the earth, a quintessence of dust fashioned specially by the Lord of the Universe in His own image. But this gratifying self-image was forever altered in the nineteenth century by the theory of biological evolution that revealed man’s fundamental kinship and continuity with other living things. Still, man in his pride could point to his unique nature, to the spark of divine reason which ordered his life, elevated him from his own animality, and entitled him to dominion over the world. Then, at the beginning of this century, the brilliant insights of psychoanalysis showed how thin is the veil of consciousness and rationality, how dominated man is by an unconscious animal self, how man is not master even in his own house.

One fortress of our pride has remained. Whatever man’s shortcomings as a creature, there can be no doubting man’s powers as a Creator. In the globe-spanning structures of civilization, behold his works!

Now comes the parable of the tribes, a theory to illuminate the nature and determinants of civilization. It shows that even in those structures where man’s power and ability are most tangibly embodied—even in the evolution of civilization—man is as much the victim as the master.

2. Understanding Change

There is something special about the human animal. Of all the earth’s creatures, we are the creators of change. After ten thousand years of steadily accelerating transformations, virtually all the life on this planet is now caught up in the destiny of the creature with the unique ability to invent his way of life.

That mankind has the power to transform the conditions of life for ourselves and other creatures does not mean we understand the powers we exercise. Just as human hearts beat for aeons before the circulation of the blood was understood, so the forces that drive the stream of change in human social life could come from us yet escape our comprehension.

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John Creaghe - The Chicago Anarchists

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:47:53 GMT

Author: John Creaghe
Title: The Chicago Anarchists
Date: 1 November 1891
Notes: Original Title: Creaghe, John, “The Chicago Anarchists”, in The Sheffield Anarchist, Vol. 1, No. 10, (Sheffield, 1891) pp. 38–9
Source: Retreived on 20 August 2024 from https://specialcollections.le.ac.uk/digital/collection/p16445coll1/id/5/

On the 11^th of November, the Anarchists of Sheffield will commemorate the death of five comrades slain in cold blood by the enemies of the workers in Chicago, U.S. on the same day of the year 1887; and in all England, and all other parts of the world meetings will be held for the same purpose.

These men were killed, not because they did what they were charged with the evidence proved distinctly the contrary, — but because they were trying to lead the workers, as we are trying, on the only true path to their emancipation — the Social Revolution.

We mourn for the brave men cruelly torn from ns, but we rejoice at the sacrifice made, for it has taught the workers all over the world much more than years of propaganda by speech and writing could. It has made them realize fully that the struggle they are en- gaged in with the capitalists is nothing less than an implacable war. and that it is foolish to expect from their enemies anything but the treatment that one enemy expects from another in actual warfare. Of course it also teaches the workers their duty to themselves and their class under the present circumstances. It serves also to show them clearly that law is only a weapon in the hands of property, for its own. defence against the workers, for in this case the law murdered these men in spite of the fact that it could bring no evidence to show that they had done what they were charged with

But what can men expect who are tried by a tribunal of their enemies, police, judges, jury and lawyers all belonging to the class they are fighting to destroy and paid to act for and please that class. It is cowardly as well as absurd for us to complain when we meet the fate which we ourselves ought to give to our enemy when the war requires it. But it is contemptible hypocrisy on the part of our enemies to pretend that their law is intended for anything but our repression, and to call the farce of a trial such as that of our comrades in Chicago by the sacred name of Justice.

We subjoin a sketch of the circumstances which led to it token from the pamphlet called the “Chicago Martyrs”, which gives in full the speeches of the men, and which we will have on sale at the Hall of Science, where our meeting will be held on the 11^th.

During 1872–78, great demonstrations took place in most of the United States in favour of the eight hours working day. Thia movement was so strong as to induce the legislative assemblies of different states to fix eight hours as the working day but was not re- cognized in practice by the makers of the law, and the working classes soon become convinced that a lessening of the hour of labour could only be obtained by organization.

At the General Conference of the National Labor Union in 1885, it was definitely resolved that the eight hours day should be introduced all over the states from May 1^st, 1886, by a general strike. An eight hours association was formed in Chicago, open air meetings were held, and in the halls where the different labour associations met, speeches were delivered and agitation was carried on with the object of teaching the workers to organize. The Socialist and Anarchist Groups were less sanguine as to the benefit to be obtained by the movement. The “Alarm” (Parson’s Paper) did not oppose the movement, but it said it would be inefficient still their spokesmen were not less active in the general movement for awakening the feeling of solidarity among the workers. “The Alarm” was the English Anarchist Organ; the Arbeiter Zeitung on which Spies and Schwab were the principal writers, was the most important German Anarchist Organ. Parsons, Spies, Fielden, Engel were among the most prominent speakers at the labour meetings and familiar names, not to the working men only.

The employers on the other hand, already organized, drew still closer together to resist their employees. Conflicts between masters and men broke out. The most noticeable being the ono at McCormack’s reaper works, in February 1886, when the master against his agreement, tried to force the men out of their organizations. Twelve hundred men were thrown out here. The excitement deepened as the first of May approached. The day arrived. Thousands of workmen stopped work and claimed an eight hour day. The Central Labor Union of Chicago convened a Mass Meeting, at which 25,000 people attended. Spies, Parsons, Fielden, and Schwab spoke. The stoppage of work increased. Within a few days more than 50,000 strikers were out. Workmen’s meetings increased. The police got anxious. The capitalists trembled with fear and rage. The employers made concessions. The labour cause was triumphant.

On May Second, there was a great meeting of men locked out of McCormack’s works, to protest against the violence of the police. Parsons and Schwab spoke.

On May Third another meeting was called by the Lumber Shovers’ Union, near McCormack’s factory. Spies was invited and poke. At four o’clock the “scabs” were seen leaving the factory, and some stories were thrown. The police were telephoned for and came In large numbers. They were received with stones and replied with their revolvers, and six men of the strikers were killed and many wounded.

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László Molnárfi - To Overthrow Capitalism, We Must First Overthrow the Communism of the Past

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:47:13 GMT

Author: László Molnárfi
Title: To Overthrow Capitalism, We Must First Overthrow the Communism of the Past
Subtitle: In Defence of Democratic Socialism
Date: August 22, 2021
Source: Retrieved on August 19, 2024 from https://marxisthumanistinitiative.org/international-news/to-overthrow-capitalism-we-must-first-overthrow-the-communism-of-the-past.html

Editor’s note: László Molnárfi is a 20-year-old student at Trinity College Dublin, where he is active in the student movement. A native of Hungary, he grew up in Brussels.

Tankieism, Then and Now

Contrary to common belief, the Hungarian uprising of October 1956 was not anti-communist in nature. It started out as a reformist movement. As shown by the sixteen demands of leading revolutionaries, and the spontaneous setting up of workers’ councils, it was a rallying cry against the perversion of communist thought by Stalinist ideas, with many of its participants calling for the establishment of a democratic socialist government. Brutally crushed a few weeks later by an invading Soviet-backed army, the hopes for a ‘socialism with a human face’ were put to an end in the Eastern Bloc for the first time.

Those who supported the crushing of the revolution, such as the pro-Soviet Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), were pejoratively labeled ‘tankies’, named for the tanks of the Warsaw Pact oppressors.

Just twelve years later, the Prague Spring of ‘68––which started as an attempt by reformist Alexander Dubček to bring about democratic socialism in then-Czechoslovakia––met the same fate at the hands of Soviet imperialism.

Exposing a repressive political order, these events irrevocably damaged the worldwide communist movement, with thousands in Western Europe, especially in Britain, tearing up their Communist Party membership cards in protest.

Today, communist organizations––which all claim to be the one and only representative mass movement and revolutionary vanguard of the people––fall prey yet again to the revisionist and anachronistic ideas of authoritarian communism. This worrying trend is intensifying, as a new wave of ‘tankie’ thought that dominates certain leftist spheres and calls itself Marxism-Leninism (ML) makes a resurgence.[1]

If Marxism is scientific, then it must be open to change through the discrediting of old and the advancement of new ideas. It is time that communist organisations break with the past, a paradigm shift that should be spearheaded by the youth: these old ideas must be called out and pushed back against within our movement, not merely because of their moral and political fallouts but also because of their inherent perversion of true Marxist thought.

Marx and Engels wrote in 1848 that ‘A spectre is haunting Europe ––the spectre of communism’. Ironically, the modern far left is haunted, too. Fragments of a bygone past, such as Cold War-style two-pole thinking, falsified Stalinist history and dogmatic sectarianism have embedded themselves within the true legacy of the communist movement. Rather than serving as agents of social progress and as the radicalizing force of society, this modern far-left current has erected bulwarks of an era which no longer exists.

The Irish Left

The Irish left, to which this article will frequently refer, is but a national manifestation of a larger-scale trend in the international movement. Irish parties in which Stalinism is once again being embraced include, for example, the Workers’ Party (WP), the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) and their respective youth branches, namely the WP Youth and the now-unaffiliated Connolly Youth Movement (CYM).

These groups must be acclaimed on the one hand but criticized on the other. In the face of neoliberal politics, they have stood firm in their commitment to Marxism, albeit a perverted form thereof. They do the utmost to advance the cause. Unabashedly exposing the tottering, unsustainable and cruel system of capitalism through class analysis and a materialist lens, they are the continuing legacy of revolutionary politics, whereas novel movements have, alas, shied away from even mentioning the name of Marx.

On the other hand, the emperor has no clothes. These parties, as an emergent whole having roots in pro-Soviet origins, delegitimize the leftist political spectrum due to their failure to break with the past in the early ‘90s, after the Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe collapsed and the crimes committed by past so-labelled ‘communist’ regimes were revealed.

At the same time, reformist factions in the communist movement, such as the WP’s De Rossa faction––which split in 1992 following the party’s failure to break from its traditional Soviet-era politics––have turned toward accepting free-market economics and have re-emerged as accomplices of capitalism.

In the absence of a reliable alternative, it is this dichotomy in which Marxism has gotten stuck in the 21^st century.

The legacy of Sovietism within our movements manifests itself both culturally and structurally––in organizational structure, historical revisionism and foreign policy. This weed must be uprooted and it is the youth who must hold the shovel.

Despite their poignant criticisms in the Dáil of Irish capitalism and of liberal-bourgeois democracy,[2] well-organized public protests or marches and well-developed policies, certain stances of these parties choke the progress of the left. Wishing Stalin ‘happy birthday’, standing in solidarity with Belarussian dictator Lukashenko rather than the people’s protest against him, or praising the iron-fisted ruler of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, on social media is a spit in the face of everything that any serious leftist thinker has ever stood for.

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Roderick McMillan - The Father of Anarchy

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:44:19 GMT

Author: Roderick McMillan
Title: The Father of Anarchy
Subtitle: Proudhon, Mutualism and the Failures of 1848
Date: 17^th August 2024
Source: https://open.substack.com/pub/morewretchthansage/p/the-father-of-anarchy-mutualism-and?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1oiue6

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“Property is theft!”
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
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Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was born on January 15, 1809, in Besançon, France, and is widely recognised as the father of modern anarchism. His upbringing in a family of workers and peasants profoundly influenced his future ideology as he experienced the struggles of the working class.

Despite financial hardships, Proudhon received an education through scholarships, which was uncommon for people of his background at the time. Initially working as a printer, he was exposed to radical ideas, which shaped his later works and his revolutionary contributions as a journalist and printer of news and posters.

What is Property?

Proudhon’s first significant work, “What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government”, was published in 1840. This avant-garde book gave the world “Property is theft!” challenging prevailing notions about Property and capital.

He argued that Property, in essence, was a tool to exploit the working class, a concept that stirred significant debate in socialist circles. By “property”, he means capital and ownership of means of production. It is essential to distinguish between this and “possession” — things people on based on use-based occupancy and personal use.

Proudhon wrote his “System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty” in 1846. This work critiqued his era’s economic theories, highlighting what he saw as Capitalism’s inherent contradiction between production and consumption by examining the contradiction between labour and value and trying to balance them.

The Rift with Marx

Karl Marx had read Proudhon’s writings and adopted his analysis that economic development always grew a propertyless working proletariat class—even inviting him to collaborate. Proudhon was happy to have a transparent and collaborative disagreement, writing to Mark in 1846 about their different approaches to the need for revolution.

“I have also some observations to make on this phrase of your letter: “at the moment of action”. Perhaps you still retain the opinion that no reform is at present possible without a coup de main, without what was formerly called a revolution and is really nothing but a shock. That opinion, which I understand, which I excuse, and would willingly discuss, having myself shared it for a long time, my most recent studies have made me abandon completely. I believe we have no need of it in order to succeed; and that consequently we should not put forward revolutionary action as a means of social reform, because that pretended means would simply be an appeal to force, to arbitrariness, in brief, a contradiction. I myself put the problem in this way: to bring about the return to society, by an economic combination, of the wealth which was withdrawn from society by another economic combination. In other words, through Political Economy to turn the theory of Property against Property in such a way as to engender what you German socialists call community and what I will limit myself for the moment to calling liberty or equality. But I believe that I know the means of solving this problem with only a short delay; I would therefore prefer to burn Property by a slow fire, rather than give it new strength by making a St Bartholomew’s night of the proprietors ...”

Letter from Proudhorn to Marx, Lyon, 1846

However, “The Philosophy of Poverty” prompted Karl Marx to write “The Poverty of Philosophy” in 1847 in response.

The book was a deliberately aggressive and personal attack. Published in French, it personally belittled Proudhon as a philosopher and economist. Marx criticised Proudhon’s understanding of Capitalism’s relationship between Labour and Value. Marx accused Proudhon of being overly idealistic and of failing to recognise a materialist basis of social relations, which Marx would make a crucial part of his own analysis.

While Marx labelled Proudhon a “Utopian Socialist,” Gurvitch claims it was Proudhon who first invented the term and used it against Marx.

Claiming that his approach to reform was impractical, in another way, looking for incremental improvements and reform can be seen as more practical than the Marxist approach of a violent workers’ revolution to replace the system at once. Proudhon’s approach has the advantage of being more immediately actionable, offering solutions that workers and communities could implement within the existing system, such as cooperative ownership and mutual credit systems.

Marx attacked Proudhon for treating concepts such as value as absolutes: unchanging regardless of circumstance. Marx’s approach was rooted in examining the historical context. However, Proudhon’s approach ultimately reflects a moral vision of society that prioritises human dignity and social harmony rather than solely economic determinism.

Marx’s framework of the historical inevitability of Communism removes the agency of the individual that we see with Anarchy. Proudhon instead identified that individuals can shape their own destiny through their ethical choices and voluntary associations.

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Debate in the Earth First! Journal about ‘The Parable of the Tribes’

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:39:59 GMT

Title: Debate in the Earth First! Journal about ‘The Parable of the Tribes’
Date: 1985—1987
Notes: A friendly debate is started when Earth First! editor John Davis (writing under his favorite pseudonym) reviewed an important book which contradicts the anarchistic tendencies of both the libertarian “rednecks for wilderness” and the more communitarian green anarchists. This sets off the first (and last) extended debate on social philosophy in the pages of Earth First! Formanistas from Davis, Manes, Abbey, and others, defend anarchism, while Schmookler more than holds his own.
Source: 1. Review of The Parable of the Tribes by Australopithecus, Earth First! Journal, vol. 5, no. 8 (22 September 1985): page 24.
2. Schmookler Replies to Australopithecus by Andrew Bard Schmookler, Earth First! Journal, vol. 6, no. 2 (21 December 1985): page 25.
3. Schmookler on Anarchy by Andrew Bard Schmookler, Earth First! Journal, vol. 6, no. 5 (1 May 1986): page 22.
4. Ascent to Anarchy by Christoph Manes, Earth First! Journal, vol. 6, no. 6, 1 August 1986, page 21.
5. Schmookler Replies to the Anarchists by Andrew Bard Schmookler, Earth First! Journal, vol. 7, no. 2 (21 December 1986): pages 24–5.
6. An Anarchist Replies to Schmookler’s Reply to the Anarchists by Christoph Manes, Earth First! Journal, vol. 7, no. 8 (23 September 1987): page 23.
7. Schmookler Replies to Anarchist’s Replies to Schmookler’s Reply to the Anarchists by Andrew Bard Schmookler, Earth First! Journal, vol. 7, no. 8 (23 September 1987): pages 26–7.

1. Review of The Parable of the Tribes by Australopithecus

Review of The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution by Andrew Bard Schmookler. University of California Press. 400pp., $19.95

Andrew Bard Schmookler’s recent book, The Parable of the Tribes, is one of the more impressive and important books of this decade. In it, Schmookler looks back through history and pre-history to learn how we humans got ourselves and all life into such a dismal mess.

Schmookler’s basic thesis is that after civilization began, violence between different peoples — and stemming from that, violence against Earth — became an inevitable part of the evolution of humanity. The “parable of the tribes” explains this inevitability roughly as follows: As long as neighboring tribes all act peacefully, peace reigns; but as soon as any one tribe becomes aggressive, all tribes must adopt the ways of violence. Consider a tribe’s alternatives when faced by a hostile neighbor: The peaceful tribe can surrender, flee, or fight; any of which amounts to a victory for the ways of violence. Even as natural evolution selects for the strongest organisms and/or communities of organisms, social evolution selects for the most powerful societies. (Schmookler uses the word ‘power’ in the sense of power over; it would be worthwhile to see a critique of Schmookler’s theories by someone, e.g. Joanna Macy, within the growing movement of persons who think that power in the sense of power over could be replaced by power in the sense of power with.) Societies attain power partly by developing technologies which exploit nature, hence nature too becomes a victim of the power struggles of social evolution.

Schmookler’s parable offers a simple yet compelling theory on the downfall of humanity. For this and many other reasons, Schmookler’s work is brilliant. One of the most pleasing aspects of the book for those of us with a primeval bent is his discussion of the harmonious ways of life of primal peoples. Primal peoples generally seem to have lived lives unfettered by the many restrictions that make modern life unpleasant; restrictions such as tedious labor, or contrived notions of good and evil (morality is a human construct arising after humanity’s fall from the state of nature, Schmookler’s work suggests).

Despite all its good points, Schmookler’s book will often disappoint many readers. Political leftists will be aghast to read his discussion of the merits of US capitalism vs. Soviet communism, in which Schmookler says that the US system is basically decent whereas the Soviet system is basically bad. The latter claim is reasonable; the former is not. Feminists may resent the lack of attention Schmookler pays to the ways in which violence against Earth and humans has been historically tied to the male dominance of societies for the past 8000 years or so. Ernest Becker, the late highly acclaimed author of The Denial of Death would think that Schmookler overlooks the immense importance of fear of death in shaping human cultures. Biologists might question his strong stress on competition as the driving force in evolution, insofar as he underrates the importance of cooperation (symbiosis) in shaping evolution. We radical ecologists wish Schmookler had discussed in more detail how his parable ties in with violence against Earth. Furthermore, we may question whether Schmookler’s is a biocentric perspective on life. Some of us grow apprehensive when we read “there is something special about the human animal.” We are apt to agree more with his suggestion that human consciousness may prove to be merely an unsucessful evolutionary experiment.

Lastly, anyone wishing for an answer to the world’s desperate plight will not find it. Schmookler explains how we entered our plight, but not how we can escape it. He hints that his theoretical solution is forthcoming. This does not inspire confidence; if he is as thorough in this next project, it may not appear until after most of Earth is a wasteland.

2. Schmookler Replies to Australopithecus by Andrew Bard Schmookler

I was delighted that a review of my book, The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, appeared in Earth First!. For much of the passion that inspired the writing of my book is the same as the passion that is blazoned in your pages.

I was pleased also that your reviewer, Australopithecus, evidently from a species akin to my own, the mis-named Homo sapiens, thought as highly as he did of The Parable of the Tribes. However, there are a few statements in the review that would give your readers an inaccurate understanding of the views I present in my book. I’d like here to correct such misunderstandings.

The review says that I find capitalism basically decent. In fact, while I do find many of the usual left-wing criticisms of the market economy misguided, my purpose in the part of Chapter 7 entitled “The Market as a Power System” was to spell out the strongest legitimate critique possible of the workings of the capitalist economy. My conclusion with respect to the market exemplifies my thesis throughout the book: that the market, like other systems ruled by power, cannot be trusted to rule our destiny wisely or humanely. The market attends well only to certain values, while ignoring others — including most emphatically the panoply of values connected with the natural world. The most that can be said for the market is that, properly limited by political choices reflecting other values, it can be a useful tool.

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Devon Price - There is no safe sex. There is no safe life.

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:39:05 GMT

Author: Devon Price
Title: There is no safe sex. There is no safe life.
Subtitle: Fucking, transitioning, and resisting the state all require admitting risk into your life.
Date: August 15 2024
Source: Retrieved on Aug 20 2024 from https://drdevonprice.substack.com/p/there-is-no-safe-sex-there-is-no.

I had to get a gonorrhea shot not too long ago.

Dealing with gonorrhea was a pain in the ass — the intramuscular injection hurt, and my arm stung for days. The antibiotic dose was heavy — a whopping 500 milligrams of ceftriaxone, as the once-standard dose of 250 milligrams no longer works for all patients (a not-so-ironic consequence of antibiotics being so heavily overprescribed).

Blasting my body with that much medication left me exhausted for a week. I had to stop having sex until the infection cleared up, and inform all my recent sexual partners about it. Some of them got frightened by any talk of disease and didn’t want to meet up with me anymore. One couple even thought that I was accusing them of getting me sick, as if unknowingly transmitting a virus was an action for which they could be blamed (it is not). Since I’d been using condoms, I was a little surprised the transmission had happened, and that made me unwilling to jump into bed with unfamiliar partners for a while.

Through all this hassle, though, I never felt one iota of shame. Why? Because I understood that the kinds of sex I enjoy comes with risks, I had taken steps to mitigate the risks I found unacceptable, and I had long ago admitted to myself that it was better to pursue the life I wanted and pay a price for it than to not have much of a life at all.

Why Shame Doesn’t Work

The following is an excerpt from my book, Unlearning Shame. Just Say No” Isn’t Enough The first time I saw my mom order wine at a restaurant, I was five years old, and it made me unbearably distraught. As soon as the glass came to our table, I burst out crying: “

I grew up with abstinence-only sex education, and it did a real number on me. But I’ve shaken off enough of my old cultural programming to realize that the transmission of bacteria and viruses is a thing that sometimes just happens when animals come together, no matter how stringently we might try to prevent it.

I have gotten urinary tract infections when a stray microbe found its way into my urethra after sex. Lube and bodily fluids have disturbed my vagina’s pH and caused a yeast infection many times. So has wearing a bathing suit for too long without drying it, yet another “risk” worth the pleasures of swimming along the sea wall.

Once or twice I’ve had an outbreak of cold sores, just like 80% of humans. If I’m like most people, I probably caught oral herpes when I was very young, sharing a sippy cup or rolling around at a sleepover.

None of this makes me disgusting, irresponsible, evil, or dangerous to others. It just makes me a living creature that exists in close contact with other creatures. I believe I have a responsibility to get tested regularly, to alert people who have been close to me when I get sick, and to use preventative measures like condoms, PreP, vaccines, toys, and masks to prevent the spread of infections as best I can. But I never imagine I can lead a life without risk — or that such a life would even be desirable.

There is no such thing as completely “safe” sex. A friend of mine can’t use condoms because they give her bacterial vaginosis. She chooses instead to take PreP to prevent the transmission of HIV, have sex without condoms, and get anything else she catches treated. A guy I know who masks and tests religiously caught COVID while fisting someone (with a gloved hand!) at an air-filtered party. HPV is so prevalent that most sexual wellness clinics don’t bother testing for it, and can’t do much for a patient if they do have it. Our bodies are teeming at all times with various endemic viruses and microbes that we will never have the power to purge.

Then there are the possible costs of not having sex — vaginal atrophy, pelvic floor weakening, reduced access to endorphins, loneliness, touch starvation, the despair of harboring dreams that one never dares try. I can’t decide for anyone else which dangers loom the largest, but for me a gonorrhea shot is a fair trade for the hours of leg-cramping, bed-staining, hypno-kinky sex that led to it. There’s no guarantee that the next time I have sex it will be anywhere near as much fun, but the potential keeps me throwing the dice.

I hear quite frequently from sexually inexperienced Autistic people who crave an intimate connection, but desperately wish to remain responsible and “safe.” They want there to be a set of iron-tight rules they can follow that will guarantee they remain a virtuous person who never hurts anyone’s feelings, and never catches any sexually transmitted infection.

I understand why they want someone to impose order onto an unpredictable, terrifying world. But I can’t give that certainty to them, nor can anyone. All I can suggest is that they be honest with themselves about what they want, inform themselves of the costs and benefits to pursuing their desires, and then venture forward — proudly welcoming the correct risks into their life, rather than trying to avoid any risks at all.

Life is nothing but a negotiation of risk. If a person has gender dysphoria and they want to combat it, they must risk a transition they could one day regret. If an abolitionist wants to take a stand against the police state, they must plan for the possibility of arrest or political repression. When we open our hearts to love, we expose ourselves to grief— our partners will keep changing and growing, sometimes away from us. Each step that we take forward in life closes off potential paths. There is no avoiding this.

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Antiauthoritarians-Internationalists of Southern Cyprus - A Small Contribution to the non-resolution of the Cyprus Problem

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:35:56 GMT

Author: Antiauthoritarians-Internationalists of Southern Cyprus
Title: A Small Contribution to the non-resolution of the Cyprus Problem
Date: 1989–1990
Notes: This article was written by people who were active in the anti-authoritarian scene of Limassol (Cyprus) and was published in the Greek anarchist newspaper ‘Enantia’ in January-December 1989–1990. It was signed by the ‘Antiauthoritarians-Internationalists of Southern Cyprus’.
Source: https://movementsarchive.org/doku.php?id=en:other:unclassified:milisi

A two-day meeting of Greek Cypriots (GC) and Turkish Cypriots (TC) was held in mid-September at the Ledra Palace Hotel (a hotel located in the buffer zone and monitored by UNFICYP) to discuss ways of “citizen participation in the Federation”. The meeting was organised by a group of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot intellectuals from the broader reformist left who first met last winter in Berlin under the auspices of an organisation of the German Green Party. After the first meeting in Berlin, it was decided to continue and expand the contacts through further meetings in Ledra Palace (again under the auspices of the German Greens). The Greek Cypriot group undertook to send some 40 invitations to Cypriots. The invitations to the Greek Cypriots were sent by name in order to exclude from the meeting any Greek Cypriot who could spoil the image the Greek Cypriot side wanted to present to the Turkish Cypriots (we do not know what exactly happened with the Turkish Cypriots).

While “personal” invitations were sent to all political “ rapprochement” political spaces, the Marxist editorial group Workers’ Democracy [Ergatiki Dimokratia] was deliberately left out (and even after a vote by the Berlin “group”), which constitutes an important part of the anti-nationalist and anti-patriotic front built mainly around the committee of support for the conscientious objector Giannis Parpas. This ‘front’ has recently come under repeated political attacks which, for various reasons, have for the most part fallen on the Workers’ Democracy group. To these attacks is now added that of their exclusion from contact with the TCs (the only reason why it might have been worthwhile to be at this meeting was contact with TCs). Two nominal invitations were sent to the Limassol milieu, which is the other important part of the anti-patriotic, anti-nationalist ‘front’. The main aim of this action was to split this front on the one hand, and on the other hand to ensure the alibi that some people from the committee of support for Giannis Parpas had been invited anyway. Here we have to admit that because Workers’ Democracy is a much more coherent political group than the disparate milieu of Limassol, it was also much more dangerous for them.

After many discussions, a part of the Limassol milieu together with antiauthoritarians-internationalists from other cities decided to denounce the GC hypocrisy at the meeting and published the proclamation that we publish here and which was also sent to some Turkish Cypriots who took part in the meeting (through our comrade who held the invitation).

The main reasons why we refuse to participate as antiauthoritarians-internationalists in such “rapprochement” events are set out very briefly in the following text.

What Greek Cypriot (GC) capitalism seeks today is to secure a political “solution” to the Cyprus problem that will allow it to re-impose its total economic and political domination — as it did before ’74 — on the entire island. Securing such a “solution” is necessary for GC capitalism so that it can proceed unhindered in further upgrading its position within world capitalism as it is taking shape in this transitional phase and play a more substantial role in international political developments (like Europe’s window on the Middle East and the Non-Aligned Movement).

Within the framework of this pursuit of a political “solution” favourable to GC interests, GC capitalism will have to make “proper” use of all the current political and economic data: its upgraded position in relation to the EEC and the international isolation imposed by the Greek and GC side on the TRNC;[1] the advantageous position of the Greek state due to its connection with the EEC vis-à-vis Turkey, the international political circumstances that encourage a climate of recession and healing of the ‘open wounds’ scattered all over the world caused by the conflicts generated by international capitalist competition and finally the reaction of the TC masses against the militaristic regime of the TRNC as expressed recently, mainly through the newly established leftist peace movement.

It is this reaction of the TCs that the Greek Cypriot capital state is rushing to exploit and turn against the rival power bloc, the Turkish Cypriot state, not because it suddenly cares about the future of the TCs, but to use them as a means of imposing its own domination.

For this purpose, a campaign has recently been launched to win the trust and consent of the TCs to what GC state-capital is seeking to achieve. A campaign planned in the wet offices of the government technocrats and carried out by all sorts of state ideology’s delinquents: the political parties, the mass media, the press, up to the ‘alternative’ left of the state intelligentsia and social-patriotism that took on the role of a broker between the GC state and the ‘reacting’ TCs, by organizing and participating in the meeting at Ledra Palace.

The truth is that such actions that promote ‘rapprochement’ serve the advancement of the interests of GC capitalism through this kind of ‘process’. This is why the meeting in Ledra Palace was so much welcomed by the GC state and was so strongly promoted by the state and party media. Moreover, this meeting paved the way for a new meeting that took place in the same place between representatives of the GC and TC parties about two months later. That is why the government itself made sure to place its lackeys in key positions within the GC part of this movement. A movement that has no other goal than to secure the trust and consent of the TC through slogans such as “reunification, “freedom”, “federation”, etc. — to what the GC state wants to impose.

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Mario Lopez - A letter

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:30:01 GMT

Author: Mario Lopez
Title: A letter
Date: August 3, 2013
Source: <web.archive.org/.../actforfree.nostate.net/?p=15058>. Retrieved on 28/08/2024 from lib.anarhija.net.

Comrades,

It’s time I used my typewriter, considering the requests from many compas from different areas of the world, including Mexico, who repeatedly asked me to tell them what situation I was going through. I’d like to start by apologizing for not giving news for many months, more than 6 to be precise. Never mind, I haven’t done so for different, very personal reasons.

For now I’m going to say only a few things, starting from the judicial ones. The trial against me is continuing but there have been some changes and there is no sentence so far. Well, a week ago my case became competence of the tribunal 20 dealing with non serious offences. This is due to the reform of the law according to which I was accused, with the result that my case is now regarded as a non serious one in the Mexican penal code: break of the public peace, with a sentence ranging from 6 to 30 years without possibility of bail, has been changed into non serious offence, with a sentence ranging from 4 to 7 years. This is the reasons why anarchist lawyers demanded my release.

The tribunal 32 based in Recusorio Varolin Preventivo Sur, which took up my case at first, made a request for it to be transferred to another tribunal. Of course the prosecution appealed against this but a couple of months later the appeal was rejected and the transfer went on. This involved some problems for a couple of weeks but finally I had notification of the transfer.

This may seems a good change but it is not completely good because a new trial will have to start, whereas the previous one had almost concluded.

The change will give the prosecution a new opportunity for gathering more evidence against me and rebuild the case, which presented a number of faults. For example, during a hearing which I attended while being detained at the Reclusorio Sur the prosecutor called a witness, a woman of the antiriot police who had nothing to do with my imprisonment. She had been involved in a previous arrest following minor incidents against bullfighting in 2009. Moreover she no longer works with the institutions. Naturally my lawyers dismissed this alleged evidence, only due to the prosecutor’s intention to prove my tendency to breach the public peace. We demanded this phase of evidence to be acquired as it was, which implied 3–4 months of trial and the risk to get a maximum sentence of 7 years imprisonment.

During these months I have been waiting (along with you all) for the decision concerning the appeal presented by the prosecution after my release – they call it freedom but I can’t define it as such only because I was released from prison, for me freedom must be absolute. The appeal was rejected and I am still free awaiting trial, while both the prosecution and the defence were granted more time to gather evidence, which we believe is useless and only serves to confirm the presence of the prosecutor in this case. We renounced this extra time. It was then that the tribunal 32 decided to transfer the case to the court dealing with non serious offences, and the prosecution made an appeal.

Personally I want to publicly declare that I maintain my position. The considerations that can be drawn from my situation should be of strategic and tactic nature, especially as concerns ideas and not only the judicial consequences that they may produce. We may say, quite often this is the price of waging a war, an individual and collective conflict, and we can’t ignore its consequences in a cowardly way by not taking into account the sentences or the incertitude that the comrades hit by the repression of the state suffer or will suffer. We must take on these consequences individually or collectively when we decide to engage in a direct struggle against the State/Capital.

Usually I don’t agree with those who picture the revolution as an easy one, a non violent change without repercussions or repression from the State apparatus. Not that I want this to happen but I’m aware of the fact that we need to reduce risks to a minimum. At the same time we also have to be aware of the fact that repression along with criminalization are the weapons the state use to stop what disturbs its dominion, if our activity is to be placed outside the legal parameters of the system and our forms of struggle are to overcome the limits imposed by ideologies in a straightforward conflict against the Authority.

I’m not saying we have to worship violence or revolutionary violence; it is simply something that the anarchist movement has taken from the past and brought into the present in order to struggle against the State/Capital. Always bearing in mind that violence is not the climax of our individual/collective intervention we have to reject the false dichotomy imposed by both the system – especially the police state we have today with DF, just to make an example – and by its defenders and supporters – leftists, pacifists, reformers, etc – in order to undermine the insurrection process or obstruct it with false dilemmas, which end up in irreconcilable splits.

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Jason Lee Byas and Billy Christmas - Methodological Anarchism

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:28:03 GMT

Author: Jason Lee Byas and Billy Christmas
Title: Methodological Anarchism
Date: August 1, 2022
Source: <routledge.com>

I. Introduction

Anarchists all share the same basic public policy proposal: abolish public policy. With regard to foreign policy, their position is to abolish the military. With regard to education policy, abolish state schools. With regard to law enforcement policy, abolish the police. And so on and so forth.[1]

Given this total agreement on policy goals, it might seem like anarchists should be free from infighting. As anyone familiar with the anarchist movement knows, they aren’t. Each form of anarchism is vigorously opposed by at least one other form, with each often writing the other out of “anarchism” altogether. In anarcho-communist Alexander Berkman’s 1929 account of these differences,[2] they are in part disputes about justice. For communists like himself, private property and commerce drive domination and injustice, and so must be abolished. For individualists, private property and commerce are fundamental constituents of freedom and justice, and so must be unleashed. Even between marketfriendly anarchists, the contents of justice are controversial. For instance, Murray Rothbard puts justice purely in terms of self-ownership, whereas Gary Chartier argues for a much broader conception that includes distributive and relational concerns.[3] These differences are rendered unintelligible within a set of assumptions predominant within academic political philosophy. We refer to this discourse as “the policy framework”: it regards prescriptions of justice as little more than prescriptions of public policy.

For instance, in “The Zig-Zag of Politics,” where Robert Nozick explained why he had greatly moderated his libertarianism, he wrote that “[t]he libertarian view looked solely at the purpose of government, not at its meaning.”[4] Taking questions of meaning seriously, he said, means that certain laws and programs must exist to voice “social solidarity and humane concern for others.”[5] Beyond that, “[j]oint political action [by which Nozick means state action] does not merely symbolically express our ties of concern, it also constitutes a relational tie itself.”[6] If true, this presents a considerable problem for anarchists. If the means by which a society not only communicates but constitutes certain social relations demanded by justice must involve the state, then justice—or at least part of justice— is conceptually impossible in a stateless society. Moreover, these intra-anarchist disputes look nonsensical, given that there is no institutional organ to institute their different conceptions of justice to begin with.

Anarchists and their critics, then, seem to be speaking different languages. There is a basic methodological difference in the way anarchists and non-anarchists think about politics, often more implicit than explicit. Anarchists see politics and justice as being concerns of social institutions, norms, and relations generally—both inside and outside the state. Much of academic political philosophy talks of politics and justice as if they are definitionally concerns about what states should do, or our relationships with each other through the state. In this chapter, we argue that the anarchists are on the right side of this difference. We call the insight that undergirds the anarchists’ understanding of politics and justice “methodological anarchism.” We seek to exorcise the policy framework in favor of methodological anarchism. Indeed, we believe it should be embraced by all political philosophers, not only the anarchists among their ranks.

Political philosophers ought to abstain from the policy framework for two reasons. First, it is analytically impoverished inasmuch as, when followed to its logical conclusion, it is unable to engage with enormous areas of analysis that are relevant to what makes a society just or unjust. Second, it instills subtle prejudice against other important approaches to mitigating injustice that are unconcerned with public policy. This also carries the danger of lending ideological support for existing injustices and thereby entrenching them. Accepting our critique of the policy framework and adopting methodological anarchism does not necessarily require the acceptance of any kind of substantive political anarchism. But it does mean thinking a bit more like an anarchist about how to make society more just—thus our characterization of it as “methodological.”

II. The Poverty of the Policy Framework

The policy framework is a mode of engagement with principles or theories of justice that treats them as little more than prescriptions for state action. If there is injustice, it is because there is something that the state ought to do but does not (or ought not to do, but does). Once there is justice, it will be because the state has implemented a successful policy (or repealed a policy) associated with this concern. Politics, therefore, is always an exercise in attempting to change states or influencing their actions. Doing so might involve engagement at any number of levels, from directly lobbying legislative officials to acts of civil disobedience, but within the policy framework the end goal is always changing the state’s constitution or its laws.

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Duane Rousselle and Süreyyya Evren - Post-Anarchism: A Reader

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:25:51 GMT

Author: Duane Rousselle and Süreyyya Evren
Title: Post-Anarchism: A Reader
Date: 2011
Source: <archive.org/details/postanarchismrea0000unse_s5y4>

Preface

Post-anarchism has been of considerable importance in the discussions of radical intellectuals across the globe in the last decade. In its most popular form, it demonstrates a desire to blend the most promising aspects of traditional anarchist theory (centrally, the attitude of hostility in the face of representation) with developments in post-structuralist and postmodern thought. However, since its inception, it has also posed a broader challenge to the reification of anarchist theory. It might be argued, as Lewis Call suggests in this book, that today ‘a kind of post-anarchist moment has arrived’; whether or not this moment marks the final becomings of a vanishing philosophical mediator whereby what used to be explicitly regarded as ‘post-anarchism’ has simply become ‘anarchism’ (post-anarchism without its defining critique against ‘traditional anarchism’) is a matter for future investigation. However, I remain convinced that post-anarchism is the radical contemporary equivalent of the traditional anarchist discourse which, without proper force and direction, remains as impotent or as strong as traditional anarchism ever has been. In this sense, I would suggest that post-anarchism is simply another word to describe a paradigm shift that erupted at the broader level of anarchist philosophy and which has yet to be fully developed on the streets.

Post-anarchism decentralizes the political movement, motions toward tactical rather than strategic action, brings anarchist thought into touch with a range of influences (in this sense post-anarchism reflects a ‘cultural studies’ approach) and provides the foundation for a thousand lines of flight; post-anarchism brings traditional anarchism into new relationships with the outside world. I believe that it is only those anarchists who speak within the broader trend of post-anarchism, a trend which is situated uniquely in the present context, who are capable of grappling with today’s issues. Today’s anarchists may not be post-structuralist but they surely embody the element of post-structuralism’s critique and the presumption of its focus in various ways. The book that you are holding aims to demonstrate this point.

The post-anarchists have been under attack. The brunt of this attack emerges from other anarchists who argue that the post-anarchists have too hastily declared a new tradition for themselves through highly selective and reductive readings of the traditional literature. This is the critique of the postanarchist reduction of traditional anarchist literature. A second and emerging critique is that the post-anarchists have given up on the notion of ‘class’ and have retreated into obscure and intoxicating academic diatribes against a tradition built of discursive straw. In any case, it is without any question that post-anarchism has proved itself worth a second look: if one considers oneself a radical today, one will have to exercise extreme caution to avoid the force and influence of the post-anarchists. One need not be a post-anarchist to appreciate what post-anarchism has to offer and the condition it seeks to explain; it is in this spirit of exploration and possibility that I offer, with Süreyyya Evren, Post-Anarchism: A Reader. And for making these essays accessible to the wider public and to an anarchist-sympathetic readership, we make absolutely no apologies.

Our aim in this book is to offer readers the most comprehensive and up-to-date collection of post-anarchist material at an affordable price and in an accessible way in order to re-stimulate debates about its importance as a general movement of thought. My hope is that this book will help to resolve lingering tensions about the discourse through which post-anarchists are often accused of speaking (what Lacan has called the ‘discourse of the university’). Likewise, many anarchist academics are suspicious of the prefix ‘post-’. The range of perspectives brought together in this volume demonstrates that there is diversity within post-anarchism and that critics should be made aware of their own reduction of the ‘post-anarchist’ body of thought.

What will surely be regarded as an academic pursuit by practising anarchists, and what will no doubt be regarded as an anarchist pursuit by thinking academics, has ostensibly been resolved into a mutual rejection of sorts. Here, one should be careful to distinguish academic writing from academic patronage (writing from the academy should in all cases be distinguished from writing for the academy) – a conflation that is very often assumed rather than argued convincingly. My best advice is to take what one finds useful in the post-anarchist literature and to dispose of what one finds to be in the service of the ‘university’; here, we can only offer the tools and it is your job to build your own shelter.

Duane Rousselle

Acknowledgements

Duane Rousselle: I would like to thank Jason Adams for his invaluable assistance in providing the needed infrastructure and motivation for this project; Aragorn! for his friendship and support in pursuing this and other projects; Süreyyya Evren for partaking in long late-night discussions about post-anarchism and for his support and effort during the tiresome editing process; Uri Gordon, Saul Newman and Stevphen Shukaitis for offering advice and direction; Richard J.F. Day, who rescued me from three narrowly avoided disasters; Mohammed Jean-Veneuse for teaching me the value and meaning of friendship; the Department of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick for their kind donation of $50 toward reprint/permissions costs for this book; the Faculty of Arts at the University of New Brunswick for their kind donation of $150 toward reprint/permissions costs for this book; Pluto Press (especially David Castle and Will Viney), who have been supportive and more than a pleasure to work with; all contributors for believing in the project and making this book happen, especially those who worked with me to produce original material; and, lastly, but surely not least, Joady Jardine, my dancing star, for her endless encouragement and inspiration.

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Georges Bataille - The Problem of the State

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:24:08 GMT

Author: Georges Bataille
Title: The Problem of the State
Date: 1933
Source: « Le Problème de l’État », paru dans le n° 9 de la Critique Sociale (Septembre 1933).

In contradiction to the evolution of the 19^th century, current historical trends appear to be moving in the direction of state coercion and hegemony. Without prejudging the ultimate value of such an assessment — which may later prove illusory — it is clear that it now overwhelmingly dominates the confused understanding and divergent interpretations of politics. Certain coincidences in the results of Fascism and Bolshevism have created the general perspectives of a bewildered consciousness of history — a consciousness which, under new conditions, is gradually transformed into irony and becomes accustomed to considering death.

Never mind the mediocre aspirations of today’s liberalism — which find a tragic outcome here — but the labor movement itself is linked to the war against the state. Workers’ consciousness has developed as a function of the dissolution of traditional authority. The slightest hope of revolution has been described as the withering away of the state: but it is, on the contrary, the revolutionary forces that the present world sees withering away, and at the same time, every living force has today taken the form of the totalitarian state. The revolutionary consciousness that awakens in this world of constraint is thus led to consider itself historically as nonsense: it has become, to use Hegel’s old formulas, torn consciousness and unhappy consciousness. Stalin, the shadow and chill cast by this name alone over all revolutionary hope — this, combined with the horror of the German and Italian police forces, is the image of a humanity where the cries of revolt have become politically negligible, where these cries are nothing but heartbreak and unhappiness.
In this situation, the misery of which is reflected in every aspect of activity, the reaction of official communism has been unspeakably vulgar: jovial blindness... Real human parakeets have accepted the worst departures from fundamental revolutionary principles as the very expression of proletarian authenticity. In the name of abject optimism, formally contradicted by the facts, they began to smear those who were suffering. This was not a childish persistence to hope; no real hope was bound up with peremptory assertions, but only an unavowed cowardice, an inability to realize and endure a dreadful situation.
Optimism may be the condition for all action, but without mentioning the vulgar lies that are often its source, optimism can become tantamount to the death of revolutionary consciousness. This consciousness (which reflects a given system of production with the social relations it implies) is by its very nature torn consciousness, consciousness of an unacceptable existence. In any case, it is fundamentally incompatible with the beatitudes of a party of official mercenaries. All the more so, in the present period, it is necessarily linked to the tragic nature of circumstances: it is thus reduced to the realization and anguish of a desperate situation as its own necessity. The optimism that opposes this attitude of complete reflection is the derision, not the safeguard, of revolutionary passion.
In such a movement of retreat — as, moreover, it occurs independently of wills — the profound claims of the Revolution are not abandoned: on the contrary, they are taken up again at their source, in close contact with what the historical movement tears apart and rejects towards misfortune. And if a renewed conception no longer represents revolutionary claims, naively, as a due the collection of which is implied, but, painfully, as a perishable force, this force, inscribing itself in blind chaos, loses the mechanical character it assumed in a fatalistic conception: just as in all anxious passion, it is liberated and enlarged by the awareness of possible death.

With this realization of the approaching danger to all humanity, the old geometric conception of the future disappears. The old regular and honest future gives way to anguish. Two centuries ago, the fate of future societies was described in accordance with legalistic dreams, with the immediate aim of removing every shadow from the prospects of bourgeois existence: at that moment, every frightening image of possible disorder and overwhelm was banished like a spectre. The labor movement was partly wrong to take up the naïve bourgeois apocalypse: it was almost foolish to burden matter, material production, with the most touching promises, as if, from a certain point onwards, necessarily, this production should bear no resemblance to the other material forces which, on all sides, leave indifferently free the possibilities of order and disorder, suffering and pleasure. Today, we would have to renounce all comprehension not to see that the admirable confidence inherent in Marx and socialism as a whole was justified emotionally, not scientifically: the possibility (perhaps the duty) of such an emotional justification has, moreover, only recently disappeared.

But today, if revolutionary affectivity has no other way out than the misfortune of consciousness, it returns to it as to its first mistress. Only in misfortune does it rediscover the painful intensity without which the fundamental resolution of the Revolution, the “neither God nor masters” of the workers in revolt, loses its radical brutality. Disoriented and disunited, the exploited must today measure themselves against the gods (the homelands) and the most imperative masters of all those who have ever enslaved them. And they must at the same time suspect each other, lest those who lead them into struggle become their masters in turn.

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It's Going Down - The Election Cycle as Counter-Insurgency

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:23:29 GMT

Author: It's Going Down
Title: The Election Cycle as Counter-Insurgency
Date: 08/12/2024
Source: Retrieved on 08/22/2024 from https://itsgoingdown.org/the-election-cycle-as-counter-insurgency/

It has been four years since a deadly pandemic ripped through the social terrain and the George Floyd uprising brought millions out into the streets, as those in power responded by telling us all to go back to work and sending in the National Guard. Months later, tens of thousands of Trump supporters, Proud Boys, and militia members attempted to install an internet troll as emperor.

Since then, the government has rolled back safety nets put in place during the pandemic, attempted to forestall an economic crisis while another tech bubble seems poised to burst, and rising inflation and price gouging has led to record corporate profits and increased anger and anxiety. In short, there should be no wonder why a deep pessimism has permeated in the face of what the two ruling parties have offered up this election cycle.

But while history will remember this year as a time when much of the country simply shrugged when a former president was shot by a member of his own party and a deeply unpopular incumbent was pushed out in the face of mass dissatisfaction, hidden from the headlines and the toxicity of the pundit class is both the worsening conditions of our lives and the attempt by the capitalist State to manufacture a narrative that not only distracts from the deepening crisis, but attempts to proclaim that the very system which accelerates it has a future.

Trump proclaims, again, that if he wins we’ll all be rich. The Democrats tell us we already are.

Running From Policy

We’re told so often that “we live in a democracy,” some of us forget that we actually don’t. What is up for offer from the ruling parties is not an organic expression of the will of the people, but instead an attempt at popularizing an operating system for a social order that is in deep crisis. Those that seek to rule us have no desire to even address, let alone fix, the material structural problems which permeate our lives. “Vibes” aside, the nausea produced by the current race has led to a deafening roar of mass nihilism, as we all doom scroll through the slow collapse of this civilization.

The scenes are different, but all speak to a drastic reactionary lurch happening within the ruling institutions of this society. The leader of the Teamsters union speaks at the RNC amid calls for the military to carry out mass deportations and with a straight face heralds the party as a friend to workers. White boomers hold up signs reading, “Mass Deportations Now!,” and the Democrats respond by openly declaring that they will in fact be even more draconian at the border than Trump. Meanwhile millions of so-called “progressives” organize to “do the work” over Zoom calls, as families in Gaza watch as their children explode in Israeli airstrikes and the Democratic governor of California helps police evict a homeless encampment.

And here in lies the greatest irony of all: while both parties say they are “running on policy,” by and large, their actual positions are not that popular. While in 2020, Harris attempted to appear as a bridge between the Dollar Store social democracy of Bernie Sanders and the Center-Right neoliberalism of Biden, by 2024, Harris had already walked back calls for things like universal healthcare, which of course, actually has mass support. There are many other examples, from turning their back on trans and LGBTQ+ rights, pushing for continued border militarization, and pivoting from calling for a version of the Green New Deal to pushing “cap and trade” schemes to shield corporations from climate fallout.

And despite Biden being pushed out of office in large part due to his unwavering support for the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the Democrats, while also rolling back COVID relief and healthcare protections, continue to fast-track billions in weapons and military aid to Israel. Cutting funding to Israel would swiftly end the war, which is deeply unpopular, especially among the Democratic base, yet the party remains deeply committed to supporting Israel’s continued genocide. In short, many progressive voters are putting hopes in Harris being in fact something she is not.

Ironically, one of the largest co-signers of this continued right-ward shift has in fact been Bernie Sanders and “the Squad,” who not only threw their support in with Biden, pushing back against growing calls to remove him, but have continued to fulfill their role, much like Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan in MAGA world, as a hype-man to the DNC, attempting to excite young people, the Left, and low-wage workers about a ticket that has by and large, abandoned any assemblage of “progressive” policy.

Thus, less than a decade after the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) began a project of mass entryism into the Democratic Party, succeeding in gaining almost 100,000 members and getting several high profile candidates elected into office, the end result has by and large been a continued move to the Right. There is a word for this: recuperation.

Meanwhile, on the MAGA side of the street, Trump has attempted to piece together a campaign by building a brand around simply not being Joe Biden. But Trump has also gone to great lengths to obfuscate his policy proposals, insofar as he has them. This has been the most apparent in his attempt to re-imagine the overturning of Roe v. Wade as a way to “send it back to the states.” But abortion is only part of a bigger issue for Trump, as popular opinion against Project 2025 has deeply soured, leading Trump to disavow the massive set of policy proposals produced by members of his former administration and backed by many of his most loyal subjects.

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Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis - The Palestinian Revolution and the Rift in the International Movement

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 07:17:42 GMT

Author: Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis
Title: The Palestinian Revolution and the Rift in the International Movement
Date: 10/07/2024
Source: https://athens.indymedia.org/post/1631163/

I can imagine many people resenting the term Palestinian revolution when reading the title of this article. Some have already written that revolution is one thing and resistance is another, that war is one thing and liberation is another. I chose this title, being literal, precisely because it would be provocative. Let us be open to any dialogue, knowing that the first thing that is at issue is the definition of the subject. In times of war, any political discourse is a polemic act. War is not a choice, it is not a means among other means, as statist positivism and its projections on the anti-authoritarian pretexts for capitulation assert; it is the incessant class condition in which we find ourselves and through which we liberate ourselves. Every phrase that has been uttered in the last 20, 50, hundreds and thousands of years flutters on the broken Gaza wall or hangs in the rubble of the city, among the dismembered children. If the well-meaning movement researchers who have produced numerous analyses of the class and social background of the Greek revolution of 1821 find it difficult to recognize the Palestinian revolution as such, this says something about their euroelitism and nationalism. As for those who deny resistance to colonialism and imperialism, as well as its revolutionary potential, by juxtaposing the “essential” antithesis of capital-labor, the totality or molecularity, today we can say that their abstractions and confines are filled with the stench of the carnivorous capitalist North. The thoughtless adoption of the dogmatic social-democratic scholasticism suggests a blind consumption of intellectualism, self-indulging in ideological garbage. If I pay you a regular salary, the relationship is class-based. But if I take your land to build a work camp or a prison, then not only the relationship is not class-based, but it is subordinate to that, even if I put you in the camp on a salary or put you in prison! If I put you up against the prison wall and shoot you, the relationship is not class-based, it is “essentially” indifferent outside of its interpretation into a monetary relationship. If I lock you up in the prison that I built by stealing your land, if I control your survival resources and bomb you day and night, the relationship is not class-based and the relation of power cannot be changed until the labor relation is universally and completely dismantled. This kind of idiocy goes around as scholastic proletarian theory.

We have entered the evolutionary phase of capitalist civilization where it is materialized as a total synchronic crisis and where every tick of the clock reveals the positioning of every political subject on the side of revolution or on the side of counter-revolution. All antitheses are condensed, they intersect and are confounded towards the maximum and the minimum and in the explosive way that they emerge they express their complexity. The anti-capitalist movement is shaped within this vortex, it does not stand still in some idealized apathetic position of an overseer. It is therefore traversed by the whole set of intersections, confusions and complexities. The war waged by the statist public health control revealed a deep rift in the anti-capitalist movement, the imperialist war in the Ukrainian territory revealed other rifts, which literally culminate into war. The revolutionary counterattack inside the territory of the zionist colonialist rule, illuminated the most fundamental rift within the movement. If we can schematically say that the first rupture concerned the fractional scope of imperialist colonialism over the social body and the second one concerned revolutionary autonomy in conditions where military rule, as fundamental to capitalism, is unveiled, then the Palestinian rupture concerns the very point of the history of capitalism and its destruction. The unfulfilled crusade of colonizing the Eurasian East (prior to the complete colonization of Africa and of the continent westward to Europe) reappears as a historically inescapable and globally universal definitive question. Incidentally, wage slavery, on which the capitalist mode of production is founded, emerged and prevailed in Europe through the colonialist war to the east (in particular, from the data so far it appears that the prime organism where the prevalence of the wage relation was incubated was crusading Venice).

The historical moment of the dissemination of CoV-2 and the culmination of the anti-health imperialist counter-revolution, through its militaristic and bio-technocratic experiment of the universal vaccination, brought to the fore the class and political subjectivity of the human body, i.e. the most elementary organic unit of human existence and society, making it the target of a totalitarian colonial campaign. Imperialist terrorism attempted to establish itself in new depths of primitive accumulation and to restructure all existing power relations with the guiding principle of the liquidation, expulsion and purging of surplus labour. This coincided with the powerful manifestation of the Black Revolt in so-called America and of the women’s revolt globally, the living subject of the history of slavery and capitalist colonization of the Earth. The war of state sanitation introduced a historically innovative regime of perpetual state of emergency, which through bio-politics gave primacy to militaristic terms of domination and to the ideology and morality that derives from that. The counter-revolutionary offensive, in the form of the emergency regime, within the metropolises of Euro-Atlantic imperialism, continued in relation to the war in the Ukrainian-Russian space and now continues in relation to the war in Palestine (the Chinese counter- revolution continues on the first axis). It is no coincidence that the Israeli techno-stratocracy is a pioneer in the production and export of technology and methodology of control and repression, of fascist organization and politics, of biotechnology, digital integration and post-humanist fiction ideology. It should be noted that Israeli fascism imposed universal compulsory biotechnological vaccination of its citizens. Zionist colonialism fuses on the one hand traditional religious totalitarianism and racism, and on the other hand the fundamentalist governmentalist and mechanistic mentality of the bourgeoisie, the theocracy of capital and its technocratic mysticism. That is why Israeli colonialism today is demonstrating worldwide, on behalf of the Western Empire, the might of its terrorism with unprecedented intensity.

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Wally Conger - Agorist Class Theory

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:55:57 GMT

Author: Wally Conger
Title: Agorist Class Theory
Subtitle: A Left-Libertarian Approach To Class Conflict Analysis
Date: 2006
Notes: There are quite a number of different versions of this text floating around on the Internet, such as on the website of the Center for a Stateless Society. This version, taken from Scribd, is the most complete one I could find.
Source: https://www.scribd.com/doc/57719648/Teoria-de-Clase-Agorista

Dedication

This work is dedicated to Sam, who got the ball rolling.

Foreword

The very term evokes mental imagery, and rightly so, of bloody tyrants and their apologists — from the killing fields of Cambodia to the massacre in the Katyn Forest, from statist dupes calling for more government power to “fight poverty” to Trotsky’s bastard ideological grandchildren that are called “neo-conservatives.”

It has been a fig leaf for banditry and the ravening twin thirsts for power and blood. It has been the mantra of those who would conspire to realize Orwell’s nightmare vision of a totalitarian boot forever stomping on a human face.

I’m referring to the other war — the Class War.

Marxist doctrine held, in a nutshell, that the relationship between the common people (the proletariat) and the elite (capitalists) was a continuation of the master and slave relationship of ancient times — and that any means, regardless of how ostensibly evil it may appear, was justifiable in addressing that iniquitous inequity.

With the meltdown of nearly all avowedly Marxist states in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the notion of a Class Struggle was supposed to be consigned to the dustbin of history along with the rest of the smoke and mirrors of Marxist ideology.

There’s only one problem, though — Marx’s analysis of the world around him was partly wrong and partly right. Where there is truth, there is relevance. It is time for libertarians to dust off the notions of class struggle, class consciousness, and class warfare in order to place them within an increasingly sophisticated libertarian/anarchist ideological framework under the primacy of the Zero Aggression Principle.

One flaw in Marx’s thinking, you see, was his theory of exploitation. Libertarians recognize that there is nothing inherently “exploitative” in any genuinely voluntary agreement, such as agreeing to work for a wage. Likewise, there isn’t anything virtuous in subtly coercing compliance with demands for labor to be performed on dictated terms, including wage rates. Where Marx was right in his analysis is that under State Capitalism (as opposed to a truly free market) there is an exploitative relationship between the moneyed interests and the common people. He misidentified the oppressor class, though.

What is this actual oppressor class, you ask? The actual oppressor class is the “political class” as originally identified by the Frenchmen Charles Comte and Dunoyer over 150 years ago. By the “political class” it is meant those who draw their livelihood not from the Market, but from the State. The political class is the parasitic class that acquires its livelihood via the “political means” — through “confiscation, taxation, and other forms of coercion.” Their victims are the rest of us — the productive class — those who make their living through peaceful and honest means of any sort, such as a worker or an entrepreneur.

State Capitalism, which most confuse with a free market, is most properly understood as a form of Socialism in a Hayekian sense of statist control. That is to say, it is banditry under guise of law. It would also be economically accurate to label it Fascism, Mercantilism, or Corporate Statism. Conversely, a truly free market (or Capitalism in the Randian sense of non-aggression minus Rand’s own personal fetish for Big Business) would, I maintain, bear a striking similarity to the vision of anti-state socialists and distributists.

Wally Conger has distilled in the accompanying text the essence of Samuel Edward Konkin III’s unfinished exposition of this class theory, Agorism Contra Marxism. I’m deeply honored to present Agorist Class Theory.

— Brad Spangler

Introduction

In the U.S., “only rightist kooks and commies talk about ruling classes and class structures,” the late Samuel Edward Konkin III remarked back in the 1980s.

Konkin was neither a rightist kook nor a commie. But his theory of ruling classes and class structures remains today a brilliant libertarian alternative to tired Marxist theories of class struggle. And that theory may serve as the foundation upon which to build a strong, revitalized libertarian movement.

Born in Saskatchewan, Canada, on July 8, 1947, Sam Konkin (known also to intimates and others as “SEK3”) was a high-profile leader in the “modern” libertarian movement’s second generation. He was a disciple of Murray N. Rothbard, arguably the most vital member of the movement’s first generation. In fact, Konkin was a consistent, radical Rothbardian, who often out-Rothbarded the great Murray himself. SEK3 called his extreme Rothbardianism — which advocated a stateless society of peaceful black markets —agorism.

For more than two decades, Konkin promised to produce a book titled Counter-Economics — a mammoth, scholarly work that, he swore, would be to agorism what Das Kapital was to Marxism. But the volume never appeared. Konkin did, however, author a major strategic guide to achieving his agorist dream —New Libertarian Manifesto— which became for his newborn Movement of the Libertarian Left what The Communist Manifesto was to communism, or what The Port Huron Statement had been to the early New Left movement in the 1960s. In addition to this manifesto, SEK3 published, over a 30-year period, such “underground” libertarian publications as New Libertarian, New Libertarian Notes, New Libertarian Weekly, Strategy of the New Libertarian Alliance, The Agorist Quarterly, and New Isolationist. It was through these periodicals that Konkin elaborated on his philosophy in disorganized detail.

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Hans Sherrer - Voting is an Act of Violence

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:50:53 GMT

Author: Hans Sherrer
Title: Voting is an Act of Violence
Date: 1999
Source: https://forejustice.org/vote/voting_is_an_act_of_violence.htm

Voting is the most violent act someone can commit in their lifetime.

This little noted anomaly about voting is directly related to the modern conception of the State as an entity deriving its grant of authority to act from the consent of the governed. The aura of legitimacy surrounding the government’s actions is enhanced by the perceived role of voting as an expression of the “people’s will.” Whether non-threatening or violent, the authority for each and every one of the government’s actions is presumed to flow from the consent of the people through the electoral process. School children are told this from their earliest years.

The idea the State derives its power to act from the consent of the people sounds romantic. Few people, however, are aware that by definition the State’s power is for the specific purpose of engaging in acts of violence. No grant of power is necessary for anyone, or any organization to act peacefully. This is no secret among scholars, and sociologist Max Weber’s definition of the State is considered one of the most authoritative:

“A state is a human institution that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.... The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence.” [1]

The legitimizing impact of voting on the government’s exercise of power intimately involves voters in the use of that power. Which means that non-voters tend to delegitimize the exercise of a government’s power as an expression of the “will of the people.” So if no one voted in an election or only a small percentage of people did, the government couldn’t profess to be empowered to act as an agent of the “people’s will.” Without the protective cover provided by voters, the government would have no pretense to act except as a law unto itself.

Consequently, the government’s actions and the voters who legitimize them are linked together. Thus at a minimum, voters are spiritually involved in every act engaged in by the government. Including all violent acts. This involvement in the government’s violence isn’t, tempered by the nominal peacefulness of a person’s life apart from voting. By choosing to vote a person integrates the violence engaged in by the government as a part of their life. This is just as true of people that didn’t vote for a candidate who supports particular policies they may disagree with, as it is for those that did. It is going through the motion of voting that legitimizes the government to act in their name, not who or what they vote for.

This means that the violence perpetrated by any one person pales in scope or significance when compared to that which is authorized to be taken by the government in the name of those who vote. The combined ghoulish violence of every identifiable serial killer in American history can’t match the violence of even one of any number of violent actions taken by the government as the people’s representative. A prominent example of this is the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after the Gulf war in 1991. These sanction prevented Iraq from rebuilding its destroyed sanitation, water, and electric power infrastructure that were specifically targeted by the U. S. military for destruction. Supported and enforced by the U. S., these sanctions are credited by UNICEF and other organizations with contributing to the gruesome deaths of an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 children a month for over 8-1/2 years. [2] All voters share in the government’s contribution to the unnecessary deaths of these children caused by disease and a reduced standard of living. So the over half-a-million deaths of innocent children in Iraq in the years after 1991’s Gulf war are on the blood stained hands of every voter in the U.S.

The same dynamic of voter involvement in government atrocities is true of the many hundreds of civilian deaths caused by the bombing of Yugoslavian cities in the spring and summer of 1999 that the United States participated in. This was a small scale recreation of the atomic bombing of the non-military cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Hundreds of thousands of innocent women, children and old people were killed from the initial bomb blasts and the long-term effects of radiation exposure. [3] Those bombings had been preceeded by the U.S. military’s killing of many hundreds of thousands of non-combatants during the firebombings of Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin. All of those people were killed in the name of the voters that had elected the Roosevelt administration in 1944 by a landslide. Voting, like a missile fired at an unseen target many miles away, is a long-distance method of cleanly participating in the most horrific violence imaginable.

So declining to vote does much more than cause a statistical entry on the non-voting side of a ledger sheet. It is a positive way for a person to lower their level of moral responsibility for acts of violence engaged in by the government that they would never engage in personally, and that they don’t want to be committed in their name as a voter. Non-voting is a positive way for a person to publicly express the depth of their private belief in respecting the sanctity of life, and that violence is only justified in self-defense.

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Transgender Revolt! - The Revolution is Now!

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:46:00 GMT

Author: Transgender Revolt!
Title: The Revolution is Now!
Date: 2024/07/23
Source: https://transgenderrevolt.noblogs.org/post/2024/07/23/the-revolution-is-now/

Anarchy is Back!

The age of revolutions is far from over. The common sentiment is that the world is fucked. Unfortunately, this recognition of a world in slow decay has been met by the utmost complacency. Much of the left has abandoned the dream of revolution for an unquestioning faith in the electoral process. The revolutionary segments of the left that still exist embrace a vision of revolution that is stuck in the age of the dinosaurs. We are at an impasse. Revolution is necessary, yet past strategies are recipes for failure.

The inability to escape capitalism should be chalked to the immense failure that was the so-called “revolutionary” left. Marxists have been successful, but only at creating genocidal state capitalist regimes. Guy Debord was spot-on when he said that “the Bourgeoise is the only revolutionary class that have ever won”. Revolutionary struggle in the 21^st century must be entirely rethought. Liberation begins once Marxism is left to the dustbins of history. Black is the new red. The juice is with Anarchy.

Marxism poses itself as a science that transcends superstition yet has always been a secular mythology. It isn’t surprising that many communists discuss revolution as if it is a single future event that will magically solve all our problems. Because of the resemblance to Christianity, many Anarchists have referred to this as the “rapture revolution”. The proletariat gloriously overthrows the dictatorship of the bourgeois and implements a workers state. Once the revolution is finished, there is little need for struggle as the red bourgeoisie are in power. Bolshevik propaganda of the October revolution resembles artist renditions of the second coming of Jesus Christ. Treating revolution as the second coming ignores the urgency of the present. It cultivates inaction with a pacifying blind hope. The rapture revolution treats liberation as a single moment.

Many leftist movements ritualize a voting, marching, meeting, recruiting pattern. The endless cycles of symbolic protests, and canvassing for politicians is a predictable element of the status quo. It is time to escape this toxic cycle and move towards revolutionary action in the present. The ballot box has become the greatest killer of revolutionary fervor. The state always has been and always will be an unmoving pillar for the status quo. To believe that the state can be turned into an instrument of liberation is akin to believing that the electric chair can be turned into an ice cream machine. Nothing could be more fatalistic than begging for breadcrumbs from our rulers. Nothing could be more foolish than repeatedly clinging to the old failed strategies. Nothing could be more ridiculous than having the utmost faith in our leaders. Revolution is the truly sober minded option. We must learn to develop a hatred for our masters and to realize our immense collective power. We must learn to save ourselves.

Fuck Waiting!

The revolution is now! Let’s not seek to wait. Let’s not seek to ask for permission. Every new day is a new opportunity to smash domination to pieces. Every new minute is a new opportunity to revolt against the prevailing order. There is no better moment than the present to fight. There is no reason that we cannot resist at the current moment! Fuck waiting!

There are a million ways we can go about attacking the interconnected forms of domination. Let’s seek to educate and agitate the populace on how to break free from their chains. Let’s create communities, organizations, federations, affinity groups, collectives and militias to make the state obsolete. Let’s prefigure mutual aid networks, library economies, direct distribution networks, really really free markets, and freeshops to subvert the capitalist system. Let’s help the vulnerable, make new friends, celebrate, and change the world. Let’s start clashes, riots, insurrections, rebellions, and revolutions ! Set ablaze a million grassroot fires!

As our world slowly crumbles, countless radicals have thrown themselves completely into the struggle for a better world. There are people fighting in the streets, helping out the vulnerable, building networks of care and agitating others to join the fight. Many have been brave enough to go as far as to put there lives on the line. Is this not preparing the soil for the new world? Is this not planting seeds of resistance? If you look hard enough, you will see that the flower of revolution is currently blooming, however slowly.

Those who speak of the revolution as a distant event are hopeless daydreamers who need a wake up call to reality. There is a revolutionary aspect to everyday life. There is an immense power in the everyday acts of resistance. The little “r” revolution has always been as important as the big “R” revolution. We may not abolish the present state of things immediately, but we can ignite a contagious burning desire for liberation in others. Slowly, we can build an inferno that will incinerate the prevailing order. Revolution takes time. Revolution is not inevitable, but must be willed.

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Perspektive Selbstverwaltung - On Palestine and Israel

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:45:04 GMT

Author: Perspektive Selbstverwaltung
Title: On Palestine and Israel
Date: May 5^th, 2024
Notes: Original text is in English.
Source: https://perspektivesv.noblogs.org/post/2024/05/05/on-palestine-and-israel/

For seven long months, we have been watching an intensification of absolutely horrific carnage, death, and destruction in Palestine. The region has turned into a stage on which genocidal rhetoric and practice, the indiscriminate killing of civilians, do not only take place, but also stream live the abyss of human civilization to the whole world. In the meantime a deeply problematic discourse about these events, their historical roots, and even efforts of legitimization around the world unveil itself; in particular in Germany.

For seven long months, we, Perspektive Selbstverwaltung, an anarchist organization in Berlin, have been silent about this. With this statement, we want to end this silence, which many of us have seen as complicity in an unfolding genocide in Gaza. We would like to clarify at the beginning, that the Palestinian and the Israeli societies are, like all societies, heterogeneous, full of internal contradictions and (conflicting) movements with different perspectives, which are important to learn about and take into account, to gain a deeper understanding of the region, its history and the ideologies at work.

This being our organization’s first statement on the matter, the aim will not be to provide an in-depth analysis of the matter but a clarification of where we stand. There are many organizations and individuals who have deeper knowledge, experience and analysis on many aspects of this topic than we do.[1]

In the following text, we will clarify our positions on the German discourse, the historical roots of the current situation and the conflict, the 7^th of October and the ongoing genocidal war in Gaza, additionally we will provide a self-criticism regarding our silence. We welcome constructive criticism and solidarity-based discourse.

On the German discourse

The discourse about the current war in Gaza, antisemitism, and the reactions to it in the German media is reflected in its confusing lack of context and the tendency towards absolute moral imperatives in the repeated (or actually non-existent) disputes within the radical left. This has flared up a smoldering debate that in the past has always managed to break up alliances and divide organizations. On top of this, in the German public sphere, the accusation of antisemitism is constantly being leveled at every critic addressing Israeli policies, at every declaration of solidarity with Palestinians, and every reference to racist and colonial continuities[2]. To name some examples: a team of Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers at the Berlinale[3][4]; migrant and left-wing activists commemorating victims of fascist violence[5]; international and Jewish organizations[6]; a congress where people wanted to educate themselves and share their thought about the ongoing genocide[7]; two social centers from which two social workers raised their voice against the genocide and posted content on their private instagram[8] (this list is incomplete and getting longer every day).

The usage of these tropes smothers any constructive and honest debate. It undermines any „never again“ and mocks the danger Jews face because of the antisemitism present in society. On the contrary, we believe, that we must not apply „Never again“ and „Resist the beginnings“ to antisemitism as a single case, but to general mechanisms in society. “Never again” means “Never again for anyone”. Of course, there is still deep-seated, often directly violent, antisemitism in German society, and therefore also in the German left, and we must take action against it. But many people in German society are just as easily persuaded to blame other oppressed minorities, to silence them, to disempower them, to deport them and even to justify genocide against them, and this is intolerable. The fact that it is the Holocaust, of all things, that is being misused to justify the mass murder of Palestinians, is as if we are allowing ourselves to be mocked by history, reproducing a racist and colonial continuity.

Another sad example for the double standards of the western discourse is the debate about sexualized violence. Sexualized violence and its weaponization in wars is something we condemn to the utmost degree and want to tackle wherever it occurs. We see sexualized violence as a part of every war on land and this is not discussed nearly as often as it should be. We position ourselves at the absolute opposition to sexualized violence in all its forms. But it is important to be aware of the selective and asymmetric coverage of the topic. And the way it is used in the current discourse serves above all to reinforce racist, orientalist and anti-Muslim narratives.

Historical roots and continuities

One of the first points we would like to point to, is the tendency of the debate in Germany to all too often morally and factually discuss the happenings of the 7^th of October, the Hamas attack, and the revenge campaign of the Israeli state as if they happened in a vacuum.

Without going into detail, the events of the last seven months happened within a larger framework which is shaped by Zionism[9], settler-colonialism, British colonialism and many historical events. To mention just some of them: the expulsion of many European Jews, especially in the aftermath of the holocaust, as well as the expulsion of many middle-eastern Jews from their previous homes and their (oftentimes forced[10]) migration to Palestine; the foundation of the Israeli state in 1948 and the following declaration of war by Arab states; the Palestinian Nakba (the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Palestinians from their homes in 1948); the occupation of the whole of historic Palestine in 1967; the Yom Kippur war in 1973 between Israel and a coalition of Arab states; a series of other wars with neighboring states; on top of this, the imperial powers and their politics also strongly affected the region. Omnipresent since 76 years is the continuous practice of depriving Palestinians of their most basic human rights, the clear discrimination which constitutes the crime of Apartheid, as well as the continuous expulsion, violence and Israeli settlement-policies in the West Bank.

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Internationalist Anarchists Leipzig - Our Silence Pisses Us Off!

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:44:03 GMT

Author: Internationalist Anarchists Leipzig
Title: Our Silence Pisses Us Off!
Date: August 26th, 2024
Source: https://internationalistanarchistsle.noblogs.org/post/2024/08/26/our-silence-pisses-us-off/

Whether Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Yemen, Bangladesh or the Polish-Belarusian primeval forests and Europe’s outsourced borders in Libya, Egypt and Tunisia – terrible news of countless crimes and unimaginable suffering are coming from everywhere. Germany, truly a picture-book national power of the 21st century, is deeply involved in all these atrocities economically, militarily and politically.

From our internationalist anarchist perspective, we want to deal with these issues in this group, show solidarity and become active.

Special focus must be placed on the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the continuing oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank. Not only because death, abuse and destruction have reached unimaginable proportions, but also because the German state plays a central role in this. Germany unconditionally supports the state of Israel and Netanyahu’s right-wing extremist government and eagerly supplies weapons for all their inhumane acts. Large sections of the German population are adopting Germany’s interests, interpretations and goals. In addition, hardly any other protest movement is criminalized and ostracized as much as the Palestine solidarity movement: people are losing their jobs, subsidies and migrantised people can now be deported even for a like on the internet. Even the slightest deviation from the opinion defined as permissible by the state shows the state’s authoritarian face. After all, for the German media and state authorities, anyone who cares about Palestinians is an anti-Semite. Anyone who even slightly criticizes the existent Zionism and its consequences, as well as the right-wing extremist settlers, experiences hostility and repression. This is not only about the violence that emanates from the hand of the state through the police and laws, but also about the influence of tolerated media perspectives or deliberately one-sided reporting.

When it comes to the suffering in Gaza, only the German left is more silent than the German media, especially (Leipzig) anarchists. And we don’t mean the anti-German „anarchists“ by their own definition, because they are unfortunately quite loud (even if they should really question whether these two world views are compatible in any way). We don’t want to go into their nationalistic nonsense here, but rather refer to the rest of the „scene“. Where are you? Where have you been in the last 10 months? Most left-wing groups have said exactly nothing about the genocide in Gaza – made in Germany. But honestly, we haven’t done much for just as long: After all, it also took us 10 months to get to this point from individual expressions of solidarity, social media posts and maybe once a demo while tolerating „anti-German“ blockaders* in our structures. While in virtually every other country in the world, the left has put pressure on governments, stopped ships for arms shipments, blocked highways and shown practical solidarity with Palestinians, we have been – silent. Why? When asked about this, many people try to talk their way out of it: It’s all very complex, people don’t have time to deal with it right now, we can’t solve it anyway, but the German guilt… There is a great fear of saying something „wrong“, of being called anti-Semitic, of being excluded from groups, of jeopardizing joint political work.

But even if „anti-Germans“ are loud (after all, they have the support of the entire political spectrum from AfD to PdL), we must not make our political integrity and our solidarity dependent on what they accept. Let’s fight again – for solidarity and against every state, every oppression and every authority. Together. Across national borders. Internationalist and anti-nationally. Can we finally show that we are not in the same genocidal continuity as the state in which we live and thus regain the trust of our international comrades? This is exactly what we call on all people in organizations of social struggles and projects to do: Take a stand! Stand up to the anti-German (fake) hegemony in the structures of this city! Engage in these processes!

Who are we?

We are a group of internationalist, queerfeminist anarchists. We stand for the self-determination and self-management of all people, independent of all systems of domination, borders and nations, patriarchal oppression apartheid and exploitation. Especially in the belly of the beast, internationalism must again play a significant role, particularly within the left and libertarian socialists. No German government will voluntarily change anything about the neo-colonial exploitation of the countries of the Global South; it is much more important to build up counter-power here on the ground. Against the logic of nation states and their interests, against the power of borders, against the national „we“! For practical internationalism, for direct and cross-border solidarity with our class siblings all over the world!

We are currently a group of exclusively queer, mostly trans* people. At the moment, all of us are white and most of us have no migration background. We are therefore not directly affected by many of the mechanisms of oppression and discrimination that we deal with. Overall, our struggles are interlinked and cannot be seen in isolation from each other. However, this still means that we are shaped by our German socialization and the privileges that come with it and that we have to be critically aware of this. It is important for us not to appropriate issues and struggles as „white saviours“ and present the „only right“ solution to those affected, but rather to be in exchange with the people who are fighting these struggles, to create learning spaces that are sensitive to discrimination and to enter into complicity with a focus on common desire and grief.

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Seb Bonet - What do resource pipelines and building cranes have in common?

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:42:54 GMT

Author: Seb Bonet
Title: What do resource pipelines and building cranes have in common?
Date: May 19, 2014
Source: Retrieved on November 2^nd 2024 from https://www.thevolcano.org/2014/05/19/pipecranes/

In colonial British Columbia, there is a lot riding on the answer to this question. The elites want us to think they represent the latest and most visible symbols of prosperity for all. But to many people who are Indigenous or living with low incomes, pipelines and cranes represent the the latest in a long series of displacements.

Here in Victoria, one place to start tracing the relationship between building cranes and displacement is the view from the mayor’s window at city hall. Earlier this year, a bench was removed across the street from Mayor Fortin’s office. Months prior to that, he had complained about having to look at elder members of the street-involved community who liked to gather at the bench and share a drink.

At about the same time, and in the same place, large white signs went up announcing the proposed redevelopment of the block into two office buildings by Jawl Properties, the largest private land owner in Victoria. Perhaps it was while imagining his new view that mayor Fortin excitedly announced that there are “more cranes up than in 2006, which was the height of the building boom.”

Fortin’s observation is bad news for low-income people who are already under serious survival stress. Looking back to 2006, by the time the cranes had finished their work, then Mayor of Victoria, Alan Lowe, was forced to strike up a task force on homelessness to address the crisis of poverty visible to the middle-class eye.

Unfortunately, it seems history is lining up repeat to itself. For example, the number of people coming through the door at Our Place, the city’s largest service provider for people with low-incomes, reached a record this December, January and February. This statistic for Victoria corresponds with last week’s announcement in Vancouver that the number of people counted on the street doubled from the previous year.

Research being completed by the Vancouver Island Public Interest Research Group (VIPIRG) supports the idea that in these neoliberal times, displacement and homelessness follow building cranes. VIPIRG has found that the low-income end of the market housing spectrum has virtually ceased to exist in Victoria. In all, there are fewer than two dozen units of housing left at the shelter rate of $375, and about 250 units renting for under $500 in the entire city. Not surprisingly, vacancy rates for this meagre pool of units is almost non-existent.

This means that as buildings for people who can buy or pay high rents are completed, and rents rise through gentrification, no stock of housing exists to absorb the displaced. That would require progressive responses from the city and the province in the form of rent controls, and the provincial and federal governments in the form of higher wage and assistance rates, progressive taxation and a social housing program. Unfortunately, these layers of government are busy making sure that the emerging city exists for developers and not for low-income communities.

Courageous resistance by Indigenous people has raised people’s consciousness that pipelines represent the open veins of Turtle Island – and that any meaningful action to heal the land will have to address the ongoing violence of settler colonialism. Similarly, anti-poverty activists are working to show that building cranes are the visible form of the capitalist economic system making Victoria in its own exclusive image. Getting those cranes out of the neoliberal skyline requires addressing the logic of capitalism.

If it were up to me, the thing pipelines and cranes would have in common is strong, visible resistance movements that connect the dots between the colonial displacement of Indigenous people out on the land and the gentrification of the remaining pockets of low-income housing in the city. Blocking pipelines and bringing down cranes are connected fronts in a struggle that appears to be intensifying. The outcome remains in our hands.

Seb Bonet - Our veins run with water, not oil

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:42:45 GMT

Author: Seb Bonet
Title: Our veins run with water, not oil
Subtitle: Fighting for our lives against capitalism and colonialism across Turtle Island
Date: Feb 12
Source: Retrieved on November 2^nd 2024 from https://www.thevolcano.org/2017/02/12/our-veins-run-with-water-not-oil/

In 1971, Eduardo Galeano published The Open Veins of Latin America. His iconic title refers to the colonial extraction of resources from Pachamama. And the book’s subtitle, ‘Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent’, pointed to their transport to another continent, Europe, where gold, tin, rubber, coffee and so many more of Pachamama’s gifts were transformed into commodities that interlocked colonialism and capitalism into a unified system of pillage and profit.

Today, Galeano’s metaphor of ‘open veins’ could equally apply to the enormous and growing network of pipelines across Turtle Island. Besides being visually apt, pipelines seem to be symbols of industrialization and all its devastation. The colonial and capitalist machine fed by pipelines is profoundly suicidal. It seems no matter how capitalists organize production, it pollutes air, land and water, sends climate into chaos, and displaces and kills countless beings. The government and media justify this destruction through racial and species hierarchies that are ultimately enforced by policy and military and police forces.

Galeano intended his book as an intervention to a profoundly political moment. Right-wing counter-revolution was taking shape on his beloved continent, much like ours. At stake for Galeano was the scope of struggle in Latin America. He wanted to connect on-the-ground resistance against elites to the more remote imperialist powers that had impelled the continued exploitation of resources. In the few years after the book was published, Western-backed military coups took place in Uruguay, Chile, Brazil and Argentina.

Galeano related colonial pillage and capitalist profit to argue that political movements to work together. The key that unlocked the relationship for Galeano was the material movement of resources. And so, as Galeano asked about gold and rubber, we might ask where fracked gas and diluted bitumen is ending up? At least one kind of place is in cities like Vancouver and Victoria. The solids, fluids and gases being sucked, fracked and mined from the earth are being converted by the machines of today’s urban capitalist labour processes – building cranes, wrecking balls and steamrollers – into a condominium skyline that secures comfort, leisure and a ‘vibrant’, ‘world-class’ lifestyle for elites.

In Victoria, this can look like a new four-storey building on North Park renting 800 square foot townhouses for $2100, or 350 square foot apartments for $1100, just a few doors down from a house recently put on the market that will displace its poor, queer, activist tenants. Or a block over, on Mason Street, Victoria’s last urban farm will be shaded out in winter by Bosa’s six-storey development, and almost certainly be permanently shaded out when it has to renegotiate a lease, given the rents its owners could now extract when they pitch ‘density’ to city planners. Organizations like Alliance Against Displacement have done heroic work, intellectually and in practice, to politicize this circuit of pillage to profit.

Oil and gas also go on a longer journey before arriving in the city. As the Petronas LNG and Kinder Morgan tar sands projects remind us, pipelines meet tankers that cross the ocean. Their cargo is used to fuel the hyper-exploitation of workers to return converted into all manner of commodities sold by companies like Apple, Wal-Mart and others. And while Apple’s 30% profit margins won’t trickle down to Chinese working people , the high-technology sector does create and keep a professional and managerial class content, renting microlofts for $2100, enjoying the leisure lifestyle provided by labourers commuting from the suburbs and holidaying in the global archipelago of places kept tidy and well-serviced for them.

In Victoria, the developer of the building on North Park confided to me: “people [with money] want new – new apartments, new screens, and new restaurants”. In other words, they are happy to define themselves by playing their part in welcoming the containers of commodities capital produces today. Ironically, what gets presented by councillors and developers as sustainable and green lifestyles, where young managers and professionals walk from coffee shop to yoga studio and home to open their packages from Amazon, is actually a moment in the circuit of pillage to profit. Organizations like Victoria’s Retail Action Network are intervening to politicize the labour that goes into capital’s realization, connecting with workers precariously employed to sell phones or the smiling work of providing services.

Taking Galeano seriously requires that we pay attention to the ways that pillage and profit get disconnected politically. During the 1970s, many people in the Canadian labour movement positioned themselves both as opponents of local capitalists and victims of empire. They worried aboutAmerican ownership of the ‘national’ colonial economy even as Canadian-owned resource extraction corporations opened Latin America’s veins, as they continue to do now. Today, urban politicians, like Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps and Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, make a show of posing as defenders of the environment against the likes of Kinder Morgan even as they approve the blueprints of urban capital for reproducing pillage, profit and the erasure of local Indigenous authority.

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anonymous - Targets that exist everywhere

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:40:41 GMT

Author: anonymous
Title: Targets that exist everywhere
Subtitle: – a strategic proposal for building a common front against the profiteers of war and repression
Date: 2021
Notes: This is the introductory text for a zine compiling many claimed insurrectionary actions, ending with the proposal-claim Direct Action Cells: Public Proposition for the Constitution of a Network of Revolutionary Violence (available at https://en.theanarchistlibrary.org/library/direct-action-cells-public-proposition-for-the-constitution-of-a-network-of-revolutionary-viole). We have posted it here for reference purposes because it began a dialogue-critique that was continued in the texts Targets That Do Not Exist Anywhere Else, and in The ‘Green’ Farce Everywhere and Nowhere Else: Towards Destroying Electric Mobility and Decarbonizing Lies, if not in other places.
Source: https://actforfree.noblogs.org/post/2021/07/14/booklet-pdf-targets-that-exist-everywhere-a-strategic-proposal-for-building-a-common-front-against-the-profiteers-of-war-and-repression/

Rapidly, time marches on; we are already in the 2^nd year of the Covid-19 state of emergency and, knowing that no power will ever voluntarily relinquish its new mechanisms of control, anarchist and other libertarian movements all over the globe are looking for strategies and practical means against it. In some regions, social tensions have recently erupted into riots.

Elsewhere, there are short-lived outbreaks known as Corona Riots. As anarchists, we are often surprised by the dynamics, sometimes finding ourselves in the crowd of the street battles or perplexed as spectators on the sidelines. Almost every state deals with us, small groups or individuals, sabotaging, agitating and roaming restless in the cities.

With the desire to finally cross the threshold from symbolic resistance to material damage to the enemy infrastructure and their tools of power. In addition to the direct confrontation with the pigs, it seems necessary to identify and disconcert the individual cogs of their machine. There is no other way to overcome the balance of power; metropolises, which in recent years have been more frequently devastated by social struggles, general strikes and riots, have relatively quickly recovered with their arrogance. But we are still too often sliding into randomness instead of tearing apart the weaker links in the chain of oppression and their profiteers.

Curfews, police killings, gentrification, ecological terrorism, war against the own population and against foreign countries – the system gives us daily occasions to look for targets whose continuous destruction may at some point be more than a figure in the balance sheet or a report in the press.

In many urban centers, traditional forms of action have emerged over the years which, beyond their local justification, could be evaluated from the point of view, how the new anarchist urban guerrilla can relate to each other in order to overcome the borders of capital, which capital has never been bound.

In Santiago, the buses of the transport companies burn for almost every occasion, in Athens it is ATMs, in the French banlieues almost all cars but also again and again those of certain companies. In Berlin, company cars or posh cars are torched for almost every occasion as well.

Throughout Europe, antenna masts and relay stations of communications providers go up in flames. What would be the impact if attacks on specific targets were intensified? We know the damage of destroyed data lines and burned cell towers, but such attacks cannot be repeated everywhere at will. Our enemies’ vehicle fleets are also harder to access than we would like. Some facilities are well secured in big cities but unguarded in small towns. Nevertheless, there are still enough known and less known targets standing around.

And who actually supplies the equipment to the police and military? Who builds what? Who works with the supply companies or hides behind a consortium of companies? Who is guarding this all? The market is constantly in motion, big companies swallow up their competitors, hide behind other names, outsource certain activities. They collect our data and face us with their logos everywhere in the city, which they consider to be their property.

Because it should not be enough for us to follow the waves of uprisings going around the world from a distance and to look for suitable solidarity actions for them each time anew, we propose to collect information about the enemies of freedom and to spread them in such a way that it becomes known everywhere. This means to use not only the publications of the militant scene but all means, such as graffiti, posters, video rallies and other accessible media to denounce these actors of capitalist barbarism. In order to then attack them worldwide, whether in campaigns or out of the blue and without apparent cause.

In this way, it could be tried out whether companies avoid certain regions or certain orders because the damage would be too great. This would be a strategic line already developed in Europe-wide acts of sabotage against the oil and gas company Shell in the late 1980s to mid-1990s, thereby showing solidarity with the resistance of the Ogoni in Nigeria, among others. Or, if the need arises to do something against justice in a particular country and it is determined that appropriate institutions are difficult to hit, why not attack the private prison operator Sodexo, even where it hides behind the name GA Tec? With an increased continuity of our interventions and a focus on global players, the response times of authorities and the delivery times of goods and information could be extended from a certain degree.

Which will open up new spaces for other attacks. This proposal is not intended as a substitute for participation in or provocation of riots, and it does not oppose the spontaneous and chaotic attack on other targets.

This booklet contains responsibility claims of attacks that meet these criteria. In order to be able to intervene in any conflict in any place, they spread suggestions about targets and those responsible for dividing this world among themselves. Attached you will find an organizing proposal on revolutionary violence from Greece.

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anonymous - Targets That Do Not Exist Anywhere Else

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:39:54 GMT

Author: anonymous
Title: Targets That Do Not Exist Anywhere Else
Subtitle: a counter-proposal to Targets That Exist Everywhere & another critique of the militarisation of the anarchist attack
Notes: from Zündlappen: Anarchist Journal from Nowhere
Source: https://scenes.noblogs.org/files/2023/11/TargetsThatDoNotExist.pdf

Who would’ve thought? You would like to finally achieve something, would like to finally kick off the social revolution with your own actions. So you go out at night, alone, in pairs or with a whole gang of accomplices... and when you wake up the next morning, you realize that once again it was only the big shot’s or yuppie neighbor’s car that you’ve messed with, and that the visible traces of the deed have already been swept up by the city’s cleaning service. Maybe you even meet the neighbor himself, who greets you joyfully from the open second or third convertible before he sets off to buy a new, fancier car. Well, it is perhaps less frequent that the big shot neighbor’s car gets got and if so, then it nevertheless usually gives substantially more cause for satisfaction, because the city council cleaning up a charred car wreck is nevertheless somewhat more overtaxed and even the richest elites nevertheless are a bit annoyed – yes, sometimes even a bit fearful – that someone set fire to her car. Most of the time it is rather the cars of some big corporations that are globally or locally involved in gentrification, prison construction, war, camps, border and the deportation industry and sometimes also in the expansion of the smart, technological prison in which we all find ourselves. And of course my heart also leaps for joy whenever I spy a burned out, flattened, painted or otherwise demolished vehicle of this kind on the side of the road, even when I read about it in an anarchist newspaper/brochure from a place near or far, and sometimes even when I learn of such an event in the not-yet-entirely-irrelevant expanses of the Internet. And yet: when I hear the proposal to “cross the threshold from symbolic resistance to material damage to the enemy infrastructure” and this expression of will is backed up in this context by listing arson attacks mainly against vehicles of corresponding companies as examples of a practical expression of this proposal (to be found in the brochure Targets That Exist Everywhere – a strategic proposal for building a common front against the profiteers of war and repression), then considerable doubts creep over me as to what extent the declared goal can be achieved in this way at all.

In fact, I have often wondered to what extent certain recurring targets of attack – and these certainly include the company vehicles of the various firms that are identified as existing everywhere – do not rather contribute to ritualizing the attacks on domination, i.e. above all, to make them a symbolic act that – while perhaps expressing a certain anger, opposition, etc. in a relatively irreconcilable way – is far from causing material damage of any significance and so also becomes, to a certain extent, calculable, predictable, offsetable. This does not mean that such an attack has no value. It can restore one’s agency or, perhaps just another name for it, one’s dignity, it can encourage others, it can intimidate, unsettle and make the right people think. It can make both the oppressed and the rulers realize that acts of aggression are always possible, no matter how controlled and ordered a particular space may be, and it can be an act of satisfaction, of revenge. All of this has its value, all of this can even ignite or incite a gigantic potential in certain situations that can result in uprisings and revolts, even if this can very rarely be predicted. And yet, a burning van belonging to a prison construction company, a logistics company, a car dealership, a technology company, etc., however much it may be a symbol of certain struggles, is only rarely more than that, is only rarely capable of disrupting processes so significantly, of hitting the infrastructure so violently, that it would or even could create a moment of departure worth mentioning, that the logistics of rule would be disrupted decisively enough, production sites would come to a standstill, construction sites would stop running, and supplies to the front lines of war and repression would fail to arrive. This much realism is necessary if one does not want to lose oneself in a self-referential, ideologized and ritualized practice.

Where is the creativity in identifying worthwhile targets, one wonders, flipping through the pages of the Targets That Exist Everywhere brochure? The answer seems to be provided by an otherwise unremarkable note at the beginning of the proposal: “It should not be enough for us [...] to search each time anew for suitable solidarity actions, but we propose to collect information about the enemies of freedom and to disseminate it in such a way that they become known everywhere.” But why shouldn’t we always reconsider where to start our attacks? Simply attacking more and more of the same targets, with the same methods, seems to me to be a quantitative argument that also ignores the fact that this is – even if the authors of the brochure seem to overlook this – a strategy that has been reproduced persistently and relatively comprehensively over the past decades, which would be difficult to increase quantitatively anyway and which, moreover, has not really led to the collapse of domination as of yet. The fact that companies avoid certain regions because they are attacked there may seem like a success at first glance (and it is, just not in an absolute sense), but it also means that these companies set up their locations elsewhere, where they remain relatively unbothered. This has only moderately harmed power itself, even in the regions that were originally avoided. It is not my intention to minimize the successes of this strategy(s), only to object that such a strategy takes the place of the actual goal it is intended to achieve. Although, for example, DB Schenker trucks repeatedly go up in flames, the company continues to successfully transport armaments and other products. If only more of these trucks would burn, some people might revel and wait for others to join the campaign. Another might go out and look at the freight tracks as they run all over Europe, try out here and there what effect fire has on signaling systems and switches, think of ways to block tracks, cut cables, etc., while someone else might figure out how to identify the group’s deliveries that are relevant to the arms industry and then specifically make them harmless. A third person who lives in a region where DB Schenker has its trucks serviced, on the other hand, might have figured out how to sabotage that one factory gate so that the trucks can’t drive out of the workshop parking lot again for a day after they’ve been serviced. Superglue in the lock might have accomplished what butyric acid in building ventilation might have done elsewhere: shut down production site and workshops for an hour, a day or more.

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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - “A sense of hope and the possibility of solidarity”

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:33:09 GMT

Author: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Title: “A sense of hope and the possibility of solidarity”
Subtitle: Colonialism, capitalism, and Native liberation
Date: Winter 2016–2017
Notes: Transcribed by Michelle Ward.
Published in International Socialist Review #103, Winter 2016–2017, a publication of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change (CERSC).
Source: International Socialist Review #103, Winter 2016–2017, Retrieved on November 11, 2024 from isreview.org

In 2014, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz published An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. The book appeared during the height of the Idle No More movement organized to protect Indigenous sovereignty and the environment, and the convergence of hundreds of thousands of people to New York calling for climate justice.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has spent decades as a revolutionary and a feminist, organizing against the Vietnam War, participating in the movement for women’s liberation, and becoming active in the American Indian Movement and the International Indian Treaty Council following the occupation at Wounded Knee in 1973; and joining solidarity movements supporting liberation movements in Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Latin America. Over the years, she has written numerous books about the histories of Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Dunbar-Ortiz is part of a group of scholars who are trying to break down some of the walls between Native Americans and Marxists. Some of these walls have been built by the legacy of Stalinist and Maoist organizations that held backward ideas of Native Americans. The collection Marxism and Native Americans edited by Ward Churchill best exemplifies this tradition. Glen Coulthard’s book Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition accepts Marxism as a useful tool to analyze capitalism but doesn’t fully adopt Marxism as a way forward for Native American liberation. In contrast, Howard Adams, who was Roxanne’s mentor, came from a Marxist background and believed that Natives and non-Natives needed to unite to destroy capitalism and fight for Native and workers’ liberation.[1]

In this interview, Dunbar-Ortiz recounts her life on the left and her history of activism, as well as her views of the role of capitalism in the oppression of Native Americans and the relationship between capitalism and settler colonialism in the United States. This interview not only introduces Dunbar-Ortiz as an activist and author, but looks to start a conversation that is critical on the left: What is the relationship between Native Americans and capitalism? What role do Native Americans have in a revolutionary movement? She spoke to Ragina Johnson and Brian Ward.

Could you tell us some of your history as an activist and how you got involved in these issues?

I came into the American Indian Movement (AIM) a few years after it was founded, in 1973 during Wounded Knee II. I had been involved at San Francisco State in the early 1960s and things were beginning to rumble there during the civil rights movement. I was married and a working-class student. The Left seemed like an elite crew to me, and I couldn’t find anyone to relate to until some African-American students invited me to come to a Du Bois Club meeting that had started there at SF State.

Then I went to UCLA and there was a big Du Bois Club in Los Angeles. Of course it was a Communist Party affiliate. I was mainly involved in Latin American history as a graduate student, specifically the anti-imperialist and anti-apartheid movements, because African studies and Latin American studies crossed over a lot [in] supporting national liberation movements. That was the main context for my politics, and Marxism was not that popular in the New Left. I personally loved the old Communists and thought they were great. I loved listening to their stories, especially the labor struggles. My grandfather had been in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Oklahoma. This was the ideological setting that I had in my mind, but I couldn’t quite understand the New Left, and why they wanted to avoid Marxist theory, because I didn’t understand anti-communism and the Cold War yet.

During this time I was doing my academic research. I ended up finally writing my dissertation in 1974. I was in residence at UCLA for three years. Then I went off to be a full-time revolutionary until I decided to teach. But I was with the Latin American students who were mostly Mexican-American, and not at all allergic to Marxism, coming from the Mexican revolutionary tradition. I was exposed to a lot, and I became more of an activist during the anti-Vietnam War movement. I learned some organizing skills, and toward the end of my time at UCLA we were trying to organize a teaching assistants’ union. The union was formed after I left, and I felt I had helped lay the foundations for that.

In the summer of 1967, I went off to London to work with the African National Congress (ANC). I was there for three months and this was the first time I ever met real revolutionaries [at the] African National Congress world headquarters. Getting to know the ANC and learning from its experiences was quite sobering after three years at university, and what felt like mainly talk. Instead, everything had consequences for the ANC.

That was an important learning experience, and the ANC wanted me to stay and work with them. They had recruited a number of people who did stay and I sometimes regret that I did not stay. After leaving London, I visited some of the veterans of the Vietnam War who had deserted the war effort and were living in Geneva, Switzerland. I decided I had to go back to the United States and get involved in the revolution, because everyone would be needed. I felt that there wasn’t all that much I could contribute to the ANC because I had no direct connections.

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Kevin Carson - On Captive Clienteles and Enshittification

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:32:26 GMT

Author: Kevin Carson
Title: On Captive Clienteles and Enshittification
Date: November 12th, 2024
Source: Retrieved on November 12th, 2024 from https://c4ss.org/content/53835

In a column four years ago, I recounted the experience of a friend in academia with the godawful “learning management software” which her institution required for designing exams. She complained

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that she was trying to create a midterm exam and “blackboard is complete fucking garbage. No intuitive way to break up questions into sections, can’t give instructions for specific sections, can’t modulate to require answers for e.g. 10 of 15 questions that students can choose.” Just as I suspected, she explained when asked that the choice of software was involuntary: “the three big ones are Blackboard, Canvas, and Moodle — ‘learning management software.’ Institutions choose one and then all instructors have to use it. Blackboard is the oldest and clunkiest and by far the worst.”
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A recent Business Insider article had a similarly negative evaluation of the workplace software “Workday.”

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Since 2006, Workday, which provides software for payroll, talent management, and expense processing, has been making a mint creating misery where painless processes could be. More than half of the Fortune 500 companies use Workday to pay, hire, onboard, and administer benefits to their employees….
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LinkedIn, Reddit, and Blind abound with enraged job applicants and employees sharing tales of how difficult it is to book paid leave, how Kafkaesque it is to file an expense, how nerve-racking it is to close out a project. “I simply hate Workday. Fuck them and those who insist on using it for recruitment,” one Reddit user wrote. “Everything is non-intuitive, so even the simplest tasks leave me scratching my head,” wrote another. “Keeping notes on index cards would be more effective.” Every HR professional and hiring manager I spoke with — whose lives are supposedly made easier by Workday — described Workday with a sense of cosmic exasperation. “It’s like constantly being botsmacked by bureaucracy incarnate,” said a copy director at an AI startup in San Francisco who had the misfortune of having to hire contractors through Workday.

So, as the subheading of the article asks: “It creates mountains of busywork for everyone. So why does half of the Fortune 500 use it?”
The answer is actually quite straightforward. So much of the crap we interact with is like something out of Brazil, or the Feds in Snow Crash, because it’s designed by the stovepiped R&D bureaucracy of one corporation, for sale to the stovepiped procurement bureaucracy of another, for the use of a captive clientele of powerless third parties (workers, job applicants, students, prisoners, taxpayers, etc.), with no one involved in the decision-making process accountable in any way to actual users for the unusable software and hardware inflicted on them.
Regarding hardware, a classic example is the mechanized ice pads for post-op orthopedic patients on the hospital rehab unit where I used to work. When I started work there, we had an in-house stock of the devices that were actually quite good. They were sturdy, with durable pump motors, and had been endlessly reused for several years with no significant issue. Best of all, the ice chest portion had thickly insulated walls so that they only had to be drained and refilled once a shift.

That didn’t stop the hospital from replacing them. The new model had thin, transparent plastic walls with little insulating capability, so that we had to refill the ice chamber every couple of hours. And the motors were so shoddy that patients complained of being billed for multiple machines — at a few hundred dollars each — during a hospital stay of a few weeks.

Since bureaucratic hierarchies distort the flow of information from below, those at the top of the pyramid no doubt judged the change a resounding success. And since those at the tops of bureaucratic pyramids communicate much better with those at the tops of other pyramids than with those in their own pyramid below them, the new ice machines were no doubt adopted as a “best practice” by other hospitals. Anyway, from management’s standpoint it doesn’t really matter whether the new machines work. They aren’t the ones who have to use them; and since the handful of big hospitals in the area all share the same organizational culture and probably the same machines, it’s hardly a competitive issue between them.

All of this is an object lesson in the pathologies of hierarchy, and the dysfunction that results from unaccountable power. Those in power make irrational decisions based on distorted information from below, and externalize the negative effects of their decisions on those below them.

The bureaucratic state and the giant oligopoly corporation are prime examples of this organizational model, which has become hegemonic in our society; together with large universities and other such organizations, they constitute an interlocking ecosystem of bureaucratic institutions all run by essentially the same circulating elites.

The only solution is to abolish these bureaucratic hierarchies: decentralize them to the smallest feasible level, and put them under the management of those who are engaged in producing actual goods and services or are affected by their actions — i.e. workers, consumers, and the local communities where they operate. Only when direct knowledge, experience of consequences, and decision-making power are located in the same hands, will rational functioning be possible.

Various Authors - NO! Against Adult Supremacy Vol. 3

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:31:11 GMT

Author: Various Authors
Title: NO! Against Adult Supremacy Vol. 3
Source: Retrieved on february 29, 2019 from https://stinneydistro.wordpress.com/index/

Young and Oppressed, by Brian Dominick and Sara Zia Ebrahimi

While most common oppressions, such as sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, even speciesism, have been identified, widely acknowledged, thoroughly discussed and deeply analyzed, one oppression remains largely untouched. This fact is astonishing given that the group oppressed by this ignored injustice is one to which every adult human has once belonged. It is the one oppression with which all humans can identify, having suffered from it directly. It is not an oppression of a tiny minority to which few will ever belong. It is not the oppression of people who can be blamed themselves — by any stretch of the imagination — for being among the oppressed.

The oppressed group is that of young people — all young people.

As we will further demonstrate, adults and adult institutions in our society regularly commit acts of abuse, coercion, deprivation, indoctrination and invalidation against young people. From the moment of conception, young people are oppressed by their elders, entirely based on the difference in age, via a process known as “ageism.”

As an oppression in need of acknowledgment and understanding, ageism is vital to oppression theory. Yet its overall framework has long been ignored. Sure, many an author has attempted to discuss the relationship between parent and child, teacher and pupil, detention center officer and detainee, etc. But when has it been stated that adult society, as an institution, oppresses the young regularly, consistently, and without exception? And when has it been stated further, in any detail, that this oppression is vital to, and largely born of, society’s need for maintenance at such absurd, atrocious levels?

Let’s face it: when adults look at oppression theory, they do so from a “grown up” perspective — one which sees right over the heads of even their own children. While the Left takes great pride in its defense of women, the impoverished, racial and religious minorities, etc., it fails to realize that among the most thoroughly and widely oppressed are society’s young. In our struggle for true liberation, we can leave no one behind — especially not those to whom the torch of revolution shall be passed. That is why ageism needs to be recognized.

Which brings us to why ageism is unique among oppressions: we are all directly its victims. It is not at all presumptuous to claim that the one oppressive dynamic of which we have all been on the receiving end is that of ageism. Indeed, we are all victims of every oppression acted out in our society. But none other than ageism claims each of us like a man carves a notch on his headboard, like a bombardier a stencil on his airplane, a capitalist a dollar in his bank account.

That is significant. When we step back and observe the social engineering performed by society’s institutions upon its members, oppressions are plainly spotted in the tool chest of the dominant. Among those oppressions which help maintain the power positions of the wealthy white Christian heterosexual male elitist adult, ageism is universal. It is also, unlike the others which are interchangeable, completely indispensable to society’s maintenance of individual apathy

In order to be a permanent victim of an unjust society’s power structure — that is, accepting and not resisting one’s own victimization — one must be engineered as a child to remain docile in the face of oppression. Certainly young people who are impoverished, female, African American, gay or otherwise in position to be oppressed, are conditioned for disempowerment. But what about white male children of upper class parents? Why do they show the same signs of submission and apathy when confronted by oppressors? Why do they, by and large, fail to expose and resist injustices, both in concept and in everyday encounters? Could it be because, as children, they undergo a rigorous process of indoctrination, both formal and informal, in schools, on television, at church, in the home? Could it be because they have been abused and coerced by legal systems, parents, teachers, police? Because they have been invalidated by overpowering institutions and individuals whose purpose it has been to teach them of their “incompetence,” their “worthlessness”? Could they be so as a result of having been deprived of their right to self management, of simple needs, indeed of love and understanding and support? Could it be, at last, because throughout childhood and adolescence they have been treated as adult society has seen fit for its young — ignored, conditioned, neglected, brutalized, violated and compelled?

Then, as adults, they reproduce their own suffering, this time inflicting it upon those the society of which they are now full members has traditionally oppressed. As adults, they are offered power over — if no one else — the people on whose behalf few stand: their children, their younger neighbors, their adolescent customers, their voiceless constituents.

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Margaret Killjoy - The Sky is Falling; We’ve Got This

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:29:05 GMT

Author: Margaret Killjoy
Title: The Sky is Falling; We’ve Got This
Subtitle: or: yes it’s bad, no we need not despair
Date: 11/6/24
Source: https://substack.com/home/post/p-151285900

I can’t tell you things are fine. I can’t tell you that hard times aren’t coming. I can’t tell you that hard times aren’t already here. Things can always get worse. That seems like, more or less, a constant in this universe: things can always get worse.

The thing is, though, things can always get better too. We can make things get better.

Maybe the biggest problem with election years is that we seem to collectively forget that we have agency outside of voting. We forget that our actions have direct, measurable impact on the world. Our non-voting actions even impact the outcome of elections: as CrimethInc pointed out, the George Floyd Uprising of 2020 had a direct and measurable impact keeping Trump from winning the election that year.

Of course, the George Floyd Uprising wasn’t trying to get Biden elected, it was trying to stop racist police violence. Moderate reforms are won by making radical demands. If you demand moderate reforms, you generally get, well, nothing.

The Democrats gambled on the perpetuation of an old, dying (dead?) status quo and it cost them the election. The old status quo is gone. To quote that old saying by Antonio Gramsci, “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

Let us midwife the new world that wants to be born.

How?

Hard times are in front of us. Fascism is on the rise in the US and its likely to replace the old neoliberal capitalist empire with something still worse. Climate change is not only inevitable, it is here. The climate will get more and more unstable and will, no matter what we do, for the rest of our lives and for the rest of our children’s lives.

We are in crisis.

Crisis is opportunity. I absolutely do not want to celebrate the fact that we are in crisis. It is not good. But it affords certain opportunities, ones that we need to engage with. What we do in the coming three months, what we do in the coming year, will have enormous impact on, well, the fate of the entire world, the people who live on that world, and the ecosystems that are woven across its surface. I know this sounds hyperbolic, but we live in hyperbolic times.

Perhaps most tangibly, what we do in the next few months and years will impact how we ourselves manage to navigate the hard times ahead. A therapist friend of mine reiterates to me all the time that acting with agency is the primary way to avoid being traumatized by negative experiences. Whether you win or lose, the act of fighting is enough to help our brains process what has happened.

Fighting to win, in other words, is the right move whether or not we are likely to win.

It just so happens, though, that I think winning is possible. I think we can make the world a better place. I think we can curb the worst excesses of the things that are happening now, at the very least. I also think we can radically transform the world.

How? Look, I am one girl and can’t give you the answers. We have to collectively determine those answers. We have to collectively determine our strategy and tactics. But I do know that we need to create the means by which we do that collective determination. If I were to spit out some suggestions, based on my experience (about 20 years in anarchist organizing and a full-time job learning about and teaching about social movements of the past), here’s what I’ve got:

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Things don’t get done unless you organize to get them done. Now is not the moment to rely solely on cliques, friend groups, or subcultures. Now is a time to form or join organizations of like-minded people wherein you can collectively determine goals and the tactics by which to work towards those goals. Horizontally organized groups are more resilient and more likely to have a meaningful impact. Avoid cults, avoid authoritarian grifters (like, unfortunately, many or most of the large scale organizations currently operating on the Left, like PSL and other adherents to authoritarian ideologies).
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Any organization ought to remember they are not the directing force of the broader movement, and we should develop strategies that work in concert with other people’s informal organizing and direct action. That is to say, there will never be a single strategy that the entire Left should use, and any strategy we develop ought to accept that and see our decentralization and organic nature as one of our strengths, not as a weakness to be overcome.
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We need organizations that are open to the public. Not every organization needs to be open to the public, but an awful lot of them should be. We are attempting to break apart a culture of isolation, and many people who need community (or would like to help) do not currently have ties to any existing subculture or movement. Our movement needs fewer gatekeepers and more ushers—people who help newcomers find ways to plug in. Always be on the lookout for newcomers. Always try to help them find their place. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should break the law with people you don’t know.
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An awful lot of people are newly disillusioned with status quo politics. The right wing has an easy time bringing those people onboard, and we need to work harder to bring people onboard as well.
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Vibrant, confrontational presence in the streets is one of the only ways to accomplish, well, anything. Clandestine actions at night can sometimes accomplish specific tactical goals, and clandestine actors should be supported if they are caught, but movements grow because they are visible and approachable while remaining confrontational. No one sticks around a movement built around big boring marches where all you do is hold signs and chant, because those marches are disempowering and do not challenge the status quo.
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Deescalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy.
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Deescalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy.
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Deescalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy.
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You can call a for a protest. You, wherever you are, whoever you are, you can call for a protest. If you live somewhere that already has a culture of protest, you might not need to, and we shouldn’t replicate work too much. But the way that anything gets done in this world is that people just, well, do things. You might fail. People who don’t occasionally fail at things are clearly not trying ambitious enough projects.
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Some people are going to be more affected by this week’s news than other people. Immigrants (documented or not), religious and ethnic minorities, and trans people are particularly likely to be struggling right now. Helping other people is one of the best ways to soothe your own pain. Help each other. Tell people you support them, and more importantly, show people you support them. A lot of families with trans kids have been trying to move out of red states for awhile now, while other families with trans kids want to stay put and fight. Support people either way.
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Remember that everyone has skin in this game, even if some people have more than others. We all rely on a livable biosphere. Anyone with any ounce of conscience is threatened by a fascist government. It’s okay to be fighting for your own future as well, whatever your identity, and it’s important to not let identity divide us (despite the fact that we need to recognize that those of different identities will be impacted differently). We should not flatten our differences, we should celebrate them. And not let them divide us. Because, as always, we need to
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Deescalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy.
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We need to offer an offramp for people on the right wing. We need to offer people the chance to deradicalize away from fascism. This isn’t to say we need to be nice to our enemies, just that we need to make it clear that they have the option of no longer being our enemies.
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Martha F. Lee - Earth First!

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:26:24 GMT

Author: Martha F. Lee
Title: Earth First!
Subtitle: Environmental Apocalypse
Date: 1995
Notes: Michael Barkun is the book series editor. Cover photo: Earth First! demonstrates against the timber industry, Ft. Bragg, Calif. Photography by Michael Schumann/SABA.
Source: <archive.org/details/earthfirstenviro0000leem>

Syracuse University Press is pleased to introduce a new series, Religion and Politics, with the publication of Earth First! by Martha F. Lee.

Contemporary religious movements constitute a wide spectrum of energetic responses to the conditions of life in the modem world. Whether fundamentalist or liberal, apocalyptic or millenarian, world-renouncing or world-embracing, such movements often become enmeshed in politics— either by participating directly in the political process or by challenging existing regimes outside of normal political channels.

The series will provide readers with critical and interdisciplinary studies of the entire range of politically involved religious movements— and, as this first volume suggests, religiously oriented political movements—in the United States and throughout the world. The series will be of interest to scholars in the fields of religious studies, politics, history, the social sciences, and contemporary affairs. The editor, Michael Barkun of the Maxwell School, Syracuse University, is advised by a panel of distinguished scholars from a variety of disciplinary and topical specialties.

For my mother, Margaret Lee

Martha Lee is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Windsor. She is the author of The Nation of Islam: An American Millenarian Movement.

Preface

During the final decades of the twentieth century, profound political changes have occurred. One of the most critical of these changes has been the rise to power and prominence of environmental ideologies. Environmentalism is particularly significant because it addresses a fundamental fact of our existence: the relationship between human beings and the natural world. In the words of political philosopher Hannah Arendt, the fact that we are earthbound creatures is “the very quintessence of the human condition.”[1] Our relationship with this planet is critical to our political identity.

It is therefore not surprising that environmentalism has spread across the traditional left-right spectrum. In so doing, it has accumulated significant political weight. Once the purview of interest groups such as the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society, concern for such issues as acid rain, global warming, and toxic waste disposal has permeated the discourse of both citizens and politicians. It is now part of the political mainstream.

In all its forms, environmentalism is—at least marginally—apocalyptic. It is the wellbeing of this planet that most fundamentally supports human life; threats to the health of the earth are therefore threats to human life itself. It is the power of that connection that drives environmentalism. Confronting pollution and extinction is in a very real way confronting the source and limits of human power.

Among environmental movements, Earth First! is unique because it makes this connection explicit in its doctrine and in its activities. For Earth First !ers, ultimate political meaning is found in wilderness, and Earth First!ers are willing to protect that wilderness by any means necessary. Their creation of a standard of good that lies outside traditional political life, coupled with their willingness to use illegal and potentially violent tactics to defend that good, makes their story compelling.

This book focuses on the evolution of the Earth First! movement, which began as a result of the direct political experience of Dave Foreman and a number of likeminded environmentalist colleagues. Over time, the movement split into two factions, one that emphasized biocentrism, and one that emphasized the interrelated nature of biodiversity and social justice. It is Earth Firstl’s original doctrine, rather than subsequent developments, however, that most clearly raises the issues of why individuals might anticipate an apocalyptic event, and choose not to compromise in their defense of the earth. For this reason, it is this initial conformation of Earth First! that is held as a measure of the movement’s later evolution.

Throughout Earth Firstl’s history, its adherents grappled with issues such as the nature of political community, the definition of justice, and the degree to which human life is meaningful. For these reasons, the movement’s development illustrates in compact form the tensions inherent in all political communities that anticipate the end of civilization. In this way, it tells us much about our own lives and politics. If we take environmentalism seriously, and follow it to its logical conclusion, we must confront many of the issues that have been (and are) confronted by Earth First !ers.

This book began as a doctoral dissertation, and I have been fortunate in the help I received during the more than four years of research and writing that it consumed. I am most indebted to Michael Barkun. His own work inspired my interest in millenarianism, and his insightful comments and great patience were a boon to me at all stages of this project. I am also grateful for the advice and criticism of Ralph Ketcham, Amanda Porterfield, Margaret Shannon, Tom Patterson, and Joe Cammarano. As the dissertation became a book, the comments of Mike Cummings of the University of Colorado at Denver helped me clarify many of my arguments, and Cynthia Maude-Gembler of Syracuse University Press was an enthusiastic and supportive editor.

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Bager Nûjiyan - The Seeker of Truth

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:21:55 GMT

Author: Bager Nûjiyan
Title: The Seeker of Truth
Subtitle: who insisted on another world
Date: 2020
Source: <https://internationalistcommune.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/English.pdf>

Michael Panser
1988 — ∞

Introduction

Our friend, internationalist revolutionary and guerrilla fighter Michael Panser, Bager Nujiyan (also Xefil vTyan) died and became immortal on December 14, 2018 in a Turkish air raid on the Medya defence areas in Southern Kurdistan.

Our hearts are full of pain, our heads are full of memories. Heval Bager was a friend who will remain in our memories especially with his insatiable and euphoric search for truth. His search and curiosity for revolutionary liberation movements has brought him to many places in the world. His greatest passion was to share his experiences and ideas with other people, to discuss them and find companions. In 2012 he travelled to Kurdistan for the first time, where his deep connection with the philosophy and revolutionary leadership of the PKK and Reber Apo began. He was driven by the idea of sharing his experiences and enthusiasm for the Kurdish liberation movement. He was convinced of the universal importance of the revolution in Mesopotamia for all freedom seekers, resistants and revolutionaries in the world. Therefore he managed to connect many people and movements with the liberation movement and to build bridges in a few years. In 2015 he himself returned to the revolutionary areas of Rojava to become part of the social change and also took his place in the defense of the Yezidi people in §engal. In 2017, however, it took him back to the liberated mountains of Zarathustra in search of wisdom, true friendship, struggle and free life in the PKK.

Also the internationalist community is undoubtedly the result of his efforts and at least one of many dreams that have come true. So many dreams have remained unrealised, but his search has become the search of many more. The seeds that Heval Bager has sown on his many journeys have begun to germinate and sprout everywhere. How we manage to appreciate the fruits and plant new seeds is now up to us who will with no doubt continue his struggle until victory. We owe it to him. It is difficult for us to do justice to our friend and comrade with words. Therefore we want to bring him up by sharing interviews and texts written by him with you in this brochure. We hope that they will make his life, his ideas, his dreams and his struggle comprehensible to more people and encourage the discussions he has always wanted so much. In this way we also want to contribute to ensuring that the revolutionary life of Micha, Xelil and, most recently, Bager Nujiyan will never be forgotten and will live on in our daily thoughts, speeches and actions.

The brochure is introduced with the text “A socialist fighter: §ehid Bager Nujiyan”, a Text written by the great philosopher and commader of Kurdistan’s mountains §ehid Qasim Engin. The text, “My name is Bager Nujiyan”, is the translation of a video interview he gave in 2017/18 during his participation in an academy in the mountains, in which he profoundly explains his process of becoming a revolutionary and joining the PKK. “Internationalism and the Question of Revolutionary Leadership — Realising a Heritage of Humanity” is a text that Heval Bager sent to us from the mountains last winter just before he fell. “Power and Truth: Power Analysis and Nomadic Thought as Fragments of a Philosophy of Liberation” was Michal Panser’s speech at the conference “Challenging Capitalist Modernity II: Dissecting Capitalist Modernity — Building Democratic Confederalism” in Hamburg from April 3 to 5, 2015. He wrote the letter “From the free mountains of Kurdistan to the southeast of Mexico: Towards a revolutionary culture of the global freedom struggle” shortly before his death in December 2018, in honor of the Zapatista Uprising. The final text of the brochure is the interview “Overcoming the Fear Reflexes”, which was conducted with him in the autumn of 2013 in the Qandil Mountains (at that time with the code name Demhat) on the way to basic education.

Heval Bager follows in the footsteps of other German revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg, Willi Munzenberg, Hans Beimler, Ulrike Meinhof, Andrea Wolf, Uta Schneiderbanger, Ivana Hoffmann, Kevin Jochim, Gunter Hellsten and Jakob Riemer. In the life of Bager Nujiyan we see an example of internationalism and the search for truth, freedom and brotherhood of the peoples. We express our heartfelt sympathy to his family and all his friends. We transform our grief into anger, our anger into the responsibility to realize his dreams and efforts of another world, be it in Mesopotamia, Chiapas or East Germany. We remember all the fallen of the revolution who gave their lives for freedom. Their struggle is ours!

A Socialist fighter: Sehid Bager Nujiyan

Text written by Sehid Qasim Engm

The freedom movement is like a river. For years, exceptional fighters from all four corners of the earth have been flowing into this river. When the process of becoming society, also called sociality by scholars, becomes the ideological beacon of hope for humanity, Kurdistan becomes the home for a person from the other part of the world. A socialist from Kurdistan, as a revolutionary, also sees the other side of the world as one’ s home. As Che Guevara said in his time, “Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary”. These words grace the heart of every revolutionary. We know that Che Guevara was a personality with a spirit of uprising, against every injustice and the imperialist system that produces this injustice. This uprising is not only with words. It is also not a resistance that is without plan, aimless and frugal. Che’s uprising is taking responsibility for his inner voice and conscience. Che is dedicated to people. His devotion to people is dedicated to all humanity. Against occupation, exclusion, enslavement, oppression, and humiliation, he cultivates an infinite anger and wrath. He wants a just world. He is longing for a world in which human beings live like human beings, together and equal.

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Withywindle - Revolutionary Silliness!

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:19:10 GMT

Author: Withywindle
Title: Revolutionary Silliness!
Date: 10/31/2024
Source: Retrieved on November 18^th, 2024 from https://beyondresistance.noblogs.org/revolutionary-silliness-by-withywindle/

Intro

For the most important time in our lives, when we’re growing up and learning to navigate the world, we’re corralled into bland and sterile cells where we are forced to sit down, shut up, face forward, and listen to the adults in power ramble about various subjects and make sure that we memorize it all. Not learn about it, memorize it. We’re not expected to analyze, interact, or ponder the information, just regurgitate it. At the same time, these lectures and drills impose expectations of what is “normal.” How things are, why they are this way, the “normal” ways to navigate the system and change it by participating in it and following its rules. If we were really learning and therefore able to critically look at these lessons, we’d realize how fucking dumb it really is. How doing things “normally” isn’t going to improve our situation or fundamentally alter the systems that keep us down.

Later on as we apply for jobs so that we can survive the capitalist system, we must prostrate ourselves before hiring managers with formal ritual and procedure as if to justify why we should be allowed to exist. You must submit a resume, you must write a cover letter where you suck the company’s dick in proper formal language, you must have former coworkers that you still talk to who can vouch for you, oh but friends and family shouldn’t be used for that because it looks unprofessional! And if (IF) you get an interview instead of being outright ignored, you must walk in wearing your sunday best with a fake-ass smile and continue to suck that corpo-cock, bullshitting so much you could start a fertilizer company. All because “it’s professional” and “it’s normal.” That fucking sucks! And the moment you call it out for being dumb, you get spurned and they get to decide that you shouldn’t be permitted to pay the bills!

All of this and more are forced upon us under the pretext of being “normal,” “appropriate,” “professional,” etc. but who decided that? Normalcy is not only a manufactured concept to enforce western capitalism, it’s also a malignant specter used in marginalization and to delegitimize radical thought and actions! The manufactured monsters of formality, professionalism, and normalcy must be countered if we truly want to make radical changes to society and adopt a revolutionary silliness!

Normalcy tells us that intrinsic parts of our personalities, psyches, or cultures are wrong and a sickness. That we must medicate or educate ourselves back to conformity. Professionalism tells us that the boss knows best and that we must kneel before capital or else we deserve to starve and suffer. Formality teaches us that some people are just better than us because of their station. That we must respect the judge, the senator, the lawyer, the bishop, all because they sit above us on the hierarchy and wear special clothes. fuck that!

A revolution with the goal of abolishing hierarchy, class, etc. would do well to, in the same stroke, abolish these codes by embracing silliness, comedy, casualness, and flagrantly defying others’ attempts to subjugate us through systemic machinations. Silliness as a personal trait and way of living is revolutionary as a means of embracing our humanity, our liveliness, and rejecting the old world while exploring how to build the new one!

Formality and normalcy

What exactly is “normal?” Normalcy is a multifaceted problem and so it has many genres — cisnormativity, heteronormativity, whiteness, patriarchy, etc. Normalcy in western society, especially the united states, can be typified with this example: The normal man is white (germanic heritage), aged 25–35, grew up in a protestant faith and may or may not still practice, works in finance or business, named something like Hunter or Declan (bonus points for weird Anglo spellings) lives in a shithole r/liminalspaces suburb, and commutes half an hour to the nearest metro center in a massive SUV or pickup truck that gets 10 miles per gas tank. Hunter buries himself in his 9-to-5 and is completely overjoyed by work related shit like company newsletters and earnings calls. Overall, he isn’t driven mad or depressed by how much he works or anything systemic cos he doesn’t care about anyone but himself and his career or his income stream. Hunter isn’t bothered by a mind-numbing daily routine that rarely deviates and he buys into capitalist bootstrap propaganda with gusto. Hunter isn’t a political guy necessarily, he’s too busy and uninterested. So he won’t be much of a fan of Alex Jones or Matt Walsh, but he might go to bat for right wing pundits or talking points because he believes that “we should listen to both sides” and that bipartisanship will solve every problem. On a more subconscious level, the left-wing detractors look kinda scary to his worldview and privilege, ultimately rendering him centrist or slightly right-leaning. Hunter is exactly who you imagine when you think of someone who actively posts or even scrolls on linkedin.

This “normal person” is who the rest of us are compared to. If you’re trans, you’re abnormal because Hunter is cis. If you’re not straight, you’re abnormal cos Hunter is hetero. Even Hunter, our template homunculus for normality, is abnormal because it’s nigh impossible for someone to live so trapped by routine and capitalism without developing some sort of mental health problem.

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Jonathan Ned Katz - Almeda Sperry to Emma Goldman

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:18:12 GMT

Author: Jonathan Ned Katz
Title: Almeda Sperry to Emma Goldman
Date: 1912
Notes: Sperry’s letters are in Mugar Memorial Libarary, Boston University. Jonathan Ned Katz is grateful to Rosalyn Baxdandall and Alix Kates Shulman for informing him of these letters. OutHistory.org is interested in any additional data about Sperry, and especially interested in a photo.
Source: Retrieved on November 18^th 2024 from https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/sperry-to-goldman/letters

A question from Emma Goldman about past love relations with men evokes from Sperry this deep-felt reply:

March 4^th 1912

My own Dear-my cherry-blossom-my moon-beam shimmering on a dark pool at night-my mountain, so calm, so serene-my drop of dew hidden in the heart of a wild rose: I do not know whether I have loved deeply and passionately or not; if you mean have I ever loved a man I will frankly say that I never saw a man. I have seen bipeds who pose as men but never saw a man. No, I have never deeply loved any man. I seem to exact too much. The men are lying pups and all they are after is sex.

Writing of a woman friend, Sperry says:

you know she has auburn hair and I made a verse about it-it goes,

“Into thy glowing mass I thrust
The thin line
Of my crimson lips Thrilling
With lust.”

The rest I don’t remember.... You know that isn’t poetry — it is just the way I felt.

The following month, on April 2, Sperry, in a depressed mood, writes Goldman that “something seems to have broken in me, I do not care for anything any more. One thing though, I love you.”

A few weeks later on April 20, feeling better, Sperry vividly describes another friend, Florence, bringing to life in words another woman as “unconventional” as herself.

Apr. 20^th [1912] In the daytime I loaf a good deal in Florence —‘s office — there all the radicals drop in from time to time ....

Florence ... is a girl of nineteen who is as mature looking as a woman of 45.

She is a mixture of French and Irish and is the most unconventional creature I have ever met; she is fat but it is a hard fat; she has dark looking eyes and dark hair and soft, caressing hands, well shaped but with spatulate nails. She thinks that when a woman marries each kid should be by a different man. She has the prettiest mouth I ever saw .... we made a bargain-I’m to stop drinking and she will stop using crude language — very vulgar language.... Florence means to marry for money only — she is unscrupulous and selfish with those she don’t like. She literally oozes sex and tells me that there are only two men she has ever met often who have not asked her for intercourse. She tells me that she shakes with desire for intercourse but is afraid of ‘getting in’ wrong — that is, having a baby. I am not telling you this for gossip I’m only describing Florence. I said to her, “Insidious poison, how did I ever become acquainted with you?” and she said, “I flirted with you.”

Florence isn’t a Christian either; she used to get a beating every Sunday when she lived at home-they beat her to make her go to church. She wants someone to place a bomb under every church in Kensington so she can light them.

She likes perfumed cigarettes only wont smoke for fear of ruining her voice she likes drink but says [of herself], “I don’t like to hold Florence’s head the next morning.” She would like to masturbate only she said she read a doctor book once and it scared the devil out of her. I certainly have fun with Florence — we say whatever comes into our heads. I say things to her I don’t say to you for I’m always afraid of losing you ....

Well, I’ll smoke a few more cigarettes and dream of you before I turn in. I like to think of you from the first glimpse I ever had of you. Tonight I approach you with reverence.

Three months later on July 28, in a letter addressed “Dearest,” Sperry writes to Goldman:

The reason that I have been reticent with you lately was because I have been ashamed of myself and did not want to tell you what I was doing; you see, I went on that trip with Newton. Newton is a Carnegie steel man whom I have known since panic times. Fred and I were living in Braddock at the time and the larder was pretty empty — in fact I helped clean out a flat for a peck of potatoes and some onions and some cabbage and I also did several ironings. Then I said to myself, “Anybody who works like this is a damned fool.” So I got a friend of mine to introduce me to Newt, who had nothing to do during the panic but walk the streets and spend his money as his salary was going on all the time; he is pretty well heeled at that. So I’ve had Newt ever since the panic times and when he asked me to take a trip with him this summer I hated to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs for God knows that Fred don’t make enuf to keep me in cigarettes and magazines. So I went on the trip and I never had a more miserable time in all my life as one can find out more about a person by living under the same roof with them a day than they can find out by seeing them every day for a year. I must say that I am more disgusted with men than I ever was and if I ever give Fred up it will have to be a ‘cookoo’ that gets me the next time. I never saw a man that works for the United States Steel trust that was in the least successful either as a major or as a minor boss that wasn’t a god-damned hog; they can eat more and hold more booze than anyone that I ever saw. Newt is a stout man with a bay window belly. I have seen him with three and four different meats in front of him at the tableno wonder he gets gout; he is a Christian too, by the powers, and thinks that his relations with me are a sin. I have always let him believe that I was a Christian, too, until lately and one day I couldn’t stand it any more and I said, “See here! I’m damned if I don’t tell you just what I believe in;” he looked in amazement for he never heard me swear before-and then I gave him a tirade on my beliefs of all sorts. Do you think that he got disgusted? No, he grinned and got an erection of the penis; he is like all the rest of the Christians-he has as much real christianity in him as my big toe has. And he has an ox-like brain that is exasperating; all he knows how to do is to horse hell out of the men to increase the tonnage of the mills. I never was so god damned mad at myself in all my life-when we’d get in a coach he would make me sit facing him all the time-so he would be sure of having me, I s’pose and he always tries to make me smear my face with cream and powder. I’ll bet that he wont want me to go on a vacation with him again in a hurry for I chased him all over the map. I darn near killed myself doing so but he was some tired, too. I wish. that I had been feeling well-he’d be up in his heaven tuning his harp by now-he’d have died of appoplexy [sic].

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